Education & Parenting

[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…

The state of Georgia “paid at least $355 million in subsidies over the past four years” to “subpar” day care centers, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports. In what ways are these centers subpar? Among other things, staffers hit children with rulers, encourage children to hit one another, and fail to notify parents…

In her paper "The Teacher Accountability Debate," Diane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University, took critical aim at a new Chetty-Friedman-Rockoff public school study. The study, she says, purports to prove a direct correlation between teacher quality and the likelihood of student personal and financial success in…

In an extraordinary set of reports for the Denver Post, Jennifer Brown reveals some of the problems not only with the federal government’s “stimulus” spending but also with government financing of education. In her first article of the series, Brown reports that some of the 5,000 “worst schools in America”…

How much control should government bureaucrats have over your children? Two days ago, Sara Burrows wrote a story for the Carolina Journal (a publication of the free-market John Locke Foundation) reporting that North Carolina officials deemed a preschool girl’s packed lunch inadequate, so they fed her chicken nuggets instead. That…

I saw Melinda Gates on TV the other day, saying the Gates Foundation (to which Warren Buffet gives billions) is focused on “solving” three big problems in the world: malaria, polio, and government schools in America. But these problems have already been solved, have they not? What is the mystery?…