Free Republic

Despite the left’s efforts to convince us that Obama’s relationship with William Ayers was irrelevant... the facts that prove otherwise are plenty and can no longer be ignored. To understand the agenda (and lies) at the core of our new national standards, you have to go back to why many on the right were concerned about Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers to begin with – their work on education reform. The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), a progressive education reform model rooted in the social justice pedagogy of John Dewey and Paulo Freire, was expanded by President Obama and communist...

The new academic standards known as the Common Core emphasize critical thinking, complex problem-solving and writing skills, and put less stock in rote learning and memorization. So the standardized tests given in most states this year required fewer multiple choice questions and far more writing on topics like this one posed to elementary school students: Read a passage from a novel written in the first person, and a poem written in the third person, and describe how the poem might change if it were written in the first person.

THE two chairs of the government’s review into the national curriculum fear our schools are becoming too “kumbaya” and overrun with “progressive, new-age fads” that are hurting our children. Australia is sliding behind a number of countries in education standards including Singapore, South Korea, Finland and Hong Kong — a development which Professor Ken Wiltshire and Doctor Kevin Donnelly’s report blames on the fact students have been handed autonomy in the classroom and that wishy-washy ideals like “child-guided learning” and “collaborative negotiated goal-setting” are overtaking the traditional model of teachers imparting knowledge. ..... Professor Wiltshire said he was dismayed by...

A Liberty Blitzkrieg reader who is a resident of Naples, Florida recently sent me a note highlighting a video in which he, and several other concerned parents, were reprimanded and treated like little children in a School Board Workshop as a result of them expressing concerns about school curriculum.In order to give you some background on the issue, see the Letter to the Editor he wrote to the Naples Daily News on 1/28 to say what he was prevented from saying at the 1/20 School Board Workshop. Letter reprinted below: Patton the causeThe controversy behind the recent parents’ review of school textbooks lays squarely at...

Under a new bill, California’s public high schools could be required to offer ethnic studies classes as part of an effort to build cultural understanding.

Dr. Sandra L. Stotsky, professor emerita at the University of Arkansas, recently said that Renaissance Learning’s latest report revealed that a large number of college freshman are reading at a seventh-grade level. Stotsky, who received her Ed. D. from Harvard, is a well-known and respected figure in the world of education. She served on the Common Core Validation Committee in 2009-10 and, along with colleague James Milgram, professor of mathematics at Stanford University, refused to approve Common Core’s standards, which she called “inferior.” In a recent interview with Breitbart Texas, Stotsky said: We are spending billions of dollars trying to...

Oakland school officials, under pressure from supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal, have agreed to reinstate a controversial curriculum that includes a lesson comparing the convicted cop killer to the Rev. Martin Luther King J

A little while back I spent several months researching the Common Core curriculum, and what I discovered absolutely shocked me. At times, it left me utterly incredulous. I wrote a two-part article on the subject. I still have part three (final installment) in progress. And I will be wrapping up that series of articles here in the near future. But the deeper I dig into Common Core, the more it has led me on numerous research paths, some of which interlock with what I thought were unrelated research paths. I still haven’t absorbed or synthesized it all. One of the...

A pair of activists in the state of Washington are promoting an anti-Israel curriculum that high school social studies teachers are considering adopting. Ed Mast and Linda Bevis, of the Palestine Solidarity Committee, have developed “The Palestine Teaching Trunk.” Bevis gave a presentation on it in October at the Washington State Council for the Social Studies annual meeting, Edward Alexander reported in The Weekly Standard on November 10, 2014. “In 1967, Israel seized control of the West Bank and Gaza from Egypt and Jordan,” the “Teaching Trunk curriculum reads. “Israel instituted a military occupation in Gaza and the West Bank—which...

The father of a La Plata High School student has been barred from the school grounds after officials said he threatened to disrupt the school environment. Kevin Wood was issued a no-trespass order last week after a telephone call with La Plata High Vice Principal Shannon Morris on Thursday. Wood called to air complaints regarding his daughter’s world history assignment that asked students to examine elements of the Islamic religion. Morris and La Plata High Principal Evelyn Arnold reported to the Charles County Public Schools central office that Wood in his phone call had threatened to upset the school environment...

It so happened that an 11-year-old boy came home from school one day and told his parents that the first European white people who came to America were so mean that they tried to kill the Indians by giving them blankets with smallpox germs. The boy’s father tried to use this as a teachable moment. He asked his son to think if that made sense, even if the first white settlers were that evil. How would they avoid getting smallpox themselves? The boy then let it be known that the American Constitution was written by the Iroquois Indians. The father...

Every year it gets worse. It seems that the community college that both my daughters have attended is steadily becoming a hotbed of liberal teachers. This time it's an America hating, military hating, obama loving history professor. Im sick of this crap and I'm making a stand. I wanted to get with the freeper brain trust to plan the best course of action. I havent done anything. I suspect if I complain to the dean nothing will happen, because I think the nut doesn't fall far from the tree. I'm sure someone out there has experience dealing with this sort...

[Summary: Decline in American public schools is best explained by the far-left politics of our Education Establishment. These people prefer mediocrity.]-- Historically, Socialism and Communism were sometimes synonyms. But generally there was a sense that Socialism was softer. If you had enough power, you moved on to Communism, which was more coercive. One intellectual summed up the matter this way. Socialists persuade you with speeches. Communists persuade you with guns. In the days after the Russian Revolution, American leftists expended billions of hours trying to describe the perfect society. Fundamentally, all the debates turned on how much power the central...

Many view America's education as a failure, but in at least one important way, it's been a success -- a success in dumbing down the nation so that we fall easy prey to charlatans, hustlers and quacks. You say, "Williams, that's insulting! Explain yourself." OK, let's start with a question or two. Are you for or against global warming, later renamed climate change and more recently renamed climate disruption? Environmentalists have renamed it because they don't want to look silly in the face of cooling temperatures. About 650 million years ago, the Earth was frozen from pole to pole,...

Oklahoma recently took action to protect the state's children from the federal education bureaucracy by withdrawing from Common Core. Common Core is the latest attempt to bribe states, with money taken from the American people, into adopting a curriculum developed by federal bureaucrats and education "experts." In exchange for federal funds, states must change their curriculum by, for example, replacing traditional mathematics with "reform math." Reform math turns real mathematics on its head by focusing on "abstract thinking" instead of traditional concepts like addition and subtraction. Schools must also replace classic works of literature with "informational" texts, such as...

Sixty years ago, Benjamin Bloom came up with what he said was a superior way to categorize educational goals and activities. The Taxonomy was famous for reducing everything to six steps: remembering; understanding; applying; analyzing; evaluating; creating. Note that "remembering" (or "knowing") is the first and LOWEST step. Bloom concocted this taxonomy to describe education at the college level. College professors, however, ignored the Taxonomy. Meanwhile, the people in charge of our public schools put this thing on a pedestal. Why? Because the Taxonomy scorned what had always been considered the most important step: knowing information. Bloom and his Taxonomy...

[For all teachers and parents]-- Malkin Dare, a lifelong teacher and education reformer, is the founder of the Society for Quality Education in Ontario. She is a big voice for sane education in Canada and throughout the world. Dare summarized her educational philosophy in an article titled “Ten Keys to Success: Fundamental Principles of Teaching.” That article is condensed here to the main points. Please, parents and teachers, read this material and discuss it. ---------------------- 1. Almost all students can learn: Obviously, there are a few students who, because of a severe disability, are prevented from learning certain things. For...

A college education historically has been the route to a better-paying job and a satisfying career. But currently, more than half of college graduates are “underemployed” in jobs that don’t require a college degree. Why the growing disconnect? Certainly, the main reason is our economy’s slow recovery. But I believe another reason is the lack of substantive learning in many students’ college studies. And while not unique in this regard, the failure to prepare students to adequately perform in degree-required jobs is evident in the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Minnesota. Every year Vascular Solutions hires recent college graduates...

I can't send my kids to public school.  This is a national shame. Both I and my wife are the products of public school.  I still remember a few of my high school teachers who encouraged me, and taught me more about life than just the curriculum in the classroom.  My kids won't be going to public school though. It's not about the teachers.  Most teachers work hard, care deeply about their students, and do their best to educate our kids.  By educate, I mean not just teach the material, but help our kids understand what learning is, and help...

Video is only 3:15 minutes long. A short graphic presentation of the nine big flaws in public schools. Suppose someone is asking the question, well, what can we do, where do we start? Here's a list of nine places to start. ---------------------------------------------- Personally I like trying to radically simplify things. That is especially appropriate in education. What these professors spend their time doing is creating so much confusion, disinformation, propaganda, alibis, excuses, lies, etc., etc., etc., finally no ordinary citizen knows what to think about the subject anymore. And that's how the Education Establishment wins. At some point you have...