Free Republic

When I mention online learning to my colleagues at Wesleyan University, most respond initially with skepticism. But based on my experience, I know that real learning can take place on the Web. I am currently teaching a massive online open course, or MOOC, on Coursera. Most MOOCs have great attrition, and mine is no exception: There were almost 30,000 students registered at the start, yet 4,000 remain active as we near the end of the semester. Unlike most MOOCs, which focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, mine is a classic humanities course. "The Modern and the Postmodern" starts off...

A Philadelphia mother wants her son’s high school teacher fired after he bought the teen the novel Fifty Shades of Grey for in-class reading. Maya Ladson says she was shocked to find a copy of the racy read in her 14-year-old’s book bag back on March 9. That shock turned to outrage when she found out how he got the book. “The minute I found out about it, it raised concern,” the mother told NBC10.com Thursday. “This is not OK to me. This is major.” Ladson's son, who is a 9th grade student at Eastern University Academy Charter School in...

More than 200 Wisconsin teachers and school administrators traveled to Green Bay last week to attend CREATE Wisconsin’s 2013 state conference. EAGnews decided to join them, to get a first-hand look at what the program, sponsored by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, is all about. State officials contend the CREATE program is nothing more than an effort to help teachers better understand and serve minority students. But as EAGnews previously reported, CREATE appears to have a much more broad and progressive agenda than simply working to close the achievement gap between students of color and their white counterparts. Many...

ALBANY, N.Y. - An Albany, New York high school English teacher who asked students to imagine they were Nazis and give reasons why Jews were evil may be disciplined, a school district spokesman said on Friday. Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard was expected to personally apologize on Friday to families of Albany High School students who were given the writing assignment, said Ron Lesko, a spokesman for the district. Vanden Wyngaard issued an apology in the press on Thursday night after a local newspaper reporter showed school officials the assignment, which had been published on the paper’s website. Lesko confirmed that...

New national standards prod schools to return to content-based education.The biggest new thing in American public education these days is a two-volume, 230-page, written-by-committee document called the Common Core State Standards. Forty-five states have pledged to the federal government that they will adopt the standards—which specify the math and English skills that students must attain in each grade from kindergarten to the end of high school—within the next several years. Some of these states genuinely believe that doing so will make more of their students ready for college and careers. Others are on board primarily because the Obama administration has...

New Teaching Standards Delve More Deeply Into Climate Change Under proposed new national science standards, students would learn concepts more thoroughly, including how human activity is driving global warming. By Teresa Watanabe April 9, 2013 The politically touchy topic of climate change will be taught more deeply to students under proposed new national science standards released Tuesday. The Next Generation Science Standards, developed over the last 18 months by California and 25 other states in conjunction with several scientific organizations, represent the first national effort since 1996 to transform the way science is taught in thousands of classrooms. The multi-state...

I just heard another Republican politico, a state senator here in Georgia, at a meeting, claim that Common Core is not a federalized education curriculum, but a “state-led” education reform initiative. He could have been reading from a press release sent by the Obama Department of Education. In reality, Common Core was attached to millions of dollars in stimulus funds that were dangled by the feds before the states in a contest called “Race to the Top” during the 2009 economic crisis. The attached Common Core standards were not even written when states signed up. Writing the standards and attached...

Yeah, yeah. I know a lot of people have a problem with Glenn Beck. To be honest, I do too, sometimes.But this is something worth listening to. He lays out how we are being intentionally distracted in order to slip the truly insidious agenda contained within the stimulus packages, Common Core and other Progressive initiatives.

Glenn has spent a lot of time over the past few weeks exposing some of the education initiatives in states across the country that are indoctrinating kids into the radical progressive agenda. Today, Glenn discussed an issue tied into Common Core that many people aren’t aware of: data mining.“We cover many important stories and topics on this program, but I don’t think any could be more important than what we are covering tonight: the progressive takeover of America’s schools,” Glenn said.Glenn spent the opening minutes of the monologue reviewing the scary pieces of legislation that have allowed the government access...

CARSON CITY — Gov. Brian Sandoval has said his administration has two top priorities: education and economic development. When it comes to education, Sandoval has used both the bully pulpit of his office and his budget to call for school choice, ending social promotion, expanding full-day kindergarten and improving funding for programs targeting English-language learners. But Sandoval and his administration have been largely silent on one key issue important to education advocates, school districts and Democrats: reining in class sizes. That’s not to say he’s ignoring it completely.

<p>Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender literature are included in the California Department of Education's newest reading list for students,prompting complaints from critics who say a leftist agenda is being pushed on kids, the San Jose Mercury News reported.</p> <p>Controversial topics have been introduced to California students in the past, but this is the first time the state has put forth works celebrated by the Stonewall Book Awards, which since 1971 has recognized LGBT literature, according to the newspaper.</p>

Conservatives are in an uproar over Common Core, an educational curriculum being forced upon the states by the Obama administration, which is scheduled to be mostly implemented this year in the 46 states that have adopted it. Common Core eliminates local control over K-12 curriculum in math and English, instead imposing a one-size-fits-all, top-down curriculum that will also apply to private schools and homeschoolers. Superficially, it sounds good. It creates universal standards that supposedly educate all children for college. But along with the universal standards come a myriad of problems, which the administrators of Common Core are disingenuously denying. The...

In February, Texas announced that the state, along with the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum (TESCCC,) would enact major changes to the controversial curriculum management system dubbed CSCOPE.

Don't just get your Kids out of Public Schools. Get the public schools out of Your State. The very Concept of public schools is Obsolete... (video)

Barack Obama did not bring us to this first circle of hell on his own. He was aided and abetted by 1) an education system with a relentless propaganda agenda, 2) a media oligopoly that has completely abrogated its First Amendment responsibility and 3) a celebrity dominated culture that is largely a product of the first two. We begin today with a look at: I. The Education System In a previous post I covered how the public education system fell under the thrall of postmodernism – simply a new name for all the old socialist/communist/relativist claptrap. Some of the...

Have you ever stopped to wonder why conservative ideology is having such a hard time gaining traction with our younger generations? Many of you will know where I am headed with this, but I believe it is time we took a long and hard look at the education system in this country. Could it be we have abdicated our rights as parents and leaders of our community to educate our children as we see fit? It may be happening in places where we would least expect it. Let us take a look at an example from Michelle Malkin, in the...

President Obama ended his State of the Union speech on a warm and fuzzy note by calling for pre-K programs for almost all children. The best thing he could do for pre-kindergarten children is to make sure he doesn't hang trillions of dollars of debt around their necks, but that isn't the route he is taking. Instead, Obama wants to provide government daycare for all preschoolers who live in households where the income is below approximately $47,100. He doesn't call it daycare or babysitting (which is a more accurate term); he calls it early childhood education. Early childhood education means...

[Summary: To dumb down the public schools, our elite educators often rely on sophistry.] Disingenuous. Paradox. Counterintuitive. Sophistry. Counterproductive. These five words always fascinated me. They suggest unexpected warps in a common-sense grasp of the world. Something is out of kilter, weird, defective, or whacko. American public education in the 20th century--which has been characterized as “deliberate dumbing down”--is impossible to discuss without constant recourse to these quirky words. They point to deception, but done with art and flair. Rod Sterling captured the resulting sense of disorientation: “You unlock this door...Beyond it is another dimension....You’re moving into a land of...

Teacher job satisfaction has hit its lowest point in a quarter of a century, and 75 percent of principals believe their jobs have become too complex. The findings are part of the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: Challenges for School Leadership. Conducted annually since 1984, the survey polled representative sampling of 1,000 teachers and 500 principals in K-12 schools across the country. Only 39 percent of teachers described themselves as very satisfied with their jobs on the latest survey. That's a 23-percentage point plummet since 2008, and a drop of five percentage points just over the past year. Factors...

Accessible Pudding What is the solution for the crumbling education system? We all can say “School was far better when I was going to school than now.”, but kids are learning about bigger things these days at a younger age. So why is the United States not number one when it comes to education? Many would blame the Bush/Kennedy Bill “No Child Left Behind”, but I think it’s more than that. For many sitting on a education board, or working within the DOE (Department of Education), or those politicians that believe throwing money at something, like if they’re trying to...

From a history teacher: I am anxiously awaiting the next installment in your Rotten to the Core series. As a history teacher, the Common Core Standards don’t have much of an impact on my teaching (yet – and to my understanding). The whole of this program seems to be shrouded in edu-speak and double talk (which are mostly the same). In addition to the Common Core, we were given an intro to another change coming to my district… and from what I’ve seen, it is spreading to districts across the country. The new model for teaching is Strategic Planning Strategies...

E. D. Hirsch, Jr. A Wealth of Words The key to increasing upward mobility is expanding vocabulary. WInter 2013 A number of notable recent books, including Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality and Timothy Noah’s The Great Divergence, lay out in disheartening detail the growing inequality of income and opportunity in the United States, along with the decline of the middle class. The aristocracy of family so deplored by Jefferson seems upon us; the counter-aristocracy of merit that long defined America as the land of opportunity has receded. These writers emphasize global, technological, and sociopolitical trends in their analyses. But...

...“I, along with 3 million educators across the country, proudly support our members’ efforts in saying ‘no’ to giving their students a flawed test that takes away from learning and is not aligned with the curriculum,” said National Education Association President Dennis van Roekel...

Kindergarten has come a long way, baby — too far, some say. Way beyond the ABCs, crayons and building blocks, the city Department of Education now wants 4- and 5-year-olds to write “informative/explanatory reports” and demonstrate “algebraic thinking.” Children who barely know how to write the alphabet or add 2 and 2 are expected to write topic sentences and use diagrams to illustrate math equations.

Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America Indoctrination Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America Indoctrination This video is 2 minutes 43 seconds. The title is self-explanatory. Our nation's children are not attending religiously neutral schools. They are forced to attend (and taxpayers are under police threat to fund) government owned and run ATHEIST schools. Government owned and run, socialist-entitlement, single-payer K-12 schools have never been, and are not now, religiously, politically, or culturally neutral. Please remember that it is ***impossible** to live in a philosophic state of religious neutrality. All humans must choose between either...

The radical teachers group Rethinking Schools published an article in its Winter 2012-2013 magazine titled, “Books About Contemporary Palestine for Children,” EAGnews.org reported. Before you go any further, here’s a hint about the nature of these recommended books: The editors of Rethinking Schools are anti-Israel and see nothing wrong with Palestinian terrorist attacks against the people of that nation. The article’s author, San Jose State University Professor of Education Katharine Davies Samway, starts off by explaining how she volunteered to work in a booth at a recent local festival that was dedicated to drawing attention to “the impact of...

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a chief proponent of the longer school year, says American students have fallen behind the world academically. "Whether educators have more time to enrich instruction or students have more time to learn how to play an instrument and write computer code, adding meaningful in-school hours is a critical investment that better prepares children to be successful in the 21st century," he said in December when five states announced they would add at least 300 hours to the academic calendar in some schools beginning this year....

Did your kids moan that winter break was way too short as you got them ready for the first day back in school? They might get their wish of more holiday time off under proposals catching on around the country to lengthen the school year. But there's a catch: a much shorter summer vacation. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a chief proponent of the longer school year, says American students have fallen behind the world academically. "Whether educators have more time to enrich instruction or students have more time to learn how to play an instrument and write computer code, adding...

U.S. history courses at American colleges and universities downplay the nation's economic, military, and political history and dramatically overemphasize the role of race. So finds a new study by the Texas Association of Scholars (TAS) and Center for the Study of the Curriculum at the National Association of Scholars (NAS). The study focused on the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M as representative institutions because Texas law requires all students at public universities to take a year of American history and for universities to post course syllabi and faculty credentials online. The researchers found that many important topics...

It's not that top universities are telling people directly to homeschool their kids. Instead, top schools are using a selection process that gives homeschooled kids a huge advantage. Here's why: 1. Good grades are a commodity, so they don't help in the admissions process. Girls are doing so much better than boys in both standard high school courses and in standardized tests that their good grades and good scores don't get girls into good colleges. It's not enough anymore. White girls especially need a hook. A hook is, ironically, something you are passionate about and engaged in that is outside...

If Barack and Michelle Obama feel comfortable allowing Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn to babysit their children, that is their problem. The question is, would you allow them to babysit yours? Let's take that a step farther: would you let them raise your children? Would you give them exclusive supervision over the majority of your children's daylight hours up to age eighteen, primary control of your children's academic curriculum and teaching methodology, and authority to arrange the broad social and moral framework within which your children will be educated? No? Then why do you accept modern public education? Furthermore, why,...

If there is one true cancer in the land of education, according to our Education Establishment, it’s the torture known as “drill and kill.”Progressive educators always hated Drill and Kill. It hurts the child, we are told, and is the end of genuine learning.For the last hundred years, our Education Establishment condemned the direct transmission of knowledge from teacher to student. These elite educators are constantly in a rage that students might be forced to prepare for a test in the traditional sense, that is, they know facts. And yet, when it helps their agenda, the commissars will turn on...

Emerging as a force in American education a century ago, social studies was intended to remake the high school. But its greatest effect has been in the elementary grades, where it has replaced an older way of learning that initiated children into their culture with one that seeks instead to integrate them into the social group. The result was a revolution in the way America educates its young. The old learning used the resources of culture to develop the childÂ’s individual potential; social studies, by contrast, seeks to adjust him to the mediocrity of the social pack. Why promote the...

A reading teacher commented on the Internet: “The situation in the local public schools is getting worse. This year they switched to Guided Reading. Take a look at Pinnell & Fountas. This is a perfect example of 'how not to teach reading.'" Curious, I asked a teacher in Chicago what she knew about Guided Reading. Here’s her indignant response: -------------- “HA!!! Fountas and Pinnell!!!!! They created Guided Reading (I think). These are two women who are obvious whole language experts. They publish their stuff at Heinemann. Let me explain how Guided Reading goes. You know, Bruce, in a whole language...

American Capitalism Gone With A Whimper It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American descent into Marxism is happening with breathtaking speed, against the backdrop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people. True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall...

A teacher in Florida summed up the educational situation in her state: “There is an obsession with the worse-off students.” School officials there proclaim: “But what about the people with pathologies? They can’t advance very far. It’s fairer if we bring everybody along together.” Notice there is no obsession with curing the pathologies, or with devising better methods to help disadvantaged kids rise above their disadvantages. No, the answer is to reduce the better students to the level of the worse students. Where does this go? Suppose that half of the people in your city are sick. Do we best...

Enrollment in online schools has increased twelvefold in Ohio since the first internet-based school was created in the state in 2000, The Gazette Medina reports.More than 30,000 students are currently enrolled, most of them concentrated in seven statewide cyber schools. Only Arizona had more students in online schools, according to the news report.Online schools, and other forms of digital learning, are an inevitable and promising form of education for the 21st Century, unless special interest forces are able to keep technology from becoming more integrated into everyday education.Professor Gary Miron of the National Education Policy Center is a leading voice...

Students may be catching a break if they misbehave in school. The rules surrounding suspensions in New York City schools are changing. The changes to the discipline code should result in far fewer suspensions, CBS 2’s Vanessa Murdock reported Wednesday. “Our goal is to make sure the schools are providing a safe environment for our students, but also we just don’t push students out of the classroom where they’re not learning as well,” Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said. What will be different? Well, for starters Walcott said cutting class and cursing will no longer be grounds for suspension.

President Barack Obama recently signed an executive order hiring race-sensitive bureaucrats to hold meetings and mandate racial discipline quotas. The order charges his new racial justice team, in part, with "promoting a positive school climate that does not rely on methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools." In plain English, that means that if different races have different incidences of disciplinary action, those of a favored race who act worse will be punished less, or those of a disfavored race who act better will be punished more, or both. It's true that a higher percentage of black students...

From Australia but it translates well to the US. Uni is short for university. Ute is a pickup truck. Scenario : Jack goes rabbit shooting before school, pulls into school parking lot with rifle in gun rack. 1957 - Vice Principal comes over, looks at Jack's rifle, goes to his car and gets his rifle & chats with Jack about guns. 2011 - School goes into lock down, Tactical Response called, Jack hauled off to jail and never sees his ute or gun again.. Counselors called in for traumatized students and teachers. Scenario: Johnny and Mark get into a fistfight...

If I were a Klansman, wanting to sabotage black education, I couldn't find better allies than education establishment liberals and officials in the Obama administration, especially Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who in March 2010 announced that his department was "going to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement." For Duncan, the civil rights issue was that black elementary and high school students are disciplined at a higher rate than whites. His evidence for discrimination is that blacks are three and a half times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers. Duncan and his Obama administration supporters conveniently ignored...

Borrowing a page from the corporate world, the University of Texas System is poised to adopt a pay-for-performance plan that would reward campus presidents and system executives for boosting graduation rates, increasing donations and meeting other goals. ....A sample of how award pay would work was included in the plan for a hypothetical official with a base salary of $350,000 and an "incentive award opportunity" of 10 percent. The official actually qualified for a bit more than 10 percent by virtue of exceeding some of the goals, which included cost savings through shared services, growth in sponsored research, increased philanthropic...

What is the best way to bring this up to the school Board??? My daughter is going into the 3rd grade this year. While looking up a supplies list on the school website my wife found that the schools 3rd grade site showed some projects that they should be prepared for this school year. Under the social studies tab it showed a project were the kids will dress up as one of the following people and do a report on that person. The list is in pictures on the website. Their choices are as follows. Susan B. Anthony Paul Revere...

As a longtime school choice advocate, I am always in favor of giving parents the tools they need to ensure their children receive a high quality education, which is necessary to compete in today’s global marketplace. And as a visiting professor of law at Liberty University and former associate professor at Xavier University, I know how a rigorous education is critical for students to be prepared to get the most value out of their time at college. Therefore, I am disturbed by a recent development in states such as Idaho, where members of the school board are questioning the worth...

Someone I know is going to be working as a teacher's assistant in a high-school U.S. History class. She is wondering if there are some good online sources that she can use that haven't been twisted by people with a leftist agenda. Would anyone be able to point me to some?

President Barack Obama is backing a controversial campaign by progressives to regulate schools’ disciplinary actions so that members of major racial and ethnic groups are penalized at equal rates, regardless of individuals’ behavior. Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/07/27/obama-backs-race-based-school-discipline-policies/#ixzz21r5DlzVI

The bulletin board at the front of Melissa Balzano’s classroom in West Orange is decorated with hand-written lists her students wrote in September, expressing their "Hopes and Dreams for Third Grade." For at least half the children in Balzano’s class at Mount Pleasant Elementary School, learning cursive topped the list. "It’s fancy writing," said Naomi Toms, 9. Cursive was once a mainstay of elementary schools, where children practiced the "tripod" pencil grip and the looping strokes of the letters. But these days little classroom time is spent teaching cursive writing, crowded out of the curriculum by the demands of an...

This exam was given in 1931 by the West Virginia Department of Free Schools (now West Virginia Department of Education) to students seeking graduation from eighth grade. For many students, that was the last year of formal schooling. The exam is provided John N. Beall of Wilmington, NC, who received it from his father, the teacher who administered the test in a one-room school in Gilmer County, WV.

For those of you who have long since gotten sick of the trend among education experts toward “self esteem” rather than actual learning, this story will be extremely cathartic. Wellesley High School teacher David McCullough, Jr. (son of historian David McCullough) had apparently had enough of feeding blithering platitudes to his students and decided to tell the truth. The result sparked controversy among the parents, who didn’t like hearing their children accused of being cosseted and pampered little brats who believed they were special for no reason. But sometimes the truth hurts. Read the greatest hits below:

A 17-year-old high school student working two jobs to support her siblings, while juggling college-level classes, spent 24 hours in jail this week for missing too much school, KHOU 11 News reported. Diane Tran, an 11th-grader at Willis High School in Willis, Texas said she was often too exhausted to get to school in time. Judge Lanny Moriarty said he warned the student last month not to miss any more classes or she would be violating truancy law, KHOU 11 News reported. When she missed school again, he had her thrown in jail. "If you let one run loose, what...