NHEG EDGuide November-December 2023

ISSUE 11-12 

Warmest 

thoughts and 

best wishes for a 

Merry Christmas and 

a Happy New Year. 

—Maya Angelou 

2023 

NOVEMBER-DECEMBER

NHEG EDGUIDE 

EDITOR IN CHIEF 

EDITORIAL TEAM 

PRODUCTION MANAGER 

PROOFREADERS/EDITORS 

Pamela Clark 

NewHeightsEducation@yahoo.com 

Marina Klimi 

MarinaKlimi@NewHeightsEducation.org 

Laura Casanova 


Contents 

2 

EDITORIAL TEAM 

4 

THOUGHT OF THE MONTH 

10-19 

NHEG MEDIA PACK 

26-27 

MISSING CHILDREN 

48-53 

NHEG INTERNET RADIO 

PROGRAM 

70-103 

FEE ARTICLES 

104 

HSLDA ARTICLES 

110-115 

RECIPES 

116-117 

NHEG PARTNERS & 

AFFILIATES 

PHOTOGRAPHERS IN 

THIS ISSUE 

PAMELA CLARK 

56-57 

NHEG BOOK 

PROMOTIONS 

62-65 

NHEG BIRTHDAYS AND 

ANNIVERSARIES 

66-67 

EARN BOX TOPS 

68-101 

FEE ARTICLES 

68-69 

PRESS RELEASE

November-December 2023 

NHEG EDGUIDE November-December 2023 

Thought for the Month 

Welcome to the official 

New Heights Educational Group store. 

As I go through the current round 

of medical complications. I am more 

thankful for my husband and family 

that support me. Furthermore, I’m 

thankful to NHEG volunteers for 

helping to keep 

the organization running. 

Thank you all. 

https://NHEG.memberhub.com/store 

NHEG Store | New Heights Educational Group, Inc. 

Pamela Clark 

Founder/ Executive Director of 

The New Heights Educational 

Group, Inc. 

Resource and Literacy Center 

NewHeightsEducation@yahoo.com 

http://www.NewHeightsEducation.org 

Learning Annex 

https://School.NewHeightsEducation.org/ 

A Public Charity 501(c)(3) 

Nonprofit Organization 

New Heights Educational Group 

Inc. 

14735 Power Dam Road, Defiance, Ohio 

43512 

+1.419.786.0247 

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1/2/23 

NHEG is going through some big changes this year and a lot of things will start to look different in 

the coming months. To move forward with NHEG’s goals and dreams, we need funding for an annual 

budget. Pamela Clark can no longer run NHEG without a paid staff. What does this mean for volunteers 

and families in need of services? 

The website will become free and searchable. NHEG will no longer take on new students for live 

lessons or tutoring. We will no longer answer phone calls for informational services, and families will 

need to use the search tool on our websites to find the answers they need. Most, if not all, of them will 

be on the site, and we will add any information that people might need. The website will stay intact and 

up to date as long as there is a volunteer to manage it and money to fund the hosting costs. Your 

donations are appreciated to help us keep it available. 

We hope the website will remain a valuable resource and blessing for those who need it and will 

honor the many hundreds of volunteers who have helped build the organization. We want to make sure 

that the information and work of the last 16 years don't go to waste. Your donations are appreciated to 

help us keep it available. We ask that, if possible, you donate at least $25 or more to help offset these 

costs. We will be required to pay $705 per year for these basic expenses. If we can’t raise these funds the 

site might go inactive by 2024. 

● 

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NHEG will no longer take on new students for live lessons or tutoring. 

All tutoring has come to an end, due to low funds and teacher/tutor shortages. 

NHEG’s pre-recorded courses will all be available for free, but families will need to contact us by 

enrolling or emailing us for access to specific classes. 

The website will become free and searchable, and it will stay intact and up to date as long as 

there is a volunteer to manage it and funds to cover the hosting fees. 

Our phone number will stay the same, but there may be longer response times. We ask that you 

search the site first before calling for information. 

We will no longer answer phone calls for informational services, and families will need to use the 

search tool on our websites to find the answers they need. Most, if not all, of them will be on the 

site, and we will add any information that people might need. 

The comic book issue currently being worked on, once published, will be our last (unless funding 

is acquired). All scripts that weren’t made into a comic book will be shared on our comic book 

page. 

The radio shows may or may not continue depending on circumstances out of our control. 

The Reading Program will stay active and pre-recorded as long as a volunteer is available to run 

the program. 

Any offerings from program partners will be shared with those who are signed up for our email 

list. 

The student leadership groups can still meet and plan for their future. 

There will be no further Recognition Days, but all volunteers will receive annual certificates of 

appreciation and a letter from NHEG if they do a good job volunteering. 

● 

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● 

● 

We need help with HR, as well as a cartoonist, professional fundraisers, publicists, grant writers, 

social media/marketing, graphic design, data compilation and organization/moving information 

to new systems, proofreading, and managing the radio show. 

A complete list of open positions can be viewed here. 

https://NewHeightsEducation.org/volunteer-with-NHEG/NHEG-volunteer-opportunities/ 

NHEG EDGuide will continue as long as Marina Klimi and Pamela Clark can devote time to it. 

We will no longer have a Research Department or review new products or programs. 

We are hoping that volunteers will stay on to organize and share NHEG information with families 

in need. NHEG’s pre-recorded courses will all be available for free, but families will need to contact us for 

access to specific classes. We ask that you don't share these classes; each person using them must 

request them by contacting he NewHeightsEducation@yahoo.com email address or by enrolling to 

receive a specific course. The reason for this is because we have paid for some curriculum from other 

companies for these classes, and we don't want to disrespect those companies in any way by openly 

offering their information for free. 

If you want to advocate for our organization and its dream of a fair and equal education for all 

who are willing to work for it, then I ask that you contact the following and tell them you want and 

expect their support for our services. 

Here is a script that you can use by phone or email, or to submit via online contact form: 

Hello, I’m contacting you as a [student, parent, volunteer, teacher/tutor] and I want to share my 

concern about the New Heights Educational Group. The organization is falling dormant because it isn’t 

receiving the support it needs to stay active. It would be a great loss to not only Defiance and the State 

of Ohio but also to the world to lose this organization and its services. It needs funding and media 

support, and we want you to make it happen. (Share what the organization has meant to you.) 

● Ohio Governor Mike DeWine: (614) 644-4357, https://governor.ohio.gov/contact 

● Representative Craig Reidel’s office: (614) 644-5091, 

https://ohiohouse.gov/members/craig-s-riedel/contact 

● Representative Bob Latta's office: (419) 782-1996, https://latta.house.gov/contact/ 

● Defiance Mayor Mike McCann: (419) 784-2101, https://cityofdefiance.com/contact/ 

● Defiance Area Foundation: (419) 782-3130, https://defianceareafoundation.org/contact-us/ 

Local Defiance leaders don’t believe that our services are needed and think they duplicate 

what the public schools offer, although we do and want to offer an educational and affordable service 

center serving all families regardless of school choice, a sensory room, a daycare for young parents, 

and our radio show. We would appreciate you sharing our information with anyone who can fund this 

dream. We can't continue to operate on a small to non-existent budget. Thank you for the blessing of 

allowing us to serve you for the last 16 years and helping us become the most awarded nonprofit on 

the planet. 

24 

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CHILD 

Carl Pruitt 

MISSING 

View, & Share 

Scan, 

Sighting CALL 

Report 

or 1--800--THE-- 

911 

LOST 

CHILD 

Elizabeth Denise Burkes 

MISSING 

View, & Share 

Scan, 

Sighting CALL 

Report 

or 1-800-THE- 

911 

LOST 


How you can help 

How you can help 

NCIC# M847543810 

NCIC# M557608387 

Missing Since: Octoberr 10, 2023 

Missinng Sinnce: October 20, 2023 

PORTSMOUTH, OH, US 

Clevelannd, OH, US 

Age Now: 14 Yearrs Old 

Age Now: 16 Years Old 

Male 

Female 

Porrtsmouth Police 

Clevelannd Police 

Deparrtment (Ohio) 

Departmennt (Ohio) 

1-740-353-4101 

1-216-621-1234 

Carrl was last seen on Octoberr 10, 2023. 

Elizabeth may still be inn the local area. Her nnose is pierced annd she may wear glasses. 

NCMEC: 2002864 

NCMEC: 2003960 

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JULY 21-30, 2023 

SEPTEMBER 9-17, 2023 

NOVEMBER 4-19, 2023 

FEBRUARY 9-18, 2024 

SIX DEGREES 

OF SEPARATION 

MARCH 15-24, 2024 

MAY 4-19, 2024


Have professional 

genealogy research 

done for only 

$ 

65 

per hr 

Genealogy costs cover the genealogist’s time 

and there may be extra charges for expenses 

that include photocopies, travel, website fees 

(Ancestry, MyHeritage, and public library fees) 

and postage if necessary. 

For more information, please visit https://School.NewHeightsEducation.org/affordable-genealogy/ 

To sign up: https://NHEG.MemberHub.com/store/items/838457 

New Heights Educational Group is now offering pre-recorded 

Genealogy and DNA courses 

https://www.readandspell.com/home-course 

Discount: NHE10 

Genealogy & Education 

In this free course, students will explore the history of genealogy 

and be inspired to learn about their family history 

and its connection to their community. 

Course topics: 

• History of genealogy 

• Family history and its ties to their environment 

• Significance of learning about family history 

• Steps to researching family history 

• Sites to help organize a family tree 

• Steps to downloading and moving a family tree 

DNA & Education 

In this free course, students will explore the world of genetics 

and DNA testing and be inspired to learn about their 

genetic makeup and their connection to others. 

Course topics: 

• Significance of learning about family history 

• Introduction to genetic testing 

• Overview of DNA 

• DNA testing options 

• Steps to take after DNA testing 

• Value of adding DNA results to other websites 

• Using Gedmatch 

• Comparing DNA in multiple systems 

• Comparing DNA relatives 

• DNA results and social media 

For more information, please visit https://School.NewHeightEducation.org/online-courses/genealogy-dna-course/ 

Contact Us 

419-786-0247 

NewHeightsEducation@yahoo.com • http://www.NewHeightsEducation.org



https://NewHeightsEducation.org/NHEG-news/heroes-of-liberty-partnership/ 

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https://www.collegexpress.com/reg/signup?campaign=10k&utm_campaign=NHEG&utm_ 

medium=link&utm_source=NHEG 

More Scholarship opportunities: 

-https://School.NewHeightsEducation.org/students/scholarship-opportunities/scholarship-search/ 

- https://School.NewHeightsEducation.org/students/scholarship-opportunities/ 

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https://NHEG.memberhub.gives/NHEG/Campaign/Details

https://NHEG.memberhub.gives/NHEG/Campaign/Details 

https://careasy.org/nonprofit/NewHeightsEducationalGroup 

Call: 

855-550-4483



https://School.NewHeightsEducation.org/online-courses/personal-development-coaching-courses/ 

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https://www.nshss.org/ 

https://School.NewHeightsEducation.org/ 

membership/national-csi-classes/ 

https://School.NewHeightsEducation.org/online-courses/discounted-and-free-online-classes/ 

https://NewHeightsEducation. 

org/NHEG-educational-programs/virtual-reading-program/ 

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VOLUNTEER PAGES 

NEW VOLUNTEERS 

VOLUNTEERS OF THE MONTH 

MYTHREYI ASHOKA 7/27/23 

ACCOUNTANT 

Mythreyi Ashoka 

Sarika Gauba 

Victor Rodriguez 


Ginnefine Jalloh 

Daniela Silva 

Javier Cortés 

Marina Klimi 

Sheila Wright 

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THE INTERNET RADIO PROGRAM 

FROM NEW HEIGHTS EDUCATIONAL GROUP


November-December 

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NHEG November Birthday 

NHEG December Birthday 

NOV 3 

Jon Aitken 

DEC 3 

Heather Ruggerio 

NOV 5 


DEC 3 

Padmapriya (Priya) Kedharnath 

NOV 21 

Margaret Spangler 

DEC 14 

Sean Urke 

NOV 26 

Piper Sharpe 

DEC 23 

Jackson Hochstetler 

NOV 26 

Frani Wyner 

DEC 25 

Nina Le 

NOV 27 

Chloe Gebers 

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NHEG November Anniversaries 

NHEG December Anniversaries 

NOV 9 

Sean Urke 

DEC 10 

Frani Wyner 

NOV 20 

Bruno Moses Patrick 

DEC 20 

Erika Hanson 

NOV 24 


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HOW TO EARN 

BOX TOPS MAKES IT EASY 

All you need is your phone! Download the Box Tops app, shop as you normally 

would, then use the app to scan your store receipt within 14 days of purchase. The 

app will identify Box Tops products on your receipt and 

automatically credit your school’s earnings online. 

Twice a year, your school will receive a check and can use that cash to buy 

whatever it needs! 

DO YOU NEED TO ENROLL YOUR SCHOOL? FIND OUT HOW HERE. 

https://www.boxtops4education.com/enroll 

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PRESS RELEASE 

THE NEW HEIGHTS SHOW ON EDUCATION AS ONE OF THE TOP 10 OHIO 

EDUCATION PODCASTS LEARNING/TUTORING CENTER 

The New Heights Show on Education has been selected by Feedspot panelist as one of the Top 10 Ohio Education 

Podcasts on the web. 

NEW HEIGHTS EDUCATIONAL GROUP RECOGNIZED AS TOP 

https://blog.feedspot.com/ohio_education_podcasts/ 

This is the most comprehensive list of Top 10 Ohio Education Podcasts on the internet. Pamela Clark, Executive 

Director/Founder of the New Heights Educational Group and the New Heights Show on Education stated, 

“It’s nice to be recognized by others for our work and podcast. Thank you to Feedspot, Anuj Agarwal and her 

team.” 

Our award-winning show can be found here: https://Radio.NewHeightsEducation.org/ 

New Heights Education Group, a non-profit organization that promotes literacy for children and adults in 

Ohio, has been voted as one of the top three Learning/Tutoring Centers in the Fort Wayne Newspapers Readers’ 

Choice Contest in 2023. 

New Heights Educational Group’s services include assisting families in the selection of schools, organization 

of educational activities, and acquisition of materials. NHEG promotes a healthy learning environment and 

various enrichment programs for families of preschool and school-age children, including children with special 

needs. 

Readers of Fort Wayne Magazine and the Journal Gazette voted on the top businesses in various categories, 

including Middle School, High School, Private School, and College, with NHEG placing as a finalist in the category 

of top Learning/Tutoring Center. 

Pamela Clark, Executive Director and Founder of NHEG, said, “New Heights Educational Group is honored to 

be recognized by readers of the Journal Gazette and Fort Wayne Magazine as a top Learning/Tutoring Center. 

We are here to help students of all learning abilities and ages, and are proud to have many success stories 

under our belt. Thank you to the readers for recognizing the quality of the services we provide to our community 

and beyond.” 

NHEG promotes literacy for children and adults by offering a range of educational support services. Such 

services include the following: assisting families in the selection of schools; organization of educational activities; 

and acquisition of materials. NHEG promotes a healthy learning environment and various enrichment 

programs for families of preschool and school-age children, including children with special needs. More information 

about the organization and its services is available at https://NewHeightsEducation.org 

You can view the digital version of the Winners booklet that was in the Journal Gazette on Saturday 9/30, you 

can view it online here: 

https://fwn-egen2.fortwayne.com/adv/adservices/ReadersChoice/0930_RCWinners_Final.pdf 

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NEUROEDUCATION IN SCHOOL: PRINCIPLES OF NEUROSCIENCE 

Neuroeducation implies understanding how a child’s brain works and how the nervous system affects their learning. 

Neuroscience studies applied to schooling have been essential both for teachers to innovate in pedagogical strategies 

and for parents to create more favorable conditions for their children’s learning. 

This article presents eight principles of neuroscience in action to help children learn in the classroom. As a strategy 

for writing the article, I will use a study conducted by the Social Service of Industry (SESI) of Brazil, which is 

now part of the National 

Network of Science for Education (Rede CPE), an association that integrates Brazilian researchers and laboratories 

from different areas that develop research to improve educational practices and policies. 

The following principles also contribute to the transformations of education over 

time: 

1. Learning changes the brain: Neuroimaging tests have found that our brain changes both in structure and in 

functioning as a person learns new skills such as reading, writing, counting, practicing a new language, etc. This 

is due to neuroplasticity and the brain’s ability to reorganize itself and form new brain synapses with each new 

learning or experience acquired throughout life. For this 

reason, students need to know that intelligence is malleable and that it is always time to learn, regardless of the 

difficulty they have with a given content. Research in the field of neuroscience reveals that when students understand 

that their intelligence is malleable and that learning changes the structure of their 

brain, they can renew their self-confidence and motivation to study. 

2. How we learn is unique: Although each of us has the same set of neural circuit 

(linked to attention, motivation, motricity, language, reasoning, etc.), how each person’s brain connects to these 

circuits is different, as it depends on the set of experiences inherent to how each person learns and experiences 

learning. Each student has a different type of neural circuitry that influences their performance and learning. 

Thus, a classroom with students of the same age does not necessarily mean that everyone will learn in the same 

way. For this reason, it is necessary to awaken everyone’s interest, investigating their previous knowledge, what 

they like to do most, their desires, and their curiosities. Diversifying pedagogical practices, as well as teaching 

resources, are alternatives for each student to put into practice their way of learning. 

As the teacher manages to connect with the students, the easier it will be to connect the interests of the class to 

the concepts of the school curriculum. 

3. Social interaction is conducive to learning: We are social beings. Learning by observing others is not as effective 

as learning by interacting with others. In a classroom, the exchange between teacher and student generates 

changes in each person’s cognitive processing, and this is evident when the teacher needs to modify the lesson 

plan because of a doubt presented by a student. Learning occurs all the time, whether between students or 

groups of teachers. This way, a new neural construct is developed in the brain for each new learning. The neural 

circuits activated by social interactions have connections with the reward system, which triggers motivation, 

essential for quality learning! 

4. The use of technology influences the processing and storage of information: 

The teacher, when using smartphones, laptops, and tablets, as a pedagogical tool, first needs to ask himself/herself 

“What are the benefits and drawbacks that information technologies offer to students in the classroom? 

70 

The indiscriminate use of these devices in the classroom can cause distractions and multitasking behaviors 

in students in a way that impairs their ability to focus and pay attention. For technology to be used to benefit 

learning, support and guidance are needed. It is necessary to guide the student on how to use selection 

strategies and identify inaccurate news when researching and seeking information, for example. Another 

important tip is to develop deep readings with students. 

Students need to use cognitive strategies that allow in-depth reading, not only in printed texts but also on 

screens. 

5. Emotion drives learning: In the human brain, reason and emotion are processes that work interdependently 

to allow our best adaptation to the environment. 

From a neuroscientific point of view, it is impossible to build memories, carry out complex thoughts, or 

make meaningful decisions without emotion. That is why they are so important for human development and 

learning. In the classroom, “what” the student feels and “how” he feels about what is being taught will directl 

impact his learning. Leading him, for example, to pay more attention (or not) to the content of the class, to 

ask (or not) questions, and to dedicate himself more (or less) to his studies. This is how emotion guide 

learning. On the other hand, emotions that trigger episodes of stress and anxiety in students impair learning. 

Working with emotions in the classroom, and incorporating socio-emotional learning into pedagogical 

practice, means considering students in all their dimensions. It is about understanding and valuing the way 

students perceive themselves, interact, and perceive learning. 

6. Motivation puts the brain in action for learning: Motivation is associated with the activity of brain areas 

that analyze the value of a given experience and also whether it is rewarding enough to be repeated and 

maintained over time. In learning, this process occurs when the student decides to dedicate more time to 

studying certain content. 

A tip to stimulate motivation in students is to arouse their curiosity through thought-provoking questions in 

the classroom. Remember that every research project starts with a question or a problem! 

Research indicates that when something truly awakens curiosity, brain regions associated with motivation 

and memory are activated. In other words, curiosity can be a great motivator that makes the brain want to 

learn. 

7. Attention is the gateway to learning: Attention is the gateway to learning. It is through this that the brain 

is able to filter the necessary and relevant information for our knowledge. Without focus and attention, we 

cannot filter the information necessary for learning, and consequently, we cannot learn. But the challenge 

of attention is to maintain concentration, and this involves emotion. For this reason, it is essential that the 

learning content has value and meaning for the student. 

This was proven through research in which, using electrophysiology techniques, they observed that when 

adolescents were presented with stimuli they considered more “interesting,” areas related to selective attention 

were influenced by brain areas related to motivation. Thus, the study demonstrated that more interesting 

stimuli increase attentional focus. 

8. The brain is not multitasking: Although the modern world values multitasking behavior in people, neuroscience 

has proven that the brain is not multitasking, alternating its attention on one stimulus at a time 

when performing a task. 

Simultaneous tasks require the brain to compromise the same brain area, the prefrontal cortex, responsible 

for working memory. Thus, carrying out multiple tasks when studying can compromise academic performance 

and the reading comprehension, for example. Other harmful factors include difficulty maintaining 

focus, mental fatigue, working memory overload, and difficulty retaining the content studied. 

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In order to make students understand the harm of multitasking behavior, it is necessary to explain to them that 

the greater the number of activities they are doing, the greater the level of distraction. In practice, this means 

avoiding using social media while studying and only using it again during the break between classes. cannot filter 

the information necessary for learning, and consequently, we cannot learn. But the challenge of attention is to 

maintain concentration, and this involves emotion. For this reason, it is essential that the learning content has 

value and meaning for the student. 

This was proven through research in which, using electrophysiology techniques, they observed that when adolescents 

were presented with stimuli they considered more “interesting,” areas related to selective attention were 

influenced by brain areas related to motivation. Thus, the study demonstrated 

that more interesting stimuli increase attentional focus. 

The educator’s work can be more effective when he/she understands how the brain learns, what motivates learning, 

and how it better captures attention—in short, how stimuli and social interactions impact the learner’s formation. 

The brain is the organ of learning, and neuroeducation aims to provide scientific evidence of how the brain 

learns more effectively in the classroom. Hence the importance of neuroeducation for 

the student’s academic life and for the teacher’s teaching process. 

Source: 

Serviço Social da Indústria. Departamento Nacional. 

Neuroscience and education: looking out for the future of learning / Serviço 

Social da Indústria, Ana Luiza Neiva Amaral, Leonor Bezerra Guerra; 

translation Mirela C. C. Ramacciotti. Brasília : SESI/DN, 2022. 

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A Power Shift 

First, power would tilt away from the state and toward the family. Without legal force compelling school attendance, 

parents would have the freedom and flexibility to assume full responsibility for their child’s education. They would 

not need government permission to homeschool, as is currently required in the majority of U.S. states. Private schools 

would not need to submit their attendance records to the state to show compliance. Public schools could still be 

available to those who wanted them, as they were prior to the 1852 law; but government schooling would no longer be 

the default education option. 

More Choices 

Because the state would no longer need to bless the creation of various private schools and ratify their curriculum 

and attendance protocols, an assortment of education options would emerge. Entrepreneurial educators would 

seize the opportunity to create new and varied products and services, and parents would be the ones responsible 

for determining quality and effectiveness—not the state. With less government red tape, current trends in education 

would gain more momentum. Virtual schooling, part-time school options, hybrid homeschooling models, and an array 

of private schools with diverse education approaches would emerge. As more education choices sprouted, competition 

would lower prices, making access to these new choices more widespread. 

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2018 

KERRY MCDONALD 

Compulsory Schooling Laws: What if We Didn’t Have Them? 

We should always be leery of laws passed “for our 

own good,” as if the state knows better. The history of 

compulsory schooling statutes is rife with paternalism, 

triggered by anti-immigrant sentiments in the midnineteenth 

century and fueled by a desire to shape 

people into a standard mold. 

History books detailing the “common school movement” 

and the push for universal, compulsory schooling 

perpetuate the myths that Americans were illiterate 

prior to mass schooling, that there were limited 

education options available, and that mandating school 

attendance under a legal threat of force was the surest 

way toward equality. 

In truth, literacy rates were quite high, particularly in 

Massachusetts, where the first compulsory schooling 

statute was passed in 1852. Historians Boles and Gintis 

report that approximately three-quarters of the total U.S. 

population, including slaves, was literate¹. There was a 

panoply of education options prior to mass compulsory 

schooling, including an array of public and private 

schooling options, charity schools for the poor, robust 

apprenticeship models, and homeschooling—this latter 

approach being the preferred method of Massachusetts 

education reformer Horace Mann, who homeschooled 

his own three children while mandating common school 

attendance for others. 

Eliminating compulsory schooling laws would break the century-and-a-half stranglehold of 

schooling on education. 

74 

The primary catalyst for compulsory schooling was a 

wave of massive immigration in the early to mid-1800s 

that made lawmakers fearful. Many of these immigrants 

were Irish Catholics escaping the deadly potato famine, 

and they threatened the predominantly Anglo-Saxon 

Protestant social order of the time. In 1851, the editor of 

The Massachusetts Teacher, William Swan, wrote: 

“In too many instances the parents are unfit guardians of 

their own children. If left to their direction the young will be 

brought up in idle, dissolute, vagrant habits, which will make 

them worse members of society than their parents are; instead 

of filling our public schools, they will find their way into our 

prisons, houses of correction and almshouses. Nothing can 

operate effectually here but stringent legislation, thoroughly 

carried out by an efficient police; the children must be gathered 

up and forced into school, and those who resist or impede 

this plan, whether parents or priests, must be held accountable 

and punished.” 

This is the true history of compulsory schooling that 

rarely emerges behind the veil of social magnanimity. 

So what would happen if these inherently flawed 

compulsory schooling laws were eliminated? 

More Pathways to Adulthood 

Without the state mandating school attendance for most of childhood, in some states up to age 18, there would 

be new pathways to adulthood that wouldn’t rely so heavily on state-issued high school diplomas. Innovative 

apprenticeship models would be created, community colleges would cater more toward independent teenage 

learners, and career preparation programs would expand. As the social reformer Paul Goodman wrote in his book New 

Reformation: “Our aim should be to multiply the paths of growing up, instead of narrowing the one existing school 

path.” 

A Broader Definition of Education 

In his biography of Horace Mann, historian Jonathan Messerli explains how compulsory schooling contracted a 

once expansive definition of education into the singular definition of schooling. Indeed, today education is almost 

universally associated with schooling. Messerli writes: “That in enlarging the European concept of schooling, [Mann] 

might narrow the real parameters of education by enclosing it within the four walls of the public school classroom.”² 

Eliminating compulsory schooling laws would break the century-and-a-half stranglehold of schooling on education. It 

would help to disentangle education from schooling and reveal many other ways to be educated, such as through noncoercive, 

self-directed education, or “unschooling.” 

Even the most adamant education reformers often stop short of advocating for abolishing compulsory schooling 

statutes, arguing that it wouldn’t make much difference. But stripping the state of its power to define, control, and 

monitor something as beautifully broad as education would have a large and lasting impact on re-empowering 

families, encouraging educational entrepreneurs, and creating more choice and opportunity for all learners. 

¹ Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, “The origins of mass public education,” History of Education: Major Themes, Volume II: Education in its 

Social Context, ed. Roy Lowe (London: Routledge Falmer, 2000), 78. 

² Jonathan Messerli, Horace Mann: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 429. 

Source: The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) 

https://fee.org/ 

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The government’s backing of student loans has caused the price of higher education to artificially rise; the demand 

would not be so high if college were not a financially viable option for some. Young people have been led to believe 

that a diploma is the ticket to the American dream, but that’s not the case for many Americans. 

Financially, it makes no sense to take out a $165,000 loan for a master’s degree that leads to a job where the average 

annual salary is $38,000—yet thousands of young people are making this choice. Only when they graduate do they 

understand the reality of their situation as they live paycheck-to-paycheck and find it next-to-impossible to save for a 

home, retirement, or even a rainy-day fund. 

Nor can student loans be discharged by filing for bankruptcy. Prior to 1976, student loans were treated like any other 

kind of debt with regard to bankruptcy laws, but as defaults increased, the federal government changed the laws. So 

student debt will hang above the borrower’s head until the debt is repaid. 

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2019 

DANIEL KOWALSKI 

How Government-Guaranteed Student Loans Killed the 

American Dream for Millions 

In Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell wrote that prices are 

what tie together the vast network of economic activity 

among people who are too vastly scattered to know each 

other. Prices are the regulators of the free market. An 

object’s value in the free market is not how much it costs 

to produce, but rather how much a consumer is willing to 

pay for it. 

Loans are a crucial component of the free market 

because they allow consumers to borrow large sums of 

money they normally would not have access to, which 

are later paid back in installments with interest. If the 

borrower fails to pay back the loan, the lender can 

repossess the physical item the loan purchased, such as 

a house or car. 

Student loans are different. Education is abstract; if 

they’re not paid back, then there is little recourse for the 

lender. There is no physical object that can be seized. 

Student loans did not exist in their present form until 

the federal government passed the Higher Education Act 

of 1965, which had taxpayers guaranteeing loans made 

by private lenders to students. While the program might 

have had good intentions, it has had unforeseen harmful 

consequences. 

The Problem with Government-Backed Student Loans 

Millennials are the most educated generation in 

American history, but many college graduates have tens 

76 

When government-guaranteed checks keep rolling in, there’s no incentive for colleges and 

universities to lower their prices. In fact, they do the opposite. 

of thousands of dollars in debt to go along with their 

degrees. Young Americans had it drilled into their heads 

during high school (if not earlier) that their best shot— 

perhaps their only shot—at achieving success in life was 

to have a college diploma. 

This fueled demand for the higher education business, 

where existing universities and colleges expanded their 

academic programs in the arts and humanities to suit 

students not interested in math and sciences, and it 

also led to many private universities popping up to meet 

the demands of students who either could not afford 

the tuition or could not meet the admission criteria of 

the existing colleges. In 1980, there were 3,231 higher 

education institutions in the United States. By 2016, that 

number increased by more than one-third to 4,360. 

Secured financing of student loans resulted in a surge of 

students applying for college. This increase in demand 

was, in turn, met with an increase in price because 

university administrators would charge more if people 

were willing to pay it, just as any other business would 

(though to be fair, student loans do require more 

administration staff for processing). According to Forbes, 

the average price of tuition has increased eight times 

faster than wages since the 1980s. In 2018, the Federal 

Reserve estimated that there is currently $1.5 trillion 

in unpaid student debt. The Institute for College Access 

and Success estimates that in 2017, 65 percent of recent 

bachelor’s degree graduates have student loans, and the 

average is $28,650 per borrower. 

How to Fix the Problem 

There are two key steps to addressing the student loan crisis. First, there needs to be a major cultural shift away 

from the belief that college is a one-size-fits-all requirement for success. We are beginning to see this as many young 

Americans start to realize they can attend a trade school for a fraction of what it would cost for a four-year college and 

that they can get in-demand jobs with high salaries. 

Second, parents and school systems should stress economic literacy so that young people better understand the 

concepts of resources, scarcity, and prices. We also need to teach our youth about personal finances, interest, and 

budgeting so they understand that borrowing a large amount of money that only generates a small level of income is 

not a sound investment. 

Finally, the current system of student loan financing needs to be reformed. Schools should not be given a blank 

check, and the government-guaranteed loans should only cover a partial amount of tuition. Schools should also be 

responsible for directly lending a portion of student loans so that it’s in their financial interest to make sure graduates 

enter the job market with the skills and requirements needed to get a well-paying job. If a student fails to pay back 

their loan, then the college or university should also share in the taxpayer’s loss. Only when the demand for higher 

education decreases will we witness a decrease in its cost. 



77



The possibilities on an Earth with an open, vibranium-exporting Wakanda are practically endless. But that doesn’t even 

scratch the surface of what would be possible with interstellar trade, migration, and division of labor. Thor and the 

Asgardians are “superhuman,” but even he had trouble with his cable service and needed assistance. 

Thanos might reply that this just pushes the problem back a step because we would eventually run up against an 

interstellar production possibilities frontier and then the “simple calculus” of growing population against finite 

resources and, therefore, the decline to subsistence famously predicted by Thomas Malthus. 

FRIDAY, JUNE 7, 2019 

ART CARDEN 

Would Thanos Have Had a Different Endgame if He Had an 

Economics Teacher? 

It’s done: One month and twenty-two movies later, my 

kids and I have watched all of the films in the Marvel 

Cinematic Universe/Avengers series, from the original 

Iron Man through Avengers: Endgame. I was impressed 

with how they pulled everything together while setting 

up Phase 4 of the Disney franchise (spoilers follow, so 

if you’re waiting for Endgame to make its way to the 

second-run theaters or make its way to video, you should 

probably stop reading). 

It all would have been different, however, had Thanos 

not clung to a flat-earth theory of the limits to economic 

growth. 

Thanos Is Wrong 

As Thanos explains to Gamora in Infinity War, “it’s a 

simple calculus: this universe is finite, it’s resources 

It all would have been different had Thanos not clung to a flat-earth theory of the limits to 

economic growth. 

“decrease the surplus population.” 

Alas, both Thanos and Scrooge are wrong: There’s no 

“surplus population.” Every new life is a blessing, not a 

curse, because it brings with it not just another mouth to 

feed but another mind with which to have ideas and with 

which to create resources. This is the simple insight that, 

in my humble opinion, should have won the economist 

Julian Simon a Nobel Prize (and that might have, had he 

not died in 1998): the mind is the ultimate resource. 

Thanos assumes, apparently, that “resources” are 

defined objectively. This isn’t the case: we can describe 

the physical, temporal, and spatial characteristics of 

objects, but what makes something a “resource” is our 

ability to identify how we can use those characteristics 

to satisfy our wants. Something isn’t a resource until we 

know how it can be used (I explain this in my chapter in 

the Cambridge Handbook of Classical Liberal Thought, 

available as a working paper here). 

finite; if life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist. It 

needs correction.” And how does Thanos plan to correct 

it? He collects all six of the infinity stones, snaps his 

fingers, and makes half the life in the universe disappear. 

Just like President George W. Bush “abandoned free 

market principles to save the free market system” during 

the Great Recession, Thanos ended life on a massive 

scale in order to save it. Or, to borrow from another 

fictional character who shared his dismal outlook, 

one Ebenezer Scrooge, Thanos took proactive steps to 

78 

Prosperity Is Unlimited 

Thanos extols his will and his steely resolve to save life 

by ending it, but his most important weakness is his lack 

of (economic) imagination. What would have happened 

had he discarded his plan to end half of life in the 

universe and had instead noticed Adam Smith’s insights 

about the productivity-increasing effects of the division 

of labor? One of the first lessons students learn in an 

economics class is that trade creates wealth: It allows 

us to get more out of a fixed quantity of inputs, or what 

is essentially the same thing, it allows us to get a given 

amount of output with fewer inputs. 


79 

https://fee.org/



This Is Your Statistics on Government 

The US Census Bureau reports that the 2017 poverty level was 12.3 percent, and it has been declining steadily over 

the past several years; yet, about 75 percent of school lunch participants receive free or reduced-cost meals. While 

children do not need to be at the poverty level to receive a discounted meal,facebook sharing buttontwitter sharing 

buttonflipboard sharing buttonreddit sharing buttonlinkedin sharing buttonemail sharing button 

the startlingly high numbers of recipients may be due to a lack of income verification and accountability to determine 

real need. There are also instances of downright fraud. 

Moreover, inclusion in the discounted school lunch program triggers a variety of other federal and state funding 

sources, including federal Title I money, so ensuring accurate eligibility is important. If participation in the school 

lunch program is inflated, it could mean that data on student academic performance is unreliable. National student 

assessments, like the Nation’s Report Card, use discounted school lunch eligibility to determine how well low-income 

children are faring in US schools. 

MONDAY, JANUARY 21, 2019 


It’s Clear the Federal Government Shouldn’t Be Involved in 

the School Lunch Business 

If nothing else, the federal shutdown has succeeded in 

drawing attention to the many programs and services 

under government control. 

One of these is the USDA’s National School Lunch 

Program, which has been providing government-issued 

meals to American schoolchildren since 1946. Today, 

over 30 million young people in over 100,000 schools 

participate in the program, which costs over $13 billion 

every year. In 2016, three-quarters of the five billion 

school lunches served were offered free or at a reduced 

price. The School Breakfast Program, which offers free 

and discounted breakfasts to eligible children, operates 

at an additional cost of over $4 billion, and the Summer 

Food Service Program adds nearly $500 million more. 

One might argue that these are essential programs that 

deserve both our money and our devotion. American 

children shouldn’t go hungry. Like many government 

programs, however, the National School Lunch Program 

and its off-shoots are deeply flawed. 

What the Data Say 

A revealing 2009 study by University of Chicago professor 

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach found that children 

who ate school lunches were more likely to be obese 

than children who brought a lunch from home—despite 

Favoring parental responsibility over government bureaucracy may be the most effective 

way to nourish children. 

80 

entering kindergarten with the same obesity rates. A 

2010 study by University of Michigan researchers found 

similar results, claiming that students who regularly 

consumed school lunches were 29 percent more likely 

to be obese than their classmates who brought lunches 

from home. 

Rather than using these studies to question the 

government school lunch program and urge more 

parents to pack their child’s lunch, policy efforts turned 

instead toward making school lunches healthier. The 

Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA), launched in 2012, 

detailed new requirements for allegedly more nutritious 

ingredients and offerings in participating schools. 

Despite these efforts, according to the US Centers for 

Disease Control and Prevention, the youth obesity rate 

climbed from 16.9 percent of children and adolescents 

in 2011/2012 to 18.5 percent in 2015/2016. In 2017, the 

Trump administration announced it was loosening the 

HHFKA requirements. 

The obesity correlation is only one problem with the 

federal school lunch program. Over the years, the 

program has been riddled with controversy. A 2010 USA 

Today investigation found that “the government has 

provided the nation’s schools with millions of pounds of 

beef and chicken that wouldn’t meet the quality or safety 

standards of many fast-food restaurants.” Then there 

was the question over whether ketchup was a vegetable, 

and the inevitable lobbying and special interest jockeying 

from various food producers and distributors. 

The (Healthy) Way Forward 

Favoring parental responsibility over government bureaucracy may be the most effective way to nourish children. 

Encouraging more parents to opt out of the school lunch program and prepare their own child’s lunch would reduce 

government control over their child’s food and lead to greater health and well-being. Being responsible for their child’s 

meals may also help more parents to make better food choices for themselves, thereby halting the climbing adult 

obesity rate, as well. 

This shift in food control could ignite local efforts to feed hungry families by mobilizing restaurants, grocery stores, 

farms and community gardens, non-profits, charitable organizations, and private businesses to help gather and 

distribute food to those most in need. Some non-profits are already doing this by buying or leasing farmland to grow 

good food for local families who need it. New start-ups are also tackling hunger in innovative, market-driven ways. 

Despite the shutdown, the National School Lunch Program is solvent through March, so children can still receive their 

schoolday meal. But perhaps this is a good opportunity for parents to pause and ask whether the government should 

be feeding their children at all. 



81



Thomas Paine spoke for many when he observed that government, even in its best state, “is a necessary evil.” 

Government is unfit and incapable of providing for people, as history has shown time and again. It creates nothing. It 

only spends, and every dollar it spends is taken from others (and almost never from their free will). 

“The entire question of government spending is perhaps best perceived when one realizes that the government is not 

a source of wealth,” the great economist Frédéric Bastiat long ago observed. “The people themselves are the only true 

source of wealth. Hence the government can only give to the people what it has already taken from the people.” 

I bring up the anecdote with my friend for a simple reason. Many Americans think the answer to fixing our schools 

means simply taking more money and giving it to schools. This is precisely what we did in the decades since Sagan 

observed that schools were failing our kids. 

It’s time to admit that the model we’re using is 

fundamentally flawed. 

John Taylor Gatto, the celebrated American author 

and school teacher, offered the proper solution 

decades ago. 

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2023 

JON MILTIMORE 

Carl Sagan Saw US Schools Were Ruining Kids Decades Ago: 

‘Something Terrible Has Happened’ 

My wife and I recently met with the principal of the 

school our daughter attends to discuss her education 

future. 

My daughter, who turns 12 in a few days, wants to go to 

a different school in the fall, largely because many of her 

friends—who are a year ahead of her—are graduating to 

new schools. (And also because her teacher, whom she 

adored, took a job in a different district.) 

When we stepped into the principal’s office, she offered 

us chairs. She was warm, knowledgeable, and helpful, 

and I got the feeling she knows my daughter and wants 

what is best for her. I suspect my daughter will return to 

the school for one more year, but it’s a conversation we’ll 

have together. 

I believe that whatever school we choose, my daughter 

will have a relatively good experience. And I’m deeply 

grateful for that. I’m all too aware of how badly our 

schools have failed American children in recent years, 

and I’m hardly the only person to make this observation. 

Despite the extravagant spending, our schools are failing our kids. Carl Sagan saw it. John 

Taylor Gatto saw it. And we all see it today. 

“My experience is, you go talk to kindergarten kids or firstgrade 

kids, you find a class full of science enthusiasts. And 

they ask deep questions. ‘What is a dream, why do we have 

toes, why is the moon round, what is the birthday of the world, 

why is grass green?’ These are profound, important questions. 

They just bubble right out of them. You go talk to 12th grade 

students and there’s none of that. They’ve become leaden and 

incurious. Something terrible has happened between kindergarten 

and 12th grade and it’s not just puberty.” 

Sagan doesn’t offer a reason as to why US schools have 

been failing for so long, but I think the simple answer is 

that it stems from those in charge of the school systems: 

the government. 

‘Good Schools Don’t Need More Money’ 

I recently was sitting around a fire with a progressive 

friend while we were enjoying our vacation in the north 

woods of Wisconsin. We agree on almost nothing, 

politically. I understand why, but I don’t think he does. So 

I asked him a simple question. 

“What is the purpose of government,” I asked. 

“Good schools don’t need more money or a longer year; 

they need real free-market choices, variety that speaks 

to every need and runs risks. We don’t need a national 

curriculum or national testing either. Both initiatives arise 

from ignorance of how people learn or deliberate indifference 

to it.” 

It was precisely this failing system that drove Gatto, 

one of the best teachers of his generation and New 

York State Teacher of the Year in 1991, out of the American public school system. 

“I can’t teach this way any longer,” Gatto bluntly stated. “If you hear of a job where I don’t have to hurt kids to make a 

living, let me know.” 

Despite the extravagant spending, our schools are failing our kids. Carl Sagan saw it. John Taylor Gatto saw it. And we 

all see it today. 

Our schools must be freed from the hands of the government, and returned to the hands of the people. 

Decades ago, the esteemed American astronomer talked 

about how US schools were ruining the minds of our 

He seemed perplexed for a moment, then answered. “To 

provide for the people.” 

children. 

There is no worse answer, of course. It’s an answer that 

runs counter to the ideas of the American system. 



82 

83



If I can move from place to place at a lower cost, I can spread my experiences and knowledge more easily. The rest 

of society benefits from that. Therefore, subsidize automobiles. But that same product damages the environment 

through pollution. Therefore, tax automobiles. 

Similar arguments can be made about any other product. Instead, we should accept the existence of externalities 

and consider the possibility that market failures may be more optimal than government failures. If any financing is to 

be publicly provided, it should be limited to the least-advantaged families. However, we should also realize that the 

education for the children from these families could also be financed voluntarily through charitable donations. 

What is Minimum? 

A forced “minimum level of education for all children” may sound good at first. Of course, children all deserve to have 

at least some minimum level of education. But how can we all agree on what that minimum level of education is? Since 

all children are diverse, some may require an additional focus on mathematics and behavior, while others may need to 

focus on reading and citizenship. 

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2016 

COREY DEANGELIS 

Governments Shouldn’t Even Certify Schools, Much Less Run 

Them 

In his famous 1955 essay, “The Role of Government in 

Education,” the venerated economist, Milton Friedman, 

proposed replacing our government-run system of 

schooling with a school choice voucher. Although, 

Friedman argued, the public interest in an educated 

citizenry meant that the government had a compelling 

interest in funding education, it did not necessarily 

follow that the government should also operate the 

schools. 

Most critics of Friedman argued against his conclusion, 

preferring a centrally-planned school system to a marketbased 

school system, but agreed with his argument that 

the government had a compelling interest in defining, 

mandating, and funding a minimum level of education. 

However, I don’t believe that government control 

of determining and funding this minimum level of 

education is economically favorable. Specifically, there 

are substantial costs for children and society as a whole 

tied to the attempt to reach a socially optimal level of 

education by force. 

The Externality Problem 

The argument for public financing of education (which 

we should refer to as schooling; something that is much 

different from what an education can be) is that there 

The social benefits of an educated public can’t justify the risks and costs of government 

involvement in education. 

84 

may be positive externalities associated with educated 

citizens. 

In other words, without subsidization of schooling, 

individuals may consume schooling at an amount less 

than the social optimum. This may be true, but how 

can anyone determine what this “socially optimal” 

level is? In attempting to reach this imaginary level, 

we may do more harm than good. We may very well 

push consumption over this level and waste resources, 

especially since we compel all children to do so. 

More importantly, by forcing all children to consume 

schooling, we are denying them the ability to consume 

other types of education. Though some children 

may benefit from 13 years of primary and secondary 

schooling, they may benefit more from a different 

combination of schooling and other educational 

activities. 

The positive (or negative) externality argument can be 

made for any type of good or service. For example, I 

can argue that the automobile creates benefits that are 

experienced by the consumer and the rest of society. 

Society benefits from the automobile when I use the 

product since I can more-easily network with other 

individuals and spend my income on their goods. 

Since all children are unique, we have an endless number of combinations of needs that bureaucrats must currently 

attempt to determine. Even with our best efforts put forth, we are guaranteed to come up with an extensive list of 

goals for this minimum level of education. In an attempt to make everyone happy, we provide all students the same 

type of comprehensive schooling. As a result, most children get a little bit of what they need (and a lot of what they 

don’t) at a monumental cost. 

Friedman states that the government could certify schools that meet “minimum standards” as they do with 

restaurants for minimum sanitary standards. Since this process is a barrier to market entry, it restricts the supply 

of schools, further increasing the price of schooling. The procedure itself also costs money and guarantees that the 

government will have a monopoly. 

Since families are unique, even government employees with the best intentions will make approval decisions that are 

not optimal for all families. Instead, multiple private certification companies could determine the quality of schools. 

Ideally, we could then have families decide what schools best meet their unique criteria. 

Even limited government intervention in the education system is not socially desirable. Though the limited 

intervention through finance and certification is well-intentioned, we should recognize the consequences of such 

policies. We should also recognize that the potential market failures may be more desirable than the current 

government failures in education. 



85



Documents leaked by an FBI whistleblower in 2022 and published by Project Veritas show the FBI has also identified 

the Gadsden flag as a dangerous symbol, one favored by “violent militia groups” alongside such things as the Betsy 

Ross flag, the Liberty Tree, and Second Amendment references (2A and the Greek phrase “ Molon Labe ”). 

To understand just how absurdly wide the FBI cast its net for images favored by violent extremists, consider this: The 

FBI itself flies the Betsy Ross flag at its headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue! 

It’s hard to reach any other conclusion from these facts than that the snoopy, heavy-handed FBI is hostile to the 

principles of the American Revolution and the ideals described in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of 

Rights. For years, Americans have routinely found themselves the target of FBI probes for no other reason than 

attending a peace rally (John Denver), voicing opposition to U.S. foreign policy (Truman Capote), advocating civil 

liberties (MLK Jr.), or being gay (Rock Hudson). 

Indeed, the FBI’s penchant for investigating dissent of government policies was noted by the U.S. Senate’s Church 

Committee decades ago. 

“The FBI … has placed more emphasis on domestic dissent than on organized crime and, according to some, let its 

efforts against foreign spies suffer because of the amount of time spent checking up on American protest groups,” the 

committee concluded in 1976. 

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2016 

JON MILTIMORE 

Why the FBI Also Deserves Blame for the 12-Year-Old 

Suspended Over ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ Patch 

Right when you think things can’t get any more strange 

and dysfunctional in America , another week passes. 

It began last Monday when video emerged of a 12-yearold 

student identified only as “Jaiden” being suspended 

for wearing a “ Don’t Tread on Me ” patch on his 

backpack. 

The disciplinary action came down from the Vanguard 

School, a tuition-free charter school in Colorado Springs, 

which told Jaiden’s mother that the Gadsden flag, which 

depicts a coiled snake on a yellow banner above the 

words that triggered the event, had to be removed “due 

to its origins with slavery and slave trade.” 

The Gadsden flag’s origins , of course, had nothing to 

do with race or slavery. As Colorado’s own Democratic 

governor explained on Twitter, the Gadsden flag is “a 

proud symbol of the American revolution.” 

The mother patiently tried to explain the symbol’s 

actual history to school officials but got nowhere. The 

story took a turn, however, when Libertas Institute 

President Connor Boyack, creator of the Tuttle Twins 

children’s books, shared on Twitter video of Jaiden being 

disciplined. 

The FBI’s penchant for investigating dissent of government policies reminds us why the 

Gadsden flag is more important today than ever. 

was writing this article), prompting the school to do an 

about-face after the school’s board of directors called an 

emergency meeting. 

“From Vanguard’s founding we have proudly supported 

our Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the ordered 

liberty that all Americans have enjoyed for almost 250 

years,” the district said in a statement. “The Vanguard 

School recognizes the historical significance of the 

Gadsden flag and its place in history.” 

It’s nice that the Vanguard School quickly recognized its 

error, but it’s worth examining how the school arrived at 

the idea that the Gadsden flag was an evil symbol. 

Some have noted the Gadsden flag first came under 

fire from the government in 2014 when a federal 

employee filed a complaint with the Equal Employment 

Opportunity Commission, alleging he was being 

subjected to a hostile workplace because a coworker was 

wearing a “Don’t Tread on Me” cap. 

Federal involvement does not end there, however. 

This might be a shocking revelation to many, but it actually helps reveal the true nature of the state. Centuries ago, 

Machiavelli explained in The Prince that rulers should have “no other object nor any other thought” but “war, its 

institutions, and its discipline.” Building on this theory centuries later, the economist Murray Rothbard noted that “the 

chief task of the rulers is always to secure the active or resigned acceptance of the majority of the citizens.” 

The Gadsden flag is a symbol that runs counter to this “resigned acceptance,” which is no doubt why the FBI flagged it, 

which helps explain why the Vanguard School panicked and demanded Jaiden remove it. 

Jaiden is back in school with his “Don’t Tread on Me” patch still on his backpack. But his suspension reveals why the 

Gadsden flag is more important today than ever. 



The post quickly went viral (it had 12 million views as I 

86 

87



Richardson founded BreakOut School in 2019 as an outdoor-based microschool, similar to a “forest school” model, 

that provides ample opportunities for unfettered movement and play, along with core academics. He has seen 

extraordinary results in his students—both academically and emotionally. 

From an economic perspective, we should be concerned about the shortage of Adderall, which is likely due, at least in 

part, to various quotas imposed on manufacturers by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) that regulates 

narcotics and controlled substances like Adderall. These shortages would likely not exist in a free market devoid of 

government meddling. 

From an educational perspective, we should be even more concerned about the shortage of Adderall this back-toschool 

season. This signals that Adderall is being used to equip children to “adapt to the conditions of standard 

schooling” without questioning whether or not that’s a desirable goal. As Richardson told me, these drugs do work. 

Kids will conform and perform. But at what cost? What are we taking away from them when we force them to comply 

with the standard schooling mold? 

TUESDAY, AUGUST 29, 2023 Standard schooling is the real problem. 


What the Back-to-School Adderall Shortage Really Tells Us 

It’s back-to-school season and that’s prompting concerns In his research of children diagnosed with ADHD who left 

about further shortages of medications to treat attention a conventional classroom for homeschooling and related 

deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). 

unconventional learning environments, Gray found that 

their ADHD characteristics and behaviors ceased to be 

Last fall, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) problematic and that most children no longer needed to 

declared a nationwide shortage of Adderall, a popular be medicated. This was particularly true if these children 

ADHD drug. That shortage is expected to worsen. 

learned in more self-directed educational environments 

According to CNBC: “Many children and young adults that intentionally avoided the trappings of traditional 

with ADHD often take the summer off medication and schooling. 

primarily rely on it during the school year. That could 

lead to even more demand in the months ahead that This topic is so important that I strongly recommend 

may not be met. Historically, prescriptions for ADHD you listen to my podcast conversation today with Dal 

medications increase as the school semester starts 

“Doc” Richardson, who founded BreakOut School in 

around the U.S.” 

Utah County, Utah specifically for children with ADHD 

and related diagnoses. Richardson holds a doctorate 

The CDC estimates that over 6 million children have in pharmacy and worked as a community pharmacist 

been diagnosed with ADHD, and 60 percent of them are for 20 years before deciding to become an education 

medicated for it. If many children don’t need their ADHD entrepreneur. He was concerned about children—and 

medication during summertime and then resume the especially boys—with ADHD being unable to flourish in a 

use of these powerful psychotropic drugs at the start conventional classroom. 

of the school year, that should send alarm bells ringing. 

Schooling is the problem. 

“The families that come to BreakOut School, many of 

them are just at their wits’ end,” said Richardson. “They 

Indeed, as Boston College psychology professor Dr. 

find that this system has been trying to jam the square 

Peter Gray asserts: “What does it mean to have ADHD? peg into that round hole and all they see are splinters 

Basically, it means failure to adapt to the conditions of occurring.” 

standard schooling.” 

I always trust parents first, and back them in their decisions regarding what is right for their children. But I hope that 

more parents who may have children with ADHD characteristics consider that standard schooling may be the real 

problem. 

Fortunately, there are now so many more schooling alternatives for these parents to explore, including BreakOut 

School, which is a recognized, low-cost private school in Utah that participates in several Utah school choice programs, 

including the new Utah Fits All Scholarship. This recently-passed universal education savings account (ESA) program 

provides each K-12 child in Utah with access to about $8,000 per year to use toward approved educational expenses, 

including microschools like BreakOut School whose tuition hovers right around that ESA amount. Today, more children 

have access to standard schooling substitutes than ever before. 

Several years ago, I wrote about how Thomas Edison would have been given Adderall today. When he was eight 

years old, his teacher called him “addled” and by all accounts he was unable to adapt to the conditions of standard 

schooling. His mother found the “addled” label to be unacceptable. She removed young Thomas from school after only 

a few weeks and homeschooled him from then on using a largely self-directed approach. “She understood me; she let 

me follow my bent,” Edison recalled.[1] 

Years later, as Edison was securing his place as one of America’s greatest inventors with more than 1,000 US patents— 

including for the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the incandescent light bulb—a chemist working in his 

massive New Jersey laboratory said: “Had Edison been formally schooled, he might not have had the audacity to create 

such impossible things...”[2] 

Today, as millions of children return to school—and some return to potent medications— it’s worth asking: Is standard 

schooling really worth it? Or, is there something better that will allow each child to follow his or her own bent and 

create those impossible things? 

— 

[1] Josephson, Matthew. Edison: A Biography. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1992, p. 22. 



88 

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The bill would “prevent states from suspending, revoking 

or denying state professional licenses solely because 

borrowers are behind on their federal student loan 

payments,” according to a press release issued last week 

by Rubio’s office. The legislation, which would give states 

two years after its passage to comply, offers protections 

for driver’s licenses, teacher’s licenses, professional 

licenses, and “a similar form of licensing to lawful 

employment in a certain field.” 

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6, 2019 

CAREY WEDLER 

Struggling to Pay Back Your Student Loans? These States 

Will Revoke Your Job License 

Student loan debt is one of the biggest burdens to 

young Americans, recently ballooning to $1.5 trillion and 

topping car and credit card debt. Millions are struggling 

to repay money they borrowed for an education they 

were told would set them up for financial success, but 

many states across the country have barred individuals 

from working if they have not yet paid off their loans. 

Fourteen states across the country currently impose 

policies to suspend, deny, or revoke occupational 

licenses from borrowers, preventing them from working 

and, ultimately, fully paying off their loans. This practice 

applies to a wide range of professions, from massage 

therapists, barbers, and firefighters to psychologists, 

lawyers, and real estate brokers. 

License Revoked 

With over 8.9 million recipients of federal student loans 

reportedly in default and as much as 40 percent of 

student loan borrowers at risk of defaulting on their 

payments by 2023, these restrictive policies only make it 

more difficult for them to work their way out of debt. 

In one recent example, last month 900 Florida health 

care workers received notices from the Florida Board 

of Health notifying them that if they didn’t repay their 

student loan debt, they would have their licenses 

suspended. Denise Thorman, a former certified nursing 

assistant in the state, lost her license last year because 

she fell behind on her payments. 

Millions are struggling to repay money they borrowed for an education they were told 

would set them up for financial success, but many states across the country have barred 

90 

“Your license is gone, your livelihood’s gone, the care of 

your patients is gone. How fair is that?” she told local 

ABC affiliate WFTS last month. 

The degree of enforcement of these laws varies from 

state to state, but those with such rules nonetheless 

claim the right to revoke professional licenses. In 2017, 

The New York Times reported there were “at least 8,700 

cases in which licenses were taken away or put at risk of 

suspension in recent years” due to student loan defaults, 

“although that tally almost certainly understates the true 

number.” 

Fourteen states currently assert their authority to 

rescind occupational licenses over unpaid loans: 

California, Hawaii, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, 

Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Arkansas, Minnesota, 

Tennessee, Massachusetts, Iowa, and South Dakota, 

Iowa, and South Dakota. Iowa’s laws allow the revocation 

of all state-issued licenses, like driver’s licenses, while 

South Dakota can revoke driver’s, hunting, and fishing 

licenses, along with camping and park permits. 

A National Burden 

For many Americans, the opportunity to work in a 

specialized field was the reason they opted to go into 

debt in the first place. loans. 

Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) recently 

partnered to introduce the Protecting Job Opportunities for 

Borrowers (Protecting JOBs) Act (S.609). This is the second time 

they have proposed this type of legislation. 

“It is wrong to threaten a borrower’s livelihood by 

rescinding a professional license from those who are 

struggling to repay student loans, and it deprives hardworking Americans of dignified work,” Rubio said when announcing the 

legislation. 

Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) recently partnered to introduce the Protecting Job 

Opportunities for Borrowers (Protecting JOBs) Act (S.609). This is the second time they have proposed this type of 

legislation. The bill would “prevent states from suspending, revoking or denying state professional licenses solely 

because borrowers are behind on their federal student loan payments,” according to a press release issued last week 

by Rubio’s office. The legislation, which would give states two years after its passage to comply, offers protections for 

driver’s licenses, teacher’s licenses, professional licenses, and “a similar form of licensing to lawful employment in a 

certain field.” 

“It is wrong to threaten a borrower’s livelihood by rescinding a professional license from those who are struggling 

to repay student loans, and it deprives hardworking Americans of dignified work,” Rubio said when announcing the 

legislation. 

IJ authors analyzed data from 36 states to calculate the burden of these government-issued licenses, estimating they 

cost Americans two million jobs annually. Further, they reported that “[b]y a conservative measure of lost economic 

value, licensing may cost the national economy $6 billion. However, a broader and likely more accurate measure 

suggests the true cost may reach $184 billion or more.” 

To their credit, some states have already moved to do away with these restraints on economic freedom. Forbes 

reports that last year, “Alaska, Illinois, North Dakota, Virginia, and Washington all eliminated their default suspension 

laws for job licenses,” and eight more are considering similar legislation this year. The Kentucky legislature just passed 

a bill to prevent licensing agencies from suspending borrowers’ professional credentials. 

The Root of the Problem 

The federal government has played a central role in the student loan debt crisis and exploding costs of higher 

education. As FEE recently explained, the Higher Education Act of 1965, which put taxpayers on the hook for the loans 

made by private lending institutions, helped create the higher education bubble, which has seen a 1,600 percent 

increase in costs since its passage. 

By the 1980s, student loan defaults were already becoming a problem. In 

1990, the Department of Education followed the lead of a handful of states, 

like Texas and Illinois, which had already started imposing laws to restrict 

borrowers’ licenses if they fell behind on payments. “Deny professional 

licenses to defaulters until they take steps to repayment,” the department 

said in its lengthy guidance entitled “Reducing Student Loans Defaults: A 

Plan for Action.” 

Nearly 30 years later, student loans continue to weigh down individuals and the economy as a whole. That the federal 

government issues loans to people, assisting their plunge into debt, and then advocates barring them from working to 

pay them off only adds insult to injury. 



91



The case focused on two single mothers in Missouri who were given jail sentences when their children, who were in 

kindergarten and first grade, were each absent from school for roughly 15 days during the 2021/2022 academic year. 

We may see this criminalization of parents accelerate in the coming months as states and school districts try to find 

the allegedly “missing” children who have left district schools since the pandemic response began in 2020. Again, it is 

likely to be low-income parents and those from historically marginalized groups who will be targeted for truancy. 

Compulsory schooling is incompatible with freedom, as Thomas Jefferson himself recognized. While promoting broad 

educational offerings, free to the poor, and noting that a society could not be both free and ignorant, Jefferson 

opposed forced education. “It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, 

than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of 

the father,” Jefferson wrote in 1817. 

Instead of criminalizing parents whose children miss school, sometimes for heartbreaking reasons such as bullying, 

we should seek instead to eliminate compulsory schooling statutes and free families from the government’s coercive 

clutches. In the absence of these laws, a robust, diverse, and decentralized education ecosystem would emerge that 

would be grounded in consent over coercion and defined by variety over monopoly. 

TUESDAY, AUGUST 22, 2023 


Compulsory Schooling Laws Have Got To Go 

When Massachusetts passed the nation’s first 

compulsory school attendance law in 1852, parents were 

mandated to send their children to school under a legal 

threat of force. Today, that threat remains stronger than 

ever. 

Prior to that law, and those that followed in all other 

US states over the subsequent decades, cities and 

towns were compelled to provide schooling for those 

who wanted it, but parents were under no obligation 

to use those schools. Many didn’t, choosing instead to 

send their children to private schools, church or charity 

schools, “dame schools” in their neighbor’s kitchen, 

apprenticeships for older children and teens, or to 

homeschool. 

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Massachusetts 

Board of Education secretary, Horace Mann, and 

other education reformers who were captivated by 

the Prussian schooling system and its embrace of 

compulsion and conformity, convinced legislatures to 

widen compulsion from municipalities to moms and 

dads. 

There was a broad and open anti-immigrant sentiment, 

especially in mid-nineteenth century Boston, that paved 

the way for compulsory schooling statutes in order to 

inculcate dominant Anglo-Saxon Protestant customs in 

newly-arrived, predominantly Irish Catholic immigrants. 

“Those now pouring in upon us, in masses of thousands 

upon thousands, are wholly of another kind in morals 

and intellect,” mourned the Massachusetts state 

legislature regarding the new Boston immigrants, 

two years before passing its pioneering compulsory 

Since their inception, compulsory school attendance laws have been used to criminalize 

parents—particularly low-income parents and those from marginalized groups. 

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attendance law. 

Mann, who homeschooled his own three children while 

working to mandate schooling for others, explained that 

strong parental bonds are obstacles to state education. 

He wrote in his fourth lecture on education in 1840: 

“Nature supplies a perennial force, unexhausted, 

inexhaustible, re-appearing whenever and wherever the 

parental relation exists. We, then, who are engaged in 

the sacred cause of education, are entitled to look upon 

all parents as having given hostages to our cause.” 

Since their inception, compulsory school attendance laws 

have been used to criminalize parents—particularly lowincome 

parents and parents from marginalized groups, 

such as immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities. In 

the wake of nineteenth century compulsory schooling 

laws, Catholic parents began sending their children 

to parochial schools to avoid the overtly Protestant 

teachings and texts of the purportedly secular public 

schools. 

Disturbed by parents opting out of public schools, 

Oregon banned attendance at private and parochial 

schools in the early twentieth century. That action 

ultimately led to the landmark US Supreme Court 

decision, Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), that famously 

proclaimed “the child is not the mere creature of the 

State.” 

Compulsory school attendance laws continue to terrorize 

parents and weaken families. Last week, the Missouri 

Supreme Court upheld a state law that allows parents of 

children who regularly miss school to be jailed. 

Some states, such as West Virginia, have taken initial steps to loosen compulsory school attendance laws by widening 

exemptions. More state policymakers should follow suit—or better yet, get rid of these cruel laws altogether. 



93



Even these low-cost schooling alternatives can be financially inaccessible for some families, which is why school choice 

policies that enable a portion of education funding to go to students directly for approved expenses are so helpful. 

In Springfield, for example, the school district spends more than $18,600 of taxpayer money per student each year. 

Even a small amount of that funding given to parents who want to exit an assigned district school would go a long way 

toward covering the cost of various schooling alternatives. 

Massachusetts doesn’t have private school choice, but many states now do, including nine that have passed universal 

or near-universal choice programs over the past three years. In Utah, for example, one of the states that passed 

a universal education savings account program this year, all K-12 students will be eligible to receive about $8,000 

per year to use on an assortment of educational expenses, including for hybrid homeschooling and microschooling 

programs. 

My heart aches for moms like Negrón who don’t want to send their children to an assigned district school, but also 

don’t want to go to jail for violating compulsory schooling laws and can’t find or fund a schooling alternative. 

Fortunately, education entrepreneurs are steadily building more low-cost, learner-focused education options across 

the US, and those options are becoming even more abundant and accessible in states with robust school choice 

policies. 

SUNDAY, AUGUST 20, 2023 It’s back-to-school season and some parents aren’t happy about that. 


To The Mom Who Doesn’t Want to Send Her Kids to School 

It’s back-to-school season and some parents aren’t happy Grace Prep was launched in 2012 by two homeschooling 

about that. 

moms who wanted more consistent structure and social 

Take the example of Rousmery Negrón, a single mom of interactions for their children within a faith-based 

two boys who was featured in a recent Associated Press learning environment. Their initial class had seven 

article on chronic absenteeism. After being insulted students. Today, Grace Prep serves 72 K-8 students with 

by his teacher and placed in a special classroom for 11 staff members, and costs just over $4,000 a year, with 

students with alleged hyperactivity, her middle schooler scholarships available to further defray fees. 

didn’t want to go to his assigned district school in 

“I think parents want to take back a little bit of control 

Springfield, Massachusetts, located in the western part of over their children’s education,” said Jenna Wertheimer 

the state. 

who leads Grace Prep and has seen its enrollment triple 

since 2020. There are dozens of University Model® hybrid 

Negrón, who is from Puerto Rico and works as a school schools across the US, and three in Massachusetts, 

cook, would rather not send him. She told the AP that including one near Springfield, where Negrón lives. 

she’d love to homeschool her boys if she could but has 

to work full-time and doesn’t want them to miss out on There are also low-cost secular options for families who 

social connections. “If I had another option, I wouldn’t cannot or don’t want to assume full-time homeschooling 

send them to school,” said Negrón. 

responsibilities. North Star is a self-directed learning 

center for tweens and teens located in Sunderland, 

For this mom and many like her, there are more low-cost Massachusetts, about 30 miles from Springfield, 

education options available than ever that blend the best that homeschoolers can use as a full-time schooling 

of homeschooling and traditional schooling. 

alternative. With a sliding scale tuition structure, 

For instance, hybrid homeschooling programs, such as and a maximum cost of $9,500 a year with generous 

the University Model®, have been gaining in popularity scholarships, North Star is a fraction of the cost of 

for more than two decades and provide affordable 

traditional, secular private schools in Massachusetts. 

education options for homeschoolers. 

Launched in 1996 by Kenneth Danford, a former public 

At Grace Preparatory Academy, a University Model® school teacher who became disillusioned with the 

hybrid homeschool just outside of Boston, students conventional school system, North Star offers regular 

attend drop-off classes with hired teachers two days a classes and mentoring for homeschoolers who want 

week, from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and then continue to to chart their own path to adulthood. In 2013, Danford 

work on their curriculum at home with their parents or cofounded Liberated Learners, a global network of North 

in self-organized cooperatives. 

Star-model hybrid homeschool programs. 

94 

Back-to-school time should not be filled with dread by either students or their parents. Childhood learning can and 

should be joyful, and there are now many affordable educational environments that foster that joy. 



95



“I see these regulations as particularly threatening to new and would-be education entrepreneurs,” said Morrison, who also has an 

MBA. “Increased regulations for nonpublic schools threaten models like ours as they shift the focus to compliance for the sake of 

checking boxes, versus focusing on encouraging, embracing, and learning from new models and what they can offer to the education 

landscape as a whole.” Morrison added that the previous regulations for Tennessee private schools, especially around accreditation 

requirements, already made it difficult to get programs like hers up and running. 

Now, these new requirements force private schools to look even more like public schools, reducing their autonomy and making 

it much harder to introduce unconventional teaching and learning methods or implement original ideas. “I assume these shifts in 

requirements are to ensure a standard of educational quality that all children are entitled to but, unfortunately, those standards are 

often outdated and do not reflect the innovation and ever-evolving best practices seen in modern education,” said Morrison. 

For example, the new approval rules requiring a private school to have 10 or more students enrolled could prevent the emergence 

of microschools, which often begin with a tiny number of students. “Had this requirement been in place at our inception, our school 

would not exist,” said Morrison. “Although our enrollment reached 10 students by February, and grew by 500 percent by our second 

year, with this requirement in place, we could not have been cleared for operation. There would have been no opportunity to 

introduce an unconventional educational model.” Morrison’s school now enrolls 37 students and is continuing to grow. 

SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 2023 


In This Business-Friendly State, Why Is It So Hard To Start A 

Private School? 

Entrepreneurship is challenging in any sector, but 

education entrepreneurs often confront regulatory 

roadblocks and bureaucratic barriers that make 

launching a new school or innovative learning model 

particularly difficult. 

Some of these roadblocks and barriers include 

occupational licensing requirements for new school 

founders, such as those in Nevada that prevent any nonstate-licensed 

teacher or administrator from opening 

a secular private school. They can also include state 

accreditation requirements, like those in Iowa, that can 

prevent some schools, especially learner-centered ones, 

from operating. 

These regulations can constrain the supply of new 

and creative schools, artificially limiting the education 

options available to families. This is particularly 

problematic now, as more states introduce or expand 

school choice programs that enable families dissatisfied 

with their assigned district school to exit and find an 

alternative. If existing or new regulations prevent those 

alternatives from sprouting, then the sustained success 

of school choice could be stymied. 

This state ranks in the top 3 for business-friendliness but in the bottom 3 for ease of starting 

a private school. 

6.5 hours a day, 180 days a year that can prevent flexible 

and creative scheduling. Additional annual assessment 

and state reporting protocols were added, and schools 

with fewer than 10 students were prohibited from 

getting started. These rules go into effect this academic 

year and can impact emerging schools like The Lab 

School of Memphis. 

Launched in August 2021 by former public school 

teacher, Coi Morrison, The Lab School of Memphis is a 

small, regionally-accredited, secular K-6 private school 

that emphasizes project-based, learner-driven education 

in a nurturing environment with no grades or state 

testing. It was honored as a 2022 national semi-finalist 

for the prestigious Yass Prize for education innovation, 

as well as a VELA Education Fund “Next Step” grant 

recipient. 

For states like Tennessee, which earlier this month ranked #3 in CNBC’s list of the Top States for Business 2023, making it easier for 

education entrepreneurs to start and scale their small businesses should be a priority. Reducing regulatory obstacles is a good first 

step. “It is now time for those who claim to be pro-business to get behind education innovators and entrepreneurs,” urged Morrison. 

Along with Nevada and Iowa, Tennessee is another state 

where it can be difficult to start a private school due to 

various accreditation and approval requirements. These 

regulations recently got even tighter. 

Last year, the Tennessee Department of Education 

revised its rules for non-public school approval. Among 

the revisions were delineated seat time requirements of 

96 

Coi Morrison is the founder of The Lab School 

of Memphis. 


97 

https://fee.org/



As a result, borrowers in such plans typically see their balance grow over time rather than being paid down.” 

The federal government took over nearly all student loans, forced students to make years of payments only to fall further behind, 

then handed the enlarged debt to the US taxpayer. The ill-advised policies began as far back as 1978 with the Middle Income Student 

Assistant Act, which let all college students accrue student loan debt. A series of bills expanded this web of indebtedness to an everlarger 

percentage of Americans — and Joe Biden supported every single legislative misstep. He also made it all-but impossible to 

discharge student loans in bankruptcy, ensuring that graduates’ hopelessly accumulating loan payments went on endlessly — and 

that college administrators continued to collect. 

If someone wanted to destroy a generation’s hope in their ability to get ahead, he couldn’t have devised a better system. 

As the French wag said, that policy is “worse than a crime; it’s a mistake.” The majority of student loans are now income-based 

according to the CBO, and the loans the government would issue between 2020 and 2029 will cost taxpayers an estimated $82.9 

billion. All this ignores the fact that Uncle Sam has proved a poor accountant. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report 

released in July found the Department of Education predicted that student loans would generate $114 billion for the federal 

government; they instead lost $197 billion — a $311 billion error, mostly due to incorrect analysis. 

MONDAY, AUGUST 29, 2022 

BEN JOHNSON 

How the US Government Created the Student Loan Crisis 

President Joe Biden unveiled a sweeping plan on 

Wednesday to let delinquent student loan borrowers 

transfer tens of thousands of dollars in debt to 

taxpayers. If he were a biblically minded leader, 

Biden would have used his nationally televised press 

conference to repent of his role in creating the student 

loan crisis in the first place. 

Biden’s student loan bailout lets individuals write off 

$20,000 in unpaid student loans if they received Pell 

Grants or $10,000 if they did not. The plan is open 

to households that make up to $250,000 a year or 

individuals who make $125,000. It would also reduce 

the number of people who have to make student loan 

payments at all, as well as the amount and time they 

must pay before US taxpayers pick up the tab for their 

full loan. 

While much of the commentary has focused on students 

who refused to make their loan payments, few have 

discussed how successive presidential administrations 

set those students up for failure. The federal government 

largely nationalized the student loan industry in 2010 via 

a piece of legislation related to Obamacare, the “Health 

Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.” The US 

government now holds 92 percent of all student loans 

— and the nation’s total student debt has more than 

doubled, from $811 billion in April 2010 to $1.748 trillion 

in April 2022. 

Part of the reason the figures have surged — and 

students start life so indebted — is due to progressive 

policies that made it impossible for most people to ever 

pay off their student loans. In their haste to have the US 

If someone wanted to destroy a generation’s hope in their ability to get ahead, he couldn’t 

have devised a better system than the federal government’s income-based repayment 

plans. 

98 

taxpayer underwrite the maximum amount of college 

tuition, they transformed most student loans from a 

fixed-rate loan — like a mortgage or car loan — to a 

plan based on the student’s post-graduation income. 

Gradually, the borrower’s share of his college loans 

shrank, while the taxpayer’s increased. 

The first income-based repayment plan — the William 

D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program, established in 

July 1994 under the Clinton administration — required 

students to pay up to 20 percent of their discretionary 

income for 25 years; any remaining balance would be 

paid by taxpayers. The George W. Bush administration 

passed the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 

2007, which let graduates pay 15 percent of their income 

above 150 percent of the federal poverty line. The 

Obama-Biden administration reduced that to 10 percent 

and wrote off unpaid undergraduate loans after 20 years 

under a series of new loan policies between 2012 and 

2014. 

These policies made student loan debt effectively 

permanent and unpayable. 

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) spelled out 

the process in a thorough, February 2020 report. CBO 

researchers followed college graduates who began 

paying off student loans in 2012. “By the end of 2017, 

over 75% of those borrowers owed more than they had 

originally borrowed. By contrast, the median balance 

among borrowers in fixed-payment plans decreased 

steadily,” they noted. “Loans are often repaid more 

slowly under income-driven plans because the required 

payments are too small to cover the accruing interest. 

Only the federal government could lose money on an industry that has grown at four times the rate of inflation. As Milton Friedman 

once observed, “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.” 

And, of course, those calculations didn’t consider the possibility that Biden would transfer a hefty part of that amount to productive 

US taxpayers, who cannot default from compulsory taxation. 

Biden and former President Barack Obama should repent for fastening this debt burden to the younger generation, then increasing 

the unfathomable national debt for all Americans. President Biden’s announcement on Wednesday afternoon should have seen him 

bow before the audience, whisper a “mea culpa,” and offer the write-offs as an act of restitution and reparation for the bad policies 

he supported for more than four decades. To fit proper biblical restitution, the payment would have to be made to the 75 percent of 

students who took out government-created, income-based student loans since the Obama administration — especially those who 

made their payments. He would also have to have the legal and constitutional authority to redistribute other people’s money, which 

he does not. But if he did, that arrangement would at least be fair. 

But in the Bible, repentance (μετάνοια) means to change one’s mind and behavior. Biden’s new student loan bailout did not represent 

heartfelt repentance but hard-hearted defiance. Instead of turning the ship of state back toward safety, Biden cried, “Damn the 

torpedoes, full speed ahead!” Rather than abandon the income-based student loan bondage he and Barack Obama designed, he 

further reduced the minimum payments to 5 percent of new graduates’ discretionary income, raised discretionary income to 225 

percent of the poverty level, and let students transfer their unpaid loans to taxpayers after 10 years. That will consign even more 

graduates to a life of hopeless interest-service payments and force taxpayers to eat an even larger percentage of defaulted, inflated 

debt. 

That only makes sense if the progressives intend to collapse the system, as many believed they designed Obamacare to force the 

US healthcare system into a death spiral, and replace it with a government-run socialist alternative. Obama admitted he favored 

socialized medicine in 2008. “If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system,” 

Obama told a campaign rally. But for the moment, he would tinker with the existing system until Americans “decide that there are 

other ways for us to provide care more effectively.” 

Is it possible this is the next step toward government-funded college? Whatever it is, it is not the road back to economic sanity. 

Biden and Obama should repent. And if they will not humble themselves, voters should humble those who support their immoral 

policies at the ballot box. 



99



Test scores need boosting and more schooling is the answer, goes the narrative. Unlike the “summer slide” story of 

yesteryear, today’s pandemic learning loss interventions are flush with cash, thanks to billions of dollars in federal 

Covid relief funds. Questioning the underlying premise of these interventions by stating that schooling is not the same 

as learning, and testing is a short-term and often artificial marker of memorized knowledge, is simply not profitable. 

It takes a bold paradigm shift to move away from the traditional model of forced schooling and recognize the many other, more 

authentic and joyful ways of being educated. Some of these ways look nothing like schooling. 

In my podcast episode this week, Karema Akilah discusses the value of unschooling and self-directed education as an alternative 

to the conventional classroom. A former teacher in the Maryland public schools, Akilah has been homeschooling for 20 years and 

unschooling for the past 12. She is the founder of The Genius School and the Genii DAO application, and works with families to 

“deschool” by helping them to shed their assumptions about learning while embracing non-coercive, self-directed education. 

“I ask parents, teachers, and kids: who do you never get to be in school?” said Akilah in our interview. “I’ve met with hundreds of 

families for the past three years and the answer is always the same: I never get to be free to be myself. Then when we talk about 

deschooling, I explain that the thing that stands in the way of children, parents, and teachers being able to be who they really want 

to be—which is authentic and free—are the expectations of others, the expectations of traditional school. That’s why I believe in selfdirected 

learning.” 

SATURDAY, JULY 22, 2023 


The Solution to Pandemic Learning Loss Is Less Schooling, 

Not More 

The latest data dump from the Nation’s Report Card 

reveals declining academic performance among US 

students. As with previous releases showing the same 

trend, especially over the past three years, the solution 

proposed by many education reformers and advocates is 

to double-down on the amount of schooling and schoollike 

activities students get. 

“The greatest challenge is finding extra hours for 

supplementary instruction,” writes the author of a recent 

New Yorker/ProPublica article explaining some of the 

strategies that have been adopted by school districts 

to fix alleged “pandemic learning loss.” These include 

“high-dosage tutoring,” longer school days, more summer 

school programs, and year-round schooling. 

The problem with proposed learning loss remedies is 

that they view more schooling as the pathway toward 

more learning, rather than challenging the whole notion 

of schooling itself. Children need less schooling, more 

time to play, and more freedom to learn. 

As Boston College psychology professor Peter Gray says 

in his latest Substack: “We have created a world in which 

children are monitored and controlled by adults nearly 

all the time. They are spending more time in school and 

schoolwork at home than ever before. Schooling itself 

has become ever more rigid with ever less opportunities 

for play or anything creative.” Gray and his colleagues 

argue in a recent paper in The Journal of Pediatrics that 

this childhood play deprivation is contributing to the 

The problem with proposed ‘learning loss’ remedies is that they view more schooling as 

the pathway toward more learning, rather than challenging the whole notion of schooling 

itself. 

100 

current youth mental health crisis. 

It’s not that learning loss remedies don’t work. It is true 

that if students are subjected to more intensive drilling 

of schooled content, and particularly content to be 

measured on standardized tests, they will perform better 

on those tests. Last month, Education Week reported 

on how “high-dosage tutoring” during the school day 

improved student test scores. 

But are those children really learning? Sure, they may be 

memorizing content for a test, but do they really know 

and retain that content? 

I have been writing for years about how “summer slide” 

does not exist, explaining that alleged learning loss over 

summer vacations exposes the folly of today’s coercive 

schooling model. Students memorize and regurgitate 

schooled content during the academic year and then 

quickly forget it. This was certainly my experience in 

school, and I bet it was true for many of us. 

Moreover, after we graduated from high school, how 

many of us really remembered much of what we had 

been taught? What is a covalent bond? What year did 

the Roman Empire fall? Chances are that the content we 

remember is the content that is most meaningful to us 

and most connected to our interests and vocations. 

Now, with all the chatter about alleged pandemic 

learning loss in the wake of school closures and remote 

learning, the same tired tale is being told again. 

As Akilah explains, self-directed learning can come in many forms, from families choosing unschooling as their approach to 

homeschooling, to joining a self-directed microschool such as Agile Learning Centers, to enrolling in a Sudbury-model school. 

Fortunately, there are now many more alternatives to conventional schooling that families can consider, and they are more 

accessible than ever. Education entrepreneurs like Akilah are steadily building these alternatives and challenging the schooling 

status quo. 

Moving away from top-down, traditional models of education toward decentralized, learner-driven ones leads to deeper learning and 

mastery tied to an individual’s personal interests and goals. 

This learning can’t be lost because it is gained through freedom, not force. 



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Despite this evidence to the contrary, critics continue to assert that it’s affluent parents who are pulling their children from school 

for homeschooling, or gathering together with other families to create “learning pods.” These pods emerged last summer, as parents 

sought creative ways to provide safe social interaction for their children. Pods created an engaging learning environment that 

included parents rotating homes and taking turns teaching, or collaborating to hire an educator to facilitate a curriculum. 

A modern twist on time-honored homeschool co-ops, learning pods can be a low-cost schooling alternative for many families. 

For Allison Fried in Fairfax, Virginia the private homeschooling learning pod she organized in her home’s basement with five other 

families has been “amazing”—and much less expensive than her child’s previous preschool. 

“The cost per family and what we would be paying out of pocket was literally 50% of what we were paying the year before for private 

preschool,” she recently told Marketplace. Her pod costs $1,000 a month per family for the teacher, learning supplies, and cleaning. 

These homeschooling learning pods are an innovative, parent-driven response to pandemic policies and school closures. They are 

an ideal example of spontaneous, decentralized, free-market education solutions that meet current demand. They involve free 

people coming together in a process of voluntary association and exchange to provide value that benefits everyone involved in the 

arrangement. 

Exasperatingly, many states were quick to slap on regulations that curtailed or prevented these small enterprises. Some states 

required the pods to be registered with government officials and limited their size and scope. Some required pods to be fully licensed 

as daycare providers. Others forbade pods from collecting fees. 

TUESDAY, MARCH 30, 2021 


New Census Data Show Homeschooling Tripled During the 

Pandemic—And One Key Group is Driving the Surge 

My daughter had a friend over this week whose parents 

just took her out of public school for homeschooling, and 

my neighbor recently unenrolled her child from public 

school to homeschool for the rest of the academic year. 

These families are much more than local anecdotes— 

they are representative of a national trend. 

New Census Bureau data show that 11.1 percent of K-12 

students are now being independently homeschooled. 

This is a large uptick from 5.4 percent at the start of the 

school shutdowns last spring, and 3.3 percent in the 

years preceding the pandemic. 

These new homeschooling families are also reflective 

of surging homeschooling numbers in certain parts of 

the country. Here in the Boston-Cambridge-Newton, 

MA-NH area designated by the Census, homeschooling 

increased from 0.9 percent last April-May to 8.9 percent 

in September-October. In Massachusetts more generally, 

the homeschooling rate soared from 1.5 percent in the 

spring of 2020 to 12.1 percent last fall. 

In its Household Pulse Survey, the Census Bureau 

counted homeschoolers as students whose parents had 

officially removed them from a school or never enrolled 

them to begin with. This distinguishes independent 

homeschoolers from the millions of students doing 

home-based remote schooling during the pandemic 

response. 

In addition to massive overall growth in homeschooling, 

the survey results also revealed increasing 

homeschooling rates across all races and ethnicities. 

While the homeschooling population has become 

Once they experience the full freedom and flexibility of homeschooling, many parents and 

children won’t ever want to return to a coercive classroom. 

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more demographically diverse over the past decade, 

the Census Bureau found that the number of black 

homeschoolers increased nearly fivefold between spring 

and fall of 2020, from 3.3 percent to 16.1 percent. This 

black homeschooling rate is slightly higher than the 

approximately 15 percent of black students in the overall 

K-12 public school population. 

The new Census data confirm what previous surveys 

have shown while also suggesting a tripling of the 

homeschooling population from its pre-pandemic levels. 

In August, Gallup reported that 10 percent of families 

expected to homeschool their children this academic 

year. And in November, Education Week estimated the 

number of current homeschoolers at nine percent. Prior 

to the pandemic, approximately 1.7 million students 

were homeschooled, according to the most recent 

federal data from 2016. The Census data now puts that 

number at over 5 million homeschooled students, which 

is comparable to the number of K-12 students typically 

enrolled in private schools. 

This year’s new homeschoolers are also more likely 

to come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. The 

Education Week survey last fall found that more lowerincome 

families were choosing homeschooling during 

the pandemic response than higher-income families, 

challenging the myth that homeschooling families are 

more affluent than others. The New York Times pointed 

out this myth in July, explaining that “the population 

of home-schoolers — before the pandemic — was less 

affluent than average.” 

Policymakers are starting to push back against these regulations. In Pennsylvania, a comprehensive school choice bill is making its 

way to the legislature that, among other things, protects learning pods throughout the state. Specifically, the bill would “exempt 

Learning Pods from state, local, and district regulatory activity,” and make certain that parents and children who participate in 

learning pods “are not subject to undue surveillance, reporting, regulatory demands or harassment.” 

“Parents will go to great lengths to get their children the best education possible,” says Colleen Hroncich, a senior policy analyst at 

the Commonwealth Foundation in Pennsylvania. “With around 86% of Pennsylvania districts still hybrid or fully remote, learning 

pods have been a life saver for many families. Parents should not need permission from the state to get together to improve their 

children’s academic or social experiences.” 

Learning pods and other examples of education entrepreneurship should be cheered and championed. We should encourage 

more visionary parents and educators to design new learning models that provide alternatives to our entrenched and outdated 

government-controlled education system. When free from the fetters of government oversight and regulation and guided by the 

free market, these innovators will build educational solutions that are better, cheaper, more creative, more personalized, and more 

successful than coercive government schooling. 

FEE’s founder, Leonard Read, predicted what would happen in a free market in education, with parents empowered to guide their 

children’s education and innovative entrepreneurs free to serve both parents and children. Writing in 1964, before the rise of the 

modern homeschooling movement, Read said: 

“While one cannot know of the brilliant steps that would be taken by millions of education-conscious parents were they and not 

the government to have the educational responsibility, one can imagine the great variety of cooperative and private enterprises 

that would emerge. There would be thousands of private schools, large and small, not necessarily unlike some of the ones we now 

have. There would be tutoring arrangements of a variety and ingenuity impossible to foresee. No doubt there would be corporate 

and charitably financed institutions of chain store dimensions, dispensing reading, writing, and arithmetic at bargain prices. There 

would be competition, which is cooperation’s most useful tool! There would be a parental alertness as to what the market would 

have to offer. There would be a keen, active, parental responsibility for their children’s and their own educational growth.” 

Today’s learning pods and diverse homeschooling approaches show how such an uplifting vision could come true, 

especially if the government would get out of the way. 

Rising homeschooling rates and innovative learning models have been bright spots in an otherwise bleak year. 

Parents and educators responded to school shutdowns and related pandemic policies with individual effort and 

ingenuity. With many schools still closed this spring, and the strong probability that remote schooling will continue 

into next fall in many districts, homeschooling rates are likely to remain high. Once they experience the full freedom 

and flexibility of homeschooling, many parents and children won’t ever want to return to a coercive classroom. 



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The four learning styles include: visual learners, auditory learners, reading/writing learners, and kinesthetic learners. However, the 

idea of learning styles is not definitive. That is to say that you are not exclusively one type of learner or another. 

Research from Pashler et al. disputes the evidence of specific learning styles. 

Rather, these learning styles are preferences rather than “hard-coded.” This is to say that these preferred learning 

styles can change over time. When a specific learning style is preferred, it is easier for students to take in that 

information. For example, some students may prefer visual stimulation to emphasize a point, so graphs and charts 

may be useful. If this engages the students, they take more in. This inevitably affects educational outcomes. 

Kinaesthetic learners are probably the biggest anomaly in the classroom. For students who learn best by being active, 

the classroom is the last place to be. It is no wonder why there are always a few individuals who are consistently 

disengaged. These individuals are often sporty and have high levels of energy. The traditional football captain who 

struggles to maintain his place on course may spring to mind. By continuing along with this standardized type of 

schooling, we are putting millions at a disadvantage. 

SUNDAY, AUGUST 18, 2019 

PAUL BOYCE 

Schools Are Outdated. It’s Time For Reform 

The public education system we currently know has been 

around for more than 150 years. However, the basic 

schooling model remains the same. Roughly 20 to 30 kids 

of the same age are stuffed into a classroom and taught 

by one teacher. 

Even though the curricula have developed, the essence 

has stayed the same. Children are still taught in a 

standardized and industrialized way. As with anything 

that comes from centralized control, it is highly 

inefficient, bureaucratic, and wasteful. 

Yes, the overall educational system has changed in 

many regards. However, the way we are taught has 

not. A teacher at the front and the children seated is 

the optimal way to learn for some students, but others 

struggle in this environment. 

Children learn best in different ways. Some children are 

best suited to learn through visual stimulation. Others 

may learn best through hands-on education. The reality 

is that the current educational system doesn’t really 

accommodate any learning style, nor does it aim for 

anything other than high test scores. 

Let Children Be Children and Enhance Their Minds 

Children rarely are allowed to be children. Play is stifled. 

Students are crammed into a classroom and taught in 

a standardized way. Creativity is restricted. They aren’t 

allowed to harness their inquisitive minds. Questioning 

things is part of the analytic mind and a key to societal 

development, but this takes a backseat to examinations. 

The very nature of tests relies on memorization, 

repetition, and regurgitation: Tests infrequently harness 

By continuing along with this standardized type of schooling, we are putting millions at a 

disadvantage. 

104 

the analytical mind. They train students to know the 

answers. However, they don’t train them on how to find 

the answers. 

Faculty aspire to develop students’ thinking skills, but 

research shows that in practice, we tend to aim at facts 

and concepts in the disciplines, at the lowest cognitive 

levels, rather than the development of intellect or values. 

Critical thinking is key to creating free and individual 

minds. It is also increasingly important in today’s age, 

where the line between information and facts is so fine. 

In fact, 95 percent of statistics are made up. A critical 

mind will question where this actually came from. Where 

did this statistic come from? Is it actually reliable? 

The issue we have today is that students are taught to 

test. Whether the information makes sense or not is 

irrelevant as long as it is correct. This comes at a cost. 

Schools teach students what to think as opposed to how 

to think. There are important critical skills that aren’t 

taught. Do students truly question whatever they read or 

accept any claim blindly? Or, perhaps, do they accept it 

as long as it confirms their biases? The current system is 

failing because it is offering the wrong type of education. 

We must develop individual minds, not mindless 

zombies. 

Learning Styles 

Each child is unique in their own right. Each has a 

different personality and preferred way of learning. 

Under the current system, each child is bundled under 

one standardized umbrella. When considering the 

different types of learners, it is easy to see why some get 

left behind. 

Educational Stagnation 

Whether you buy into learning styles or not, it is evident that the current classroom system is outdated. Literacy 

rates have stagnated since 1971, while there has been no progress in math since 1990. So what are the causes of this 

stagnation? 

The New York Times would have you believe the issue is underfunding. Throwing more money at something is a 

classic proposal used by modern-day liberals. This problem cannot be solved with money alone, however. Kansas 

City, Missouri, provides us with a perfect example. It currently spends roughly 63 percent of its entire budget on 

schooling. Benefiting from the best-funded school facilities in the country, student performance has failed to improve. 

Furthermore, the US spends more on education than any other OECD country besides Norway. 

At the same time, it is receiving little value for the money. Outcomes are average, but mathematic results are 

particularly poor. Countries such as Vietnam, Hungary, and Slovakia score higher. 

Testing Is Outdated 

So why is testing such a bad thing? It teaches children how to absorb information. Children “learn for a test.” However, 

once the test is taken, is the information truly absorbed? How long does it stay present in the mind? Research by 

neurobiologists Blake Richards and Paul Frankland suggests it isn’t very long. 

According to the neurobiologists, the brain quickly disregards information that is no longer required. Forgetting is an 

evolutionary strategy to promote the survival of the species. Richards and Frankland state: 

From this perspective, forgetting is not necessarily a failure of memory. Rather, it may represent an investment in a 

more optimal mnemonic strategy. 

It is true that repetition can help with memory retention. However, if that specific memory is not recalled, it is 

eventually forgotten. Further research from Bacon and Stewart studied individual students for up to two years 

following course completion. They concluded that most of the knowledge gained during the course was lost within two 

years. 

It is clear that the current system is generally based upon memory—who can memorize the most information to 

prepare for the test. Is this really arming kids with the tools they need for adulthood? 

Potential Solutions 

One potential solution for education would be to start “formal” schooling at age seven. Research from the University 

of Cambridge concludes that there are benefits of later starts to formal education. This evidence relates to the 

contribution of playful experiences to children’s development as learners and the consequences of starting formal 

learning at the age of four to five years of age. 

There also needs to be a reduction in the level of testing. We have developed a system whereby teachers have a strong 

incentive to “teach to test.” It’s about memorizing as much information as possible rather than learning how to think. 

Furthermore, the testing culture is putting a strain on both teachers’ and students’ mental health. Test results are the 

be-all and end-all. It is for that reason that many teachers are already leaving the profession. Reforming this testing 

culture would not only reduce teacher and student stress but also relieve teacher turnover rates. 

Thirdly, school vouchers are a viable option. There are already a number of states that have experimented with this. 

Mostly, there has been large success across the board. The benefits of school choice are widely documented. The vast 

majority of existing studies find positive effects. Not only are test scores improved, but graduation rates and civic 

engagement are also enhanced. 



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“Even though a lot of times the teachers would try and help, I would just hear the way that they were speaking to 

students. And oftentimes it was just hurtful, telling kids that they weren’t ever going to be anything. That’s just very 

disrespectful. I’d see some teachers even grab children, and once I had my own children, I just started thinking about 

how that could be my child, like that’s somebody’s baby,” Goff told me on this week’s LiberatED podcast episode. 

She taught for two more years while homeschooling and then quit in 2021 to launch Creative Space, a child-centered 

learning center for homeschoolers located on Long Island. “I just couldn’t keep turning the other cheek seeing that,” 

said Goff. “Each day it just got more and more soul-crushing to go to work,” she added. 

Like so many homeschooling parents, Goff wanted a more nurturing, learner-driven, respectful educational 

environment for her own children. As a teacher, she also wanted it for other children as well. Becoming an education 

entrepreneur enabled her to create a learning model that would support and inspire childhood curiosity and selfdetermination 

while emphasizing core academic content. She currently serves over 20 homeschooled learners. 

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2023 


No, John Oliver, Homeschooling Doesn’t Need More 

Regulation 

Those of us who have homeschooled for years are 

accustomed to periodic calls for greater regulation of 

homeschooling. Whether it’s a Harvard professor or NPR, 

the hackneyed hollers to regulate homeschoolers remain 

unconvincing. 

Joining the tired chorus is comedian John Oliver, who 

earlier this week hosted an episode of his “Last Week 

Tonight” HBO show calling for more homeschool 

regulation. 

“It does seem like giving parents a get-out-of-all-scrutinyfree 

no-questions-asked card just isn’t the answer 

here,” said Oliver, “because being a parent doesn’t 

automatically make someone moral and being with a 

parent doesn’t automatically make a child safe and the 

truth is a few extra security measures would not hurt the 

many parents who homeschool their children responsibly 

but they definitely safeguard against those who use 

personal liberty as an excuse to neglect or harm.” 

The issue with regulation in general, and homeschooling 

regulation in particular, is who decides? Creating these 

homeschooling “safeguards,” as Oliver urges, grants that 

power to the State, not parents. Is it “neglect or harm” 

to teach creationism to children? Is it “neglect or harm” 

to teach children that they can change their gender? 

Parents may have their own, deeply-held beliefs on both 

of those issues, and a multitude of others, and should 

be free to raise and educate their children accordingly, 

without State interference. 

When it comes to clear examples of child abuse, we 

Many parents choose homeschooling specifically because of the harms they believe are 

caused by public schooling. 

106 

already have solid laws against that and parents 

suspected of such abuse should be vigorously 

prosecuted. But to place an entire group— 

homeschooling parents—under anticipatory scrutiny 

presumes guilt over innocence. While there are horrible 

examples of parents, including homeschooling parents, 

who abuse their children, research suggests that 

homeschooling does not lead to statistically significant 

differences in child mistreatment. 

There is also no compelling evidence that greater 

regulation of homeschooling families makes children 

safer—but it could make children less safe. Making it 

harder to homeschool could, for instance, make it more 

difficult for children who are being bullied in school or 

dealing with school-related mental health issues to get 

out. 

Indeed, many parents choose homeschooling specifically 

because of the harms they believe are caused by public 

schooling. According to the US Department of Education, 

the top motivator for homeschooling parents is “concern 

about the environment of other schools, including safety, 

drugs, and negative peer pressure.” More recently, 

EdChoice found that student safety is a key priority in 

parents’ educational decision-making, especially for 

homeschooling parents. Protecting a child’s well-being is 

a common catalyst for homeschooling. “School was very 

dehumanizing,” said Rachel Goff, a New York City public 

school teacher for 16 years who pulled her own children 

from school in 2019 for homeschooling while still working 

as a public school teacher. 

Adding layers of homeschool regulations would not only infringe on parents’ rights to direct the education and 

upbringing of their children, it would also halt the growth of joyful learning environments like Creative Space that 

are now sprouting all across the country. The US Census Bureau estimates that more than three million children are 

currently being homeschooled, which is well above pre-pandemic levels. Many of them attend new microschools or 

learning centers like Creative Space, with the majority of these programs founded by former public school teachers 

like Goff who’ve become disillusioned with conventional schooling. 

“I am excited by thousands of education entrepreneurs starting microschools, learning pods, hybrid schools, co-ops, 

and other unconventional learning environments,” said Michael Donnelly, a homeschooling parent of seven who is 

mocked in Oliver’s video while talking about homeschool science experiments. Donnelly was a senior counsel at the 

Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) advocating less regulation of homeschooling. He now serves as Vice 

President of the yes. every kid. foundation that supports education entrepreneurs and champions more decentralized, 

personalized education options for young people. “These innovative approaches better respect the inherent dignity of 

children by meeting their individual needs and interests,” he told me in a recent interview. “By removing burdensome 

regulations from all education—private as well as government-run—we can foster a dynamic and free marketplace 

where families and educators are trusted to meet the needs of children.” 

More regulation of homeschooling is unlikely to make children safer, but it could keep them trapped in unpleasant 

district schools and will certainly stifle the growth of innovative, child-centered learning models, such as microschools 

and pods. When it comes to protecting children’s well-being, look to parents and teachers—not the State—to do the 

best job. 



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CNE.news 

18-09-2023 

FRANCE RESTRICTS RIGHTS OF HOMESCHOOLING CHILDREN 

https://cne.news/article/3627-france-restricts-rights-of-homeschooling-children 

Christine Clarridge 

Sep 13, 2023 

WASHINGTON’S HOMESCHOOLING BOOM IS HERE TO STAY 

https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2023/09/13/washington-homeschooling-pandemic 

Lexi Lonas 

Dec 09, 2023 

HOMESCHOOLERS ‘VIGILANT’ OVER LATEST SCHOOL CHOICE WINS IN STATES 

https://thehill.com/homenews/education/4198330-homeschoolers-vigilant-over-latest-school-choice-wins-in-states/est-school-choice-wins-in-states/ 

Fox news 


SHANNON BREAM SITS DOWN WITH FAMILIES WHO CHOSE HOMESCHOOLING 

OVER TRADITIONAL EDUCATION 

https://www.foxnews.com/video/6336929890112 

Amy Halpern 


HOMESCHOOLING IN MONTGOMERY COUNTY GOT A PANDEMIC BOOST—THAT 

HAS STUCK 

https://moco360.media/2023/09/08/homeschooling-trend-spiked-in-montgomery-county-after-pandemic/ 

108 

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PAMELA CLARK, FOUNDER/EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AT 

NEW HEIGHTS EDUCATIONAL GROUP 

GREAT COMPANIES: HOW DID YOU GET YOUR IDEA OR CONCEPT FOR THE BUSINESS? CONCEPT FOR THE BUSINESS? 

Pamela Clark: Originally, I was a home school mom and other moms would come to me for advice. Then after homeschooling 

for about four years, I learned about charter schools. I became a parent leader for a charter school for some time. During 

that time, I helped many families from all school backgrounds. I 

advocated for families to receive a fair education. Once I discovered 

that families needed to cooperate, especially in educating children 

with learning difficulties such as ADHD, bipolar disorder, autism, 

and neurological disorders. When I left the charter school I had a 

meeting with a few moms I had served. One of the first things I told 

them was that I wanted to create a group that helps all families. I 

had served so many families from multiple school backgrounds at 

this time, I didn’t understand the strict lines drawn by those in the 

education system. Everyone pays taxes whether they have children 

in public school, yet there was minimal, or no support offered to the 

homeschoolers asking for access to the art, music, and other programs. 

Charter school students receive help only from the charter 

they belong too, and traditional schools only care about the students 

in their classrooms. I didn’t want to combine them into one 

school but truly believe that everyone willing to work for it deserves a fair and equal education. NHEG wants families to 

reach their dreams and goals. When a family and student reach their full potential, we all benefit as a society. 

GREAT COMPANIES: WHAT ARE THE VARIOUS SERVICES PROVIDED BY NEW HEIGHTS EDUCATIONAL GROUP? 

Pamela Clark: New Heights Educational Group is the first one-stop-shop in education. 

NHEG has served over 550,000 students via online services and courses via its site and affiliate and partner sites. I lead 

a team of 73 volunteers who research advancements, provide training to teachers and tutors, create courses and tutor 

students. The organization has many internal departments including education, research, graphics, photography, HR, 

social media and marketing, proofreading/editing, authors/writers/script writers, comic book, production management for 

magazine, content builders, internet radio show/podcast, accounting and more. 

NHEG provides fill-in-the-gap tutoring to reach students who have been left behind by traditional schools. It offers classes, 

an educational magazine called the NHEG EDGuide and the E.A.S.YToons comic books that has over 100,540 Views. 

The organization has published two books: Unraveling Reading and Unraveling Science. Both books are part of the Unraveling 

series, which provides strategies to parents, teachers and tutors to help them support children’s learning processes. 

The series will include a book for each subject. One Nonprofit’s Journey to Success, written by an NHEG volunteer, was 

released worldwide in March 2015 and tells the organization’s story. NHEG’s internet radio show, New Heights Show on 

Education, has had over 357,841 listens and is on 29 networks and became a syndicated show in 2019. 

NHEG and its partners/affiliates offer over 1,200 low-cost and high-quality courses on its website, and it makes national 

and international leadership opportunities available to its students. 

In 2020, NHEG grew its reach by over 90,000 people. In 2021, through new partnerships with Stack Social, Skillwise, 

National CSI Camp, Citizen Goods and The Hip Hop Healthy Heart Program for Children and Natural Born Leaders, it has 

more than tripled its previous course offerings with the over 1,280 free and discounted unique courses mentioned above 

and another 284 classroom resources for all subject matters. The in-person reading program switched to an online reading 

program with the help of one of NHEG’s partners (The 2nd & 7 Foundation), and it went from a 2-tier to a 5-tier reading 

program within the last year. 

GREAT COMPANIES: WHAT MAKES NEW HEIGHTS EDUCATIONAL GROUP DIFFERENT FROM HUNDREDS OF OTHER SIMILAR 

SERVICE PROVIDERS? 

Pamela Clark: NHEG is the only organization that offers a range of educational services and resources under one business. 

We excel at it; we are the best in the world at it. This is proven by the many awards and recognition the organization has 

won since its creation and the many families that have benefited from this dream. 

GREAT COMPANIES: WHAT ARE THE STRUGGLES AND CHALLENGES YOU FACE? 

Pamela Clark: Every step of the way there has been struggles and challenges. It is a struggle to reach those in the educational 

system that see us as a threat instead of what the organization can do for the community. Many in power have 

biased thinking and keep us a secret from the families in need of our services. Instead, they send families to for-profit 

businesses that they can’t afford and, in turn, cause more difficulties for these very families; it’s a vicious cycle. 

Funding is our biggest roadblock; everything NHEG has built, all the work it has done is yet to be fully funded. It would cost 

$457,567.00 to fund the first year of the organization’s entire dream. That amount is less than is spent on two school dropouts 

over a lifetime of receiving public assistance, and yet NHEG struggles to receive funding. It is very frustrating. 

Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What do 5 years down the line look like for New Heights Educational 

Group? 

Pamela Clark: NHEG envisions building a computer lab and learning center 

Purpose: The lab and learning center will provide a space for academic research, academic studies, school assignments, 

educational planning, testing and tutoring services and other educational options. The lab can be used by families with 

students enrolled in any type of school or afterschool programs, for homeschool resources and as a teaching space for 

themed co-op/enrichment classes. The facilities will enable NHEG to teach, assist and provide technology resources to 

families for self-learning. 

Genealogy program - NHEG is looking to create a genealogy program with the goal of building students’ self-esteem and 

further connecting them to their community and country. 

NHEG GED Program / Testing Site and implementing a sensory room for those with disabilities and creating a daycare for 

young mothers and fathers. 

Creation of a sensory room in the hopes of reaching students with disabilities/special needs. This is very important for 

those with special needs and can open a new world for these students and their families. 

Support for Teenage Parents 

NHEG works with many teen parents that are struggling with the traditional education settings. Those that have children 

while still in high school or college, can still have a successful life if they have access to a support system. They are encouraged 

and treated with fairness and respect. NHEG recognizes the value of self-esteem and works towards building theirs 

by listening to their dreams and helping them achieve them. The organization provides a support system with affordable 

child-care, fun activities and learning opportunities, promotes student leadership, and teaches them to value themselves, 

so they can continue their educational endeavors. NHEG excels at providing this support that helps them reach their goals 

and this must be done if we want to effect change in society. 

GREAT COMPANIES: IF YOU HAD ONE PIECE OF ADVICE TO SOMEONE JUST STARTING OUT, WHAT WOULD IT BE? 

Pamela Clark: Don’t just start a business, start a passion. If starting a charity, find someone in your community doing 

something similar and volunteer for a while. Never think of any job as beneath you; do everything and learn everything, so 

you can mentor others. 

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ROAST TURKEY - HIGH HEAT METHOD - FROM SAFEWAY.COM RECIPE 

Ingredients 

• Turkey, thawed (Recipe calls for 10-24 lb Manor 

House/Safeway turkey, but I PRESUME any turkey of 

the same weight will do -- ???) 

• 1-2 tbsp. O Organicsâ¢ Extra Virgin Olive Oil 

• Kosher Salt 

• Pepper 

Directions 

1. Remove and discard truss that holds turkey legs 

together (Tip A). Pull or trim off and discard any 

excess fat in neck or body cavity. Remove giblets 

and neck. 

2. Rinse turkey inside and out with warm water. Pat dry 

with paper towels. 

3. Place the adjustable V-shaped rack in a 13 x 16 x 

3-inch roasting pan (set rack sides so the bird is a 

minimum of 2 inches from pan bottom). 

4. Rub turkey skin generously all over with olive oil 

and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Set bird breastside-up 

on rack.. Pull wings away from body, then 

firmly twist them to push the wing tips under the 

bird. 

5. Using aluminum foil, form caps over the tips of the 

end of each drumstick. If any parts of the turkey 

extend beyond pan rim, fashion a foil collar underneath 

to make sure drippings flow back into pan. 

Do not tie legs together, add stuffing, or close body 

cavity. 

6. nsert an oven-safe meat thermometer near the center 

of the breast through thickest part until the tip 

touches bone, which is most accurate spot to check 

doneness (Tip B). 

7. Verify oven temperature and set pan on the lowest 

rack in a 475Â° oven. Roast according to time chart 

at right, checking as directed during cooking, until 

thermometer reaches 160Â°. Halfway through roasting 

time, rotate pan in oven to assure even cooking 

and browning (Tip C). If areas on turkey breast start 

to get browner than you like, lay a piece of foil over 

the dark areas. 

8. Remove pan from oven, set in a warm spot, and 

loosely cover pan with foil to keep it warm. Rearrange 

oven racks to accommodate potatoes and 

dressing. Decrease oven temperature to 400Âº. Let 

turkey rest 30 to 60 minutes. The resting period will 

allow the internal temperature to reach 165Â°, the 

USDA safe cooking temperature for poultry. 

9. Drain juices from body cavity (often plentiful in 

unstuffed birds) into roasting pan. Transfer turkey 

to a platter or rimmed cutting board. Set aside 

juices for gravy. 

10. Cut off turkey legs at thigh joint (Tip D). If joint is red 

or pink, return legs to the oven for 3 to 5 minutes 

(at 300Â° to 475Â°) or heat in a microwave oven for 

3 to 4 minutes. Carve the rest of the turkey. Carving 

juices may be clear to pink or rosy; both are fine. 

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TUYO (DRIED FISH) RECIPE 

Ingredients 

• 1 kilo Tunsoy Fish (small) 

• 1 kilo rock salt 

• 1 gallon fresh water 

MRS. HARVEY’S WHITE FRUITCAKE RECIPE 

Ingredients 

• 4 cups shelled pecans (approx. 1 lb.) 

• 8 ounces candied cherries (original recipe had 1 lb. 

but I took the liberty to reduce the ratio to half 

that of candied pineapple; I just liked it better - 

sorry, Mrs. Harvey!) 

• 1 pound candied pineapple 

• 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour, divided 

• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder 

• 1/2 pound butter 

• 1 cup sugar 

• 5 large eggs 

• 1/2 to 2 ounces vanilla extract (1 to 4 tablespoons is 

quite a range for flavorings, but it is all personal 

preference. I used 2 tablespoons each of vanilla 

and lemon and it was just fine.) 

• 1/2 to 2 ounces lemon extract (see note above) 

Directions 

Directions 

1. Clean up the fresh fish with fresh water and drain for 20 minutes. 

2. All fishes are gutted, salted liberally and brined for 3 hours. 

3. Brine solution : mix 1gallon of water with 1kilo of salt. 

4. Wash off the excess salt and line them up in a wire screen mesh to sun dry and air dry for two to three days. 

5. Turn the fish over every hour or two for even drying. 

6. Once all dried, we keep them in an air tight storage to keep the salty-smell lingering in the house 

7. To COOK: 

8. Heat a shallow pan and add canola oil. 

9. Once hot, put the tuyo fish and fry until desired crispness. 

10. 2 minutes on each side will give the right crisp. 

11. Serve with fried rice with garlic and sinamak for dip. 

12. *I usually like to dip in cane vinegar with crushed garlic and chili. 

1. There are endless possibilities for pans or tins to bake fruitcake. You can use one 10-inch tube pan or large fruitcake 

tin for the whole recipe; 2 or 3 medium loaf pans; 6 or 7 mini loaf pans 5 1/2 x 3 1/2, or 18 to 24 petite loaf 

pans 4” x 2 1/2, depending on desired fill amount. 

2. Whichever you choose, it is best to line them with parchment paper, clean brown paper bag paper cut to size, foil, 

or for smaller loaf sizes, commercial paper liners. I don’t find the need to grease them or spray. The liner helps 

them release from pan without tearing, and protects fruits and nuts. 

3. Chop nuts and fruit into medium-size pieces (see photo for approximate size). Dredge with 1/4 cup of the flour 

(see photo); set aside. 

4. Beat butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, vanilla and lemon extracts. 

5. Stir together remaining 1 1/2 cups flour and baking powder in medium bowl; fold into butter-egg mixture. Using 

strong wooden spoon, blend in fruit and nuts (batter will be stiff.) 

6. Push batter into prepared pan(s). 

7. Place in cold oven and turn the oven to 250 degrees. 

8. When done, the fruit cake will be golden and firm on top with no wetness, and golden brown on sides and bottom 

(see photos). 

9. Remove from oven; cool in pans on cake rack. Remove wrappers or liners if desired and re-wrap in plastic wrap or 

foil. (Batter has a lot of butter so liners might be greasy.) 

10. Approximate baking time: 

11. FOR 10-INCH TUBE PANS OR LARGE FRUIT CAKE TIN: Bake 2 1/2 to 3 hours. Check cake 1 hour before earliest 

done time and again 30 minutes before to make sure it doesnât over bake. 

12. FOR MEDIUM LOAF PAN SIZES: 1 3/4 to 2 hours; check one half hour before earliest time to make sure it 

doesnât over bake. 

13. MINI LOAF PANS: About 1 to 1 1/4 hours total; check after 50 minutes. 

14. PETITE LOAF PANS: About 45 - 50 minutes total; check after 35 minutes. 

15. Yield: 4 1/2 pounds of fruitcake, or 24 servings (3-ounce generous slice size.) 

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CHICKEN PROVENCAL W/ HONEY & LAVENDER (GLUTEN FREE) RECIPE 

Ingredients 

• 1 Tbs culinary lavender, crushed 

• 2 cloves of garlic, finely minced 

• 1/2 c. raw wildflower honey 

• 1/2 c sweet butter 

• 1 lemon’s juice 

• 1 1/2 tsp fresh rosemary, finely minced 

• 1 1/2 tsp fresh thyme leaves, finely minced 

• fine sea salt & freshly ground Tellicerry black pepper 

• 1 Roasting chicken, soaked in salt water, rinsed well 

and dried thoroughly 

• olive oil 

• sea salt & freshly ground black pepper 

CREAM COFFEE CAKE (GLUTEN FREE) RECIPE 

Ingredients 

• 2 cups Pamela’s Flour Mix 

• 1 cup organic evaporated cane juice 

• 1 tsp vanilla 

• 2/3 cup butter 

• 2 large eggs 

• 1 cup sour cream 

• 1 cup chopped walnuts 

• 3 Tablespoons organic evaporated cane juice 

• 3 Tablespoons brown sugar 

• 2 teaspoons cinnamon 

Directions 

1. Preheat your oven to 425^. Clean and dry the bird well and clip the tip joints off the wings 

2. Liberally oil the bird front and back and, over a large serving bowl, liberally sprinkle the sea salt and the 

black pepper. Truss the bird, wing and legs. Set aside as you prepare the seasoning infusion liquid 

3. Crush the lavender flowers in a mortar to bruise and release the oils - you are not pulverizing the blooms, 

you are releasing the perfume 

4. In a small sauce pan, bring together, the lavender, honey, butter, garlic, lemon juice, rosemary, thyme, 

salt and pepper to taste. Heat over a med-low flame for about 10 minutes to marry all the flavors, then 

strain the liquid and discard all the solids 

5. Fill a culinary injection syringe with the liquid and, entering at the neck, inject fluid into the back, 

between the skin and the meat. Then inject the fluid between the breast meat and skin, then the thighs 

and legs. Reserve the remaining fluid 

6. Carefully lay the bird, breast up, on a rack in a roasting pan to which you have added as much water as 

possible without touching the bottom or your roasting rack 

7. Roast the bird for 1 1/2 hours at 425^, then remove the roasting pan from the oven and baste the bird liberally 

with the remaining liquid. 

8. Return the bird to the oven and roast 1/2 hour more. 

9. Remove and let rest for 10 minutes, then carefully cut and remove the trussing string. 

10. You may halve or quarter the bird with poulty shears. 

Directions 

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. 

2. For the Filling: Mix together 1 cup chopped walnuts, 3 Tablespoons organic evaporated cane sugar, 3 Tablespoons 

brown sugar, and 2 teaspoons of cinnamon in a large bowl and set aside. 

3. For the Batter: Soften Butter in your Kitchen Aid Mixer. 

4. Add sugar to butter and cream it on high. 

5. Add eggs and vanilla and continue whipping batter. 

6. Turn off mixer and add your flour and sour cream. Mix on low until blended. Turn off and scrape down sides of mixing 

bowl. Then turn on high and mix for a good minute until well beaten and fluffy. 

7. Grease a silacone bundt pan. 

8. Spoon the batter into the bottom of the bundt pan and smooth it around. 

9. Add a layer of nut filling. 

10. Repeat steps until you have used all your batter and filling. The top layer should be batter. 

11. Bake for 45-50 minutes in the oven. 

12. Let stand in bundt pan until cool (about 15 to 20 minutes for best results). 

https://cookeatshare.com 

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NHEG EDGuide November-December 2023

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