Reality Check with Jeanne Allen

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Mark Mix Feb 24, 2018

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Can a private organization force someone to pay them to speak on his or her behalf? That's the question before the U.S. Supreme Court as it hears oral arguments in Janus v. AFSCME on Monday, February 26. The case may well mean the end of mandatory dues under agency shop agreements, the major source of funds for public employee unions, including the teachers' unions which have a stranglehold on the nation's public schools. This week's guest on Reality Check with Jeanne Allen is Mark Mix, President of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which represents Mark Janus, the plaintiff in the case. Learn all about one of the most important Supreme Court cases of the year on this Episode 10 of Reality Check.

Robert Enlow Feb 09, 2018

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The late Milton Friedman once wrote, "The tragedy, and irony, is that a system dedicated to enabling all children to acquire a common language and the values of U.S. citizenship, to giving all children equal educational opportunity, should in practice exacerbate the stratification of society and provide highly unequal educational opportunity." This week's guest on Episode 9 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen is Robert Enlow, the president of EdChoice, which was founded two decades ago as the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. Enlow, once a man of the left, now devotes his life to making Friedman's vision of equal educational opportunity for all a reality.

Gerard Robinson Jan 27, 2018

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This week's Episode 8 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen features a discussion with Gerard Robinson, whose career includes running the education departments of not just one but two states, and a passion for focusing on the nexus between criminal justice reform and education. From Historically Black Colleges and Universities and his work at the Thurgood Marshall Fund, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Center for Advancing Opportunity, there are probably few education experts in America who have a broader understanding of the challenges and opportunities that await education reformers today than Gerard Robinson.

National School Choice Week Jan 19, 2018

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This is National School Choice Week, and so this week we have a special hour-long edition Episode 7 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen with a constellation of guests. You’ll hear interviews with some of the brightest lights in the school choice world, including Johnny Taylor and Sylvia Simms, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Senator Ted Cruz, and House members Paul Mitchell, Virginia Foxx and Luke Messer. You’ll also hear from some of the beneficiaries of school choice tell their heartwarming personal stories, including Denisha Merriweather and Walter Banks. Get excited about school choice this week, with Jeanne Allen!

Tom Carroll Jan 13, 2018

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The major tax reform law that passed Congress in mid-December 2017 included a provision expanding the use of so-called 529 plans—tax free savings accounts that allow parents to put away money for their children’s college education. Now, they can be used for elementary and secondary education too. In this week’s Episode 6 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen, Thomas Carroll, a leader in the effort to include the measure in the tax bill, explains why it’s so important: “it’s the first time that a national school choice measure has been adopted [at the federal level] in the past 20 years.” Carroll knows what he’s talking about—he helped create New York’s charter school law and founded a network of high-performing urban charter schools.

Why Is College So Expensive Jan 06, 2018

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Why has a college education become so expensive, throwing millions of students into debt before they’ve even entered the work force? This week’s Episode 5 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen explores that and related issues with John Katzman, one of he nation’s leading experts in higher education. “Technology in every other industry has lowered costs,” Katzman points out. But “in higher ed, it’s actually raised costs.” Moreover, “The reality is that education has gotten more expensive, but not the teaching part. The actual teaching is about 20 percent of what a school spends on a student.” For more, check out this week’s podcast on education with Jeanne Allen.

A Solid BASIS Dec 29, 2017

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This week’s Episode 4 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen features a discussion of the extraordinary 20 year history of BASIS Schools with co-founder Michael Block, who launched their international network of schools with his wife Olga back in 1998. From a single school in Tucson, Arizona BASIS has now grown to more than 30 schools which set the pace for private, public and charter schools alike. “Very early on,” he says, they “recognized that hard work and perseverance and failure is important. The ability to learn from your failures is really very important.” Today, four of the top five high schools in the United States are BASIS Schools. Find out how they did it!

Democrats for School Choice Dec 16, 2017

Show notes

This week, Episode 2 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen features a discussion with guest Joe Nathan, Director of the Center for School Change in St. Paul, Minnesota. Joe has been at the cutting edge of the education choice movement in America, and helped write the nation’s first charter school law. He’s a prime example of the wide philosophical range of those who embraced choice at the outset in the early 1990s—he describes himself as a “Paul Wellstone Democrat”—and who have been making common cause with political conservatives in creating real choices and opportunities for lower-income children, whose lives a good education will change.

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