“What the CTU Strike Teaches Us about the Fight for a Better World” was a featured theme of last month’s Midwest Marxist Conference, held at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. (Document link was available here, but apparently the Chicago Socialists site is down. As of this posting, the document can be accessed here.)...
Read More »

The Independent Institute is delighted to announce the publication of the 25th Anniversary Edition of Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, by Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs. First published in 1987, this classic work introduced to the reading public the notion that national crises—the Great Depression, the two...
Read More »

A dozen ballot initiatives in nine states focused on K-12 education issues. Also making news was the surprise defeat of Indiana incumbent and reformer State Superintendent Tony Bennett by Glenda Ritz, a former teacher backed by the union. Charter schools won big in Georgia and Washington. Georgia voters passed an amendment allowing a statewide...
Read More »

When the September unemployment figures were announced a month before the presidential election as having miraculously declined to below 8% for the first time since the current administration started, more than a few speculated that there may have been some book-cooking in the back room. In response, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, said she was...
Read More »

Won’t Back Down, a film about the struggles of a single mom and a dedicated teacher to take over their failing Pittsburgh school using a parent trigger law, was released last month (see here and here for more)—on the same day the New York City teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, announced that...
Read More »

Only in the bizarro world of education politics would a teachers union strike that shut down schools for a week, affecting 350,000 students, be hailed as “great for students” and an exemplar of “union and management coming together to create great public schools, to make sure every single school is a school of choice.”...
Read More »

As a young woman, I took over a business that was bankrupt: its liabilities exceeded its assets by a considerable amount, and the wolf was well and truly at the door. Lots of people thought I was foolish not to “erase” its debts through filing bankruptcy and be given a “clean slate” by the...
Read More »

Most Americans are celebrating Labor Day with barbecues, picnics, and parades—but not the Chicago Teachers Union. They’re busy planning the city’s first teachers’ strike in 25 years, which incidentally coincides with the September 10 start of most Chicago Public Schools. Observers had hoped a strike could be averted when Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and...
Read More »

There have been a number of claims that lack of insurance is life threatening. The most recent and well known is an Institute of Medicine (IOM) study claiming that 18,000 people die every year because they do not have health insurance.[1] Using a similar methodology, a study for the Physicians for a National Health...
Read More »

The U.S. Department of Education will soon be handing out federal paychecks to teachers across the country. On July 18 President Obama unveiled his $1 billion Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Master Teacher Corps. According to the White House: The STEM Master Teacher Corps will begin with 50 exceptional STEM teachers established in...
Read More »