Free Republic

Video is only 3:15 minutes long. A short graphic presentation of the nine big flaws in public schools. Suppose someone is asking the question, well, what can we do, where do we start? Here's a list of nine places to start. ---------------------------------------------- Personally I like trying to radically simplify things. That is especially appropriate in education. What these professors spend their time doing is creating so much confusion, disinformation, propaganda, alibis, excuses, lies, etc., etc., etc., finally no ordinary citizen knows what to think about the subject anymore. And that's how the Education Establishment wins. At some point you have...

Normally I don’t have any special affection for the TV show 60 Minutes. So trust me when I say I was overwhelmed by the show on March 30. I wish every student in middle school or high school could see this program. They would see heroism, genius, ethics, inventiveness, capitalism at its best, visionary talent, the future unfolding, all the things they need to see. The first segment was about a young manager of a brokerage firm. He saw trading irregularities he didn’t like, and did something about it. (Most of us won’t understand the math but you will quickly...

While the U. S. rushes to completely nationalize education, allegedly to improve test scores, America’s nearest northern neighbor, Canada, is taking a different approach. “I don’t know why Americans don’t adopt the Canadian approach to education,” Jason Clemens of the Canadian Fraser Institute said last weekend at a seminar in Chicago. In Canada, there is “no federal role in education,” Clemens said at the Friday conference sponsored by the free-market Atlas Network and the Illinois Policy Institute. Both spending and governance of education in Canada are “entirely provincial,” Clemens said. While, over the past two decades, Canada’s national government achieved...

Hispanic evangelical leaders are speaking out after a federal appeals court ruled that New York City has a constitutional right to bar religious groups from using public schools for worship services after hours. The National Latino Evangelical Coalition, a group of over 3,000 Hispanic evangelical churches, immediately expressed its disagreement with the ruling Thursday. "This decision is absolutely unnecessary and whimsical. How is allowing for certain worship practices but not worship services consistent with the First Amendment?," Gabriel Salguero, president of NaLEC, said in a statement. "Worship in empty school buildings in no way undermines the non-establishment clause." The ruling...

Check out this video and feel your head spin like Linda Blair as you watch the teacher go into a very, very complicated and convoluted method (algorithm?) to solve the very, very simple subtraction problem 32 – 12 = 20. Source.

Earlier this week, I wrote about a 9-year-old North Carolina boy who was being teased at school for wearing a “girlie” My Little Pony backpack to school. Administrators at Hyatt Elementary initially tried to solve the problem by telling Grayson Bruce to not wear his beloved backpack, telling him was a “trigger for bullying.” But then a social media firestorm ensued. Grayson’s mom, Noreen Bruce, launched a Support for Grayson Facebook page, attracting over 70,000 fans, and people all over the world wrote in messages telling the boy that his love for My Little Pony is awesome. Men posted images...

I wish my Irish eyes could be smilin’ on St. Patty’s Day. But New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has stoked my Irish temper. And that’s no blarney. As an Irish lassie, I should be at the bar drinking green beer. Instead, I must be more austere. For Billy Boy is threatening to close New York’s charter schools by denying them the ability to “co-locate” or share real estate with public schools. The New York State Legislature is in the midst of budget negotiations that will impact the future of charter schools in New York and could also set a...

Bill Gates, the multi billionaire who does not have an earned college degree or teaching certificate, never taught a day in the classroom, never worked in an educational system or one room school house is comparing the education of children to electrical outlets.

In a Breitbart column insisting that Ronald Reagan was not as assertive as commonly believed on military and foreign policy issues, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) mentions, in passing, “I met Ronald Reagan as a teenager when my father was a Reagan delegate in 1976.” . But his father, Ron Paul, is hardly a Reaganite today. Indeed, he is now claiming that Crimea has a right to leave Ukraine and join Russia, and that U.S. sanctions against the Russian regime are “criminal.” “That’s just people looking to start a war,” Paul said. “This is criminal, it’s stealing and will just aggravate...

Control.If an article could consist of one word this article would be finished.The government knows that it’s in trouble, in more trouble than the administrations that came before it. Government spending is out of control and the fact that the country is still actually afloat is simply down to the privately owned, and inappropriately named, Federal Reserve buying up government debt like it’s going out of fashion.The government knows that more and more people are waking up to the possibility that we are going to face a major crisis in our lifetime. Awakened people are far more difficult people...

The Kansas Supreme Court said Friday the state’s current public school funding levels are unconstitutional. In the much-anticipated ruling, the court said Kansas’ poor school districts were harmed when the state made the decision to cut certain payments when tax revenues declined during the Great Recession. The Supreme Court sent the case back to district court for more review to “promptly” determine what the adequate amount of funding should be, but didn’t set a deadline for a hearing. It did, however, set a July 1 deadline for legislators to restore money for two funds aimed at helping poorer districts with...

<p>A Minnesota public high school was so committed to obeying its fire drill policy to the exact letter of the law that it forced a female student–dressed only in a swimsuit, and sopping wet–to stand outside in the freezing cold for ten minutes. As a result, she suffered frostbite.</p>

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Officials at a Northern California high school acted appropriately when they ordered students wearing American flag T-shirts to turn the garments inside out during the Mexican heritage celebration Cinco de Mayo, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the officials' concerns of racial violence outweighed students' freedom of expression rights. Administrators feared the American-flag shirts would enflame the passions of Latino students celebrating the Mexican holiday. Live Oak High School, in the San Jose suburb of Morgan Hill, had a history of problems between white and Latino students on...

Nevada education officials are making it easier for students to pass a math proficiency test that's required for graduation but has proved tough for high schoolers. State board of education officials announced Wednesday that they would implement a pass score of 242 on the 500-point math portion of the high school proficiency exam.

Days after a great-grandfather brought the wrong boy home from school, the boy's mother is calling administrators incompetent and demanded that the school take action. Angela Stone said her 5-year-old son was waiting for the bus at Sterling Community School on Friday when a man walked up to him and mistook the little boy for his own great-grandson and brought the boy to his house. Only then did he realize he had the wrong child. "Once the grand great-grandmother sees the boy and removes his hat, she realizes it's not her great-grandson and calls the school to say the great-grandfather...

FULL TITLE: Kindergarten teacher suspended after two of her students, aged five, are caught 'having sex' in school bathroom A kindergarten teacher has been suspended from her job after two of her students were found ‘having sex’ while naked in her classroom's bathroom. Kelly Mascio, who has been teaching for more than 15 years in Mullica Township, New Jersey, has been suspended with pay since the incident on September 30. According to a police report, Mascio found the two five-year-olds - a boy and girl – naked in her in-classroom bathroom. They told her they were ‘having sex.’ Scroll down...

This week's award for Biggest Common Core Jerk goes to Missouri GOP state legislator Mike Lair. Parents, teachers and administrators who object to the government education "standards" racket -- which usurps local control, impedes academic achievement and undermines family privacy -- have politicians on the defensive. The only thing these Fed Ed flacks and hacks can respond with is cowardly condescension. Lair, chairman of Missouri's House Appropriations Committee on Education, inserted an $8 budget line item to mock Common Core critics as tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists. Lair's item reads: "For two rolls of high-density aluminum to create headgear designed to...

The current textbooks being used in public schools today, that your children are reading, memorizing and being tested on, are inaccurate, revisionist, anti-American, racist, climate change propaganda based on fake science, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, pro-Islam, Marxist, globalist, pro-Socialism/Communism, pro-homosexuality, pro-abortion, and sexually explicit. Below is a list of examples and… who wrote the Pearson Publishing textbooks, that TN schools are now using. (Related story, as of Dec. 2013, Pearson Foundation fined millions for violating laws. Story here.) During August of 2013, scores of TN volunteers reviewed the 72 books on the State textbook list – 39% were declared acceptable for TN...

“I trudged the several blocks home from school, satchel in hand. It was a beautiful, golden afternoon, and I was ready for some adventure. I had a little homework, but that could wait until after supper. My parents knew that kids needed time to play and there was only so much daylight left. My best friend and I spent the afternoon exploring in the nearby woods and seeking out “evil” boys to annoy. We got home in time for supper and had plenty of time to finish our homework before bed. I don’t remember ever being stressed about tests and...