Education

Marguerite Anna McKenna "Peg" Luksik is well known to her neighbors in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where she's actively involved in community service work, including Mom's House, a comprehensive service network she founded for single parents and their

Now in the middle of his third term of office, John Norquist was elected the 37th Mayor of Milwaukee in 1988 after serving in Democratic leadership positions in both the state assembly and senate.

Nina Shokraii, The Heritage Foundation's leading education policy analyst, is School Reform News' newest contributing editor.

Year after year, the tune is the same: "We need more money to pay our teachers what they are worth" or "we need more money to build a new school or addition.

Dr. Paul E. Peterson's recent studies of voucher programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland have propelled him to the forefront of the educational choice debate.

In his 1987 book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, educator E.D. Hirsch demonstrated that literacy has two key components: the ability to read, and an assumed base of shared factual knowledge conveyed by the words being read.

In 1988, then-Secretary of Education William Bennett came to Chicago and declared its schools to be "the worst in the nation." Events since then suggest that the trend has been to even lower depths.

School Reform News contributing editor David Kirkpatrick is uniquely qualified to speak as an advocate of school choice.

Another year has passed without reform of the state's system of financing schools. Republicans once again stopped a "tax swap" plan to lower property taxes by raising the state income tax, this time despite sponsorship of the plan by Governor Edgar.

Appointed by Mayor Richard M. Daley, Paul C. Vallas took over as Chief Executive Officer of the Chicago Public Schools on July 1, 1995. Within three weeks, Vallas had hammered out a new four-year teachers' contract.

Dr. Anne C. Fox was elected the state of Idaho's Superintendent of Public Instruction in 1994.

Too bad Bernie wasn't here to see it. Last week, a plan to increase Illinois' income tax died in the Revenue Committee of the Senate.

The country's growing private school voucher movement owes its birth and a large part of its success to J. Patrick Rooney, chairman emeritus of Golden Rule Insurance Company.

African-American children in public schools are failing in record numbers, crippling their futures and limiting their careers. For some African-American parents, doing nothing about the problem was not an option.

Those familiar with the school reform movement, and with this newspaper, are keenly aware of the key role--sometimes positive, more recently quite negative--that teacher unions have played in school reform debates nationwide.

The Illinois General Assembly is debating whether and how to change the way the state finances its public schools.

Twenty-five years ago, Marva Collins left a public school teaching position to open her own school, in her own home.

Michael Joyce is president of the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The Foundation is devoted to strengthening American democratic capitalism and the institutions, principles, and values which sustain and nurture it.

Thank the Lord for the Illinois parents who send their children to parochial or private schools. By keeping their students out of tax-supported government schools, those parents save Illinois taxpayers over $2 billion a year.

More than fifty books, three hundred articles, and dozens of awards and prizes for his scholarship have made Dr. Herbert J. Walberg an internationally recognized expert in the field of education. He is one of three U.S.

In the 35 years since Wisconsin became the first state to adopt public-sector bargaining, public employee union membership has increased dramatically.

When I debated Keith Geiger, president of the National Education Association, a couple of years ago on the Larry King radio show, he used a verb that I thought epitomized the battle over school choice: escape.

The United States now spends more per student on public elementary and secondary education than any other advanced country belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Why does the world's most productive country have the world's least productive school system? The U.S.