RealClearEducation Articles

Conversations about fixing America’s college campuses often go nowhere. Conservatives split between giving up on the university and wanting to tear the ivory towers down altogether. Progressives divide between seeing speaker shout-downs as going a step too far and believing that the campus is where needed radical change begins, in any form that it comes. Despairing of the dramatic political imbalance in the faculty room, even conservatives aren’t sure how to make diverse voices more welcome, while some progressives don’t want conservative voices on campus in the first place,...

Breaking news: legally speaking, only two genders exist. While you may have seen reports of myriad “non-binary” gender identities like “Two-Spirit,” “Demi-boy,” and “Cake-gender”—to name a few—the Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that only males and females exist. Indeed, just last year, in the controversial Dobbs v. Jackson opinion that rejected a constitutional right to abortion, the dissenters repeatedly invoked the consequences that the decision would have for ... women. Not transgender men. Not non-binary-uterused...

It’s rare to see a comeback story as strong as that of Mississippi students. According to the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, Mississippi fourth-graders, when adjusted for demographics, are ranked as the nation’s top performers in reading and second in math. Mississippi’s dead-last ranking in the United States in overall education was once a familiar statistic, but recent test scores reveal the incredible new reality of academic prosperity for students in the state. Graduation rates have skyrocketed to about 10% higher than the national average. Most...

The Supreme Court is likely to strike down the Biden Administration’s borrower bailout in the coming weeks. The administration’s plan to transfer up to $20,000 in student loan debt per borrower—from individuals who voluntarily took out loans to finance their college education to unsuspecting taxpayers—is one of the most audacious examples of executive overreach in American history. Despite its $400 billion price tag, the action is only a small piece of the administration’s strategy to create a massive new public subsidy for higher education. A cynic might wonder...

Each school day, the roughly 500 students at Woodland Hills Elementary School in Kingwood, TX, spend time playing in and exploring one of the hallmarks of elementary school education: the playground. But this school year, Woodland Hills’s fairytale-themed playground looks noticeably different, with the presence of new wheel-chair accessible ramps, sensory panels, height-adjustable structures, and a smooth playground floor. The new playground design, recognized in a recent report as one of the nation’s most inclusive, is emblematic of a changing perspective on...

The teaching profession has undeniably thrived under the dedicated guidance of teachers’ unions, and they deserve credit for their contributions. It’s crucial to acknowledge, however, that these organizations have evolved into powerful entities capable of promoting controversial ideologies and potentially harmful policies. Unions are steering our education system perilously close to a cliff. I was a union member for nearly twenty-five years, and I discovered early on that certain viewpoints were discouraged. Prior to the...

What do campus shout-downs, cancellation campaigns aimed at heterodox faculty, increasing rates of self-censorship among college students, and the use of political litmus tests in faculty hiring have in common? They are all the sorry progeny of campus “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) efforts—a misleading moniker that conceals these efforts’ true purpose and impact on university campuses today.  In fact, these concepts really stand for sowing division among students based on group identity; supporting race-exclusionary policies, clubs,...

The importance of creativity in problem-solving cannot be underestimated, especially in the realm of public policy. When confronting a task, it’s important to make sure that you have the right tool, especially if you want to be bold. Remember the old saying about how, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail? A trio of United States senators – Marco Rubio and Rick Scott of Florida and Utah’s Mike Lee – have introduced legislation that addresses the increasing use of government accreditation to enforce “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” on...

The school choice revolution continues. Six states now allow each child’s education funding to be used for the school or educational expenses of his choice. More states are soon to follow. What seemed impossible only five years ago became permissible — necessary, even — in red states thanks to a perfect constellation of circumstances. Most notably, union intransigence over school re-openings and Zoom schooling revealed to families how disconnected schools were from their own...

The teacher-hiring crisis is far from over. High teacher-turnover rates are outpacing the sharp decline in student enrollment numbers in K-12 public schools.  Consider just a few examples of the nationwide trend. North Carolina faced a 12.1% teacher departure rate for the 2021-2022 school year, followed by 15.6% of teachers exiting the profession for 2022-2023. Louisiana had similar rates, at 11.1% and 13.9%, respectively. Washington State came in at 10% and 12% for those same years, experiencing the highest percentage loss of teachers for the state in more...

The motto of The Ohio State University (OSU) is Disciplina In Civitatem, Education for Citizenship. This motto is fitting for this esteemed land-grant institution. OSU will uphold it only if its students learn to engage in civil, respectful dialogue and consider political and social ideas that deviate from prevailing campus beliefs. A recent survey conducted by College Pulse on behalf of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, encompassing 2,003 OSU students, reveals that Ohio's flagship university...

Iowa, Utah, Indiana, and my own state of Arkansas have passed legislation expanding state-funded school choice to include private schools. Every day, I hear from indignant defenders of traditional public schools predicting an educational apocalypse; school-choice supporters often counter by promising educational utopia.  I have friends in each camp, so for me, school choice isn’t war. Instead, it’s more like dating – you have to do some listening as well as talking. Back in college, years before meeting my wonderful wife, I was dating a pretty, brilliantly sarcastic...

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the majority of Ohio’s fourth-graders are failing as readers. And only two out of eight Ohio children living in poverty are proficient in reading. This is a wake-up call that demands attention: early-grade reading proficiency correlates directly with future earnings, college attendance, homeownership, and retirement savings.  Equally troubling is that, over the past two decades, NAEP scores have remained mostly flat – that is, until recent declines,...

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who means to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives,” wrote James Madison. The success of the American experiment in self-government depends on an informed, united citizenry that is engaged in public life. ContextUS is the Jack Miller Center’s newly published, free online library that provides citizens with the content to gain that necessary civic knowledge. This state-of-the-art resource gives teachers, students, and scholars access to more than 700 core texts of the American...

America’s COVID-19 public health emergency officially ended on May 11, thanks to bipartisan legislation signed by President Joe Biden. But the Education Recovery Scorecard reminds us that America’s K-8 students still face a national COVID-19 education emergency. The Scorecard is the most thorough research to date on the pandemic’s effects on students in grades 3 to 8 and provides three insights into this calamity:  There is a divide between the reality of student learning loss and parents’ perceptions of learning loss Learning loss is related...

More parents want a weekly hybrid K-12 school model for their children. According to an EdChoice poll, if given the option, 59% of parents would prefer their children’s schooling occur one or more days each week at home with a parent or tutor, while only 41% desire on-campus schooling five days a week for their child.  Of the 59% of parents, 11% prefer that all learning occurs at home. That leaves the rest, 48%, preferring a hybrid approach to learning for their children, combining on-campus and at-home learning days each week – ranging from one day a week at home to...

Last week, I had the pleasure and honor of congratulating nearly two dozen of my advisees as they walked across the stage at Sarah Lawrence College to receive their diplomas. It was a bittersweet moment. My cohort survived the chaos of the pandemic; from the frantic conversations we shared in March 2020 to the countless Zoom, FaceTime, and text exchanges we had during the lockdowns and beyond, this truly was a special group. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the nation and the world, my students and I grew remarkably close. Over the following two years, we entered each other's lives in...

On May 8th, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed into law “three bills to counteract the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party in the state of Florida.” One of the bills, he said, would help “stop CCP influence in our education system from grade school to grad school.” Such efforts cannot come soon enough. Like Mao masquerading as Mr. Rogers, the Chinese Communist Party quietly continues to use Confucius Classrooms to influence American kids that it is neighborly and normal. But...

Over the past 40 years, Western education has emphasized math, engineering, and invention, while neglecting the disciplines that allow us to cope with their creations. We are more equipped than ever to disrupt entire economies and ways of life with technology and less equipped than ever to deal with the consequences. If we want to retain a life worth living, one where human beings control the tools that they create, and not vice versa, we need to return to the deep well of human wisdom: what we once called with pride “the...