Free Republic

A report showed that nearly 70% of enforcement actions executed by the Biden administration’s Education Department targeted faith-based and career schools. A report showed that nearly 70% of enforcement actions executed by the Biden administration’s Education Department targeted faith-based and career schools… “As our report details, the Biden-Harris Department of Education has been engaged in a long-running scheme to punish Christian colleges that are ideologically opposed to the left’s agenda. The unfair targeting of these institutions has been egregious, and it needs to stop immediately.” The APP notes that two of the nation’s most prominent Christian universities, Grand Canyon University...

The growth of classical education schools is astonishing. The numbers keep rising; there is no sign that the movement is beginning to plateau. Schools open, networks are created, charters are authorized, and kids fill the seats. One would think that as more spaces are available the (supposedly) small number of parents who favor the classical way would be satisfied and demand would diminish. How many Americans want their children to study Latin, read the Old and New Testaments, and appreciate the High Art of the Renaissance? Couldn’t be too many, say intellectuals and educators on the left. Those enlightened practitioners...

North Carolina sheriffs must comply with Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer requests with the passage of House Bill 10 over Governor Roy Cooper’s veto Wednesday. The bill will also funnel more than $2 billion to the state’s Opportunity Scholarship school voucher program over the next decade — expanding the program to allow students of all income levels to receive taxpayer funding for tuition at private schools in the state. The state House of Representatives voted to override Cooper’s veto by a 72-44 margin Tuesday, with three Democrats joining all Republicans present in favor. On Wednesday, the state Senate followed suit,...

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. In 2018, Arizona voters overwhelmingly rejected school vouchers. On the ballot that year was a measure that would have allowed all parents — even the wealthiest ones — to receive taxpayer money to send their kids to private, typically religious schools. Arizonans voted no, and it wasn’t close. Even in a right-leaning state, with powerful Republican leaders supporting the initiative, the vote against it was 65% to 35%. Coming...

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio—"If we only had 5,000, I wouldn’t be talking to you right now," says Reverend Barron—real name Kenneth Selig—in what’s become a common refrain in the embattled city of Springfield, Ohio. Barron, a street preacher, food truck owner, and former warehouse manager, has emerged as a colorful champion for the small city as it struggles through an unprecedented transformation. As many as 20,000 Haitian immigrants, city officials say, have arrived in Springfield since the pandemic, swelling its population to almost 80,000. Times were already tough before the rumors started swirling about migrants eating cats, dogs, and geese. "Look man,...

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — The Republican-dominated North Carolina legislature passed a supplemental spending bill Wednesday that eliminates a large waitlist for private school vouchers and also directs sheriffs to assist federal immigration agents seeking jail inmates... Fully funding the universal voucher program was a leading priority for Republican legislators earlier this year.... The bill also retains language that tells county sheriffs to comply with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainers that identify jail inmates believed to be in the country unlawfully and who have been charged with the most serious crimes.... Republican advocates of the immigration provisions say they’re necessary...

ATLANTA, Ga. - Your tax dollars could be used to put some Georgia students through private school. The House Education Committee passed Senate Bill 233, also known as the “school choice bill,” on Wednesday. Now it heads to the floor of the Georgia House for a final vote. If the proposal becomes law, students in Georgia’s lowest-performing schools could be eligible for a $6,500 voucher. Families could take that money and put it toward private school tuition. Georgia House Speaker Jon Burns is leaning into the push to pass the voucher plan. Burns, a Screven County Republican, made what he...

For GOP lawmakers who view public education as a quasi-socialist project, the gaping hole in state budgets left by subsidizing private school tuition is a feature, not a bug. Bait-and-switch is an old retail tactic. You lure customers in with promises of a deep discount, only to inform them that the deal has a catch. The real price tag, it turns out, is quite a bit more. Though it took supporters of school vouchers a while to catch on, they’ve learned quickly that the trick works just as well in education policy as it does in retail sales. Pick a...

Parents, children, lawmakers and educators gathered at an ‘Education Freedom Rally’ in Jackson on Wednesday. The event, hosted by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, was attended by over 120 people, with representatives from half a dozen different organizations taking part. “Last week saw the Republicans win a super majority in Mississippi. Parents at our rally would like to see them use that majority to achieve major strategic change in Mississippi education,” explained Douglas Carswell, CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. Corey DeAngelis of the Federation for American Children spoke at the event, explaining why school choice is...

A judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a leader of one of New Hampshire's teachers' unions to stop public dollars from being spent to fund private schools through the Education Freedom Account program, saying she has not shown that it violates the state constitution. The lawsuit was filed in Merrimack County Superior Court last year. It sought an injunction to stop the voucher-like program. Deb Howes, president of the American Federation of Teachers New Hampshire, had said the program runs afoul of the constitution because money from the state's education trust fund is specifically set aside for public education...

On Monday, the education establishment pitched their vision for the public school system to the House and Senate Education Committees. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Debbie Critchfield, State Board of Education President Kurt Liebich, and Idaho Education Association President Layne McInelly took turns extolling the public school system, asking for ever more taxpayer money and, of course, rejecting any suggestion that money should follow students to wherever they get an education. Corporate media, left-wing activists at Reclaim Idaho, and the state’s education establishment have seized upon the term “voucher” as a way to scare families away from supporting school choice....

Oakland, California, is set to give adult residents vouchers to donate to candidates for local office every other year, according to The San Francisco Chronicle. Nearly 74% of the city’s voters approved Measure W, mandating that the city biannually send four $25 dollar vouchers to residents 18 years of age and older for donations to mayoral, City Council or school board candidates, the outlet reported. The program will be paid for with city general funds and include legal permanent residents who lack U.S. citizenship. (RELATED: San Francisco Fires Long-Time Elections Official To Meet Its Racial Equity Goals) Seattle enacted a...

All Arizona parents now can use state tax money to send their children to private or religious schools or pay homeschooling costs after an effort by public school advocates to block a massive expansion of the state's private school voucher law failed to collect enough signatures to block it.

As most readers know, Pennsylvania’s race for Senate is one of the most-watched across the country to potentially swing the upper body of Congress back to the GOP, with Democrat candidate John Fetterman facing off against Republican candidate Mehmet Oz in the purple state.Of course, Fetterman’s unforced errors and inability to put on a semblance of a real campaign make for prime fodder for ridicule–since they’re attempting to pass his campaign off as running the way a normal Senate campaign should.One of the most glaring issues is of him not agreeing to debate the Republican nominee–as my colleague Bonchie pointed...

Pennsylvania Senate hopeful John Fetterman (D.) opposes vouchers that let children in failing public school districts attend private and charter schools. But the progressive champion, who lives in one of Pennsylvania’s worst performing school districts, sends his kids to an elite prep school. Fetterman’s kids attend the Winchester Thurston School in Pittsburgh, where parents pay up to $34,250 for a "dynamic" learning environment and an "innovative" approach to teaching. They would otherwise go to schools in Woodland Hills School District, where graduation rates are far below the state average. The local elementary school that serves Fetterman’s town of Braddock is...

The GED Testing Service requires test-takers be 16 years of age or older. However, most states require that a person be 18 years or older. This needs to change: Anyone age 16 or older should be permitted to take the GED. High achieving students deserve the ability to verify their proficiency in key subjects so they can get on with college. Going even further, states should deem that anyone who scores high enough shall have satisfied the state’s graduation requirements and can leave school.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — Three parents of children who attend public schools in West Virginia have filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s private school voucher law. The suit filed Wednesday in Kanawha County Circuit Court contends the law violates the state Constitution and will siphon money away from public education, news outlets reported. The law was enacted earlier this year and creates a publicly funded savings accounts program called the Hope Scholarship that plans to begin accepting applications in March. The law allows state money to be put into a special account that parents could then spend on private school...

We’ve seen this coming for a while now, like a slow-motion train wreck. After the National School Board Association (NSBA) sent a letter to the Biden administration comparing parents to domestic terrorists and even suggesting the PATRIOT Act might be used to reign them in. That turned out to be the last straw for a lot of parents and maybe also for the NSBA. The group apologized for the letter in late October but by that point the damage was done. Within days, five state associations canceled their membership in the national group. By early December the number of associations...

Smearing parents fed up with their kids’ schools as “domestic terrorists” seems to be a wild, incendiary charge with little basis in reality. Yet it’s the basis on which the U.S. attorney general has convened an FBI task force to surveil and intimidate parents who object to what their children are being taught, and how they are being treated, with public tax dollars. The organization that colluded with the Justice Department to create the pretext for chilling voters’ speech has backed down, but the FBI threat remains. School lockdowns have clarified and accelerated the deep, irreconcilable differences among American parents...

“[I]f ever there were a structure systemically keeping African-Americans from getting ahead, it would surely be America’s big-city public-school systems,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn. Look, for example, at the most recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card. For the past 20 years, achievement has been broken down by school district level in its Trial Urban District Assessment. Of the 27 U.S. urban school districts that reported their results for 2019—from Boston and Chicago to Fort Worth, Texas, and Los Angeles—not a single one can say a majority of the black eighth...