It’s Friday!
Events: Early Bird Registration is now open for the 2017 Georgia Legislative Policy Forum on Friday, October 13 at the Renaissance Atlanta Waverly Hotel. The theme for the daylong event is “Wisdom, Justice, Transformation,” with a focus on health care and education. Early Bird Registration is $100; register here. Details to follow! View previous events here.
Quotes of note
“When one side only of a story is heard and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it insensibly.” – George Washington (1795)
“Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.” – George Orwell
“Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater. Keep your thoughts free from hate, and you need have no fear from those who hate you.” – George Washington Carver
Education
Accountability: Asked how schools are held accountable in states (like Georgia) with tax credit scholarships and vouchers, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos responded, “[W]hen parents choose and they are unhappy with whatever the school setting is they will choose something different. And that’s the beauty of having choices.” Read more of her wide-ranging interview with the Associated Press here.
Stifling innovation: There’s a lot to be said for limiting the federal government’s role in education, according to an op-ed in The Washington Post. “States are “laboratories of democracy. … If the federal government delivered choice through a new nationwide model, it would likely swamp these democratic labs and snuff out competition among differing choice policies, including vouchers, education savings accounts and other ideas of which no one has yet dreamt.”
A rose by any name: The 2017 EdNext Poll on School Reform shows support for using “standards for reading and math that are the same across states” is much higher when no mention is made of Common Core. Sixty-one percent of respondents support the general concept of standards that are the same across the states, 20 percentage points higher than the share in support when “Common Core” is mentioned.
Regulation
Stopping the slush fund: Attorney General Jeff Sessions has ordered the Justice Department to halt approvals of third-party payments in settlement agreements. One egregious example of this is the Environmental Protection Agency “using settlements of enforcement actions to subsidize its favored industrial groups,” writes Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute in The Hill.
Limiting government: The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which reviews all significant federal regulations, processed 67 regulatory actions in the first six months of this administration, including notices, proposals, and final rules, compared with 216 actions by the same point in the Obama administration, according to government data. Source: Bloomberg News
Transportation
Proof of the pudding: Don’t fall for the hype about millennials leaving behind cars. In fact, millennials are finally starting their own baby boom and heading for the suburbs in big SUVs, much like their parents did, Bloomberg reports. In a recent survey by Ford, they ranked having children, buying a suburban home and driving a big family vehicle higher in terms of importance than living in a major city or relying on alternate forms of transportation.
Friday Flashback
This month in the archives: In August five years ago the Foundation published, “Charter School Successes Well Documented.” It noted, “Here is what we know: Students in urban areas do significantly better in school if they attend a charter school than if they attend a traditional public school. These academic benefits of urban charter schools are quite large.”
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Visit www.georgiapolicy.org to read our latest commentary, “Certificate of Need: A Blunt Instrument for a Fiscal Problem,” by Kelly McCutchen.
Have a great weekend!
Kelly McCutchen and Benita Dodd
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