Teaching in a public school today is far more complicated than it was in the mid-1950s. At that time, rural communities tended to be more homogeneous. Immigrants in major cities also tended to assimilate into well-established ethnic and religious neighborhoods, with each group sending their children to attend the local public school. The cultural…

Historians often identify Horace Mann and other middle-class reformers of the mid-nineteenth century as the catalysts of the Common School Movement, the forerunner of today's public school systems. Despite education historians' focus on Mann and his ilk as the original advocates of common schooling, the notion of free universal public education…

Over the past decade, the Gurian Institute has trained more than forty thousand teachers in more than two thousand schools and districts, both coed and single-sex. The institute's trainers have worked with public and private schools, Montessori schools, and a variety of charter and independent schools in fifteen countries; it has therefore been…

Policymakers target educational accountability primarily at public school administrators and teachers, rather than also include the broader society in which schools are housed and where poverty thrives. This article proposes a process through which community members can develop a report card to determine the educational capacity of a region and…

On June 25, 2007, the United States Supreme Court rendered its decision in "Morse v. Frederick", a long-awaited ruling regarding student speech in public schools. For nearly twenty years, the Supreme Court had been silent on the issue while lower courts attempted to apply the rules announced in previous Supreme Court decisions. It is unclear what…

The author discusses his book "Homeschool: An American History," and offers four primary impetuses for the current status of homeschooling as a political movement. First, he writes, social and political changes of the second half of the twentieth century partnered radical leftists who wanted nothing to do with conventional America and conventional…

In this article, the author answers the question: "Why do Americans love to reform the public schools?" His answer has three parts. First, there is an old and persistent cultural strain in American history, derived from many sources, that seeks human perfection and sees education and schooling as essential to that perfectibility. That goal is high…

Students have problems in their lives, but can teachers help them? Should teachers help? The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act and its emphasis on standardized test results have forced school systems to produce high scores, and in turn school administrators pressure teachers to prepare students for taking standardized tests. Teachers may want to…

Based on public opinion, public schools have never made the kind of dramatic, positive impact on the lives of the poor that it originally intended. In order to assess whether public schools are effective or not, the author attempts to answer several questions. These questions include: (1) Is school a sorting mechanism?; (2) Is public education a…

Most of us who are parents would pay an attorney a lot of money to prevent the unjust incarceration of one of our children in a confined space with psychopaths, wouldn't we? So just why are we paying the government a lot of money to unjustly incarcerate nearly all of our children in confined spaces with psychopaths? Most of us try hard to stay…

Saying the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools has generated controversy for more than sixty years. On Flag Day, June 14, 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court sidestepped an opportunity to clarify the constitutionality of public school students reciting "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. But this issue is not going away. Following the Supreme…

Why did our former president and the late progressive U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone support the charter public school approach, while rejecting public funds for private or parochial schools? Why has civil rights legend Rosa Parks been a strong charter supporter? Why has the number of states with some form of charter law grown from one in 1992 to…

In 2002, when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized public vouchers for use in religious schools (Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 122 S. Ct. 2460), the battle over school choice, rather than being ended, was actually begun in earnest. But now the fight involves "Blaine amendments": statelevel constitutional amendments passed in the nineteenth century to…

The alternative school movement is a threat to the traditional educational system, as well it should be. The traditionalists see that, and fear it. Lower enrollment, nonexistent discipline, absence of learning with respect to declining test scores and evaluation measures, disrespect for teachers by students, administrators, and parents, low…

As amply documented by "evangelical/liberal" Jim Wallis in his new "God's Politics", any country can be profoundly improved by voices of faith, hope, and love whose appeals are to reason, conscience, and civility, and who have avoided the entrapments of partisanship. Among such voices have been those of Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Mohandas…