Free Republic

My antennae go up whenever any education initiative is associated with radicals, like Bill Ayers. We still don’t know why Bill Ayers was at an education conference with Arne Duncan and a representative from Achieve, the well-connected, Washington-based non-profit organizing this effort to nationalize education. But once I began investigating the curricula and test questions I learned that sure enough, the rigorous “standards” turned out to be nothing more than efforts to impose a curriculum that will make global citizens out of all American students. Or the kind of curriculum Bill Ayers would like.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said, “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years since the Industrial Revolution.” For the U.N., it does not matter that the report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change shows that human activity is not causing climate change. Climate change is actually about changing capitalism.

Common Core is not a benign set of federals standards meant to make your children smarter, warns an educator who says it looks more like an indoctrination program to push students toward “green” jobs for a “green economy.” Alex Newman, coauthor of “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children,” pointed to speeches by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. “He gave one to UNESCO in 2012, for example, and he bragged that he was using these standards and our government schools to create green citizens to take their place in the green world order with...

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said on Tuesday that he has met with gang leaders in his hometown of Chicago and they’ve told him that it’s a lack of jobs that keeps them on the streets. “We have to have jobs for young people,” Duncan said at the National Summit on Youth Violence Prevention in Crystal City, Va. “I probably shouldn’t say this in a room like this, but occasionally when I go home I’ll sit down with some of the gang leaders—back home in Chicago.” He said he asked them what was the “biggest impediment” to getting gangs to stop...

Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Tuesday proposed the idea of public boarding schools, saying there are “just certain kids we should have 24/7.” “One idea that I threw out … is the idea of public boarding schools,” Duncan said at the National Summit on Youth Violence Prevention in Crystal City, Va. “That’s a little bit of a different idea—a controversial idea—but the question is do we have some children where there’s not a mom, there’s not a dad, there’s not a grandma, there’s just nobody at home? There’s just certain kids we should have 24/7 to really create a safe...

Much has been written about Obama’s controversial appointments, not only to the federal bench, but to key cabinet positions, as well as to the unaccountable (and probably unconstitutional) “Czar” positions. Much of the criticism has dwelled on the Obama administration’s lack of vetting when filling these rolls—but that’s not the issue. To the contrary, the Obama team did investigate thoroughly and they choose precisely. When an administration repeatedly nominates hard-left individuals, it’s not a vetting error—it’s a pattern. We should not allow the media to portray these appointments as a series of errors; but rather, we need to realize that...

p>The Talk Shows September 14th, 2014 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): White House chief of staff Denis McDonough; Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C; Michael Hayden, a former CIA and National Security Agency director.MEET THE PRESS (NBC): McDonough; former Secretary of State James Baker; Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.FACE THE NATION (CBS): McDonough; Secretary of State John Kerry; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas.THIS WEEK (ABC): McDonough; Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa; Education Secretary Arne Duncan.STATE OF THE UNION (CNN): McDonough; Harkin; Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; Rep. John...

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Thursday that states can apply for extra time before they use student test scores to judge teachers’ performance. Duncan’s decision is an acknowledgement of the concerns by teachers’ unions and others that it’s too early to make teacher personnel decisions based on how well students do on new assessments developed under the Common Core standards that will be used in much of the country this school year. …

The U.S. Department of Education’s report, “Succeeding Globally Through International Education and Engagement” tries to show how American students will gain more international experience. The report features six quotes by the department secretary Arne Duncan, with phrases such as “recipe for protectionism and global strife,” “grow the pie for all” or “compassionate neighbors” and “global society.” Here are the six quotes, with the corresponding dates, in full: “The economic future of the United States rests not only on its ability to strengthen our education system but also on citizens in other nations raising their living standards. Thinking of the future...

The president of the nation’s second-largest teachers union said Friday that President Barack Obama’s education chief has turned his back on the concerns of educators and parents, but she stopped short of calling for his ouster. Teachers unions have been clashing with the Obama administration over its support for charter schools and its push to use student test scores as part of teacher evaluations, a relationship that further frayed after Education Secretary Arne Duncan spoke in support of a California judge’s ruling last month that struck down tenure and other job protections for the state’s public school teachers. …

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan can threaten us all he wants; we’re finished with Common Core in Oklahoma. Last week Governor Mary Fallin made it official, signing into law legislation repealing the law’s impact on our state’s education standards. As a state representative, I was proud to have voted to stop Common Core. As a conservative, I’m outraged I had to in the first place. We need to be standing up for school choice, not whitewashing standards that are better for bureaucrats than parents and children. At any rate, the Obama administration is none too happy with us. “We partner...

An unsurprising yet groan-inducing addendum to the empty gestureexecutive order President Obama so magnanimously introduced this week to allow millions of student-loan borrowers to cap their monthly payments at 10 percent of their current income and then be fully forgiven after 20 years — a “favor” to borrowers to lessen their burdens that will, in the long run, only serve to inflate future tuition prices and borrowing costs ever further. I missed this on Monday, but the WFB didn’t:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO SECRETARY OF EDUCATION ARNE DUNCAN: We actually don’t know the cost yet. Obviously we have...

Thursday marked a high point for opponents of Common Core, as Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin signed legislation making her state the third to ditch the national educational standards. In a press briefing at the White House on Monday, though, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan struck back by vaguely suggesting that the federal government may now punish Oklahoma. Duncan asserted that “40 percent of high school graduates” in Oklahoma “have to take remedial classes when they go to college” and only “25 percent of Oklahoma’s eighth-graders in math are proficient.” The Obama administration education chief declared that the Common Core Standards...

Under a new program implemented by education czar Arne Duncan, employees from the federal department of education will be placed in schools throughout the nation to oversee their operations and ensure they’re following federal guidelines and procedures. This doesn’t sound so horrible, until you remember that the federal government isn’t supposed to have any hand in education and they’re continually telling us that their role is ‘limited’.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on Monday will host an Internet discussion aimed at uncovering why young black and Hispanic men are “less successful” in the job market and in school, and what causes encounters between them and law enforcement. The discussion is part of President Barack Obama’s “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative, which the administration announced in February. That initiative created a task force including Duncan as education secretary, and is meant to develop proposals to “enhance positive outcomes and eliminate or reduce negative ones” for young black and Hispanic men. In his February announcement, Obama said many groups have...

Education Secretary Arne Duncan on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday said it was “worth considering” giving student athletes a free graduate school education in addition to the free ride they already get for undergrad. “Yeah, I think that’s really important. People talk about helping them graduate from college. Yes, they should do that, but M.B.A., you know Master’s, PhD, having some ability for the rest of your life to go back and get education. I think that’s something worth considering. Some folks are talking about the medical expenses long term. I think that’s a fair question on the table,” Duncan...

Education Secretary Arne Duncan […] tells reporters that schools are often the safest place in a community, and gun violence is a societal problem and “not a school problem.” He says tougher gun control measures are needed. A spokeswoman for Duncan clarifies that he means the problem isn’t a lack of school safety, but easy access to guns. …

Obama’s Education Secretary recently said that opponents to the Administration’s “Common Core” Standards are merely “white suburban moms” who are, all of a sudden, learning that their kids aren’t real bright. Arne Duncan (wow. . . Perfect name for a 1970’s sitcom) made the degrading remarks to a group of state school superintendents on Friday. According to the Washington Post: U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a group of state schools superintendents Friday that he found it “fascinating” that some of the opposition to the Common Core State Standards has come from “white suburban moms who — all of...

Common Core: Rather than defend a program accused of indoctrinating students via national standards and whose implementation is as bad as ObamaCare, Education Secretary Arne Duncan plays the race card. Perhaps nothing personifies the arrogant nanny state paternalism of the Obama administration more than this statement by Duncan on Friday: "It's fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were, and that's pretty scary."...

We have a tendency in our fast-moving world to focus on controversial-sounding soundbites, instead of the complex policy debates that underlie them. Unfortunately, I recently played into that dynamic. A few days ago, in a discussion with state education chiefs, I used some clumsy phrasing that I regret – particularly because it distracted from an important conversation about how to better prepare all of America’s students for success. In talking about the importance of communicating about higher learning standards, I singled out one group of parents when my aim was to say that we need to communicate better to all...