Shame on the Teachers’ Union and Double-Shame on the NAACP

Utterly despicable. But this is an understatement, an entirely inadequate phrase to capture my feelings about how the NAACP and the teachers’ union have joined forces to undermine educational opportunities for minority children. There are honest left-wingers, who are misguided but genuinely wish to make America a better place. But that’s definitely not the right [...]

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Thomas Sowell Wonders Why the Obama Administration Is Trying to Undermine Educational Opportunities for Black Children

Welcome, Instapundit readers. This school choice video shows the best way of dealing with the problems described in this post (though, as Walter Williams explains, that’s only part of the answer). ======================================================= If you care about helping the less fortunate succeed, I’m commenting today on a Thomas Sowell column that will make you sad and [...]

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The Complete Failure of Bush’s No-Bureaucrat-Left-Behind Education Scheme

The education people at Cato do remarkable work. They put together one of the best charts I’ve ever seen, and they are leading the fight for school choice and against any federal government role in education. This new video, showing the failure of Bush’s main education initiative, is one example of their great work. The [...]

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What if the NFL Was Run Like the Government School System?

Regular readers know that the two things that get me most excited are the Georgia Bulldogs and the fight against a bloated public sector that is ineffective in the best of circumstances and more often than not is a threat to our freedoms. So you will not be surprised to know that I am delighted [...]

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More Evidence for School Choice

School choice doesn’t automatically mean every child will be an educational success, but evidence from other nations certainly suggests it means better overall performance. Sweden, Chile, and the Netherlands are just some of the countries that have seen good results after breaking up state-run education monopolies. The same is true in the United States. When [...]

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Shame on the NAACP for Putting Big Government Ahead of Black Children

I’ve written before about how I get especially upset when rich people use the coercive power of government to screw poor people. There’s an equally offensive corollary to this principle, and that’s when powerful people use big government to impose hardship on helpless people. And that’s exactly what’s happening in New York City, where the [...]

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School Choice in Pennsylvania Is a Bigger Threat to the Left than the Loss of Union Power in Wisconsin

Forget the victory over the union bosses in Wisconsin. Yes, that was important, but school choice is an ever bigger threat to the left. Breaking the government education monopoly would reveal the inefficiency and incompetence of government, while simultaneously threatening the power of the National Education Association, which is a major source of money and [...]

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School Choice Is a Necessary but not Sufficient Condition to Improve Educational Performance by Minority Students

School choice should be the civil rights issue of the 21st century. Rich people already have school choice, both because they have the ability to live in good school districts and they have the resources to send their kids to private schools. The children of poor people, by contrast, are warehoused in failing government schools. [...]

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Some Good News on Education

You wouldn’t expect any positive developments from California when it comes to schooling, but this video shows that parents now have the ability, for all intents and purposes, to fire the incumbent management of a government school. I don’t think this is nearly as good as what’s being proposed in Douglas County, Colorado, but it’s [...]

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What Happens on School Choice in Colorado May Be More Important than Stopping Obama’s Tax Hikes

I generally focus on fiscal policy and I love low tax rates, so when I say that what happens on school choice in Douglas County, Colorado, may be more important to the future of the nation than what happens with Obama’s plan for higher tax rates next year, that should give you an idea of [...]

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Remarkable School Choice Revolution in Colorado?

Some of my Republican friends were disappointed with last week’s election results in Colorado, but something far more important is about to happen in the Centennial State. Douglas County, which is a significant jurisdiction with 240,000 residents south of Denver, appears to be on the verge of implementing a sweeping school choice system.  Here’s a blurb [...]

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Encouraging School Choice News from Pennsylvania

When Democrat and Republican candidates for governor in a large state both endorse school vouchers, that doesn’t necessarily mean genuine educational reform will take place, but it surely is a positive sign. If a state like Pennsylvania breaks the grip of the teacher unions and ends the state school monopoly, the impact would be powerful [...]

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Hurricane Katrina’s Huge Silver Lining

This video from Reason TV about school choice in New Orleans is a perfect example of something good resulting from a bad event. Lemonade out of lemons!

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Blacks and the Collectivist Plantation

Republican is a dirty word for many African-Americans, often for good reason. But blacks should be equally hostile to Democrats – at least if actual results count for anything. This is the basic message of this video sent to me by a black friend. 

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School Choice Issue exposes Gap Between Honest Leftists and Politicial Hacks

There are a handful of issues that expose hypocrites on both sides of the philosophical spectrum. Republicans and conservatives love to talk about free markets, for instance, but you often find them voting for completely sleazy and corrupt forms of corporate welfare such as the ethanol subsidy for big agri-business. For Democrats and leftists, a [...]

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Why Do I Hate Republicans? Let Me Count the Ways

Apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but I had to paraphrase her famous line after reading this Bill McGurn column in the Wall Street Journal about how Republican political hacks in the Illinois state legislature voted to kill a voucher bill that would have rescued inner-city children trapped in terrible government monopoly schools. If you don’t [...]

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George Will Condemns Obama’s Dependency Agenda

The healthcare fight in Washington is not about access to doctors and hospitals, or the cost of those services. It is an effort by the left to create more dependency on government. George Will examines this theme in a Washington Post column: Killing this small program, which currently benefits 1,300 mostly poor and minority children, [...]

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School Choice Video Shows Why Government Education Monopoly Should Be Disbanded

My Cato colleague Izzy Santa explains why a free-market approach is the key to better schools.

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Powerful Evidence for School Choice, Part III

Here’s another study showing the benefits of comprehensive school choice in a foreign country. Interestingly, the author of the report about the Chilean system clearly is not a fan of competition, yet even his data shows higher scores for private schools and rising overall scores, even in the government schools – which is exactly what [...]

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Powerful Evidence for School Choice, Part II

I was vaguely aware the there was a school choice system in the Netherlands, but I had no idea how good it was. Nearly three-fourths of all schools are privately controlled. Not surprisingly, the Dutch score very highly compared to other nations. Here’s some of the data from a recent study: One of the key [...]

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The Grinch that Stole Education

Walter Williams eviscerates the government education monopoly for its grotesque failure to properly educate most black students. Walter punctures every shibboleth the other side has created, including the notions that more money and smaller class sizes are the keys to educational achievement: Detroit’s (predominantly black) public schools are the worst in the nation and it [...]

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Standing in the Schoolhouse Door

Few things nauseate me more than leftists who send their kids to private schools while at the same time fighting against school choice for poor kids. There is no explanation for this hypocrisy beyond a selfish political desire to act as lapdogs for the teacher unions. It’s ironic that George Wallace and the segregationists stood [...]

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School Choice Means More Jobs

There is a growing body of evidence showing that school choice improves academic outcomes, but a new study published by the South Carolina Policy Council highlights research showing that a market-based education system also leads to more self-employment among youth. Here is the key section: South Carolina is in dire need of economic growth, especially [...]

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A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

This chart, put together by my Cato colleague Andrew Coulson, is a devastating indictment of the government monopoly education establishment. They’ve received huge amounts of money in recent decades, and dramatically expanded the bureaucracy, but student achievement is stagnant.

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President Obama’s “Betrayal”

The left has now resorted to the sleazy tactic of asserting that critics of the President’s policies are racists. So one can only wonder how they will respond to the latest column by Walter Williams, the famous black economist. Professor Williams savages the White House for killing a school choice program in Washington, which was [...]

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Powerful Evidence for School Choice

The Mayor of Stockholm gave some brief remarks at the closing dinner of the Mont Pelerin Society meeting and mentioned that the number of students in private schools had skyrocketed after the implementation of Sweden’s school choice program. Intrigued, I emailed the folks at one of the nation’s research organizations to ask for some details. [...]

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