Free Republic

Republican Governor Kay Ivey on Thursday signed the CHOOSE Act into law, making Alabama the latest state to make universal school choice law. "Alabama is only the 14th state in the nation to provide families with an education savings account option," Ivey said after signing the legislation. The education savings account is a school choice model that enables parents to use public funds to cover a variety of education expenses, including private school tuition, instructional materials, and homeschooling costs. School choice, or providing all families with alternatives to the public schools they’re zoned for, can be expanded through multiple avenues...

Texas' public schools are starved for cash. Teachers need raises. Legislators are in Austin, looking for money. We found some. Several hundred million dollars a year, in fact. A new Houston Chronicle investigation, "Broken Trust," reveals that the Texas Permanent School Fund – at $44 billion, the country's largest education endowment – should be billions larger than it is. Politically connected investment managers are collecting soaring fees while returns lag behind other comparable funds. The fund is managed by officials in two separate agencies, one of which is led by Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush. When inflation is taken...

Before professors everywhere seize upon the Baltimore riots as a “teachable moment,” we’d like to offer a few simple pieces of recent history to cogitate over. Expect your local professor to echo the president’s claim that Baltimoreans, and some out-of-towners rioted because the federal government has not dumped enough money into the Charm City. As it happens, on May 4, 2015, Elizabeth Harrigan reported in the Washington Free Beacon, “The city of Baltimore received over $1.8 billion from President Barack Obama’s stimulus law, including $467.1 million to invest in education and $26.5 million for crime prevention.” Harrigan and her peers...

An agreement awaiting a federal judge’s final approval soon could end one of the nation’s most historic desegregation efforts following decades of court battles and $1 billion of special aid to Little Rock-area schools. Lawyers and patrons this week will pick apart details of a proposed settlement among three school districts, state lawyers and others involved in the case to determine if it is fair. Unless U.S. District Judge Price Marshall finds fault with the deal, for the first time in more than a quarter century the state no longer will be required to make extra payments to help fund...

Taxpayers in Arizona spend $125 million each school year funding more than 13,000 students who don’t exist at public schools. That’s because the state school system uses an antique budget approach that causes taxpayers to overpay, says a new report, “Ghost Busters: How to Save $125 Million a Year in Arizona’s Education Budget,” by Goldwater Institute education director Jonathan Butcher. The system pays for some students twice, Butcher says. Here’s how it happens. Arizona schools are funded based on the number of students who attend each school in the prior school year, Butcher’s report says. However, when a student transfers...

At the dawn of the Obama era, in anticipation of an increase in their “take” from government, Black civic and religious leaders in Chicago started to chant the familiar phrase “inner city schools are underfunded.” Given the willingness of Americans to attribute uneven results to uneven fundamentals and the knee jerk support for this premise it gets from the media “underfunding is the cause of underperformance” is automatically accepted as true by most people. Nationally schools with a predominately Black student body receive 105% of the “White school” baseline while Asians get 107% of what White receive and Hispanics recieve...

State politicians and media are suddenly abuzz with the concept of consolidating school districts. Gov. Jennifer Granholm wants to spend $50 million to "incentivize" districts to merge, and she's getting air support from a new Michigan State University study claiming that $612 million could be saved by consolidating Michigan's 551 school districts into 83 single-county districts. Policymakers should approach this study with extreme caution. For one thing, the study appears to contain a significant amount of material plagiarized from other sources. MSU says it's investigating, but from a public policy perspective the more immediate issue is the study's fatally flawed...

Waiting for Superman is the new documentary by the same people who made An Inconvenient Truth, and this film sets out to do with regard to public education in America what its predecessor did with regard to climate and energy policy. That is, to expose the manifest failings of the system, point to the culprits for those failings and, finally, to suggest remedies. Making the case that the American education system is failing is probably the least contentious part of that process. The statistics on American educational underachievement are far less disputed than those on global warming. And the movie...

RUSH: An NBC reporter actually stumbled upon an economic truth. It was an accident. It wasn't intentional, but still the NBC reporter got it right. Andrea Mitchell was talking to the correspondent Rehema Ellis about schools closing in Kansas City and elsewhere because of budget shortfalls, and Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, said, "This is not just Kansas City. This is the most drastic case we've seen so far, but this is a ripple effect we're seeing from the recession. What is going to happen to the students there and elsewhere across the country?" ELLIS: It's simple, too, Andrea, you...

In case anyone thought that we were on the cusp of a thoughtful discussion about education in Illinois, enter Al Sharpton. Thanks to a confused Chicago press corps that has mistaken him for a "civil rights leader", Sharpton is now enjoying local airplay for piggy-backing onto State Senator James Meeks' Chicago Public Schools (CPS) student boycott scheduled for day one of the school year. By allowing himself to be cast with Sharpton and other professional liars, Meeks is frittering away his breakthrough opportunity for low income families whose children are unfairly locked into failing schools. While I disagree with some...

A Democrat Governor proposes tax cuts, however fleeting, and Republican legislative leaders respond by asking, "How's he going to pay for them?" These are confusing times to be a Republican in Illinois. When they are not letting the Democrats in charge off the hook for managing massive public systems into DEFCON 1 core meltdowns or for creating open-ended entitlement programs, they are rejecting tax cuts. Nevertheless and in spite of themselves, Republicans will be presented this year with yet another opportunity to reconfigure the political balance of power in Illinois and reestablish their electoral relevance. Against the backdrop of Governor...

The Senate removed a provision from the energy bill that would have extended for four years payments to rural counties that once depended on federal timber money to pay for schools and libraries. A House bill approved last week would set aside more than $1.5 billion to compensate 700 rural counties in 39 states -- mostly in the South and West -- that were hurt by federal logging cutbacks in the 1990s. An additional $350 million would have gone to rural states through a program that reimburses state and local governments for federally owned property. The timber plan had support...

Candidate Kinky holds court at Bleacher's Cafe RUTH BRADLEY AVALANCHE-JOURNAL When Kinky Friedman walked into Bleacher's Sports Cafe Sunday afternoon, a cigar in his mouth, he stopped for a moment to take a picture with a constituent before taking his place on stage next to a sign reading "Keep Austin weird, make Lubbock Kinky." This is not your typical gubernatorial candidate. And that's the way Friedman wants it. "I think that most of us have come to the conclusion that we could use a non-politician to run the state of Texas," he said, a cigar in one hand and a...

When children can support themselves, they generally leave their parents’ home. When state colleges and universities can do the same, they find it difficult to leave the nest of taxpayer-subsidized state and federal supports. “Ours is an economy of scarcity,” Gary A. Olson writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Even well-endowed institutions find themselves in a constant struggle to find enough money to do everything that they want to do.” “That economy of scarcity extends to salaries: Most academics and administrators are not compensated at the level that their education, skills, and experience would garner in business and industry.”...

Candidates for Congress get questionnaires from many organizations. Most encourage us to file our answers on line. All but one have assured us that our “answers will not be edited” or censored. There was one, glaring exception, the North Carolina “Edukashun” Association. This group keeps their answers private, sharing them only with their state leaders and their “member-convenors” who interview us in district to see if we’re really toeing the party line. Answers are never shared with union members. Okay, let’s break the embargo. Here are some of my answers, and I welcome responses from teachers who agree, or disagree,...

School finance issue at root of Jones challenge BY ELLIOTT BLACKBURN AVALANCHE-JOURNAL Challengers are assailing one local incumbent for his support of several bills last legislative session, but it is one issue in particular that has the veteran legislator on the chopping block, according to political observers throughout the state. State Rep. Delwin Jones, R-Lubbock, broke ranks last year to vote against a tax bill changing the school finance structure. The bill was supported by the rest of the Lubbock legislative delegation and most Republicans. He voted in support of a Democratic alternative to the bill. That sealed it for...

Texas school districts illegally tax property owners to pay for public education and the state must find a new way to fund schools by June 1 or classrooms will remain closed in the fall, the Texas Supreme Court ruled Tuesday. Texas' highest civil court ruled that the property taxes for schools have become an unconstitutional statewide property tax and charged lawmakers with repairing the $30 billion funding system. State funding would be stopped if the deadline isn't met.

SACRAMENTO (AP) - Nearly two decades after voters approved Proposition 98, the school-funding initiative has become a central target in the debate over Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempt to gain greater control over state spending. The landmark education funding measure, narrowly approved by voters in 1988, made a simple promise to schools and community colleges: They could depend on getting the lion's share of state spending - in good times and bad. As California struggles with annual budget deficits, Schwarzenegger has argued that it can no longer afford the funding guarantee of Proposition 98. He said the funding mandate takes too...

 Vatican official decries lack of public funding for Catholic schools WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The lack of public funding for religiously sponsored schools in the United States is an injustice and an "incredible anomaly" in the world, a Vatican education official said Sept. 14. Archbishop J. Michael Miller, secretary of the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education, said Europeans "are absolutely amazed at the situation in the United States," one of the few nations in the world that provides little or no public funding for the education of children in religiously run schools. That policy puts the United States "in the company...

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) -- A slight majority of Kansans believe the state Supreme Court's demand for more funding of public schools overstepped its authority, but reaction is mixed over whether lawmakers should defy justices, a new poll shows. The survey conducted this week for The Kansas City Star and The Wichita Eagle did find one point of agreement: Nearly two-thirds of respondents said schools need more money. On Wednesday, legislators will return to the Kansas Statehouse to begin discussions on how to cope with the high court's order to provide another $143 million in school funding by July 1. Lawmakers...