robert holland

Lately, education scholars at Washington, D.C.-based, nominally conservative think tanks have spun themselves into a tizzy about the education reform movement’s splintering into quarreling factions.

More than a few parents active in the fight to end Common Core’s suffocating grip on elementary and secondary education are targeting privatization as their enemy. They object to corporate groups seeking to redefine education as workforce preparation and to vendors hawking instructional materials for a curriculum most parents and many teachers do not favor.

So where does Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton stand on Common Core? The answer is she’s squarely on the side of national standards and assessments, because she played a key role, along with other insiders, in getting this statist scheme rolling a quarter-century ago.

Would it be constitutional for a public school board to offer grants and scholarships to families wishing to choose private schooling, yet exclude those benefits for families who prefer for their children’s private school to be a religiously affiliated one?

Uncle Sam is becoming “Uncle Shrink” to millions of schoolchildren, including many preschoolers, who are now subject to various psychology-focused educational components that have been implanted in federal education legislation over the past decade.

National Common Core-aligned standardized tests for elementary and secondary schools are in the midst of a death spiral, despite the $360 million the Obama administration spent on the creation of the two consortia, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced, five years ago.

School choice has been trending for a good many Januarys now, and that’s not just because of the successful promotion efforts of National School Choice Week (NSCW), held annually during the final week of January. After launching five years ago with just a few hundred public events, NSCW will sponsor 16,140 rallies, forums and the like in all 50 states this Jan. 24-30.

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.