Free Republic

The Obama campaign blasted presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney Friday for his comments on a visit to an inner-city school that smaller class sizes are not a guarantee of a good education. “I’m not sure what universe he’s operating in,” said Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, speaking to reporters on behalf of the president’s reelection campaign. “It’s clear that Mitt Romney is out of touch with reality.” Mr. Romney visited a charter school in west Philadelphia Thursday and, during a roundtable discussion with teachers, noted that a McKinsey Global Institute study found that class size was not a factor when...

Sarah Palin was the first to recognize the problem: By participating in President Obama's signature education initiative, the Common Core Standards, Alaska would lose control over its own curriculum. On May 31, 2009, then-Gov. Palin announced Alaska would adopt a "watch and wait" attitude: "If this initiative produces useful results, Alaska will remain free to incorporate them," Gov. Palin said, adding that "high expectations are not always created by new, mandated federal standards written on paper. They are created in the home, the community and the classroom." Texas Gov. Rick Perry, to his credit, was the next to recognize...

Schools belong to taxpaying parents.

The homosexual agenda could destroy the moral fabric of our country as they target children, since that is where our future lies. Have you checked your local school's curriculum and textbooks? Homosexual activists have set a well planned and well financed agenda that started in the 1960s and now includes not only tolerance of their lethal lifestyle but acceptance with privileges as a special class, as a minority group. The key target is our youth. This can be seen in the following written by "gay revolutionary" Mark Swift and printed in the February 15, 1987 issue of Gay Community News....

Backers of an effort to repeal a law that requires schools teach about the historical contributions of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, and people with disabilities, failed to collect enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. The group, Stop SB48, which is named after the law, faced a Wednesday deadline to turn in just under 505,000 signatures. In an e-mail, the group said, "We thank all of you that worked so hard to provide the hundreds of thousands of signatures received. In the end, 90 days was too short a time to accomplish such a large task." The nearly...

At last week’s presidential debate in Florida, Rick Perry said something that made the audience gasp in disbelief. He said critics of in-state college tuition for illegal aliens “have no heart.” Welcome to Compassionate Conservatism 2.0. The Perry tactic of debate by slander was an eye-opener for many conservatives, and it probably contributed to his poor showing in the Florida straw poll that followed the debate. Republicans are in no mood for a replay of the Bush amnesty plans. Or Perry’s poor showing in the Florida straw poll might have something to do with a recent report about the highly...

Bloodsucking Capitalists: Shocking Excerpts Read at Tucson School Board Meeting From A Book Used In The Controversial Ethic Studies Curriculum (Grades 3-12)

The good old American inclination to wave a magic wand and say to an urgent problem, "Begone!" is on display in the fast-emerging movement for a national K-12 curriculum.Ah, you didn't know there was such a movement, far less that it was emerging. Here's the lowdown. Various analysts representing mostly the education establishment are pressing for a so-called "common curriculum" -- one that would supposedly engage the minds of all American students, aligning their performance with the latest thinking as to what's needed.All but six states (including Texas) have fallen into bed with an effort -- supported by the U.S....

A major review of school subjects…..is expected to lead to a focus on the essential knowledge pupils should grasp at each key stage of their education. The move is intended to reverse more than a decade of dumbing down of primary and secondary school subjects in favour of trendy skills-based lessons and “cross-curricular themes”. Launching the review, the Coalition said the last Government stripped vital content from the national curriculum, leaving pupils with a poor understanding of English literature, maths, science, foreign languages, history and geography. ….Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, said “profound mistakes” made with the curriculum by Labour...

Jared Lee Loughner, the suspected gunman in Saturday's Arizona shooting, attended a high school that is part of a network in which teachers are trained and provided resources by a liberal group founded by Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers and funded by President Obama, WND has learned. The group, Small Schools Workshop, has been led by a former top communist activist who is an associate of Ayers. Obama provided the group with funds in the 1990s when he worked at an education reform group alongside Ayers. Loughner attended Mountain View High School, which is part of Arizona's Morana Unified School District....

Concern over a new hip-hop curriculum that refers to the founding fathers as "old dead white men” has delayed the program's rollout for at-risk students, Oklahoma City Public Schools Superintendent Karl Springer said. "We're making sure that whatever we do, first, we do no harm,” Springer said. "The science behind the concept is wonderful. There may be some things, though, that are inappropriate that we need to be careful about.” Known as Flocabulary, the program is a music-based educational tool that uses raps, rhythms and rhymes to help students learn and memorize everything from vocabulary and English to math and...

Concern over a new hip-hop curriculum that refers to the founding fathers as "old dead white men" has delayed the program's rollout for at-risk students, Oklahoma City Public Schools Superintendent Karl Springer said. "We're making sure that whatever we do, first, we do no harm," Springer said. "The science behind the concept is wonderful. There may be some things, though, that are inappropriate that we need to be careful about." Known as Flocabulary, the program is a music-based educational tool that uses raps, rhythms and rhymes to help students learn and memorize everything from vocabulary and English to math and...

We live in northern California, and we are thinking seriously of homeschooling our (now preschool-age) children. We would also be open to enrolling them in a charter school, private school, or similar if it met our standards. (We are politically conservative and also rather old-school when it comes to the subjects our kids would be learning, but we are not religious and would prefer not to enroll them in a school where they would receive active religious instruction.) I mentioned to a friend that we were thinking of homeschooling because we felt the curriculum in public schools did not meet...

It hardly seems possible that with California’s irreligious reputation, a school district would choose to add the bible to its curriculum. But the Chino Valley School District has done so. Beginning this fall, high school seniors of the Chino Valley School District will have the chance to enroll in a new course called “Bible as/in Literature and History.�[The class] will offer a survey of the Bible, beginning with the historical context of the Old Testament, and then will focus on the New Testament later in the semester. It will also provide students with a historical knowledge of the Middle East....

How ridiculous is this? Trying to re-write history???? The only ones trying to re-write history are the ones opposing this.

State Board of Education members kept up their bitter, yearlong ideological tussling until the very end Friday, when they finally approved new social studies curriculum standards. Despite two consecutive 15-hour days of discussion and changes, board members still had plenty of steam Friday to argue over issues great and small throughout the standards for history, government and economics that serve as the basis for textbooks and lessons in Texas' public schools. They tackled Thomas Jefferson, religious freedom, communism and more before passing the high school standards on a 9-5 party-line vote, with Republicans in the majority. One Republican, Geraldine Miller...

The Texas Curriculum Massacre What a conservative rewriting of history tells us about how Texans view the world, which is, for them, Texas. Texas Stands Alone 165 years after it joined the U.S., Texas remains forever ruggedly individualistic By Evan Smith | NEWSWEEK Published Apr 16, 2010 From the magazine issue dated Apr 26, 2010 Given the redness of my home state of Texas at the moment—more crimson than rosé—you'd be forgiven for dismissing the recent headline-making flap over revisions to our high-school social-studies curriculum as pure politics. A near majority of the duly elected 15 members of the State...

AUSTIN, Texas – A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade. Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation's Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a "constitutional republic," rather than "democratic," and students will be required to study the decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment...

Modernization or Memory Hole Malcolm A. Kline, February 5, 2010 Modernizing history may be the ultimate oxymoron. “He may be the president who governed during the Civil War, freeing the slaves, but under a new curriculum proposal for North Carolina high schools, U.S. history would begin years after President Lincoln, with the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877,” Molly Henneberg reports on Fox News. “State education leaders say this may help students learn about more recent history in greater depth.” It may but here’s a few chaps such an approach would leave out:...

Howard Zinn’s America Deborah Lambert, December 18, 2009 America-bashers are working overtime these days to divide our nation into enemy camps. One way to describe it is a war between the country that you and I love vs. Howard Zinn’s America. If you think that the 87-year-old Marxist professor/author of A People’s History of the United States is ready to shuffle off into the sunset, you would be wrong. In fact, Zinn is actively spearheading an effort to “change the way our pre-K through high school children learn American history,” according to Big Hollywood. His curriculum ideas focus on a...

Advanced Placement for Dummies by: Deborah Lambert, July 15, 2009 Should AP classes be available for everyone, regardless of their skill sets? Absolutely not, says Laurie Rogers, author of the book, Betrayed, who noted in EducationNews.org that she thought it was a “really stupid idea.” A theory among educators is that even if the kids aren’t qualified, “they’ll learn just by being there.” In fact, many educators think in terms of “equity,” “opportunity” and the fact that these classes are “challenging” the kids. Rogers disagrees, especially about math. While young children usually enjoy math and science, Rogers says that “by...

ALAMEDA — School district leaders have approved lesson plans for kindergartners through fifth graders that aim to curb anti-gay bullying. Trustees voted 3-2 on Tuesday to adopt the Safe Schools curriculum, which supporters say will help children of gay parents feel welcome at school and help end anti-gay teasing and bullying on the playground. The lessons also aim to provide a safe environment for children to learn, as well as to offer a framework for teachers to break down stereotypes and teach kids about different types of families. "The need for this is real," said Beth Kromer, a fourth-grade teacher...

Social Studies curriculum group had tossed out traditional American history to make room for left-leaning agenda The Texas State Board of Education on Wednesday came down with a reprimand on its social studies curriculum working group after a draft proposal of the group’s new curriculum came to light showing a series of far-left changes that education bureaucrats wanted to install in place of the traditional Texas social studies curriculum.

Globally Warm Schools by: Santiago Leon, May 28, 2008 As Global Warming becomes an issue in people’s lives, it has also become part of school’s curricula. I recently learned that my boss’s son had an assignment and quiz in his Spanish class on Global Warming. In many of the questions students had to translate sentences from Spanish to English but with a Global Warming theme. They even had to watch Al Gore’s movie, “Inconvenient Truth,” which has been a part of several school courses. Teaching Global Warming in schools is widespread across the nation, especially providing materials like Gore’s film,...

Nashville, TN (WRCB-TV/Associated Press) A controversial bill requiring Tennessee's public schools to offer an elective bible course is making its way to Gov. Phil Bredesen. The legislation unanimously passed the Senate last week and was approved overwhelmingly in the House Tuesday. If Gov. Bredesen signs the legislation, public schools will soon be required to offer bible as an elective course taught with an approved textbook. The Tennessee Department of Education would create a uniform bible curriculum. This legislation does come with some safeguards. It prohibits the use of any religious test when assigning teachers to the bible class. For many...

(IsraelNN.com) Education Ministry officials have decided to keep Arabic in the core curriculum for middle and high school students until further notice. Arabic was removed from the core curriculum earlier in the year as part of an attempt to streamline the curriculum and make it acceptable to the hareidi-religious community. Most hareidi-religious schools have rejected the core curriculum and prefer to operate as private schools with some government funding. However, the Supreme Court recently ruled that the government cannot fund high schools that do not teach the core curriculum, a decision that would leave many hareidi-religious schools facing a budget...

Behind the School Safety Movement by: Bethany Stotts, February 27, 2008 Many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and queer (LGBTQ) organizations believe that promoting school safety is essential to their organization’s mission. Ally Action, the Anti-Defamation League, Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN), Out for Equity, Safe Schools Coalition, and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation all consider fostering safe gay-accepting schools a high priority.... The SSC’s “Guidelines on Bias” (pdf) eschews the term “minority” for “non-majority” and considers language labeling minorities as disadvantaged or needy “patronizing” and biased. In an ideal situation, “The right of non-majority people to decide what is...

Groundhog Day Curriculum by: Malcolm A. Kline, February 01, 2008 Somewhat like the character Bill Murray plays in the film Groundhog Day, college administrators rarely achieve real reform in resolving the crises in higher education because they keep on doing the same thing over and over again. “In class, many students are ready to talk, but they want to talk about themselves or about large-scale public themes, independent of the books they are supposedly reading,” Robert Newman, Dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Utah notes in a U-Utah publication from last year. “They are happy to...

On thursday morning a group of seven Patriots gathered in front of the Boulder High School to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

No Culture Left Behind? by: Nirmala Punnasami, September 27, 2007 At this stage in the history of education in this country, most education analysts who focus on the federal No Child Left Behind Act prefer to “assess time allocation” and the strengths and weaknesses of this controversial piece of federal legislation, but Terry Stoops , the Education Policy Analyst for the John Locke Foundation, a North Carolina- based “think tank,” compares “course enrollment to student enrollment growth,”referring specifically to what is happening with education in North Carolina. For the academic year 2000 to 2001, North Carolina Public Schools offered students...

Some Oregon high schools are adopting Mexico's public school curriculum to help educate Spanish-speaking students with textbooks, an online Web site, DVDs and CDs provided free by Mexico to teach math, science and even U.S. history. The Oregon Department of Education and Mexico's Secretariat of Public Education are discussing aligning their curricula so courses will be valid in both countries... Mexico has made its national curriculum available to communities across the U.S. since 2001 to encourage Mexican adults and youths to continue an education often abandoned back home due to limited resources. "We wanted people to be aware that they...

Put Islamo-Fascism into the college curriculumSix years after 9/11 we are engaged in a global conflict in which we cannot name the enemy who has attacked us. The President has described the war we are in as a “war on terror.” But terror is only a tactic used by many. Our enemies are Islamo-fascists. They are religious fanatics who, as the President has said, “are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of...

With classwork like this, who needs to play? Undergraduates taking Cyberporn and Society at the State University of New York at Buffalo survey Internet porn sites.... It's called the porn curriculum, and it's quietly taking root in the ivory tower. A small but growing number of scholars are probing the aesthetic, societal and philosophical properties of smut in academic departments ranging from literature to film, law to technology, anthropology to women's studies. Those specialists argue that graphic sexual imagery has become ubiquitous in society, so it's almost irresponsible not to teach young people how to deal with it.... Students agree...

ROCKVILLE, Maryland, July 9, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Maryland State Board of Education will not interfere with a local school board's efforts to insert curriculum material legitimizing homosexuality. The board agreed that while parents may have some say in what is taught to their children, that "right is not absolute. It must bend to the State's duty to educate its citizens." Parents in Montgomery County have been battling the school board on the insertion of homosexual material in schools for two and a half years. In November 2004 the parents won a delay in the courts after the Montgomery Board...

A Proposal to Write a Book "An (Internet) Alternative to College" Undergraduate College Curriculum of Internet-based Courses for Self-taught Students I spent four years earning a BA at a fairly good state university back in the early 1950s. Much of what I learned has been forgotten (although I can still recite the first 18 lines of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales). I could have learned (and retained) far more if given a curriculum to follow and access to a good library (and a final comprehensive exam in each subject to keep my nose to the grindstone) instead of the...

In recent years, Hamilton College has done little that would have pleased its namesake. It's hard to imagine that any of the founding generation's leaders—perhaps excepting Paine—could find much to their liking in the college's fawning treatment of radical icons or its fervent multiculturalism. It was Hamilton that sought to bring former weather underground member and convicted terrorist, Susan Rosenberg, to campus as an instructor and "artist-in-residence", as it was Hamilton that launched Ward Churchill into world class notoriety by inviting him to speak. But it's good to discover that Hamilton is capable of learning something from its repeated embarrassments....

Are British parents prepared to be 24-7 role models for their children? They’d better be, since British schools have apparently decided to opt out of a large part of their previous responsibilities for educating students. It all started when a re-wording of the national curriculum statement revealed that the education establishment was no longer bound by pesky moral absolutes like right and wrong. Ostensibly created to “slim down” the rules and regs, the working draft’s new wording eliminated a previous statement saying that “the school curriculum should pass on enduring values. . .(and) develop principles for distinguishing between right and...

A national group is asking Arizona's public universities to require at least one United States history course of every student before graduation. American History currently isn't a required course at any of the state's major public universities. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has written letters to Gov. Janet Napolitano and 20 state lawmakers, asking them to pressure college regents and administrators to make the change. "The flag doesn't mean all that much if you don't know how it got there," trustees member Charles Mitchell said. "What use is the Constitution if you don't know how it was written?"...

Former Toyota President Shoichiro Toyoda has founded Kaiyo Academy, a $175-million school that he modeled after Britain's Eton Academy -- a school that boasts 19 British Prime Ministers among her alumni and the second-in-line to the throne, Prince William. In Japan there is dissatisfaction with the 'dumbing-down' of its curriculum. Four years ago, the government cut 30% of the workload off the elementary and junior high school curriculum. Toyota's Kaiyo academy is attractive for many reasons. 1. It is backed by Toyota. 2. It is focusing on developing kids who can do more than just pass exams. 3. It is...

Teacher's union begins plans to promote homosexual marriage in public schools The National Education Association is set to endorse homosexual marriage at their convention coming up in Orlando June 29 through July 6. The new NEA proposal essentially says schools should support and actively promote homosexual marriage and other forms of marriage (two men and one woman, three women, two women and three men, etc.) in their local schools. The new proposal, expected to pass overwhelmingly, is found under the B-8 Diversity paragraph: The Association... believes in the importance of observances, programs and curricula that accurately portray and recognize the...

A Senate committee approved a bill Wednesday that would require California's textbooks to include the contributions of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people to the state and nation's history. The bill outraged some religious and conservative family groups, which said it would indoctrinate students in what they view as an unacceptable lifestyle. The Senate Education Committee passed the bill by state Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, 8-3, along party lines. It now goes to the full Senate. "Our community is invisible in all of the teaching material, so that our students are never, ever given any information about the fact...

The Global Education Conference held at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. last month was used to teach educators how to bring global issues into the classroom. But, when it came time to practice the logistics of coordinating a debate the political opinions of the teachers could not be suppressed. The organization that put together the conference, Americans for Informed Democracy (AID), claimed to be a non-partisan group established to “educate and engage Americans in global issues….[in order to] create a generation of Americans that will support a U.S. role in the world that is appropriate….” But what is appropriate? AID...

A RADICAL Muslim thinker who inspired al-Qa'ida is being served up as subject matter for high school students in NSW. Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian militant hanged in 1966 but still a powerful influence on violent Islamists, and the Pakistani fundamentalist Sayyid Maududi are the only two modern Muslim thinkers on a revised syllabus for studies of religion. Experts this week condemned the prominence of political Islam in the new syllabus, and especially the inclusion of Qutb. "I am surprised and dismayed that the NSW religion syllabus narrows modern Islamic thinkers to its totalitarians," said Daniel Pipes, whose US-based Middle East...

A Humanistic Curriculum: Solution for Philippine Moral Decline by: J. Reylan B. Viray The Problem Philippine society is faced with various problems such as economic, social and political. More and more Filipinos cannot cope up with the continuous increase of prices of basic commodities. Foreign debts servicing gets the biggest chunk of the National Budget. Oil prices in the world market rises to points where the Philippine Deregulation Law proved to be insufficient and futile. Trade markets are going down the drain. More investors, foreign and local, are pulling their investments from corporations for fear of unfavorable returns. Government agencies...

A magazine cover story about postmodern life on the American college campus depicts three monkeys in cap and gown, covering their ears, eyes and mouth, a parody of the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil caricature. But students at many colleges actually get quite the opposite. They're required to hear, see, speak and study all about evil, as long as it's the evil oppression of everybody in American society. There's an emphasis on multicultural studies and few campuses have escaped the disease, ... students study the life and murder of Tupac Shakur, the "gangsta" rapper ...There's "Queer...

The achievement gap between minority and white students has long been a stain on the bright mosaic of culturally and racially diverse school districts.From North Jersey to Cleveland to San Diego, whites as a group generally score considerably better on standardized tests than their minority peers. Whites also tend to enroll in more honors classes, while minorities are more prevalent in remedial courses.Now, one Bergen County district is introducing a sweeping concept that it hopes will bridge its gap by addressing a wide range of possible roadblocks to academic success.The initiative includes dozens of ideas. Some are in the talking...

When it comes to the classroom, religious extremists have an ambitious agenda: to replace science with ideology at every opportunity. As if denying even that their own ideas can evolve, they've recently taken up their dusty arms against an old, familiar issue — the teaching of evolution in public schools. New Name, Same Agenda The supposed rival to the theory of evolution — creationism — now goes by the new name of "intelligent design." Just as with other phrases (like the Bush administration favorite, "culture of life"), the name change is merely the latest tactic in an ongoing strategy by...

White House senior adviser Karl Rove caused a firestorm last week after observing that liberals favor "therapy and understanding" to fight terrorism in a post-Sept. 11 world. Rove spoke the truth. But he barely scratched the surface. The left-wing Kumbaya crowd is quietly grooming a generation of pushovers in the public schools. At a time of war, when young Americans should be educated about this nation's resilience and steely resolve, educators are indoctrinating students with saccharine-sticky lessons on "non-violent conflict resolution" and "promoting constructive dialogues." Peaceniks are covering our kids from head to toe in emotional bubble wrap. They are...

Judge rules sex-education curriculum violates First Amendment rights Phyllis Schlafly townhall.com June 6, 2005 A federal judge in Montgomery County, Md., has issued a temporary restraining order to stop the teaching of a sex-education course because it violates the First Amendment. I can't remember any other case in the last 30 years in which a judge sided with parents against a curriculum adopted by a school board. This sex-education curriculum was scheduled to be taught in three high schools and three middle schools despite parental protests and petitions with 4,000 signatures. After the court decision, the board voted 7-1...

Arizona schools have added a fourth "R" to reading, writing and arithmetic — rifles. Students who choose to enroll in this new course learn the safe way to handle a gun and earn one credit — the equivalent to ceramics or photography electives. Critics are gunning the debate; they say handing teenagers loaded weapons equals trouble. “We learn life skills, like when we miss [a shot], not to get mad. You learn a lot of cooperation with your team members,” said student Kim Peters. And many parents argue they would rather their children learn how to handle a gun and...