Free Republic

Taking Dictation from the ACLU A case study in anti-Patriot Act propaganda. October 18, 2004 By Heather Mac Donald IMAGINE THE New York Times writing a damning article about the Clinton administration's tax policies cribbed exclusively from a Heritage Foundation press release. Can't do it, can you? How about the Gray Lady recycling ACLU misinformation about the Patriot Act without any additional research? This time, no need to imagine anything: Both the New York Times and the Washington Post did exactly that recently and thereby published a tissue of fabrication. Both papers issued tight-lipped corrections the next day, but...

Mr.Greene is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Education Research Office. Buried in a new report by the U.S. Department of Education is a comparison claiming to show that charter schools — independently run public schools free from many restrictions — have lower average test scores than regular public schools. A front page New York Times story, put together with the help of America’s second-largest teachers union, recently trumpeted this previously obscure statistic. But the original report buried the finding for a very good reason. Such a broad comparison between charter schools and regular public schools is sheer nonsense....

City Journal Our Islamic Fifth Column Farrukh Dhondy Autumn 2001 My first name gives rise to confusion. It’s a common Muslim name, so people I meet, or who read my byline, assume that I am of the faith. Most recently, in response to a column I write for an Indian paper, in which I confessed to having met a few terrorists in my time and attempted to analyze their limited grasp of the world, I received a lot of hate mail. Some of the e-mailers clearly thought I was a Muslim apostate and reminded me that the penalty for that...

New Forms of School Choice: The Real McKaysSchool Choice Forces Emboldened by Recent String of Judicial and Legislative Victories By Robert Holland Printer Friendly   Email a Friend The fastest-growing voucher program in the land is the McKay Scholarship, which three years ago emerged in the choice-friendly climate of Florida. As of July 2003, more than 9,200 Florida special-education students were using McKays to attend private schools equipped to accommodate them. (Special education is education lingo for  individualized instruction developed  to meet the needs of each student judged to have a disability.) McKays predate the June 2002 Zelman decision. But the...