On February 25th, while Barack Obama chatted about ObamaCare with members of Congress, the Federal Department of Education – lead by its cabinet level chief Arne Duncan who’s also from Chicago – prepped for release to the public his and his boss’s second assault on our freedom; this time a scheme to further intrude on your child’s education. As an announcement from two think tanks put it: “generationally important Tenth Amendment issues [were] opened on two fronts—the prospect of centralizing health care and education policy.” And that’s pretty much what’s going on, but using expressions like “two fronts” assumes a great deal from the average reader or listener these days. That’s because such expressions harken back to historical events the facts on which the general populace is thin. Doubt me? Ask anyone under 40 why Hitler shouldn’t have invaded The Soviet Union.

Read more on The RTT Ruse…

Reading, [w]riting, [a]rithmetic, and…religion? So says Cal Thomas in a post from the WaPo blog On Faith.

Writes Thomas, “Religion as a subject and the beliefs of individual religions absolutely should be taught in all schools and at all levels.”

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In an essay for TCS Daily last week, Arnold Kling wrote, “With or without the words ‘under God,’ the Pledge of Allegiance feels to me like a prayer. It’s a fairly nice prayer, and I have no problem with having it taught in private schools. I have no problem praying for my country — such a prayer is included in the standard weekly service at my synagogue. But government institutions ought not to be telling people how to pray.”

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U.S. high school students are taking harder classes, receiving better grades, and from every indication in recent data, leaning much less than their counterparts fifteen years ago. Go figure. All the talk about spending more money and about improving testing and teacher standards and the end result is that two decades of educational reform may not have improved things overall.

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Sen. Dave Schultheis of Colorado has “proposed a ‘Public Schools Religious Bill of Rights’ to combat what he calls mounting, nationwide violations of students’ and school staffs’ constitutionally protected religious freedom.”

Read more on The Right to a Religious Education…

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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