Free Republic

Police in Reading, Pa. are investigating and sorting through surveillance video of a melee that involved as many as 100 teenagers armed with boards, bats, table legs, hammers and other weapons. Sgt. John Solecki says detectives are looking at video from surveillance cameras and bystanders who posted footage of Wednesday's brawl on Facebook. A phone tip alerted police to video of the melee. The Reading Eagle reports the teens were fighting at basketball courts in a park when police responded around 4 p.m. Wednesday. At least one person, a 17-year-old boy, was taken to the hospital. Investigators say the large...

<p>Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender literature are included in the California Department of Education's newest reading list for students,prompting complaints from critics who say a leftist agenda is being pushed on kids, the San Jose Mercury News reported.</p> <p>Controversial topics have been introduced to California students in the past, but this is the first time the state has put forth works celebrated by the Stonewall Book Awards, which since 1971 has recognized LGBT literature, according to the newspaper.</p>

From a history teacher: I am anxiously awaiting the next installment in your Rotten to the Core series. As a history teacher, the Common Core Standards don’t have much of an impact on my teaching (yet – and to my understanding). The whole of this program seems to be shrouded in edu-speak and double talk (which are mostly the same). In addition to the Common Core, we were given an intro to another change coming to my district… and from what I’ve seen, it is spreading to districts across the country. The new model for teaching is Strategic Planning Strategies...

E. D. Hirsch, Jr. A Wealth of Words The key to increasing upward mobility is expanding vocabulary. WInter 2013 A number of notable recent books, including Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality and Timothy Noah’s The Great Divergence, lay out in disheartening detail the growing inequality of income and opportunity in the United States, along with the decline of the middle class. The aristocracy of family so deplored by Jefferson seems upon us; the counter-aristocracy of merit that long defined America as the land of opportunity has receded. These writers emphasize global, technological, and sociopolitical trends in their analyses. But...

...endless shock waves of intellectual disorientation. Here is jargon concocted by our elite experts during this long national nightmare: psycholinguistics, miscue analysis, reading strategies, comprehension strategies, whole word, guessing, picture reading, whole language, sight words, balanced literacy, reading readiness, word walls, active learning practices, closed instructional activities, high-frequency words, thinking and learning about print, invented spelling, reading recovery, emergent literacy, creative curriculum approach, functional systemic linguistic theory, rich literacy activities, authoring cycle, capability beliefs, post-reading, lifelong reader, cognitive flexibility theory, independent reading, kid watching. The drift of all this malarkey is that reading is a very difficult thing to do.

After watching the viral video of the Obamaphone lady in October, I thought to myself — we are in a lot of trouble. It forced me to consider just how literate are the voters and people of the US. It’s very hard to tell given so few studies nail it down to specifics. For some reason the federal government does not want to get an exact account of how many illegal immigrants we have or how much illiteracy there is in the US. The census bureau delves into high school graduation levels, but not literacy rates. Perhaps because literacy and...

If there is one true cancer in the land of education, according to our Education Establishment, it’s the torture known as “drill and kill.”Progressive educators always hated Drill and Kill. It hurts the child, we are told, and is the end of genuine learning.For the last hundred years, our Education Establishment condemned the direct transmission of knowledge from teacher to student. These elite educators are constantly in a rage that students might be forced to prepare for a test in the traditional sense, that is, they know facts. And yet, when it helps their agenda, the commissars will turn on...

PHILADELPHIA — Like many of his third-grade classmates, Mario Cortez-Pacheco likes reading the “Magic Tree House” series, about a brother and a sister who take adventurous trips back in time. He also loves the popular “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” graphic novels. But Mario, 8, has noticed something about these and many of the other books he encounters in his classroom at Bayard Taylor Elementary here: most of the main characters are white. “I see a lot of people that don’t have a lot of color,” he said.

A reading teacher commented on the Internet: “The situation in the local public schools is getting worse. This year they switched to Guided Reading. Take a look at Pinnell & Fountas. This is a perfect example of 'how not to teach reading.'" Curious, I asked a teacher in Chicago what she knew about Guided Reading. Here’s her indignant response: -------------- “HA!!! Fountas and Pinnell!!!!! They created Guided Reading (I think). These are two women who are obvious whole language experts. They publish their stuff at Heinemann. Let me explain how Guided Reading goes. You know, Bruce, in a whole language...

.... From there the regression into abandoning the teaching of reading to children was rapid. Teaching “reading” came to be viewed by many to be the act of repeatedly showing children flash cards in an effort to get them to recognize words by rote memorization as opposed to actually reading the words. Fortunately for my eldest, this had not reached the elementary schools by the mid-90s and she was taught how to read and write. My youngest, though, was met with this like a freight train and the results were comparable with a train wreck. My youngest was a hard-working...

[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...

American media are excitedly reporting that women are smarter than men, according to IQ tests. Not equal to men, supposedly the goal of feminism, but superior to men. That is quite a jump, all in a matter of decades. How could such a thing happen? After all, biology tells us that genes tend to be stable over generations. An ABC News blog reported: “James Flynn, a New Zealand-based researcher known as an IQ testing expert, said...that women have closed the gap and even inched ahead in this battle of the intelligent sexes...Deciding which is the smarter sex is an ever-controversial...

The class of 2012 had the worst SAT reading scores since 1972. The left will no doubt attribute this to racism, but any serious look at the past generation leads to the inescapable conclusion that kids who grew up in the computer age just don’t read anymore. So it is no mystery that they will perform poorly on reading comprehension tests. Kids don’t forget how to read, they simply lose the ability (if they ever had it) to comprehend and process the information they are reading, and analyzing it to any meaningful degree. Based on what I have seen in...

House Speaker John Boehner--who two years ago led House Republicans in releasing the 48-page “A Pledge to America” to tell voters what Republicans would do if they won control of the House--mocked the national platform produced by the delegates to the Republican National Convention by telling a group of reporters in Tampa on Monday that the document should have been restricted to "one sheet of paper" if the delegates wanted anybody to read it. “Have you ever met anybody who read the party platform?” Boehner said at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. “I’ve not met ever anybody.”...

When David Petraeus visited the Harvard Kennedy School in 2009, one of the meetings he requested was with author Doris Kearns Goodwin. Petraeus, who holds a PhD in International Relations from Princeton, is a fan of Team of Rivals and wanted time to speak to the famed historian about her work. Apparently, the great general (and current CIA Director) is something of a bibliophile. He's increasingly an outlier. Even as global literacy rates are high (84%), people are reading less and less deeply. The National Endowment for the Arts (PDF) has found that "[r]eading has declined among every group of...

“I scream, you scream… well, you know the rest.” That’s the line dozens of local news anchors across the country read off their teleprompters recently, giving Conan O’Brien plenty of fodder for what has become a regular segment on his show–supercuts of TV anchors saying the exact same thing (video above).

Students are suing the state of Michigan and their Detroit-area school district for violating their "right to read." The class-action lawsuit appears to be the first of its kind, and potentially signals a new wave of civil rights litigation in the United States to enforce laws intended to boost academic achievement, education law experts say. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan filed what it has dubbed the "right to read" lawsuit on behalf of the nearly 1,000 students in the impoverished district.

Edward Yacuta felt rushed and nervous when he took a test to determine whether he was ready for college-level English classes at Long Beach City College. The 18-year-old did poorly on the exam, even though he was getting good grades in an Advanced Placement English class at Long Beach's Robert A. Millikan High School. Most community colleges would assign students like Yacuta to a remedial class, but he will avoid that fate at Long Beach. The two-year school is trying out a new system this fall that will place students who graduated from the city's high schools in courses based...

They've been called “Courtiers of the Marble Palace” and “Sorcerers' Apprentices.” But to the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, their law clerks are much more: sparring partners, workhorses and, often, extended family. Each of the court's nine justices hires several law clerks for yearlong stints, newly minted lawyers from top law schools who have impeccable credentials. The role of a clerk includes assisting the justices in determining what cases to take, preparing them for the oral arguments and helping write opinions. Now a new collection of essays, “In Chambers: Stories of Supreme Court Law Clerks and Their Justices” (University...

For more than 40 years, Mona McNee has been fighting the good fight on behalf of intelligent reading instruction. She is the author of "Step By Step" (a phonics program) and "The Great Reading Disaster" (with Alice Coleman, 2007, 335 pages), which chronicles the incompetence of the UK's Education Establishment. I always think of Mona McNee as the Patron Saint of Reading.Mona has recently prepared a booklet called "Why Billy can't read," which sums up her message in 30 pages. You can find a pdf of this booklet, and as well her free phonics program, on phonics4free.org (link below). Mona...