Free Republic

Two separate incidents of potential school yard mayhem were narrowly averted by decisive action on the part of public school officials in New York and Delaware. In Delaware’s Christina School District, 1st grade student Zachary Christie was spotted eating lunch with an unauthorized Boy Scout mess kit tool—a combination knife/fork/spoon. Disaster was avoided when the vice-principal quickly disarmed and immobilized the child. The school’s “zero tolerance” policy calls for the offending 6-year old student to be sentenced to 45 days in reform school. School officials rebuffed arguments that the child’s age and the circumstances should be taken into consideration. “This...

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has launched a wonderful little feature that will run until Barack Obama takes the oath of office next month. They are calling it "Dear Mr. Obama" and it is a heartwarming exercise in child indoctrination and brainwashing. The Post-Gazette will be publishing letters from local students to Obama asking him for all sorts of global warming fixes, Iraq war enders, and big government programs. Sadly, it appears that the government schools these kids have been subjected to have failed to teach their charges about anything like the American system, federalism, even science seems neglected. But they SURE...

PARMA, Ohio -- A kindergarten student with a freshly spiked Mohawk haircut has been suspended by school authorities who said the hair was a distraction for other students. Michelle Barile, the mother of 6-year-old Bryan Ruda, said nothing in the Parma Community School handbook prohibits the haircut, characterized by closely shaved sides with a strip of prominent hair on top. "I understand they have a dress code. I understand he has a uniform. But this is total discrimination," she said. "They can't tell me how I can cut his hair." An administrator at the suburban Cleveland charter school first warned...

A tussle that began with a condom and a banana has morphed into all-out war at a New Jersey high school, with some parents trying to end a peer-to-peer sexual-education course taught in about 45 other public schools statewide. Parents opposed to the classes at Clearview Regional High School, in Mullica Hill, say that kids shouldn't be instructing kids about sex ---snip--- Do you want a 16-year-old boy teaching your 14-year-old daughter how to put on a condom by using a banana?" asked Lisa Westermann, whose son said the course had made him uncomfortable

In California, a summit has been called to "close the achievement gap" in government schools. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/11/12/MNH8T5LTC.DTL California government school warden Jack O'Connell thinks that minority students are performing poorly because of teachers' "widespread cultural ignorance." In other words, the white teachers can't relate to the black and Latino students. Now enters a man by the name of Glenn Singleton, who runs the Pacific Education Group in San Francisco. He is a consultant for government schools. They take thousands of dollars of taxpayer funds and give those dollars to this man in return for his words of "wisdom." He is the...

The National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME) is having its annual conference in Baltimore, Maryland starting today through Sunday. Now taxpayers in every state, listen up. Your money is paying for K-12 teachers from all 50 states to attend the NAME convention. The teachers can sit in on any of the workshops and determine which multicultural propaganda they would like to indoctrinate their government school with upon their return. Let's take a look at some of your workshop options: ***"The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Dismantling White Privilege and Supporting Anti-Racist Education in Our Classrooms and Schools." Designed to help educators...

NOW @ SDSU's bake sale charges men more for the same goods Imagine going to McDonald's and hearing that, because you're a white male, you pay full price for a Big Mac. Meanwhile, the girl behind you pays three-quarters of the total amount for the same thing. NOW (National Organization for Women) @ SDSU brought that reality to San Diego State yesterday at the Aztec Center by holding a pay equity bake sale. The prices for cookies reflected the difference of pay between genders and races. "It's just to raise awareness," NOW @ SDSU Co-President Amanda Whitehead said. "A lot...

In last month's column "Academic Cesspools," I wrote about "Indoctrinate U," a recently released documentary exposing egregious university indoctrination of young people at prestigious and not-so-prestigious universities (www.onthefencefilms.com/movies.html). I said the documentary only captured the tip of a disgusting iceberg. The Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a frontline organization in the battle against academic suppression of free speech and thought, released information about what's going on at the University of Delaware, and probably at other universities as well, that should send chills up the spines of parents of college-age students. The following excerpts are taken from the...

The University of Iowa's history department and Duke's history department have a couple of things in common. Both have made national news because neither has a Republican faculty member. And both rejected the application of Mark Moyar, a highly qualified historian and a Republican, for a faculty appointment. Moyar graduated first in the history department at Harvard; his revised senior thesis was published as a book and sold more copies than an average history professor ever sells. After earning a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in England, he published his dissertation as "Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965" with Cambridge University...

When a high school friend told me several years ago that he and his wife were leaving Washington's Mount Pleasant neighborhood for Montgomery County, I snickered and murmured something about white flight. Progressives who traveled regularly to Cuba and Brazil, they wanted better schools for their children. I saw their decision as one more example of liberal hypocrisy. I was childless then, but I have a 6-year-old now. And I know better. So to all the friends -- most but not all of them white -- whom I've chastised over the years for abandoning the District once their children reached...

Liberals are tremendously attached to the idea that we are apes, but are unwilling to face the fact that we humans still retain an awful lot of our ape programming. This is what led to the Christian concept of Original Sin and the Jewish concept that we are all born with both the urge to good and the urge to evil. And this programming is not identical for men and women, because behavior that enables a male chimp to pass his genes on might get a female chimp a new home in a saber-toothed tiger's stomach. Sometimes when I read...

It takes a big man to teach small children. At 6 feet 5 inches tall, Josh Reineking towers over his kindergarten students at Stephens Elementary School, but it's actually his large heart and patient, steady manner that keep his lively charges learning, and in line. It doesn't hurt that he finds it easy to laugh, and thinks on his feet. Oh, and he also doesn't mind folding up like a Swiss Army knife to fit in a kindergarten-size chair. "My friends, my friends. Hands up for a message," Reineking says quietly and firmly as his class of 5-year-olds begin squirming...

Global warming lecture at CSUF stirs controversy Science weighs against philosophy on campus By: Sylvia Masuda Issue date: 10/18/07 Section: News Posted: 10/18/07 Controversy erupted in the Cal State Fullerton science community over Tuesday's global warming lecture in the Titan Theater. Research professor and climatologist Patrick Michaels presented "Reducing the Effects of Global Warming in Southern California," a presentation which explained why global warming is not an imminent problem. The Economics Association organized the event. Over the years, science organizations have criticized Michaels for exaggerating his credentials and for pushing what they feel is a political agenda. CSUF science...

It’s not the score of a Hawkeye football game. It’s the number of Democrats versus the number of Republicans in the University of Iowa history department, and it has Iowans in an uproar. So, too, do charges published by Mark Bauerlein that left-wing bias has influenced the department’s hiring process. In response to the revelations, department chair Colin Gordon announced that the department had committed no wrongdoing, and neither he nor the university has expressed any concern about the total absence of intellectual diversity. Rarely have the hypocrisy and mendacity of academia been so thoroughly exposed as in the history...

In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice "from local to global level." This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn't long in coming. The Council on Social Work Education, the national accreditor of social work education programs, says candidates must fight "oppression," and sees American society as pervaded by the "global interconnections of oppression." Now aspiring social workers must commit themselves, usually in writing, to a...

WASHINGTON -- The latest smack-down of former Harvard President Lawrence Summers should extinguish any remaining doubt that political correctness is the new McCarthyism. Summers, you'll recall, was driven out of his university post in 2005 after he suggested at a conference that gender differences might account for an underrepresentation by women in science, math and engineering. Never mind that scientific evidence suggests as much. One simply doesn't say -- ever -- that men and women aren't equal in every way. Summers' remarks were seized upon, taken out of context and misinterpreted by many, including one female biologist from MIT, who...

Whether one is on the left or right, it cannot be denied that the left has had an enormous impact on the major institutions of American society -- specifically journalism, education and the judiciary. In every poll I have seen, liberals overwhelm conservatives in academia, including the teachers' colleges, which are quite far left, and in journalism. And few deny the leftward tilt of the Supreme Court for most of the last 40 years. Former U.S. vice president Al Gore accepts the award for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Television during the 59th Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, California...

Joel Klein vows probe of Queen's school's 911 edict BY JESS WISLOSKI, CARRIE MELAGO and ERIN EINHORN DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS Tuesday, September 11th 2007, 4:00 AM Schools Chancellor Joel Klein yesterday vowed to investigate a Queens high school policy that may have cost a teen girl her health. The Daily News reported yesterday an official at Jamaica High School barred school deans from calling 911 in an emergency - just weeks before 14-year-old Mariya Fatima suffered a stroke her family says could have been less devastating. Klein called this a violation of Department of Education policy and instructions he...

Like many public school parents, my wife and I spent the last days of summer sorting through our kids’ complicated school supply lists: Color-coded binders, color-coded notebooks, color-coded index cards. But even we were surprised how far things have gone at Lawrence High School: Color-coded kids. Superintendent Wilfredo Laboy has divided the students into six separate “schools” based on curriculum. The dress code goes even further, requiring students in each “school” to wear matching shirts. Kids studying the arts wear red, for example. The math kids are brown shirts while the “humanities and leadership development” (whatever that is) wear white....

No Child Left Behind has seen better days. Under attack from both the right and left, President Bush’s signature education achievement might not survive if some members of Congress get their way. House Education and Labor Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) offered a 435-page legislative draft last month that rewrites several provisions and guts the few measures in the law that limited-government conservatives support. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) wants to go one step further and rename the law to something other than No Child Left Behind.So not only does the Bush administration face the prospect of significant policy changes, it could...

An article in my local newspaper recently covered the story of a young 14-year old Muslim girl, Yasmeen Flamra from Cliffside Park, N.J., with a heading "Schools become Muslim friendly." Yasmeen had a simple request: All she wanted to do was to go off by herself for a few moments to pray. I checked with Google and found that this story had been covered pretty much throughout the nation. Her family contacted a Muslim advocacy group, The Council on American-Islamic Relations, which asked the school district to reconsider its initial denial of the request. When Christian children cannot bend their...

Confidential strategy directives from the National Education Association urge the union's field representatives involved in the collective bargaining process to "attack the chief school administrator" and "mislead" their own members. The confidential NEA documents obtained by OneNewsNow carry the title "NEA Strategy Directives to Field Representatives for Difficult Negotiations." The documents recommend strategies for field representatives who are engaged in negotiations with school districts that are reticent to certify the powerful teacher's union. One strategy the NEA calls "Block the boss" calls on field reps to "Attack the chief school administrator. Charge him with poor mismanagement, poor working conditions and...

Former Howard County teacher Kirsten Ann Kinley pleaded guilty Tuesday in Circuit Court to one count of third-degree sex offense for improper sexual conduct with a 15-year-old boy at her Columbia apartment more than two years ago. Similar charges against her involving a second boy were dropped after he refused to cooperate with prosecutors. Neither youth was one of her students. As part of a plea agreement, Kinley, 27, a former special- education teacher at Marriotts Ridge High School in Marriottsville, could receive up to 18 months in jail. She is to be sentenced Nov. 15. -snip-

Whatever happened to liberals? One thing I have learned by writing columns on global warming the past two weeks is that liberals are less interested in free expression of ideas than in total compliance with their ideas, less interested in critical thinking than in being critical, and less interested in the truth than in their truth. It wasn’t always so. In fact, considering that I was raised as a good Democrat and a proud liberal, it pains me to have to admit such distaste for the current state of liberalism. But how can I remain silent when so many people...

Even if you don't pay taxes or tuition to the University of Colorado, my state's pride and joy, CU's academic rigor or lack of it should concern you. The notorious Prof. Ward Churchill made the place a national scandal, and the regents finally fired him. But will they take further steps to counter the dominance of multicultural leftists over this once-great institution? It's doubtful in light of this farcical moment at a board meeting last December: “Is it Western hemisphere? Is it Western hemisphere north of the equator?� The inquiry sounded like a game-show contestant trying to buy a clue....

BACK TO SCHOOL nowadays means back to classrooms, lessons and textbooks permeated by multiculturalism and its championing of "diversity." Many parents and teachers regard multiculturalism as an indispensable educational supplement, a salutary influence that "enriches" the curriculum. But is it? With the world's continents bridged by the Internet and global commerce, multiculturalism claims to offer a real value: a cosmopolitan, rather than provincial, understanding of the world beyond the student's immediate surroundings. But it is a peculiar kind of "broadening." Multiculturalists would rather have students admire the primitive patterns of Navajo blankets, say, than learn why Islam's medieval golden age...

Parents sue over teacher quality Suit claims new instructors counted as highly qualified By Shirley Dang The Oakland Tribune Article Last Updated: 08/22/2007 02:41:10 AM PDT Parents and students from the Hayward, Los Angeles and West Contra Costa school districts filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against the U.S. Department of Education alleging that the department broke with laws meant to ensure a quality teacher in each classroom. When Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, lawmakers specified that teachers needed to be credentialed and teach in a subject where they received proper training in order to be...

  Teachers Unions and Educational Quality Student drop-out rates are higher in areas where teachers' unions predominate than in areas which are not unionized, according to a study by Caroline Hoxby of Harvard University. The study, entitled "How Teachers' Unions Affect Education Production," appeared in the August 1996 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Starting with some background on the teachers' union movement: As teachers' unions have gained power over the past three decades, the proportion of students enrolled in unionized public school districts has grown from 1 percent in 1963 to 43 percent in 1992. In 1960,...

Equity and Race Relations White Privilege Conference For the first time, Seattle Public Schools are sending students from four high schools to attend the annual White Privilege Conference, sponsored by the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, the University of Denver, Teaching Tolerance, Study Circles Resource Center, The Matrix, Center for Judaic Studies, GLSEN, and many more organizations. Speakers include Geneva Gay, Peggy McIntosh, Joy Leary, John-Paul Chaisson-Cardenas and many others who are actively engaged in anti-racism. This year's conference takes place in Colorado Springs from April 18th through the 21st. There are workshops designed specifically for youth, as...

Forcing An Inconvenient Truth By Kevin Libin National Post | May 24, 2007 First it was his world history class. Then he saw it in his economics class. And his world issues class. And his environment class. In total, 18-year-old McKenzie, a Northern Ontario high schooler, says he has had the film An Inconvenient Truth shown to him by four different teachers this year. "I really don't understand why they keep showing it," says McKenzie (his parents asked that his last name not be used). "I've spoken to the principal about it, and he said that teachers are instructed to...

The “Weekly Standard” profiled libertarian-leaning conservative and political commentator turned documentarian Evan Coyne Maloney, whose new documentary about the leftist ideological indoctrination and pervasive political correctness in the US higher education system is called “Indoctrinate U”. Saturday May 19, CSPAN ran a segment about his film on the network’s “Washington Journal”, but CSPAN posts footage of the shows online (when they have it up, I'll post it. His spot is at the two-hour mark). You can see a clip of his film on YouTube as well as the film's website, Indoctrinate-U.com. “Indoctrinate U” focuses on the pervasive trampling of free...

Math conferences aren't typically hotbeds of controversy. But add a Harvard-trained civil rights philosopher, a notorious Weather Underground fugitive, and a clutch of young, idealistic math teachers, and you have a banner-waving radical math convention—not to mention a formula for backlash. Creating Balance in an Unjust World, slated for April 27 through 29 in Brooklyn, is fronted by hotshot lefty math icons Bob Moses—founder of the Algebra Project, a math program for inner-city and rural students—and Bank Street College of Education adjunct professor Cathy Wilkerson, who's fortunately not teaching chemistry. (In 1970, Wilkerson and a pack of fellow Weather Underground...

In a society filled with the choice of an infinite number of colored, carbonated or uncarbonated sugar water drinks, an uncountable number of automobile models designed to fit every conceivable taste or price range, or even a range of crayon colors or wall covering choices beyond imagination we confront the monolith known as PUBLIC EDUCATION. Here the choice is not “our way or the highway” it is just “our way”!

GLENDALE, Ariz., May 7, 2007—The Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD) has placed a professor on forced administrative leave and has recommended that he be terminated for e-mailing a Thanksgiving message to his colleagues last November. On the day before Thanksgiving, Professor Walter Kehowski sent out the text of George Washington’s “Thanksgiving Day Proclamation of 1789” and a link to the webpage where he’d found it—on Pat Buchanan’s web log. After several recipients complained of being offended by the e-mail, MCCCD found Kehowski guilty of violating the district’s Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) policy and technology usage standards. Kehowski then contacted...

Our colleges and universities are a hotbed of anti-Americanism. To many professors, this world would be better if there were no USA. Thanks to No Indotrination dot org for providing the website that outs the scumbags who earn a good living while bashing America and indoctrinating students in their classrooms. =========================================================================== PREVIOUS ENEMIES -- 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ============================================================================== Warning: Postings are only opinions. (See Terms of Service)Note: Although the postings appear to be anonymous, NoIndoctrination.org knows the posters' names. We communicate...

SACRAMENTO, April 26, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Students in at least three school districts around the Sacramento region were suspended for peacefully expressing their views last week about the Day of Silence - a day during which homosexual activist students, with the approval of schools, hand out pro-homosexual literature.  The Day of Silence is an annual event staged in April at many high schools. Students are encouraged to go the entire school day without speaking as a protest against harassment of gay and lesbian students, and to "demand change." Approximately thirty students at Rio Linda alone were sent home, suspended or...

At least another 75 students have been suspended from school in California for wearing shirts that expressed their biblically-based opposition to homosexuality, and the district that, as WND reported, has been imposing the punishments, says those quotations aren't necessarily acceptable because they are from God's Word.

Families have flooded the state with applications for the EdChoice voucher program despite Gov. Ted Strickland's attempt to do away with the program. Nearly three times as many people — 7,957 — are seeking to use vouchers to pay for private-school tuition for the coming school year compared with the number currently in EdChoice. There are 2,785 in the statewide program this academic year, which is available to students assigned to low-performing public schools. Most of those — 2,545 — have applied to continue in the program. The applications for the coming school year include 1,489 from Franklin County districts...

Stephan Goyne entered teaching as a "fight the good fight" kind of guy, taking a job in East Oakland right out of college. "I come from a family of teachers. It wasn't even a question of whether to do that," Goyne said. "The question was whether to do elementary, middle or high school." But after six years in the trenches -- transferred from campus to campus, forbidden from organizing field trips and ordered to teach math only after lunch -- Goyne left the profession. Now he works in real estate and runs a Brazilian jiujitsu studio in Oakland. "That last...

SAN FRANCISCO, March 15 — A scathing 18-month evaluation of California’s public schools has concluded that the state’s educational system is “broken,” crippled by a complex bureaucracy, flawed teacher policies and misspent school money, leaving it in need of sweeping reforms that could cost billions of dollars. The report, a compilation of 22 university studies titled “Getting Down to Facts,” was released in two parts on Wednesday and Thursday. The long-awaited report, requested by a bipartisan group of state educators and legislators in 2005, cost $3 million and evaluated why California’s 6.8 million school-age students have lagged behind children in...

Reading the following email, sent to all Harvard freshmen by the Dean, Horsefeathers almost regrets missing out on contemporary Ivy League "education"! It's comforting to know that our educated elites welcome "every gender", and that they'll all emerge from Harvard with something worth fighting for: the right to a great sex life. Hooking Up: Hot Hints For Making Your Harvard (or Future) Sex Life Great Thursday, March 1 7:00 PM Ticknor Lounge "Want to know more about how to access pleasure, how to communicate your desires and how to make sure that you're getting what you want and need from...

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs knows a few things about technology and running a business. So when he says all the computers, wiring, programs and Internet access in the world won't improve public schools as currently constituted, maybe it's time that the powers that be paid attention. Appearing in Texas this month at a conference on the technological future of education, Mr. Jobs named the No. 1 reason for public schools' manifest failures: "(T)hey have become unionized in the worst possible way." To enthusiastic applause from his audience, he added, "This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts...

Chris Romer is a freshman Colorado Senator. He's a bright fellow with a degree from Stanford in economics and more than 20 years of experience in the private sector as a public finance investment banker, specializing in municipal and state budgets. The son of former Gov. Roy Romer, he has a good political pedigree. He describes himself as a "lifelong Democrat," but I don't necessarily hold that against him. After all, Ronald Reagan was once a Democrat. Romer was awarded a seat on the Education Committee. Since Colorado governments - at all levels, combined - spend more money on education...

In a study released this week (“Why We Fight: How Public Schools Cause Social Conflict”), Cato’s Neal McCluskey suggests that America could end its thus-far intractable public school wars (over sex ed, school prayer, evolution vs. creationism or “Intelligent Design”, etc.) by adopting well-designed state-level school choice programs. The most intense opposition to this proposal comes from people who want the theory of evolution taught to all children regardless of parental wishes. Anything less, they argue, would doom America to a new Dark Age of scientific backwardness. As someone who agrees wholeheartedly that a natural process of evolution is the...

Those with superior intelligence need to learn to be wise. If "intellectually gifted" is defined to mean people who can become theoretical physicists, then we're talking about no more than a few people per thousand and perhaps many fewer. They are cognitive curiosities, too rare to have that much impact on the functioning of society from day to day. But if "intellectually gifted" is defined to mean people who can stand out in almost any profession short of theoretical physics, then research about IQ and job performance indicates that an IQ of at least 120 is usually needed. That number...

Researchers from California Business for Education Excellence and the Pacific Research Institute have taken a look at what the state and its students are getting from more than $1 billion spent so far to help improve low-performing schools. Their conclusion: not much. The schools in the program are not doing any better than similar schools that did not participate and did not get the extra money, they say. And they say the state's accountability program is covering up that failure by using a system to assess schools that most people do not understand. ... Their report's executive summary is here.

California education officials are battling the U.S. Department of Education over provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, hoping Congress considers their complaints as it evaluates the five-year-old landmark education reform law. At the heart of the dispute is disagreement over how best to measure student performance. California says its incremental system is best for the state and wants to keep it. Federal officials say California must use another method to follow the law. The California Department of Education also wants to delay the federal law's deadline to have all students reading and doing math at grade level...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush plans to meet with lawmakers next week to jump-start talks over the renewal of the No Child Left Behind education law, a Democratic congressional aide said Wednesday. The top Democrats and Republicans on the House and Senate committees that deal with education issues planned to attend the White House meeting Monday, said the aide on the condition of anonymity because the White House had not announced the session. Monday also is the day the Bush administration is commemorating the fifth anniversary of what is widely considered the most significant federal education law in decades. Education...

BERKELEY — From college football's frenetic bowl season to the ultrahyped March Madness, it would be easy to assume sports is a financial boon to college campuses. At the University of California, Berkeley, however, sports funding has been largely a one-way stream. In the 2004-05 fiscal year, the university spent about $13.5 million more on athletics than it earned, its highest deficit ever. With Cal's long commitment to sponsoring a broad range of sports in jeopardy, university leaders say they've found ways to raise money without cutting sports. If all goes well, the athletics department could be self-sufficient within 10...

The Dirty Dozen: America’s Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses Occidental College’s The Phallus ranked the most bizarre class of ’06 -’07 HERNDON, VA – As college costs soar through the roof—averaging above $31,000 a year for tuition, room & board—today’s college students study adultery, the male genital, and Native American feminism. The Dirty Dozen highlights the most bizarre and troubling instances of leftist activism supplanting traditional scholarship in our nation’s colleges and universities. The growth of these courses gobbles up tons of money and resources and ignores scholarship from conservatives. For instance, books and speeches from the...