Free Republic

"The children belong to all of us," Paul Reville, an education professor at Harvard and former Massachusetts secretary of Education, said Friday in explaining why states should adopt the Common Core State Standards Initiative. "What we're doing at the national level ... is what a lot of our states thought made sense individually. Why should some towns in cities or states have no standards or low standards and others have extremely high standards when the children belong to all of us and would move. And the same logic applies to the nation," he said, making the case for national standards....

THE SCHOOL AS SOCIAL CENTEROCTOBER, 1902 An address delivered before the National Council of Education, Minneapolis, Minn., July, 1902. According to the character of my invitation to speak to you, I shall confine myself to the philosophy of the school as a social center. I accept the invitation with pleasure, but at the same time I do not feel that the philosophical aspect of the matter is the urgent or important one. The pressing thing, the significant thing, is really to make the school a social center; that is a matter of practice, not of theory. Just what to do...

Senate Bill (SB) 248 was introduced on December 3, 2013, and would require children’s services to review all homeschool notices to determine whether homeschooling is “in the best interest of the child.” Under this proposed legislation, children’s services would be required to meet with parents who choose to homeschool and conduct separate in-person interviews with each of their children. Children’s services would then make a recommendation for or against the excuse from compulsory school attendance.

Over the years, pediatricians and others in North Carolina have worried about children supposedly being educated at home who end up missing, dead or abused. The latest case: An 11-year-old Union County boy found handcuffed to his front porch with a dead chicken tied to his neck. Wanda Sue Larson, who had custody of the boy and four adopted children living in the home, had filed last year to home-school the children. Larson has been charged with child abuse, and investigators say they found signs the boy was frequently handcuffed inside. Home schooling is booming in North Carolina. The number...

A Common Core school district – Gulfport, Mississippi – is covering up failing test scores. At a recent meeting by Superintendent Glen East, parents were told that the test scores of the district had improved dramatically under the implementation of the Common Core curriculum.  The Superintendent made his claims regarding dramatic academic improvement of all students by using ONLY the scores of the  top 150 students.In his comments to parents, Mr. East stated, “This district already had national average ACT scores. We’ve now gone with our top students, our top 150 students, we’ve gone from a 23 average to almost...

<p>CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Authorities say it appears the 11-year-old boy found handcuffed to a porch with a dead chicken around his neck was routinely handcuffed in the home.</p> <p>Union County Sheriff’s Capt. Cody Luke also told The Charlotte Observer on Sunday that human waste was found on the home’s floor.</p>

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."...

Our family is heavily involved in FIRST Robotics. I have a favor to ask. Up Next- Team 3528 made a video and entered it in the Rockwell Automation "Engineering Our Future" video contest describing what we would engineer to help change the world. They’re giving away $10,000 in team grants to use on future projects. It's all based on the number of votes, so we need to get as many people to vote between now and November 29. They allow you to vote once every 24 hours, so I’d appreciate if you could vote as many days as possible. In...

Homeschoolers whose children were recently seized by the German government are now not allowed to emigrate to a country that allows homeschooling. In August, the children of Dirk and Petra Wunderlich were seized at gunpoint by German officials because the Wunderlich's refused to send their children to the public school. In mid-September, the Wunderlichs were reunited with their children, but only after they promised to send their kids to public school. The Wunderlichs then requested that they be allowed to leave the country so that they could go to a country that will allow them to homeschool. A judge told...

A growing number of military parents want to end the age-old tradition of switching schools for their kids. They've embraced homeschooling, and are finding support on bases, which are providing resources for families and opening their doors for home schooling cooperatives and other events. "If there's a military installation, there's very likely home-schoolers there if you look," said Nicole McGhee, 31, of Cameron, N.C., a mother of three with a husband stationed at North Carolina's Fort Bragg who runs a Facebook site on military home schooling. At Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, the library sported special presentations for home-schoolers...

Congratulations! Our state has won national attention in the public schools debate. Education historian and activist Diane Ravitch told an overflow crowd at the Free Library on Tuesday, "The state of Pennsylvania is ground zero for the destruction and privatization of education." Who wants to live at ground zero of a crisis? Apparently, we do, and the experts are coming. According to the latest Pew poll that shocks no one, the majority of Philadelphians think that our schools stink, that the city is a good place to live and a lousy one to educate children. Oh, and almost everyone is...

It is our duty to stop stuff like this. Guyer High School (and obviously several others) are complicit in attempting to condition students to interpret the 2nd Amendment in a clearly opposite manner in which it was intended. The 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th are also misinterpreted as several commentators below pointed out. This textbook, currently being used by Guyer High School, is attempting to redefine the Second Amendment to impressionable young minds. Parents, you must speak up and demand action. Investigate your child's history book ASAP, and post more pictures in the comments below. Call your school and demand...

Jaden Smith (pictured), the son of actors Will and Jada, reportedly attacked the U.S. educational system in a Twitter rant relayed to his nearly 4.6 million followers about how society would be better off “if everybody in the world dropped out of school.” Now concerned parents are in an uproar because the pint-sized actor and his “too cool for school ‘tude” is reportedly influencing his school-aged followers, according to US Magazine. Jaden Smith ‏@officialjaden If Everybody In The World Dropped Out Of School We Would Have A Much More Intelligent Society. Jaden Smith ‏@officialjaden If Newborn Babies Could Speak They...

Four children, ages 7 to 14, have been forcibly taken from their home by police armed with a battering ram, and their parents have been told they won’t see them again soon, all over the issue of homeschooling, according to a stunning new report from the Home School Legal Defense Association. HSLDA, the world’s premiere advocate for homeschoolers, said the family of Dirk and Petra Wunderlich has battled for several years Germany’s World War II-era requirement that all children submit to the indoctrination programs in the nation’s public schools. The shocking raid was made solely because the parents were providing...

Parents and educators in New York were shocked last week when student test scores plummeted following the state’s adoption of the Common Core national standards. Even prior to the adoption of the new standards, however, test results were, to many, still unacceptable, suggesting that despite billions of dollars of taxpayer funding, American students have little to show for it.

The best educated children in America don't go to school. Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute, compared home schoolers and public school students on the results of three standardized tests -- the California Achievement Test, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the Stanford Achievement Test -- for the 2007-2008 academic year. With public school students at the 50th percentile, home schoolers were at the 89th percentile in reading, the 86th percentile in science, the 84th percentile in language, math and social studies.

The U.S. Department of Justice has revealed in a court filing it agrees with the philosophy of the German government that bureaucrats can punish homeschooling parents. The agency contended parental rights to keep children free from instruction that violates faith essentially are negligible when the government’s goal is an “open society.” The arguments were made in a pleading before the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that urges the judges to send a German homeschooling family, the Romeikes, back to Germany where members likely would face persecution. “The goal in Germany is for an ‘open, pluralistic society,’” wrote the government’s...

The U.S. Department of Justice has revealed in a court filing it agrees with the philosophy of the German government that bureaucrats can punish homeschooling parents. The agency contended parental rights to keep children free from instruction that violates faith essentially are negligible when the government’s goal is an “open society.” The arguments were made in a pleading before the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that urges the judges to send a German homeschooling family, the Romeikes, back to Germany where members likely would face persecution. “The goal in Germany is for an ‘open, pluralistic society,’” wrote the government’s...

Yes, definitely. But hear me out. Every homeschooling parent knows about the “S” word—socialization. We’ve all had conversations with concerned relatives who wonder if our kids are being properly socialized. Read any article about homeschooling in a mainstream media source and inevitably, the comments section will fill up with concerns about it. Never mind that we also talk about socializing puppies or that it’s something we do at after-work Happy Hours, and that children who are caught socializing too much in school are reprimanded. People who don’t know anything about the homeschooling family down the street have “grave concerns” about...

If politicians introduced a bill mandating the slaughter of all human babies under the age of two years; but called it, “The Little Babies Protection Act,” establishment conservatives and unthinking people all over the Country would be clamoring for its passage. We have become a shallow and easily deceived people. If it sounds good on the surface, we are all for it. We assume the proposal will live up to its name. 1 We don’t trouble ourselves to actually read proposals and analyze them before we clamor for passage. The name, “parental rights amendment” (PRA), sounds so good! But it...