Students wrongly accused of sexual misconduct by campus disciplinary systems stacked in favor of the accuser are winning vindication in court. Judges are tossing out the life-ruining punishments meted out by these "guilty until proven innocent" campus tribunals.  This month, Judge Amul Thapar of the federal Sixth Circuit appeals court…

"I also have a dream." This rallying cry, handwritten on a simple white placard held up by an Asian-American mom at a protest this week against liberal New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's plan to radically transform New York City's public schools, says it all. A new civil rights struggle in education has exploded — yet the national…

Educrat (ED-yoo-krat) noun, usually pejorative. A government school official or administrator whose primary function is to spend tax dollars telling other parents what to do with their children. Beltway education bureaucrats abhor families who choose to keep their kids out of public schools — unless it's to grandstand over gun control.…

While congresscritters expressed outrage at Facebook's intrusive data grabs during Capitol Hill hearings with Mark Zuckerberg this week, not a peep was heard about the Silicon Valley-Beltway theft ring purloining the personal information and browsing habits of millions of American schoolchildren. It doesn't take undercover investigative journalists…

It's elementary. Education control freaks will use any excuse to crack down on competition. With two million K-12 students now educated at home (including our 9th grade son), the temptation to exploit the most marginal cases of alleged child abuse by home-schoolers has proven irresistible to statist politicians and government apologists. Take the…

Take our 12-Question Christmas Quiz and test your knowledge of Christmas-related Americana. (Answer key may be found at the bottom) 1. In which one of the following years did Congress declare Christmas to be a federal holiday? a. 1776 b. 1781 c. 1870 d. 1890 2. The iconic rosy-cheeked picture of Santa Claus…

The U.S. Justice Department finally is confronting Harvard University and other elite colleges that blatantly discriminate against Asian-American applicants with a quota system. To get into Harvard, students of Asian heritage have to score hundreds of points higher on competitive exams than non-Asian applicants with similar or even inferior academic…

Good news for college men. You're again welcome on campus. On Friday, Sept. 22, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos ripped up the Obama administration's one-sided rules on how colleges and universities handle accusations of sexual assault and misconduct. The rules, imposed in 2011, were so stacked against the accused—usually young men—that…

George Orwell once observed, "There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."  Were Orwell alive today, perhaps he would revise his adage to, "There are some ideas so manifestly true that only a college professor could deny them."  Consider the professorial community's latest collective…

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."   Although just ten years old, the words of Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 have already ascended into the pantheon of expressions of America…

According to The New York Times, the civil rights division of the Trump administration's Justice Department is going to ramp up investigating and sue universities over affirmative-action admissions policies deemed discriminatory against "white applicants." Incidentally, nothing in the story backs up the Times' assertion that "white…

Springtime may be in bloom, but snowflakes never go out of season at America's most prestigious colleges and universities. Quivering students at the University of Notre Dame launched a protest last week against the school's decision to invite Vice President Mike Pence as commencement speaker. Activist Imanne Mondane told the campus newspaper that…

There is no way to prove this, but see if you agree with me: The average American parent would be glad to see his public high school celebrate Martin Luther King Day with tributes to the Civil Rights movement, lectures on the history of slavery and Jim Crow and discussions of the challenges faced by blacks and other minorities in America today. Actually…

Public schools beleaguered by waves of refugees will get a breather thanks to President Trump's executive order suspending refugees from entering the U.S. for 120 days. And under Trump's new policy, when the U.S. reopens its doors to refugees, local communities will be consulted. That beats the Obama administration's dictatorial approach, which has…

There's something perverse about an ideology that views the disposing of an unborn child in the third trimester of pregnancy as an indisputable right but the desire of parents to choose a school for their kids as zealotry. Watching President-elect Donald Trump's pick for education secretary, Betsy DeVos, answer an array of frivolous questions this…

Nothing so epitomizes the politically correct gullibility of our times as the magic word "diversity." The wonders of diversity are proclaimed from the media, extolled in the academy and confirmed in the august chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States. But have you ever seen one speck of hard evidence to support the lofty claims?…

Back in the days of the Cold War between the Communist bloc of nations and the Western democracies, the Communists maintained pervasive restrictions around Eastern Europe that were aptly called an "iron curtain," isolating the people in its bloc from the ideas of the West and physically obstructing their escape. One of the few things that…

Bad teachers. We've all had one. A Connecticut judge is ordering the state to stop spending money on teachers who can't or won't teach. State Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawsher ruled last week that Connecticut must overhaul how it evaluates and pays public school teachers, including expediting firing the worst performers. Connecticut claims 98…

Ordinarily, it is not a good idea to base how you vote on just one issue. But if black lives really matter, as they should matter like all other lives, then it is hard to see any racial issue that matters as much as education. The government could double the amount of money it spends on food stamps or triple the amount it spends on housing subsidies…

  We have gotten so used to seeing college presidents and other academic "leaders" caving in to so many outrageous demands from little gangs of bullying students that it is a long overdue surprise to see a sign that at least one major university has shown some backbone. Dr. Robert J. Zimmer, president of the University of Chicago,…

We keep hearing that "black lives matter," but they seem to matter only when that helps politicians to get votes, or when that slogan helps demagogues demonize the police. The other 99 percent of black lives destroyed by people who are not police do not seem to attract nearly as much attention in the media. What about black success? Does…

Brace yourselves, parents: Hillary Clinton's Fed Ed jackboot squad is from the government and is here to "help." Clinton wants a cadre of new government educrats to undo the decades-old damage of old government educrats in America's worst public schools. She pitched her creepy proposal at the Democratic presidential debate in Michigan on…

Many colleges and universities today are inhospitable to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of thought. It’s not an exaggeration or an over generalization, it’s simply a matter of fact. From “trigger warnings,” “safe spaces” and “microaggessions” to campaigns to “disinvite&rdquo…

Fighting for social justice isn’t cheap. Turns out, the student demonstrations that disrupted college and university campuses last fall are having some baleful economic consequences — at least in Missouri. And that is a very good thing. The higher education bubble could use some deflating, and if the spectacle of campus unrest has parents…

Next week is National School Choice Week. Now in its sixth year, the event — really, 16,140 events spread across all 50 states — is meant to celebrate a range of educational options for parents and kids and shine a bright light on places where those options are few and far between. We live at a time when you can order more than 80,000…

No Child Left Behind is history. Earlier this month, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, the latest iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. President Obama signed the bill into law last week. It only took about eight years to get done. Most of the news reports describe the new law as “sweeping…

Storm trooper tactics by bands of college students making ideological demands across the country, and immediate preemptive surrender by college administrators — such as at the University of Missouri recently — bring back memories of the 1960s, for those of us old enough to remember what it was like being there, and seeing first-hand how…

Deray McKesson, the professional agitator whose racial rabble-rousing began at tax-subsidized Teach for America, proudly unveiled his new enterprise on the Internet Thursday: A website chronicling "THE DEMANDS" of his radical brothers and sisters on college campuses across Northern America. "We recently launched http://thedemands.org…

At the risk of allowing a wish to replace a thought, maybe the student unrest on college and university campuses across the country this week and last will hasten the collapse of the higher education bubble. Let’s face it, it’s long overdue. America spends far too much money on far too many student amenities and far too little on education…

A recent, widely publicized incident in which a policeman was called to a school classroom to deal with a disruptive student has provoked all sorts of comments on whether the policeman used "excessive force." What has received far less attention, though it is a far larger question, with more sweeping implications, is the role of disruptive…