“Education” on The Daily Caller

A year ago this week, more than a dozen students sat in Speaker John Boehner’s viewing box to watch President Obama’s third State of the Union address. (more)

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s State of the State address was a breath of fresh air for New Jersey residents, who have grown tired of hearing that the only acceptable reform in public education is to further balloon schools’ administrative staffs. Why else would the U.S. Census Bureau report that Camden, Jersey City, Newark and Trenton all spend over $20,000 per student per year on public education? That’s over $400,000 of spending for every classroom of 20 kids, folks. Take out the teacher’s salary and benefits, as well as a healthy overhead percentage for management to run the school, and you’ve still got to wonder where another couple hundred grand is going. Then multiply that pecuniary disappearing act by every single classroom in school after school, and it gives you a sense of the situation. When I tell people the town of Newark, New Jersey alone had a $940 million budget last year, many think it’s a joke. In fact, the joke’s on us. (more)

Animal House — also known as Dartmouth College — is making national news again, this time for a controversial op-ed written by a current student, senior Andrew Lohse, on the experience of being hazed in his fraternity. The op-ed brings up some important questions about being a young person today. (more)

During tonight’s State of the Union address, President Obama will once again talk about his plans for higher education. And once again, those plans won’t be appropriately scrutinized. (more)

On Friday the Supreme Court ruled that Indiana’s school voucher program, which is the largest school voucher program in the country, is constitutional. America’s presidential candidates should waste no time realizing the significance of this, not only as an educational issue, but also as an economic one. (more)

Moments ago at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Apple’s VP of marketing Phil Schiller announced what has been rumored for weeks — Apple is setting its sights on the textbook industry. (more)

The White House has produced a new campaign-style video highlighting Vice President Joe Biden’s low-key education policy pitches in three swing states. (more)

As school choice becomes more integrated into the fabric of American public education, teachers’ unions have been using a new tactic to fight these reforms: the lawsuit. And it’s making for strange bedfellows. (more)

NEW YORK (AP) — Apple is scheduling a media event in New York next week, but the company isn’t saying much about the topic it plans to discuss. (more)

For a number of years now, I’ve been closely tracking the way that Title IX has been enforced in American athletics. While most people still associate Title IX and its rigid gender quotas with colleges and universities, enforcement of the law has now reached elementary and secondary education — and many of the effects of the law are quite shocking to the uninitiated. (more)

With the New Year upon us, pundits are handing out their “best and worst” awards and gossip magazines their “top whatever” lists. Well, on my list, you won’t find Occupy Wall Street or No Child Left Behind drama, but something much more significant to taxpayers, parents, and citizens: the top five underreported education stories of 2011. (more)

As children, we often spoke about what we wanted to be when we “grew up.” Many of us identified with those professionals we viewed as heroic — policemen, firemen, or fighter pilots. Other children were drawn to the glamour that comes with being an actor, a sports star, or even a president. (more)

Whenever the president or members of Congress do things that people don’t like, they’re accused of acting like children. As a former child, I am offended by this statement. In kindergarten, if my teacher had ever accused our class of acting like a bunch of members of Congress, we would have burst out in tears. (more)

It was nearing lunchtime on a recent Thursday, and ninth-grader Noah Schnacky of Windermere, Fla., really did not want to go to algebra. So he didn’t. (more)

Coloradans have said no to higher education taxes, voting down Proposition 103 by a two-to-one margin. There was good reason for that decision. Total per-pupil spending in Colorado has more than doubled since 1970, even after accounting for inflation. The same is true at the national level. Over that same period, student achievement at the end of high school has stagnated in math and reading and declined in science. So raising taxes has a long record of educational failure. Surprisingly enough, lowering them actually works. (more)

By the end of the day today, 16 more young Americans will be murdered. (more)

In the 1960s, the late New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (D) used conservative, market-based, competitive forces to create new jobs in the inner-city wasteland of the minority neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. A cynical New York City reporter (a redundant expression) was heard to mutter, as he heard Kennedy’s pro-market, pro-business ideas to help the poor, “You sound like Barry Goldwater.” Legend has it that Kennedy responded: “Maybe, but I know that I mean it.” (more)

Nearly a year ago, I noted how 2010 had been “a very bad year” for defenders of the education status quo, or as I may have called them, “antediluvian, retrograde, establishment-defending hacks.” So far, 2011 isn’t pretty either. (more)

“For over a hundred years,” F.A. Hayek wrote in 1961, “we have been exhorted to embrace socialism because it would give us more goods. Since it has so lamentably failed to achieve this … we are now urged to adopt it because more goods after all are not important.” (more)

Several members of Congress joined 80 pre-school students from the Sunshine Early Learning Center on Thursday to help as they read the book “Llama Llama Red Pajama.” (more)