The strongest results were in Florida and Texas. In just one year in a Texas charter school, an average student gained 7 percentile points in math and 8 percentile points in reading, while Florida charter schools improved student performance by 6 percentile points.

Of all the hard jobs around, one of the hardest is being a good teacher.

In today's world, marketers reach inside the home and attempt to figure out not what's good for your daughter, because that is not their business, but what deep desires they can manipulate, stimulate and ostensibly satisfy in order to produce cold, hard cash.

Getting married is the boldest and most idealistic thing that most of us will ever do.

For faithful Catholics, communion is not just a nice ritual: It is the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and the ultimate sign of our willingness to be incorporated into the church.

To imply that religious believers have no right to engage moral questions in the public square or at the ballot is simply to establish a Reichian secularism as our state faith.

It is not discrimination to treat different things differently.