On News9, McGuigan points to administrative-overhead growth

On the CBS affiliate in Oklahoma City, Patrick McGuigan points out (at the 5:11 mark) that public education in this state has abundant revenues, and that administrative-overhead growth has been startling.

'More parents choose homeschooling due to Common Core'

Breitbart has the story.

'Slap on wrist irks parents in Sand Springs teacher-student sex case'

The Tulsa World has the story.

Common Core film is excellent

I saw it today and I highly recommend it. It premieres March 31 on YouTube.

Lindsey Nicole Henry Scholarship Stories: Trinity School

'Making tomorrow positive'

Positive Tomorrows serves as the only school in Oklahoma for homeless children, The Oklahoman reports.

And ESAs would enable the school to help even more children.

Oklahoma teacher had sex with student

"A former English teacher in Sand Springs has pleaded guilty to contributing to the delinquency of a minor," the Associated Press reports.

Quote of the day

"All over the world, smart countries are moving away from the outdated model of state education monopolies and allowing civil society back into education, where it belongs."

Harvard University historian Niall Ferguson

Your tax dollars at work

Pat McGuigan reports on $27.6 million worth of "school improvement grants" to seven Oklahoma schools. Only one school saw improvement.

'Essentially no link' between state education spending and student performance

Even as various school-employee labor unions and other members of the public-education community are preparing to converge on the state capitol March 31 for an “education funding rally,” a new study released yesterday suggests that "there is essentially no link" between state education spending and student performance.

Using a time-series regression approach, Cato Institute scholar Andrew J. Coulson "adjusts state SAT score averages for factors such as participation rate and student demographics, which are known to affect outcomes, then validates the results against recent state-level National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test scores. This produces continuous, state-representative estimated SAT score trends reaching back to 1972. The present paper charts these trends against both inflation-adjusted per pupil spending and the raw, unadjusted SAT results, providing an unprecedented perspective on American education inputs and outcomes over the past 40 years."

Coulson gives state-by-state results, but he says "the overall picture can be summarized in a single value: 0.075. That is the correlation between the spending and academic performance changes of the past 40 years, for all 50 states. Correlations are measured on a scale from 0 to 1, where 0 represents absolutely no correlation between two data series and 1 represents a perfect correlation. Anything below 0.3 or 0.4 is considered a weak correlation. The 0.075 figure reported here suggests that there is essentially no link between state education spending (which has exploded) and the performance of students at the end of high school (which has generally stagnated or declined)."

[Cross-posted at OCPA]

In landmark case, Kansas court says it's not all about spending

As Stephen Moore points out, the Court said education spending isn't the only measure of "equity."

The poor and private education

James Tooley discusses low-cost ($1 per month) private schools run by entrepreneurs in some of the most destitute places on earth.

Facebook page glorifies fights at school

News9.com has the story.

Oh Horace, Horace, Horace. Where did it all go wrong?