Featured Education News November 2016

Issues welcomes to its pages Finn Laursen, Executive Director of Christian Educators Association International and author of Standing on the Word: Christian Educators in Public Schools (Advantage Inspirational, 2015). This article is a conversation with Mr. Laursen and has been co-edited with him. Issues is grateful for the dialogue, examining with him different views about the opportunities and challenges today for Christians and public education. We pray God’s continued blessings for his work on behalf of Christ’s kingdom.

Gloucester County, Virginia is probably best known as the home of Pocahontas, who saved the life of Captain John Smith and later married John Rolfe, bringing about a peace in the war between the Jamestown colonists and the surrounding Native American tribes.

Once again, Gloucester has become the site of a (temporary) peace—this time in a war that the U.S. government has been waging against school districts and students over access to locker rooms and restrooms by members of the opposite sex.

Though agency fees are a common practice in the K-12 space, in Friedrichs, a handful of California educators argued that collective bargaining is essentially a political act so forcing them to subsidize that act violated their First Amendment free speech protections. Republicans—who have long been skeptical of unions—tend to agree.

As presented on the campaign trail and detailed on the Trump-Pence website, President–elect Donald Trump wants to implement school choice programs in all 50 states that will allow students and their parents to pick the school that works best for them, and the money to pay for it will follow the student, not the school bureaucracy.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump declared that in order to cut federal spending he wants to eliminate the Department of Education on “Fox News Sunday.”

Los Angeles teachers union turns down millions of dollars from the philanthropist earmarked for schools that work.