Free Republic

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.The full plan to close the racial achievement gap by altering the structure of the high school is known as the High School Redesign. It will come before the Berkeley School Board as an information item at...

IT WAS the kind of student conference I hate. “I’ll do better,’’ my student told me, leaning forward in his chair. “I know I’ve gotten behind this semester, but I’m going to turn things around. Would it be OK if I finished all my uncompleted work by Monday?’’ I sat silent for a moment. “Yes. But it’s important that you catch up completely this weekend, so that you’re not just perpetually behind.’’ A few weeks later, I would conduct a nearly identical conversation with two other students. And, again, there would be no tangible result: No make-up papers. No change...

To boost the economy out of the recession, President Obama has chosen to spend an additional $100 billion on public schooling over the next two years. His education secretary, Arne Duncan, is touring the nation to promote this education "stimulus." However well-intentioned, their effort isn't just futile; it's also counterproductive. Far from being an engine of wealth creation, the education system is bleeding the economy to death. The U.S. spends 2.3 times as much per pupil in real, inflation-adjusted dollars as it spent in 1970, but the return on this ballooning investment has been less than nothing. Student achievement at...

I AM often asked to talk at schools and almost always ask students three questions about a film that lies about the "stolen generations". First: "How many of you have been shown Rabbit-Proof Fence?" Answer: every one. Second: "Have you been shown the movie as a great piece of film-making, or as a history lesson?" Answer: in every case as history. You know, like you learn America's history from John Wayne movies. And third: "How many of you have checked whether the film is actually true, by, say, reading the book on which it's based?" Answer: of thousands of students,...

There is no evidence supporting auditory and visual learning, psychologists sayAre you a verbal learner or a visual learner? Chances are, you've pegged yourself or your children as either one or the other and rely on study techniques that suit your individual learning needs. And you're not alone— for more than 30 years, the notion that teaching methods should match a student's particular learning style has exerted a powerful influence on education. The long-standing popularity of the learning styles movement has in turn created a thriving commercial market amongst researchers, educators, and the general public. The wide appeal of the...

<p>In 1997, Matt Damon played the part of a janitor who turned out to be not only a math wizard, but one of the most brilliant men you could find anywhere. Trying to impress an arrogant Harvard student, who thought he knew everything, Damon’s character quotes from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. He tells the Harvard kid and a psychiatrist at the hospital he works at that “you’re surrounding yourself with all the wrong fuckin’ books. You wanna read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll [explitive deleted] you on your [explative].”</p>

In 1998, Californians voted to pass Proposition 227, the “English for the Children Act,” and dismantle the state’s bilingual-education industry. The results, according to California’s education establishment, were not supposed to look like this: button-cute Hispanic pupils at a Santa Ana elementary school boasting about their English skills to a visitor. Those same pupils cheerfully calling out to their principal on their way to lunch: “Hi, Miss Champion!” A statewide increase in English proficiency among all Hispanic students. Instead, warned legions of educrats, eliminating bilingual education in California would demoralize Hispanic students and widen the achievement gap. Unless Hispanic children...

Marvin Olasky has touched upon a brilliant meme in terms of academia. As the universities and colleges have been hijacked by the Left, perhaps it is time to consider charter colleges. It would certainly improve the quality of education, considering the generation of know-nothings schools are producing these days. Cross-posted at RudyCarrera.com.

Those who believe that America is a special place where dreams can come true and everyone has the opportunity to succeed, had better keep their thoughts to themselves if they attend the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development. A new report posted by the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group of the University recommends those training to be Minnesota public school teachers must repudiate our cherished American dream. This “Task Group” even recommends teacher candidates adopt its party line that America is “an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic.” Teachers must harbor hatred and resentment for...

How do we get politically correct students and schools? We get them by churning out politically correct teachers from teacher colleges and teacher credentialing programs which filter the teaching of education through the lens of political correctness. In a press release in October of this year, U.S. Secretary of Education's Arne Duncan stated, “By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom. America’s university-based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change--not evolutionary tinkering.” The press release...

I had a somewhat disturbing conversation yesterday with Steve Fussell, the senior VP of human resources at pharmaceutical maker Abbott. His basic message, which I may pursue in a column down the road, was that Abbott is going to be hiring tons of people for high-paying jobs over the next decade, but not many of them will be Americans because we study the wrong things in college and we're not willing to work overseas. The key quotes: 1) "I hate to say we don't have the world's best universities. We may have the best minds, the best liberal arts education....

TAMPA, Fla. – Jeffrey Kolowith's kindergarten students read a poem about Christopher Columbus, take a journey to the New World on three paper ships and place the explorer's picture on a timeline through history. Kolowith's students learn about the explorer's significance — though they also come away with a more nuanced picture of Columbus than the noble discoverer often portrayed in pop culture and legend. "I talk about the situation where he didn't even realize where he was," Kolowith said. "And we talked about how he was very, very mean, very bossy."

There is so much for high school seniors and their parents to know about colleges that they not only need to get a lot of information but also need to make sure it is the right kind of information. A number of college guides have useful information but, unfortunately, the best-known and most pretentious of these guides — "America's Best Colleges"— is grossly misleading. There is no such thing as a "best" college, any more than there is any such thing as a "best" wife or a "best" husband. Who would be best for a particular person depends on that...

“The full-time residential model of higher education is getting too expensive for a larger share of the American population.” Is it any wonder “more and more students are looking for lower-cost alternatives to attending college?” What does the future hold for higher education? ▪ White students will likely be outnumbered by minority students on college campuses. ▪ People will need to rely on more and more formalized education to advance their careers or change to new ones. ▪ It is estimated that ten years from now, the average cost for a 4 year public college in-state resident will be $31,949.28...

The Bitter Homeschooler's Wish List 1 Please stop asking us if it's legal. If it is — and it is — it's insulting to imply that we're criminals. And if we were criminals, would we admit it? 2 Learn what the words "socialize" and "socialization" mean, and use the one you really mean instead of mixing them up the way you do now. Socializing means hanging out with other people for fun. Socialization means having acquired the skills necessary to do so successfully and pleasantly. If you're talking to me and my kids, that means that we do in fact...

Henry Ramirez, meet Kyle Gosselin. We thought you should be introduced, at least virtually, because you have some things in common. You're a couple of low-key, low-drama, low-maintenance 17-year-olds who have just navigated 11th grade at large public high schools. Both of you are planning to go to college. Both thinking about careers in medicine. Both willing to work hard (but not insanely hard). Both smart (but not gunning to be No. 1). In the 20 or so miles that separate Jefferson High School from La Cañada High, in the miles between inner city and suburb, there exists a social...

All Things Considered, May 1, 2009 · Public education is among the many casualties of the growing war in Afghanistan, and the threat of violence is especially acute for Afghan girls. Parents, who in the past did not allow their daughters to go to school because of societal taboos, are once again keeping them at home because of the threat of attacks by militants wielding acid or worse. But many girls are refusing to give up their schooling — no matter what the cost.

MOUNDSVILLE - Days of lugging home heavy backpacks filled with textbooks could soon be over for students in Marshall County, where school officials may stop requiring them to complete their homework. Bonnie Ritz, director of curriculum and instruction, said administrators have discussed a policy that would not penalize students for failing to do their homework. The idea is that students who do their homework would improve their grades, but students not doing the work would not see grades suffer as a result. She said the concept grew out of concerns that some students in the county don't have sufficient help...

"Our initial reaction was that the reprint illustrated the reliance on force-fed rote memorization of yesteryear. On further reflection, most of the questions are still appropriate. They stress a broadness of education, which seems largely lacking today. Enjoy testing yourself; the questions are tough for 8th graders or adults!"

"Thus impoverished, writers and intellectuals generally veered sharply to the left in these years. Indeed, 1929-1933 was a great watershed in American intellectual history. In the 18th century American men of ideas and letters had been closely in tune with the republicanism of the Founding Fathers. . ."

Republicans and conservatives are in jeopardy of being "educated" out of existence. That begs the question, why in a county that is over 60% Republican and conservative, do we allow our local school system to be run by liberals? Yes, while conservatives have slept, the local school systems across the country, including ours, have been completely taken over by liberals. It is not only the liberals alone that have made this possible. It is also RINO (Republicans in name only) that have supported these liberal policies and made it possible for them to dominate the school system. Locally RINO's like...

Scholasticism (Gk. scholastikos, “schooled” or “educated”) Scholasticism was a school of thought which sought to reconcile the established Christian belief within a body of reason or rational thought, especially that of Greek philosophy. The “scholastic period” primarily refers to the period during the late middle ages (eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries) in the West when Christianity was experiencing a renaissance of learning and education and was being challenged by the rational thought of Islam. Early Christian scholastics include Anselm, Peter Abelard, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and Thomas Aquinas. The term can also refer to any system of...

Some people collect sports memorabilia, or rare coins, or sea shells from the beach at Ocean City. Wilson Watson collects sentences. He taught local community college students for 35 years and has now slipped gently into retirement. But his students’ sentences trail behind him like ship’s anchors, evidence of the sinking of American writing skills. Or, as one of Watson’s scholars wrote so succinctly: “Some people use bad language and is not even aware of the fact.” Or, another: “It’s good I’m doing something with my self; Therefore, I can do better in the foochure.” Or, “People who murder a...

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban,...

A wide variety of concerns and perspectives marked a sometimes disorganized and rancorous PTSA forum about mixed-level classes, scheduled in the wake of a surprise change to the senior English program which eliminated the honors-only level. Over 150 people attended the forum, "Mixed-Level and Honors-Only Classes at ETHS: The Past, The Present and The Future" on Oct. 6. Superintendent Eric Witherspoon provided a backdrop to the discussion through a review of the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, the District's recent positive performance against those requirements and the comprehensive restructuring that has taken place through the System of...

Higher (Priced) EducationBy Burt Prelutsky Oscar Wilde once described a cynic as a man who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. It makes me wonder, were he alive today, if he would characterize us as a country of cynics or merely dismiss us as a nation of fools. I mean, how is it that Americans who lived hardscrabble lives 150 years ago could read, write, do math problems, and quote at length from Shakespeare and the Bible, while today, in spite of “Sesame Street,� pre-school, Operation Head Start, computers, and mind-numbing hours of homework, millions...

You are a damn elite, not me! That sums up the current political debate—whether we look at charges that John McCain has so many houses he can’t remember any longer the actual number of them; or that poor Barack Obama is depressed at the soaring price of arugula; or that Fightin’ Joe Biden once bootstrapped himself up at ten in Scranton; or that moose-hunting Sarah snowmachines as naturally as Barack Obama trips over himself in a bowling lane.A nation of wood-cuttersIn short, we remain log-cabin America, formed as the frontier antithesis of Europe. Apparently, we are determined, at least in...

Q. Although attending college has long been a staple of the American dream, you argue in your new book, “Real Education,” that too many kids are now heading to four-year colleges and wasting their time in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree. A. Yes. Let’s stop this business of the B.A., this meaningless credential. And let’s talk about having something kids can take to an employer that says what they know, not where they learned it. Q. You’re not the first social scientist to knock the liberal arts, but you may be the first to insist that only 20 percent of...

I'm incredibly frustrated. My daughter, who is in 6th grade, is very good at and very interested in math. Over the summer she asked for 6th and 7th grade math workbooks; she completed the 6th grade books and some of the 7th grade books. She also took an online Math Olympiad course through Johns Hopkins CTY, and also did some work on the Aleks math program (which I love). We also had her tested academically over the summer; she came out generally in the 96-99% for math on both I.Q. and achievement tests. Last year, she had been very bored...

When Students Run the Classroom Here’s an easy question: What would happen if children were allowed to come up with their own grading rules? Common sense — not an immediate recollection of the plot of Lord of the Flies — is all one needs to possess in order to know that rudderless kids just might come up with a system that puts immediate gratification before, say, scholarship. It’s not unlikely, for example, that 20 5th graders could put aside their feuds to agree on the following: Homework grades should be given only when the grades will “raise a student’s average,...

My father always said that anyone who lived through John F. Kennedy’s assassination remembers what they were doing at the precise moment the president was shot. This may well be true, but we also lucidly recall the circumstances of far lesser events such as the controversy surrounding the publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The furor its conclusions caused is forever ingrained in my memory. At the time I was a psychology graduate student and found that most of my associates were familiar with the work but...

In a bid to correct what he called a “knowledge deficit” among New York City public school students, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced on Monday a pilot program that would overhaul the way children in 10 city schools are taught to read. The program, devised by E. D. Hirsch Jr.’s Core Knowledge Foundation, is being paid for with $2.4 million in private donations raised by the Fund for Public Schools. Called the New York City Core Knowledge Early Literacy Project, it will run for three years, following kindergartners at the 10 schools through the first and second grades. The...

College is not all it's cracked up to be. Dumbed-down courses, flaky majors and grade inflation have conspired to make the letters B.A. close to meaningless. But another problem with today's colleges is more insidious: They are no longer a good place for young people to make the transition from childhood to adulthood. Today's colleges are structured to prolong adolescence, not to midwife maturity. Once upon a time college was a halfway house for practicing how to be a grown-up. Students couldn't count on the dean of students to make allowances for adolescent misbehavior. If they wanted to avoid getting...

Higher education could heal itself by teaching civics—not race, class, and gender.The university is worth fighting for. No other institution can carry the burden of educating our young people. That’s why we must redouble our efforts to restore integrity, civility, and rigorous standards in American higher education—particularly in the area of civic education.I’ll be the first to admit that the situation is dire. I sympathize when critics throw up their hands in despair. I sometimes feel that way myself. Darkness often prevails in places where the light of learning should shine. I often trade horror stories with my friend Hadley...

Modesto is known as the bible belt of California. It has deep conservative roots in farmland and a vocal Evangelical community. But increasingly, some less familiar notes are echoing through California's Central Valley, CBS News correspondent John Blackstone reports. Like many other places, Modesto is becoming more religiously diverse. But unlike any other place, religion is a required course in high school here. "We can't preach, but we can teach," teacher Yvonne Taylor said. Using "Teach Don't Preach" as her motto, Taylor guides the world religions course at Johansen High. "And now we're going to be looking at Judaism, Christianity,...

The environmental fervor sweeping college campuses has reached beyond the push to recycle plastics and offer organic food and is transforming the curriculum, permeating classrooms, academic majors and expensive new research institutes. The University of Maryland teaches "green" real estate strategies for landscape architects. The University of Virginia's business graduate students recently created a way to generate power in rural Indian villages with discarded rice husks. And in a Catholic University architecture studio last week, students displayed ideas for homes made from discarded shipping containers. "It should be part of everything we do," said Ligia Johnson, a Catholic student whose...

An exceptional essay well worth reading. A few excerpts are: "...What the university offered, then, became no different from the fare of a television station, a local movie theater, rap concert, or a government bureaucracy: the more the campus devolved into popular life, the less it had to offer anything of rarity or singular beauty—confirming Plato’s pessimism that the radical egalitarian appeal to mass appetites must lead to arts of a lesser and more accessible quality. If half-educated strippers and sex entertainers are deemed street artists or populist philosophers, then they can now be welcomed to campus, exempt from both...

This month 3,700 recent college grads will begin Teach for America's five-week boot camp, before heading off for two-year stints at the nation's worst public schools. Teach for America offers smart young people something even better than money – the chance to avoid the vast education bureaucracy. Participants need only pass academic muster and attend the summer training before entering a classroom. If they took the traditional route into teaching, they would have to endure years of "education" courses to be certified. On average, high school students taught by TFA corps members performed significantly better on state-required end-of-course exams, especially...

THIS drug is peddled on every street corner in America, and is found in every country in the world. It is psychoactive, a stimulant and addictive. Users say that it increases alertness and focus, and reduces fatigue. But the high does not last and addicts must keep consuming it in increasing quantities. Put this way, sipping coffee sounds more like an abomination than the world's most accepted form of drug abuse. But centuries of familiarity have put people at their ease. In the coming years science is likely to create many novel drugs that boost memory, concentration and planning. These...

One of the unwritten codes for white teachers teaching in public schools has been that when it comes time to discipline a black student, the task should be left to another black teacher or administrator. This is to avoid the possibility that the student might mistake the discipline for just another display of the Eurocentric-White-Power-That-Rules-the-World-and-Keeps-All-People-of-Color-Enslaved-Hegemony. Sometimes, however, a white teacher needs to make requests in the classroom, like telling a poor, disadvantaged student to turn off the blaring music on his iPod. There are classes and workshops for teachers on how to do this “sensitively.” While being interviewed on National...

This is the story of educational romanticism in elementary and secondary schools —its rise, its etiology, and, we have reason to hope, its approaching demise. Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better. Correlatively, educational romantics believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive; that innate intellectual limits (if they exist at all) play a minor role; and that the current K-12 schools have huge room for improvement. Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and...

WASHINGTON, April 24, 2008 – It was déjà vu in the Pentagon’s center courtyard today, as children gathered with their parents for arts and crafts as part of 16th annual “Take Our Sons and Daughters to Work Day.” Air Force Col. Rod Dorsey watches his sons, Joshua, 9, left, and Ben, 13, paint a T-shirt as part of the Pentagon's observation of the 16th annual "Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day." About 1,000 children and their parents participated in the April 24, 2008 event in the Pentagon's center courtyard. Photo by Samantha L. Quigley, Department of Defense  (Click...

Though they perch far apart on the avian family tree, birds with the ability to learn songs use similar brain structures to sing their tunes. Neurobiologists at Duke University Medical Center now have an explanation for this puzzling likeness.In all three groups of birds with vocal learning abilities -- songbirds, parrots and hummingbirds -- the brain structures for singing and learning to sing are embedded in areas controlling movement, the researchers discovered. The team also found that areas in charge of movement share many functional similarities with the brain areas for singing. This suggests that the brain pathways used for...

This bullfrog animation will show us how to share and greet each other with kind word no matter what nationality by example. Bullfrogs speak in English and Spanish. Remember when it comes to animation I'm a novice. Revski

OCEANSIDE, Calif. -- John Corcoran graduated from college and taught high school for 17 years without being able to read, write or spell.Corcoran's life of secrecy started at a young age. He said his teachers moved him up from grade to grade. Often placed in what he calls the "dumb row," the images of his tribulations in the classroom are still vividly clear. "I can remember when I was 8 years old saying my prayers at night saying please god tomorrow when it's my turn to read please let me read. You just pretend that you are invisible and when...

Common Learning Agenda Blues by: Malcolm A. Kline, January 08, 2008 Those who argue that colleges and universities lack standards may be incorrect but only technically. “Under the current curriculum guidelines, students must take four humanities and two social science classes that could include history and political science,” Bucknell’s Nick Mozal writes of that Pennsylvania university’s “Common Learning Agenda.” “However, there is no course requirement to teach students the core history and cultural heritage of the United States.” “Students have difficulty even finding such a course.” Mozal presides over the Bucknell University Conservatives Club, which publishes The Counterweight newspaper, in...

Reflecting a shifting national philosophy on how to educate middle-grade students, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee is considering expanding several elementary schools to include students up to eighth grade, going back to a pre-kindergarten through eighth-grade structure once the norm in the District. Rhee has been discussing the idea with parents and teachers for the past several weeks as part of her proposal to close nearly two dozen schools. The idea is being met with skepticism from elementary school parents who do not want adolescents in the buildings with their young children and elementary school teachers who are opposed...

Why do PhDs in academia tend to be politically liberal? A paragraph in Science magazine’s feature “Random Samples” on December 21 suggested a reason: conservatives value other goals, like going into business to make money, or choosing to stay home and raise a family... ... It appears that conservatives are the fittest, working hard to pass on their genes, while liberals are like parasites, advancing primarily by taking over the host (the classroom) and churning out clones to infect other cells. A university setting is a contrived, unnatural environment where the parasites thrive. In the open air of true academic...

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...

he average taxpayer and parents who foot the bill know little about the rot on many college campuses. "Indoctrinate U" is a recently released documentary, written and directed by Evan Coyne Maloney, that captures the tip of a disgusting iceberg. The trailer for "Indoctrinate U" can be seen here. "Indoctrinate U" starts out with an interview of Professor David Clemens, at Monterey Peninsula College, who reads an administrative directive regarding new course proposals: "Include a description of how course topics are treated to develop a knowledge and understanding of race, class, and gender issues." Clemens is fighting the directive, which...