ESSA

While teachers have walked off their jobs in several states this spring to protest what they believe to be low pay and lack of classroom resources to support teaching, armies of bureaucrat have been bickering over implementing the massive Every Student Succeeds Act.

Roughly one in every 50 public school students in the United States was a victim of a physical assault, sexual assault, rape, attempted rape, robbery, or threatened with physical assault at school during the 2015–16 school year.

When they have the power to do so, parents choose a child’s school on the basis of such varied criteria as safety, discipline, moral values, curriculum, and the availability of extracurricular opportunities.

In the land of the free, surely choice eventually will triumph over the dreary imposed sameness of a Common Core.

Kiarre Harris withdrew her children from the Buffalo Public School District in December 2016. Less than a month later, Child Protective Services (CPS) showed up at her door with police…

Betsy DeVos survived a Senate confirmation process made bitter because of the opposition of the teachers unions, which fear that she can parlay her advocacy of school choice into much bigger gains for choice in her powerful new position.

The morning after the Senate Committee held a confirmation hearing for Betsy DeVos, a more important development on the choice front came from down Florida way.

For the Feds in the U.S. Education Department, ‘flexibility’ means there’s nothing left to lose.

The Heartland Institute hosted a “Stop Fed Ed” event at the Andrew Breitbart Freedom Center on Wednesday, October 12. The event featured Cora Weber, who discussed her role in the grassroots effort to stop Common Core and (eventually) eliminate the federal Department of Education.

Sponsors of this fall’s presidential debates ought to devote one debate entirely to education, with Common Core being the primary topic.
Trump should be pinned down on how he believes a president could quickly end a program that is not a freestanding federal enactment. Clinton should be made to walk Americans through her game plan for ensuring Common Core’s permanence using a similar strategy as the one utilized by the Bill Clinton administration through the School-to-Work Act of 1994. And by all means, the Libertarian Party candidate, who will be selected Memorial Day weekend, should be included as well and asked to explain how he or she plans to extract the federal government from education entirely, root and branch.

Because Arne Duncan, the former secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, often engages his mouth before his brain, the case for abolishing the department may have just become stronger than ever.

Proponents of the “Every Student Succeed Act” (ESSA) — a bi-partisan, progressive, 1061-page “No Child Left Behind” reauthorization education bill passed by Republican majorities in both houses and signed by President Obama on December 10, 2015 – have argued that the bill is worthy of conservative support, claiming it stops Common Core, reins in Obama’s Department of Education, and consolidates a number of federal education programs.