Free Republic

...This film takes a deeper look at how the three superpowers of the 21st Century - China, India and the United States - are preparing their students for the future. As we follow two students - a boy and a girl - from each of these countries, we compose a global snapshot of education, from the viewpoint of kids preparing for their future. Our goal is to tell the broader story of the universal importance of education today, and address what many are calling a crisis for U.S. schools regarding chronically low scores in math and science indicators...

There are new studies and new polls that strongly suggest that we are breeding increasingly stupid kids here in America. Like our tasteless tomatoes, they merely look good and healthy. But of course there is more than one way to test intelligence. So, while only 43% of our 17-year-olds know that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900, as opposed to, say, 1750-1800 or after 1950, they are very good at text-messaging. They also probably know the names of Britney Spears’ kids, which is more than Ms. Spears does at any given moment, but they have no idea...

The Board’s action closed PUSD high school campuses at lunchtime for all students. Only third-year and fourth-year students in good standing, and with parent permission, will have the opportunity to leave campus for lunch beginning in August 2006. Based on community input, a student in good standing must have at least a cumulative 2.0 grade point average – or C average – and have earned enough credits to stay on track to graduate: Specifically students must earn the following: § 14 credits by the end of the fourth semester; § 18 credits by the end of the fifth semester; §...

Irate parents said a religious education teacher at the Alsager High School in England told students to wear Muslim headgear during a lesson on Tuesday. "But if Muslims were asked to go to church on Sunday and take Holy Communion, there would be war," the grandfather of one of the students said.

Two seventh-grade boys were given detention and their classmates forced to miss their scheduled refreshment break when the pair refused to kneel and pray to Allah during a religious studies class. Outraged parents called the punishment of the boys for not wanting to take part in the practical demonstration at Alsager High School near Stoke-on-Trent, UK, of how Muslims' worship Allah a breach of their human rights. "This isn't right, it's taking things too far," parent Sharon Luinen told the London Daily Mail. "I understand that they have to learn about other religions. I can live with that, but it...

Two schoolboys were given detention after refusing to kneel down and 'pray to Allah' during a religious education lesson. Parents were outraged that the two boys from year seven (11 to 12-year-olds) were punished for not wanting to take part in the practical demonstration of how Allah is worshipped. They said forcing their children to take part in the exercise at Alsager High School, near Stoke-on-Trent - which included wearing Muslim headgear - was a breach of their human rights. One parent, Sharon Luinen, said: "This isn't right, it's taking things too far. "I understand that they have to learn...

Washington (CNSNews.com) - Some of the almost 10,000 members of the National Education Association (NEA) attending the teachers union's annual conference this week in the nation's capital spoke out on the issues they hope their lobbyists will fight for during next year's legislative session, including the establishment of a peace academy, in-state college tuition and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who graduate from high school. Susie Jablinske, a first grade teacher at Central Elementary School in Edgewater, Md., said children who are in the country illegally should have the same educational rights as American children. She proposed that...

OCEANSIDE ---- While they're out of school for summer, students in Oceanside can pick up a free lunch at various school and community sites throughout the city. Through the federal Seamless Summer Feeding Program, Oceanside Unified School District employees are giving out about 1,000 meals a day at 10 different sites to anybody under the age of 18, district officials said. The program was designed to ensure that students, especially those from poor families, get nutritious meals while they're out of school. "During the whole school year, they get good nutritious meal, but in the summer, some of them are...

A brief has been filed in a federal appeals court asking the justices to overturn a judge who ordered a school district specifically to ban the Bible in its policy regarding the distribution of literature to students. WND reported just a week ago when a federal judge declared unconstitutional a Florida law that was used to prevent Gideons from handing out Bibles to students on public property near schools.Now comes another dispute, this one in Missouri and pursued by Liberty Counsel in its request to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis. It wants the court to...

Unfortunately, that TownHall.com aricle isn't news, or shouldn’t be. America’s public schools haven’t merely been falling behind. They’re in a freefall compared to other nations, including “developing” nations such as Romania, Belarus, et al. which, almost literally, don’t have a pot to pee in but yet succeed in educating kids far better than we do. Thing is, it’s not news simply because it’s been going on for a generation, at least, and if anyone noticed, they haven’t said much about it, and those who try to say much about it are derided as simpleton reactionaries. The causes of the misedumacation...

CLARENDON COUNTY, SC (WIS) - A school district employee faces lynching charges, and authorities say the victims were a group of teenagers. It was another quiet day in downtown manning until a mob scene broke out in the Dollar General parking lot. "I heard the woman say they're fighting, they're fighting," says Tonya, an employee at the Dollar General. "I seen a little girl getting beat up, her weave being pulled out by a grown woman." A young girl was losing the fight to a woman nearly 30 years older. And Dana Hawkins wasn't holding back. Authorities say she even...

American School Books Redefine 'Jihad' to Exclude Violence -- Where is Media? By Warner Todd Huston | June 8, 2008 - 21:49 ET In yet another example of why the west could be too weak to fight the sort of global terrorism that takes the form of Islamofascism, a textbook monitoring group is charging that American textbooks have been cleansed of mentioning the violence inherent in the Islamic "Jihad." Now, our children will not be taught what "Jihad" truly means, nor that it has been used as an excuse to kill their fellow citizens because our schools have sanitized Islam...

Dissatisfied with teaching in Spanish 85 percent of the time, a North Carolina superintendent is pushing for a $10 million budget that includes a plan for a school where only Spanish is spoken. Superintendent Peter Gorman pitched his proposal to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board today, with provisions to turn Collinswood Elementary into a Spanish program. Nora Carr, chief communications officer for Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District, told WND the facility will help to preserve Hispanic culture. We find that a lot of kids who go there have parents who might be English-speaking immigrants, and they might be very successful," she said. "They...

Reform Three: Give Parents Real Choice In Education Mr. Norquist makes the case for reform in a few compelling sentences: "America in the third millennium runs its public-school system as a cross between the Soviet Union's steel industry - a monopoly - and Socrates chatting with a handful of students under a tree, which is by definition 2,000-year-old technology. "Ignoring technological change in communications is inexplicably silly. Running something as important as the education of our children through a monopoly bureaucracy that since the 1960s is also subject to labor-union rules is difficult to understand." Even Albert Shanker, the former...

Here's how rising fuel prices affect an organization with a fleet of 1,273 school buses: The Montgomery County school board today will consider giving Superintendent Jerry D. Weast emergency powers to make students walk farther to school, if need be, in the coming academic year. (snip) Should prices continue to rise, the school system could save money by raising maximum walking distances for students, because more walkers means fewer buses. Currently, elementary school students walk up to a mile, middle school students 1.5 miles and high school students two miles.

Saying their son was "silenced" by his teacher for talking about hunting in the classroom, the parents of a fourth-grade student at North Bennington Graded School took their son out of school and have taken their case to the local school board. Jared Harrington's mother, Wendy Bordwell, and his father, Martin Harrington, removed their son from school with 10 days left in the school year and home-schooled the 10-year-old boy. "We are aggressively pursuing Jared's right to free speech," Bordwell said. The couple addressed the local school board Monday night to air their grievance. Bordwell said in a telephone interview...

Massachusetts High School Faces Pregnancy Boom Thursday, June 19, 2008 A Massachusetts high school is facing a pregnancy boom with 17 girls entering summer vacation expecting babies in what some have called a pregnancy pact. Officials at Gloucester High School in Gloucester, Mass., are investigating whether half of the teens made a pact to get pregnant during the school year, Time.com reported. Officials said that beginning last fall a large group of girls started asking the school clinic for pregnancy tests, the site said. "Some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," principal Joseph Sullivan...

U.S. states are being surveyed one at a time by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice in order to determine the feelings of residents on school choice. Spokesman Paul Diperna says Idaho is the latest of four states that have been checked thus far. "The broad takeaway is that Idaho parents ... want more [alternative school] choices...," he says. "... [W]e've seen overwhelming support for private schools, charter schools, home schooling, and even virtual schools to some extent," Diperna reports.   According to a press release, 39 percent of Idahoans would prefer sending their child to a private school; 25 percent, a charter...

One dhimmi elementary school principal in Oregon has banned the Pledge of Allegiance, so as not to offend Muslims. Slowly they chip away at life as we know it. If this does not stop. Eventually Bibles and all non-Islamic religious symbols will be banned. All for a group of people who have never heard the expression "respect is a two-way street". When will this madness end? http://islaminaction08.blogspot.com/2008/06/oregon-school-bans-pledge-of-allegiance.html

When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he notably dissented from liberal orthodoxy on welfare and the death penalty. Many observers have been wondering if Barack Obama will follow Clinton's example. They frequently raise school choice as a cause Obama could take up to show his independence from Democratic interest groups. It doesn't look as if that's going to happen, as ABC News's Jake Tapper reports: On the same day that he was extolling the need to shake up the "status quo" in education, Obama also defended his opposition to school vouchers. "We don't have enough slots for every...

The mother of an autistic girl says the public school board was "completely unprofessional" to formulate a theory that her daughter was being sexually abused based on a psychic's perception.

Book Description What's really going at your local public school? In From Crayons to Condoms: The Ugly Truth About America's Public Schools, Steven Baldwin and Karen Holgate let parents, concerned teachers and students speak for themselves about the dismal state of government education in America today. The conclusion? Today's schools are laboratories for disaster, where failed methodologies and policies continually find new life thanks to bureaucracies more interested in maintaining power than in educating. Lavishly armed with your tax dollars, government at every level encourages mass social experimentation on our kids - success optional. In From Crayons to Condoms you'll...

Students earn way by sweat of brow in new program . Bruce Randolph's bold decision last fall to end social promotion, to inform parents that students who fail core academic classes will not be passed on to the next grade. "We're changing the culture," said Principal Kristin Waters. "You can't not pass anymore; you have to do the work." It's an unprecedented stance by a neighborhood school in Denver. DPS, unlike other metro districts, allows parents to decide whether their children are held back a grade until they reach high school. Few choose to hold them back. Not until grade...

Anyone who isn’t aware that there are major problems in our public school systems must be a recent graduate of a public school system. There are exceptions to any rule but, in general, what follows is substantially applicable to American schools. In a word, they are failing. New York City School Chancellor, Joel Klein, has said, "It is the greatest domestic issue we as Americans face.” I wouldn’t presume to have all the answers to remedy the chaos in many classrooms, declining test scores amidst inflated grades, violence and lack of motivation, overcrowding due to illegal immigration, all of which...

An Oregon City fourth grader missed her last day of school Friday because she shared a lip cream with two classmates. Madison McFadden attends Redland elementary. She said she didn’t know she was breaking school rules. Madison says it all began the day before school got out when students were cleaning out their desks. Related Content More education news More Oregon news She found a medicated, over the counter, lip cream called “abreva” in her desk. It’s a cold sore medication and can numb up an area. A classmate asked her what it was and wanted Madison to share. She...

<p>POLICE and teachers who told a group of high school students that two dozen of their classmates had been killed in road smashes had to admit it was just a hoax when the teenagers became hysterical with grief.</p> <p>The fake announcement was part of a road safety campaign meant to scare the students off drink-driving.</p>

State Department officials said Thursday they have no plans to close a Saudi-financed Islamic school in Northern Virginia that has failed to eliminate violent and intolerant language in textbooks. "They told us they would revise the textbooks by the 2008 school year," State Department spokesman Rob McInturff said. "We don't plan to take additional action apart from the discussions that have been going on with the Saudi government." Results released Wednesday from a federal investigation into the Islamic Saudi Academy - with campuses in Alexandria and Fairfax - found textbooks at the 900-student private school had passages that blame the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — If Johnny can't read and Sally can't add, it's often because of the color of their skin and their ZIP code, educators and activists said Wednesday. The heads of the New York City and Washington, D.C., school systems joined with civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton and others to press for a shake-up of public schools from coast to coast to narrow the achievement gap between white students and black and Hispanic students. The group called the gap the nation's most pressing civil rights issue. By the time they near high school graduation, black and Hispanic teenagers...

Hot on the heels of my column yesterday, "Islam in America's Public Schools: Education or Indoctrination?," which included mention of the Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA) in Fairfax, Virginia, comes news that the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has released its findings from a review of the school's textbooks and found that they promote hatred, intolerance, and violence. As reported by the Associated Press: -The authors of a 12th-grade text on Koranic interpretation state that apostates (those who convert from Islam), adulterers and people who murder Muslims can be permissibly killed. -The authors of a 12th-grade text on monotheism write...

An Islamic group has been banned from visiting classrooms in Seminole County schools after officials said it crossed the line between telling students about the Muslim culture and pushing its religion. The flap over the Academy for Learning Islam's visit to Lake Brantley High School also has caused the school system to re-evaluate who it lets into county classrooms to present educational programs and what they can talk about. By fall, teachers will have stricter guidelines. Speakers on religion, drugs, alcohol and nearly 50 other touchy topics will get closer scrutiny before they can speak on campuses, Superintendent Bill Vogel...

With fatal terrorist attacks on the decline worldwide and al Qaeda apparently in disarray, it would seem a time for optimism in the global war on terrorism. But the war has simply shifted to a different arena. Islamists, or those who believe that Islam is a political and religious system that must dominate all others, are focusing less on the military and more on the ideological. It turns out that Western liberal democracies can be subverted without firing a shot. Nowhere is this more evident than in the educational realm. Islamists have taken what's come to be known as the...

With fatal terrorist attacks on the decline worldwide and al Qaeda apparently in disarray, it would seem a time for optimism in the global war on terrorism. But the war has simply shifted to a different arena. Islamists, or those who believe that Islam is a political and religious system that must dominate all others, are focusing less on the military and more on the ideological. It turns out that Western liberal democracies can be subverted without firing a shot. Nowhere is this more evident than in the educational realm. Islamists have taken what's come to be known as the...

PORTLAND, Ore. - The exclusion of the Pledge of Allegiance from a southwest Portland elementary school's ceremony has proved upsetting for a local mom. Departing fifth-graders at Capitol Hill Elementary usually open their promotion ceremony with the Pledge of Allegiance but not this year. "I was sad," said parent Briana Reese. "The flag was sitting up there, you know. Two of the kids went up and they said 'everybody rise' and we rose and I thought for just a second 'oh yeah, we're going to put our hands on our hearts and we're going to salute the flag' - but...

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)- When Rock Hill school officials tell commencement crowds to hold their applause until the end, they mean it — police arrested seven people after they were accused of loud cheering during the ceremonies. Six people at Fort Mill High School's graduation were charged Saturday and a seventh at the graduation for York Comprehensive High School was charged Friday with disorderly conduct, authorities said. Police said the seven yelled after students’ names were called. “I just thought they were going to escort me out,� Jonathan Orr told The Herald of Rock Hill, about 70 miles north of Columbia....

I should have put the year I took up boxing on my resume. It's sixth period, my first day teaching high school, and my regular Junior English class refuses to settle down. I give them a brief talk, amid the jostling and visiting (and the walking, and the love taps, and the food trading, and the vaulting over desks) about respect. I will respect them, I say, and they will respect me.

A textbook monitoring group said that Maryland middle and high school students will be required to read about Islamic teachings that have been dumbed down and are products of political correctness. According to the New York Examiner, a new report issued by the American Textbook Council said that administrators who approved books for use in the Montgomery County school district caved into pressure by pro-Islamic groups seeking to present a less violent interpretation of Islam. Gilbert Sewall, director of the council, stated that, for example, the definition of jihad has gone through "amazing cultural reorchestration" in textbooks, losing any connotation...

A new report issued by the American Textbook Council says books approved for use in local school districts for teaching middle and high school students about Islam caved in to political correctness and dumbed down the topic at a critical moment in its history. "Textbook editors try to avoid any subject that could turn into a political grenade," wrote Gilbert Sewall, director of the council, who railed against five popular history texts for "adjust[ing] the definition of jihad or sharia or remov[ing] these words from lessons to avoid inconvenient truths." Sewall complains the word jihad has gone through an "amazing...

It wasn't your typical field trip that Danielle Quinto took her fourth-grade class at Our Community School in North Hills on last week. Her 25 students - all from lower- to middle-class working families - didn't go to the Los Angeles Zoo or Travel Town. Instead, they went to see men whom they said scared them, men they thought were dangerous and stole things. Quinto took her class of 9-year-old children on a field trip to a city-funded, day-labor work site in North Hollywood near a Home Depot. "It was a little weird taking the kids on a field trip...

The Friendswood Junior High principal who outraged some parents by allowing an Islamic group to make a 40-minute presentation to students last month is now off the job. In a two-sentence statement sent late Wednesday, the school district said Robin Lowe "has accepted another administrative position effective immediately."

Parent wants apology from school district He spends $4,000 fighting citation By JANICE KAYSER jkayser@cninow.com Posted: June 5, 2008 The Wauwatosa father said he took a photo of a reading wall in a Wilson School classroom Feb. 19 to help a parent in his wife's online support group for parents of autistic children. The photo, however, led to an interrogation of another parent, conspiracy accusations and, eight hours later, a disorderly conduct arrest of the puzzled father. "I just cannot believe this happened," Dave Gallenberger said. Gallenberger and his wife, Arlene, and Dana and Barbara Nicholson told a reporter last...

Parents in an area near Houston say they are waiting – for now – to see what a school board will do before taking any other action regarding a public school principal's decision to sponsor a mandatory class for students held by representatives a the Council on American Islamic Relations, an organization that has been linked through its employees to terror allegations. "Every parent and community member who has communicated with us has been deeply concerned about this action and has expressed that changes must be made," said a statement from Pastor Dave Welch, a spokesman for the Houston Area...

Dozens of gangster girls playing hooky from school battled each other in a bloody knife fight on the streets of Brooklyn yesterday afternoon that ended with two teens hospitalized and two more arrested on assault charges, cops said.

Fairfax May Junk Study on Behavior Staff Report Shows Racial, Ethnic Gaps Among Students Fairfax County School Board members said they are likely to abandon a staff report that showed racial and ethnic gaps in some measures of student behavior, including in the demonstration of "sound moral character and ethical judgment." The board had delayed an April vote to approve the report after concerns were raised that findings were based on subjective measures, such as elementary report card data, and that they would fuel negative stereotypes. Board member Phillip A. Niedzielski-Eichner (Providence) said yesterday that he plans to propose at...

Three seniors at Bloomington Kennedy High School will not be allowed to walk in their graduation ceremony after driving to school with confederate flags flying from their trucks. Seventy-five other students showed up at the school Wednesday morning to protest the action taken by the school against Justin Thompson, Joey Snyder and another student. "I figured, you know, we’re seniors, it’s the last day of school…we didn’t mean any offense by it," Thompson said. Added Snyder: "We didn’t look at it as racist or anything." But school officials feel that flying a confederate flag violates the school’s student conduct policy....

A 12-year-old 6th-grader in Hutchinson, Minn., committed to an unusually brave mission for the month of April: he intended to wear T-shirts with a pro-life message to his middle school every day for a month. His courage, however, was met with resistance. According to the boy's attorney, his principal and teachers told him "not to wear the T-shirts, publicly singled him out for ridicule in front of his classmates, removed him from class, sent him to the principal's office, forced him to turn his pro-life T-shirt inside out, and threatened him with suspension if he did not stop wearing the...

He had a doctorate in education from UCLA, but his ideas were anything but "Piled higher and deeper." Max Rafferty had been elected twice (in 1962 and 1966) as California's Superintendent of Public Instruction. Dr. Max Rafferty wrote books with titles like "Suffer Little Children" and "What They Are Doing To Your Children." Rafferty blasted modern public education and its emphasis on "life adjustment." His conservative views on education appeared in a nationally syndicated newspaper column. Rafferty's conservative supporters put him up as an alternative in the June 4th, 1968 Republican U.S. Senate Primary. Rafferty faced incumbent liberal Republican U.S....

What’s next? Assemblies with fake ID manufacturers? Gym classes with coyotes? Darleen Click points to this L.A. Daily News report on a 4th-grade public school field trip to a local illegal alien day labor site: It wasn’t your typical field trip that Danielle Quinto took her fourth-grade class at Our Community School in North Hills on last week.Her 25 students - all from lower- to middle-class working families - didn’t go to the Los Angeles Zoo or Travel Town.Instead, they went to see men whom they said scared them, men they thought were dangerous and stole things.Quinto took her class...

A Fourth-grader at Toy Town Elementary School in Winchendon, MA was suspended for five days for showing his friends an empty shell casing to some friends at lunch. According to the NRA-ILA (http://www.nraila.org/Legislation/Read.aspx?ID=3975), Bradley Geslak had been given the casing — from a blank fired during Memorial Day — by a US veteren. He was given two, one of which he gave to his grandfather, also a veteren. He was showing his souvenier off to some friends during lunch when a teacher confiscated the casing and called the boy’s mother to take him home. He’s also been told he won’t...

A public school principal in Texas who arranged for an Islamic instruction presentation for students by an organization whose leaders have been linked to terror groups apparently arranged for that indoctrination after being told not to by her district's superintendent, parents have told WND. The issue developed this week when public school students at Friendswood Junior High in the Houston area were herded into an assembly scheduled by Principal Robin Lowe that suddenly replaced a scheduled physical education class, according to reports. There, two women from the Houston division of the Council on American-Islamic Relations instructed students that Adam, Noah...

...On May 29, 2008 the Worcester Telegram & Gazette published a story concerning a ten year boy who was immediately suspended when a school employee found him with a spent blank shell. According to the story entitled "Souvenir Rifle Shell Gets 4th Grader Suspended" the young man was given two of the spent casings by a uniformed veteran after a Memorial Day event. "This is a tragic example of how far over the edge this state and our schools have gone. For the school officials to react in such a manner is simply inexcusable," said Jim Wallace Executive Director of...