"In the mostly minority Dayton, Ohio, school district, for example, 28 percent of schoolchildren have opted out of public schools in favor of charter schools, which are publicly financed but privately operated.

In Houston, 12 percent have done the same; in Oakland, Calif., 9 percent of public school children attend charter schools. In New York City, 12,000 children, 1.2 percent of the school population, attend charter schools, but the number of such schools is capped.

In Washington [DC], in addition to those children opting for private schools, many others are flocking to charter schools, which have siphoned off about 25 percent of children, and $37 million in revenue this year alone."

"Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children."

Parents searching for a way to give their children help in the classroom need look no further than the ring finger on their left hand.  A new study published in the Journal of Divorce & Remarriage clearly shows that parents who make their marriage successful are conferring a remarkable academic benefit on their children - especially their daughters.

By using data for 265 seniors enrolled in a Colorado Springs public high school, researcher Barry D. Ham assesses "the impact of divorce in relation to students' academic achievement."  And the pattern is clear: "Adolescents from intact homes perform better academically and maintain better school attendance than do those students from either single-parent or remarried homes."

Ham calculates that in comparison with peers from other family structures, students from intact families earn GPAs that average more than 17% higher.  He further calculates a distinctively low rate of absenteeism among students from intact families, who missed 78% fewer class periods than peers from non-intact households.

While some have supposed that parental remarriage will erase the harmful effects of parental divorce, Ham finds that, overall, "children in remarried households performed no better than children in either single-mother or single-father families."  More careful parsing of the data, however, indicates that "when a stepparent is brought into the home, the males somehow benefit" while females do not.  Highlighting it as "one of the most significant findings of this study," Ham points to statistics indicating that "females were more negatively impacted" than males by living in a stepfamily created after parental divorce.

Ham does not comment on the irony of his findings in a social world in which feminists generally regard parental divorce and the stepfamilies it produces with indifference. He does see in his findings strong indications that, compared to peers in non-traditional homes, "those students residing with their two biological parents appear to be given an increased chance to excel educationally."