Free Republic

Overshadowed by important debates and competing proposals about the future of education in Detroit, a longshot legislative proposal to give special-needs students access to more opportunities has exposed the priorities of school choice foes. House Joint Resolution B by Rep. Tim Kelly, R-Saginaw, would place a constitutional amendment before Michigan voters to allow families of special-needs students to use public funds to support their child even if they enroll in a private school. A favorable vote from two-thirds of House members would be needed to place the idea before voters on the ballot. An onerous provision in Michigan’s state constitution...

Last fall, Lt. Gov. Brian Calley took the helm of a group to recommend reforms to Michigan’s special education system. For affected Michigan families looking for something better, one particular solution, unfortunately, lies out of immediate reach. The special education task force, primarily comprised of educators and policymakers, is working to address problems Calley identified after a 2015 town hall listening tour throughout the state. The desire to improve services reflects in part the scale of the challenge. More than one in eight students served in Michigan public schools received special education services during the 2014-15 school year, according to...

The Free Republic Dance When we were children We did as we were told They say it’s wrong to play to win It get’s worse as you get old Try to force you to conform To do things their way Break down your inner Republic Even tell you how to play But deep inside you were so sad No joy was in your life And when you tried to be yourself Their words cut like a knife Eventually you start to see You have to take a chance Be who your are Do what you do And do the Free...

There's been a lot of talk in this election about strategic voting -- voting for someone you don't really support to block someone else you support even less. That's not our advice to our readers in this very important election. We urge you to vote for the leader and party you believe is best qualified to lead Canada. On that basis, we endorse Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives. Harper successfully led Canada through the worst recession since the Great Depression, emerging in better shape than almost any other developed country. Since then, he has successfully balanced the federal...

In animal husbandry, the word "cull" means to remove undesirable animals from the herd — the scrawny and the sickly. To hear the word applied to human beings is harsh, but that's just how Valerie Hudson, professor in the Department of International Affairs at Texas A&M University, means it when talking about the growing worldwide trend of families — largely in Asia, Southeastern Europe, the Middle East and some parts of Africa — to have sons rather than daughters. "This is a very troubling turn, that in the 21st century the culling of females is once again becoming more prevalent...

Answer the following questions to see how your beliefs match each political party.

 Vicious Fetuses Form Group Terror Hack Against Defenseless Pro-Choicers  Fanatical anti-abortion scientists used the latest in direct mind-controlled, brain-to-brain communication to link 100,000s of dirty little vermin, white-trash, N-Word and Illegal Immigrant fetuses, then trained them to attack innocent pro-choice defenders and guarantors of a woman's sacred right to choose. Fanatical fetal cohorts operating under the handle iFetus, coordinated hack attacks against heroic Planned Parenthood and NARAL defenders, using collective psi-power under the direction of anti-choice criminals David Daleiden and Lila Rose. Our sincere and idealistic pro-choice patriots had no choice but to counter-attack against the vicious fetal forces, only...

"Leadership is not a talent or a gift. It's a choice. It's not complex, but it's very hard." General Stanley McChrystal explains to a packed auditorium of 600 at Stanford Graduate School of Business. McChrystal shares his perspective on leadership and influence discussing the importance of understanding culture, leading by example, building trust, and creating a common goal within a team. McChrystal is a four-star general and former commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan. He also served as the former leader of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

Something is actually growing in Detroit, a city that mostly has been in the news for the its losses—charter schools, 66 of them. Their growth tracks with a statewide trend, and has the Detroit public schools worried. “With more than 260,000 Michigan students relying on educational choice, critics have likely realized that they must act now to limit it, before its growing popularity makes the task impossible,” Audrey Spalding writes in Impact, a magazine published by the conservative Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Specifically, “This year, more than 150,000 Michigan schoolchildren attend public charter schools. Another 110,000 students use ‘Schools...

The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon’s wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either...

  Lavonne Wilenken, former Planned Parenthood nurse practitioner, spoke with Douglas R. Scott, in  Bad Choices: A Look inside Planned Parenthood (1993):  Once when I was working in the family planning clinic where also the abortuary [abortion clinic] inhabited the same building, I was in a room with a counselor and a young woman. One of the family planning assistants came – burst in the room and said, "Please, you’ve got to come quick! She’s trying to back out of the procedure and everything is all ready!" The counselor left hurriedly down the hall and I followed to see exactly what...

LaTanya Dorsey is a mother who sends her daughter to a public charter school in Eastpointe. Her daughter is on the honor roll and doing very well. Dorsey didn't expect to have a say in where her daughter went to school. “Usually, it's the district that you're in is the school that you would have to attend,” Dorsey said. “That kind of surprised me — that I did have a choice to send her to another school, so I was real grateful for that.” Dorsey said that parental choice is critical to helping students attend a school that is the...

Educational choice in Detroit is worth the fight. That's the message from 11 Detroit-area families whose children attend charter schools and spoke to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy about a proposal to limit public charter schools in the city. The Mackinac Center met with the families at their homes and at schools so they could publicly share their views on school choice. “Let them flourish,” said Corey Hughes, who has had experience with charter schools first as a father and now as a grandfather. A coalition of foundations, public school officials and other interests has proposed centralizing control of...

COLLEGE HILL, OH - A College Hill, Ohio woman is accused of beheading her infant daughter, a source close to the investigation told WCPO. Deasia Watkins, 20, is charged with aggravated murder in connection with the death of her 3-month-old girl, according to police.

When in 2011 the Legislature voted to repeal a cap on charter public schools, Democrats warned that “allowing an unlimited number” of “for-profit” charter schools would put students at risk. Four years later, a new report by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools finds that while Michigan has the fifth most charter school students in the country at 159,000, growth in the number of schools has been steady. California leads the nation with 547,800 charter school students. Nationwide, there are an estimated 2.89 million students enrolled in charter schools. The report states that Michigan added 10 new charter schools...

Conservative discourse mainly features teachers' unions as the enemy when it comes to school choice, leaving others, like sociologists and other tenured intellectuals, free from public accountability as they exert their substantial influence on education policy. One thing that you should know if you follow school choice issues is that for leftist academics who oppose school choice, their dogmas take primacy over empirical evidence, and their most fundamental dogma when it comes to school choice is that it promotes racial segregation, and thus thwarts their version of equality. Racial segregation, as a policy in the United States, saw its end...

Last April, Michigan Capitol Confidential published “From Detroit to the Ivy League: One Student’s Journey,” about Cesar Chavez Academy student Daniel Felix, who comes from a poor community but achieved high academic scores and letters of acceptance from many of the top universities in the country. The best research shows that students in charter public schools in Michigan gain an academic advantage over their conventional school counterparts. According to a study from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), charter students in Detroit gain three months of additional learning compared to students of similar backgrounds in Detroit Public Schools....

Robert Luce lives in and pays property taxes to Canton Township. On a daily basis he watches school buses from the Plymouth-Canton school district pass by his house. However, the subdivision where Luce lives is located within the jurisdiction of the Wayne-Westland school district. This is also the district to which Luce and his neighbors pay school taxes. An elementary school in Plymouth-Canton is one mile away from his home, Luce said. The closest Wayne-Westland elementary school is four miles away. “It makes no sense,” Luce said. For parents it makes a great deal of difference though, and not just...

It is no small irony that when I accessed Richard Cohen’s Washington Post column praising terminal brain cancer patient Brittany Maynard’s “courageous” assisted suicide, an ad for Source America appeared with the article featuring Denise Kasten, a woman with Downs Syndrome. “Courageous” mothers typically kill off children like Denise through abortion. Downs syndrome children, after all, live Brittany Maynard’s great fears. They’re limited and dependent as long as they live. That, in a society obsessed with independence defined as personal autonomy, constitutes for many people Lebensunwertes Leben, “life unworthy of life.” A friend contrasted Brittany Maynard’s suicide with Lauren Hill’s...

"As soon as I was given the choice, I left," Amy Rosno, a teacher with the virtual class program at the Waukesha school system, told FoxNews.com. "I never really understood the union anyway." Rosno said she had a better understanding once she was asked to be a representative for her department and attended her first WEAC meeting. "I realized that it was all political and not about teaching," she said. Teachers who spoke to the nonprofit education think tank EAGnews.org said they were glad to be free of the union's grip, especially because of the perception their dues were spent...