Free Republic

August 2017, Charlottesville: Police disappear even as belligerents advance toward each other, and fighting in the streets begins. The same tactic had been used successfully in Ferguson and Baltimore. Who but President Obama and the respective governors could have given the orders to stand down? Who else but mayors and police chiefs could have expedited such counterintuitive commands? Democrats got their optics. CNN could chant each day that the USA is full of white nationalists and right-wing criminality. Obama must've been proud. Anyone could see that white supremacists lurked on every street. Funny thing: If you wait around for these...

The Story USA Today Wouldn't Run This column by Ronald Kessler describes President Bush's longstanding commitment to education--above all, to successful strategies for teaching children to read. But Kessler's column cited a source who is a Bush supporter, and was therefore deemed per se unreliable by USA Today. The newspaper killed the column. Just another nail in the coffin of children, especially minority children, who are daily sacrificed to liberal shibboleths about education.

Educators are worried by a general decline in reading skills among Israeli youth, and blame a teaching method imported from the U.S. Is the remedy a back-to-basics approach? Y. a 16-year-old girl from Jerusalem, was sent to see Dr. Nurit Elhanan-Peled, a psychologist and literacy expert, for some remedial help after the school system determined that she had great difficulty reading. Y., who came to Israel from the former Soviet Union, was referred to Elhanan-Peled after her teachers noticed, for example, that she didn't immediately catch on that the word malta'i refers to someone from Malta or that the word...

The only effective group of citizens today in open opposition to big government are the home schoolers. They are the only Americans willing to take on the public education system that props up the entire statist enterprise of big, intrusive government. Forget about conservative politicians. They are more concerned about conserving their legislative privileges than rolling back increasingly intrusive government. Although President Bush has said nice things about home schoolers, he is doing more to expand federal control over education than any previous Republican president. His call for nationwide standardized testing is in reality a call for a federal curriculum,...