The teachers-union-backed California School Boards Association (CSBA) is warning school officials that a financial crisis is coming for the state’s hundreds of school districts. CSBA’s advice: Beg for a handout. “At a time when 25 cents of every dollar received by local schools goes toward pension obligations, districts and county offices of education need more...

We need to get back to educational basics.   Little did I know that when I was teaching in the 1990s and “multicultural education” became all the rage, that it was just the beginning of an onslaught of radical endeavors that shows no sign of abating. As 2022 winds down, let’s take a glimpse at...

In January, a Gallup poll found that Americans’ belief in grade-school teachers’ honesty and ethics had dropped to 64%, an all-time low. Then in July, another Gallup poll showed that just 28 percent of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in public schools – the second-lowest this figure has been...

The results of the first post-lockdown National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were released on June 1, and they showed anything but progress. Most subgroups took a big hit, but Blacks and Hispanics suffered the greatest damage. Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the test, said, “These results are...

The state of public education in America is not good.  The Organization of Economic Cooperation reported in 2016 that students in our public schools scored below average in math, tied with five countries for 37th out of 70; average in science, tied with 12 nations for 19th out of 70; and average in reading, tied...

There have been, and no doubt, are now taking place, many studies of how the results obtained by the nation’s public charter schools differ from those of other public schools with similar student populations. Depending on the study you cite, either charter schools do better than traditional districts in improving student or do no better....

Traditionally, business was the most important political backer of free markets, which made sense because business needs markets in order to exist at all. However, in the last generation, the views of business, as expressed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other outlets, have increasingly diverged from the free-market ideal. As crony capitalist ideas...

The deceptively innocuous-sounding name belies the crippling effects a centralized K-12 education curriculum will have on the United States once it is allowed to take effect. Ze’ev Wurman, software architect, electrical engineer and longtime math advisory expert, feels Common Core is a federally-enforced “mediocre national benchmark” that “marks the cessation of educational standards improvement” and...

Given the constant chatter from the Obama administration and from teachers’ unions on the need to spend more for public education, let’s address the question “Is the US spending enough on education?” I propose we look at the stats in graphical form starting with charts of population and total spending, culminating with education spending per...