On Tuesday morning, President Barack Obama plans to give a nationally televised speech directed to school children. He wants to talk about the importance of working hard and staying in school. It’s a kind of presidential pep talk for kids.
Bitter partisans have…
Christian Gooden/Post-Dispatch
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon missed the boat when he decided against joining — even for the time being — 46 other states that have agreed to work together to develop common standards for language arts and mathematics in grades kindergarten…
Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Beverly Hall speaking at Webster Univ. on Mar. 5 (Eddie Roth/Post-Dispatch)
Three in four students enrolled in the school district are from low-income households and are eligible for free or reduced-price meals.
The Board of Education just appointed its…
Lucky Jay Nixon
It’s far too early to say whether Jay Nixon will be a good governor, but Missouri’s new chief executive has one thing going for him: Timing.
Like his two immediate predecessors, Democrat Bob Holden and Republican Matt Blunt, Mr.…
Post-Dispatch file photo.
The United States will spend $98 billion this year on services for military veterans.
Yet tens of thousands of veterans are on waiting lists for urgently needed counseling and psychiatric care. A backlog of more than 400,000 disability claims…
AP Photo by Seth Perlman, February 2003.
I MET ROD BLAGOJEVICH just once. It was March 9, 2007. Twenty-one months later, I don’t know what to think about what I saw and experienced that day.
The Democratic governor of Illinois and several senior…
Photo: EPA
I don’t care what the advance polls say: Right now, neither I nor anyone else knows who our next president will be. Nor can anyone say for certain why those who vote for Barack Obama or John McCain will do…
After two weeks’ vacation and more than 1,700 Midwestern highway miles, I came home looking for some wisdom. I found it on the editorial page of Sunday’s Post-Dispatch — in a letter to the editor by Dorothy Anderson of Spanish Lake:
“I have…
In too many instances, the only time school districts examine their safety policies is after tragedy strikes— say, in the wake of a Columbine massacre. Occasionally, the discovery of a weapon in a locker might provoke a sudden reassessment.
At that…
Law professor and novelist Stephen Carter wrote a terrific column on the decades long political tug of war over so-called affirmative action.
Turns out the struggle is make believe, a palliative that provides an excuse for not dealing with what’s really at issue. The…
Sunday’s Commentary page is devoted entirely to the issue of charter schools, particularly whether they have the potential to improve the education of children in the St. Louis Public Schools district. The material grew out of a recent meeting of the…
We Americans love freedom. And education. When it comes to education, we especially love “academic freedom.” Who could be opposed to that?
That helps explain why “academic freedom” has become the latest fig leaf for anti-evolutionists. The latest example is a…
