On the Grandest Policy Stage, Trump Signals Shift to Scaled-Down Education Ambitions

President Trump’s State of the Union was many things, but it was decidedly not ambitious when it came to education policy. My latest in The 74: A good portion of the reaction to Tuesday night’s State of the Union was about a snubbed handshake and the tearing of a speech. Although in recent years the speech has certainly become a performative event full of partisan posturing, Tuesday night signaled a subtle yet substantial shift in the presidential approach to K-12 education policy: President Donald Trump indicated that his administration is more interested in incremental education measures than any administration in recent history.

By Alex Spurrier

February 5, 2020

SCOTUS and Blaine Amendments

Do you know what Blaine Amendments are, why a Supreme Court case might invalidate them, and what it might mean for schools? I try to answer these questions in a recent post on Ahead of the Heard: The upcoming ruling in Espinoza may be yet another step towards articulating the relationship between state funding, parents’ choices, and religious providers of K-12 education. Some observers, including teachers unions, are hoping for either a ruling in Montana’s favor or a narrowly-scoped ruling for the parents, which might not lead to significant policy changes in other states.

By Alex Spurrier

January 22, 2020

Louisville Families Deserve School Choice

My first op-ed placed in Lousiville’s paper of record, the Courier Journal: All families deserve to choose the best educational path for their children, but right now in Louisville, that right is reserved only for the wealthy. Families with financial means who are unhappy with Jefferson County Public Schools have several options. They can move to nearby Oldham, Shelby or Bullitt counties, as thousands have done since the early 1990s, taking a significant amount of taxable wealth with them.

By Alex Spurrier

November 17, 2019

Making an editable map for PowerPoint with R

Recently, I needed to make a map that would color-code states and overlay some points to represent data for specific metro areas. My initial reaction to graphic creation is to always start with R and use ggplot2, but the final product also needed to be editable as a PowerPoint graphic. This was the perfect opportunity to try a few R packages that were new to me: the urbnmapr package from the Urban Institute for map-making and the officer and rvg packages to export data from R into Microsoft Office document formats (including .

By Alex Spurrier

November 4, 2019

School Crossing

My latest from Bellwether is a brief on student transportation safety: In our new report, “School Crossing: Student Transportation Safety on the Bus and Beyond,” we examine historical changes in how students get to school and the safety concerns of each mode of student transportation. We present a menu of recommendations for how individual communities, whether rural or urban, can improve student transportation safety. Many of these actions require leadership from and collaboration among different parts of a school community, including families, school and district leaders, local governments, and state policymakers.

By Alex Spurrier

August 27, 2019