Commentary Have you heard the outrageous story of what happened recently in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s capital? Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.), elected in 2022, had campaigned on school choice for tens of thousands of children, mostly minorities, who are forced to attend failing public schools in places like Philadelphia. “It’s what I believe,” Shapiro, then state attorney…

Commentary As America’s public education system reports the worst literacy and math performance in decades, its schools dedicate increasingly immense portions of their time to lessons on the supposed virtues of racial and gender segregation. With only eight hours per day and 180 school days per year, one would think that everyone from the newest teacher’s aide…

Commentary It’s common now to speak of the before times in contrast to the after times. The turning point was of course March 16, 2020, the day of 15 Days to Flatten the Curve, though authoritarian trends predate that. Rights were suddenly broadly throttled, even religious rights. We were told to conduct every aspect of…

Commentary What can be done to turn around the troubling trend of a public education downturn over the last several years? We can brainstorm some solutions as we wrap up another school semester and peer ahead to the next academic year. First, the federal Dept. of Education ought to minimize its influence on local education,…

Commentary There are several features of the pandemic policy response that still astonish me. It does not surprise me that bureaucrats couldn’t suppress, control, much less eradicate, a respiratory virus by scrapping the Bill of Rights. What I cannot get over is all the ways that the response ended up achieving the opposite of what…

Nico’s prospects were already looking dicey in the second grade. Raised by his Latina grandmother in a Spanish-speaking home, he was a witty boy whose clowning got him branded as a troublemaker in an Arizona public school outside Phoenix. But Nico was saved from this downward spiral by an unlikely intervention—a test given to all…

Although Horace Mann grew up poor and without a solid means of education, he went on to become a pioneer that would change the way Americans received education for centuries to come. In fact, Mann was a lawyer, politician, and educator who had many beliefs and ideals that were well ahead of his time. His…

Commentary This is the last in the series on “The Ideas That Formed the Constitution.” It applies the series’ lessons to how we educate our young. The U.S. Constitution is America’s highest secular law—“the supreme Law of the Land” (Article VI). It structures the central government, regulates American federalism, and protects individual rights. Its study…

Commentary Are school trustees politicians? The answer seems obvious. Trustees are elected by the public, held accountable by voters, and conduct their business in open board meetings. This certainly sounds like a politician’s job. Not only that, but many school trustees use their position as a stepping stone to higher political office. For example, Ontario…

Commentary The word “weaponized” has rapidly sprung into widespread usage in the last year or two. The dollar has been weaponized as an instrument of foreign policy. The Department of Justice has been weaponized by identifying parents concerned about what their children are being taught in schools as “domestic terrorists” (even as the DOJ has…