Free Republic

MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. -- For 46 years, crime, recessions and hurricanes proved no threat to the daily ritual of St. Monica School, where the entire blue-and-white uniformed student body gathered outside each morning to join in prayer. Come June, though, the tradition will fade away, and "amen" will close St. Monica's morning recitations for the last time. The school, a home-away-from-home for mostly minority students, will close. As Pope Benedict XVI next week makes his first trip to the U.S. as pontiff, Catholic schools across the country, long a force in educating the underprivileged regardless of their faith, face the...

The Washington Post March 30, 2008 6:00 AM Amongst the moss-draped live oaks of Charleston Collegiate School's 33-acre campus in Johns Island, S.C. - where children of all ethnicities, religions and abilities work and play together - the words of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright seem alien and hostile. His sometimes hate-filled rhetoric is weirdly out of sync with this quiet corner of the Old South, where ancestors of the school's African-American students worked as slaves, perhaps upon these very fields. The differences between this microcosm of a near-utopian community and the world that informs Wright are as stark as the...

...Cases like these have increasingly become a flash point in special education, pitting parents against school systems that say they cannot afford to pay to privately educate disabled children whose parents unilaterally reject their proposed placements. Expectations that the Supreme Court would settle whether such parents must try public schools first evaporated after Justice Anthony M. Kennedy recused himself without explanation in two cases from New York State. Without Justice Kennedy, the court split 4 to 4 in a New York City case on whether Tom Freston, the former chief executive of Viacom, should have put his learning-disabled son in...

<p>Harvard professor Martin Feldstein used to tell students in his introductory economics class that economists agree on 99% of the issues in the field. From the nature of monopolies to the basic laws of inflation, Feldstein asserted, economists of all political stripes are in accord on the same principles. He claimed that what we read about in the popular press are the 1% of economic issues where the data support no clear-cut conclusion.</p>

Jewish Leaders Demand Retraction of Ontario Premier's Attack on Faith Schools McGuinty's comments are flip-flop from his previous support for religious schools By Hilary White and Steve Jalsevac TORONTO, August 30, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Bernie Farber, chief executive of the Canadian Jewish Congress, in comments to the National Post on Tuesday, accused Ontario's Premier Dalton McGuinty of doing "a complete about face" from his previous position of support for limited funding of independent religious schools.  Last week, the Liberal premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty, called faith-based schools "segregationist" and harmful to Ontario's "social cohesion." "I don't think that Ontarians believe...

Durham — A teacher at a Durham private school underwent a sex change over the summer, sparking a debate among school administrators and at least one parent over how to approach the issue in class. Leslie Webster has taught music at Duke School for Children for 12 years as a woman but started the new school year Wednesday as a man. The parents of all 460 students at the private elementary and middle school, which isn't affiliated with Duke University, received a letter this week notifying them of Webster's sex change and outlining plans to inform students on Sept. 4....

NEW HOPE, Pennsylvania, October 17, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The National Pro-Life Action Center (NPLAC) in Washinton D.C. is calling for an investigation after a private school sponsored a field trip to a nearby abortuary, triggering outrage in the local community.More than a dozen high school students from Solebury School, near Philadelphia, were taken by bus to the Planned Parenthood location in Warminster, Catholic News Service reported, where they spent several hours touring the clinic. According to CNS the students wore vests used by abortion staff when escorting women into the building. Jason Gordon, social science teacher for the school...

LANCASTER - "Moral scurvy" is weakening America, retired U.S. senator Zell Miller said Friday at a fundraising dinner for Desert Christian Schools. "As a country we're dying and we don't even know it," he said. "We're drowning and we don't feel it." The majority of Miller's talk focussed on Christian faith and the role of Christians and Christian education in the life and welfare of America. "There's a war being fought," he said. "Not just the war in the Middle East - a war for our children's souls." "It has been said, if you want to change the world you...

According to a recent study published by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), public school students are outperforming their private school counterparts in fourth grade mathematics and have equaled “private school students in fourth grade reading and eighth grade math.” However, as Shanea Watkins, Policy Analyst in Empirical Studies in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation, explains, these results require greater scrutiny. Some commentators that reference the NCES report believe the study points to a causal relationship—that attending a public school will cause higher academic achievement in math. However, the study focuses on data provided by...

West Seattle High School seemed too violent and private school seemed too elitist, so Barbara Tippett looked across the water to find the right school for her son, Sky. Starting this morning, his first day of high school, Tippett will drop off Sky at the Fauntleroy ferry dock to catch the 6:45 boat to Vashon Island. He won't be alone. About 75 Seattle kids commute the same way every day — filling two school buses that shuttle them from the Vashon dock to the island's three public schools. The rural, 550-student Vashon Island High School meets Sky Tippett's criteria of...

School vouchers allow individual families, rather than to school districts, to select the public or private schools of their choice and have all or part of the tuition paid. They have recently become a 'hot button' issue in many local elections. Some of the common misconceptions regarding school vouchers are addressed in this article.

National Catholic Reporter; 3/26/2004; Donovan, Gill While many families struggle to pay the rising cost of sending their children to Catholic schools, parishioners in one U.S. diocese don't worry about tuition--including the high cost of tuition for Catholic high schools. The children of active parishioners in the Wichita diocese attend Catholic schools tuition-free. A model of stewardship was initiated in Wichita diocese-wide in 1985 by Bishop Eugene Gerber (see "Wichita bishop took 'leap of faith' for stewardship." Parishioners embraced that model, which called for them to give generously of their time and their talents and to give as high a...

[snip] The findings come at a time when both the U.S. Department of Education and Ohio lawmakers have sought greater support of private-school vouchers. Research that favored private schools would likely have bolstered pro-voucher arguments. "I think what (the report) does, more than anything, is puncture the image of private schools as inherently superior," said Gerald Bracey, a Virginiabased education researcher and author of The War Against America’s Public Schools. "And by doing that, it sort of throws a monkey wrench into what I’m sure were going to be additional calls for vouchers" by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and President...

The Times report says “Children in public schools generally performed as well or better in reading and mathematics than comparable children in private schools.” The actual study says, “In..both reading and mathematics, students in private schools achieved at higher levels than students in public schools.” The only point at which parity is reached is in comparing poor children in public schools with poor children in private schools. Which is hilarious because thanks to the Times’s hatred of school choice, there are no poor kids in private schools.

WASHINGTON, July 14 — The Education Department reported on Friday that children in public schools generally performed as well or better in reading and mathematics than comparable children in private schools. The exception was in eighth-grade reading, where the private school counterparts fared better. The report, which compared fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores in 2003 from nearly 7,000 public schools and more than 530 private schools, found that fourth graders attending public school did significantly better in math than comparable fourth graders in private schools. Additionally, it found that students in conservative Christian schools lagged significantly behind their...

George Roche, Captain of Hillsdale Ship by Ron TrowbridgePosted May 16, 2006George Roche, president of Hillsdale College for 28 years, from l971 to l999, died May 5 at age 70. His body had been torn by diabetes most of his life. It is nearly impossible to exaggerate his accomplishments. He made Hillsdale College what it is, even today where the foundation he established remains, with the college presently building upon it. He was the captain of the ship, steering the boat and giving us mates direction. He gave the college the best faculty and the best students it had ever...

Mark Lauden Crosley describes himself as a "passionate believer" in public education. The 54-year-old homeowner in San Francisco's Castro district believes it's critical that children of all socioeconomic and racial backgrounds be educated together. The software designer said he has never voted against any education measure in his life. But, he said, he believes that even the city's best public schools are overcrowded and underfunded. And despite his belief in the importance of public education, he must do what's best for his three daughters -- so he sends them to private schools.

Shrinking Number of Military Schools Wylie Brace The morning bugle sounds and I know it is time to get dressed and ready for school. Looking in my closet, I shift through neatly pressed uniforms: BDU’s, class B, and… there they are! My khaki slacks and navy polo shirt. The military uniforms are no longer worn now that Millersburg Military Institute is becoming Forest Hill Preparatory School. The transition to a college preparatory school will be complete by the beginning of school year 2006-2007. Most students will not be in uniform, but there will be a military unit of about 24...

Tuition and fees at some New York City private high schools will cost more than $30,000 for the school year ... New York already boasts the highest private school tuitions in the country, but prices at some schools will now surpass even the cost of sending a child to Harvard... Riverdale Country School, located on a leafy oasis in the Bronx, will charge $31,200 for tuition, lunch, and books for grades six through 12. Bus service from Manhattan costs an additional couple of thousand dollars. Parents are looking to spend about $400,000 before their children even get to college. Undergraduate...

When Mark and Jenny Sanford moved from Charleston to Columbia, S.C., they had a big concern: Where would their kids go to school? They wanted to send their kids to public school, but the middle school near their new home was not particularly good. But it turned out that this wouldn't have been a problem for the Sanfords because the reason they had moved to Columbia was Mark had just been elected governor. While students are normally assigned to schools based on where their house is located, Gov. Sanford's family was offered special options: People from better school districts invited...

$10 million spent annually by district for classroom subs... Driven by parental concerns about teacher absenteeism, the Chicago Public Schools for the first time will start scrutinizing schools with high numbers of teachers taking sick days. On any given school day in Chicago, an average of 1,500 teachers, about 6 percent of the teaching staff, call in sick or take a personal day, according to a Tribune analysis of teacher payroll records. The absentee rate is highest on Fridays, when an average of 1,800 teachers don't show... For each of the last six school years, Chicago teachers missed an average...

San Francisco seems an unlikely home for the man who in 1962 first proposed the privatization of Social Security. Asked why he dwells in liberalism's den, Milton Friedman, 92, the Nobel laureate economist and father of modern conservatism, didn't skip a beat. "Not much competition here," he quipped. Friedman is considered perhaps the most influential economist... It was Friedman who in 1962, with the publication of "Capitalism and Freedom," first proposed the abolition of Social Security, not because it was going bankrupt, but because he considered it immoral. Friedman calls Social Security, created by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, a...

The New York Times ran a story on 28 January, 2006, entitled, “Public-School Students Score Well in Math in Large-Scale Government Study.” Well, it wasn’t a “government” study. It was only paid for by a government grant. When one looks into the methodology of the atudy and the histories of its two researchers, the results are highly suspect. The Times wrote: A large-scale government-financed study has concluded that when it comes to math, students in regular public schools do as well as or significantly better than comparable students in private schools. The study, by Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski,...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 — A large-scale government-financed study has concluded that when it comes to math, students in regular public schools do as well as or significantly better than comparable students in private schools. The study, by Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski, of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, compared fourth- and eighth-grade math scores of more than 340,000 students in 13,000 regular public, charter and private schools on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress. The 2003 test was given to 10 times more students than any previous test, giving researchers a trove of new data.

Former Gov Codey was pretty busy signing many items into NJ law before Corzine stepped up this week. One of the Amendments Codey signed into law is the Model School Nutrition Program. http://www.state.nj.us/agriculture/PolicyQA.pdf I became curious because it seems to be an initiative of the USDA. I always thought it was the FDA that dealt with foods and labeling. Anyway, the School Nutrition Policy is an effort of another initiative called Healthy People 2010. The Model School Nutrition Program is the first implementations of the Healthy People 2010 Project. The USDA, State and Local levels are presenting this as a...

The Florida Supreme Court struck down a statewide voucher system Thursday that allowed children to attend private schools at taxpayer expense - a program Gov. Jeb Bush considered one of his proudest achievements. It was the nation's first statewide voucher program. In a 5-2 ruling, the high court said the program violates the Florida Constitution's requirement of a uniform system of free public education. About 700 children are attending private or parochial schools through the program. But the ruling will not become effective until the end of the school year. Voucher opponents had also argued that the program violated the...

TALLLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- The Florida Supreme Court has struck down the state's school voucher system that paid for some students to attend private schools.

In what could be the first big legislative test for New Jersey's school voucher supporters, a pair of bills was filed that would provide privately funded scholarships for 4,000 children in four cities to attend schools of their choice. The proposed Urban Schools Scholarship Act would create pilot programs in Newark, Orange, Camden and Trenton where low-income children could tap scholarships of up to $9,000 to attend private schools or public schools outside their district, backers say. They would be funded entirely by corporate contributions that, under the new bills, would in turn qualify for state tax credits of up...

Adil Lalani was still in high school when he conceived the idea for SurfYourWork.com, a free, web-based school management system that lets teachers and administrators post assignments and other documents online for students and parents to view and download. Now, little more than a year later, a New York-based educational software provider has purchased the product, prompting schools across the country to take a serious look at this one-time classroom project--while reportedly making Lalani, 19, a millionaire in the process. The company--Jasmine Technologies Inc.--reportedly offered Lalani, who currently is enrolled at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, $1.25 million in...

"Agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies seized the materials from the home of Allan Douglas Winters of Vienna, Va. Mr. Winters, 35, teaches social studies and music at the Nysmith School in Herndon." -----snip----- "Mr. Winters asked to speak with his mother when agents asked for permission to search his computer..." -----snip----- "Some of the boys in the material were as young as toddlers, agents said. Many of the recovered images showed children -- mostly young males --..."

"If I ran my business the way you people operate your schools, I wouldn't be in business very long!" I stood before an auditorium filled with outraged teachers who were becoming angrier by the minute. My speech had entirely consumed their precious 90 minutes of inservice. Their initial icy glares had turned to restless agitation. You could cut the hostility with a knife. I represented a group of business people dedicated to improving public schools. I was an executive at an ice cream company that became famous in the middle1980s when People Magazine chose our blueberry as the "Best Ice...

IT WAS ONCE unfashionable, even unpatriotic, to criticize one's local public school, and for years mainstream media were reluctant to reveal a systemic decline of public education. For better or worse, No Child Left Behind changed all that. Suddenly, schools became accountable and their shortcomings were made public. That was four years ago. Keeping in mind test scores, discipline problems, rising spending, stagnant graduation rates and schools that fail to teach children the "basics," parents face a sometimes frightening prospect of enrolling their children in public school today. Amid these fears, putting one's child on the school bus may appear...

Connecting the Dots Secretary-Treasurer Lily Eskelsen leads a campaign to expose the perils of privatization. The presidential election has been decided, but educators don't need a crystal ball to predict the future. When it comes to public education, says NEA Secretary-Treasurer Lily Eskelsen, the Bush Administration has made it clear: the more "private" the better. That would be more vouchers, more private school tuition tax credits, more contracting out of public schools services. In short, more serious efforts to privatize public schools. It's time to sound the alarm, says Eskelsen. Privatization—and the people behind it—deserve more public scrutiny, she says....

HONOLULU -- Blowing conch shells and chanting Hawaiian prayers, some 15,000 people marched through downtown Honolulu Saturday to protest a federal court ruling striking down Kamehameha Schools' Hawaiians-only admissions policy as unlawful."We are outraged," said Lilikala Kameeleihiwa, a professor of Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii. "This is a great setback for our people. Here we are on our own homeland and we can't educate our children."The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled 2-1 on Tuesday that the private school's policy of admitting only native Hawaiians amounted to "unlawful race discrimination" even though the school...

..St. Bernard in Levittown, the School of the Holy Spirit in New Hyde Park and St. Joachim in Cedarhurst... These schools join the 22 Catholic schools in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens that are being closed for good. Finances are to blame, at least on Long Island. The elementary schools just can't afford to operate any longer on the $3,000-per-child average annual tuition... tuition is already a stretch, especially on top of property taxes, meant primarily to cover the budgets of public schools, that are among the highest in the nation. For the Catholic schools to survive, parents need to get...

SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT Free to ChooseAfter 50 years, education vouchers are beginning to catch on.BY MILTON FRIEDMANThursday, June 9, 2005 12:01 a.m.Little did I know when I published an article in 1955 on "The Role of Government in Education" that it would lead to my becoming an activist for a major reform in the organization of schooling, and indeed that my wife and I would be led to establish a foundation to promote parental choice. The original article was not a reaction to a perceived deficiency in schooling. The quality of schooling in the United States then was far better...

Miami Students like Adrian Bushell have always posed an awkward political problem for opponents of school tuition vouchers. Like most students receiving vouchers in Florida, he is black and lives in a poor neighborhood with bad public schools. How can you claim the moral high ground when you're denying him a chance to escape to a better private school? The traditional answer has been that his classmates would be left behind in a public school made worse by the loss of resources and students. But this argument is looking more dubious than ever, and you won't be hearing much of...

Private Schools' Rules For Hiring Teachers Vary POSTED: 6:51 am EDT May 13, 2005 BALTIMORE -- Policies among private schools differ widely among states concerning criminal background checks to screen prospective employees. Maryland requires private schools to conduct background checks, but does not prevent them from hiring convicted criminals. State lawmakers are looking at exerting more control after last week's revelation that a Baltimore school knowingly hired a convicted murderer, who now faces charges of sexual assault. "There obviously needs to be more oversight," Sen. Paula C. Hollinger, a Baltimore County Democrat and chairwoman of the Education, Health and Environmental...

Schools are wrapping children in cotton wool rather than encouraging them to take risks, Sir Digby Jones, the director general of the Confederation of British Industry, said yesterday. Sir Digby: ‘We are trying to create a nation of victims’ "Unless you educate children about risk, get them to understand it, get them to embrace it, then we will fail as a nation and fall behind our economic rivals," he said. "China will have our lunch and India will have our dinner." Sir Digby told head teachers meeting in Telford, Shropshire, that he was alarmed some schools did not hold sports...

Nearly 40 percent of Florida lawmakers with school-age children send their kids to private schools, a rate four times as high as that for parents statewide, a St. Petersburg Times survey has found. The rate climbs to 60 percent for lawmakers on education committees that make key decisions about K-12 policy and funding. Does it matter? Some lawmakers say yes. Lawmakers with children in private schools "know there's a problem" with public schools, said Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, who chairs the House Education Council and has a child enrolled in Catholic school. "They want to fix the problems for everybody...

Dover's police chief called teacher James Risi ``a poster boy for pedophiliac behavior'' and helped drive him out of his toney town's schools, but after he left, the boys and girls of Brockton and Chelsea called him something else: their teacher. ``It was the one thing we had all been promised, that he would never get another teaching job,'' said the mother of the 9-year-old Dover girl whom Risi traumatized. ``This is just so sad on so many levels.'' Doctors ultimately said Risi had no sexual interest in children, but the state found his record disturbing enough to eventually revoke...

Local Muslim school taken aback by letter Its request to join a state group is met by 'hostile' queries By EDWARD HEGSTROM Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle A national Islamic organization has demanded an apology from a Texas-based private school association after claiming its director took an "alarmingly intolerant and hostile attitude toward Islam and Muslims." The protest by the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations was prompted by a letter sent by the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools to the representatives of an Islamic school in Houston. Dar-Ul-Arqam, which enrolls more than 300 students at three area locations...

A new study finds government regulation is stifling the creation of new private schools in the U.S., just as more parents are determined to pull their children out of under-performing government institutions. The study by the Reason Foundation says the result of the government red tape is that there are fewer non-public-school options open to parents, which drives up the cost of existing private facilities. "Parents who want higher-quality education for their children are routinely being turned away or put on waiting lists as private schools fill to capacity and high demand and low supply force prices upward," the report...

More than 25 percent of public school teachers in Washington and Baltimore send their children to private schools, a new study reports. Nationwide, public school teachers are almost twice as likely as other parents to choose private schools for their own children, the study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found. More than 1 in 5 public school teachers said their children attend private schools.

Los Angeles Daily News With teachers, don't do as they do ... Educators sending their children to private school more and more By Alan Bonsteel It's hard to imagine a better expert on the quality of Los Angeles' public schools than the teachers who work there. It may come as a shock, therefore, to discover that Los Angeles' public school teachers are abandoning those government-run schools and sending their own kids to private schools at a far higher rate than the general public. According to a new study based on the 2000 Census by educational researcher Denis Doyle of Chevy...

Families from three Maine towns went to court Friday to challenge a state law that prohibits public money from being spent on religious school tuition. The families, who live in Durham, Raymond and Minot, claim they are being discriminated against by a law that allows towns to pay public and private school tuition for their neighbors' children, but will not pay the families' tuition bills because their children go to schools with religious affiliations. "It's all about fairness," said Jerilyn Ward of Raymond, who is not Catholic but sends two of her three sons to St. Dominic Regional High School...

VOUCHER "RELIGION TAX," ATHEIST GROUP CHARGES President George Bush is wrong in supporting a voucher scheme to aid Washington, DC parochial schools and other religion-affiliated schools the country, an Atheist civil rights groups charged today. On Saturday, Mr. Bush sang the praises of Catholic education in a White House ceremony that included more than 200 Roman Catholic officials, including members of the National Catholic Education Association. Once again, the President singled out religious belief for adulation noting "Catholic schools carry out a great mission, to serve God by building knowledge and character... By teaching the word of God, you prepare...

FAITH UNDER FIREIndonesia's new 'legal' jihadMuslims now take on Christians through legislation Posted: September 15, 20031:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com In the aftermath of the Bali bombing, jihadists in Indonesia have begun fighting on a new front – through government legislation designed to make life a living hell for non-Muslims, according to a Christian relief organization. Voice of the Martyrs points to a June 10 law approved by the Indonesian Parliament that requires schools with 10 or more students of any particular faith to be taught religious studies by a teacher of the same faith. The law, the group says, is...

Vouchers, tuition tax credits, and scholarships are being awarded in a growing number of states and big cities as a way of allowing more children to attend private schools, rather than government-operated public schools. Wherever these programs are implemented, critics claim that vouchers or tax credits won't give children from poor families access to private schools because the costs of such schools are high. But are private schools really prohibitively expensive? Not according to the numbers. The most recent figures available from the U.S. Department of Education show that in 2000 the average tuition for private elementary schools nationwide was...

<p>Teenagers need to learn to make important choices for the right reasons, without being unduly influenced by peer pressure, traditional gender roles or the fear of being different. Boys and girls gain invaluable educational and social experiences when they can resist the temptation of conformity.</p>