Education
The following comments were made in a Wall Street Journal editorial (available for a fee) entitled Jayhawk Judgment: …[In Kansas] the state Supreme Court has commanded that the legislature must increase spending on the schools, as well as the taxes to pay for it, by precisely $853 million over the next two years. This week…
The New York Times published an editorial yesterday entitled False Data on Student Performance: Americans often can’t find reliable information about how the schools in their state compare with schools elsewhere. The No Child Left Behind Act [“NCLB”] was supposed to change that by requiring states to file clear and accurate statistical information with the…
Robert Gordon, a former education policy advisor to John Kerry, has written a provocative article in The New Republic magazine about the Democratic Party’s actions on educational matters. Ed Achorn has recently commented on the article here, noting: …Mr. Gordon contends that Democrats should stop letting Republicans eat their lunch on education. Democrats, given their…
Five years ago, fighting the Rhode Island educational establishment of bureaucrats and teachers’ unions reminded me of Sisyphus, who mythology says was condemned to constantly pushing the rock up the hill – only to have it slide back down so he would have to repeat the senseless effort again and again. But the winds of…
Rhode Island Politics & Taxation, Part XXI: Blocking More Charter Schools Means Hurting Our Children
The latest news on charter schools in Rhode Island is bad news for our children, especially those who need our help the most: The House Finance Committee’s decision to impose a two-year moratorium on new charter schools has derailed plans to open such a school in East Providence this fall. Dennis Langley, chief executive officer…
David Gelernter of Yale has written this editorial: …Our schools teach history ideologically. They teach the message, not the truth…They are propaganda machines. Ignorance of history destroys our judgment. Consider Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill), who just compared the Guantanamo Bay detention center to Stalin’s gulag and to the death camps of Hitler and Pol Pot…
This latest response by the Warwick teachers’ union reminded me of when our children were quite young and did what kids that age do when they don’t get their way – throw a tantrum: The Warwick Teachers Union, responding to what it called a School Committee “ultimatum” over the issue of retroactive pay, says it…
One offshoot of returning to school is that it has brought me into contact with several teachers from Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Nearly all of them agree that it is in middle school that a child’s educational future, and by extension post-educational future, is largely determined. If parents and teachers don’t reach them then, very…
Milton Friedman has written a new editorial entitled “Free to Choose: After 50 years, education vouchers are beginning to catch on” Little did I know when I published an article in 1955 on “The Role of Government in Education” that it would lead to my becoming an activist for a major reform in the organization…
Tom Coyne of RI Policy Analysis offers this ProJo editorial on whether teachers are fairly compensated: A growing number of Rhode Island communities are experiencing acrimonious contract negotiations with their teachers’ unions. At the heart of these discussions lies the question of whether teachers are adequately compensated for their work and the results they produce.…
