Education

Many of the pronouncements coming from those who run our public schools range from fallacies to frauds. The new book “No Excuses” by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom exposes a number of these self-serving lies. You may have heard how hard it is to find...

We may become the first society destroyed by its own experts — especially experts in fields where there is no expertise that can be verified by facts. Over the past several decades, no one has been victimized more by so-called experts than parents and children....

The spirit of George Wallace is alive and well — among left-wing zealots in some of America’s most “progressive” taxpayer-funded schools. In Oberlin, Ohio, local school board president Tony Marshall argues that only black high school teachers...

Say what you want about The New York Times, but it still makes more news than any other paper in the United States. By this, I don’t mean in the sense of printing the news, as other papers do, but rather in the sense of news about the Times itself. Consider...

Marc Epstein teaches history at Jamaica High School in Queens, N.Y. He wrote the summer 2003 issue of Education Next’s feature story, titled “Security Detail.” If an American, who passed away as late as 1960, were somehow resurrected, he’d...

Giving kids a better grasp of what America means usually begins with a good book. The combination of appealing pictures and exciting ideas may spark a young person’s interest to learn more about a topic. Several classic children’s books offer reasons to...

Conservatives everywhere were celebrating last week with the announcement that Howell Raines was forced out as executive editor of The New York Times. Raines had pushed the paper yet further to the left and had done so in ways that were intended to be as irritating to...

When critics point out the abysmal performances of schools in ghetto neighborhoods, teachers defend themselves by pointing out the disinterested, disruptive, and sometimes dangerous students they have to deal with. But teacher failure and student failure are not...

It has been said that, when Ronald Reagan was governor of California, someone told him that admitting students to the University of California on individual performance alone could mean that all the students at Berkeley might be Asian Americans. “So what?”...

Thomas Watkins, Michigan’s superintendent of public schools, is on a mission to expand his authority beyond the traditional K-12 boundaries. If given his way, every child in the state–practically from birth–would become the exclusive property of...

Israel is criticized for alleged insensitivity to the risks of casualties among civilians, especially children, during counter-terrorist missions. But the tragedy of unintended casualties from justified military actions cannot be compared to a society’s...

The test results are in: America’s children are flunking math. In 1996 American high school seniors finished close to the bottom on an international mathematics test. At the end of last year, American eighth-graders ranked below those of Malaysia, Bulgaria, and...

The public education monopoly can’t stand the thought of “unqualified” parents teaching their own children. That is why they are cracking down on home schooling, even as a new study shows that thousands of public school teachers themselves are...

While we ought to learn from our own experiences, it is even better to learn from other people’s experiences, saving ourselves the painful costs of the lessons. In the case of the dominant educational fads of our times, many have been tried out before in other...

One of the objections by the educational establishment to state-mandated tests for students is that this forces the teachers to teach directly the material that is going to be tested, instead of letting the students “discover” what they need to know...

Florida’s school year has already started early, so that its students will have more preparation before the state-mandated tests that will be administered to them later in the school year. Meanwhile, there is much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth because...

Most discussions of the problems of American education have an air of utter unreality because they avoid addressing the most fundamental and intractable problem of our public schools — the low quality of our teachers. There is no point expecting teachers to...

Some thought that racial preferences and quotas — “affirmative action” — in university admissions decisions were on their way out after they were banned by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas and by Proposition 209 in California. However,...

Accused pipe bomber Lucas John Helder had barely been taken into custody before people began saying that he was crazy. Apparently no one is responsible for doing wrong things any more. Some of young Mr. Helder’s comments may sound illogical to many of us. But...

I spent my 21st birthday, in 1973, in Jerusalem, months before the Yom Kippur War. As part of the college junior semester abroad, I lived and traveled in Israel for nearly five weeks. In preparing a thesis called “U.N. Resolution 242 and the Viability of an...

The next time someone receives an award as an outstanding teacher, take a close look at the reasons given for selecting that particular person. Seldom is it because his or her students did higher quality work in math or spoke better English or in fact had any tangible...