Last week, the Washington Policy Center held its eighth annual conference on health care. As part of the conference, Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna and KING-TV’s Allen Schauffler discussed the multi-state lawsuit challenging several provisions in the recent national health care reform legislation. You can view the discussion here, and it’s surprisingly interesting and informative. The entire video is about 45 minutes. The first 25 […]
John LaPlante
About John LaPlante
Posts by John LaPlante:
Saving Cleveland
Can Cleveland be saved? Reason TV investigates. Cultural amenities are nice, but policy changes are even more necessary. As Joel Kotkin say, we think that cultural amenities drive prosperity, but it’s prosperity that drives amenities.
Geekiest Football Conference? Big 10/11
Much has been made of the fact that in its shopping trip to find new members, the Big 10/11 has been committed to taking in only members of the American Association of Universities (AAU). So just what is this association? It’s a club of leading universities that do some heavy lifting on the academic front. As the “about” page says, “The 61 AAU universities in […]
Where there’s a controversy, there’s a legislator
The sports world is abuzz this week with talk of changes in the big-time college conferences. Naturally, it’s driven by money. The Big 10 wants more eyeballs for its profitable cable network, and non-Texas universities in the Big 12 are unhappy with the distribution of money within the league. Rumor has it that Texas will go to the PAC 10. What happens then? For one […]
Time for differentiation in schooling
Instead of developing national, college-prep standards for high-school students, maybe we should be fostering some diversity in what students gets out of their time in school. The surprising advocate of this idea? Chester E. Finn Jr., whose Thomas B. Fordham Institute has been an advocate of strong academic standards. In this commentary, Finn worries that the Common Core movement might lead to more students dropping […]
Back in the self-published blogosphere
I started blogging in May, 2003, with a blogspot-hosted blog before eventually moving it Policyguy.com. Blogger and FTP did the trick. Then Google bought Blogger, which was fine–until Google announced that they were discontinuing support for the method I was using to publish. Six-plus years of blogging, kerput. So it became time to move to the PolicyGuy blog, 2.0, driven by WordPress.
District consolidation saves money–but only to a point
Would Minnesota benefit from having fewer school districts? I don’t know, but based on the evidence I’ve read, I’m skeptical. Here’s what I know after some research into the question: Matthew Andrews, William Duncombe, and John Yinger (all of Syracuse University) say there may be some efficiencies to be gained from moving from consolidating very small districts–specifically, those with 500 or fewer students to those with 2,000 […]
Colorado cripples teacher tenure
Give President Obama credit for one thing: We may look back years from now and credit his Race to the Top fund for launching the beginning of the end of teacher tenure. Colorado is on the verge of enacting a law that would dramatically weaken tenure. Money available from the fund was enticing enough to get the school board association, one of the teacher unions, […]
Online learning in Minnesota thrives
If you’re looking for a bright spot in K-12 education, check out an article in the current edition of the Minnesota Sun on the Minnesota Connections Academy, one of two dozen or so online options available to Minnesota students. The article mentions several families who benefit from online programs: A girl in Eagan who was failing classes, suffers from some learning deficiencies, is now on the honor […]
Banning beds and beyond
Unless you’re the parent of a small child, you may have missed this: The U.S. government has outlawed the sale of drop-down cribs. The cribs, which have hardware that let you to temporarily drop one side down to reach your child, are functional. They’re cribs, after all. They’re also useful for saving the backs of parents. The rationale taken by the Consumer Product Safety Commission is […]