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?
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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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...
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08/06/24 | Matthew Ladner
Living up to the legacy of Milton Friedman
Norse mythology included the concept of Valhalla. Valkyries flew down to earthly battlefields on winged horses to transport the worthy fallen to that Asgardian great hall of the honored dead....
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07/30/24 | Matthew Ladner
Where Florida leads…
Years ago, I was getting what remained of my hair cut in Prescott, Arizona. My barber was telling me about the old days in Arizona, and that he had grown...
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07/23/24 | Matthew Ladner
Reports of the death of public education have been greatly exaggerated
Rarely does a day go by in which your author does not come across yet another would-be Cassandra predicting the death of public education. Those rare days only...
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07/16/24 | Matthew Ladner
‘Chances from which neither of us are exempt’
The magisterial “History of the Peloponnesian War” relates the calamity of conflict between the Greek city states of Athens and Sparta. The account includes an Athenian addressing the Spartan assembly...
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07/09/24 | Matthew Ladner
The revenge of the rubber room
An education reform era policy ended recently as New York lawmakers repealed a law that attempted to remove ineffective instructors from public school classrooms. As Kathleen Moore of the...
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07/02/24 | Matthew Ladner
The greatest trick the Bootlegger ever pulled…
Over at Charter Folks, Jed Wallace weighed in on the recent Rotherham/Pillow/Yours Truly discussion on the state of the charter school movement in an era of increased popularity of ESAs....
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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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