Free Republic

The Biden administration is scrambling to shelter thousands of unaccompanied minors crossing the southern border from Central America. The media are declaring the crush at the border a "crisis." Truth is, this crisis could be heading to your school district. If your kids are in public school or you pay school taxes, you need to know the facts. The media show photos of young migrant children. Don't fall for that. Three-quarters of these unaccompanied minors are young men ages 15 to 17. Think tattoos, not teddy bears. These teens are carrying the name and phone number of a relative in...

When COVID-19 hit, I quarantined in Eastern Massachusetts. Biking around the woods, I noticed something strange. There are two campgrounds near my house. One is full. Lots of people pitch tents or park trailers at a place called Maurice's. A short bike ride away is a much bigger campground that's almost entirely empty. Why? It's the topic of my new video. The empty campground is run by the state. It has great facilities: a new paved road, new bathrooms, etc. Signs direct people to campsites, even to group camping, but there are almost no people. Dozens of picnic tables are...

It’s an indictment of Republican leadership that President Trump, who like most businessmen knows nearly nothing about education, still has better political instincts on this. When schools shut down this spring, Congress sent them $31 billion — nearly half its annual schools outlay — for sanitation and online learning, even though students weren’t in schools to theoretically contaminate them and online learning barely happened for millions of children. The vast majority of this money has not even reached schools yet.Nevertheless, the Wall Street Journal reports that education special interests are demanding, through their Democrat representatives, nearly half a trillion in...

Political correctness is apparently more important than educating children. At least that’s the message I take away from a Colorado Democrat’s plan to defund schools that have “unauthorized” mascots. Wielding the self-righteous tomahawk of political correctness, Democrat Joe Salazar has decided to leverage Colorado’s pawns kids as a bargaining chip in his effort to rid the world of “offensive” Native American mascots.Under the Thornton legislator’s plan, schools will be required to seek permission from Native American tribes for their western-themed mascots, or go without any state funding. (On the bright side, I can now honestly say I’ve seen a Democrat propose...

When some people hear that the president has proposed a new federally funded pre-school program, they might think, “Great idea. It’s about time!” But they’d say this, surely, because they’re unaware that Washington is already running pre-school programs. Not just one or two, in fact, but 45 early learning and child-care initiatives. And no fewer than 12 of them are explicitly designed to provide early childhood education. The rest, however, also allow funds to be used for that purpose. So if the federal government is already bankrolling -- excuse me, if you and I and other taxpayers are already bankrolling...

In six weeks there will be a little-followed election that could help determine the path for education reform in the United States for a long time to come. At issue is whether a local school board has the authority to tell the government employee union—you know, the forces of darkness that are preventing commonsense education reform in our schools? -- to take a hike. In July 2012, that’s exactly what Douglas County, Colorado school board decided. After months of negotiations the school board reached an impasse with the union as their contract expired. Previously the union has demanded that the...

It is now official. For all their talk about education’s failings, and all their feigned interest in bettering the educational system, liberals once again have proven that they hate giving the disadvantaged the same opportunities as the privileged. According to Fox News, the Justice Department is trying to stop a school vouchers program in Louisiana that attempts to place children in independent schools instead of under-performing public schools. So, apparently it’s all about “the kids”. . . Unless Teacher’s Unions are set to lose a dollar. Louisiana is one of a few states that have implemented a very limited voucher...

Apparently, under the new Common-Core standards, correct answers don’t really matter. At least that’s according to a “curriculum coordinator” in Chicago named Amanda August. “Even if [a student] said, ’3 x 4 was 11,’ if they were able to explain their reasoning and explain how they came up with their answer really in, umm, words and oral explanation, and they showed it in the picture but they just got the final number wrong, we’re really more focused on the how,” said the common core supporter and typical liberal, Amanda. Off course this reasoning explains quite a bit regarding our nation’s...

The U.S. House passed Speaker John Boehner's bill to restore and expand a D.C. school vouchers program geared for low-income students. Public schools in the District of Columbia continuously rank among the nation's worst ...

In the cinematic classic Casablanca, corrupt police chief Louis Renault deflects official attention away from a troublesome crime scene by instructing his minions to “round up the usual suspects.” The Education Establishment appears to be engaged in a similar exercise when it tries to explain dropout rates and other such problematic measurements. In fact, they had such a confab on July 22, 2010. After reporting a 73.4 percent high school graduation rate and an 8 percent dropout rate in public secondary schools (which does not compute), the College Board goes on to warn of a shortage of counselors and a...

More spending doesn’t necessarily buy you better schools. With property taxes rising across the country, we took a look at per-pupil spending in public schools and weighed it against student performance--college entrance exam scores (SAT or ACT, depending on which is more common in the state), exam participation rates and graduation rates. Winners in this rating system are counties whose schools deliver high performance at low cost. The losers spend a lot of money and have little to show for it. Marin County, Calif., provides the best bang for the buck. In 2004 Marin spent an average of $9,356 ($6,579...

WASHINGTON — While state officials nationwide say they need more money to educate children, newly released figures show states are returning millions to the federal Treasury rather than spending it in the hinterlands. Last year, states returned $124 million to Washington that was to have gone toward large education programs such as special education and aid to poor children, according to Education Department data obtained by The Associated Press. The states had more than three years to tap into the money before it reverted to the federal government on Sept. 30, 2003, said C. Todd Jones, a budget official in...

<p>The latest evidence of a weak connection between education spending and academic achievement comes courtesy of the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. A report released last week found that rural states in the West and Midwest tend to have the highest rates of high school graduation. So here's a pop quiz: Guess where most of those same states rank in per-pupil spending?</p>

(NEW YORK) A new analysis shows wealthy colleges get more federal financial aid than schools with more poor students. The New York Times study shows that private universities such as Brown, Dartmouth and Stanford received funding ranging from about 169 to 211 dollars for every student who applied for financial aid. The median equivalent amount for most of the nation's colleges was 14 dollars. Almost 200 colleges were given less than 3 dollars per applicant. The City University of New York had the most financial aid applicants in the nation the same year, but got just four cents for each...

<p>DIXON, Kentucky (AP) -- Webster County High senior Zach Cato spends his Mondays mowing lawns and watching football game films. He is not cutting class -- he is taking advantage of his school district's move to a four-day week.</p> <p>"The only ones who are complaining are the ones who don't want to be here at all," the 17-year-old Cato says.</p>

Schools always have seemed to be the center of every rural community. They provide an identity to a community; people even 10 or more miles outside of a city's or village's boundaries most often associate themselves with being "from" the school district that covers their rural world. Unfortunately, schools over the years also have become the most expensive service for which rural taxpayers have been asked to pay. There have been moves to ease the property burden on those rural taxpayers, but in the end the moves have been little more than shifts from one tax to another. Even use-value...

Amidst all the woeful tales of college students over-burdened with tuition and college loans, the real college-cost story — that it's taxpayers who are truly suffering — has been ignored. Here's reality. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, more than half of public university revenue — $79 billion — was extracted directly from federal, state, and local taxpayers, while only 18.5 percent came from student fees and tuition. The bill for private schools was smaller, but still mammoth: 16.4 percent of private college revenue — $12 billion — came directly from taxpayers, with tuition and fees providing 43...

<p>A new semantic game is being played out in the corridors of the Capitol -- one that has been echoed in media outlets across America, thanks to a campaign by special interests and their allies in the Democratic Party. Typical of Washington's Beltwayspeak, a cry has gone up, saying that the No Child Left Behind education reform bill is "underfunded." Nothing could be further from the truth. President Bush has increased K-12 education spending by 40% since he took office. That's more in two years than it increased during the eight previous years under President Clinton. In raw terms, this president has increased education spending by $11 billion. As a nation, we now spend $470 billion dollars a year on K-12 education locally and federally -- more than on national defense.</p>

A gaudy sign reading "No Child Left Behind," the education slogan of the Bush Administration, guards the entrance to the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, D.C. The more-than-a-thousand-page NCLB education law, enacted at the beginning of last year with bipartisan flourish, combined a big increase in spending to please the Democrats with conservative buzzwords to please Republicans such as "standards," "tests," and "accountability."If no child is to be left behind, why are so many students flunking and being left behind in failing schools? Why are schools in an uproar all over the country, with complaints coming from parents, teachers...

There was disturbing new evidence released last week that when it comes to education, throwing money at the system just isn't working. A study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that although the United States spends more money on education than all other major industrialized nations, the math and reading test scores of our students simply don't measure up. ``There are countries which don't get the bang for the bucks, and the U.S. is one of them,'' said Barry McGaw, education director for the organization. It's not exactly stop-the-presses kind of news. But still, there are politicians...