Parents In Charge News

Money for Nothin’?

When it comes to buying or leasing a car, we have a lot of choices, and competition discourages any one manufacturer from charging inflated prices. The profit motive ensures that automakers are always looking for ways to make their vehicles more attractive, from side-curtain airbags to 150-channel satellite radios.

Why do we expect so much less from our schools? MORE

School Choice Promotes Educational Excellence

Educators are fond of saying that students have individual backgrounds and interests and learning styles and should be treated as individuals. They’re right, of course. But most educators fail to take the next logical step: choice as a better way than central planning to accommodate these differences. MORE

Parents are answer to education

States encourage minimal parental involvement. Parents have little or no voice as to where their children will go to school or what they will be taught. MORE

VISION schools get high marks

“Delta County School District leaders deserve credit for their flexibility and willingness to change with the demands of families in their community, particularly because the district voluntarily divested itself of some power by requesting waivers from state law for the VISION schools and programs to operate autonomously,” wrote Marya DeGrow, a research associate at Independence Institute. MORE

Toyota to build 100,000 vehicles per year in Woodstock, Ont., starting 2008

He said Nissan and Honda have encountered difficulties getting new plants up to full production in recent years in Mississippi and Alabama due to an untrained - and often illiterate - workforce. In Alabama, trainers had to use "pictorials" to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech plant equipment.

"The educational level and the skill level of the people down there is so much lower than it is in Ontario," Fedchun said.  MORE

School-choice system would suit most

In a market system, customers can choose from a wide variety of options. In a political system like the school system, however, one group "wins" and the losers are stuck with products or services they don't like. MORE

The Rest of the "Used Bus" Story

It seems that the state education department might not be telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the amount of money it has on hand to spend on buses. One has to wonder what it did with the money instead. Surely, it didn't take money that could have purchased as many at 1,600 new buses and spend it to maintain old ones. MORE

Ohio to launch largest school voucher program

Ohio is more than tripling the size of its school voucher program, making it the nation's largest since the practice of using public money for private school tuition was found constitutional three years ago. MORE

School vouchers (FL)

Public education is not "free" (as Wells notes). Florida's taxpayers shelled out about $6,516 per pupil in 2003-04, according to the National Education Association.

Second, vouchers are not a dollar-for-dollar proposition.

Opportunity Scholarships to private campuses are pegged at $4,300 $2,216 less than the public schools would have received for that now-departed pupil. Thus, the state comes out ahead on the deal. MORE

Program aims to turn kids' talk into debate

Class clowns. Schoolyard bullies. The kids who know how to hijack a lesson and leave a substitute in tears.

They will form the core of Miami-Dade's new public high school debate league. MORE