Free Republic

Attention, parents: Have your little ones been subjected to "TS Gold" in school yet? If you care about student privacy, data mining and classroom intrusions, you might want to start asking questions and protecting your children now before it's too late. What's happening here in Colorado with this onerous testing regime is happening everywhere. Informed families and teachers from all parts of the political spectrum agree: It's a Big Government/Big Business "gold" rush you don't want to join. "TS Gold" stands for Teaching Strategies Gold. This "school readiness assessment system" was mandated in our state several years ago. It has...

Students at several Jefferson County, Colorado, high schools walked out to protest the school board's recently proposed curriculum review committee that seeks to promote patriotism, respect for authority, free enterprise, plus the positive aspects of U.S. history. The teachers union, whose members forced two high schools to close by calling in sick, is against the implementation of performance-based pay. The union has encouraged and applauded student protests against what it's calling academic censorship.The average parent and taxpayer has little idea of what is being taught to our youngsters. In February 2006, I wrote a column titled "Indoctrination of Our Youth,"...

Political correctness is apparently more important than educating children. At least that’s the message I take away from a Colorado Democrat’s plan to defund schools that have “unauthorized” mascots. Wielding the self-righteous tomahawk of political correctness, Democrat Joe Salazar has decided to leverage Colorado’s pawns kids as a bargaining chip in his effort to rid the world of “offensive” Native American mascots.Under the Thornton legislator’s plan, schools will be required to seek permission from Native American tribes for their western-themed mascots, or go without any state funding. (On the bright side, I can now honestly say I’ve seen a Democrat propose...

The other night I could hear my wife and third-grade daughter talking heatedly about something. I assumed they were having an argument. But eavesdropping on the raised voices, I realized that was not it. They were both loudly, angrily complaining about my daughter's math homework. Her assignment involved one of several methods of subtraction she must learn. The way most people learn to subtract -- carrying numbers and borrowing -- is derisively called the "Granny Method" and is discouraged. The task at hand the other night involved subtracting using the "Counting-Up Subtraction Method." This method of subtracting actually uses addition....

There's a big battle brewing in the Jefferson County, Colorado, school system. The manufactured controversy over a proposed curriculum review is generating national headlines. But the fight is not about what misguided students and biased reporters say it's about. "Censorship" is a red herring. The real issue is union control. Here's the deal: Public school teachers in this Denver-area district walked out of their classrooms this week to protest the implementation of performance-based pay. The JeffCo school board approved the new compensation system last week, which rewards the most highly effective teachers with 4.2 percent raises, effective teachers with 2.4...

Eight days before 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, he received his high school diploma from Normandy High School in the Normandy School District near Ferguson. In January 2013, Normandy district schools lost their accreditation from the Missouri state Board of Education because of poor performance on standardized tests and poor graduation rates. The 2014 evaluations have just been issued from the state board and the Normandy district score has dropped even further from last year. Scores are based on compiling results of a number of different performance measures and in order to remain accredited, a...

After President Obama in his 2013 State of the Union address called for a new federal entitlement for taxpayer-funded free preschool or pre-K for all 4-year-olds, we thought his idea would be quickly discredited, not only by its enormous cost, but even more importantly by the overwhelming weight of research proving the lack of any long-term benefit from such programs. Now we are dismayed to learn from Politico that a dozen Republican-governed states are expanding state-based pre-K programs or are planning to do so next year. And in Washington, some Republicans are offering bipartisan support to a pre-K bill drafted...

On November 12, 2013, Amy Lacey, the principal of Texas’ Hempstead Middle School, was placed on administrative leave and subsequently fired when she made a simple request to students: speak English. Now that the gag order has expired, Lacey is speaking out about what happened that day, dispelling rumors that she banned Spanish from the school’s campus. “I informed students it would be best to speak English in the classrooms to the extent possible, in order to help prepare them for [state] tests,” she wrote in a letter to the Houston Chronicle explaining her side of the story. “It is...

It's back-to-school season across the country. But in an increasing number of districts, "back to school" doesn't mean back to learning. Under the reign of social justice indoctrinators, academics are secondary to political agitation. Activism trumps achievement. In Massachusetts, the John J. Duggan Middle School will open on August 25 with a new name and mission. It is now a "social justice magnet school." As a hiring advertisement for teachers explained earlier this year, the emphasis will be on "helping students develop the necessary skills to analyze and synthesize information and to generate empathy by looking at multiple sides of...

While reading the first chapter of Jason Riley's new book, "Please Stop Helping Us," I thought about Will Rogers' Prohibition-era observation that "Oklahomans vote dry as long as they can stagger to the polls." Demonstrative of similar dedication, one member of Congress told Vanderbilt University political scientist Carol Swain that "one of the advantages and disadvantages of representing blacks is their shameless loyalty. ... You can almost get away with raping babies and be forgiven. You don't have any vigilance about your performance." In my opinion, there appear to be no standards of performance low enough for blacks to lose...

"American politics has often been an arena for angry minds." So begins "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," a classic work that the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1964, another time of deep division and mutual suspicion. In that essay, he traced the roots of an American style that goes back at least to the late 19th century, when a plethora of mass movements kept finding new candidates for the source of all our troubles. It might be International Bankers one year and the gold standard the next as older scapegoats -- Catholics, immigrants, Masons -- gave way to...

Oklahoma recently took action to protect the state's children from the federal education bureaucracy by withdrawing from Common Core. Common Core is the latest attempt to bribe states, with money taken from the American people, into adopting a curriculum developed by federal bureaucrats and education "experts." In exchange for federal funds, states must change their curriculum by, for example, replacing traditional mathematics with "reform math." Reform math turns real mathematics on its head by focusing on "abstract thinking" instead of traditional concepts like addition and subtraction. Schools must also replace classic works of literature with "informational" texts, such as...

Five teacher hiring and firing laws bit the dust in California this week. In a major blow to teachers unions, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu’s ruling struck down teacher tenure, while freeing districts from spending hundreds of thousands to fire teachers and from having to fire newly-hired teachers first during layoffs. The ruling is being applauded as a major civil rights victory, with Judge Treu comparing it with historic desegregation battle Brown v. Board of Education. Treu said both cases addressed “a student’s fundamental right to equality of the educational experience.” The data could not be clearer...

When someone hears bureaucratic terms like “compliance, mandates and penalties,” they might think of the EPA, the IRS, or these days, the Department of Health and Human Services. But another federal government department is fast adopting the language of strict and onerous regulation. Annoyed that Indiana wants to extricate themselves from the Common Core education standards, the U.S. Department of Education is erecting procedural obstacles to make this as difficult possible. At stake for Hoosiers is $200 million in federal education funds. The Obama Administration is using “No Child Left Behind” waivers to warn Indiana officials of the penalties they...

In the twenty-three years since Minnesota became the first state to adopt a charter school law, the legislative slog to expand educational freedom elsewhere has borne massive advancements for parents and students. Often tedious and sometimes nasty, the success of this long fight has hinged on the willingness of stout legislators in state houses across the country to forge coalitions of the unlikely. We've done that exceedingly well in Georgia and have much to celebrate as we mark National Charter Schools Week. Now, that's not to say that we haven't suffered setbacks, like in 2011, when Georgia's high court ruled...

All politics is local. So Republican politicians with national ambitions better pay attention to what grassroots parents are saying and doing about the federal education racket known as Common Core. In bellwether Indiana this week, anti-Common Core activists won a pair of pivotal electoral victories against GOP Gov. Mike Pence. Pence's attempt to mollify critics by rebranding and repackaging shoddy Common Core standards is fooling no one. Tuesday's Republican primary elections in the Hoosier state resulted in the landslide defeat of two establishment incumbents running for statewide re-election. Pence had endorsed GOP State Rep. Kathy Heuer over challenger Christopher Judy....

President Obama is passionate about education, especially for underprivileged kids … or so he says. An ardent opponent of school choice, except when it comes to his own kids, one of his first acts was to try to kill the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship that provides poor kids in the nation’s capital the chance to escape failing schools. He’s repeatedly tried to ax the program, only to be blocked by Republicans. But the President’s assault on education doesn’t end with just young kids, it continues throughout the entire education system. For the last few years, the Obama administration has waged a...

Author's Note: This column uses some information previously published in my 2007 column "A Tale of Two Bigots."It's not often that I have to defend a leftist because a university is trying to restrict his First Amendment rights. But I do so whenever I have the chance. It helps to set a good example for my students by showing that the First Amendment is there to protect speech - not just speech you personally agree with. (Note that it also protects those who end their sentences with prepositions). Today, I write in defense a Gene Nichol in spite of the...

President Barack Obama and his feminist friends have been trotting out their tiresome slogan that women are paid only 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. Every reputable scholar who has commented has proved that this is a notorious falsehood that anyone should be embarrassed to use. U.S. law calls for equal pay for equal work, but the feminist slogan is not based on equal work. Women work fewer hours per day, per week, per year. They spend fewer years as full-time workers outside the home, avoid jobs that require overtime, and choose jobs with flexibility to take time...

There's an MRCTV video circulating on the Internet that features a man with a microphone asking college students in Washington, D.C., to name just one member of the United States Senate. At least half a dozen are stumped. When he asks how many senators each state has, the same crew is equally flummoxed. One hundred percent of the students could name the hit song from the movie "Frozen," though. These surveys about how ignorant Americans are have become hardy perennials. Survey data confirm that large numbers of Americans lack even rudimentary knowledge of what used to be called "eighth-grade civics."...