Learning and Well-Being

Following Florida into the education Hall of Shame, a judge in California is poised to toss out graduation exams as "unfair". IWF here.

Also a very good resource, especially for parents, to find out what is going on in Illinois schools and what you can do for your child, the Illinois Loop site.

Today at Stanford, its Center on Adolescence is holding a syposium examining education and its effect on adolescence. We've got to consider a new approach to schools, given that we have increased spending on our schools over the past 40 years and seen academic achievement drop. Here is Michael Strong, CEO of a new firm proposing educational reform, in Real Clear Politics:

In the 1955 Milton Friedman proposed educational vouchers that would allow children to attend private schools with public moneys. Friedman's proposal was dismissed in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. By the 1980s Brookings Institution researchers John Chubb and Terry Moe were coming to the conclusion that the decline in test scores despite doubling our expenditures in education was not an accident. They looked carefully at public and private schools and concluded that, in fact, Friedman had been correct: the private sector was more efficient and innovative than the bureaucratic government-managed sector. Despite their liberal Brookings base, they broke ranks with the Democrats and advocated school vouchers in their 1990 book, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools.

The Stanford group will also explore the explosion in social pathologies besetting adolescents and the role of our public schools in fostering this. Strong goes on to say:

Elsewhere I have argued that if an education market were allowed to function freely, parental interest in their children's well-being would drive an ever-more sophisticated market in happiness and well-being. [5] I am a secular humanist, not a religious person, but after spending fifteen years founding and leading innovative Montessori and Paideia schools, I discovered that I needed autonomy to create a school based on a common moral vision, more autonomy than is possible in public schools or even in charter schools. I needed to be able to hire, fire, and promote a staff based in part on their common commitment to a moral vision. Adolescent well-being cannot be developed using a character education curriculum taught by faculty who are cultural relativists. The faculty must believe in something, they must themselves be united by a common moral vision, and the school's leader must be free to organize the school around the core moral purposes of that community.

We have got to make dramatic changes now, before we lose another generation. The free market offers the quickest and most transparent approach to make it happen, with the best results.

Give parents the choice to help their child succeed.

It's in the finest American tradition.