Free Republic

At least one form of very productive education disruption is growing exponentially. "Parents can choose public schools for their children in 55 percent of the nation's largest school districts, more than double the percent of such districts that offered school choice 15 years ago," Grover (Russ) Whitehurst writes in the Education Choice and Competition Index for 2015 compiled by the Brookings Institution, for which he toils. "In addition, programs that allow students to enroll in public schools outside their home district are available in about 20 percent of the states. Additions to the menu of school choice in many locales...

Members of a secretive Turkish Islamic movement that is at the center of a congressional ethics committee investigation have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and to her family’s charity, a Daily Caller investigation has found.The largest donation from a leader of the Gulen movement, which is operated from Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains by a moderate Muslim cleric named Fethullah Gulen, came from Recep Ozkan. A former president of the Gulen-linked Turkish Cultural Center, Ozkan gave between $500,001 and $1,000,000 to the Clinton Foundation in recent months, the charity’s website shows. He also served as a national...

Muhammad Fethullah Gulen is a Turkish Islamist, writer and preacher with a secret plan for bringing Shariah law to America. Arguably Turkey's most influential spiritual leader of the past 50 years, Gulen left that country in the late 1990s and now directs his cult-like Islamic movement from a guarded compound in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. Part of his empire consists of a thriving network of more than 140 charter schools in 26 states that sell themselves to parents as a secular and more academically rigorous alternative to public schools. As the second largest chain of charter schools in the...

Can you name the most contentious issue in American politics? Here's a hint. It's being fought at the federal, state and local levels. And it doesn't go away. The struggle is persistent, ongoing, unending. Here is a second hint. The issue is not gay marriage, or gun control, or police brutality and or immigration. Those issues are either settled, largely settled, isolated or completely out of the control of local and state governments. Here is a third hint. The issue divides Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. But it is especially divisive among Democrats and among people who call themselves...

A recent, widely publicized incident in which a policeman was called to a school classroom to deal with a disruptive student has provoked all sorts of comments on whether the policeman used "excessive force." What has received far less attention, though it is a far larger question, with more sweeping implications, is the role of disruptive students in schools. Critics of charter schools have often pointed to those schools' ability to expel uncooperative and disruptive students, far more readily than regular public schools can, as a reason for some charter schools' far better educational outcomes, as shown on many tests....

In Washington, Mr. Jeffries, a second-term congressman, is best known as a collegial, next-generation Democrat with a keen interest in criminal justice reform. In New York, however, he has positioned himself at a nexus of powerful interests that have grown frustrated during Mr. de Blasio’s tenure.... Where Mr. de Blasio has opposed charter schools, Mr. Jeffries has firmly defended them; in April, he addressed a fund-raising gala for the Success Academy organization, a fast-growing charter network heavily backed by wealthy critics of the mayor. When Mr. de Blasio sought to limit expansion of the ride-hailing company Uber, Mr. Jeffries spoke...

Amid the rubble and rebuilding efforts, unseen by most Americans was a profound rebuilding of a major American city’s education system. Tragically, it took a hurricane to do this. But out of Katrina’s death and destruction rose one of the greatest transformations ever witnessed in American public education. A decade later, education reformers highlight the “Katrina effect” in education innovation and reform. Katrina left most New Orleans schools literally underwater. Most schools remained officially closed for months. Many New Orleans families fled the city to escape the floods and rebuild lives; some never returned. Many students who remained missed months...

Texas Senator Ted Cruz has more than the White House on his mind–he’s also taking a shot at Gracie Mansion. The conservative Republican, a probable presidential contender in 2016, blasted Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, for his educational views in a speech he gave yesterday at the Heritage Action Conservative Policy Summit in Washington, D.C. Mr. Cruz, a supporter of charter schools, said Mr. de Blasio’s opposition to Eva Moskowitz’s charter network amounted to throwing “young African-American kids” out of school. “In my view school choice is the civil rights issue of the 21st century. And I gotta say...

Who's afraid of Mayor Bill de Blasio in Albany? Not state Senate Republicans, who denied his request for permanent mayoral control of New York City schools, granting him one year instead. Not Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who didn't deny he and his team were the unnamed officials in news reports who belittled the mayor as "incompetent" and clueless on influencing the legislative process. Not advocates for charter schools, who won a lifting of a cap for new schools over de Blasio's opposition in the three-way agreement last week among Cuomo, state Senate Republicans and the Democrat-led state Assembly. "There isn't...

It’s lottery season. "Lottery," to you, might bring to mind ping-pong balls bouncing around in a glass tube, as millions anxiously wait to see if they'll win millions of dollars. But nationwide, millions of parents must anxiously wait out a different kind of lottery: to see if their children will be selected to have a chance at a better opportunity. The expansion of charter school programs in some of the nation’s biggest metropolitan areas have given more parents and students access to a different educational track and an alternative option to an underperforming public school system. But despite expansions in...

Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) recently proposed the Parental Choice in Education Act as a way to provide more opportunity for parents in choosing which schools would be the best fit for their children. The legislation would use $70 million in taxpayer money to create an education tax credit for families making $60,000 or less. Parents who qualify could receive up to $500 in a tax credit or refund for each student attending a private school. Among other benefits, it would also encourage more private school scholarships. "This is about fairness and this is about parents choosing the school that is...

The state Education Department has rejected all 15 applications for new charter schools, including 12 in New York City, claiming they failed to meet academic standards. “We always look for quality and these applications didn’t measure up,” Education Department spokesman Dennis Tompkins said Wednesday. “We invited several of the applicants to reapply in June and we gave them suggestions on how to improve their applications.” But charter-school advocates weren’t buying it, saying the rejection of all the applicants reeked of pro-teacher-union politics. “The timing and nature of these blanket rejections should raise serious concerns for New Yorkers ... Mayor de...

Gov. Rick Snyder’s plan to revitalize schools within the city of Detroit has school-choice advocates concerned about potential threats to school choice in the city. Charter school advocates fear that Snyder’s plan creates a bureaucracy with the authority to stop the growth of charter schools or even shut them down if different political leadership put anti-charter board members in charge. The governor’s plan calls for the old Detroit Public Schools to be kept in existence for the administrative purpose of paying off the district’s debt. DPS has $483 million in operating debt and a combined capital and bond debt of...

Alabama and Montana passed historic school choice legislation this legislative session, giving parents more options in choosing the best atmosphere for the education of their children. Finally, Alabama and Montana join more than 40 states in the movement for school choice and educational freedom, demonstrating that Americans want school choice. In Alabama, the state legislature passed SB45, allowing for the first public charter schools. Within the bill, an unlimited number of conversion charter schools are permitted, while start-up charter schools are limited to ten schools per year until the law sunsets in 2020. Additionally, charter schools may be authorized by...

LaTanya Dorsey is a mother who sends her daughter to a public charter school in Eastpointe. Her daughter is on the honor roll and doing very well. Dorsey didn't expect to have a say in where her daughter went to school. “Usually, it's the district that you're in is the school that you would have to attend,” Dorsey said. “That kind of surprised me — that I did have a choice to send her to another school, so I was real grateful for that.” Dorsey said that parental choice is critical to helping students attend a school that is the...

More evidence indicates that school choice works, even in so-called blue states. The Boston-based Pioneer Institute undertook a study of charter schools in the bay state and found that “Case studies of five high-performing charters schools from around the state reveal that these schools create highly effective teaching workforces in specific ways. First, they take great advantage of the autonomy that they have to assemble their own teaching workforces, in most cases without having to consider teacher tenure or other common constraints that teachers unions impose on traditional public schools. When assembling their workforces, high performing charter schools tend to...

Necessity drives invention. In the field of military innovation, all sorts of inventions — the Maginot line, the flame fougasse, trench warfare, the Vickers machine gun — were rooted in the same urgent necessity: keeping Germans out. War is evil and ugly, but Europe experienced a worse horror when that necessity was inverted, and the totalitarian movement that controlled half of the continent decided it needed a way to keep Germans in. And so utopia’s jailers built the Berlin Wall and any number of similar fortifications. The ideologue may say that a wall is a wall is a wall, but...

Opponents of charter schools have claimed that these schools are "cherry-picking" the students they admit, and that this explains why many charter schools get better educational results with less money than public schools do. Many controversies about how students should be admitted to educational institutions, especially those supported by the taxpayers, betray a fundamental confusion about what these institutions are there for. This applies to both schools and colleges. Admitting students strictly on the basis of their academic qualifications, which might seem to be common sense, is rejected by many college admissions committees. A dean of admissions at Harvard, years...

Deion Sanders knows better than most that there's power in a nickname. When he was still just a skinny cornerback at Florida State University, he dubbed himself "Prime Time" and birthed an alter ego that would earn him fame, riches, and a place in the pantheon of the 20th century's greatest athletes, not to mention greatest egos. Yet for Sanders today, nicknames are more a matter of convenience than a conscious act of branding. "Blind Side," yells the Hall of Famer. "You're up!" It's another sweltering June morning on the artificial turf of Texas A&M-Commerce's football field. The campus, an...

Charter school growth has exploded over the last two decades and so have the waiting lists to get in them. “Today there are charter school laws in 42 states and the District of Columbia,” Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools said Monday in a conference on Capitol Hill. “Close to 50 percent of D. C. public schools are charter schools.” Rees spoke at a forum assembled by the American Federation of Children (AFC) and hosted by Senator Tim Scott, R-South Carolina. “In Louisiana we’ve doubled the number of charter schools and 90 percent of New...