Education & Parenting

There is a growing effort on the part of parents of children in government-run schools to broaden the options open to them for improving their children’s education. This movement, known as the parental school choice movement, has been underway for decades. But a new effort within the movement has recently…

In criticizing his state’s proposed tax credit-based school voucher program, called the “Opportunity Scholarship Act,” former New Jersey governor James J. Florio writes: “You don’t have to be an economist to understand that [education] tax credits are tax expenditures and, thus, revenues lost to be made up by someone else.”…

Like many states, New Jersey has been grappling with the issue of teacher tenure in its government schools. Now, a major tenure reform bill sponsored by State Sen. Teresa Ruiz (D) is gaining steam in the state legislature. It would restructure tenure around a “teacher effectiveness and evaluation” procedure focussed…

Why is government involved in setting college tuition rates? The Denver Post reports: Colorado Attorney General John Suthers on Tuesday said state-supported institutions of higher education do not have the authority to create discounted tuition categories for illegal-immigrant students without legislative approval. The opinion came in response to a query…

Louisiana has passed a bill establishing in the state the broadest school voucher system in America to date. Under the plan, all of Louisiana’s school children are eligible for full or partial state-issued private school tuition vouchers up to $8,800, the current annual per-pupil cost of the state’s government-run schools.…

[Correction posted below. —RMS] The College Board, which administers the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) for high school students seeking college admission, has cravenly capitulated to pressure from egalitarian democracy-mongers who despise the unequal brains, potential, and talent of America’s smartest students. The Board had recently announced a special program, offered…

Many New Jersey parents were recently shocked to learn that their state’s standardized student test contained a question asking students “to reveal a secret about their lives [and] explain why it was hard to keep.” Child psychologist Dr. Steven Tobias said: A question like this is really fraught with problems –…

The Library of Economics and Liberty offers an insightful study by Linda Gorman on the history and causes of the declining quality of education in America. The report covers a lot of ground and demonstrates, among other things, the wasteful destructiveness of tax-funded education. At the K-12 level in America, for…

I am nearly at a loss for words: “The New York City Department of Education is waging a war on words of sorts, and is seeking to have words they deem upsetting removed from standardized tests,” reports CBS New York. The offending words include “dinosaur” because the term suggests “evolution…

An almost-unbelievable story in The Sun claims that teachers at some UK schools have banned “best friends.” Harry Hawkins writes for that paper: Teachers are banning schoolkids from having best pals—so they don’t get upset by fall-outs. Instead, the primary pupils are being encouraged to play in large groups. Educational…