Education Policy & School Reform News

In 2008, when coach Joseph Kennedy knelt in silent prayer at the 50-yard line of the Bremerton High School football field after a game, he likely never anticipated his subsequent firing would take him all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.  And it’s been a long journey, to say the least.  First Liberty Institute,…

Any working mom can attest that work never quite turns off.   We don’t necessarily get to sleep in on the weekends or kick back and sip wine when we get home from our jobs.   Most likely, we’re cooking dinner, giving baths, refereeing fights, negotiating on bedtime or television, reading stories, and trying to accomplish the…

Being a wife and mother while working full time is a lot. Add homeschooling to the mix? Now you have entered superhero status in our book.  Marguerite Bowling, a senior communications manager at The Heritage Foundation, is actually no superhero, but she and her husband are committed to their children’s education and upbringing. When Bowling…

“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Those were the famous words of Terry McAuliffe’s failed gubernatorial campaign in Virginia last fall. The past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed just how little control parents have over their children’s public school education. And their powerlessness did not end when…

As in so many other places around the country, the public education system in Baltimore is failing the city’s children. Public schools have been failing American students for decades, but the issue is pronounced in Maryland’s biggest city.  Stories abound of Baltimore’s momentous failures to teach its kids. One report details how a student graduated…

Parents have spent the last two years dealing with lawmakers’ and school officials’ indecisions about school reopenings, a nightmare for many. Public officials have constantly alternated between remote and in-person learning, masking and unmasking, social distancing and not. Now, many families are rejoicing as they see states lift their remaining COVID-19 restrictions. Getting their children caught…

Accusations of left-wing free speech authoritarianism—whether through corporate restrictions, the state targeting “misinformation,” the shouting down of dissent in universities, or the canceling of dissenting voices—are well-documented. Attempting to even the ledger, liberals have begun alleging that conservatives are engaging in “book bans” in public school districts. The newest outrage on this front comes from…

Last month’s attempted assassination of a Jewish politician in Louisville, Kentucky, by a Black Lives Matter activist has gone largely unreported by the press. The incident and the general reaction to it speaks volumes about the relationship between the U.S. and Israel. The shooter, Quintez Brown, was open about his views. In an op-ed, he…

Abigail Martinez called the pain of losing her daughter a pain with no name. “Even when you breathe, it hurts,” she said during an event on radical gender ideology in schools. Her daughter, Yaeli, began struggling with depression in the seventh and eighth grades after classmates criticized her appearance. Abigail described her daughter as a…

In this age of cancel culture, nothing is off limits for the woke left. Christians and conservatives increasingly find themselves on the defensive. Deplatforming and censorship are the norm on social media. In fact, it happened to The Daily Signal just last week for allegedly violating YouTube’s COVID-19 “misinformation” policy. And while having a video…

Any parent with school-age kids knows they’re probably not getting the civics education they need. Teachers lack proper training or are increasingly pressured to embrace “action civics.” A new study from the Pioneer Institute and the National Association of Scholars, provided exclusively to The Daily Signal, offers a detailed ranking of 15 civics education programs offered for…

Editor's note: The Daily Signal's audience reacted passionately to a mother's commentary about how a Catholic high school encouraged her daughter's attraction to transgenderism rather than helped the girl's parents respond with facts and faith. Below is a generous sampling of opinion from the mailbag at [email protected].—Ken McIntyre Dear Daily Signal: Charlie Jacobs' commentary article…

As a former school board member and currently a public school teacher of 30 years, I want to share some information with parents that school districts won’t tell them. Under a program called Multi-Tiered Systems of Support, many outside agencies have access to students without parental knowledge or consent. Many of those agencies provide mental…

Editor’s note: Jan. 23-29 is National School Choice Week. This is the last of a five-part series of commentaries exploring the successes and challenges of educational choice and the people fighting to make it available to all American schoolchildren.  As we conclude National School Choice Week 2022, people around Washington state are about to hear…