Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'vouchers'

Educational choice is a social justice issue

Note: This article is part of the ‘Principles Project,’ a list of principles, axioms, and beliefs that undergird a Christian view of economics, liberty, and virtue. Click here to read the introduction and other posts in this series. Continue Reading...

Education as liberation: 4 priorities for reform

With the recent appointment and confirmation of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, the movement for educational choice has plenty of reasons for optimism. Throughout the nomination process, opponents of DeVos ridiculed the school-choice movement for caring little about quality, equality, and opportunity, ignoring that these are the precise drivers of advocates for school choice. Continue Reading...

Left Wing Bias in Schools Requires More than a Band-Aid

Taxpayer subsidized textbooks tend to tilt left, often aggressively so. Mary Grabar notes that this is especially obvious with composition textbooks: Freshman composition class at many colleges is propaganda time, with textbooks conferring early sainthood on President Obama and lavishing attention on writers of the far left—Howard Zinn, Christopher Hedges, Peter Singer and Barbara Ehrenreich, for instance–but rarely on moderates, let alone anyone right of center. Continue Reading...

School Choice in D.C.

Washington, D.C., has long been a focal point of debates about vouchers and other forms of school choice–partly because the public schools there are so notoriously bad that a working majority of politicians and parents are open to experiments that might improve them. Continue Reading...

Faith, Funding, and Substance Abuse

Why might there be “increasing participation by religious organizations in offering substance abuse treatment funded by federal government vouchers”? Perhaps because, at least in part, “A program’s faith element relates to the people they serve and the type of help they provide, as programs with more explicit and mandatory faith-related elements are likely to be substance-abuse programs.” Continue Reading...

The Inevitable Loophole

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. Continue Reading...