Education

A new curriculum to teach students how to disagree.

The group comes out against equal treatment before the law.

Real diversity exists at many public universities, but students often struggle to stay enrolled.

St. John’s College lowers tuition, a lot.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, aka the richest guy alive, recently announced plans to donate $2 billion to create a network of preschools. “The child will be the customer,” says Bezos. Maybe we’re old-fashioned, but the idea of pupils as “customers” doesn’t lead us to believe that Bezos has a firm…

The film is a poor example of what education should look like. But there’s a better one in the movie industry, featuring a classics teacher named William Hundert.

The film is a poor example of what education should look like. But there’s a better one in the movie industry, featuring a classics teacher named William Hundert.

It may be remembered for its short-term savvy and long-term failure to meet expectations.

For students and society, the answer is a resounding "yes!"

Three lessons from Hayek that helped a conservative reformer understand that authority should be devolved.

Creeping totalitarianism.

Micah Mattix, exterminator.

An unfortunate hallmark of our hyper-partisan age is the temptation to use the levers of government as a weapon against ideological foes. When one side loses an election, some conclude the next best thing is to cast a specter of misconduct and illegality over the winners or their allies. But the…

In Kentucky, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Arizona, and Colorado, teachers have refused to teach until lawmakers agree to raise their pay. Some have stormed statehouses; others have closed their schools and walked out. The mainstream press affords them lavish and highly sympathetic coverage, and…

If the Hells Angels have softened somewhat, others are toughening up—and we bless them for it. A school district in Erie, Pennsylvania, faced with the increasing frequency of school shootings, has passed out baseball bats to its teachers. That strikes us as a neat compromise between, on the one…

In 2015, the Association of American Medical Colleges revised the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) for the first time in nearly 25 years, stretching the full exam-day experience from around five hours to eight or more. The test drew attention at the time for its sheer length; less widely…

"How many of you drive for a living? How many of you want to?" That's the question Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University, posed recently to an audience assembled in Washington, D.C., to learn about the future of driverless cars. Crow, who participated in a discussion called…

A 12-year-old girl in Baltimore County, Maryland, complained to her teachers, her guidance counselor, and her middle school principal when a boy wouldn't stop harassing her. He leered at her in class, and, she says, touched her out on the playground in a way state law classifies as a sexual…

After months of attempted negotiations, the Department of Education has retracted privileges its union employees once enjoyed, saying the union “acted in bad faith” by refusing to broker an agreement with the agency.

If you work for the companies that produce standardized tests, as I have done for many years (creating and evaluating exams in the area of English and reading), you will eventually identify a significant flaw in our nation’s meritocratic system of higher education and in the highest-ranked schools…

Press coverage of the acquittal of former Yale student Saifullah Khan on sexual assault charges has distorted the facts of case, jurors say. Khan’s case—an alleged campus sexaul assault that triggered a police investigation and worked its way to criminal court—concerns an encounter between the now…

On Saturday mornings, I make eggs and bacon for my four children and wife—usually a dozen eggs and most of the package of bacon—before shoveling the kids into the car, hopping into the driver’s seat, and pretending my minivan is a Mustang so that we get to catechism class on time. By the time I…

On Thursday, President Donald Trump tossed out a characteristically jarring idea: Arm teachers. His original statements were less than clear, so at a White House public forum he clarified: “I don’t want teachers to have guns, I want certain highly adept people that understand weaponry, guns—if they…

Nikolas Cruz delighted in torturing animals. The Florida school shooter is reported to have killed frogs and squirrels, and sicced a dog on a neighbor’s piglets. Cruz’s social media feeds were replete with images of dead and maimed critters, apparently hurt by his own hand.

America doesn’t need “more philosophers” Sen. Marco Rubio said in a 2015 presidential debate, echoing politicians on both sides of the aisle who have, unfortunately, derided education in the humanities.

One year and a day after Betsy DeVos was confirmed as secretary of education, she sat in her seventh-floor office, a vast and soulless space in one of the unloveliest buildings in Washington, and reflected upon the process that brought her there.

A recent study of abuses in for-profit postsecondary education highlights a reputational disparity within American higher education. For-profit programs and colleges are distrusted and maligned. Their proven value to populations for whom traditional college is out of reach and the various…

For decades, the public schools of Edina, Minnesota, were the gold standard among the state’s school districts. Edina is an upscale suburb of Minneapolis, but virtually overnight, its reputation has changed. Academic rigor is unraveling, high school reading and math test scores are sliding, and…

The recent federal government shutdown (bringing with it colorful talking sticks, fake news, and finger-pointing festivities) that started when the parties couldn’t agree on how to include DACA protections as part of a continuing resolution, has given new life to the conversation surrounding…

Uncovering the TUSD Deep State. Imagine if your local school district had a secret document. The purpose of this document is to blacklist and retaliate against employees. That's what the Arizona Daily Star's Hank Stephenson uncovered at the Tucson Unified School District.

On January 17, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told us what she’s really up to. She was the keynote speaker at the American Enterprise Institute conference “Bush-Obama School Reform: Lessons Learned.” There she gave a tough-but-fair appraisal of the costly failed federal attempts at education…

How China infiltrated the U.S. classroom. Over at POLITICO, our own Ethan Epstein has a good look at how China has used soft power to exert influence with American students via funding "Confucius Institutes."

WaPo O'Keefes Project Veritas. What happens when one of the right wing's best known provocateurs gets caught? He spins. This is what happened Monday when the Washington Post kneecapped Project Veritas's James O'Keefe, posting an absolutely bombshell story alleging that O'Keefe sent an activist…

A nationwide network of Catholic prep schools offered exclusively to low-income families is warning that the House version of tax reform contains provisions that could devastate their funding model, and could spell the end of an educational program that has graduated tens of thousands of low-income…

There have been very few Renaissance men since the Renaissance—and they weren’t exactly thick on the ground even in their glory days. No modern figure is more worthy of that appellation than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), who was not only the greatest German poet, playwright,…

"Here, you can be the policeman." Jenna (not her real name), a 4-year-old, hands me one of the dozen small figures spread in front of her, a black woman in a police uniform. “I’m going to be the doctor,” she says as she picks up another black woman dressed in a doctor’s coat. For the next few…

Who said there’s a free speech crisis on college campuses? As everyone knows, that’s just a figment of the right-wing imagination.

Scottsdale, Ariz.

Scottsdale, Ariz.

Oakland, Calif.

Oakland, Calif.

The Dallas Independent School District has plans to change up to 24 school names with connections to slavery or the Confederacy, according to the Dallas Morning News. The district has compiled a list of problematic names they’ve placed under review, a list that, expansive as it is, could be even…

The start of classes was just a week away when white supremacists clashed with counterprotesters in Charlottesville. The town that is home to the University of Virginia is now synonymous with American carnage. At the heart of the August 12 riot that left one young woman dead sat Robert E. Lee atop…

When is a college acceptance letter not a college acceptance letter? When a school suddenly realizes that it has 800 more freshmen than it knows what to do with. This is what happened last month at the University of California, Irvine, which—in an effort to reduce that number—started rescinding…

When is a college acceptance letter not a college acceptance letter? When a school suddenly realizes that it has 800 more freshmen than it knows what to do with. This is what happened last month at the University of California, Irvine, which—in an effort to reduce that number—started rescinding…

Grade inflation has popped up again in the news, this time with the disclosure that it has spread to American high schools. High schools, public and especially private, now serve up 50 percent A’s to their students, just like the universities. It’s part of the college preparation track in high…

These are not the journals you’re looking for.

Burlington, Vt.

These are not the journals you’re looking for.

Burlington, Vt.

It’s up to the legislative branch, not bureaucrats, to decide whether Title IX of the Higher Education Act actually applies to gender identity, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said Thursday afternoon, after a day of meetings with Title IX stakeholders at the Department of Education.

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, Preston Cooper of the American Enterprise Institute joins host Eric Felten to find out why, whether good times or bad, the price of college tuition keeps going up.

A college preparatory school for black and Latino boys opened in Washington, D.C., last year to a burst of public interest—and the inevitable question from the American Civil Liberties Union of the Nation's Capital: What have you done for girls lately? In the city's newest public high school,…

A college preparatory school for black and Latino boys opened in Washington, D.C., last year to a burst of public interest—and the inevitable question from the American Civil Liberties Union of the Nation's Capital: What have you done for girls lately? In the city's newest public high school,…

Expanding school choices for parents remains a heated debate, from states providing families vouchers for their children to attend private schools, to school boards creating magnet schools and other public alternatives, to states and districts granting charter schools freedom to innovate the way…

Ever since the founding, the people of the United States have been particularly interested in their own history. The first collected edition of the Federalist Papers was published shortly after the originals were first printed. In the early days of the republic, newspapers would print transcripts…

Senator Ben Sasse's new book The Vanishing American Adult calls attention to a coming-of-age crisis: The undeniable drag that consumerism, technology, and other modern forces have had on the institution of family and the work ethic for which Americans were once recognized around the world.

Contentious school board elections in Los Angeles served up a dramatic victory for education reformers in a district, the second-largest in the nation, that has long been dominated by teachers unions' hand-selected board members.

It's that time of year again: Graduating high school students, consumed by "senioritis," are making that all-important decision of which college or university they will attend. And their parents, consumed by anxiety, are aghast at the ever-growing cost of higher education.

It's that time of year again: Graduating high school students, consumed by "senioritis," are making that all-important decision of which college or university they will attend. And their parents, consumed by anxiety, are aghast at the ever-growing cost of higher education.

Education policy is prone to extremes. Cozy bipartisan cooperation brought big, messy compromises like the Bush-era "No Child Left Behind." Then, an oppositional fervor stoked by Tea Party-flavored federalism attacked the Common Core, and now bitter battles with big labor consume the school choice…

"Learning styles"! That's the idea—trumpeted for decades in education schools and school districts across the country—that children have many different individual ways of absorbing classroom material, and it's up to the teacher to present that material in ways that accommodate all of those…

During my teaching days, along with courses on Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Willa Cather, I taught an undergraduate course called Advanced Prose Style. What it was advanced over was never made clear, but each year the course was attended by 15 or so would-be—or, as we should say today,…

Until he roared back onto the scene with his sure-to-please declaration that a free press was "indispensable to democracy," George W. Bush hadn't said too much since leaving the public eye in 2009. During the Obama years, we'd heard more from Will Ferrell as Bush than from Bush himself.

During my teaching days, along with courses on Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Willa Cather, I taught an undergraduate course called Advanced Prose Style. What it was advanced over was never made clear, but each year the course was attended by 15 or so would-be—or, as we should say today,…

Non-Californians need not apply. That’s the message the University of California system sent last week, when it proposed to limit out-of-state residents to just 20 percent of student slots at its flagship schools. At UC campuses with higher rates of out-of-state students—at Berkeley, for example,…

The Washington Post Magazine's cover story this week is about … the horrors of home-schooling. Specifically, the horrors of "fundamentalist Christian" home-schooling. The cover illustration for the story depicts a sinister windowless log cabin that's supposed to be your typical home school, I guess.

For nearly six years now, a federal mandate has manhandled American colleges. The Department of Education's 2011 guidance on campus sexual misconduct reinterpreted a gender parity law—Title IX of the Higher Education Act—to police colleges' responses to reported sexual assaults. In so doing, the…

For nearly six years now, a federal mandate has manhandled American colleges. The Department of Education’s 2011 guidance on campus sexual misconduct reinterpreted a gender parity law—Title IX of the Higher Education Act—to police colleges' responses to reported sexual assaults. In so doing, the…

Slam or spoken word poetry, and its sometimes extemporaneous hip-hop-style recitation, is a trendy way to prove to students that a poem has a life beyond the page. But one teacher and her middle school English class in Madison, Wisconsin have taken the curriculum in an R-rated direction.

What happened to Common Core—that is, abolishing it? President Trump's promise to get rid of the controversial program of standards for elementary and secondary schools is gone from his speeches.

Higher education had a very good year. That's the news from the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which reports that "during an election year soaked in populism, some of America's biggest philanthropists bestowed an unusually large chunk of their charity on colleges and universities, including several…

Northfield, Il.

Higher education had a very good year. That’s the news from the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which reports that "during an election year soaked in populism, some of America's biggest philanthropists bestowed an unusually large chunk of their charity on colleges and universities, including several…

The opponents of Donald Trump's pick to be secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, are animated in large part by anger at her support for school voucher programs. And in their efforts to undermine vouchers, they've gone far afield—to Chile, to be exact, where an expansive school choice system was…

Eight hundred people showed up for the meeting. So many that it was necessary to use the school gymnasium instead of the more intimate and comfortable auditorium, as planned.

Friday's edition of the indispensable Inside Higher Ed brings news of the annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, just in case you were wondering. According to Colleen Flaherty's report, an air of apprehension hangs over the event, which is being held, where else,…

The opponents of Donald Trump’s pick to be secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, are animated in large part by anger at her support for school voucher programs. And in their efforts to undermine vouchers, they've gone far afield—to Chile, to be exact, where an expansive school choice system was…

Eight hundred people showed up for the meeting. So many that it was necessary to use the school gymnasium instead of the more intimate and comfortable auditorium, as planned.

In this episode of THE WEEKLY STANDARD Confab, Alice Lloyd reports on the bitter battle over Betsy DeVos' nomination to be secretary of education. Then, Christopher DeMuth joins host Eric Felten to talk about whether and how Donald Trump will push for deregulation.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush was quick to praise the president-elect's choice of Betsy DeVos for Education secretary when the transition team announced her nomination in November. And on Tuesday, the day of her confirmation hearing, he expounded his support for DeVos in USA Today, praising her…

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with reporter Alice Lloyd on how Trump can thank Obama for the ability to defund so-called 'sanctuary campuses.'

The day following his stunning electoral victory, Present-elect Donald Trump announced his plan for his first 100 days in office. Trump outlined a few ambitious objectives in his School Choice and Education Opportunity Act that could reshape America's educational landscape. Trump's education plan:

Precious college snowflakes at the University of Michigan-Flint can get the help they need following Hillary Clinton's stunning presidential loss.

Wesley College has been practicing Queen of Hearts justice: “Sentence first—verdict afterwards."Such is the finding of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, which announced this week that the Dover, Delaware, school has been rather jumping the gun when it comes to punishing those…

For 100 years, from the late 1800s to the late 1900s, nearly every American K-12 public school shared several defining features. Whether you found it in a rural town, a major city, or a sprawling suburb, you could say for certain a number of things about that school. It was run by a government body…

Wesley College has been practicing Queen of Hearts justice: “Sentence first—verdict afterwards."Such is the finding of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, which announced this week that the Dover, Delaware, school has been rather jumping the gun when it comes to punishing those…

What would you think of a lender that holds more than one $1 trillion in loans outstanding, targets low income and minority borrowers, has a payment delinquency and default rate in excess of 25 percent, and has postponed repayment on 14 percent of its loans, but is still accruing interest on them?…

In the last mile of a narrowing race, Donald Trump delivered his own plan to combat the college crisis everyone's been crowing about—per the highly effective advice of progressive policy pollsters. Trump's plan is no more his than Hillary Clinton's Bernie Sanders-inspired plan is hers. Trump's…

In December of 2015, Congress did something rare: It passed a law, with bipartisan support, that President Obama signed and conservatives are championing. The Every Students Succeeds Act, known as ESSA, rolls back federal authority in local schools and limits the reach of the secretary of…

This was not how the cautious, self-disciplined Prime Minister Theresa May was supposed to sound. "Yesterday I laid out the first step of an ambitious plan to set Britain on the path to being the great meritocracy of the world," she wrote in the September 9 Daily Mail. "It is a vision of a Britain…

This was not how the cautious, self-disciplined Prime Minister Theresa May was supposed to sound. “Yesterday I laid out the first step of an ambitious plan to set Britain on the path to being the great meritocracy of the world," she wrote in the September 9 Daily Mail. "It is a vision of a Britain…

Ask either presidential campaign about any fraught issue in the ideologically riven realm of education policy and ye shall receive an answer in the form of a question or a "hold that thought"—mutterings about "school choice" and "results!" notwithstanding. For now, anyway, all we have is a…

Charter schools are essentially less regulated public schools, free for students and free from unions’ and districts' hiring requirements as well as most curricular constraints. They offer a popular alternative path to families in low-income districts where flagging reform efforts do less good than…

Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson recently ruffled professorial feathers with an impassioned anti-academic screed. His call for "destructive" reforms in higher education smacks of Freudian slippage. (Good ideas, according to the ruling tech paradigm, are "disruptive"—their "destructive" effects only…

Last summer, workers removing chalkboards from a high school in Oklahoma City discovered another set of boards hiding underneath. They had last seen the light of day in 1917. The boards were still chalk-marked with drawings, a calendar, and mathematics. But perhaps most striking were the…

Successful compensation systems generally include some form of pay-for-performance. If you are a salesperson, you receive higher commissions the more you sell. If you are an assembly line worker paid by the piece, you receive a bigger check the faster you work. Even if you are a CEO, you receive a…

Kelden, a 15-year-old from Show Low, Arizona, is autistic. Having this neurodevelopmental disorder means that he lacks social awareness, has trouble communicating with others, and struggles academically in humanities and language classes. He has also been a victim of bullying for as long as he can…

Among several things Alexander Astin’s impassioned new study sets in italics is this disconcerting observation: "Most of the students who end up in college are [about] average or even below average." That is, the main business of most colleges and universities is educating average or below average…

Hillary Clinton's campaign unveiled an outline of its upcoming new college affordability platform Wednesday. And it looks awfully familiar.

The Democratic party published a draft of its official platform last week that continues the Obama administration's attack on for-profit higher education. The relevant section of the platform reduces the entire for-profit university industry to the Trump University case, claiming that the school…

We're used to hearing Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren shout about college affordability, rallying hoards of debt-ridden youth with stats of bankers' bonuses compared to rising tuition costs.

The Graduate Record Examination (GRE), a standardized test required for admission to most advanced degree programs in the humanities and sciences, is not doing its job, according to the company that administers it.

A joyless rite of passage, the SAT is a source of dread that most adults get to ignore until they're forced to confront it anew along with their high-school-age children. And as critics and reformers of the SAT have long pointed out, students would put down their pencils, close their booklets,…

In a 2014 article on Common Core, Andrew Ferguson wrote, "Conservative hostility to the Common Core is also entangled with hostility to President Obama and his administration. Joy Pullman, an editor and writer who is perhaps the most eloquent and responsible public critic of Common Core, wrote…

In the Gates Foundation's annual letter, dreamily entitled "What If...," CEO Sue Desmond-Hellman writes of past progress and future goals. The foundation aims to save the world from what Bill and Melinda Gates consider its greatest problems: namely, infectious diseases, cigarette smoking and the…

In a new defense of education against further closing of the American mind, George Mason University president Angel Cabrera responds to the New York Times in a letter to the editor published May 9:

Last week, the Georgetown Memory Project (GMP) inspired op-eds and editorials pondering what Georgetown University should do for the descendants of 272 slaves whose 1838 sale saved D.C.'s Jesuit university from bankruptcy. GMP raises funds for research to track down these descendants and to honor…

Are there really too many high-achieving college applicants? Ted O’Neill, dean of admissions at the University of Chicago for two decades, seems to think so, writing recently, "It was nice to be able to take chances on kids who didn't have perfect records, but who revealed something special—some…

I went to a private college—Augustana College, in Rock Island, Illinois—and am grateful for having been able to do so. Doing so back then wasn't all that daunting: The tuition and room and board 30 years ago was just under $8,000, and with a $3,000 scholarship my parents found it a manageable…

The Times of London reports that for a mere $43,500 per year your child can attend Avenues: The World School in Manhattan, where 4-year olds sit in swivel chairs and are taught in Mandarin or Spanish half of the time. Every student is expected to become a responsible "global citizen" from a "world…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaces No Child Left Behind, unceremoniously ushers Uncle Sam out of a domestic arena like no legislation since welfare reform two decades ago. How in the world did that happen during the hyper-progressive Obama administration?

Most student loans in the United States are guaranteed by the federal government. The main difference between private loans and the guaranteed loans is that the former usually come with a higher interest rate: Students generally don’t seek these out until they cannot access guaranteed loans any…

Have you heard the news? The liberal arts, whose study antedates that old peripatetic from Stagira, are in jeopardy. In fact, they are in such a weakened state that public intellectuals are busy writing books with titles like In Defense of a Liberal Education, as if the study of man and man's place…

Hillary Clinton may be planning to close a lot of schools. At a town hall event today in Keota, Iowa, Clinton said she would keep open "better than average" schools:

Newark, New Jersey, may have been an idyllic American pastoral in the days of Philip Roth's youth, but you wouldn't want to be a kid there in this century. Drugs, gangs, and the 70 percent single-motherhood rate aside, education had become ancillary to the purpose of Newark public schools.…

Coming soon to a girls' locker room in a high school near you: the Obama administration's transgender gendarmes.

At the University of Missouri, feminist professor Melissa Click cried out “I need some muscle over here!” to expel a reporter from the Concerned Student 1950 protest in a public quad. A more apt encapsulation of what conservatives feel ails academia—identity obsession, rights-curbing,…

Next month the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Abigail Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, one of the most important cases this term. In 2008 Fisher, a white high school senior in Texas, applied for admission to the university and was turned down. She sued the school, claiming that its…

Having a decidedly anti-romantic view of college, I find myself not entirely opposed to the student radicals besieging campuses across the country.

Democrats have won votes by alleging that Republican positions amount to a "war on women." Yet politicians and pundits are now saying that a constellation of liberal policies favored by Democrats, on issues ranging from entitlements and healthcare to education and the economy, constitutes a war on…

Every few years in the Northeast, biologist John Cooley gets famous—because he’s the man who discovered the mating secrets of one of the insect world’s weirdest and most-publicized species: Magicicada septendecim, the 17-year cicada. True to their name, and unlike the bottle-green “annual” cicadas…

From Kate Davidson of the Wall Street Journal, we learn of one more reason to hope for a return to four percent growth and generally good economic times. Seems that:

Maybe he is the Republican Obama after all. Like the outgoing president, Florida senator Marco Rubio is charismatic, self-assured, and intelligent, as his performance in Tuesday night’s debate displayed. Alas, also like the president, Senator Rubio harbors an anti-intellectual streak, one that is…

If one good thing comes out of the Bill Cosby Crisis, The Scrapbook is fairly certain what it will be. For as the New York Times reported in a recent story, the 60 or so institutions of higher learning in America that have, during the past few decades, conferred honorary degrees on Bill Cosby are…

On a fall afternoon in 2010, the unlikely trio of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg took the stage of the Oprah show to declare their plan to remake American urban education. The scene, which turned ecstatic with the…

Donald Trump may own some of the nation’s most chichi country clubs – they don’t let just anybody in the Mar-a-Lago! – but his base of political support comes from clubs of a different sort. Ten years after two writers took to these pages to urge Republicans to appeal to people at Sam’s Club rather…

Michelle Obama introduced Bono at an event this evening in New York City. As the first lady introduced the singer-turned-icon, she repeated one of his signature lines: "povery is sexist."

After great fanfare, and much handwringing from an anxious higher education community, the Obama administration finally launched its ballyhooed College Scorecard. It disappoints, but not, perhaps, for the reasons that many think.

Nearly everyone recognizes that student debt has risen to a level that will be difficult to sustain, given the nation’s slow-growing economy and the sagging incomes of too many college-­educated Americans. Nearly 40 million Americans carry some form of student debt; more than 7 million are in…

Americans have long been skeptical of the liberal arts. Frequently this takes the form of a discussion of whether a degree in history or literature is “worth it” in a purely economic sense. Annual reports highlight the top-earning college majors, subtly encouraging students to forgo a class in…

In the July 3, 2015  “Notable and Quotable” column, the Wall Street Journal honors the school reformer, Marva Collins, who died this week at age 78, by resurrecting a 1982 opinion piece about her authored by Paul Gigot. Collins was a fearless supporter of funded tuition vouchers, and herself a…

First Lady Michelle Obama is thankful for her life. At the More magazine Impact Awards at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., the first lady credits her good life--and independence--to education.

Campbell Brown has launched the http://www.the74million.org, a new online outlet dedicated to covering education. 

The latest Conversations With Bill Kristol featuring Peter Berkowitz:

Nowadays when you mention the book Profiles in Character to Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida and, as it happens, the coauthor of Profiles in Character, he immediately cracks wise.

Scott Walker may not be a candidate for president yet, but the Wisconsin governor’s growing political action committee staff is already going after a potential rival in the Republican primary. GOP strategist Liz Mair, CNN reports, has just signed on to consult for Walker’s Our American Revival PAC,…

Scott Walker was never going to win fans among the faculty at the University of Wisconsin. Four years ago, Wisconsin professors were in the state capitol protesting the governor’s plans to limit public employee collective bargaining powers. But, boy, did he make enemies this month when he proposed…

Encouraged by Fox News host Megyn Kelly, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin mocked former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her Ivy League degree in remarks posted to Kelly's Facebook page.

The Washington Post has a long article up about Scott Walker's formative years. It has some fine reporting, but the overall tone and headline are curious: "As Scott Walker mulls White House bid, questions linger over college exit." 

Jonathan Easley of The Hill writes:

The president is proposing more higher education (at the community college level) as a cure for our economic woes.  Along with some substantial tax increases, of course.  But is more college the answer?  Or should we, perhaps, be concerned about the quality of the college we already have when, as…

 Previewing an item from his upcoming State of the Union address, President Obama announced a "Free Community College" plan Thursday evening for "anyone who's willing to work for it":

The school house for American children is, increasingly, the same one where they eat and sleep and live with their parents.  As Genevieve Wood of the Daily Signal reports:

At the conclusion of the latest installment of the endless Arab war against Israel, the leaders of Hamas simultaneously accused Israel of “genocide” against the residents of Gaza and took to the streets, dancing, ululating, and jubilating in celebration of their “victory” over the Zionist enemy.…

A candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, after a debate with his opponent, said that:

Time magazine has a cover story out that's causing a fair amount of outrage, but for all the wrong reasons. The story is headlined, "Rotten Apples: It's nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher. Some tech millionaires may have found a way to change that." Since then, some 70,000 people signed an…

When the College Board released a revised framework for Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH), it ignited controversy. Conservative critics objected that the standards evinced a fixation with identity politics, a bias against free enterprise, and a clear partisan preference. Liberal defenders…

Nina Rees writes about Campbell Brown taking on the education establishment:

As Michelle Maitre at EdSource reports, when people learn more about the Common Core educational standards, they like them less.  The Common Core is the latest attempt to apply universal standards of instruction and performance across American schools.  It has the support of big names like Bill…

Senior editor Andrew Ferguson joined Reason's Nick Gillespie to discuss his recent WEEKLY STANDARD article, "The Common Core Corruption." Ferguson explains how the education reform-industrial complex keeps getting it wrong. Watch the video below:

It has been five years now since America got the news, or was supposed to: Henceforth our children would enjoy a revolutionary new approach to learning in the public schools, in the form of national educational standards. They’re called the Common Core State Standards, or Common Core for short—or…

One of the Democratic party’s most loyal and powerful interest groups is, evidently, falling out of love with the Obama administration.  As Peter Sullivan of The Hill reports:

Peter Berkowitz, writing in RealClearPolitics:

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published a month ago but just publicly released on Monday found that while the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has taken steps to see that ineligible beneficiaries do not receive reduced-price or free school meals, oversight still needs to be…

Support for the decision of Brandeis University not to award Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree, after previously announcing it would do so, has coalesced around the notion that while Islamic radicalism can be criticized, even condemned, one cannot criticize Islam itself.  By condemning both, and…

It is the “Cubs Fail to Reach World Series” of news stories. American students are found to be doing poorly at their job which is, of course, learning. Today’s iteration of that story comes from Libby Nelson of Vox who reports:

Writing in the Tennessean, a man named George Parker writes:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has just released this statement in response to Brandeis University's decision to rescind her invitation to receive an honorary degree:

Athens, Ga.

In school, the intense pressure to do well on tests creates a temptation to cheat. And in Philadelphia, it seems that teachers and their supervisors succumbed to it.  As Stephanie Banchero of the Wall Street Journal writes:

On January 27, the Tikvah Fund in New York City will be kicking off its new Winter Speaker Series with a talk by Bill Kristol on "American Foreign Policy and the State of Israel." Other speakers in the line-up include Elliott Abrams, Yuval Levin, Meir Soloveichik, and Ruth Wisse.

A Missouri school district faces a $150,000 bill for Obamacare, according to a report on KMIZ-MO:

We’re going to hear a lot in the coming days about how the “Chinese” education system is superior to America’s.  That’s because the results of an international exam were released today, and American students fared predictably poorly. And it was “Asian nations [who] dominated the test,” reports the…

The educrats have decided that if students are to be taught about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, then it might be best to leave out any mention of that … well, that war that was being fought at around that same time.

There is widespread opposition to the latest federal initiative aimed at improving education in this country.  And the secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, knows why. It is because the imposition of something called the “Common Core State Standards”has exposed a terrible truth to many:

Elections, as we are too-often reminded, have consequences. You vote for someone who says that you can keep your health care plan and … er, bad example.

An organization representing Louisiana parents shouldn't be allowed to intervene in a federal lawsuit against the state's school voucher program, the Department of Justice said in a response to a motion requesting legal intervention. The Louisiana chapter of the Black Alliance for Educational…

New research from the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee shows that over the last 5 years, the U.S. has spent about $3.7 trillion on welfare. Here's a chart, showing that spending versus transportation, education, and NASA spending:

It was almost sad last June when the Los Angeles Unified School District announced its intention to buy an iPad for every one of its more than 600,000 students in a deal valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The scheme carried more than a whiff of desperation​—​education bureaucrats…

In the early days of the Obama administration, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was the bipartisan superstar. At Duncan’s confirmation hearing, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) told him, “President-elect Obama has made several distinguished cabinet appointments, but in my view of it all, I think…

Bobby Jindal is outraged over a Department of Justice lawsuit against a Louisiana school voucher program. The suit, which he (repeatedly) calls “cynical, immoral, and hypocritical” and the “worst misuse” of federal desegregation laws, aims to stop a program that allows poor students in failing…

If the public is to understand the full awfulness of the sequester, it seems that it must first suffer. So, as Eric Katz reports at Government Executive, the FBI will be furloughing agents and cutting costs in a way that, according to its departing director will:

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, on Air Force One en route to New York for the president's education bus tour, had some strong words to say about the prospects of those who don't graduate from high school, and also about those who complete high school but do not go on to college.  While…

It looks as though the various state universities and colleges will have to place a freeze on the hiring of additional diversity counselors, compliance administrators, and the like.  

It is becoming increasingly clear that President Obama does not approve of the American Founders’ notion that Congress’s role is to pass laws, and the president’s role is to execute them. On the heels of his unilateral decision not to start Obamacare’s employer mandate on the date that the…

In New York City, 26 percent of students in third through eighth grade passed the tests in English, and 30 percent passed in math, according to the New York State Education Department. This was reported yesterday, by Javier C. Hernandez reports in the New York Times.

As a “millennial” (i.e. one born between 1980 and 2000), I’ve grown used to reading descriptions of myself – written, always, by those much older than I – that I don’t recognize. It’s a bit like hearing my voice on tape – can that really be me? So take, for example, the trendy idea that people my…

In Dakar, Senegal, speaking at the Martin Luther King Middle School, First Lady Michelle Obama likened her upbringing to the upbringing of the Senegalese children at the school. Obama told the children of her "experience," and how it was similar to theirs.

The New York Times is announcing that it has discontinued The Choice blog, which was created four years ago to help students demystify college admissions and financial aid. Although we will no longer update the blog’s monthly college checklists, virtual guidance office sessions, and student posts,…

For nearly 30 years—at least since Bill Bennett’s tenure as secretary of education and Lamar Alexander’s as governor of Tennessee—education-minded conservatives at both national and state levels have embraced a two-part school reform strategy, focused equally on rigorous standards and parental…

Obamacare regulations are forcing employers to cut employee hours at Indiana schools, according to the Courier-Journal.

About a half-century ago, Secretary of State George C. Marshall used his commencement speech at Harvard to announce what came to be known as the “Marshall Plan.” Of course, not every commencement address can be a major policy pronouncement by a leading statesman, but this year’s decision to give…

When President Obama unveiled his Race to the Top initiative in 2009, the idea was to award $4.35 billion in federal grant money to states to replicate policies that boosted student achievement.  That quickly changed and the federal money was instead used to persuade states to adopt…

From Eric Katz, at Government Executive, we learn:

Harvey Mansfield, writing for the Claremont Review of Books:

A Louisiana high school is in "chaos" after 57 teachers skipped school to protest the governor in Baton Rouge. The problem is that there were not enough substitute teachers to replace those who decided to protest the Republican governor, Bobby Jindal.

There may actually be some movement in the long struggle to change and improve the way children are educated in this country.  The forces of the status quo – especially the teachers' unions – have fiercely resisted just about every reform and they have considerable power.  Still, the occasional…

In a season when we all become bracketologists, here is an interesting variation that uses the form to conduct a playoff in which the school that costs more to attend wins and moves on to the next round against another institution of absurdly high priced learning.  Another elimination and the…

The story is so depressingly familiar that you just read it and shrug it off.  According to a CBS report:

First Lady Michelle Obama spoke today in Chicago about her new physical education initiative for kids. She called her new program "our patriotic obligation to this country" and "our moral obligation."

David Plouffe, a former advisor to President Barack Obama, tells a student newspaper at the University of Chicago that one need not be college educated to do politics. Plouffe states, though, that he thinks "everybody should have a college degree."

At an event at the White House for the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program awards program, First Lady Michelle Obama praised arts in children's education by saying, "if it’s good enough for our kids, it’s good enough for all of our kids."

The Scrapbook notes, with some amusement, that George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars franchise, sold his lucrative Lucasfilm enterprise last week to the Disney Company, which announced in turn that it intends to revive and extend the Star Wars saga. We leave it to the experts to judge whether this…

Halfway through what feels like the usual interview with a Hollywood entertainer in town to promote a new work, I’m stopped short. 

The teachers, if you ask them, resisted the fearful boot of repression and struck a blow for worker's rights:

The courts are moving with customary alacrity in ruling on Mayor Rahm Emanuel's request for an injunction that would have compelled teachers to return to the classroom this morning. Not so fast, the judge said, Wednesday would be soon enough, although “by then, the legal matter could be irrelevant.…

Like others who are convinced that reform of public education is possible, Bloomberg believes:

“To say that the contract will be settled today [Tuesday] is lunacy,” CTU president Karen Lewis told cheering teachers.  Ms. Lewis sounded like she is digging in for the long haul when she said,