Kids benefit from having a supportive family more than they do from special resources.

You know you’re getting old when you begin transferring the dreams you once had for yourself – such as playing basketball for the NBA – on to your child, a friend of mine recently noted.

His observation is one that will likely resonate with any parent. From the time a child is just a twinkle in the eye, almost every good parent begins dreaming of giving that baby the best of everything in life. And the years that follow see parents doing everything they can to execute that hope by providing excellent nutrition, the best education affordable, and lessons in piano, dance, soccer, computer programming, and every other thing imaginable that might bring that child happiness and future success. Continue reading →

Is your child getting a good education?

If asked that question, many would likely reply – somewhat indignantly even – “He goes to a good school. He gets good grades. Of course he’s well educated!”

But well-educated is not the same as well-schooled. And sadly, most of what we call education today is actually schooling, a fact former New York Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto did his best to draw attention to in the years before his death in 2018. Continue reading →

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 →

Several weeks ago, I made the claim that a culturally literate person knows the Bible. Because the Bible was a part of common culture for so many centuries, those who fail to familiarize themselves with its contents cut themselves off from deeper historical and cultural understanding.

I was reminded today just how valuable that knowledge can be as I was reflecting on Veterans Day and World War I. Continue reading →

The curriculum in today’s public schools leaves much to be desired.

But have you ever noticed how difficult it is to figure out exactly what kind of books our children are reading in school? Continue reading →

Have you ever heard someone use the phrase “Go Local”? The concept, which encourages supporting local industries and businesses, has grown in popularity over the years with people of all political persuasions.

But oddly enough, there’s one area where “go local” has been roundly shunned over the years, and that is education.

Oh, sure, people give lip service to having local schools or community schools. But history shows that politicians and officials are interested in anything but local schools, and instead of going local, schools have done the exact opposite. Continue reading →

My entire family was invited to a graduation party over the weekend. Such an invitation is nothing out of the ordinary; what made this invitation unique was that the graduate was a third-generation member of a long-standing friendship – his grandparents were neighbors of my parents for more than 40 years.

This invitation would naturally seem rather strange to the casual observer – a coattail acquaintance, if you will, out of whom the graduate was simply trying to squeeze another gift.

Nothing could be further from the truth, for although the graduate’s grandparents – Bob and Jane, my family’s longtime neighbors – are now deceased, the connection with the family remains, forged by careful cultivation over a relationship of years. Continue reading →

Stop for a moment and listen. American freedom can be found in the sound of backyard birthday parties and the daily commute.

We enjoy the right to raise our children according to our own values. (Biba Kayewich)

As a child, my family would sometimes be out walking when suddenly Mom would say, “Stop! Close your eyes and then listen to see who can hear five separate sounds first.”

We would all pause, even holding our breath, straining to catch the faintest sounds of a bird, a car in the distance, or even an airplane far above in the sky. It was a fun activity, and it made us exercise one of our five senses that we weren’t relying on as much as we looked around. Continue reading →

The other day I ran across a passage from That Hideous Strength which seems oddly applicable to our time. A dystopian novel written by C. S. Lewis at the close of World War II, That Hideous Strength finds one of its main characters, Mark Studdock, working for N.I.C.E., an organization which pulls the strings in a controlling, totalitarian society.

Studdock is assigned to write propaganda articles for N.I.C.E., an assignment which he objects to when he receives it from his boss, Miss Hardcastle. Studdock argues that it won’t work because newspapers “are read by educated people” – too smart to be taken in by propaganda. Continue reading →

While compiling a list of individual, public-school districts in Minnesota the other day, I noticed something curious. My list consisted of around 330 districts … but the district numbers weren’t all consecutive.

The list started with Aitkin (District Number 1*), proceeded to Hill City (District Number 2), jumped to McGregor (District Number 4), and then to Anoka-Hennepin (District Number 11). The numbers continued jumping, eventually reaching Ada-Borup-West (District Number 2910).

“There must have been around 3,000 districts in Minnesota at one time,” I concluded, thinking that going from 3,000 to just over 300 was quite the reduction! Continue reading →

We’ve reached the home stretch of the school year, and by now, most parents, teachers, and even students understand the lay of the land in their schools. It’s pretty apparent whether classrooms are under control, whether students are learning, and whether teachers are getting burnt out by top-down mandates and demands.

Unfortunately, it seems the individuals smart enough to decipher these signs aren’t liking what they’re seeing, for according to a new poll from Pew Research, only 16% of Americans believe the public education system is going in the right direction. Continue reading →

You’re more qualified to teach your kids than you think you are.

Homeschooling parents who learn alongside their children often share their enthusiasm as well. (LightField Studios/Shutterstock)

I had lunch with a friend the other day, and it wasn’t long before our conversation drifted to her role as a homeschool mom. In essence, she was frustrated and overwhelmed, convinced that she was doing a terrible job teaching her children, and desperately wondering if she should put them in a traditional classroom.

“Well, I wouldn’t put them in a public school – on an academics basis alone,” I said, working my way through lunch. Being an education researcher has its perks, because when she asked what I meant, I started citing the proficiency statistics for a public school district near her own. “Did you know that only 23 percent of kids in that district can read proficiently?” I asked. “Think your kids can do better than that?”

“Oh,” came her response, and as a hint of a smile played at her lips, I knew she’d suddenly realized that maybe her kids were doing way better than she thought. Continue reading →

Several days ago, I was handed a pile of old schoolwork and curriculum found in paperwork and memorabilia from my grandmother. Sifting through the stack, I soon pulled out several booklets labeled “Minnesota State Board Questions Certified.” Yellowed with age and somewhat dog-eared, they appear to be workbooks with which students could prepare for their yearly school exams.

I grabbed the one labeled “Introduction to Social Science” from 1945, the year my grandma was 17 and likely a senior in high school, and paged through it. Judging from the cover, it appears she was a scribbler like me, doodling by writing her name and some shorthand. Judging from the inside, students like her had to know their lessons well in order to pass their exams… Continue reading →

As a student, I was a whiz at memorization, so much so, that I remember basically memorizing two lead roles for different plays – one at age 13 and one at age 16 – after only one serious and focused read-through of the scripts. As an adult, I see myself mirroring my mother’s shock at such a feat, but at the time, such ease in memorization was simply second nature.

But while memorization was a hugely beneficial learning device for me as a student, it often seems like a sidelined and disgraced learning technique in the contemporary education system. Continue reading →

Movie music is the subtle cue that tells you how to respond to a certain scene. Happy, sad, afraid, angry – you name the mood and the composer will ensure that the desired emotion is accomplished.

I sometimes wonder if news articles work the same way. Take the recent and widely shared Washington Post article on the explosion of homeschooling occurring since Covid. “In 390 districts,” The Post explained, “there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year.”

That 10 percent mark, also known as “the tipping point,” helped inch the numbers of homeschooling students up to a high of 2.7 million – 1 million more than the number of students in Catholic schools, according to The Post.

Such numbers, although still relatively small, appear to have The Washington Post worried. Very worried.
Continue reading →