by Steve Klein Defense Distributed has a mission to design and share open-source projects for personal manufacture of firearms, including the use of 3D printing. Its first big success, the Liberator, was, indeed, a shot heard around the world. After settling with the State Department in June and ending a case in which the Obama administration argue...

If you weren't able to join the live event on June 26th, no problem. Please click to watch the full event now. Stay tuned to wyliberty.org for information on future events. 

by Jessica Leach Are public charter schools any different from traditional public schools? Wyoming's top five performing schools, according to the Wyoming Department of Education State Growth and Achievement Report form the 2016-2017 school year are as follows: Snowy Range Academy, public charter school (Albany County #1): 87% proficiency in math a...

by Steve Klein In the 2018-19 legislative interim, the Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions committee is addressing campaign finance law. This is the first time the committee has taken up the topic since, well, last year, after a comprehensive bill on the topic—House Bill 67—died without a vote in the House during the 2018 Budge...

by Jessica Leach When education choice is mentioned in Wyoming, the reply often is, "school choice won't work in Wyoming", or "Wyoming doesn't have enough students to support different choices". Children living in Wyoming's most remote localities, however, would simply disagree. Grace Anderson, a graduating senior from Crook County, boasts an impre...

Any attempt to unravel a government's regulatory thicket is far more daunting than taking on an old mess of tack, ropes, and miscellaneous bits accumulating in a neglected barn. You don't know where to start and you just want to walk away and let it pile up.  But we don't have to walk away from Wyoming's regulatory thicket challenge just yet, ...

The Wyoming school system receives $19000.00 a year per student for funding. Amazingly, this increase in funding has not yielded any improvements overtime in performance test scores. Why aren't our educators and legislators held accountable for this disconnect of funding and lack of results? The very fact that these actual spending, funding and tes...

by Wyoming Liberty Group Staff TheWyomingProsperityProject.com Yesterday I gave an overview of what tax increases we can expect at the state level: tallying up the worst-case, but increasingly likely scenario, we are looking at half-a-billion dollars in higher taxes. This tax shock - which, I repeat, is no longer unrealistic but increasingly probab...

by Wyoming Liberty Group Staff TheWyomingProsperityProject.com Between the legislature, Governor Mead, the Wyoming Association of Municipalities and assorted local tax efforts, we as a state could easily be facing half a billion dollars in higher taxes. Half a billion dollars. This number represents a worst-case scenario, and until recently I thoug...

by Stephen Klein There were a number of developments at this week's interim meeting of the Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions committee of the Wyoming Legislature. Several draft bills suggest potential amendments to Wyoming's campaign finance laws; some of proposals are good, and some of them are not. I am encouraged that members of...

Wyoming K-12 school personnel reportedly feel they've been required to "teach to the test" for a number of years now. Our previous article documented how, overall, the state is not excelling at doing that though a few individual school districts scoring well and a handful are showing improvement. This article focuses on the improvement (or lack of ...

Wyoming K-12 schools have felt required to "teach to the test" for a number of years now. Wyoming Liberty Group wrote earlier about how the state overall has fallen short of success in spite of those efforts. Here we report on those shortcomings, and rare successes, by individual school districts. We use Wyoming's PAWS (Proficiency Assessments for ...

A number of our legislators claim we cannot cut education spending because we don't want to settle for mediocrity. Please see the graph below of 2016 ACT® results for states where 100 percent of 11th graders take the test (100% ACT states). From it, a disinterested observer could easily conclude that mediocrity is precisely what Wyoming has achieve...

What will it take to convince us our K-12 education system is not a success and needs to be held responsible for its failures? We recently got the latest 11-Grade ACT® scores from the Wyoming Department of Education (WDE). They show basically two-thirds of our kids failed to reach proficiency – just as in 2015-16. The press release of August 16 fro...

What do PAWS, NAEP & ACT® have in common besides being arcane acronyms? They are all K-12 education testing systems, each testing different age groups by subject, with the object of assessing what kids know and can do. They've also become canaries in the coal mine telling us our education systems and theories are dangerously ineffective. The fi...

Wyoming Liberty Group attended the July 25 meeting of the legislature's Select Committee on School Finance Recalibration. It was interesting to see how much of a closed loop the process will be. The consultants engaged to do the work exclusively define interested stakeholders as elected government officials and employees plus employees of and lobby...

Certain Wyoming legislators want our schools to compare favorably with the best schools in the country. Before we compare ourselves to the Joneses, though, we need to get our heads out of the sand and look honestly at how poorly we performed against our own state benchmark as measured by the testing system Wyoming's experts chose, "PAWS". We note t...

Listen in as Robert Nelson discusses the recent release of the Wyoming education PAWS testing results with host Glenn Woods. 

What do PAWS, NAEP & ACT have in common besides being arcane acronyms? They are all K-12 education testing systems, each testing different age groups by subject, with the object of assessing what kids know and can do. They've also become canaries in the coal mine telling us our education systems and theories are ineffective. See the four graphs...

by Stephen Klein A group called Wyoming Promise has declared the dastardly goal of overturning the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and to open the doors to campaign finance "reform," or regulating free speech by restricting the money used to pay for it. Wyoming Promise aims to accomplish this by gatheri...