RealClearEducation Articles

The House of Representatives is currently considering a bill focused on providing a range of services to veterans, from healthcare to housing support. Despite being introduced with bipartisan fanfare in both chambers of Congress, the bill has been slow to move over the past month and has yet to move out of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, as of this writing. The bill’s stagnation is costing America’s veterans access to much-needed support in many aspects of their lives. But one of the most important parts is a small, relatively unheralded part of the bill....

America has often created blue ribbon commissions to determine the causes of cataclysmic events like the 9/11 attack, JFK’s assassination, Pearl Harbor, Watergate, the Challenger explosion, and the 2008 “Great Recession.” Another investigative commission, precipitated by an increasingly likely military conflict with China, may be closer than we care to imagine. Despite our domestic political preoccupations, China’s People’s Liberation Army is preparing for conflict with the U.S. and has been actively engaging in hostile military acts against the Philippines and...

K-12 Education may not top the list of issues in this year’s presidential election, but four days after Joe Biden made her the heir apparent for the Democratic nomination for president, Kamala Harris will address the 2024 convention of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s second-largest teachers union. The convention gives the AFT, and the public, a first clear look at where she stands on education issues. The AFT was among the first organizations to endorse Harris, and since the union is a perennial power center in Democratic politics, Harris will...

One of the greatest features of Sarah Lawrence College is the number of creative students who join us from across the country.  Rather than being comprised exclusively of a group of urban and coastal students, the College enrolls many students from small towns in places like North Dakota, Tennessee, and Wyoming in recent years. I love working with them. Their upbringings have been markedly different from my coastal students and they regularly bring socio-economic, political, and viewpoint diversity into my classroom. These small-town students are often white but are nothing like the...

In his novel 1984, George Orwell writes of the dystopian totalitarian state Oceania, and that its children were recruited to spy against enemies of the state. Although they “adored the Party and everything connected with it,” their ferocity against thought criminals was such that it “was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.”Writing in 1949, Orwell was not painting on a blank canvas. At the time, the Soviet-era Young Pioneers were actively indoctrinating Russia’s children in communist ideology. This example illustrated...

Critics are accusing the American Federation of Teachers of antisemitism over several resolutions that will be voted on at the AFT conference in Houston this week. This reflects a troubling trend in teachers unions–labeling resolutions critical of Israeli policies “antisemitic”.   In reality, the AFT resolutions mirror views of the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza that are held by the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, as well as numerous human rights groups, Middle East experts, and historians, including many in Israel.  This doesn't mean the...

As July becomes August and the new school year approaches, Americans shouldn’t miss what transpired in Philadelphia earlier this month at the annual meeting of the country’s largest teachers’ union. Radical members of the National Education Association (NEA), revealing their likely strategy for the fall, introduced several “new business items” designed to teach and promulgate hatred toward Jews and Israel.  The NEA is the largest labor union and teachers’ union in the United States, representing approximately 3...

Amid an especially fraught presidential election, polarizing armed conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, and deepening political divides over issues like immigration, the economy, and even our democracy itself, the nation is facing a politically charged moment that shows no signs of abating. Tribalism is on the rise, as is an intense—and historic—distrust of many of our nation’s most important institutions, including Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidency. Higher education has not been spared from this crisis of faith, with just 36 percent of Americans...

Surprisingly, President Biden and former President Trump have common ground on a key workforce policy: more apprenticeships. Both presidents support "earn while you learn" opportunities by incentivizing apprenticeships with employers and using their executive powers to expand them. Earlier this year, President Biden issued an executive order focused on expanding Registered Apprenticeship programs in the federal government, while former President Trump established an apprenticeship advisory committee — led by notable CEOs — aimed at broadening their availability across the...

This summer, several states have proposed banning smartphones in public schools or introducing programs that will limit kids’ phone use during school hours. So far New York, Indiana, Ohio, California, and Oklahoma have proposed bans or restrictions, showing rare bipartisan concern over the issue.   The impetus for this movement came in May when Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders sent a letter to every fellow governor in the United States with a complimentary copy of The Anxious Generation, a new book by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Haidt shows...

Frustrated by decades of foreign gift and contract disclosure failures by America’s universities, in June 2020 the U.S. Department of Education launched an online portal for reporting foreign source gifts and contracts valued at $250,000 or more per calendar year, as required by Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965. But in June 2024, the Education Department announced that due to a “contract change” it had decommissioned the reporting portal’s interactive data table for analyzing foreign funding disclosures. The Department’s...

Etched onto the side of the Main Building at the University of Texas at Austin is a verse taken from John’s Gospel: “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Justin Dyer says that this represents UT’s Austin’s North Star: “The university is a truth-seeking institution.” A faculty partner of the Jack Miller Center, Dyer is the author of eight books on natural law, constitutionalism, and American political thought. He previously worked at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri but was drawn back...

Phones in schools are bad news. It’s intuitively obvious. There are studies documenting it. There are so many stories of schools ditching them and students and teachers saying everything got better – and essentially no stories of schools ditching them and regretting it.  So, why aren’t phone-free schools already the norm? Because parents oppose phone bans and, it turns out, there are actually very good reasons why they do. And those reasons point to a grand policy bargain that state legislatures could make.  The first reason is bullying and violence. More than half...

When Benjamin Franklin famously said, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it,” he was, as usual, prescient. This summer, the democratic republic known as the United States of America is 248 years old, and civically minded organizations around the country are already busily working on plans to celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday in 2026. Such a milestone is a cause for real celebration; by most reckonings, we are the longest-lasting democracy in history. Democracies are fragile: The Athenian democracy never made it to 200. Americans should use this anniversary as an...

When I began to teach high school English, one of the texts that I had to assign my freshmen classes was the short story “Marigolds” by Eugenia Collier. The story is set in the American South during the Depression and recounts a time when an adolescent girl overhears her father’s struggles at finding a job and eventually takes out her frustration on an old woman’s marigolds.  No one, including me, ever really cared for the story, but it was listed as a required text on the English I curriculum because someone somewhere thought it was a relevant, engaging text for...

To no one’s surprise, a new poll commissioned by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) found that confidence in higher education is at an all-time low. Americans’ dissatisfaction with higher education has been in slow decline for more than a decade. Ubiquitous footage last spring of students parroting terrorist slogans while building campus encampments and occupying academic buildings only accelerated the collapse. A reversal of this persistent downward trend is hard to imagine. Today, the possibility that a restoration of faith in higher education...

As my kids continue to grow, I find myself constantly amazed at all the great educational opportunities popping up everywhere in our town of Lynchburg, VA.   When my wife and I first decided we wanted to homeschool our kids, we worried about the time it would take, our ability as educators, and the well-roundedness of opportunities we could provide for our children. However, we have quickly realized we aren’t alone in our search to provide our children with the perfect education, and there are plenty of resources to help.   We’re incredibly lucky to have the...

Teachers union delegates from around the country will descend upon Philadelphia this week for the National Education Association’s annual Representative Assembly. The powerful union will map out its political strategy, rally the troops to campaign for union-endorsed candidates, and endorse the progressive agenda du jour. Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association (NEA), rarely demands the attention that American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten relishes and receives from her friends and foes. Pringle’s unhinged closing...

Something unusual is happening in girls’ track and field: Boys keep winning. On June 1st, Soren Stark-Chessa won the 800-meter Class C title in Maine. On May 25, Veronica Garcia in Washington claimed a girls’ state 400-meter dash track title. Also in May, Aayden Gallagher in Oregon took first place in the girls’ state 6A 200-meter race, and Lana Huff won the 200-meter race in Hawaii. In just a few weeks, in only one sport, four boys became girls’ track champions.  The wave of boys in girls’ sports is growing, and if President Biden gets his way, that wave...