Free Republic

Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Slightly Apart

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...

The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count. At a school where economic analysis was all the rage, he taught rights, race and gender. Other faculty members dreamed of tenured positions; he turned them down. While most colleagues published by the pound, he never completed a single work of legal scholarship. At a formal institution, Barack Obama was a loose presence, joking with students about their romantic prospects, using first names, referring to case law one moment and “The Godfather” the next. He was also an enigmatic one, often leaving fellow faculty members guessing about his...

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...

I should have put the year I took up boxing on my resume. It's sixth period, my first day teaching high school, and my regular Junior English class refuses to settle down. I give them a brief talk, amid the jostling and visiting (and the walking, and the love taps, and the food trading, and the vaulting over desks) about respect. I will respect them, I say, and they will respect me.

An elementary school teacher retiring after a 36-year career died of a heart attack moments after saying goodbye to her final class for the summer. Sharon Smith, 57, died Friday on the way to a hospital according to her niece, Doreatha Jackson. Smith was a fourth grade teacher at Molino Park Elementary School, where she had worked since 1972.

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...

New York City teems with many more of these schools than any other district in the country. A handful have been around for years, including El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice, with its wacky hip-hop curriculum (“An F for Hip-Hop 101,” Summer 1998). But Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joel Klein’s project to break up many of the system’s dysfunctional large high schools and replace them with new small schools has spawned many more. The Department of Education’s website lists at least 15 of the new small high schools that either are explicitly named as social justice schools...

Chancellor Joel Klein of New York City's Department of Education and superintendents from other parts of the state are opposing language in the budget bill clarifying last year's agreement that teachers shouldn't be evaluated on student test scores; they should be assessed on how they use test scores and other data to adjust their teaching to help students improve. This enlightened approach to tenure decisions is something that the Legislature and the governor agreed last year was eminently reasonable. The approach is akin to judging doctors on how they use the results of blood tests, X-rays, and the like to...

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...

...Tegethoff used to teach what she called "very boring math," using worksheets of addition and subtraction problems. Now her lessons delve into algebraic thinking. By the third grade, Viers Mill Elementary students are solving equations with letter variables. Long considered a high school staple, introductory algebra is fast becoming a standard course in middle school for college-bound students. That trend is putting new pressure on such schools as Viers Mill to insert the building blocks of algebra into math lessons in the earliest grades. Disappointing U.S. scores on international math tests have added to the urgency of a movement that...

Hi, my name is Migdia Chinea and I'm a recovering LAUSD "substitute." Oh, I'm also UCLA-educated with honors, refined, empathetic, college-level Spanish fluent and a Googleable professional screenwriter. To make ends meet during hard economic times, I became a "substitute teacher" for the Los Angeles Unified School District, or LAUSD – or to put it more kindly, a "guest teacher." As a guest LAUSD teacher I thought I would be an asset, but the system has never appreciated nor taken advantage of my educational or professional hard-earned accomplishments. There's no teaching going on at LAUSD – only confinement of...

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...

That was a week and a half ago. I am thrilled today that almost all of my students can divide and convert fractions to decimals (based on a test). I am scheduling one-on-one tutoring with the other students to ensure that they will be able to do so, too. I realized that what they needed was a recipe, something to follow every time so that it was systematic. I was kind of intimidated that we would get so far behind in the actual physical science material that we wouldn’t be at the level necessary to take the first periodic assessment...

by Steven ErteltLifeNews.com EditorSeptember 21, 2007 Boyntown Beach, FL (LifeNews.com) -- Police in southern Florida have arrested a public school teacher who is accused of having sex with two of his students and using an abortion to cover up his actions. Santaluces High School drama teacher Andrew Foster, 29, allegedly started having sex with the students last year and got one of them pregnant. Foster was arrested yesterday in Collier County by the U.S. Marshals South Florida Fugitive Task Force.The teacher had been on the lam for about two weeks until authorities located him at a hotel in Immokalee. After...

Former Howard County teacher Kirsten Ann Kinley pleaded guilty Tuesday in Circuit Court to one count of third-degree sex offense for improper sexual conduct with a 15-year-old boy at her Columbia apartment more than two years ago. Similar charges against her involving a second boy were dropped after he refused to cooperate with prosecutors. Neither youth was one of her students. As part of a plea agreement, Kinley, 27, a former special- education teacher at Marriotts Ridge High School in Marriottsville, could receive up to 18 months in jail. She is to be sentenced Nov. 15. -snip-

The vast majority of American historians no longer regard American culture as an essential area of study. Instead, what they care about is social history -- the struggles and hard-won accomplishments of women, workers, African Americans, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans in a country often inhospitable to the poor and the powerless.

Last week I went shopping in our small rural hometown, where my family has attended the same public schools since 1896. Without exception, all six generations of us - whether farmers, housewives, day laborers, businesspeople, writers, lawyers or educators - were given a good, competitive K-12 education. But after a haircut, I noticed that the 20-something cashier could not count out change. The next day, at the electronics outlet store, another young clerk could not read - much less explain - the basic English of the buyer's warranty. At the food market, I listened as a young couple argued over...

Parents sue over teacher quality Suit claims new instructors counted as highly qualified By Shirley Dang The Oakland Tribune Article Last Updated: 08/22/2007 02:41:10 AM PDT Parents and students from the Hayward, Los Angeles and West Contra Costa school districts filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against the U.S. Department of Education alleging that the department broke with laws meant to ensure a quality teacher in each classroom. When Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, lawmakers specified that teachers needed to be credentialed and teach in a subject where they received proper training in order to be...

A FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING POVERTY by Ruby K. Payne, Ph.D. INTRODUCTION I do not remember why I bought this book, but I am glad I did. This book took a week to write, but it sold over 1,000,000 copies. While popular, the book must be unacceptable to mainstream, academic educators. There are no formal book reviews; there are no Wikipedia entries. In spite of neglect and criticism, the book is surely popular. Why, is easy to understand. Dr. Payne discusses what is not supposed to be discussed-- social class. She believes that misunderstanding between social classes results in problems for...

Thinking about home schooling your kids? ... Establish a vision for your family. Why are you doing this? What are your goals? You need to have this before you start. This will sustain you during rough times. If you believe you have God's direction in it, this establishes faith to make things happen when, at times, it seems impossible. Raising relaxed, well-adjusted children is one goal you might want to consider... Classroom education must address the learning style and pace of the majority. This creates stress in a child that learns differently... For such children, classroom education can be destructive......

The National Education Association (NEA), which gathers this week for its annual meeting in Philadelphia, has just been brought up short by an Ohio court ruling that an individual teacher’s union dues may not be used to fund pro-abortion activities, if that teacher objects for religious reasons.  But many teachers may not be aware that NEA and its state affiliates also fund pro-homosexual activities, including groups advocating the full expression of homosexuality and “transgendered” behaviors by children and teachers at school.The teachers’ union also sponsors training on “GLBT issues.” Its NEA-GLBT Caucus will hold a workshop on June 29 for...

Some teachers in the Albemarle School District in Virginia are rebelling against their managers' orders to hand out to students as young as kindergarten a promotion for a summer camp that advocates for "Atheists, Freethinkers, Humanists, Brights, or whatever..." A representative of the teachers talked to WND only on condition that a name and school not be used, and said such advertisements provided by the district to hand out to children violate the teachers' religious beliefs. It was the same school district that WND earlier reported was distributing publicity about a "Pagan Christmas ritual" being held in the community.

The atheist philanthropist who gave the New York Archdiocese $22.5 million for Catholic school scholarships yesterday blasted the city's public school system as "lousy." Robert Wilson laid the blame for the state of the public schools on the United Federation of Teachers, the union that represents teachers at city schools. Wilson, 80, told Bloomberg News that his huge donation "was a chance for a very modest amount of money to get kids out of a lousy school system, and into a good school system." Wilson's remarks came as the renowned former Wall Street investor and the archdiocese announced his donation...

WASHINGTON, May 11, 2007 – Elementary school students in Missouri are building their character through activities designed to salute the troops. A non-profit group called “Salute the Troops” aims to support servicemembers and veterans through character education and school and community events, Carrie Fain, the group’s executive director, said. “We believe in the importance of our kids looking up to real role models of character,” she said, referring to servicemembers. “They are the true examples of honor, respect, responsibility, self-discipline and integrity -- (qualities) that we are hoping to instill in future generations.” With the cooperation of school counselors...

Capt. Thaddeus Janicki helps Afghan Capts. Mohammed Azam, left, and Amanullah Bakhshi, right, while teaching a computer fundamentals course to Afghan National Army soldiers at the Kabul Military Training Center, April 2, 2007. U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Cecilio M. Ricardo Jr. Air Force Captain Teaches Classes, Experiences By Staff Sgt. Carlos Diaz U.S. Central Command Air Forces Public Affairs Camp Eggers, Afghanistan, April 6, 2007 — There was no school bell, but class was definitely in session inside of a cement building where Capt. Ted Janicki teaches “The Introduction to Computers� course to Afghan National Army...

Who, on average, is better paid—public school teachers or architects? How about teachers or economists? You might be surprised to learn that public school teachers are better paid than these and many other professionals. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, public school teachers earned $34.06 per hour in 2005, 36% more than the hourly wage of the average white-collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty or technical worker

When the Najaf Teaching Hospital opens in 2007, it will accommodate 200 medical and 50 pharmaceutical students. Courtesy photo. NAJAF -- The Najaf Teaching Hospital, a project worth more than $10 million, will open in early 2007 featuring a seven-story building capable of housing 420 patients and containing 13 operating rooms. The hospital development, which has survived gun battles, the termination of its primary contractor and serious security issues, first came to the attention of the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office (IRMO) in September 2004. During that month, the flooded basement, containing debris and human remains, was cleaned and repaired, as...

Iraqi workers prepare to place concrete at the Academy of Health and Science in Baghdad. Department of Defense photo by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Learning, Teaching and Growing in Iraq Capacity building and community involvement define reconstruction efforts By Norris JonesGulf Region Central DistrictU.S. Army Corps of Engineers BAGHDAD, Dec. 7, 2006 -- Projects under the U.S.-led reconstruction program in Iraq were initiated in the understanding that in an asymmetric war, progress is most clearly witnessed at the local level. For both the Iraqi people and the Coalition engineers and soldiers involved, reconstruction efforts to restore essential services...

Nachum Shifren is an ordained rabbi in Los Angeles who spent 18 years of his life as a secondary school teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. He was also known as the "Surfing Rabbi" because of his abilities as a former professional surfer. He is quite familiar with youth culture and can be a pretty hip fellow -- despite his long beard, yarmulke and phylacteries that hang from his waistband. His level of coolness, however, never prepared him for a public school system where he received a death threat in class by a student and, on another day,...

“My daughter is now 20 years old,” one mother wrote to me recently. “After graduating from high school in June 2005, she enrolled at the local community college. It was necessary for her to take a placement test and it was determined she needed to take Basic Skills Math and English before she could take [college level courses.] After failing both classes twice, she will not be returning. It breaks my heart to see that she can’t pass basic math or English class. How did she graduate high school?” The answer is that her parents were heavily levied with property...

Many who admit that homework is probably academically worthless in the elementary grades and not very helpful in high school still think kids should have it because: 1. It gets parents involved in their kids' education.This implies that the homework isn't for the kids, it's for the parents. In other words, the school feels they have a right to assign parents to spend time doing worthless assignments with their children. But what exactly are we doing when we're "involved" in our kids' homework? Either we're not needed, because the kids can do it fine without us, or we are needed,...

THERE is no more pivotal issue in the values debate than the school curriculum, and the corruption of the humanities agenda waits to be made into a front-line political issue. ... Sawyer is explicit: the purpose of English is to produce children who have the mind and ethics to vote against John Howard. His diatribe is pompous and devoid of the qualities of reflection and balance expected of an education professional. The website of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English carries a message from president Paul Sommer noting that while Sawyer's views are his own he "writes with...

Schools of education have gotten bad grades before. Yet there are some truly shocking statistics about teacher training in this week's report from the Education Schools Project. According to "Educating School Teachers," three-quarters of the country's 1,206 university-level schools of education don't have the capacity to produce excellent teachers. More than half of teachers are educated in programs with the lowest admission standards (often accepting 100% of applicants) and with "the least accomplished professors." When school principals were asked to rate the skills and preparedness of new teachers, only 40% on average thought education schools were doing even a moderately...

This week's back-to-school ads offer amazing bargains on lightweight backpacks and nifty school supplies. All those businesses scramble to offer us good stuff at low prices. It's amazing what competition does for consumers. The power to say no to one business and yes to another is awesome. Too bad we don't apply that idea to schools themselves. Education bureaucrats and teachers unions are against it. They insist they must dictate where kids go to school, what they study, and when. When I went on TV to say that it's a myth that a government monopoly can educate kids effectively, hundreds...

The Ed Schools’ Latest—and Worst—Humbug Sol Stern Teaching for “social justice” is a cruel hoax on disadvantaged kids. In 1980, Bill Ayers and his partner Bernardine Dohrn came up from the underground—the Weather Underground, that is. It had been a wild ride for the Bonnie and Clyde of the sixties New Left. They first went into combat during the 1969 “Days of Rage” in Chicago, smashing storefront windows and assaulting police officers and city officials in the fantasy that they were aiding their Vietnamese allies by “bringing the war back home.” They spent the next few years planting bombs at...

Some parents have objected to specific teaching materials that their children have brought home from school. The two environmental books most often objected to are, "Heather Has Too Much Stuff", and "Help! Mom! There's a Polluter Under My Bed!". One local Woodland parent, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution toward his child, told us, "These kids shouldn't be taught this controversial stuff at such a young age. What ever happened to reading, writing, and arithmetic? My kids come home knowing their 'carbon footprint', how much sea levels are supposed to rise, and Al Gore's middle name, but...

A national group is asking Arizona's public universities to require at least one United States history course of every student before graduation. American History currently isn't a required course at any of the state's major public universities. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has written letters to Gov. Janet Napolitano and 20 state lawmakers, asking them to pressure college regents and administrators to make the change. "The flag doesn't mean all that much if you don't know how it got there," trustees member Charles Mitchell said. "What use is the Constitution if you don't know how it was written?"...

The smart young are, of course, already trending conservative -- they've grown up with the hash my generation has made of love and marriage, and they have soldiered their way through the nonsense we have made of education. But way-left boomers turning right in middle age? Come on. But it's true. A woman around my age, a stalwart, a pillar, a lodestone of the ultra left-wing literary world on Canada's West Coast told me last week, that this year she was going to embrace her Inner Republican. An adorable new friend, Howie Siegel who spent the '70s naked and stoned...

Experts have consistently misdiagnosed and misdefined the problem of schooling to serve their own pocketbooks. The difficulty is not that children don't learn to read, write and do arithmetic very well - it is that kids don't learn at all the way schools insist on teaching. When we strip children of a primary experience base - as confinement schooling must do to justify its very existence -we destroy the natural sequences of learning which always put experience first. Only much later, after a bath of experience, can the thin gruel of abstraction mean anything. We haven't forgotten this, but there...