Congratulations to John B. King, President Obama’s pick to replace Arne Duncan at the helm of the U.S. Department of Education. The former New York State schools chief can look forward to spending the next year overseeing a bureaucracy that shouldn’t exist, beset by hostile teachers’ unions on his left flank and hostile congressional…

First of an occasional series. At the heart of every argument, squabble and fight over public education is a profound disagreement about what schools are supposed to do. Education, according to the Global Partnership for Education, is “more than reading, writing, and arithmetic.” It is, rather, “the single most effective way of…

Political scandal always makes for more salacious news than arguments over mere public policy, so word this week that Hillary Clinton’s trove of personal e-mail during her tenure as U.S. Secretary of State contained highly classified material was bound to dominate headlines. Which is a shame, really. Because the Democratic presidential frontrunner…

Parents shouldn’t be stuck with poor public schools for their children. In theory, public schools exist to school the public — to give the young the skills they need to live and flourish in a self-governing republic. Ideally, parents should have the option to send their kids to the school of their choice, whether public, private or parochial…

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan will enroll his two children in the top-rated University of Chicago Laboratory Schools this fall, the Washington Post reported last week. Just about every parent wants the best for his kids. So it’s hardly surprising that a man of Duncan’s station would choose a school widely recognized as among the…

If ever there were a moment to build a popular consensus against federal meddling in education, this is it.   The House of Representatives on Wednesday narrowly passed HR 5 reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, the contentious education law that made federal aid contingent upon higher standards and test scores. The vote was 218-213. Also known…

Congress once again is at a standstill in its effort to reauthorize No Child Left Behind, the sweeping 2001 federal education law mandating that states make yearly gains in student achievement in exchange for tens of billions in school funds. Although the law technically expired in 2007, Republicans and Democrats have agreed to let it continue until…

It's increasingly difficult to tell the difference between Teach for America -- whose leaders are at the forefront of inflammatory anti-police protests in Baltimore, Ferguson, and now McKinney, Texas -- and left-wing activist groups such as Organizing for Action (President Obama's partisan community organizing army). Guess what, taxpayers? You're…

Many political debates in the upcoming presidential race will play out this way: The Democrat will offer "X for all," and the Republican will respond, "Do you have any idea how much that's going to cost?" That's the way nearly all political debates are engaged -- usually to the disadvantage of Republicans (and the public fisc).…

A stellar group of American historians and academics released a milestone open letter yesterday in protest of deleterious changes to the advanced placement U.S. history (APUSH) exam. The signatories are bold intellectual bulwarks against increasing progressive attacks in the classroom on America's unique ideals and institutions. Moms and dads in my…

There’s no one answer to the question of what ails public education in America. That owes not only to the fact there are a wide array of problems with the way we school our children but also to the fact that the specific nature of those problems varies dramatically depending on where you’re talking about. The ailments in Phoenix aren&rsquo…

An op-ed piece titled "Conservatives, Please Stop Trashing the Liberal Arts" appeared last week in the Wall Street Journal. But it is not conservatives who trashed the liberal arts. Liberal professors have trashed the liberal arts, by converting so many liberal arts courses into indoctrination centers for left-wing causes and fads, instead…

Opponents of charter schools have claimed that these schools are "cherry-picking" the students they admit, and that this explains why many charter schools get better educational results with less money than public schools do. Many controversies about how students should be admitted to educational institutions, especially those supported…

Conservatives surveying all the damage that has been done by the Obama years — and considering the fact that the American people re-upped the president’s contract in 2012 — might be tempted to adopt the same attitude as Bertolt Brecht, the Marxist playwright from East Germany. When Brecht noticed the public losing faith in the government…

The federal government has constructed a virtually perfect system by which to create a dependent class. First, have the state interfere in private markets, driving up prices and leaving consumers feeling the financial burden. Then, provide government assistance to cushion the economic blow. When the aid, by stimulating demand, only drives prices up…

Alabama this year has been the locus of two major battles over education policy, both with national implications. These fights merit close attention. First, in what even strong supporters of school choice (myself included) acknowledged was a sneak attack on February 28, the state legislature’s Republican leadership suddenly substituted in conference…

If conservatives are looking for a new way to sell the movement’s opportunity message to more people, embracing charter schools as a civil rights issue is both good policy and good politics.  Fed up with a low-performing public school, parents at 24th Street Elementary in Los Angeles decided to replace the administration and teachers, and…

Underneath the fights that have raged in recent years over the future of public employment – from right-to-work laws to education reform to collective bargaining – is a deeper question about the nature of modern government: Is government employment still synonymous with “public service”? That this question even arises owes…

With all the attention earned by state governors recently for enacting major education reforms, it’s tempting to think that local officials can call their own shots when it comes to education policy.  But states have almost no control over two of the biggest obstacles to further reform: No Child Left Behind’s impossible standards,…

Over the past three years, the Tea Party’s gifts to conservative politics have been legion, but none have been so acutely commendable as the grassroots movement’s ability to fundamentally reshape the parameters of political conversation on the right. Since the beginning of the Progressive Era roughly a century ago, the slow, relentless…

During performances last week at the flagship state universities of North Carolina, Colorado and Iowa, President Obama executed rhetorical sleights-of-hand that would make David Copperfield blush.  Exuding the confidence of someone standing in the midst of a friendly audience, Obama told University of Iowa students, “I’m always interested…

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has always been a man in a hurry. By the age of 20, he was an honors graduate of Brown University with double majors in public policy and biology. By 23, he had completed a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford (having politely declined admission to Yale Law and Harvard Medical School) and taken a position with the prestigious…

The constitutional, statutory and philosophical abuses by the Obama administration continue piling up. Last week, two of the top former lawyers for the federal Department of Education released a peer-reviewed report showing the administration violating or evading three separate federal laws by pressuring states to adopt a national core curriculum.…

The election of Barack Obama was supposed to be a penitential act. His ascension to office, we were told, was interpretable as an offer of atonement for a nation whose founding promise of equality and liberty was soiled by the original sin of slavery.  As a controlling argument for his candidacy, it was thin gruel. It’s an act of electoral…

Within the last month, President Barack Obama has earned plaudits from many college students for taking aim at the cost of higher education, albeit without bothering to explain why the price keeps rising.  But while Obama’s supporters are cheering his rhetoric, they would do well to consider how much they will lose if he wins.  When…

The newest wave of cheating scandals is threatening to sweep away the reputation of one of the most famous education reformers from the last decade.  With pressure mounting for investigations into several academic miracles-turned-frauds, it is time for the public to demand a new era of accountability.    It’s been a bad summer…

The United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to prohibit Michigan’s ban on using race as a factor in college admissions highlights liberalism’s latest failure to achieve racial equality through education.  Instead of promoting policies that match students to schools where they will succeed, liberals prefer to rig…

Never let it be said that liberals refuse to reform the public school system.  Or even, for that matter, that they oppose school choice.  While conservatives often push for changes that affect the classroom, liberals are setting their sights on a different battleground: the cafeteria.  In what could be spun as alternative definitions…

When it comes to the creeping socialism stretching from President Barack Obama’s Washington, D.C., Texas Governor Rick Perry has a three word response, “No, thank you.”  On January 13, Perry announced that Texas would not participate in the U.S. Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” competition. …

In 1965, a young economist named Mancur Olson published a book that revolutionized the study of interest group politics. In “The Logic of Collective Action,” Olson turned the conventional wisdom about the economics of political power on its head.    Up until that point, the foremost anxiety of good government devotees had been…