Free Republic

...So, while my Journal of Ohio Archaeology paper concludes rather pessimistically that there are no documented early American Indian traditions that speak reliably to the original purpose and meaning of the ancient earthworks, there is no reason to believe that traditional stories of contemporary tribes with historic roots in the eastern Woodlands could not include themes and elements that echo, if faintly, traditions of the Hopewell culture. And if that’s conceivable, and I think it is, then it would be worthwhile to look for them... One reason why it’s important to take seriously what American Indians have had to say...

The Education Establishment went way too far, and this has presented the country with a unique opportunity for real improvement of the public schools. As never before, parents across the United States will tell you emphatically that they hate Common Core, and they especially hate Common Core Math. The Education Establishment will try to maneuver around this revulsion. Compromises will be offered. The same dumb ideas will be repackaged as something new and wonderful. The challenge is to refuse to compromise. Sometimes a good thing, compromise is now the biggest threat to genuine reform. Our Education Establishment has been selling...

For the past 15 years that Kenneth Berding has been teaching the New Testament, he admits that his students have always had little knowledge about the Bible. But today, he says, biblical illiteracy has reached a crisis point. "All the research indicates that biblical literacy in America is at an all-time low," Berding, professor of New Testament at Biola's Talbot School of Theology, told The Christian Post. "My own experience teaching a class of new college freshman every year for the past 15 years suggests to me that although students 15 years ago knew little about the Bible upon entering...

Donning a white cap and gown, Rachel Jeantel came through on a promise to her late friend, Trayvon Martin, this Friday. She graduated from high school. Jeantel was the last to speak to 17-year-old Martin, moments before the unarmed teenager was shot dead by George Zimmerman in 2012. Jeantel later served as a key witness for the prosecution. Unlike those that mocked Jeantel’s speech and mannerisms during the trial, Martin allegedly never judged Jeantel for her personality or the way she spoke. According to Jeantel, Martin “cared about you. That’s a good human.” Miami defense and civil rights attorney...

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...

(CNSNews.com) - Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) says that the newly launched Congressional Full Employment Caucus will “give President Obama a number of executive orders that he can sign.” Jackson Lee made the statement while gathered with Democrats on January 29th to announce the establishment of the Full Employment Caucus. “We will be answering the call of all of America because people need work and we’re not doing right by them by creating work,” Jackson Lee said. “I believe this caucus will put us on the right path and we’ll give President Obama a number of executive orders that he...

(CNN) -- Early in her career as a learning specialist, Mary Willingham was in her office when a basketball player at the University of North Carolina walked in looking for help with his classwork. He couldn't read or write. "And I kind of panicked. What do you do with that?" she said, recalling the meeting. Willingham's job was to help athletes who weren't quite ready academically for the work required at UNC at Chapel Hill, one of the country's top public universities. But she was shocked that one couldn't read. And then she found he was not an anomaly. Soon,...

Four score and seven years ago our progressives brought forth in this country a new notion, conceived in socialism, and dedicated to the proposition that all students must be created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil debate, testing rather that notion, or any notion so arbitrary and totalitarian, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that debate. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for the ideologues who here told lies that this infamous notion might live. It is altogether fitting and propitious that we...

[Summary: easy way to understand sight-words.] Hey, wait a minute, you're thinking. There's no such thing as English hieroglyphics. There are Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sumerian hieroglyphics, maybe some others. But English? No way. Yeah, you know that. But does a six-year-old kid know that? Not hardly. You know what this means? The school system can pull a fast one. Teachers point to a word-– "house" -– and say, "This design is pronounced 'house.' Memorize it." Presto, that English phonetic word is now English hieroglyphics, simply by saying it is. That's what American public schools did circa 1930; they changed all English...

Thirty years ago, a panel of distinguished experts concluded that US public schools were so bad they could be an enemy attack. The famous Nation at Risk Report stated: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” Thirty years later, nothing has improved. Probably the opposite. (“Nation is at Greater Risk. But everyone pretends not to know why." A new Examiner article explains why our schools don't improve. Link below.) We are celebrating the 30th anniversary of one of...

Keeping with its mission to deepen the community’s understanding of adult illiteracy in the region, the San Diego Council on Literacy (SDCOL) today released Voices and Faces: Literacy in San Diego. This dramatic new documentary tells the story of 13 adults, whose inability to read kept them from meeting their personal and professional needs and achieving their life goals. These 13 people represent the hundreds of thousands of adults in San Diego County and the countless more in America who go through life facing unimaginable obstacles. Often times, they are too embarrassed to tell anyone and live with a painful...

Hey folks, We’re trying something different for today’s mid-day update. Rather than write a bunch of text, I’ve imbedded below some of the more key tweets I’ve made over the course of the morning. (This has the benefit of giving me a few minutes to each some lunch.) Hopefully, the tweets below will give you a sense for how West’s cross-examination of Rachel Jeantel has gone so far this morning. We’ll have a detailed analysis, of course, in this evening’s end-of-day wrap-up post. Enjoy, and be sure to check back in to our live coverage page at 1:14PM (EST), here:...

The Education Establishment continues a weird charade. They maintain that dyslexia is entirely caused by inborn genetic problems. On the other hand, phonics experts have always found that if you teach children to read with sight-words, the children will get dyslexia. If you change the pedagogy from sight-words to phonics, the children will usually recover. Isn’t that fairly clear-cut? Just recently on Edutopia a self-appointed expert left a perfect statement of the Party Line, which inspired an article on Examiner. (link below) The expert’s key assertion is this: dyslexia “is not the result of ‘sight words’ or anything other than...

In his last State of the City address, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg bragged about his huge taxpayer investments in education. “Now, let me ask you: is there anyone who still believes that New York City can’t get big things done? Since we’re here in Brooklyn, I’ll say it again: Fuhgeddaboudit.” Bloomberg was right about one thing only: forgetting about it. Because not only are big things not getting done in New York City on education, even small things aren’t getting done. According to officials from City University of New York, a full 80 percent of high school graduates...

It’s an education bombshell. Nearly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates need to relearn basic skills before they can enter the City University’s community college system. The number of kids behind the 8-ball is the highest in years, CBS 2′s Marcia Kramer reported Thursday. When they graduated from city high schools, students in a special remedial program at the Borough of Manhattan Community College couldn’t make the grade. They had to re-learn basic skills — reading, writing and math — first before they could begin college courses.

Rosa Brooks serves as Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michele Flournoy. In May 2010 she also became Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and then Special Coordinator for Rule of Law and Humanitarian Policy. She is running a new Pentagon office dedicated to those issues. She is on leave from her job as a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. Brooks is known as a columnist (most recently with the LA Times) and at the Pentagon her portfolio has included both human rights issues and global engagement and strategic communication. Her mother, Barbara Ehrenreich, is...

A few years ago, the big question for me was whether we should say that the public schools are bad because of incompetence or subversion. Incompetence is a pleasant cop-out. You have clumsy people who can’t do a job right. You have the gang that can’t shoot straight. You have F Troop, an old TV program. They’re clumsy and sort of ridiculous. But you don’t have to deal with that whole realm of intentional malfeasance, of evil. More and more, when I looked at the patterns over decades -- the same dumb methods and bad results--you couldn’t conclude it was...

An Italian court sentenced scientists to jail time for not having a functioning crystal ball ahead of the 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila. The arguments of science and reason fell on deaf ears. Rarely since a Catholic inquisition in Rome condemned Galileo Galilei to spend the remainder of his days under house arrest for the heresy of teaching that the Earth revolves around the sun, has an Italian court been so wrong about science. Today, a court in the central Italian city of L'Aquila, 380 years after that miscarriage of justice, sentenced six scientists and a government bureaucrat to six years...

[ARTICLE IS ABOUT READING] Everyone sees the parallel between the Jerry Sandusky case and the Catholic Church’s problems with pedophilia over the last several decades. Namely, there are unspeakable crimes well hidden by endless hypocrisy. A blogger writes: “This Sandusky story reminds of pedophilia among many priests of the Catholic Church, that were also swept under the rug for many, many years by Bishops, Archbishops, Cardinals…and I hate to say it, all the way up to the movers and shakers of Catholicism at the Vatican!” A professor of history wrote in a recent column: “For a quarter-century, much of my...

The Latin root of educate is to "lead out from," as Moses led the Jews out from Egypt. The original concept was that children are living in ignorance, and we would naturally want to lead them from that world into a better world. A world where they know more and have more options. Freedom is central to this original concept. As you become educated --that is, as you learn more--you move from less freedom to more freedom. When George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and the other founders talked about public education, they were clearly thinking of schools that would liberate children....