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A concerned Williamson County [Tenn.] parent stumbled upon < a href="http://www.menacommoncore.com">this, “On October 24 and 25, hundreds of schools, leadership teams, and teachers from across the region will gather in Dubai, to learn about the Common Core State Standards, share curricula and best practices, and network with each other.” "If Common Core is local and state-led why are they holding Common Core conferences in the Middle East including more than 20 other nations? If Williamson Strong is local and parent-led why is their logo included among the international organizations sponsoring this event?” asks Julie West. And, what is MENA? Middle...

Aaron Rodgers and David Gruber partner for season three of itsAaron.com. This year Aaron and David are highlighting three amazing organizations who are doing big things for many people. In this episode, Aaron surprises Annie, the creator of Gold In September (GoldInSeptember.org). And together they surprise the entire neighborhood.

Al Gore and his rich global warming friends are probably packing up and off to Florida and/or the Caribbean for the long frigid winter. So this must be the pattern. Come May they start up again blaming every warm weather event on Global Warming right through the fall, and as soon as it gets cold, off to the south! But in the meantime at least we will all have fresh meat to throw at them with another record cold winter, with no response whatsoever from Gore and his band of global climate frauds!

In my grandson's words: School Board members talked to the Sr class and after all was said and done they wanted a q&a so I stand up and say this: "This is A#$^ H&!@$!@%& and this question is for all the School Board: Why is it required we know how to find triangles angels legs etc 50 different ways but it's not required to teach us about taxes (whole sr class yells in agreement) so after things settle down A bit the school board members attempt to answer my question yet avoid it and tell me to talk to the...

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has released the 19th edition of its annual Report Card on American Education, where it ranks states’ education policy based on six areas: state academic standards, charter school laws, home-school regulations, private school choice programs, overall teacher quality and policies, and digital learning opportunities. Its findings highlight an old fact: more spending does not translate into better outcomes for K-12 students. States spend an average of $11,153 per pupil on education. The District of Columbia topped the list at $29,029 per student – nearly triple the national average – yet achieved only mediocre results....

The Dog Delusion Evolution News & Views October 30, 2014 5:05 AM | Permalink In his latest book, geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig of the Max Planck Institutes in Germany takes on the widespread view that dog breeds prove macroevolution. His book is Unser Haushund: Eine Spitzmaus im Wolfspelz?, or in English translation, Our Domestic Dog: A Shrew in Wolves' Clothing? (Monsenstein & Vannerdat, 2014). He shows in great detail that the incredible variety of dog breeds, going back in origin several thousand years ago but especially to the last few centuries, represents no increase in information but rather a decrease or...

David T. Fagan has eight kids and his oldest daughter is a senior in high school–and he hasn’t saved a penny for his children’s college education. But Fagan isn’t stressing. In fact, Fagan says he would prefer it if his children didn’t go to college at all. Fagan and his wife lay out their parenting philosophy in new book Guerrilla Parenting, scheduled to be released in January, and say they encourage their children to strike out on their own and create businesses from the time they’re in elementary school. If the children are set on going to college — and...

Sure, Atheism Is a Religion, to which Neil deGrasse Tyson and Cosmos Seek Converts David Klinghoffer October 28, 2014 1:46 PM | Permalink Some Twitter correspondents objected to my comment, in connection with our new book The Unofficial Guide to Cosmos, that "Cosmos is not appropriate for public schools, where you're not supposed to advocate any religion, including atheism." But of course Tyson-style atheism counts as a religion. As I'm hardly the first to say, it has almost all the trimmings that religions commonly do: An account of origins (panspermia and Darwinian evolution), a philosophical commitment to a certain way...

PITTSBORO, Ind. —A retired Indiana school principal who was NASCAR star Jeff Gordon's driver's education teacher was killed with his wife in a Tennessee crash while returning from watching Gordon race. Officials say 78-year-old Larry Sparks and 77-year-old Jacqueline Sparks of Pittsboro, Indiana, died in Monday's crash. WBIR-TV reports their recreational vehicle went off Interstate 75 near Jellico, Tennessee, and ran into a tree. Larry Sparks was a teacher and principal at Tri-West High School near Indianapolis and his wife was a retired elementary teacher

While Michelle Obama’s skimpy school lunch mandates have been widely rejected by students and schools, the elite private school attended by both Obama daughters will be serving chicken wings and potato chips on Wednesday. Sidwell Friends is the elite private school with a $36,264 tuition per child where President Obama sent his daughtersinstead of Cardozo high school, a government-run school in Washington, D.C. After Wednesday’s chicken wings , on Thursday Obama’s daughters can get a Cuban sandwich. Pasco County Schools in Florida had to eliminate Cuban sandwiches because they violated Michelle Obama’s lunch standards. Land O’ Lakes High had gone...

Wouldn't that be a great poll question for the GOP or some education minded conservative group to have commissioned? How about Fox News? I would love to know the percent of eligible voters who know this name. I bet it is less than 30%.

A legendary music teacher famed for developing a world-renowned violin method and who boasted about his friendship with Albert Einstein has been been exposed as a fraud and a liar. Shinichi Suzuki founded the Suzuki method in the 1950s and it has since been used by millions across the world. The violinist died in 1998 and had claimed Einstein was his 'guardian' and that he spent eight years in the 1920s studying at Berlin Hochshule, in Germany, as a private student of top violinist Karl Klinger, The Telegraph reported. Yet it has surfaced that the musician was rejected from the...

Common Core could be called ObamaEd. It's as much a signature issue as ObamaCare. Indeed, it has the same goals: more government power, more control of individual citizens, more jobs and money under White House control. In short, Common Core is Obama's baby. A Democrat who opposed Common Core would be accused of stabbing the President in the back. As a practical political matter, Democrats cannot be against Common Core. And that alone is ample justification for keeping them out of office. Common Core is a nightmare that everyone should be against.If you don't know how bad it is, check...

Peter Singer to Court: Make Chimps Persons! Wesley J. Smith October 27, 2014 5:40 AM | Permalink There he goes again. Peter Singer -- who has argued that cognitively devastated people should have been used instead of chimps in the creation of the hepatitis vaccine -- urges a court to impose chimp personhood on society.Why? Well, because he wants to destroy human exceptionalism.And what could accomplish that task better than "breaking the species barrier" (his term from the Great Ape Project) by making some animals legally and morally equivalent to people -- thereby reducing us (and our self-perception) to just another...

There has been a lot of effort in the last few years put into tagging and identifying individual white sharks on the east side of Cape Cod, especially in the Chatham area. Even though I have always had good info on what is happening with these white sharks, I was surprised by the number of whites that hang around that area. They are tagged, filmed by researchers and pleasure boaters, individually identified, and documented, in such a small area. On the east side of Cape Cod we are talking about an area 20 miles long and not very wide since...

 Link only due to being from Vanity FairHere is the link. Lots of good comments at the source. http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/10/jose-antonio-vargas-drivers-license-immigrants?mbid=social_twitter

Interesting quiz. How's your knowledge of current events? What do you know about the news?Test your knowledge of prominent people and major events in the news by taking our short 12-question quiz. Then see how you did in comparison with 1,002 randomly sampled adults asked the same questions in a national survey conducted September 25-28 by the Pew Research Center. When you finish, you will be able to compare your News IQ with the average American and compare responses across demographic groups.

Evolution and the Ebola Virus: Pacing a Small Cage Michael Behe October 24, 2014 2:23 PM | Permalink I received a request to comment on the evolution of the Ebola virus. The best, most recent work, which sequenced and compared 99 entire virus genomes, was published in Science last month: "Genomic surveillance elucidates Ebola virus origin and transmission during the 2014 outbreak." It came at a very high cost -- five co-authors actually died of Ebola in the course of the work. The paper is mostly concerned with tracing the timing and spread of the virus. The authors show that...

New Book Discusses Scientific and Theological Problems with Darwinian Evolution Casey Luskin October 22, 2014 4:22 PM | Permalink A new book, More Than Myth?, features contributions from various pro-ID authors discussing the scientific and theological problems with Darwinian evolution. The editors include Paul Brown, a professor of chemistry, biology, and environmental studies at the evangelical university Trinity Western, and Robert Stackpole, a Catholic theologian. Their vision for the book was to show that both Catholics and Protestants can agree that there is scientific and theological evidence showing that intelligent design -- rather than Darwinian evolution -- is the best...

(CNSNews.com) -- Some high schools in Oregon are creating an optional “13th grade” in order to provide students with another year of academic support while boosting the state's on-time graduation rate. Starting with the Class of 2014, hundreds of students who have completed four years of high school but have not received their diplomas will be considered “graduates" for statistical purposes. At 69 percent statewide, Oregon had the second-lowest graduation rate in the nation for the Class of 2013, according to the U.S. Department of Education.