Education

Announcement: Power Line University Webinar Tomorrow

Featured image Following up on our dry run at Power Line University last week (not too late to go back and take it in if you missed it), tomorrow (Wednesday) at 4 pm Pacific/7 pm Eastern, we’ll be doing our first class session on The Federalist in webinar format, which means you’ll be able to watch live and send in questions and comments. We’ll be covering Federalist numbers 1 – 10, with »

Loudoun County School Officials Indicted

Featured image The parents’ revolt in Loudoun County, Virginia, continues to reverberate. A grand jury has now indicted former (fired last week) Superintendent of Schools Scott Ziegler and Public Information Officer Wayde Byard: Former Superintendent Scott Ziegler is charged with one count of false publication, one count of prohibited conduct, and one count of penalizing an employee for a court appearance. All are misdemeanors. Ziegler was fired last week, one day after »

The Sewer of Elite Education

Featured image It is hard to overstate how awful our public schools are. And yet, the very worst schools are private, and expensive. In Chicago, the $42,000 a year Francis W. Parker School is educating its students in ways that most of us didn’t experience when we were growing up: The dean of students at an elite, $42,000-a-year Chicago prep school has been filmed bragging about kids playing with “dildos and butt »

How Shutdowns Devastated Young People, Continued

Featured image This comes from Britain, not the U.S., but the similarities to the U.S. are obvious: According to a study from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), over a fifth of all children have been “missing” from schoolrooms since the government began implementing lockdown measures. The report found that 2 million of the nation’s nine million students are not attending class regularly. The figure includes 1.67 million kids who were deemed »

A Ray of Hope [Updated]

Featured image Yesterday’s election results were bad across the U.S., and in Minnesota they were horrific. But there was one positive: the performance of conservative school board candidates. The teachers’ union, Education Minnesota, has largely run our state for decades. Among other things, in most school districts the union has more or less appointed members of the school board *against* whom the union negotiates teachers’ contracts, a corrupt arrangement. My organization has »

We Are Proud of the Enemies We Make

Featured image By universal consent, the most powerful force in Minnesota politics is the teachers’ union, Education Minnesota. In my opinion, Education Minnesota is the state’s number one source of evil. My organization, Center of the American Experiment, has been fighting for years to counter the teachers’ union’s malign influence. We are the only effective challenge to their power. Among other things, we have exposed the fact that the union spends much »

The Battle Over the Schools Heats Up

Featured image In Minnesota, as in other states, concerned parents have banded together to try to wrest control of the public schools away from teachers’ unions, in order to improve the quality of education and to stop left-wing indoctrination. Earlier this year, we started a 501(c)(4) organization called the Minnesota Parents Alliance to lead those efforts in our state. Today the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune both posted stories »

The Costs of Covid Shutdowns

Featured image It was obvious early in the covid epidemic that the benefits of lockdowns were speculative and hypothetical, while the costs were large and undeniable. Now that the dust has settled, those costs can be quantified. My staff has produced two new papers on the costs of the covid shutdowns in Minnesota. While their analyses are state-specific, it is reasonable to assume that their findings would be reflected in other states, »

Head-On Crash at the Intersection

Featured image “Intersectionality” is a favorite lib word. It refers to the idea that there is a hierarchy of oppression, so that, for example, Native American women are more oppressed than homosexual white men. All of the allegedly oppressed groups ostensibly make up the liberal coalition, and liberals expect them to take their places in the pecking order. This works, sort of, as long as everyone is on board. But as we »

Can We Have Accountability For the Covid Shutdowns?

Featured image From early in the covid epidemic, it seemed obvious that the shutdowns ordered by nearly all governors and many municipalities did little good and caused tremendous damage. Experience has borne out that conclusion, but almost everywhere, governments have moved on without any accounting for the mistakes that were made. American Experiment has just released two papers that address the consequences of covid shutdowns. While their specific focus is on Minnesota, »

Stelter Goes to Harvard

Featured image Brian Stelter was fired by CNN as part of the network’s effort to shift its image away from far left commentary and toward mainstream news coverage. While at CNN, Stelter used his platform to aggressively promote Democratic Party themes, and in particular to make war on CNN’s more successful rival, Fox News. But Stelter has landed on his feet: he is going to Harvard. Stelter broke the news on social »

Corruption In the Public Schools

Featured image What is going on in our public schools is horrifying, in several ways. Most fundamental is that the quality of education is abysmal. It is hard to see how our children are going to compete with the Chinese, or anyone else, given the pathetic level of instruction, especially in math, the sciences, and history. Meanwhile, our schools focus relentlessly on political leftism and bizarre sexual theories. This book, Gender Queer, »

Who Fact Checks a Democrat?

Featured image The self-appointed “fact checkers” generally fall silent when a Democrat tells a whopper. We are seeing a lot of that in Minnesota these days, with incumbent Governor Tim Walz locked in a tight race with Dr. Scott Jensen. Walz didn’t have a lot of composure to start with–he is an angry, intemperate man–and whatever composure he had seems to be crumbling under pressure. The result is frequent departures from the »

Only Racists Need Apply

Featured image I don’t know that there has ever been a place and time in American history when only racists were permitted to teach in the public schools. Mississippi in, say, 1935? I don’t know, maybe. But to my knowledge they had no purity test. Contrast that with Minnesota in 2022, where the Minnesota Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board is considering a new standard that would only allow people who profess »

“Extremely proud,” but keep it quiet

Featured image Last week Alpha News reported on the blatantly racist contract provision in the new teachers’ union contract with the Minneapolis school district. John drew attention to the Alpha News story the same day. The contract provision is not only blatantly racist, it is blatantly illegal. Alpha News (on whose board I site) performed a public service in reporting on the provision and it has since become a national story. Teachers’ »

Teachers’ Union “Extremely Proud” of Racism

Featured image We wrote here about the new teachers’ contract for the Minneapolis School District, which provides that white teachers will be laid off first, regardless of seniority, and if teachers are called back after a layoff, white teachers will be called back last. The blatant racism of this contract provision attracted a great deal of adverse comment, but the teachers’ union is sticking to its story: The president and vice president »

Good News From the World of Academia

Featured image NBC News reports that college attendance is dropping: A little-understood backlash… Little-understood by them. …against higher education is driving an unprecedented decline in enrollment that experts now warn is likely to diminish people’s quality of life and the nation’s economic competitiveness, especially in places where the slide is most severe. I sincerely doubt that. These are the numbers: There are 4 million fewer students in college now than there were »