RealClearEducation Articles

Dear Graduates: It is now the middle of college graduation season, and we will not be making any commencement addresses. One of us is a former president of several major universities who will mark the first time in 45 years not presiding over graduation festivities. The other heads an academic association composed of faculty at schools across the country. But if we were speaking to students, their families, and our fellow academics, we would present a sharp contrast to the controversial commencement remarks made earlier this month at the University of Michigan and other campuses, where...

The NYU Executive Committee of the Student Government Assembly expressed “profound disappointment” that their graduation speaker was to be internationally renowned social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In a Statement on All-University Commencement, the committee asked the administration to “reconsider.” “The pivot from figures of universal inspiration,” NYU students complained, “to an individual who has been accused of making homophobic remarks in a class and public misconceptions about transgender identity, and has promoted disturbing rhetoric around...

I want to say something to the Class of 2026 that Sarah Lawrence College did not say at Commencement. They deserve to hear it plainly. On May 8, 2026, Sarah Lawrence held its 98th commencement in the centennial year of its founding. The date mattered. Exactly one hundred years earlier, Sarah Bates Lawrence had died, and the college her husband soon chartered would bear her name. A school that has spent a century telling a story about audacious, student-centered education had a rare opportunity to renew that story in front of the students who embody it. Sadly, it did not. I have taught...

The Department of Education is proposing a new rule that threatens to close 92% of beauty and wellness schools across the U.S.—eliminating career training for 150,000 students annually and devastating an industry that supports 1.3 million American jobs. This isn’t just about haircuts and manicures. This is about the American Dream. The beauty and wellness industry represents one of the last true pathways to middle-class prosperity for Americans from all backgrounds. Our schools train entrepreneurs who build thriving small businesses in every community. This female-dominated...

Foreign influence is reaching into our children’s schools in Texas and around the United States. Kids are being exposed to lesson plans and textbooks stained with propaganda and even antisemitism. Who is providing this tainted largesse? China for one, certainly. But less talked about is the money coming from the deep pockets of the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar. Qatar supports terrorist groups like Hamas. It also supports schools in Austin and Houston, giving substantial sums of money to hire Arabic language teachers, buy curricular materials and pay for classroom observers. The...

On May 1, millions of high school seniors committed to college, many with the understanding that a four-year degree is the next step toward stability and success. But are students being prepared to make that decision in the first place? The average college graduate now leaves school with roughly $30,000 in student loan debt, and Americans collectively owe more than $1.7 trillion. At the same time, fewer than two-thirds of students who start a four-year degree finish within six years. For teenagers just beginning adult life, it is one of the largest financial decisions they will ever make,...

Chicago’s teachers union isn’t just negotiating contracts anymore—it’s mobilizing children. Under the banner of “civic action,” the Chicago Teachers Union has pushed the public school system into a new role: not as an institution of learning, but as a vehicle for political organizing, backed by taxpayer dollars and institutional power. In March, the CTU passed a resolution to have schools closed on May 1st for a “May Day” protest. Their resolution was a laundry list of far-left causes, ranging from anti-Trump rhetoric to specific foreign policy demands. After a standoff with...

The most important charter school story today isn't how many students they serve or whether they outperform district schools. While those questions matter, they're too narrow. National Charter Schools Week invites us to talk about the bigger story of how the charter school idea has reshaped American K–12 public education. When the charter idea emerged in the early 1990s, it was framed as a way to create independent public schools of choice with more freedom over how they operated but more accountability for what students learned. In 1999, that goal led National Urban League President Hugh...

At the University of Michigan’s 2026 commencement exercises,  history professor Derek Peterson stood before graduating seniors and their families and, as chair of the Faculty Senate, used his five minutes at the commencement microphone to praise pro-Palestinian campus activists for opening “our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.” The line drew applause. It also drew, according to Inside Higher Ed, nearly 500 angry emails, twenty threatening calls, a public apology from university president Domenico Grasso, calls from Republican regent...

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story first ran in Dispatches, our weekly newsletter from our reporters about their recent investigations. Sign up to receive stories like this one in your inbox every Saturday.Every Tuesday, almost like clockwork, the U.S. Department of Education would update a public list of schools and colleges it was investigating for possible violations of students' civil rights.Every Tuesday, that is, until Jan. 14, 2025, six days before President Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term. Today, that online list remains...

If your college isn't already feeling financial strain, it probably will be soon. The wealthiest and most-selective institutions may be insulated from the worst financial turbulence, but many colleges that must compete for a limited number of traditional-age students are falling short of enrollment and revenue goals.A cadre of college-finance experts have come to specialize in parachuting into struggling institutions to stop the bleeding. Those experts are busier than ever.Interim chief financial officers can be a godsend for an institution drowning in red ink, says Charles M. Ambrose, a...

I met Charlie Kirk at a Turning Point USA event last year. He had already spent hours on stage, yet still stayed afterward to speak with students one by one. During our conversation, Charlie mentioned he recognized my writing. For someone who had only recently read his first book, that moment carried real weight. In 2024, during my sophomore year of high school, I was diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. For years, teachers labeled me lazy, tests often ended in frustration, and school felt like a system where long-term success seemed unlikely. My experience reflected what...

Harold Bloom, the greatest literary critic of his age! Look on his works, ye Mighty, and despair: by the end of his long, super-contemplative and rather oddball life, he'd published almost 50 original books, edited hundreds of critical works in his role as general editor at Chelsea House Publishers (a job he undertook to support a disabled son), and read untold millions, nay, billions of words so that you and I wouldn't have to. And now we have the first published volume of Bloom's correspondence, The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom, which may prove the tip of a...

Tucked into a corner of the oldest part of Yale University's campus is a statue of the famous Revolutionary War spy, Nathan Hale. My children have long been fascinated by it. For years, it was right outside my husband's office, and although he has since moved spaces, we still make periodic trips to see the statue. In one of my favorite family photos, we are introducing our youngest child (then 2 weeks old) to the Hale statue, while his older siblings once again inspect this interesting American artifact. The statue shows Nathan Hale shortly before his death by hanging. We don't know what...

Last month, the local government in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, shut down my children's school—not because of safety concerns, financial issues, or lack of student learning. In fact, the 60-some children who attend Threefold Schoolhouse, which my wife and I cofounded in 2019, are thriving. My wife's phone buzzes with calls from other moms who want to enroll their kids next year. What shut us down? A zoning issue we didn't even know existed. We ran into a regulatory barrier that represents the next battleground for school choice. Threefold Schoolhouse operated out of a former office...

Imagine an unassuming medium-sized college, dotted with red brick buildings, situated at the outskirts of a small American town. It is staffed with an earnest and devoted faculty, committed to providing students with an education that will equip them to flourish both as citizens and as human beings. Its teachers belong to departments organized by discipline, within which curricular decisions are made collectively and pedagogical challenges are addressed together. They are imperfect, of course, and often disagree among themselves. Nevertheless, together they possess the kind of practical...

Harvey C. Mansfield, who enrolled at Harvard in 1949, joined the faculty in 1962, and retired in 2023, has been called many things: "great dissenter," "prophet," "racist, homophobic and misogynist," "sophist," "slipshod." Mansfield prefers "annoying Socratic gadfly." A dean once advised that he'd be more persuasive if he argued less. Mansfield says he tried, but it didn't work. "Retirement seems to strengthen my voice." For six decades, Mansfield was the sharpest conservative thorn in the side of Harvard's body politic — a "one-man antidote to liberal complacency," in the words of the...

Is everyone fit to homeschool? The short answer is an obvious no. But the real answer is far more complicated. Who exactly is fit to homeschool is a more controversial question, and the answer is increasingly that far more people than you might think are equipped to do this, and to do it excellently. Researcher Anthony Bradley recently took to X to share a graph showcasing abysmal literacy rates across the country, arguing that the statistics rendered the argument that “anyone can homeschool” laughable. The most obvious reason Bradley’s argument falls short is that in far too many...

Recently, Rep. Elise Stefanik released a new book about her most viral moment in Congress and the fallout. In December of 2023, the presidents of multiple elite universities testified before Congress and Stefanik asked plainly, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s code of conduct?” University presidents wouldn’t answer, and shockwaves rippled across the country. For the average Americans who consider it blindingly obvious that calls for genocide at U.S. educational institutions is unacceptable, the blinders were taken off about the situation on college...