Free Republic

The Founding Fathers understood government forms. What they meant by the term was the arrangement of power found in any civil society, whether monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy. This is what Thomas Jefferson meant when he wrote in the Declaration, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,” and “mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” The careful, prudent balancing of the forms of government in the U.S. Constitution—combining...

As readers may or may not be aware, it’s School Choice Week. However, given the items in the news, you could be forgiven for not knowing. In fact, given those same items, one might get the idea that we’ve instead been going through something like Bullying Month. After years of hand-wringing about the phenomenon of bullying, whether in its generic form oragainst specific groups, it appears to have taken the phenomenon of hazing in the National Football League to get the practice widely condemned to the degree it deserves. In an ideal world, this would lead into a wider discussion...

In 2007, a group of governors and state education chiefs got together to try to remedy the declining and degraded U.S. public academic system. Their goal was to establish a new set of standards that better prepared kids for college, careers and their ever-changing, hyper-connected and globally competitive world. In short, as a result, the Common Core State Standards were born. In 2010, standards were published and made available for mathematics and English language arts. Though standards for science and social studies are still in development, the goal is for states to have 85 percent of their curricula based upon...

So, last Saturday I'm back on the ball field coaching my 9-year-old boy's little league team along with three other fathers. We lose big. Why? Because it was hot. Yes, I know what you're thinking: Wasn't it hot for the other team? Stop with the logic, OK? My team wilted in the fourth inning. In fact, three of the players cried. One missed his mother. I told him the game would be over shortly and she was looking forward to seeing him. He accepted it, but struck out anyway. The right fielder cried when the ball hit his thumb after...

I wrote recently how teachers unions, parent-teacher associations and school bureaucrats form an education "Blob" that makes it hard to improve schools. They also take revenge on those who work around the Blob. Here's one more sad example: Ben Chavis, founder and principal of the American Indian Public Charter Schools, got permission to compete with the Blob in Oakland, Calif. Chavis vowed, "We'll outperform the other schools in five years." He did. Kids at the three schools he runs now have some of the highest test scores in California. His schools excel even though the government spends less on...

If you’re a regular Townhall reader, you’re familiar with Mike Adams’ columns. If you’re any other Townhall columnist (and competitive like me), always seeing him scattered among the “Top 10” most-read most-commented columns makes you want to finally give in and do a column on Mike Adams with the hopes of cracking the top 10. Adams graduated from high school with a GPA of 1.8. Despite his apparent fear of success, he still managed to get an Associate’s degree from San Jacinto College. He then got his B.A. with a more respectable 3.4 GPA and Master’s in psychology from Mississippi...

The digital age continues to confuse and confound a generation of adults who have learned to participate in it, but lack the ability for what Ethel Merman as Annie Oakley called "doin' what comes naturally." We still think a microwave is for heating coffee and thawing frozen food, never the name of a computer game. We weren't born to researching on Wikipedia or Googling for facts. Our fingers can text, but often strike two letters on the Android, making for some strange communications. We despair of catching up with the tools at hand and wonder what it all means...

A stunning announcement out of Florida this week. The state that was exhibit A for economic disaster two years ago is now experiencing a tremendous rebound thanks to Gov. Rick Scott’s pro-growth policies. Washington should take a page – no several pages – out of Scott’s book. Since December 2010, one month before Scott took office, the unemployment rate in Florida has dropped from 11.1 percent to 7.8 percent – that rate is lower than the national average. After two years of Scott’s policies, 282,000 private sector jobs have been created; in the previous four years the state had lost...

Shortly after I did my first TV special on education, "Stupid in America," hundreds of union teachers showed up outside my office to yell at me. They were angry because I said union rules were a big reason American kids don't learn. The union is a big reason kids don't like school and learn less. Union contracts limit flexibility, limit promotion of good teachers, waste money and make it hard for principals to fire even terrible teachers. But I was wrong to imply that the union is the biggest problem. In states with weak unions, K-12 schools stagnate, too. Education...

Conservatives are in an uproar over Common Core, an educational curriculum being forced upon the states by the Obama administration, which is scheduled to be mostly implemented this year in the 46 states that have adopted it. Common Core eliminates local control over K-12 curriculum in math and English, instead imposing a one-size-fits-all, top-down curriculum that will also apply to private schools and homeschoolers. Superficially, it sounds good. It creates universal standards that supposedly educate all children for college. But along with the universal standards come a myriad of problems, which the administrators of Common Core are disingenuously denying. The...

I was deeply troubled when video surfaced last week of striking Strongsville, Ohio teachers heckling substitute teachers who were applying to be their temporary replacements. Over 300 teachers are on strike because the school board is refusing to give them automatic raises, and the school board undercut their mass temper tantrum by hiring substitutes to keep schools open. The substitutes, complete with police escorts, had to endure heckling and jeering by the strikers. The unionists often followed alongside the substitutes, berating them and yelling in their faces as they headed to the local police department for mandatory background checks. The...

American education is in a sorry state of affairs, and there's enough blame for all participants to have their fair share. They include students who are hostile and alien to the education process, uninterested parents, teachers and administrators who either are incompetent or have been beaten down by the system, and politicians who've become handmaidens for teachers unions. There's another education issue that's neither flattering nor comfortable to confront and talk about. That's the low academic preparation of many teachers. That's an issue that must be confronted and dealt with if we're to improve the quality of education. Let's look...

The radical teachers group Rethinking Schools published an article in its Winter 2012-2013 magazine titled, “Books About Contemporary Palestine for Children,” EAGnews.org reported. Before you go any further, here’s a hint about the nature of these recommended books: The editors of Rethinking Schools are anti-Israel and see nothing wrong with Palestinian terrorist attacks against the people of that nation. The article’s author, San Jose State University Professor of Education Katharine Davies Samway, starts off by explaining how she volunteered to work in a booth at a recent local festival that was dedicated to drawing attention to “the impact of...

This past week, I made an audio recording endorsing the re-election of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel's general election Tuesday, Jan. 22. I explained in the endorsement: "You might think I'm a tough guy in my films, but in a rough neighborhood like the Middle East, Israel has its own tough guy. His name is Bibi Netanyahu." Netanyahu's leadership and strength were evident as far back as 1967, when he was a part of the Israel Defense Forces' elite commando unit, Sayeret Matkal. And they were just as obvious in his public service through the years, as I...

Among his 23 gun control executive orders, President Obama authorized the spending of $150 million to hire “up to 1,000” armed resource officers and school counselors. Just one problem: there are 98,817 government schools in America, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency. Therefore only 1 percent of schools would potentially benefit from Obama’s new government solution. Apparently the other 99 percent (hey, where have we heard that term before?) would be left to the whims of deranged individuals who think it’s acceptable to slaughter children. Hiring 1,000 new government employees to potentially cover, on average,...

The last of the college applications have been rewritten, tweaked and polished, and at last entrusted to the tender mercies of the U.S. Mail or the Internet. Fretting over deadlines morphs into waiting, and yearning, wishing and praying for coveted letters of acceptance. This is the annual crisis in thousands of homes with ambitious high school seniors -- the high school seniors and their parents who still believe that college is the route to the American Dream. But wait. While they play the conventional game of aspiration, certain scholars and economists, and hundreds of thousands of "concerned citizens" have initiated...

When I attended primary and secondary school -- during the 1940s and '50s -- one didn't hear of the kind of shooting mayhem that's become routine today. Why? It surely wasn't because of strict firearm laws. My replica of the 1902 Sears mail-order catalog shows 35 pages of firearm advertisements. People just sent in their money, and a firearm was shipped. Dr. John Lott, author of "More Guns, Less Crime," reports that until the 1960s, some New York City public high schools had shooting clubs where students competed in citywide shooting contests for university scholarships. They carried their rifles to...

Instead of appropriately dealing with gang-related violence, an independent Chicago school closure commission is recommending no school closures because such a move could force students to cross gang lines. So in Chicago, gang violence is the “new normal” and instead of combating and gaining some control over the problem, city leaders are simply accommodating it. Wow. Gangs of street punks are now influencing public policy and million dollar decisions. It looks like they really have won. Of course the Chicago Teachers Union, which stands to lose money if schools close, agrees with the recommendation. The CTU has been arguing against...

New York City Schools Spend $6,900 Per Student - on Bus Transportation! Government schools are an expensive endeavor, especially when union labor and no-bid contracts are involved. The New York City Department of Education has been catching heat from transportation unions lately over a decision to solicit bids for private transportation services in an effort to curtail runaway costs. The district has not sought “significant” bids for student transportation services in 33 years. That means it’s probably been using the same companies for years, without competitive bids to naturally control rising costs. And those costs are increased every year...

At least the teachers of Occupy Oakland are finally being honest about their political agenda. They’re openly calling for an all-out abolition of capitalism. The Occupy Oakland Education Committee – comprised of public school teachers from the Oakland, California school district – has renamed its publication “ClassRoom Struggle” and its platform TEACH, which stands for “Transform Education, Abolish Capitalism and Heal.” Finally the radical teachers have acknowledged what we’ve been saying all along: they want to end capitalism and replace it with a socialist economy, quite possibly enforced by a totalitarian form of government. And what, precisely, is their strategy?...