Free Republic

Does anyone have a link to the complete article that appeared in the WSJ 1/19/16 titled "After the Carnage, Shale Will Rise Again"? Would appreciate it if you could send it to me if you have it.

As a teen pumping gas on a highway north of New York City, Jim Tour dreamed of becoming a state trooper. It beat filling tanks. The notion of Tour as a highway cop is almost laughably discordant with present-day reality. Three decades later, the trim, intense, 50-year-old Tour has established himself as one of the leading, if not premier, scientists at Rice University. And he's learned to dream big. Four years after Nobel laureate Rick Smalley's untimely death, it is the prolific Tour who as much as anyone has carried on Smalley's groundbreaking legacy in the science of nanotechnology. Confirmation...

Each year, the homeschool movement graduates at least 100,000 students. Due to the fact that both the United States government and homeschool advocates agree that homeschooling has been growing at around 7% per annum for the past decade, it is not surprising that homeschooling is gaining increased attention. Consequently, many people have been asking questions about homeschooling, usually with a focus on either the academic or social abilities of homeschool graduates....Drawing from 15 independent testing services, the Progress Report 2009: Homeschool Academic Achievement and Demographics included 11,739 homeschooled students from all 50 states who took three well-known tests—California Achievement Test,...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will take to television airwaves tomorrow with a 60-second litany of all the budget-balancing plans he won't sign. http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/capitolalertlatest/023834.html

The Southern Baptist Convention is Finally 'Throwing in the Towel' on Government Schools President and Executive Director of the SBC Executive Committee Proposes Major Expansion of Christian Schools by Churches COLUMBIA, SC, June 2 /Christian Newswire/ -- In 2004 Brig. Gen. T.C. Pinckney, USAF Ret. and former 2nd Vice President of the SBC, and Dr. Bruce Shortt, Houston attorney, opened a debate over education by submitting a resolution to the Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention urging Baptists to remove their children from government schools and, instead, give them a Christian education. Although the Pinckney/Shortt Resolution was met with...

...But in celebrating accomplishments like these [the SBC's success in creating colleges and universities], I now wonder if our focus in the evangelical community should shift at least in part from training our children during the transition to adulthood to placing greater emphasis on training up a child in the way he should go. I'm not advocating the neglect of what we have already established in higher education, but simply a course correction in an area that seems to have suffered neglect -- the protection and nurturing of the spiritual health and growth of children and adolescents. In far too...

HIGH-TECH MARXISM COMES TO AMERICA ©2009 Beverly K. Eakman Deep down, most Americans once thought they were immune from blatant propaganda, government-sanctioned media-bias and psychiatric hospitals-cum-prisons — hallmarks of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich and Josef Stalin’s Communism. Such confidence is shifting as folks increasingly fear speaking their mind — on schools campuses, on the job, in houses of worship and public places. Worse, a metastasizing mental health industry has convinced government leaders that “nonprofessionals” — especially parents — are unqualified to make decisions on behalf of children. Average Americans find themselves intimidated by bureaucracies ranging from Child Protective Services to...

COLUMBIA, SC, Jan. 13 /Christian Newswire/ -- Because of the comprehensive and accelerating failure of the government school system, Exodus Mandate has launched "The Call to Dunkirk", a new initiative calling upon churches and ministries to reorder their priorities so that they can assist parents in rescuing their children from the public schools. A key stumbling block preventing some Christian leaders from openly calling for the long overdue exodus of Christian families from government education has been the mistaken belief that traditional Christian schools and homeschooling are the only alternatives to government schools. Consequently, a central focus of "The Call...

...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...

GIG HARBOR, Wash. -- A Pierce County High School student is back in school after a three-day suspension for warning classmates about a sex offender on campus. Last week, Raydon Gilmore found a 16-year-old fellow student at Gig Harbor High School at the Washington State Sex Offender Information Center, a Web site that lists the state's level 2 and level 3 sex offenders. "Then it hit me that I was in P.E. freshman year, and this kid was there for a while and he was my neighbor at my locker," Gilmore told KIRO 7 Eyewitness News. The 16-year-old was convicted...

...When I think of the Exodus story I can’t help but see Charlton Heston leading a cast of thousands out of a movie-set Egypt. One day there are millions of the Hebrew children in Egypt and a few days later, not one. The removal of Christian families from public schools will not be that way. Think instead of an oppressed minority leaving a repressive political regime. A few get out early, others need a more urgent threat, others escape through some kind of underground rescue movement, dogs baying in the background. Some will stay too long. I’m convinced that we’ll...

Ya Got Trouble Right Here in Oklahoma City! by Bruce N. Shortt Oklahoma’s crack team of government educators, the folks who spend billions of dollars a year to achieve heretofore unknown levels of semiliteracy and illiteracy among otherwise normal children, periodically take time out from their educational misfeasance to offer ominous warnings that we’ve got trouble – terrible, terrible trouble – lurking in homeschooling homes all across the state. But as was the case with the flimflam of a certain “Professor” Harold Hill, these warnings are just part of a swindle...

WELCOME TO THE CONTINUING COLLAPSE! “Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm – but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” T.S. Eliot ADVENTURES IN DIVERSITY TRAINING All of you undoubtedly know that the education system relentlessly promotes a leftist ideology. Still, you may find it instructive to read how the system works at the grassroots to reinforce the Gramscian voice...

The head of the nation's largest teacher union hailed a summit meeting for clergy and educators initiated by the Baptist Center for Ethics an historic first step toward building bridges between public schools and people of faith...."Many of you in your pulpits, sometimes your greatest detractors may be your board of trustees or your deacons," Weaver addressed ministers. "What we are saying is if in fact we can help you, select some of us to be on your deacon board or trustee board. We will solicit you, perhaps, to run for school board. We will solicit you to help with...

"Reform math", sometimes called "fuzzy math" or "rainforest math",is taught in the vast majority of public schools even though it is a demonstrable failure. While those of us who follow k-12 education can tell you that these curricula cripple children and are a threat to our economy and national security, this brief, lucid video by an appalled mom who also has a local TV job makes the point very effectively by showing a small part of what the problem is. Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1qee-bTZI By the way, note that McDermott fails to point out that the even the alternative...

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: By some estimates, the number of children in this country being taught at home is well over a million and may be approaching two million, and in some states there is very little or no government oversight of what the kids are learning, which is just the way most home school parents want it. We have a Lucky Severson story today on the home school debate...[be sure to watch the streaming video of the program that is now being broadcast over PBS's TV stations this weekend]

Homeschool regulation: The revenge of the failures Posted: January 4, 2007 1:00 a.m. Eastern By Bruce N. Shortt, Ph.D. In their never-ending effort to "help" homeschoolers, public school bureaucrats periodically try to increase homeschooling regulations. This makes K-12 education perhaps a unique endeavor: it's a field in which the failures regularly, and astonishingly, insist that they should be able to regulate the successful.

Math pop quiz stumps Randi BY ERIN EINHORN DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER Talk about a high-stakes test. The radio audience was live and the question for teachers union president Randi Weingarten involved sixth-grade math: "What's 1/3rd plus 1/4th?"... Mike Pesca, who was filling in for Lehrer, introduced the show's education topic by saying American college grads can't do basic math while high school grads in Canada and middle-schoolers in India have no trouble. After Weingarten stumbled, another guest quickly produced the correct answer: 7/12ths, leaving Weingarten to explain herself.

Hank Bounds, MS Superintendent of schools, is proposing forming a panel to explore regulating homeschoolers. This proposal is getting support from Jackson's Clarion Ledger: http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061216/OPINION01/612160304/1008/OPINION The irony of this is that by 4th grade 79% of the children that Bounds is responsible for are below grade level in reading, and about 1/3 can't read at all. Given the "exceptional" academic performance of MS public schools, someone ought to publicly propose that homeschoolers regulate Superintendent Bounds until the students he is responsible for perform as well as homeschoolers. One of the especially insidious aspects of this approach is its attempt to...

Talk of high property taxes and fraud in the administration probably cause you to think of issues on Capitol Hill. Well, not in this case. These are two major problems facing suburban school systems nationwide. According to a recent Yankee Institute of Public Policy study, the cost of suburban schools has risen far beyond the rate of inflation because of an opportunistic relationship between parents and the public educators they are supposed to be regulating. Parent PTA members and school board members can vote on issues that directly affect their families, such as: subsidized trips abroad, full paid sabbaticals for...