This year has not been kind to the land of the free. Due to advancing ignorance and arrogance – a deadly combination – the basic tenets of our republic are in trouble, and public education is at the center of much of what is wrong. While we went through a similar socio-political upheaval in the...

Firing one employee is big news, while not firing hundreds is ignored. Without going through another weedy analysis of James Damore’s firing from Google – Holman Jenkins, George Leef and Nick Gillespie have done a fine job of that – let’s just say the Silicon Valley engineer was canned for stating what most scientists and...

Aftershocks could have ramifications; teacher union leaders grouse as they plan next steps. On Tuesday, May 6th, Nick Melvoin and Kelly Gonez, who are more concerned with the needs of parents, kids and taxpayers than stoking the bureaucracy and complying with teacher union diktats, were elected to the Los Angeles Unified School District board. Reformers...

A new study points fingers at charter schools for malfeasance, but traditional public schools are still by far #1 in wasteful spending.

Education establishment is protecting its turf in the Golden State; kids are not on its radar.  In late April, U.S. News & World Report released its yearly national rankings of America’s public high schools, and six of the top 10 are charter schools – public schools that don’t have to be in lockstep with their...

May Day, which may have had some justification 131 years ago, has become an excuse for unions to spread leftwing propaganda. As the Communist Party USA website informs us, May 1st is a day for working people to “demonstrate their unity and celebrate those who labor and produce all wealth. But it’s also a day...

Unlikely elsewhere, but in California, just fuggedaboutit. As I wrote recently, the teachers unions had a bad week in early February. Anti-forced unionism lawsuits, the emergence of yet another right-to-work state and the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary all combined to make for a miserable few days in Unionland. But unlike waking from...

Despite America’s veer to the right in the recent election, Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions” goes on unimpeded. Antonio Gramsci, an early 20th Century Marxist, believed that it was most effective to spread revolutionary ideology slowly and incrementally. By doing it gradually, he thought that enough people would eventually be won over to Marxist...

Los Angeles teachers union turns down millions of dollars from the philanthropist earmarked for schools that work. Last year, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation formed Great Public Schools Now (GPSN), an organization whose goal was to create 260 new charter schools in Los Angeles. The plan was to enroll at least 130,000 students in...

For years, teachers’ unions have tried to kill charter schools—but only on odd-numbered days. On even-numbered days, they tried to organize them. Things lately have become very odd, at least in California; the unions are in full-assault mode. United Teachers of Los Angeles president Alex Caputo-Pearl has long groused about how charter schools don’t play...