Free Republic

Illiteracy is a serious and growing problem in the United States: 21% of adults were illiterate in 2022, and 54% of adults have a literacy below sixth-grade level. Illiteracy traps people (and nations) in poverty. This, despite the fact that the United States spends more money on primary and secondary education than any other industrial nation. One of the main reasons our literacy skills are so abysmal is the rejection of traditional phonics-based pedagogy in favor of trendier, "ground-breaking" or "leading edge" methodologies pushed by prominent schools of education at prestigious universities. Educational fads pushed by highly credentialed advocates and...

Those who long for a traditional high school or college curriculum, particularly when they never experienced one, might not appreciate the internal conflicts that plague multicultural education. "Many Hip Hop pedagogies, from Alim's critical Hip Hop language pedagogies (2004) to Emdin's work on Hip Hop and science education (2010), for example, argue for the use of rap battles--improvised verbal duels--in classroom learning," Django Paris and H. Samy Alim write in the book Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies. "Yet few take up the fact that the Hip Hop battle can sometimes be a masculinist space that excludes young women, queer youth, and young...

Children have a natural need to run around and scream. I first learned this truth on the playground of the Experimental Elementary School at Salisbury State Teachers College in Salisbury, Maryland. But I didn’t know I knew it until a generation later, when my own children were the same age. Now comes news that school administrators in Attleboro, Massachusetts, have outlawed the game of tag because “children might get hurt and sue the school”. What’s next? Outlawing cookies because they have sharp edges? Children are bundles of energy. That’s why recess was invented. To get the urchins sitting quietly and...

Columbia President Lee Bollinger has been publicly praising the sacredness of free speech in the wake of the violent melee that last week forced the university to shut down a speech by Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist. Yet while Bollinger talks a good game, it doesn't appear that his own university is listening to him. Columbia's Teachers College - one of our nation's most prestigious education schools - has policies that go beyond telling students what they can or can't say; it tells them even what they are required to believe. At Teachers College, students are required to have a...

Letting the PC slip showBy Mona CharenFriday, October 13, 2006 You've probably never heard of Teachers College, but it has profoundly affected your life and is now affecting your children's lives. TC is the graduate school of education at Columbia University and laboratory of most of the "reforms" that have corroded K-12 education over the past 50 years. New math, whole language, open classrooms, outcome-based education -- you name the fad and it probably originated in Morningside Heights in New York. Teachers College is the most influential graduate education program in the country, and like so many leading schools, it...