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Yet another student has landed in trouble for having something that represents a gun, but isn’t actually anything like a real gun.This time, the student is 12-year-old Joseph Lyssikatos, a student in advanced math who had perfect attendance last year. The seventh-grader made the mistake of bringing a ridiculously small, silver keychain shaped like a gun to Alan Shawn Feinstein Middle School in Coventry, R.I, reports local NBC affiliate WJAR.The two-inch keychain fell out of Lyssikatos’s backpack while he was at school.After another kid picked it up and displayed it to other students, a teacher intervened and impounded the keychain.Apparently fearing that the...

When it comes to the matter of educating children, the state of Ohio and the federal government are run by a host of blithering idiots. It was over a year ago that I learned the state of Ohio will no longer be teaching cursive writing in their classrooms. Upon first learning of the announcement, I foolishly believed that the state’s educators might eventually return to their collective senses and re-institute the teaching of this critical skill.

Some parents at Leeds Elementary Public School in Alabama were in for a shock when their kids brought home a permission slip for corporal punishment. It stated that failure to return the form would be considered authorization for school personnel to administer the punishment. Corporal punishment is legal in 19 states in America. …

Almost 1 in 10 U.S. high school seniors have engaged in recent extreme binge drinking—downing at least 10 drinks at a rate that barely budged over six years, according to a government-funded report. Less severe binge drinking, consuming five or more drinks in a row, has mostly declined in recent years among teens. But for high school seniors, the 2011 rate for 10 drinks in a row—9.6 percent—was down only slightly from 2005. The most extreme level—15 or more drinks in a row within the past two weeks—didn’t change from 2005 to 2011. Almost 6 percent of high school seniors...

If you come from a broken or dysfunctional family, or bad neighborhood, how enticing and deceptive this indoctrination is… Via The Blaze: Fourth-grade students in Illinois are learning that “government is like a nation’s family” because it sets rules and takes care of needs such as health care and education. So says a worksheet for social studies homework that was distributed to students at East Prairie School in Skokie, Ill, complete with a drawing of Uncle Sam cradling a baby that represents the citizens. Students are then prompted to answer 10 questions comparing government and families, including how their family...

There is outrage among the chattering class over Assad’s use of toxic chemicals, and a supine public is sullenly acquiescing. The United States is about to start its 3rd war in the area. One cannot easily discern coherence as to our interests/policy in Syria from the “wizards” currently pretending to be in charge in DC, a familiar state of affairs, unfortunately. Syria is a mess and one imagines history will show that this administration contributed to it through vacillation and late starting “covert” weapons supply. The Assad father/son tag team is truly evil and guilty of most of the allegations...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 49 things that defenders of government run schools don’t want you to know 1) The United States is tied for first place with Switzerland when it comes to annual spending per student on its public schools. However, this has never stopped liberals from making the false claim that U.S. public schools are “underfunded.”2) Education majors have the lowest SAT scores of any college major.3) Public schools teach math and science much better when the teachers don’t have a degree in education.4) When Barack Obama lived in Chicago, he refused to allow his children to attend Chicago’s...

A new cornerstone piece on public education by Allison Benedikton on Slate.com titled, "If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person," was shocking but consistent and clearly revealed that liberals value the word “education,” as long as the word “public,” precedes it. According to the author, public schools continue to fail because parents are sending their children to private schools, instead of public schools. Parents who spend their hard earned money to send their children to private schools are in fact destroying the fabric of America’s public education: which is immoral. For liberals, abortion is...

(CNSNews.com) - The Chicago Public Schools this year are mandating that the district’s kindergarten classes include sex education, fulfilling a proposal President Barack Obama supported in 2003 when he served in the Illinois state senate and later defended when he ran for president in the 2008 election cycle. At a Planned Parenthood convention at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C., on July 17, 2007, a teenage girl who said she worked as a sex-education “peer educator” in the D.C. public schools asked then-U.S. Sen. Obama what he would do to encourage the teaching of “medically accurate, age-appropriate, and responsible sex...

Detroit Teachers Moonlight As ‘Sugar Babies’ To Offset Wage Cuts DETROIT (WWJ) - It’s back-to-school season and many Detroit teachers are struggling in the wake of budget cuts and overcrowded classrooms. According to the National School Supply and Equipment Association, the average teacher spent at least $485 on school supplies for their classroom last year. So, what are some Detroit women doing to offset their struggles in the classroom? Well, they’re becoming “sugar babies” of course — seeking financial assistance from wealthy men online. In the Detroit School District alone, 201 teachers are moonlighting as sugar babies to offset wage...

This is a story that SCREAMS for attention. In Michigan a family has been, and continues to be, brutalized by a systemic rot within the school system. A rot that perpetrates, and unbelievably as it sounds, excuses CHILD RAPE – despite the community outrage. This just came onto our radar screen. However, a cursory review shows this storyline has a similar disposition to the Penn State, Sandusky scandal. The Janczewski’s son was brutally raped over a period exceeding three years (2006-2009) by his middle school math teacher, Neal Erickson. Years later, in 2012, an anonymous tipster alerted authorities to video...

I have been teaching for over twenty years. Generally, I have been given either no curriculum or curriculum that was focused on skills, not specific texts. I would have to get those skills taught in whatever way I wanted to get there. Sometimes I was given more direction and that direction was generally pretty good including texts, key terms, supplemental stories, and suggested writing assignments. These directions were created at a school level by the teachers in the school. I helped write some myself. Mostly, I have had a lot of freedom in how I could achieve the learning goals....

At least one mother told KCAL9′s Tom Wait she was upset after hearing that her 7-year-old daughter was allegedly forced to kneel before Carter. “She says that she has to drop down on one knee with her hands at her side, wait for the principal to come out, lift his arms and tell them to go to class,” said the mom. “I feel that the principal wants to be like a king, and we don’t have kings in America,” she added. District officials said Carter will schedule a future meeting with parents to plan different safety options on campus.

A few weeks ago in Part 1, I finished by discussing how Thomas Jefferson distinguished the U.S. from other countries in asking, "What but education has advanced us beyond the condition of our indigenous neighbors?" But is today's public education system what he and other Founding Fathers were imagining it could be back then? The answer is: Yes and no. Yes, Jefferson foresaw that public education would teach a broad range of basics. But no, he didn't imagine that academia would be run by the federal government or that it would turn into limited indoctrination camps for political correctness and...

There is very little meaning in things simply given away. America’s public education system has become the quintessence of that idea -- a “free” system that produces unprepared and overly entitled youths ill-equipped to advance America's future. High-minded progressives see public education as something to be protected from private competition and the ravages of more innovative systems at home and abroad. I spared teachers from my ire of my last column, but they are not without fault. For the most part, though, teachers are superseded by education reformers, especially on the right. In public education, teachers are rarely specialists in...

ROSE CITY, Mich. – August 19 is the crucial day.At 7 p.m. in the Ogemaw Heights High School auditorium, the Rose City community will learn the fate of seven West Branch-Rose City teachers who recently wrote letters in support of a colleague convicted of molesting a young student.John and Lori Janczewski, the victim’s parents, want the teachers fired. They also want school board member Michael Eagan – who sat with the family of convicted child molester Neal Erickson during his sentencing – recalled from office.“We had been quiet … and sat back and said nothing,” John Janczewski said of the...

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican nominee for this year's gubernatorial race, outlined a comprehensive education reform plan during a campaign stop today. Cuccinelli aims to create an easier process for opening charter schools, extend tax credits that send low-income preschoolers to private schools, allow parents to close failing schools by majority petition, expand virtual schooling, and improve curriculum and testing through a new panel. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II unveiled a 12-point education plan on Tuesday that would push for charter schools, offer voucher-like scholarships for preschoolers and empower a majority of parents to close down, convert...

The “Student/Parent/Principal Contract For Eliminating Guns and Weapons at School” was sent as part of the district’s registration packet for the 2013-2014 school year. Under the contract, parents must agree to teach “…including by personal example, my teenager about the dangers and consequences of the misuse of guns and weapons and I will keep any guns and all weapons under lock and away from school grounds and away from my children.”

Gabriel Lugo is president of the faculty senate at UNC-Wilmington. He's generally a nice fellow with a good sense of humor. But, unfortunately, on August 9th, he sent out a wildly unprofessional memo to the entire university faculty. His memo lends credence to my concern that the UNC system has become little more than a political lobby for the Democratic legislative agenda. Thus I will soon propose that we rename our school DNC-Wilmington to reflect the fact that it is an institution committed to politics rather than honest intellectual inquiry. In a section of his memo allegedly updating them on...

One can't imagine the fear in the hearts of the parents of those nine black students who walked past shouting placard-carrying mobs as they entered Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Each day, they were greeted with angry shouts of "Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate." In some rural and urban areas, during the school desegregation era, parents escorted their 5- and 6-year-old children past crowds shouting threats and screaming racial epithets. Often there were Ku Klux Klan marches and cross burnings. Much of this protest was in the South, but Northern cities were by no...