LifeNews.com Pro-Life News Report
Friday, December 2, 2016
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Top Stories
• President-Elect Donald Trump Names Pro-Life Ben Carson as HUD Department Secretary
• Abortion Activist: “Sex is About to Get A Lot Less Fun” Because Donald Trump is President
• Liam Neeson Resigns From Catholic Boxing Club After Members Upset He Made Video Promoting Abortion
• Donald Trump Gets an A+ So Far on Critical Pro-Life Appointments That Matter to Unborn Children
More Pro-Life News
• Planned Parenthood Abortion Biz Closes Three More Clinics in Pennsylvania
• Satanic Temple Complains About New Texas Law Requiring Proper Burial for Aborted Babies
• Woman Sues Abortion Clinic That Donated Her Aborted Baby’s Body for Research Without Her Consent
• Abortion Clinic Refuses to Call 911 After “Visibly Pregnant” Woman Injured in Abortion
• Gilmore Girls Creator: It’s “Absolutely” Possible Rory Might Kill Her Unborn Baby
• University Bans Pro-Life Students From Having Official Club: “Would Give Them a Platform to Harass Others”
• Activist Admits She Has Her “Own Internalized Abortion Stigma” About Women Having Multiple Abortions
• This Picture Shows the Safest Time in a Human’s Life, Except at Planned Parenthood
• Responding to the False Argument: “If You Ban Abortion, Women Will be Investigated for Miscarriage”
• How Secrecy and Immunity Destroy “Safeguards” in Assisted Suicide Laws
• Death on Demand: Euthanasia Activist Admits Assisted Suicide Not Just for Terminally Ill
• Irish Government Paying €30,000 to Woman Who Aborted Her Disabled Baby is “Utterly Outrageous”
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President-Elect Donald Trump Names Pro-Life Ben Carson as HUD Department Secretary
President-elect Donald Trump has named another pro-life advocate to his Cabinet today, this time choosing pro-life physician Ben Carson to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Abortion Activist: “Sex is About to Get A Lot Less Fun” Because Donald Trump is President
Jill Filipovic wildly claimed that “sex is about to get a lot less fun” in a Thursday op-ed on CNN.com.
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Liam Neeson Resigns From Catholic Boxing Club After Members Upset He Made Video Promoting Abortion
Irish actor Liam Neeson’s pro-abortion views are believed to be the reason why he recently resigned as president of a club that he has been involved with since childhood.
Donald Trump Gets an A+ So Far on Critical Pro-Life Appointments That Matter to Unborn Children
During the Republican primary, Donald Trump wasn’t the first choice for most pro-life voters.
Planned Parenthood Abortion Biz Closes Three More Clinics in Pennsylvania
Three Planned Parenthood facilities in Central Pennsylvania are closing this fall after the abortion chain suffered huge losses in the Nov. 8 election.
Satanic Temple Complains About New Texas Law Requiring Proper Burial for Aborted Babies
The Satanic Temple is lashing out against a new Texas rule that requires aborted babies’ bodies to be cremated or buried.
Woman Sues Abortion Clinic That Donated Her Aborted Baby’s Body for Research Without Her Consent
A woman who aborted her baby in 2012 says the abortion facility donated her aborted daughter’s body to researchers at the University of New Mexico without her full knowledge or consent.
Abortion Clinic Refuses to Call 911 After “Visibly Pregnant” Woman Injured in Abortion
Two recent medical emergencies, one in Cleveland, Ohio, and the other in Detroit, Michigan, have spotlighted the increased desire of abortion facilities to cover-up the seriousness of patient injuries.
Activist Admits She Has Her “Own Internalized Abortion Stigma” About Women Having Multiple Abortions
How Secrecy and Immunity Destroy “Safeguards” in Assisted Suicide Laws
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Houston journalist Scarlett Fakhar, 
What Did You Say? 
In his piece, Harris singled out Detroit’s charter school initiative as “the biggest school reform disaster in the country.” Citing one “well-regarded study,” Harris argued that “Detroit’s charter schools performed at about the same dismal level as its traditional public schools.”
The study to which Harris was referring—a study on charter school performance in Michigan conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO)—was actually far more positive toward the Detroit charter environment than the Times piece would have one believe.
It is hardly a “disaster,” with, as Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out, some 47 percent of charter schools in Detroit significantly outperforming traditional public schools in reading.
As the conclusion of the CREDO study explains:
Neerav Kingsland, who writes about choice and charters, also parsed the data from the CREDO study to better understand the performance of Detroit’s charter sector compared to Denver’s. He found that Detroit charter schools performed better than Denver charter schools when compared to their local public school counterparts, with Detroit’s charter schools having twice the impact (0.070**) on reading scores as Denver’s charter schools (0.036**).
Moreover, Kingsland notes that almost all of Detroit’s charter schools (96 percent) performed better than or equal to their traditional public school counterparts in the area of reading. Kingsland provides an important caveat: that “Denver’s traditional schools are probably better than Detroit’s traditional schools, which brings the Denver charter effect down.”
But importantly, he writes, “given that parents in Detroit can’t enroll their children in schools in Denver, we should not decry a charter sector that is providing families better options than what they would otherwise have access to.”
In The New York Times piece, Harris goes on to reference New Orleans’ school choice system, which offers both charter school options and vouchers for private education—relevant points for Harris, since the secretary-designate is also a voucher proponent. He references an important study by Jonathan Mills, Anna Egalite, and Patrick Wolf, published in conjunction with the School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas and Harris’ own organization, the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. That study found that voucher recipients in New Orleans performed worse in mathematics after attending private schools. Harris identifies this as “exactly the opposite” of what came from the New Orleans charter reforms.
First, there are important differences between Detroit’s charter sector and that of New Orleans. New Orleans’ school system was completely leveled by Hurricane Katrina, and the charter sector that emerged in its wake was practically built up from scratch. By contrast, Detroit’s charter sector has had to operate within a larger entrenched public school system. But more importantly, the negative findings regarding the private school choice program in New Orleans may be due to uniquely strict regulations that have not existed in any other private school choice program.
In this hyper-regulated environment, just 31 of the 84 private schools in New Orleans chose to participate in the voucher program, leaving thousands of dollars in scholarship money per student on the table. When researchers asked why these private schools did not participate in the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP), the primary reason private school leaders gave was fear of future regulations. Moreover, those that did participate were already experiencing enrollment declines prior to entering the scholarship program. As Jonathan Butcher and I noted, “the schools that chose to enroll in the LSP—and incur the litany of state regulations in the process—were those schools that were already struggling, as evidenced by declining enrollment before program entry.”
Heavy-handed government regulations, all in the name of “accountability,” are likely to blame for hindering the potential of private school choice in New Orleans.
Finally, it is worth noting that there is a general disconnect between test scores and later life outcomes. It is highly reductionistic to measure the success of charter and other schools solely on the basis of student outcomes on state assessments.
Jay Greene at the University of Arkansas identified 10 rigorous evaluations of the impact of charter and private school choice programs on later life outcomes. Greene found that some schools have large impacts on test score gains but have no real impact on later life outcomes. Other schools have no impact on test score gains, but end up having large impacts on later life outcomes. As Greene explains:
Context is important. Choice and charters continue to be welcome escape hatches for students across the country.
The secretary-designate has been a champion of school choice for years, and for good reason: Choice enables families to match learning options to their children’s unique learning needs, and is a far better way to allocate education funding.
Contra The New York Times, it is not the variety of school options in Detroit that has been a disaster. On the contrary, these options have been a vital lifeline for thousands of students. A monopolized, government-run school system has been the problem.
Creating new schooling alternatives that empower families and children is imperative, and a worthy cause that must not be abandoned.