Free Republic

In place of academic excellence for all, the district’s primary mission is now to ensure that students think correctly on social and political issues — most importantly, on race and “white privilege.” District leaders enshrined this new mission in EPS’s “All for All” strategic plan, adopted in 2013. The plan mandates that, going forward, the EPS must view “all teaching and learning experiences” through the “lens of racial equity.” If “equity” meant “treating kids equally,” all thinking Minnesotans would support it. In this context, however, it’s code for racial identity politics — a simplistic blaming of “white privilege” for the...

Here is a Father that has had enough and is addressing his unified school district in San Diego.

The fourth-grade tradition of building a California mission out of Popsicle sticks and sugar cubes is being pushed aside by the state as history lessons change to reflect all cultures and more accurately depict the past. A new framework for the curriculum at K-12 public schools means less research into the floor plans of the mission at say San Juan Capistrano, and more time looking at what life was like for both the missionaries and the native people of California.

A teacher at a public high school in Alabama sent his students home with a summer reading list chock full of conservative authors from which to choose, including Ann Coulter, Ronald Reagan, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, and libertarian John Stossel. But parents became concerned that it leaned too far right and so now, the kids don’t have to read anything over the summer.

Are we "doing" high school right these days? Is it enough to say we have improved our schools by offering more electives, more AP courses, IB classes, and STEM programs? Is that impactful enough, or at all? These are inputs, not outputs, and they are no guarantee to students that they will get a job or get into the college they want to attend when they graduate. So, again, are we doing high schools right, today? As the issue of school choice heats up, this is a question that needs an answer. If the choice is between two schools that...

A humanities course currently taught at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs teaches that the Founding Fathers were hypocrites, terrorists and money-hungry barons who used hyperbole and fear to rile up the colonists to revolt against England. The “Resistance and Revolution” class is co-taught by history lecturer Jared Benson and sociology instructor Nicholas Lee, who also suggest that it was Mikhail Gorbachev – not Ronald Reagan — who brought down the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that wealthy CEOs deserve to be in a “moral prison,” among many other assertions. Calling the Founding Fathers “terrorists,” Benson and Lee voice...

What would you do if your child came home from school and showed you the papers of how they were being taught the Islamic faith? I'm not just talking about a history lesson, kids are being taught the Islamic faith by liberal educators and unless you as a concerned parent or community member say something, things only going to get worse. Liberals have worked so hard to get prayer taking out of the school and now this! Over the years, they have even stopped prayer groups from coming together to high schools and college universities because these administrations did not...

Public schools are expert at creating illiteracy. Our K-12 system can usually guarantee that students don't become fluent readers. The system is nearly foolproof. Parents and teachers can make children illiterate or semi-literate simply by following this well-tested seven-step formula: 1) FORGET ABOUT THE ALPHABET. Do not teach the alphabet, the sounds, or the blends. Reading maestro Frank Smith maintained in Reading Without Nonsense (1973): "I have said that children should not be taught the alphabet[.] ... Until children have a good idea of what reading is about, learning the names of letters is largely a nonsense activity."

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.

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...

Another shot was fired in the never-ending battle over Texas textbooks last week, when Roni Dean-Burren of Pearland, Texas, posted a screenshot of her 15-year-old son’s new world geography textbook. The picture was of a map with a caption that exemplifies—perhaps unintentionally, in this case—the controversial changes Texas has made to its social-studies textbooks in recent years: “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” The next day, Dean-Burren—a former Pearland English teacher and now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Houston—followed...

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...

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...