More bad news on Illinois school test scores (Prairie State Exams), and we lag the country (NAEP Exams). Tribune:
Four years ago, when all states began taking the exam, Illinois posted pass rates higher than the nation in every category.
This year, Illinois pupils are either equal to or behind their national counterparts on every exam, the data shows.
Read More...His forthright defense of freedom emboldens us all.
When Alan Keyes was running against Barack Obama for US Senate, a friend of mine from Indianapolis called me to ask if I was supporting Keyes. “No”, I replied, “He is too far out there”. “Too far out there?” my friend said “Barack Obama represents the worst school districts in the United States and campaigns against education reform, all the while sending his own kids to private school, are you sure it is Keyes who is ‘out there’”. It was a good point. Sometime the more radical idea is full of common sense, yet political inertia has convinced us such issues as taxation, education, and foreign policy are best served by the status quo, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
In many cases, Ron Paul comes across as having a much clearer vision of the United States than any of his post-modernist ... Read More...
CHICAGO BRIEFING
September 2007
Cook County’s struggling health-care system; death of a lobbyist; hybrid cars for Chicago, and more…
Read More...Defending a proposed Aurora woman’s health center, pro-choice clerics recently took the high road. To deny access to abortion, they said in a Loop church, is to deny “moral standing” to people who want one, which is another way of saying we’re right and you’re wrong. Let’s not play that right-and-wrong game, if you don’t mind. Let’s get analytically philosophical, like the British did when I was getting scholastically philosophical in the 1950s.
First, health center. Chi Trib’s Eric Zorn tells us this center provides things besides abortion. Yes, but dear heart, where would Planned Non-parenthood be today if it did not provide abortion? They would be pushing pills that everybody has who wants them, victim of their own success. Abortion saved their goose.
Zorn, by the way, says if they lied to get the Aurora permit, that’s OK. Creative subterfuge, he called it, to head off ... Read More...
