Matthew Ladner

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?

12/17/24 | Matthew Ladner

ProPublica goes full Dale Gribble

The television classic “King of the Hill” included a character known as Dale, who despite being a conspiracy theorist is entirely oblivious to the fact that that his wife is...

12/10/24 | Matthew Ladner

Ivy League Plus: Destructive or overrated?

David Brooks has a piece in the Atlantic called How the Ivy League Broke America: The meritocracy isn’t working We need something new that is generating a lot of...

12/04/24 | Matthew Ladner

Surpluses are just a party, and parties…

During World War II the British kept a group of stately manors for high-ranking German military prisoners. The British treated them well in these gilded cages, giving them full access...

11/26/24 | Matthew Ladner

Gen X lowers the hammer with more blows on the way

For we who grew up tall and proud In the shadow of the mushroom cloud Convinced our voices can’t be heard We just want to scream it louder and louder...

11/19/24 | Matthew Ladner

The pursuit of educational happiness in Arizona’s Roosevelt Elementary District

Facing a multimillion-dollar deficit, the board of the Roosevelt Elementary School District in Phoenix Arizona recently began a debate over a proposal to close as many as five schools, a...

11/13/24 | Matthew Ladner

Parent power is REAL

Vice President Harris received more votes from every generation of Americans except Gen X, but as it happens the loss of Gen X proved decisive. Gen X, Americans born between...

11/05/24 | Matthew Ladner

Election 2024: ‘Everything sad comes untrue’

Today is election day in America. In the immortal words of C3PO “Thank the Maker!” I do not know about the rest of you, but I am well past my...

10/30/24 | Matthew Ladner

Public schools and the looming shortage of American labor

Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has calculated a worker shortage index for each state, calculating the ratio of people looking for work...

10/22/24 | Matthew Ladner

Apocalypse NOT, Permissionless Education NOW

Francis Ford Coppola shot a scene for Apocalypse Now set in a plantation owned by die-hard French imperialists holding out in Vietnam. Set in 1968 during the height of the...

10/15/24 | Matthew Ladner

Milton Friedman welcomes two warriors into school choice Valhalla

Sad news this week: Two great warriors for education choice, Institute for Justice co-founder Chip Mellor and the Walton Family Foundation’s Caleb Offley, died on the same day. The Wall...

10/15/24 | Matthew Ladner

Families adapt to the dysfunctional K-12 system — if they can afford it

Education Next published a piece recently by Holly Korbey called The Tutoring Revolution, which reads in part: Recent research suggests that the number of students seeking help with academics is...

10/08/24 | Matthew Ladner

Here we are now going to the south side

The Wall Street Journal ran an article which had your humble author giggling for hours afterwards called Sorry Harvard Everyone Wants to Go to College in the South Now. Nothing...

10/01/24 | Matthew Ladner

Arizona Mama Bears versus the Blob of Bureaucratic Goop

Years ago, education reformers coined the phrase “Big Learning Organization Bureaucracies aka the BLOB” to describe the collection of groups associated with the K-12 status quo. Recently the Arizona...

09/24/24 | Matthew Ladner

What American military aviation strategy might teach the ESA movement

Recently I watched a presentation about the United States military. We face a very real if under-discussed possibility of an attack by China on American forces as a part...

09/17/24 | Matthew Ladner

Reforming the shattered pieces of South Carolina’s ESA

The Japanese art of pottery, kintsugi, uses gold in the process of reconstituting something broken. Rather than attempting to conceal the repair, kintsugi makes something new and even more beautiful...

09/10/24 | Matthew Ladner

Why don’t district teachers benefit from increases in district spending?

Recently, because this is the sort of thing your friendly neighborhood school choice mad scientist likes to do, I examined the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction annual reports. Stick...

09/03/24 | Matthew Ladner

Take a great law and make it better

Oklahoma lawmakers created the most robust K-12 personal use tax credit in American history last year. It occurred to your humble author that with a couple of tweaks an Oklahoma-style...

08/27/24 | Matthew Ladner

‘One headline, why believe it?’

Kate Payne of the Associated Press wrote a piece about the Madison County School District, a small rural area east of Tallahassee titled School choice and a history of...

08/20/24 | Matthew Ladner

American education shortchanges our dudes

Steve Malanga writing in City Journal recently made a rather chilling and well-documented case that a growing number of American men are not simply unemployed but are also unemployable....

08/13/24 | Matthew Ladner

Yesterday ‘accountability’ might have stood against the world

“School accountability is gone, fallen into a ditch, without so much as a shovel of dirt to give it a half-decent burial,” began Paul Peterson in a recent review of...