Education

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?" was the...

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 state authorities....

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 deliberate...

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 shamefully unqualified...

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 through their own...

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 so...

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 teach...

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, the 6th Circuit Court...

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 they are...

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...

"It's not ethically sound to make a profit off educating students in a school that serves the public, which a charter school is, using funds from public coffers." That's not a sentence from Mao's Little Red Book. It's from Philip Parr, Chief of Staff of the Pittsburgh...

Although it's only seven years since Caroline Minter Hoxby received her Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the brilliance of her subsequent research at Harvard University into the effectiveness and cost of public education has...