Education & Parenting

When Roy Costner IV of Liberty High School delivered his valedictory speech, he chose to express his Christian faith and to recite The Lord’s Prayer—ostensibly as a form of protest against the school district’s new policy of not permitting prayer at graduation ceremonies. Although his speech was met with overwhelming…

The well-documented abysmal failure of government schools has prompted a homeschooling boom, as many parents have chosen to retain or regain control of their children’s education instead of leaving it in the hands of the state. One inspiring example comes by way of the Harding family. The parents, Kip and…

The cost of college is skyrocketing, and students are graduating with record levels of debt in order to meet the expense. Since 1978, college tuition and fees have increased by 1,120 percent—outpacing inflation four times over and racing past other core consumer costs such as medical expenses and food. In…

The Freedom from Religion Foundation recently threatened to sue public schools in the town of Muldrow, Oklahoma, if they refused to remove plaques inscribed with the Ten Commandments from classrooms. Unfortunately, when Republican State Representative John Bennett weighed in on the controversy in his district, he upheld the popular yet…

The use of standardized testing in government schools—as mandated by George W. Bush’s 2001 No Child Left Behind Act and supported by the Obama administration—has triggered “an expanding revolt against high-stakes standardized tests and the use of students’ scores to evaluate teachers, schools, districts and states,” writes Valerie Strauss for…

In his TOS article “The New Abolitionism: Why Education Emancipation is the Moral Imperative of our Time,” C. Bradley Thompson argues that the “‘public’ [i.e., government] school system is the most immoral and corrupt institution in the United States of America today, and it should be abolished.” Those not yet…

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…