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ARLINGTON, Texas (AP) -- Shabazz Napier walked slowly through the hallway of the stadium - the tears still drying, the twine from the cut-down net still hanging around his neck. "Bittersweet. Bittersweet. Bittersweet," he said, over and over again. Bitter because it's over. Sweet because UConn won it all after being left behind and told to go away.

The single most important aspect of education is reading.   If children are not reading, their entire education comes to a halt. That’s what has happened in millions of lives.  All the statistics for many decades reveal a curious surprise: our public schools don’t actually know how to teach reading or, more likely, they pretend not to know.  This is a bizarre scandal, especially given that children have been learning to read for thousands of years, and 100 years ago this country was thought to be moving toward universal literacy.   An odd thing happened circa 1931. The Education Establishment pushed look-say (or...

President Barack Obama on Monday announced more than $100 million in grants for two dozen schools across the country that are helping students gain work experience for what he called the “in-demand jobs of the future.” The money, which comes from fees that companies pay for visas to hire foreign workers for specialized jobs, is the result of an executive order Obama signed last year to better prepare high school students for college or for careers. Students are working on “cooler stuff than when I was in high school,” Obama said as he announced the grants before cheering high school...

Myth-Making Aside, Eugenics Was a Mostly Progressive Enterprise Wesley J. Smith April 6, 2014 4:58 PM | Permalink I have often stated that biologist/eugenicist Charles Davenport (pictured above) was one of the great villains of American history. A new book by Paul Martin, Villains, Scoundrels, and Rogues: Incredible True Tales of Mischief and Mayhem, includes a chapter on this odious man. Good.But -- if the excerpt in Salon is a reliable indication, there may be other agendas afoot in Martin's writing about Davenport. Indeed, a reader of the article would never guess that eugenics was primarily supported by political progressives who rejected human exceptionalism. From "Hitler's Favorite American": What's...

The "Unintelligent" Are Not Wanted in Life! Wesley J. Smith April 3, 2014 | Eugenics is pernicious. Its core philosophy holds that some human beings are better than others based on invidious categorization of human capacities and characteristics.Eugenics leads to oppression and even killing. The old eugenics unleashed involuntary sterilization in the U.S. -- as well as infanticide and the murder of disabled adults in Germany.Those horrors put eugenics into hibernation, but it has awakened in the very places it started in the first place -- among the intelligentsia. Oxford bioethicist Julian Savulescu is a leading neo-eugenicist. Now, he proposes...

A Texas mom thinks it's bull that her 3-year-old girl was expelled from the Jubilee Child Development Center in San Antonio for saying "sh-t," WOAI reported. "I don't condone her saying i,t but for that to be a faith-based day care, I would think that they would reinforce and let her know that's not a word to say," Cassandra Wright told the local station. Wright said she doesn't use that word at home and isn't quite sure how little Arianna heard it in the first place. She even doubts whether she knows what it means. "I asked her what word...

WHEN LaTisha Styles graduated from Kennesaw State University in Georgia in 2006 she had $35,000 of student debt. This obligation would have been easy to discharge if her Spanish degree had helped her land a well-paid job. But there is no shortage of Spanish-speakers in a nation that borders Latin America. So Ms Styles found herself working in a clothes shop and a fast-food restaurant for no more than $11 an hour. Frustrated, she took the gutsy decision to go back to the same college and study something more pragmatic. She majored in finance, and now has a good job...

"A Connecticut community college suspended a student veteran for his aggressive questioning of Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy during a public forum,.... Shortly thereafter, Saucier received notice from the administration that he was suspended on grounds that his “continued presence on campus would present a danger to the persons, property and/or academic process of the College.... The college attempted to persuade Saucier to plead guilty to the charges and undergo counseling. He refused, opting instead for a formal hearing. At the hearing, administrators refused to let him play his recorded video, which he argued would acquit him by showing that he...

Last week, high school senior Kwasi Enin found out he had been accepted to every college he applied to — including all eight Ivy League schools. How did Enin pull off this impressive feat? The Long Island student scored a 2250 on his SAT, had taken 11 AP courses, and was in the top 2% of his graduating class, but that doesn't necessarily show him fully as an applicant. The answer could be in his college application essay, which The New York Post published today.

A lot of Internet ink has been spilled over how lazy and entitled Millennials are, but when it comes to paying for a college education, work ethic isn't the limiting factor. The economic cards are stacked such that today’s average college student, without support from financial aid and family resources, would need to complete 48 hours of minimum-wage work a week to pay for his courses—a feat that would require superhuman endurance, or maybe a time machine. To take a close look at the tuition history of almost any institution of higher education in America is to confront an unfair...

Last week, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that because members of Northwestern University’s football team seem close enough to “employees” of the university to satisfy the statutory definition, they can proceed in their stated desire for union representation. The United Steelworkers union, hoping for a transfusion of dues money, helped the activist players, led by quarterback Kain Colter, push their petition for a union certification election. Conceivably, the union could wind up negotiating on behalf of the Northwestern players with the university over all matters that are subjects of collective bargaining under the law...

A fifth of Germany’s schoolchildren have problems with simple decision-making tasks, such as selecting the cheapest item from a page in a catalog, results from the global PISA test showed on Tuesday. […] For Germany, the performance was not sparkling, with its children ranking behind those of Australia, Canada, Finland, England and most East Asian countries that took part. Germany only scored slightly higher than the average of the 44 countries that took part. Almost 20 percent failed to reach the OECD’s baseline level. This meant that at best, these pupils could only solve very simple problems that required no...

Seventeen-year-old Kwasi Enin of Shirley took a shot at -- and won -- what amounts to an academic royal flush: He applied to and was accepted at all eight Ivy League schools. But the William Floyd High School senior said he never thought he'd land slots in the class of 2018 at Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. He hasn't decided where he'll attend, but would cross Long Island Sound to attend Yale in New Haven, Conn., depending on the financial aid package offered.

COPENHAGEN (The Global Edition) – The Copenhagen Zoo has killed several of its staff members early this morning in order to create four new job openings, the Zoo public relations sector reported. Officials of the Zoo say that the four members of the staff were humanely executed after being put to sleep with a lethal injection, and then skinned and chopped up while visitors crowded around and the meat was fed to the lion population.

I just have a question about the political system of the United States that I don't quite understand. Why does it matter which party you are registered for? What effect would it have if, for whatever reason, everybody was registered with one party or another? In Canada, one doesn't have to register with any party and we are completely unhindered from voting for whichever party we wish, so that is the basis for my question. All responses are appreciated.

I have been a Freeper for 12 years and a teacher for 10. I work in Los Angeles, in a public school, and I teach English. I want to say something about Common Core, although my observations will be strictly limited to my particular domain: English. I cannot comment on the Math portion. I will begin bluntly: I do not understand the conservative outcry about Common Core. Perhaps it’s only because I teach in California, but to me it is an improvement, at least in some ways. If you aren’t a teacher (and most conservatives aren’t, which is a pity)...

When Bill and Melinda Gates go to Africa and see healthy people and sick people, they presumably have a single thought: what can we do to make everyone healthy? The problems are easily understood; goals can be clearly stated. Given a big commitment, there’s a high chance of success. ~snip~ What fascinates Bill Gates is something else entirely: namely, the variety and incoherence from school to school, city to city, and state to state. It looks so messy and inefficient. And he thinks: a guy with my money and management skills should be able to organize all this disorder, turn...

Published on Mar 30, 2014 Evacuating a sample of unknown fluid (to vaporize for mass spectrometry). Pressure drop causes a decrease in temperature. The fluid simultaneously both boils and freezes? Would like some insight here...

A stunning 77.6 percent of NYC public-high-school graduates who entered CUNY community colleges as freshmen last fall needed remediation in math, reading or writing, new data show. Despite their high-school diplomas, the grads failed CUNY admission tests in one or more of the key subjects, officials told The Post.

One of the great memes out there in trying to diagnose persistently high unemployment and anemic job growth during what is still, I argue, the Great Recession is the so-called “skills gap”. The idea here is that the fact that there are millions of unfilled job openings at the same time millions of people can’t find work can be chalked up to a lack of a skills match between unemployed workers an open positions. To pick one random example out of many, here’s the way US News and World Report put it last year: Some 82 percent of manufacturers say...