Voice For Liberty

Category: Education

  • Bureaucracy vs. something that works

    Here’s how the education bureaucracy and teachers unions won out over students in the creation of the No Child Left Behind Act:

  • Market forces and teacher (mis)-education

    In a system governed by market forces, teacher pay would be based on how well students learn, not how many superfluous degrees teachers accumulate

  • Minimum wage price controls hurt Kansas

    This article presents compelling evidence that raising the minimum wage is not in the best interests of low-wage workers.

  • Adjusting the testing gap

    Charles Murray has a commentary titled “Acid Tests” which describes how the way that the No Child Left Behind program uses test scores is misleading. By adjusting what states use to measure “proficiency,” states can appear to be closing the gap between different groups of students. In Texas, the gap between the percentage of white…

  • Even the New York Times recognizes testing fraud

    A New York Times editorial titled “The School Testing Dodge” realizes that nearly all states report student achievement scores, as measured by their own tests, that are much higher than what the same students do on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress exam.

  • No Child Left Behind Leaving Many Behind

    Recently an Associated Press article reported how the test scores of some two million children aren’t being counted, due to a loophole in the No Child Left Behind Act. (See ‘No Child’ loophole misses millions of scores at CNN, April 18, 2006.)

  • A declaration of independence from public schools

    Mary Moberly, a young woman just 15 years old, wrote this piece. She lives in Manhattan, Kansas. I have been reading her two websites for the past few months, ever since I saw that she referred to a post on this website. If you look at her two websites, Tea and Crumpets Zine and Just…

  • School choice helps those best who have least

    An article in the March 2, 2006 Wall Street Journal by Katherine Kersten of the Minneapolis Star Tribune tells of the large numbers of African-American families in Minneapolis who send their children to charter schools or to schools in other districts, thanks to Minnesota law that allows district-crossing.

  • The wonderful and frightening uncertainty of competition

    Take education. Bureaucrats like to say, you will go to this school, because we said so, and you will be taught according to this program, because we said so and we know best. Those of us with confidence in markets think you could do better deciding for yourself. Neither the bureaucrats nor the freedom lovers…

  • Schoolchildren Will Be Basically Proficient

    A few months ago I wrote how most states, when testing their schoolchildren, post results such as “80% of our state’s students are proficient in reading or math,” but when tested by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the number judged proficient falls to 30% or so. (See Every State Left Behind.) It was…

  • Lack of Literacy is Threat to Liberty

    Writing in a recent commentary, Stephen M. Lilienthal of the Free Congress Foundation expresses concern over the literacy skills of recent college graduates. The findings of some recent studies are quite troubling.

  • Book Review: Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families

    Public schools are a great intrusion on liberty. Attendance is compulsory, as is paying for the public schools. Could the government devise a better way to expand its influence? “Despite the claim of moral neutrality, public education is linked to a particular set of values, namely, the values of the modern welfare, or social-service state.…