Free Republic

Across the country, people found alternatives in home schooling, private schools and charter schools.

Families are voting with their feet to charter schools, which are increasingly resisted by school boards and teacher unions. Diana Diaz-Harrison, above, started a charter in Arizona to fill a gap: no specialized services for children like her autistic son Sammy. . A vote by the Los Angeles board of education vote last month to ban charter schools from sharing space at 300 district campuses is the latest big-city attack against alternatives to struggling traditional public schools. With the strong support of United Teachers Los Angeles, school board members say the ban will protect black and Latino students from the...

Charter schools in the US are significantly outperforming their traditional-public-school peers across the nation — and by particularly large margins in New York City and other urban areas, an extensive new study reveals. “This is not a fluke,” said Margaret Macke Raymond, director of the prestigious Stanford University Center for Research on Educational Outcomes, which performed the study. “The charter-school sector has improved across the country. “The New York results are among the best in the country,” she added.

Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma sent a letter to Attorney General Gentner Drummond Monday indicating that he was “troubled” by a recent opinion the AG gave regarding religious charter schools. Drummond issued an opinion late last week recanting his predecessor, John O’Conner’s, support of religious charter schools calling it “state-funded religion.” Stitt responded to Drummond’s claims Monday, arguing that by not providing religious citizens with an alternative, they may very well be forced to choose between their faith and receiving an education, according to the letter. “You state that ‘religious liberty is one of our most fundamental freedoms’ that...

Faced with the undeniable fact city kids attending charters schools do far better on state exams than those stuck in the regular public-school system, critics routinely complain that charters “teach to the test” — as if that’s somehow a bad thing. Tests, after all, measure what kids are supposed to learn. Schools that don’t “teach to the test” effectively aren’t teaching at all. In other words, the critics are just avoiding the fact that public charter schools work — and, most embarrassing to the vested interests that depend on the regular system, work far better for lower-income minority children. Indeed,...

A video of two students viciously beating a 9-year-old student on a Florida school bus has surfaced online, alarming the community and prompting a swift reaction from the girl’s parents. The disturbing footage shows two boys repeatedly striking the girl as she is folded over in a seat, barely defending herself with one hand as she tightly grips her backpack with the other. Many of the punches land on the girl’s head, neck and face. No fellow students or adults intervened... "We’ve had issues before with my son and the kids on the bus, and also in the cafeteria and...

Three Tennessee school boards denied the application of the American Classical Academy, a K-12 charter school system affiliated with Hillsdale College that provides students with a classic liberal arts education. The American Classical Academy alleges that these decisions are politically motivated and based on its ties to Hillsdale, which is Christian and conservative, as well as comments made by Hillsdale’s president, Larry Arnn.The American Classical Academy filed appeals with the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission, a group appointed by the governor. In two statements of intent, the American Classical Academy said that the Rutherford and Madison school boards did not...

You know you’re hitting the target when your opponent starts fighting back. In this case, the target is good education, namely charter schools, and the opponent is Biden’s Department of Education. In the same week the New York Times was digging for any kind of dirt it could toss at Hillsdale College’s charter-school initiative, a new DOE rule went into effect. The rule, proposed in the unplumbed depths of the federal register a month prior on March 14, added some 14 pages of federal regulations on the traditionally local process of charter-school application, approval, and administration. Among other things, the...

With only 1,500 students on a small-town campus in southern Michigan, Hillsdale College is far from the power corridors of government and top-ranked universities. But it has outsize influence in the conservative world, with strong ties to the Washington elite. Republican leaders frequently visit, and Justice Clarence Thomas delivered the 2016 commencement address, calling Hillsdale a “shining city on a hill” for its devotion to “liberty as an antecedent of government, not a benefit from government.” Now the college is making new efforts to reach beyond its campus, this time with an even younger audience. The college is fighting what...

Governor Jeb Bush visit with our Optima Domi Team to share a few words in the metaverse.

<p>FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP) — A Virginia Senate committee has killed two key pieces of education legislation sought by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, including one that was designed to eliminate teaching of critical race theory in K-12 schools.</p><p>The committee on Thursday also killed a bill that would have made it easier to create charter schools in parts of the state.</p>

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee (R) announced on Monday a state partnership with Michigan’s Hillsdale College to launch a number of K-12 charter schools. Lee announced the partnership during his state of the state address on Monday evening in front of a special joint session of the state Legislature. Hillsdale College is a liberal arts college in southern Michigan known for its refusal to accept federal funds. The college has launched an initiative to revitalize “public education through the launch and support of classical K-12 charter schools.” Lee and Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn are working together to build a system...

A former White House adviser to former President Obama pled guilty to wire fraud on Friday in connection to an alleged scheme to steal $218,000 from a school network that he helped create. “Seth Andrew, a former White House advisor, admitted today to devising a scheme to steal from the very same schools he helped create," Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. "Andrew now faces time in federal prison for abusing his position and robbing those he promised to help.”

Further, as the report notes, “Nearly 240,000 new students enrolled in these innovative, student-centered public schools, despite a sharp decrease in overall public school enrollment during the same period. Of the 42 states evaluated, 39 experienced charter school enrollment increases, while only three saw modest decreases. By comparison, district school enrollment dropped precipitously in every state.” So, during the ill-fated 2020-21 school year, a mass exodus occurred at public schools while charter schools experienced their highest growth rate in years. There are several reasons for this shift, yet one cannot dismiss the double whammy that COVID-19 and critical race theory...

In response to Saturday’s post, several commenters remarked that it is not appropriate to blame “bad schools” for the poor academic performance of many children from minority groups, particularly black children. These commenters suggest that there are other factors that play a principal role, and that these factors are things that schools can do nothing to change, particularly low IQ and/or a culture that does not value education. The problem with this contention is that there is actually substantial and even definitive evidence that schools can make a very large difference in the educational outcomes of minority children. I previously...

These highly skilled parents came together to not just solve their own kids' education needs but offer a high-quality education to families in their glorious Colorado mountain town.Merit Academy of Woodland Park, Colorado, opened on Aug. 23 in a buoyant ceremony featuring American flags and a teenage rider riding a dun horse while waving the school flag. The new public school went from idea to reality in just one year, opening K-8 with plans to grow into high school. As a classical school, it offers a low-screen, high-relationship environment and a focus on creative and critical thinking through careful attention...

“[I]f ever there were a structure systemically keeping African-Americans from getting ahead, it would surely be America’s big-city public-school systems,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn. Look, for example, at the most recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card. For the past 20 years, achievement has been broken down by school district level in its Trial Urban District Assessment. Of the 27 U.S. urban school districts that reported their results for 2019—from Boston and Chicago to Fort Worth, Texas, and Los Angeles—not a single one can say a majority of the black eighth...

The founder of Black Lives Matter in Saint Paul, Minnesota resigned from the organization after discovering an “ugly truth.” Rashad Turner, the founder of BLM in Saint Paul, resigned after a little over one year, as he realized that the leftist organization had “little concern for rebuilding black families.” He continued, “My mother wasn’t able to take care of me, so I was raised by my grandparents. They told me that if I was going to change my life for the better, education was the answer. So, I worked hard in school. I got into Hamline University, and earned a...

A former White House education adviser during the Obama administration has been arrested and charged with stealing $218,005 from a charter school network he founded, prosecutors said. Seth Andrew, 42, who served as a senior adviser in the Office of Educational Technology, was arrested April 27 on charges of wire fraud, money laundering, and making false statements to a financial institution. Federal prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York allege that he used more than half of the money to maintain his bank account above a threshold that enabled him to get better interest...

A former White House adviser has been arrested and charged by the FBI with stealing $218,005 from charter schools he helped found. Seth Andrew, 42, served under former President Barack 0bama as a senior adviser in the Office of Educational Technology. He was arrested on charges of wire fraud, money laundering, and making false statements to a financial institution. Federal prosecutors said that he used more than half of the allegedly stolen money to maintain his bank account above a threshold that enabled him to get better interest rates for a mortgage of his multimillion Manhattan apartment. “As alleged, Seth...