Report Gives Florida Nation’s Best Overall Grade for Education Freedom

After a legislative session where Florida lawmakers passed universal school choice, the state was recognized as the nation’s best in a recent report for its policies on education. 

The nonprofit American Legislative Exchange Council, which previously published the Report Card on American Education over the past 25 years, has a new publication, The Index of State Education Freedom: A 50-State Guide to Parental Empowerment.

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Trump Unveils Plan to ‘Save’ Education from ‘Radical Left Maniacs’

Former President Donald Trump announced Thursday his plan to “save American education” from “the Radical Left maniacs” as part of his 2024 presidential campaign.

The plan, unveiled on Twitter, focuses on tackling cultural issues in education including critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology. Trump proposed cutting federal funding from schools that promote “[CRT], gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children,” the investigation of schools which engage in “race-based discrimination,” and keeping men out of women’s sports.

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Commentary: The Promise of Habit-Based Learning

Something has gone awry in American education. For example, over the past decades, the U.S. has dropped to the bottom of international rankings for developed countries in math. This decline has coincided with education reform, a shift that has emphasized understanding and downplayed practice. Could something that sounds so sensible have possibly been responsible for the drop?

The brain has two major learning systems. One is based on practice, and leads to fast, automatic behavior. This system is not accessible by conscious thought and is the source of intuition. The second system is based on deliberate thought—it is slow but flexible. You are consciously aware and can verbalize what you have learned. These two systems are roughly analogous to Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s “thinking, fast and slow.”

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Commentary: Failing Public Schools Motivate More Black Families to Home-School

As the United States observes Black History Month, African-American families are making history by leaving failing public schools and home-schooling their children in record numbers.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, parents, and especially black parents, found public schools incapable of handling the crisis. Even prior to the pandemic, public schools were failing to improve learning among African-American children.

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As More Schools Start 2022 with Remote Learning, Advocates Say 2021 Was ‘Historic Year’ for School Choice

As school districts across the U.S. start 2022 in remote-learning settings or are considering doing so because of a rise in COVID-19 cases, parents now have more options as 22 states expanded or created school choice initiatives in 2021.

That’s a silver lining, advocates say, as parents grow more frustrated by ever-changing mandates, failed virtual learning outcomes and conflicting views with school boards over a range of issues.

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Commentary: Campus Radicals Destroy What Made American Universities Wonderous Institutions

Students walking on college campus

There is no faster – or more amusing – way to make a campus radical lose his composure than to fuss about the importance of cultural literacy.

The term “cultural literacy,” made popular by the controversial scholar E.D. Hirsch, describes a person’s capacity to comprehend cultural references and use that knowledge in conversation with others.

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Commentary: US Schools Are Leaving Students Ill-Equipped to Compete with Artificial Intelligence

by Kerry McDonald   We have long known that the robots were coming, but now that they are here, the mismatch between our modern education system and the technology-fueled workplace is glaringly apparent. As robots expertly perform routine tasks and increasingly assume broader workforce responsibilities, we must ask ourselves an important question: What is our key human differentiator? The Power of Creativity According to Boston University professor Iain Cockburn, who just published a new paper on the impact of artificial intelligence, the human competitive advantage lies in optimizing “what we can do better than machines, which is imagination, creativity, judgment.” In the paper, Cockburn and his colleagues suggest that it’s possible the robots will catch up to us soon in these realms, but they are not there yet. They write: Instead, recent advances in both robotics and in deep learning are by and large innovations that require a significant level of human planning and that apply to a relatively narrow domain of problem-solving (e.g., face recognition, playing Go, picking up a particular object, etc.). While it is of course possible that further breakthroughs will lead to a technology that can meaningfully mimic the nature of human subjective intelligence and emotion,…

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