ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew Ladner
My background story
What I did before joining Step Up For Students
What do I do on my day off?
How to reach out?
06/25/24 | Matthew Ladner
Who should decide the school mix in Columbus, Ohio?
The 74 recently ran an article titled Fewer Students, Crumbling Buildings: Columbus Looks to Shut Schools Again: Ohio district has tried to downsize, and failed, twice since 2016. But with...
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06/18/24 | Matthew Ladner
Beware the Bootlegger, my son-the mouth that deceives, the claws that rent-seek! The frumious Bootlegger!
Last week we discussed how Baptist and Bootlegger coalitions have taken the wind out of the sails of the charter school movement. The term “Baptists and Bootleggers” comes from regulatory...
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06/11/24 | Matthew Ladner
Postponing the heat death of the charter school universe
Recently Andy Rotherham tweeted and then wrote about the below image. Our own Travis Pillow then noted that both charter schools and ESAs were doing great in Florida at the...
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06/05/24 | Matthew Ladner
Primary elections spur hope deep in the hearts of Texans
Your humble author was enjoying a cigar in his favorite haunt recently, when he encountered a friend, his sister and her husband. A proposal was made and accepted to adjourn...
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05/29/24 | Matthew Ladner
What do parents want? It’s not hard to decipher
EdChoice retained the polling firm Morning Consult to survey a nationally representative sample of more than 1,500 American parents in early November 2023 about what they want from schools and...
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05/20/24 | Matthew Ladner
Education major ROI shows the colleges of education should RIP
Preston Cooper, an economist, calculated the return on investment by college major for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, and the news was not good for education majors: You...
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05/14/24 | Matthew Ladner
An Empire State of…bind
The Stanford Educational Opportunity Project has developed a new data tool called the “Segregation Explorer.” Let’s start with the definition of what is being measured in this data, which...
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05/09/24 | Matthew Ladner
A real Fresh Prince can go to school in Scottsdale but not Bel Air
Imagine the major metro area near you if students were free to attend the fanciest school district in the leafiest local suburb. Can Dallas kids enroll in Highland...
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05/07/24 | Matthew Ladner
Serfing USA
Medieval serfdom in Europe involved landed aristocrats exploiting serfs who were bound to the land. Aristocrats owned the land and their serfs worked land which they did not own, attempting...
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04/30/24 | Matthew Ladner
70 years after Brown vs. Board, the Linda Browns of today can still be denied access
Available to All has released a new study called The Broken Promise of Brown v Board of Ed A 50-State Report on Legal Discrimination in Public School Admissions. This May...
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04/23/24 | Matthew Ladner
Mexicayotl’s radical success demonstrates the folly of charter school technocracy
Mexicayotl Academy of Excellence, a charter school in Nogales Arizona, demonstrated the highest level of average academic growth among Arizona schools in the latest version of the Stanford Educational Opportunity...
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04/16/24 | Matthew Ladner
The disastrous rise of misplaced power
On Jan.17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a 10-minute farewell address after having served his nation as president. He had interesting things to say, such as: As we peer...
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04/09/24 | Matthew Ladner
MatchED and the way of the future for permissionless education
In the early days of education savings accounts, several of our intrepid Scooby-gang members wrote and spoke about user reviews as the future of “accountability.” In a multi-vendor system, we...
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04/02/24 | Matthew Ladner
ESA and the bucking of the booted and spurred
Tyton Partners provided an update on the status of Education Savings Accounts programs: Since being introduced in Arizona, ESAs have been enacted in 12 additional states; in six states, the...
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03/26/24 | Matthew Ladner
COVID school shutdowns: four years on
Somewhere around four years ago, public school systems around the country began “temporarily” shutting down as a reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. The United States had a plan, an allegedly...
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03/19/24 | Matthew Ladner
Housing and schooling abundance versus demographic decline
The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s instigated an enormous Russian baby bust. Geopolitical analysts Peter Zeihan predicted in a 2014 book that Russia would invade Ukraine...
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03/12/24 | Matthew Ladner
Governor Abbott deals a setback to the Texas district industrial lobbying complex
During the 2013 Texas legislative session, I made my way to Houston to visit one of the grand old men of Texas K-12 reform, the late/great Charles Miller. Miller...
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03/05/24 | Matthew Ladner
American K-12 shortchanges kids and teachers but spaghettifies your bank account
The Reason Foundation released a new study called Public Education at a Crossroads: A Comprehensive Look at K-12 Resources and Outcomes for All 50 States. Nationwide data from...
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