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<p>BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - The Louisiana Supreme Court has refused to stop the launch of Gov. Bobby Jindal's statewide voucher program, which began this month.</p> <p>The high court denied an injunction request by teacher unions and school boards to stall the voucher program as they challenge whether it is constitutional. A hearing in the court case is set for October.</p>

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One of the most contentious issues in public education in this country, in addition to teachers unions, is school vouchers. But to me, it's pretty straight forward. Vouchers help parents pay for private schools - giving their kids more opportunity, and in some cases, a safer choice - without putting their retirement on the line, and going broke in the process. And I’m not alone in that thinking. Nineteen states and Washington D.C. have a voucher system or similar program, according to the Wall Street Journal Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/willis-report/blog/2012/04/12/give-parents-choice?link=mktw#ixzz1rwHjWA2J

Crime was worse in neighborhoods where former Chicago Housing Authority residents used vouchers to move into private apartments, a new study found. From 2000 to 2008, violent crime was 21 percent higher in neighborhoods with high concentrations of voucher-holding former CHA residents — when compared to similar neighborhoods without them, the Washington-based Urban Institute found. Property crime also would have been lower without relocated residents in those neighborhoods, the study said. Violent crime dropped about 26 percent across the city over the same time period, according to the Chicago Police Department. The Urban Institute attributed about 1 percent of the...

BATON ROUGE — Louisiana will be home to one of the nation’s largest school voucher programs once Gov. Bobby Jindal signs legislation that recently passed his state’s legislature. Today, by a vote of 60-42, the Louisiana House of Representatives approved Gov. Jindal’s voucher expansion, which passed the Senate last night 24-15. “This is a momentous day for the families of Louisiana,” State Superintendent of Education John White said. “All students deserve a fair chance in life, and that begins with the opportunity to attend a high-quality school. These policy changes are aligned with that central belief, and Gov. Jindal and...

Gilbert Olivares, a counselor at Salinas High School in California, pleaded not guilty this week to a host of sexual crimes – making sex tapes of students, touching the buttocks of a 14-year-old (identified as “John Doe” in court documents), possessing child pornography. It is but the latest scandal involving a California public school employee. Just last week, an unnamed teacher at Haydock Intermediate School in Oxnard was placed on paid administrative leave as school district officials investigated whether she had been moonlighting as a porn actress. The week before that, John Eaton Cromwell, a teacher at Maple Creek Elementary...

Santorum Bashes Public Schools, Says They're Stuck In Factory Era By Mitchell Landsberg February 18, 2012 Reporting from Columbus, Ohio— Republican GOP hopeful Rick Santorum may be the most prominent homeschooler in America. So it might not have been surprising that, on Saturday, he told a conservative Christian audience that he intended to homeschool his children in the White House. In his remarks to the Ohio Christian Alliance, however, Santorum went further, seeming to attack the very idea of public education. In the nation’s past, he said, “Most presidents homeschooled their children in the White House.… Parents educated their children...

For years, American education from kindergarten through high school has been a virtual government monopoly. Conventional wisdom is that government must run the schools. But government monopolies don't do anything well. They fail because they have no real competition. Yet competition is what gives us better phones, movies, cars -- everything that's good. If governments produced cars, we'd have terrible cars. Actually, governments once did produce cars. The Soviet bloc puts its best engineers to work and came up with the Yugo, the Volga and the Trabant. The Trabant was the best -- the pride of the Eastern Bloc. It...

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) - Weeks after Indiana began the nation's broadest school voucher program, thousands of students have transferred from public to private schools, causing a spike in enrollment at some Catholic institutions that were only recently on the brink of closing for lack of pupils. It's a scenario public school advocates have long feared: Students fleeing local districts in large numbers, taking with them vital tax dollars that often end up at parochial schools. Opponents say the practice violates the separation of church and state.

Link to Video Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, and the students and staff at Messmer Preparatory Catholic School were all targets of an obnoxious protest on Friday, August 26, 2011. From this report by the MacIver News Service, it is clear the protesters (Union members, socialists, MPS officals, liberal activists) could learn a lot by emulating the behavior of the children inside the school.

Oh wait, that's not the Tea Party. It's Obama-supporting Democrat-voting* public union teacher protesters -- again.Yes, the Democrat-media complex still smear the Tea Party and anti-Obama conservative Americans as vitriolic and racist, and most recently "the real enemy" who can "go straight to hell." Meanwhile in the real world, actual vitriol and (by the left's own standards) racism occurred at the hands of union protesters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin both Thursday and Friday.As reported by Milwaukee's local Fox-TV affiliate: Vandals super glued the locks of several doors and a parking gate at Messmer Preparatory School in Milwaukee. School officials believe the people responsible...

Step Up for Students, the Tampa-based group that administers tax-credit vouchers statewide, said in a press release today that it received more than 33,000 new applications this year before cutting off the process May 21.That's up a ton from last year, and months ahead of last year's cutoff. And it's another strong sign that demand for vouchers among low-income families is rising fast.According to Step Up for Students spokesman Jon East, the group received 22,000 new applications last year between the start of the application period, April 1, and mid September. New applications are filled out by families who aren't already in the program.The number of available...

A Palm Coast rabbi and an Ormond Beach school principal are front and center in a legal challenge filed Wednesday to a 2012 ballot proposal that would repeal Florida's constitutional ban on using public money to aid churches and other religious organizations. Rabbi Merrill Shapiro, who lives in Palm Coast and is the spiritual leader of Temple Shalom in Deltona, and Pine Trail Elementary Principal Susan Persis are among nine plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed Wednesday in Tallahassee. Others include leaders of the statewide teachers union and other school-related organizations and clergy from several denominations. They claim the constitutional amendment,...

DALLAS — At least eight people were hurt when thousands of housing voucher applicants rushed the doors at the Jesse Owens Memorial Complex in Dallas, Texas. An estimated 5,000 applicants waited for hours to receive applications for one of the 3,800 available vouchers. The waiting applicants became a frenzied stampede when officials opened doors to the housing voucher offices earlier than expected. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaoiegq52y8

With a stroke of a pen, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker today signed a 2011-2012 state budget that dramatically expands the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program to include tens of thousands of working class and middle income families. His signature also means that a brand new school choice program will be established in Racine County. The budget had previously passed the Senate and House on June 17 by votes of 19-14 and 60-38, respectively. "This is incredible news that I know would make Milton and Rose Friedman smile," said Robert C. Enlow, President and CEO of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice,...

From June 2006 through November 2010, the woefully cash-strapped Florida Department of Education (DOE) forked over $2.057 million to Julius Brown, former middle school basketball coach and cofounder of a string of obscure sports apparel businesses. The money was in the form of tuition vouchers for kids with physical and learning disabilities to attend the South Florida Preparatory Christian Academy, the Oakland Park K-12 private school of which Brown — a looming and lean former basketball pro with a slug-like mustache — was founder, president, principal, athletic director, and boys' basketball coach. As is customary with schools that receive the...

Bloodsucking Capitalists: Shocking Excerpts Read at Tucson School Board Meeting From A Book Used In The Controversial Ethic Studies Curriculum (Grades 3-12)

An expansive new voucher program, signed into Indiana law today, has been widely praised as a momentous victory for school choice and Gov. Mitch Daniels on the brink of his long-awaited presidential campaign announcement. In reality, the voucher program is a tactical victory for highly constrained choice won at the price of a broad strategic defeat for educational freedom. To see why, consider the bill's regulations. Most people would agree there are some topics about which every child in this country should learn. Historical documents, for instance, that are vital for understanding our shared American heritage: the Federalist Papers, the...

The Democratic mayor of Washington, D.C., Vincent Gray, distinguished himself last week by getting arrested in an act of "civil disobedience" reminiscent of the '60s. The mayor, six council members and more than 40 other protesters were detained by Capitol police for blocking the street to oppose the congressional budget deal that deprived D.C. of federal funds for abortions. They were also protesting a mandate under the same agreement that revives a popular school choice program, the "Opportunity Scholarship Program," which allows poor children in failing schools an opportunity to attend schools they and their parents believe will give them...

Tucson will be affected by a recent favorable ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in preserving Arizona’s school voucher program that is funded by tax credits offered to state taxpayers.