Terry Stoops

Today, the National Education Association is wrapping up their 2017 Annual Meeting and Representative Assembly. While much of the coverage of the meeting has focused on the NEA’s “tougher stance” on charter schools, NEA delegates tackled many issues during their meeting. New Business Item 1 was adopted. …

In a 7-2 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that a Missouri church was wrongly denied state funds for playground resurfacing. The ruling in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Mo. v. Comer may have broader implications for the school choice movement.  Education Week explains, The farther-reaching question underlying…

Researchers from the University of Washington have released another study on the impact of minimum wage increases in Seattle.  In an NBER study released today, Ekaterina Jardim and her colleagues write, Our preferred estimates suggest that the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance caused hours worked by low-skilled workers (i.e., those earning…

From The American Mercury, June 1924: NORTH CAROLINA EXCHANGE of amenities between church and State in North Carolina, as reported by a news dispatch from Raleigh: The ball room of the governor’s mansion was the scene of a prayer service this afternoon, when more than 100 people, mostly State…

House Bill 90 would prohibit the use of “local final examinations or an analysis of student work process to assess teacher performance and professional growth as part of the North Carolina Teacher Evaluation System.”  This provision would complement the decoupling of state test scores from teacher evaluations that…

Fiscal Survey of the States, an annual publication of the National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO), indicates that North Carolina’s budget is on the right track. For obvious reasons, I was most interested in the list of states that were forced to cut their K-12 education budget…

The 2017 KIDS COUNT Data Book is a publication of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.  The most recent edition of KIDS COUNT compares measures of childhood well-being, including indicators of economic, education, health, and family/community conditions, across states. North Carolina was 33rd overall, an improvement of one spot since…

Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, was a skeptic of vouchers until she considered how it could help her son succeed in school.  In an op-ed published by U.S. News and World Report, Lake writes, But my husband and I started adding up the money…