The final IES report on the School Improvement Grant program is devastating to Arne Duncan’s and the Obama administration’s education legacy...

  Despite its gargantuan price tag, SIG generated no academic gains for the students it was meant to help. Failing schools that received multi-year grants from the program to “turn around” ended up with results no better than similar schools that received zero dollars from the program. To be clear: Billions spent had no effect. -Andy Smarick Go To Site

The Head Start situation is a classic among government-run social programs. Why do so many succeed as pilots and fail when taken to scale? Go To Site

'Alarming' study finds children who attended state-funded pre-K worse off than peers

Government, Incompetence, Oops, Education, Waste

Children who attended a state-funded pre-K program more than 10 years ago are doing worse than their peers who received other methods of education, a new study found.

  "At least for poor children, it turns out that something is not better than nothing," Dale Farran, a professor in Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, and one of the authors of the study, told the Hechinger Report. "The kinds of pre-K that our poor children are going into are not good for them long term."

  The multi-year study focused on 2,990 children who attended state-funded Tennessee pre-K schools during the 2009-10 and 2010-11 school years. The study, which was published by the American Psychological Association, found that those students were worse off than their peers by the time the sixth grade concluded on issues such as academic achievement, discipline issues and special education referrals.

Education Department Admits Flawed Data in Gainful Employment Analysis

Government, Incompetence, Education

WASHINGTON -- The Department of Education has acknowledged using flawed data in a study on the impact of race on student loan repayment rates, having omitted black students from its calculation.

‘Head Start’: The $166 Billion Fed Ed Failure

Government, Incompetence, Financial

“Head Start,” the flagship pre-kindergarten program introduced in 1965, has been a $166 billion failure. That’s the upshot of a sophisticated multi-year study just released by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Self-Impressed Technocrats...


  The trouble with the Common Core is not that it was the handiwork of anti-American ideologues or anti-teacher dogmatists, but that it was the work of well-meaning, self-impressed technocrats who fudged difficult questions, used federal coercion to compel rapid national adoption, and assumed that things would work out.

Education Secretary Can't Say Where Constitution Authorizes Education Department | CNSnews.com

Government, Incompetence, Education

Washington (CNSNews.com) – U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard, could not say where the U.S. Constitution authorizes the federal government to be involved in primary and secondary education.

Obama Administration Report Shows Head Start Ineffective | The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.

Government, Incompetence

The Foundry promotes conservative policies and principles by offering the best in public policy research with the day’s current events. The Foundry is published by The Heritage Foundation.