Yes, the unions don’t like Matt Ladner or Rio Grande Foundation education reforms

Recently, the lefty’s over at “ProgressNow” made a big deal over Matt Ladner’s receipt of the “lifetime achievement Bunkum Award” from the official-sounding “National Education Policy Center (NEPC).”

If you haven’t been following New Mexico education policy over the last few years, you’ll know that Ladner, working with the Rio Grande Foundation, brought the “Florida Model” for education reform to New Mexico.

What they fail to point out in giving Ladner this “award” is, as Ladner points out in this biting response posting, that the NEPC is funded by teachers unions which have a vested interest in opposing any and all serious education reforms that don’t involve funneling more money into the education bureaucracy.

And, lest you think that only conservatives are awarded with such prestige as the Bunkum Award, liberal groups with whom Progress New Mexico would normally align themselves, including the Progressive Policy Institute and the Center for American Progress, earned NEPC Bunkum Awards this year from NEPC.

No word from Progress New Mexico as to what they’d do to bring our state’s graduation rate up from the very bottom among US states. More of the same?