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It's the story of children, parents, teachers, and entrepreneurs in the poorest corners of the globe who, in response to failed public education, are not waiting for handouts. They are educating themselves-and succeeding under the most challenging conditions imaginable.

Four decades of involvement in education -- as a volunteer, writer, and sometime teacher -- have blessed me with riches that cannot be measured in normal ways.

"It's a delicate process to go through because oftentimes there are a lot of politics involved," Mueller says of outsourcing. "You want to be sensitive to people. But ultimately, we are here to provide the highest level of service to the citizens at the lowest cost."

How would you like to pay $1,000 so that someone--probably not you--can ride high-speed trains less than 60 miles a year? That's the question the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) effectively asked last month when it invited states to submit proposals for spending $8 billion of stimulus money that Congress allocated to high-speed rail.

The consensus seems to be that next year's budget situation at the state capitol will be tight. Sure, Oklahoma's share of "stimulus" money could help, but then again it could serve to lock in higher levels of spending, thus exacerbating our problems.

If this were a baseball game, you might look at it this way: The OU print shop is allowed to start the inning as a runner on third base, before anyone else even steps up to the plate.

Personal income is an important economic measure of a state's well-being. Higher levels of personal income mean that a state's residents are able to buy more goods and services such as homes, cars, education, and health care. It is also a very useful way to gauge the ability of a state's residents to pay taxes.

OCPA adjunct scholar Andrew Spiropoulos isn't sold on Oklahoma's new tort-reform law, but in today's Tulsa World OCPA trustee John Brock says the law is good news.

For many college students, their years of "higher education" don't involve much education at all. Sure, they take a lot of courses and usually pass with As and Bs, but that is no guarantee that they have learned much. Between the inflation of grades and the watering down of the curriculum, students can get degrees without much intellectual effort.

In these circumstances, America's greatest hope is hardly its political leaders. Rather it is those millions of Americans who still treasure liberty and have no intention of becoming comfortable serfs. As Tocqueville himself observed, "The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults."