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YOUNGSTER'S BLACK-POWER POEM RILES SCHOOL A 7-year-old prodigy unleashed a firestorm when she recited a poem she wrote comparing Christopher Columbus and Charles Darwin to "pirates" and "vampires" who robbed blacks of their identities and human rights.

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND, EVERY TEACHER A CRIMINAL? Jan 13, 2005 - FreeMarketNews.comby David H. Smith WAS PRESIDENT BUSH'S 'NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND' INITIATIVE BASED ON FALSIFIED DATA - AND DOES IT MATTER ANYWAY? Education and Newsbriefs Correspondent (With reports) The much-touted successes of the The Houston Independent School District (HSID) helped inspire the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act of 2002. Yet now it has been reported that HSID testing numbers may have been fudged. According to The Christian Science Monitor, The Houston Independent School District (HSID) is conducting an investigation of what it terms “suspicious” results on...

In Dickens’ classic “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge wishes that “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.” Scrooge would make the perfect public-school bureaucrat -- except he’d insist on calling it a holiday pudding, playing “Winter Wonderland” as background music, and doing it all in the name of inclusiveness, sensitivity and church-state separation. In the latest manifestation of what Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition calls “secular fundamentalism,” the South Orange/Mapplewood, New Jersey School District has banned playing the instrumental...

MILLBROOK, N.Y. (AP) _ A mother says her son's behavioral problems got worse after school officials gave her an ultimatum: Put the first-grader on Ritalin or he'll be placed in special education classes. Patricia Weathers has filed notice that she will sue the Millbrook Central School District on behalf of her son, Michael Mozer, for the mental and physical pain she says he suffered for two years starting in 1997. Michael, she said, had trouble focusing and was easily distracted. Officials in the Dutchess County school referred her son to a pediatrician who prescribed Ritalin, Weathers said. By the third...