Free Republic

High school seniors are eagerly watching their mail this month, hoping for the "fat envelope" indicating acceptance by the college of their choice. Unfortunately, more American students are receiving the "thin envelope" because college acceptance rates are continuing their decade-long decline. The most selective public colleges, such as UCLA and Michigan, now take one out of six applicants, compared to one out of three a decade ago. Top private colleges, such as Stanford and Harvard, admit one out of 20 applicants, compared to one out of 10 a decade ago. What explains the steady decline in college admission rates for...

What does it say when in two days a teacher exhausts the ink in his red pen? Since a nation cannot be “ignorant and free," as Thomas Jefferson put it, it perhaps means we face a threat graver than the Red Menace. Apathetic or even hostile students, dumbed-down tests, often incompetent and ideologically driven teachers, Cracker Jack-box degrees, morally toxic curricula, revisionist history, the new math — education has collapsed in America. And one of the sincere educators, wandering amidst the rubble, recently provided a window into this academic apocalypse.

A good shepherd doesn’t just cuddle his sheep. He also fights off wolves. In light of this, here are five things I recommend all pastors do to protect their flocks from false prophets, false apostles, and false teachers. Show them the math. In other words, don’t just teach the Bible correctly. Take some time to show them how you arrived at your interpretation. The problem with a lot of preaching is that people are not being taught how to interpret Scripture for themselves. Thus, they can’t spot unsound interpretations. So you need to teach them sound principles of biblical interpretation,...

It is a common scene in World War II movies: a captain maneuvers in close to a big ship and fires a spread of torpedoes. None of them detonate. Some submarine officers lost the will to fight and had nervous breakdowns. In fact, German engineering was not always at fault. Sabotage (sporadic, opportunistic, often a personal enterprise) was almost a second army arrayed against the Third Reich. Here are some revealing war stories: 'U-505s fifth patrol, in July 1943, lasted less than two weeks--she was attacked by Allied airplanes and had to return to France for repair. The next four...

In 2008, Ed Boland, a well-off New Yorker who had spent 20 years as an executive at a nonprofit, had a midlife epiphany: He should leave his white-glove world, the galas at the Waldorf and drinks at the Yale Club, and go work with the city’s neediest children. “The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School” (Grand Central Publishing) is Boland’s memoir of his brief, harrowing tenure as a public school teacher, and it’s riveting. There’s nothing dry or academic here. It’s tragedy and farce, an economic and societal indictment...

Sort of a New Year's resolution... For many years I've focused on education reform; that work will continue. I have more than 400 articles on the Internet and over 3,000,000 views/visits on YouTube and various sites [e.g. FreeRepublic]. To find education articles and videos, simply enter your interest in Google with the name Bruce Deitrick Price. It's an easy way to find a lot of material quickly. You can assume this material is intelligent, practical, lucid, conservative, and intended to help every student advance as far as possible. During 2015, I was constantly struck by two main trends we need...

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ran headlong into the leftist meat grinder by questioning whether college admission of blacks with academic achievement levels significantly lower than the rest of the student body is beneficial to blacks. His question came up during oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas, wherein the court will rule whether the use of race in college admission decisions violates the 14th Amendment's guarantee of "equal protection of the laws" to all citizens. Justice Scalia's questions generated news headlines such as "Justice Scalia Suggests Blacks Belong at 'Slower' Colleges," "Scalia questions place of some black...

When we think of President Woodrow Wilson, we think of a multitude of historical events: the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank and other progressive legislation at home; idealistic internationalism, a world war to "keep the world safe for democracy," and promotion of the League of Nations abroad. Lately, we think of the Princeton University students protesting against him. In mid-November, they were agitating for the former university president's name to be removed from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs over his legacy of white supremacy. But there's another reason conservatives should revisit Woodrow Wilson. We need...

A new trend in math at elementary schools around the country has parents pulling out their hair. Mainly because it is the opposite of how most of today's adults were taught to do simple multiplication in the first place. According to a Common Core math worksheet that's gone viral, an elementary child today cannot just say, "5 x 3 = 15." Instead they have to change the multiplication problem to addition before solving the equation. However, if the child says, "5 + 5 + 5 = 15," they will still lose points because the problem must be written as it...

Four years ago, Tom Vander Ark (former executive at the Gates Foundation, current partner at Learn Capital) wrote in an email exchange with members of the Foundation for Excellence in Education and the Council for Chief State School Officers: “New tests will hinder rather than help competency-based models…In short, I don’t want one big cheap end of year test used for more than it should be…I don’t want it to lock in the teacher-centric age cohort model for another decade. I don’t want simple assessments…I want a system that will incorporate all the performance feedback that students will be receiving...

We frequently hear about American students’ low-test scores in science and math, and everyone from the PTA to candidates for the White House is rightly concerned with how to improve them. Indeed, this concern is a major part of our national conversation. And those who worry about our educational system often suggest that better instruction in these areas could help solve America’s economic, fiscal, and social problems, too. Certainly, there are plenty of good reasons to boost our efforts in science and math. But we should not lose sight of the fact that there are other subjects in which we...

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in education continue to crumble when they encounter reality. “Not a single junior at Seattle’s Nathan Hale High School showed up to take this spring’s Smarter Balanced tests (SBAC—one version of the COMMON Core standardized tests), according to a school district spokeswoman,” according to the editors at Rethinking Schools. “Earlier this year, a group of teachers, administrators, parents, and students had agreed to boycott the standardized tests, but Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Larry Nyland threatened teachers with the loss of their teachers licenses if they didn’t administer the test.” “Under this pressure, the school’s...

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

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

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

Traditional education has taken a real beating the last 75 years. The entire Education Establishment lined up to demonize everything that teachers and schools had done for many thousands of years. The result is the vastly dumbed down classrooms we have now in K-12 education.But how, at this point, can we resurrect a vanishing paradigm? As we will see, there is one example left, as if preserved in a time capsule.Apparently, giving children lots of knowledge is what our socialist professors hate about traditional education. So these ideologues came up with a parade of insults, all designed to stop schools...

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

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

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

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