Just one week after the public release of the Catholic High School Honor Roll, positive reactions are streaming in. Many schools have let us know that they have observed a noticeable change because they were named to the Honor Roll. Other schools have used already used this occasion to jump start their advancement engines.

Read more on Honor Roll Reactions Streaming In…

In case you missed it, there is a great discussion brewing on Amy Welborn’s blog about the Honor Roll. Specifically there is reference to the examination of civic education as a criterion, specifically regarding a school’s teaching of economics, business, and Catholic social teaching. Go to her blog to follow the discussion.

Read more on Honor Roll discussion on Welborn blog…

On yet another day in a long season of bad news for Catholic schools in major urban areas, Chicago’s historic high school seminary is slated to close.

Michael J. Petrilli addresses the broader context of the problem in this analysis on NRO. The first part of the article lays out the by now familiar reasons for the epidemic of Catholic school closures in cities such as Detroit and Boston.

Read more on The Inevitable Loophole…

Rick Ritchie has a thought-provoking post over at Old Solar, deconstructing a rather shrill WorldNetDaily article. In a piece titled, “What!? Caesar’s Money Has Strings Attached?,” Ritchie soberly observes, “When you do accept state funding, the state does have an interest in how its money is used.”

Read more on Government Money, Government Morality…

One of the flashpoints in school choice debates is the performance of public schools as compared to private. A while back a Department of Education study drew attention by claiming that, when certain socio-economic factors were controlled, there wasn’t much of a difference between achievement by public and private school students. Those findings are now under fire from Harvard researchers Paul Petersen and Elena Llaudet, who use the same data but a different method—and claim that the Department of Education’s method was flawed.

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Hunter Baker, blogging at his new home on the American Spectator Blog (recently added to our blogroll), responds to a post by James G. Poulos, which emphasizes President Bush’s “proposed emphasis on math and science education, to the patent detriment of the humanities.”

Read more on Federal Funding for the Humanities…

In today’s OpinionJournal Clint Bolick, president and general counsel of the Alliance for School Choice, gives an overview of the state-by-state successes of school choice advocates. One of Bolick’s important observations is that the move for increased choice and competition in education is increasingly becoming bi-partisan.

Read more on A Long, Hard Road…

Rep. Vito Fossella (R-NY13) endorses federal tuition tax credits for K-12 education at NRO, “An A+ Choice.”

Says Fosella: “Here’s how it would work: Families would be permitted to take a dollar-for-dollar reduction in their tax liability for non-public-school-tuition expenses. For example, a taxpayer with a liability of $10,000 and a tax credit of $4,500 would be required to pay only $5,500 in taxes. Simply, it allows families to keep more of their money to spend on their children’s education.”

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Not directly, of course, but the implication of a recent story from NPR’s Future Tense is that video games have a positive stimulative effect on doctors who are about to perform surgery.

Read more on Video Games Can Save Lives and More……

“Last week, the Department of Education reported that science aptitude among 12^th-graders has declined across the last decade.” Anthony Bradley explores some of the root causes for why science education continues to falter in schools across the country. Bradley asserts that the typical American now views education as a means for a comfortable lifestyle rather than a means to knowledge about the world. The purpose of education, instead of producing knowledge and insight into the workings of nature and society, is now to teach everything you need to know in order to enter the work-force. The results of this distortion of the purpose of education is the decline of interest in less “practical” fields including science.

Read more on America’s 12th Graders Dumbing Down in Science…