ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew Ladner
My background story
What I did before joining Step Up For Students
What do I do on my day off?
How to reach out?
11/19/24 | Matthew Ladner
The pursuit of educational happiness in Arizona’s Roosevelt Elementary District
Facing a multimillion-dollar deficit, the board of the Roosevelt Elementary School District in Phoenix Arizona recently began a debate over a proposal to close as many as five schools, a...
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11/13/24 | Matthew Ladner
Parent power is REAL
Vice President Harris received more votes from every generation of Americans except Gen X, but as it happens the loss of Gen X proved decisive. Gen X, Americans born between...
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11/05/24 | Matthew Ladner
Election 2024: ‘Everything sad comes untrue’
Today is election day in America. In the immortal words of C3PO “Thank the Maker!” I do not know about the rest of you, but I am well past my...
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10/30/24 | Matthew Ladner
Public schools and the looming shortage of American labor
Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has calculated a worker shortage index for each state, calculating the ratio of people looking for work...
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10/22/24 | Matthew Ladner
Apocalypse NOT, Permissionless Education NOW
Francis Ford Coppola shot a scene for Apocalypse Now set in a plantation owned by die-hard French imperialists holding out in Vietnam. Set in 1968 during the height of the...
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10/15/24 | Matthew Ladner
Milton Friedman welcomes two warriors into school choice Valhalla
Sad news this week: Two great warriors for education choice, Institute for Justice co-founder Chip Mellor and the Walton Family Foundation’s Caleb Offley, died on the same day. The Wall...
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10/15/24 | Matthew Ladner
Families adapt to the dysfunctional K-12 system — if they can afford it
Education Next published a piece recently by Holly Korbey called The Tutoring Revolution, which reads in part: Recent research suggests that the number of students seeking help with academics is...
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10/08/24 | Matthew Ladner
Here we are now going to the south side
The Wall Street Journal ran an article which had your humble author giggling for hours afterwards called Sorry Harvard Everyone Wants to Go to College in the South Now. Nothing...
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10/01/24 | Matthew Ladner
Arizona Mama Bears versus the Blob of Bureaucratic Goop
Years ago, education reformers coined the phrase “Big Learning Organization Bureaucracies aka the BLOB” to describe the collection of groups associated with the K-12 status quo. Recently the Arizona...
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09/24/24 | Matthew Ladner
What American military aviation strategy might teach the ESA movement
Recently I watched a presentation about the United States military. We face a very real if under-discussed possibility of an attack by China on American forces as a part...
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09/17/24 | Matthew Ladner
Reforming the shattered pieces of South Carolina’s ESA
The Japanese art of pottery, kintsugi, uses gold in the process of reconstituting something broken. Rather than attempting to conceal the repair, kintsugi makes something new and even more beautiful...
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09/10/24 | Matthew Ladner
Why don’t district teachers benefit from increases in district spending?
Recently, because this is the sort of thing your friendly neighborhood school choice mad scientist likes to do, I examined the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction annual reports. Stick...
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09/03/24 | Matthew Ladner
Take a great law and make it better
Oklahoma lawmakers created the most robust K-12 personal use tax credit in American history last year. It occurred to your humble author that with a couple of tweaks an Oklahoma-style...
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08/27/24 | Matthew Ladner
‘One headline, why believe it?’
Kate Payne of the Associated Press wrote a piece about the Madison County School District, a small rural area east of Tallahassee titled School choice and a history of...
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08/20/24 | Matthew Ladner
American education shortchanges our dudes
Steve Malanga writing in City Journal recently made a rather chilling and well-documented case that a growing number of American men are not simply unemployed but are also unemployable....
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08/13/24 | Matthew Ladner
Yesterday ‘accountability’ might have stood against the world
“School accountability is gone, fallen into a ditch, without so much as a shovel of dirt to give it a half-decent burial,” began Paul Peterson in a recent review of...
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08/06/24 | Matthew Ladner
Living up to the legacy of Milton Friedman
Norse mythology included the concept of Valhalla. Valkyries flew down to earthly battlefields on winged horses to transport the worthy fallen to that Asgardian great hall of the honored dead....
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07/30/24 | Matthew Ladner
Where Florida leads…
Years ago, I was getting what remained of my hair cut in Prescott, Arizona. My barber was telling me about the old days in Arizona, and that he had grown...
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