Free Republic

Shortly after I did my first TV special on education, "Stupid in America," hundreds of union teachers showed up outside my office to yell at me. They were angry because I said union rules were a big reason American kids don't learn. The union is a big reason kids don't like school and learn less. Union contracts limit flexibility, limit promotion of good teachers, waste money and make it hard for principals to fire even terrible teachers. But I was wrong to imply that the union is the biggest problem. In states with weak unions, K-12 schools stagnate, too. Education...

Conservatives are in an uproar over Common Core, an educational curriculum being forced upon the states by the Obama administration, which is scheduled to be mostly implemented this year in the 46 states that have adopted it. Common Core eliminates local control over K-12 curriculum in math and English, instead imposing a one-size-fits-all, top-down curriculum that will also apply to private schools and homeschoolers. Superficially, it sounds good. It creates universal standards that supposedly educate all children for college. But along with the universal standards come a myriad of problems, which the administrators of Common Core are disingenuously denying. The...

I was deeply troubled when video surfaced last week of striking Strongsville, Ohio teachers heckling substitute teachers who were applying to be their temporary replacements. Over 300 teachers are on strike because the school board is refusing to give them automatic raises, and the school board undercut their mass temper tantrum by hiring substitutes to keep schools open. The substitutes, complete with police escorts, had to endure heckling and jeering by the strikers. The unionists often followed alongside the substitutes, berating them and yelling in their faces as they headed to the local police department for mandatory background checks. The...

American education is in a sorry state of affairs, and there's enough blame for all participants to have their fair share. They include students who are hostile and alien to the education process, uninterested parents, teachers and administrators who either are incompetent or have been beaten down by the system, and politicians who've become handmaidens for teachers unions. There's another education issue that's neither flattering nor comfortable to confront and talk about. That's the low academic preparation of many teachers. That's an issue that must be confronted and dealt with if we're to improve the quality of education. Let's look...

The radical teachers group Rethinking Schools published an article in its Winter 2012-2013 magazine titled, “Books About Contemporary Palestine for Children,” EAGnews.org reported. Before you go any further, here’s a hint about the nature of these recommended books: The editors of Rethinking Schools are anti-Israel and see nothing wrong with Palestinian terrorist attacks against the people of that nation. The article’s author, San Jose State University Professor of Education Katharine Davies Samway, starts off by explaining how she volunteered to work in a booth at a recent local festival that was dedicated to drawing attention to “the impact of...

This past week, I made an audio recording endorsing the re-election of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel's general election Tuesday, Jan. 22. I explained in the endorsement: "You might think I'm a tough guy in my films, but in a rough neighborhood like the Middle East, Israel has its own tough guy. His name is Bibi Netanyahu." Netanyahu's leadership and strength were evident as far back as 1967, when he was a part of the Israel Defense Forces' elite commando unit, Sayeret Matkal. And they were just as obvious in his public service through the years, as I...

Among his 23 gun control executive orders, President Obama authorized the spending of $150 million to hire “up to 1,000” armed resource officers and school counselors. Just one problem: there are 98,817 government schools in America, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency. Therefore only 1 percent of schools would potentially benefit from Obama’s new government solution. Apparently the other 99 percent (hey, where have we heard that term before?) would be left to the whims of deranged individuals who think it’s acceptable to slaughter children. Hiring 1,000 new government employees to potentially cover, on average,...

The last of the college applications have been rewritten, tweaked and polished, and at last entrusted to the tender mercies of the U.S. Mail or the Internet. Fretting over deadlines morphs into waiting, and yearning, wishing and praying for coveted letters of acceptance. This is the annual crisis in thousands of homes with ambitious high school seniors -- the high school seniors and their parents who still believe that college is the route to the American Dream. But wait. While they play the conventional game of aspiration, certain scholars and economists, and hundreds of thousands of "concerned citizens" have initiated...

When I attended primary and secondary school -- during the 1940s and '50s -- one didn't hear of the kind of shooting mayhem that's become routine today. Why? It surely wasn't because of strict firearm laws. My replica of the 1902 Sears mail-order catalog shows 35 pages of firearm advertisements. People just sent in their money, and a firearm was shipped. Dr. John Lott, author of "More Guns, Less Crime," reports that until the 1960s, some New York City public high schools had shooting clubs where students competed in citywide shooting contests for university scholarships. They carried their rifles to...

Instead of appropriately dealing with gang-related violence, an independent Chicago school closure commission is recommending no school closures because such a move could force students to cross gang lines. So in Chicago, gang violence is the “new normal” and instead of combating and gaining some control over the problem, city leaders are simply accommodating it. Wow. Gangs of street punks are now influencing public policy and million dollar decisions. It looks like they really have won. Of course the Chicago Teachers Union, which stands to lose money if schools close, agrees with the recommendation. The CTU has been arguing against...

New York City Schools Spend $6,900 Per Student - on Bus Transportation! Government schools are an expensive endeavor, especially when union labor and no-bid contracts are involved. The New York City Department of Education has been catching heat from transportation unions lately over a decision to solicit bids for private transportation services in an effort to curtail runaway costs. The district has not sought “significant” bids for student transportation services in 33 years. That means it’s probably been using the same companies for years, without competitive bids to naturally control rising costs. And those costs are increased every year...

At least the teachers of Occupy Oakland are finally being honest about their political agenda. They’re openly calling for an all-out abolition of capitalism. The Occupy Oakland Education Committee – comprised of public school teachers from the Oakland, California school district – has renamed its publication “ClassRoom Struggle” and its platform TEACH, which stands for “Transform Education, Abolish Capitalism and Heal.” Finally the radical teachers have acknowledged what we’ve been saying all along: they want to end capitalism and replace it with a socialist economy, quite possibly enforced by a totalitarian form of government. And what, precisely, is their strategy?...

My undergraduate studies took place at Presbyterian College, a liberal arts school of about 1,000 students in Clinton, S.C. The town was so small that you had to leave it to find a McDonald's or go to a movie. The campus was picturesque. Old, tall oak trees, brick buildings, a lawn where students played Frisbee and football, a girls' freshman dorm that had shared bathrooms in the hall and no air conditioning. When I started, I knew only one other student (the previous year's valedictorian from my high school), but I gained many lifelong friends along the way. While the...

Nearly two years ago, U.S. News & World Report came out with a story titled "Educators Implicated in Atlanta Cheating Scandal." It reported that "for 10 years, hundreds of Atlanta public school teachers and principals changed answers on state tests in one of the largest cheating scandals in U.S. history." More than three-quarters of the 56 Atlanta schools investigated had cheated on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test, sometimes called the national report card. Cheating orders came from school administrators and included brazen acts such as teachers reading answers aloud during the test and erasing incorrect answers. One...

Dear CRM 495 Students: Welcome back! It's hard to believe that Christmas break is over and that it's time to start a new semester. It's almost as hard as believing that one of your professors is actually sending you an email using the word "Christmas." But even the liberals agree that I am no ordinary professor. Please allow me to explain. After I got tenure, I left the political Left and became a conservative Republican. I know you've never had a conservative professor before and you are probably wondering what to expect. In a nutshell, you can expect to hear...

Half of recent college graduates can’t find employment. Those who find a job often settle for something less than a “college level job.” So what good is a college education, anyway, in our very unstable economy? As 2013 launches with more federal government debt and American businesses guessing when the next punitive regulatory show will drop, most Americans are ignoring an area of societal upheaval that is poised to get more intense. Increasingly, Americans are wondering how essential it is for one to possess a college degree. The upheaval transcends what you’ll read in the occasional “top paying” and...