Free Republic

In his recent address before Congress, President Trump delivered a clear and unflinching message: The U.S. will no longer squander its power on utopian projects or endless commitments to a fading rules-based international order. Instead, his administration will focus on hard-nosed realism, prioritizing national interests, blunting the ambitions of revisionist powers and shoring up America’s defenses. This is not a vision for a new Cold War but a pivot to a grand strategy of restraint — a shift long overdue and one that will inevitably reshape the contours of global power. There is a growing, almost hysterical, strain of thought...

EMPOWERING PARENTS AND STUDENTS: President Donald J. Trump is taking action to expand K-12 educational options for disadvantaged children impacted by the pandemic.Today, President Trump signed an Executive Order offering flexibility to provide certain disadvantaged children with emergency K-12 scholarships to access in-person learning opportunities.The Order allows States and eligible entities to use available Federal Community Service Block Grants (CSBG) funds to provide life-changing scholarships to families whose children cannot access in-person learning. CSBG funds totaled nearly $1.7 billion in FY 2020.Scholarships provided with CSBG funds can help families pay for private school tuition, home schooling, micro schooling, learning-pod expenses,...

Okay folks, sorry for the vanity, but I need some advice here. My children (daughter 9 son 7) go to a Parochial School, and this morning my daughter mentioned that they pray every morning for Obama. I asked her if they used to pray for W and she said, “no, never.” Then I said, well, maybe it’s because he’s just starting, to which she responded that they’ve been praying for “The One” since November. Now, of course, instinctively, I have a problem with this, because it’s naked partisanship, but what’s the remedy? Asking that he not be prayed for anymore...

The efficacy of Catholic schools in urban neighborhoods has been documented time and again, beginning with James S. Coleman's landmark studies in the 1980s. His findings were so devastating at the time that the public-school establishment panicked. School officials heatedly claimed that Mr. Coleman's results were flawed because public schools had to take everyone while Catholic schools could select more talented students -- or at least those who came from more stable homes. But the economist Derek Neal exploded that myth in the 1990s, showing definitively that Catholic-school methods are both class- and color-blind. The stereotypical product of a poor,...

The expression “back to school” is a bit of a misnomer when we understand the teaching of the Catholic Church on the nature and vocation of the Christian family. The family is the first school and the home is the first school house. Parents are the first teachers of their children. Also, a polestar of Western educational law for centuries was that teachers acted “in loco parentis”, in the place of the parents, meaning at their direction. When Christian parents send their children “back to school”, they are really extending their educational mission to teachers and entrusting their treasured children...

..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...

May 26 was a day of tears and heartache as classes ended for the last time at three Mobile area Catholic elementary schools: Holy Family, Our Lady of Lourdes and St. James Major. Children and teachers at Lourdes, near Dog River, buried bits of their 45-year-old school's heritage -- young pupils' written remembrances, a prayer card, a smiley face, a crucifix, a bandana -- in a glass-jar time capsule. The burial may represent the flagging health of many Roman Catholic schools. Rising tuition, migration to the suburbs and decreasing desires for parochial schooling among Catholic parents have been working against...

Moms, dads are fighting back after schools are closedBy BONNIE ADAMSbadams@leader.net PITTSTON - Parochial school parent Joseph Rogo has found it easier to e-mail the Vatican than the Diocese of Scranton regarding local school closures. The Vatican responded this week to Rogo's e-mail and included the mailing address for Pope John Paul II's personal secretary. But Rogo and other parents accuse the Diocese of Scranton of blocking their e-mails to Bishop Joseph Martino. Rogo had e-mailed the Vatican to complain that Martino closed two schools without warning and lied about the process. The response from the Vatican Information Service advised...

<p>The city's eighth-grade parochial school students flunked last year's state math exam nearly as badly as public-school students, explosive results released by the state Education Department show.</p> <p>Sixty-two percent of the 5,000 students in Archdiocese of New York schools failed the exam.</p>