Exhausted and tired female student studying outdoors.

Tell most parents about the concept of school choice or Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) and they almost immediately jump on board. The idea of having the financial freedom to choose the education that best suits their children is a dream come true for many families, so it’s no surprise that consistently 70-75% of school parents support the idea.

But there are still a handful of naysayers, particularly those who fear that school choice will drain the public schools of necessary funds. After all, they argue, our country needs public education, and if we don’t have enough money for public schools, that essential component of our nation’s freedom and success will vanish.

The problem is, what many consider public schools today may not be the type of educational institutions that our nation’s founders envisioned. Continue reading →

(Flickr-Wonder woman0731, CC BY 2.0)

If you’ve made it this far into the year and are still maintaining your New Year’s resolutions, congratulations!

But if you, like most of us, have already failed at these efforts of reform, take heart. There’s still time to make changes, even small ones. And my suggestion for that small change is that you start by choosing one book to read this year. Continue reading →

“Training a boy to manhood requires them to attain knowledge and courage”. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

We all saw horrifying images and heard heartbreaking stories about the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene. But chances are you also heard a few stories of hope, of people lending a hand to those in need. I heard one of these a few days after the storm, compliments of some friends living in the area.

Although their home was high enough to avoid getting swept away in the deluge, my friends were cut off from the outside world for a few days as a nearby creek became a raging river. While waiting to evacuate, the family’s two early- to mid-teenage sons heard screams coming through their window one night while reading before bedtime. When they couldn’t find their father – who was, unbeknownst to them, trying to get some news from the outside world on the car radio – they took matters into their own hands, grabbing some equipment and heading out to the creek, where they rescued their neighbor from debris and a partially submerged car. Continue reading →

Noah Webster

If you’re a normal person, you’ve likely done a double take some time in the last year as your eye rested on a news headline so crazy – even in this unbelievably chaotic world of ours – that you couldn’t believe it. Evidence that such craziness is now a common occurrence shows itself in the popularity of news sites such as “Not the Bee,” whose tagline is “your source for headlines that should be satire, but aren’t.”

But there are still some normal headlines out there that also cause us to do mental double takes, largely because they run completely opposite this trend by offering unbelievably positive news. Such was the case when I came across a Wall Street Journal headline proclaiming, “Sales of Bibles Are Booming.”

The article largely attributed these booming Bible sales to the heightened marketing tactics of Christian booksellers. But it also acknowledged that some seismic cultural factors may be playing a role in the 22 percent increase in U.S. Bible sales this year. In fact, as I read those quoted in the article – everyone from a social media influencer to a Nevada mother – I began realizing that they were all citing three main reasons for their renewed interest in the Bible, namely, a search for stability, meaning, and happiness. Continue reading →