Education & Parenting

Michelle Rhee—a former Baltimore teacher who gained national attention as Washington DC’s first public schools chancellor, and founder of StudentsFirst—has acquired a reputation as an aggressive education reformer unafraid to challenge entrenched ideas, including those of her own Democrat Party and its constituents. In describing “My Break With the Democrats,”…

In May of 2007, Valdosta State University (VSU) student Hayden Barnes peacefully protested the university’s plans to build two parking structures at a cost of $30 million. His protest took the form of a collage of cut-and-paste photos with a caption calling the project the “Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage”—a line…

In The K-12 Implosion, Glenn Reynolds makes a commonsense argument that government-run schools are in a bubble—a bubble that is ready to pop. He notes, for example, that the government has spent ever-increasing amounts of money on K-12 education but can show for it no positive returns, only negative ones—and…

Teacher evaluation is all the rage today. The “central question” confronting the education establishment, writes Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post, is, “What’s the best way to identify an effective educator?” And, Layton notes: After a three-year, $45 million research project, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation believes it has…

In a USA Today op-ed Tuesday, Glenn Reynolds, author of the popular blog Instapundit, reported that government schools are seeing ever higher competition from private and online schools and homeschooling. He writes: Americans across the country—but especially in large, urban school systems—are voting with their feet and abandoning traditional public…

Hats off to Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit for linking to C. Bradley Thompson’s latest TOS article, “The New Abolitionism: Why Education Emancipation is the Moral Imperative of our Time.” Thompson’s article vitally important, and Reynolds’s link is a major promotion. Thank you, Instapundit! Related: The New Abolitionism: Why Education Emancipation…

Daniel Wahl reviews The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined, by Salman Khan.

Interviews with five rising innovators in the field of private education, discussing their organizations, missions, philosophies, and offerings.

Tackles the problem that is the so-called public schools, showing that they are fundamentally corrupt and unfixable, and must be abolished.

Slate’s Amanda Marcotte argues that a new Florida law attempts “to get around the spirit” of the 1962 Supreme Court decision Engel v. Vitale—a decision that banned government-sponsored prayer in public schools on the grounds that it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The Florida law “allows students…