By Douglas Holtz-Eakin
The young drop coverage to avoid higher premiums
The nation's high-school graduation rate is the highest since 1976, but more than one-fifth of students are still failing to get their diploma in four years, the Education Department said in a study released Tuesday.
The Department of Education has dispatched "mystery shoppers" posing as prospective students to various colleges and universities across the country — an anti-fraud initiative that came months after another agency dumped a similar plan amid criticism that it amounted to spying.
A number of states struggling with vast racial achievement gaps in schools may have found a way around the problem: Lump blacks and Hispanics with handicapped and poor children.
More than four years after the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, the horrors of that day on the Virginia Tech campus are about to be relived in court.
Republican presidential candidates are increasingly using the federal Department of Education as a punching bag, citing it as yet another example of big government's heavy hand in local affairs.
By 2015, the nation's schools will abandon traditional textbooks in favor of digital learning. Over the next four years, the nation's government will spend more than $2 billion to provide every student with a tablet and, in the process, become the first country in the world to go paperless in its schools.
The U.S. Department of Education was created with the primary stated goal of increasing students' test scores, but test scores for 17-year-old American students have remained essentially flat since 1970. The department's budget has grown to a whopping $107 billion this year. Per pupil, taxpayer-financed education spending (adjusted for inflation) has risen by more than 200 percent since 1970 (and 150-plus percent since 1980). Clearly and unambiguously, the department deserves a grade of F.
Even as Congress and the Obama administration have attempted to make higher education more affordable for veterans through the expanded GI Bill, others are proposing arbitrary rules that will make it a lot harder for our warriors to gain their educational goals.
