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1 week ago | 
nextstepsblog.org | Matthew Ladner
“War, huh, yeahWhat is it good for? Absolutely nothing”— Edwinn Starr, “War”The District of Columbia Public School system has a troubled history with special education.
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2 weeks ago | 
nextstepsblog.org | Matthew Ladner
EdChoice has an interesting survey question comparing what sort of school parents would prefer (district, charter, private or home) and comparing the results to actual enrollment patterns. In 2024 it looked like this:There is a lot happening in that chart, starting with the apparent desire of approximately 50% of the parents of district students to have their students somewhere else.
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3 weeks ago | 
nextstepsblog.org | Matthew Ladner
June 1, 2025, marked the 100th anniversary of the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Pierce v. Society of Sisters– effectively the first victory of America’s school choice movement. In 1922, the voters of Oregon had passed a ballot proposition, Measure 6, which required public school attendance for school age students, creating fines and jail sentences for non-compliance. Supported by the Ku Klux Klan and other nativist groups, the measure passed by a margin of 53% in favor, 47% opposed.
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1 month ago | 
nextstepsblog.org | Matthew Ladner
Jason Bedrick and I published a piece at the Daily Signal about the Roosevelt Elementary School District in South Phoenix. The Roosevelt district has experienced enrollment loss for decades, and the school board of the district has announced plans to close five schools. I first learned of Roosevelt Elementary School district some 20 years ago when a Roosevelt student brutally assaulted a co-worker’s child.
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1 month ago | 
dailysignal.com | Jason Bedrick |Matthew Ladner
School choice opponents have long predicted that policies like Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program would destroy the public school system. For years, Gov. Katie Hobbs has warned that it would “decimate” the state budget and “bankrupt” the state, yet the program has a history of surplus and savings.
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1 month ago | 
nextstepsblog.org | Matthew Ladner
Longtime NextSteps readers know that your humble author has been holding forth on the Baptist and Bootlegger problem that helped throttle the growth of the charter school movement. The term “Baptists and Bootleggers” comes from economics and references prohibition, which Baptists supported out of religious conviction, and bootleggers supported to limit competition in their manufacture and sale of alcohol.
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1 month ago | 
nextstepsblog.org | Matthew Ladner
Opponents of education freedom, facing a series of legislative defeats, have responded by going off the deep end with conspiracy theories and crackpot fables. The formula works something like this: start with tortured and incomplete reading of the research on school choice which ignores a large majority of the findings and studies.
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1 month ago | 
nextstepsblog.org | Matthew Ladner
Julius Caesar led Roman forces to victory in the decisive battle of the conquest of Gaul at Alesia. Having pursued the Gauls to a fortified city, Caesar first surrounded the city with a wall (to keep the Gauls trapped in Alesia) and then a second wall (to keep Roman forces protected from a relief army). Having completed these and other siegeworks, Caesar began the process of starving a surrender out of Alesia.
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2 months ago | 
nextstepsblog.org | Matthew Ladner
Tim DeRoche featured the tale of an Arizona boy named Brayden in a Time Magazine piece on the shortcomings of open enrollment practice and law for students with disabilities:“In May 2022, an Arizona mom named Karrie got a heartbreaking message from the local public school: Her son Brayden wouldn’t be allowed to return as a second-grader in the fall. The reason?
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2 months ago | 
nextstepsblog.org | Matthew Ladner
Back in 2017, techno-optimist Jason Bedrick made the skeptical Robert Pondiscio a bet on the adoption rate for self-driving cars in the Phoenix area:“Robert and I are putting our money where our mouths are. Although I expect that in five years, few people will be sending their kids to school in autonomous vehicles, I predict that at least 25 percent of children in the Phoenix area will get to school via a self-driving car by the 2022-23 school year.
