Olympic excitement has taken hold. All eyes are on China to watch the best swimmers, runners, cyclists, gymnasts, boxers, weightlifters, shooters, and ballplayers compete at the highest level and represent their countries under the brightest lights on the international stage.

But there’s another Olympics taking place, as well. The Thomas Fordham Foundation has created the Education Olympics website, as a way to measure America’s education performance versus other nations, according to a series of different measures. After two events, Finland and Norway have taken home the gold, while the United States has been shut out of the medal count so far.

You can stay tuned with video clips that provide “coverage” of the “events”. Here’s hoping - and all but expecting - that the United States will perform better in the real Summer Olympics in Beijing than in the Education Olympics.

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The Education Policy Center people said they’re a little busy today. So instead of having them write anything, I asked them to show you this video, which makes a very compelling argument for school choice:

This clip from the 1980s British sitcom Yes Prime Minister should be required viewing for education policy makers. It may come from overseas, and it may be 20 years old, but the brilliant common sense that flows through the satire in this piece feels like a breath of fresh air for Colorado. Of course - for the choices already available to them, Colorado families have a great resource in the School Choice for Kids website.

(H/T Jay Greene, via What’s Wrong With the World?)

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My parents and my friends at the Education Policy Center say that school is a place for learning what I need to be successful some day, and that includes hearing both sides of an argument. It’s kind of scary then to see that some schools are busy indoctrinating kids.

As the Heartland Institute points out, the British High Court ruled that due to at least 11 scientific errors contained in Al Gore’s feature-length movie An Inconvenient Truth, schools who show the movie to students in class must balance the presentation with contradictory evidence.

In Colorado, our Governor Bill Ritter has made it clear he wants all K-12 students “to understand the science of climate change.” Yet as more students are exposed to this topic, it is important they receive a balanced presentation and not an uncritical indoctrination from Al Gore’s movie.

The British approach is to make a universal mandate for all their classrooms. But in Colorado, we value local control. One way then to ensure your public school student is not being indoctrinated in climate change hysteria or anything else is to petition the local school board or your school principal. Of course, school leaders are more likely to listen to the concerns of students and parents where they have the power of choice and can use their feet to find someplace that doesn’t indoctrinate.

An important tool helping parents to become good education consumers is our School Choice for Kids website - search to find the right school near you! As for me, I’ve still got a lot of time before school begins again. I’m going to go enjoy it.

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This post is a little different than many of the usual ones here, but sometimes it’s good to expand our horizons. My parents say that’s an important part of a good education.

Well, anyway, a couple months ago, the Education Policy Center (the whole Independence Institute really) made a new friend in Ethiopian journalist Habtamu Dugo, who fled his homeland to avoid persecution from the government. Here’s a 5-minute video in which Habtamu tells his own story:

Now living in the United States, Habtamu recently wrote about the problems with his nation’s education system, particularly how the government’s repressive segregationist policy is so harmful to the ethnic groups not represented by those in power. Continue Reading »

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