RealClearEducation Articles

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran a piece that offers a beautiful and evocative snapshot of intellectual life at its best. Its authors, Khafiz Kerimov and Nicholas Bellinson of St. John’s College, describe students gathered around a blackboard in a campus coffee shop, each wielding a different color of chalk as they work through Euclid and Lobachevsky together. There are groans of frustration, bursts of laughter, and sudden, collective insight. It is a vision of education at its finest: collaborative, messy, deeply human. St. John’s has built its entire model of...

Every morning, millions of students start their day the same way: roll over, reach for the phone, and open a social media app. Scroll. Snap. Like. Post. Repeat. It feels natural; almost automatic. The speed and immediacy of social media give us a rush of connection and belonging, especially for young people. But too often, this always-on cycle turns toxic. Emotions run high, minor conflicts spiral into drama, and every thought feels like it must be broadcast to the world. What if we paused and chose not to post? The world feels like it’s ready to explode, and tempers and emotions are...

Charlie Kirk once said, “The greatest rebellion against the chaos of our modern world. . .[is] raising a family grounded in truth and light.”He was right. Revolutions start at the kitchen table and with bedtime routines, not in the chaos and confusion of a world consumed with hate and violence—both online and off.It’s at the kitchen table that tomorrow’s thought- and faith-leaders are sown, grown, and nurtured by the parents who know and love them best.It’s there that parents exercise the full measure of their right and responsibility to...

The conservative activist Charlie Kirk wasn’t just murdered on Wednesday. He was killed for engaging in a fundamentally American activity—public debate. America’s future depends on all of us rejecting such violence and recommitting ourselves to reasoned discourse. It’s tough to overstate the significance of where Charlie Kirk was, what he was doing, and why the killer’s actions represent a danger to us all. To my knowledge, Mr. Kirk is the first American public figure to be assassinated literally in the act of public dialogue, and this is a key to understanding...

The first time I encountered “no-zeros” grading, I was still a teacher. To demonstrate how to use a new data entry system, our technology coordinator plugged a zero into the software, and to everyone’s surprise, the online gradebook rounded up to 49.9 percent. He’d accidentally exposed a yet-to-be-announced grading policy (the “fifty-percent” rule). The teachers in the room were apoplectic. To them, giving half credit to a student who turned in no assignment or bombed a test was an insult to their expertise, unfair to other students, and an act of deception...

Fixing American education, especially at the college level, won’t be easy. Put simply, it will take shock therapy to overcome the parade of DEI, anti-Semitism, and the broader efforts to instill leftwing doctrines on campuses today. But students will suffer until there’s a major course correction. And insisting on hefty sums from colleges like UCLA—such as the Department of Justice’s recent $1 billion demand—is the type of tough medicine that it will take to get there. UCLA is a public school. That means that it has to abide by the U.S. Constitution, just like...

Through distortion and exaggeration, union critics are promoting the myth that teachers unions are hostile to Jews, and are leveraging this myth to encourage government interference with and intervention in the labor movement.  The US Congressional Committee on Education and the Workforce is investigating the National Education Association, America’s largest teachers union, for alleged antisemitism in the wake of controversies surrounding the NEA’s Representative Assembly in July. Committee chairperson Tim Walberg (R-MI) says the committee is considering...

On today’s campuses, evidence itself is too often branded as hostility. Research that once sparked debate now risks being dismissed as “harm.” At Sarah Lawrence College, that reflex has escalated further: a faculty member joined students in a federal lawsuit, mischaracterizing scholarship as an “attack.” That isn’t mentoring or teaching. It is indoctrination in grievance tactics, and it represents a dangerous turning point for higher education. I know this firsthand. In a complaint just filed in the Southern District of New York (Case 1:25-cv-06442, filed...

President Trump recently announced that up to 600,000 Chinese students will be allowed to study in the United States, drawing criticism from some MAGA supporters. For students in China, this represents a major opportunity, one that was previously available primarily to the wealthiest families. Those who do not fall within the top ten percent of wage earners in the country typically have far fewer options. With the start of the 2025–2026 school year in September, more than 13 million Chinese high school seniors are expected to sit for the Gaokao, the country’s grueling national...

The internet used to feel like a vibrant but messy patchwork of human curiosity. Websites, discussion forums, blogs, and conversations were stitched together by real people sharing unpolished yet real ideas. Today’s internet remains full of debate and unfiltered opinions. Yet it feels much less alive — and much less human — than it once did. The internet’s dominant force is social media, which produces infinite TikTok-style clips stitched from stock footage and narrated by a perky synthetic voice. These AI-generated clips (“Five simple hacks that will change...

The American right blames teachers unions for “failing schools”, low test scores, the damage caused by COVID school closures, and much more. However, it never occurred to me that we were also accountable for crime in schools.  School choice advocate Corey DeAngelis details a recent FBI report that found that between 2020 and 2024, law enforcement agencies reported 540,000 assaults occurring on school property nationwide. This figure only includes the 9,000 law enforcement agencies out of 18,000 nationwide that submitted data to the FBI.  DeAngelis is...

When policymakers and the public talk about student debt, they usually picture undergraduates: young people taking their first steps into higher education and making some of their first consequential financial decisions. That’s where most of the attention and reform energy has gone. But the real engine of recent growth in federal student loan volume has increasingly been graduate education, where borrowing is less constrained and loans are larger—a cost to both student borrowers and taxpayers when degrees fail to deliver a payoff. Despite making up a smaller share of the student...

In the coming weeks, students will flood America's college campuses as they embark on a new school year. What remains to be seen is this: How do America's leading institutions deal with antisemitism against Jewish students while still protecting freedom of expression? Columbia University’s landmark deal with the Trump administration has elicited mixed reactions. Some see it as a significant and long-overdue step, given how institutions of higher learning have stood by as campus climates grew increasingly hostile to Jews, especially in the wake of Hamas’s recent atrocities....

From debates over student loan forgiveness to the reorganization of the U.S. Department of Education, the federal government’s role in postsecondary education has become a partisan flashpoint. Often lost in the noise, however, are the students themselves—and the surprising ways both Republicans and Democrats are increasingly aligned to support them.  The recent reconciliation bill was no exception, drawing intense scrutiny and sparking sharp disagreement across ideological lines. And yet, tucked within that highly controversial package was a rare point of bipartisan...

The passage of the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) and its K–12 tax credit program marks a pivotal moment for states committed to strengthening public education. While the law allows funds to flow to private school scholarships, a prospect that rightly concerns many public education advocates, it also opens a promising new and uncharted path: one that empowers public school families with the financial means to provide their children with the individualized academic and mental health support they deserve. Critics have long warned that federal support for private school tuition...

It’s confirmed: If Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani is elected New York City mayor in November, he’ll wage war on charter schools to the detriment of working-class families. “I oppose efforts by the state to mandate an expansion of charter school operations in New York City,” the Queens Assemblyman said in a Staten Island Advance survey, according to the New York Post’s exclusive. “I also oppose the co-locating of charter schools inside DOE school buildings, but for those already co-located, my administration would undertake a comprehensive review of...

When the semester begins, my classroom fills with anticipation and nerves—mine included. Every term offers a chance to start fresh, build habits, and forge relationships that will carry us through. Those first weeks of any term are far more than icebreakers; they're a blueprint signaling to students who they are in this space and what we'll achieve together. I work hard to elevate every student. But as a professor and parent, I've noticed a pattern: male students often drift first when the relationship isn't there. Men are relational learners. When a young man feels known—when he...

Public school K-12 enrollment hit a historic high in 2019, but since that pre-COVID peak, enrollment has taken a steep 7.6% nationwide nosedive post-COVID. This dramatic downturn looks to be far from over, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Millions of parents watched their children struggle academically and socially during the COVID pandemic because of the isolation of shutdowns across the country. The uncertainty they faced in how long these conditions would last led to a reckoning with traditional schooling, and many parents sought new options for educating their...

"Everybody—sooner or later—sits down to a banquet of consequences." – Robert Louis Stevenson On a sunny afternoon in April 1999, I walked out the door ahead of the students to say hello to parents gathered in the parking area beside the school. Inside the school, the children collected their belongings and prepared to head home. As I walked down the entry ramp and out into the sun, a mother met me and asked with an unsteady voice, "Did you hear what happened at that high school near Denver?" Shock and disbelief reverberated in her voice. I knew intuitively that whatever she...