Kristin Maguire of Clemson was elected today to be the leader of the state Board of Education in 2009.

Maguire, who teaches her four daughters at home, was nominated from the floor during the panel’s regularly scheduled monthly meeting. The 17-member school board historically votes each December to pick a “chair-elect” a year in advance of when the term is scheduled to begin.

No other state school board in the nation is headed by a person who is a home-school educator, according to National Association of State Boards of Education.

The State

I didn’t think this woman had a prayer of being elected Chairman of the State Board of Education because she has received a lot of criticism about home schooling her four kids.  This is awesome.  Now we have someone who is outside of the bureaucracy and the status quo of the failed public education system we have in this country to bring new and fresh ideas.  South Carolina, leading the way.

South Carolina, where the high school dropout rate is regularly among the highest in the nation, shouldn’t look to Washington to solve its problem, Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson said Tuesday.

Rather, people should look in the opposite direction.

“The federal government does not have a solution to children dropping out of school, to local schools choosing not to educate their children,” Thompson said in a crowded gun shop in Greer.

“If that’s the case, parents have got to do it. It’s a hard lesson. I know every political candidate is supposed to come up with a 10-point program to solve all problems, but I’m telling you the truth. Those in this country who need help should get help. We have a social safety net. We have a lot of organizations out there that are not government organizations, that are charitable organizations, that are nonprofit organizations. Americans help each other. But at the end of the day, you cannot get around parental responsibility, you cannot get around the responsibility of the teenager, you cannot get around the responsibility of the local school board.”

Spartanburg Herald-Journal

I don’t have much to add to this.  He is exactly correct and I have said for a long time that the number one problem with education in the U.S. is the lack of parental involvement.  It seems so many parents today don’t want to be bothered with their kids’ upbringing.  They don’t take the time to go to school board meetings or get involved with their classwork.  They don’t bother to find out who their friends are and what influence they have over them.  They seem to view the schools  as a day care center that they can drop their kids off at when they go to work.

Next Tuesday, Utah voters go to the polls to decide if their state will become the first in the nation to offer school vouchers statewide. Referendum 1 would make all public-school kids eligible for vouchers worth from $500 to $3,000 a year, depending on family income. Parents could then use the vouchers to send their children to private schools.

What a great idea. Finally, parents will have choices that wealthy parents have always had. The resulting competition would create better private schools and even improve the government schools.

But wait. Arrayed against the vouchers are the usual opponents. They call themselves Utahns for Public Schools. They include, predictably, the Utah Education Association (the teachers union), Utah School Boards Association, Utah School Employees Union, Utah School Superintendents Association, the elementary and secondary school principals associations, and the PTA. No to vouchers! they protest. Trust us. We know what’s best for your kids.

Real Clear Politics

This needs to be closely watched.  The public school system in this country absolutely sucks.  Kids aren’t being taught anything anymore and frankly I don’t think America is a country that has a culture valuing education as much as others.  Inserting competition into the public school system is direly needed.

I saw Stossel on Fox News one evening about a year or so ago talking about the way Belgium funds their education system.  Rather than the local schools deciding how much money they need and passing levies or school boards raising taxes like we do here in the U.S, the money is instead attached to the student.  The country decides how many Federal dollars will be allocated to each student each year and that money goes to the which ever school the child enrolls in.  This breeds competition among the schools as they all want the funding so they do what they can do be better educators than the others.  Sounds like common sense to me, which is why it’s unlikely we’ll ever see it here in the near future.

The problem in this nation is that the public is so apathetic at election time.  They vote in school board members based on their political party rather than whether or not they are even qualified to sit on a school board.  Another issue are the politicians.  The unions are steadfastly against any plan that would require schools to actually have to work for something other than the status quo and since the NEA is a major donor to many politicians they do whatever the NEA wants.  The NEA doesn’t care one bit about your child’s education.  Their only concern is to keep the money flowing in to the union.

U.S. Rep. Walter B. Jones has introduced a proposal to withhold federal education funds from schools that prohibit the display or wearing of American flags, his office announced today.

Jones, a Farmville Republican, introduced the bill this week after a tiff over a Sampson County high school policy earlier this month.

Raleigh News & Observer

What this is stemming from is an incident on this past September 11th in which a student in North Carolina was ordered to remove a t-shirt that had an American flag on it based on a policy the Sampson County School System has that apparently bans the clothing with flags of any nation. It’s an idiotic policy and the superintendent of the school system had an even more idiotic answer in that the educators shouldn’t be forced to pick which flags are permissible. I think that answer is a pretty obvious one and it’s frightening that this person is an “educator.”

Their stupidity aside, is this really an issue that the Federal Government should be involved in? Granted, if the school is receiving Federal funds and Congress doesn’t like the way they are running their schools I suppose they have the right to withhold that funding, which is what Jones’ bill would do, but is he overreacting here?

Victory on the education front.

In a sweeping decision likely to affect school integration efforts nationwide, the Supreme Court on Thursday threw out programs from Louisville and Seattle that used students’ race as a factor in school placement to build diversity across a district.

Chief Justice John Roberts announced the decision decrying racial considerations in public schools and was joined by his four fellow conservatives. The ruling prompted liberal justices to declare they feared for the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 landmark that set the nation on the path of desegregation.

Maybe now school districts in the South can stop the asinine busing plans that send students to schools far away from their homes.