Free Republic

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...

Educational choice in Detroit is worth the fight. That's the message from 11 Detroit-area families whose children attend charter schools and spoke to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy about a proposal to limit public charter schools in the city. The Mackinac Center met with the families at their homes and at schools so they could publicly share their views on school choice. “Let them flourish,” said Corey Hughes, who has had experience with charter schools first as a father and now as a grandfather. A coalition of foundations, public school officials and other interests has proposed centralizing control of...

COLLEGE HILL, OH - A College Hill, Ohio woman is accused of beheading her infant daughter, a source close to the investigation told WCPO. Deasia Watkins, 20, is charged with aggravated murder in connection with the death of her 3-month-old girl, according to police.

When in 2011 the Legislature voted to repeal a cap on charter public schools, Democrats warned that “allowing an unlimited number” of “for-profit” charter schools would put students at risk. Four years later, a new report by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools finds that while Michigan has the fifth most charter school students in the country at 159,000, growth in the number of schools has been steady. California leads the nation with 547,800 charter school students. Nationwide, there are an estimated 2.89 million students enrolled in charter schools. The report states that Michigan added 10 new charter schools...

Conservative discourse mainly features teachers' unions as the enemy when it comes to school choice, leaving others, like sociologists and other tenured intellectuals, free from public accountability as they exert their substantial influence on education policy. One thing that you should know if you follow school choice issues is that for leftist academics who oppose school choice, their dogmas take primacy over empirical evidence, and their most fundamental dogma when it comes to school choice is that it promotes racial segregation, and thus thwarts their version of equality. Racial segregation, as a policy in the United States, saw its end...

Last April, Michigan Capitol Confidential published “From Detroit to the Ivy League: One Student’s Journey,” about Cesar Chavez Academy student Daniel Felix, who comes from a poor community but achieved high academic scores and letters of acceptance from many of the top universities in the country. The best research shows that students in charter public schools in Michigan gain an academic advantage over their conventional school counterparts. According to a study from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), charter students in Detroit gain three months of additional learning compared to students of similar backgrounds in Detroit Public Schools....

Robert Luce lives in and pays property taxes to Canton Township. On a daily basis he watches school buses from the Plymouth-Canton school district pass by his house. However, the subdivision where Luce lives is located within the jurisdiction of the Wayne-Westland school district. This is also the district to which Luce and his neighbors pay school taxes. An elementary school in Plymouth-Canton is one mile away from his home, Luce said. The closest Wayne-Westland elementary school is four miles away. “It makes no sense,” Luce said. For parents it makes a great deal of difference though, and not just...

It is no small irony that when I accessed Richard Cohen’s Washington Post column praising terminal brain cancer patient Brittany Maynard’s “courageous” assisted suicide, an ad for Source America appeared with the article featuring Denise Kasten, a woman with Downs Syndrome. “Courageous” mothers typically kill off children like Denise through abortion. Downs syndrome children, after all, live Brittany Maynard’s great fears. They’re limited and dependent as long as they live. That, in a society obsessed with independence defined as personal autonomy, constitutes for many people Lebensunwertes Leben, “life unworthy of life.” A friend contrasted Brittany Maynard’s suicide with Lauren Hill’s...

"As soon as I was given the choice, I left," Amy Rosno, a teacher with the virtual class program at the Waukesha school system, told FoxNews.com. "I never really understood the union anyway." Rosno said she had a better understanding once she was asked to be a representative for her department and attended her first WEAC meeting. "I realized that it was all political and not about teaching," she said. Teachers who spoke to the nonprofit education think tank EAGnews.org said they were glad to be free of the union's grip, especially because of the perception their dues were spent...

House Democrats have introduced legislation as a measure to place a moratorium on any new charter public schools opening in Michigan. However, the pro-school choice Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP) reads the bill differently. According to GLEP Executive Director Gary Naeyaert, as drafted, House Bill 5852 would eventually spell doom for all of the charter public schools in the state. “What we have uncovered is that the legislation they claim would just push the pause button on increasing the number of charter schools would, in reality, close every charter school in the state over time,” Naeyaert told Capitol Confidential. “Language...

House Democrats want to place a moratorium on opening any new charter public schools in Michigan. They have introduced House Bill 5852 to do so. Legislation such as this bill, offered by the minority party in the House amid election campaigning, has little chance of moving and isn’t likely to even get a hearing. But from a larger perspective, the call for a moratorium on new charters is seen by some as part of an overall war on charter public schools. This “war” is backed by a coalition of interests, most notably teachers unions, and involves attacks on various fronts,...

The president of the Michigan State Board of Education said there are “detrimental effects” on education performance with an "unregulated" school marketplace where parents are left to decide. John Austin made the comments in an email when asked about accountability of charter public schools. He said parents don’t have “perfect information” about education quality and “many parents and their students can't execute a choice if they wanted to… they don't have time energy, transportation money to pick or get to a different school.” (See Austin's full comment here). In a later phone interview, Austin said he considers Michigan to be...

There are 51 schools that have been in the bottom 5 percent of the Michigan Department of Education's Top-to-Bottom rankings three years in a row. Of those 51 schools, four were charter public schools and three of those four were closed. Meanwhile, the conventional public schools on the list remain open. "Charter schools have traditionally been the only public schools that have been held accountable for their performance," said Michigan Association of Public School Academies President Dan Quisenberry. "If they fail their students, they're closed down. That's never happened with a traditional public school, ever. What we need is this...

It's fortunate the Supreme Court of the United States saw it fit last week to rule that corporations could not be coerced into covering religiously objectionable forms of birth control for their employees. This was a critical ruling, because it indicates that the majority of the Court still thinks religious beliefs and personal choice have a valid place in American society. The margin of the split decision, however, is alarming, because it reminds us of how close we are to having a government that will subject moral convictions to its bureaucratically directed control. People have legitimate differences of opinion about...

DETROIT — Driving down Waterman Street in Mexicantown in Southwest Detroit you pass boarded up houses, closed down businesses, and other things that make up too much of the city. Until you get to Cesar Chavez Academy. The school stands out like an island. No boards. No graffiti. No garbage in the parking lot. This is a place for learning. And it's where Daniel Felix has excelled. He came to Detroit from Los Angeles as a child and lives a few blocks from the high school with his two brothers, a grandfather, and parents who speak mostly Spanish. Felix with...

A smack in the face from an Atheist.

Gov. Bobby Jindal is battling to protect Louisiana’s fast-growing school voucher program from an all-out attack by the Obama administration. The Justice Department claims the state’s private schools are defying a decades-old federal desegregation order. In November, a judge ruled the Department could monitor Louisiana's voucher program, even though 90 percent of the 6,750 students who use the Louisiana Scholarship Program are minority, and 85 percent are black. Jindal filed a 38-page response to the ruling earlier in January, asking a judge to overturn a 1976 "white flight" case that prohibited giving public funds to all-white private schools. "The state...

HOUSTON – A Houston woman who says she is pregnant with Arian Foster’s baby is taking the Texans running back to court. Brittany Norwood, a 20-year-old University of Houston senior, says Foster has been pressuring her to get an abortion. Norwood claims she didn’t know Foster was married with children when she had sex with him last summer. She said they were first intimate at Hotel ZaZa where Foster was staying during training camp. Norwood said they also spent a week together in California in November while Foster was recovering from back surgery. Norwood sold photos of them together in...

Prohibition: Washington is moving to ban trans fats. The obvious question, of course, is what will it ban next? If it can outlaw trans fats, it can outlaw anything. Is taking away choice what we want government to do? Trans fats, also called partially hydrogenated oils by many, have been in our foods for decades. These artificial fats help extend shelf life and in some cases simply make food taste better. Activists, though, tell us they're not healthy. We're not going to debate the issue. The health concerns of trans fats are not the point. But this is: Where does...

Wake County Board of Education Election TODAY in Districts 1, 2, 7, and 9. VOTE FOR SCHOOL CHOICE!