Free Republic

Is-ness Is All A New York Times reporter, Tamar Lewin, tries grading SAT II essays and discovers that she's out of step with the veteran graders. What they think is a top-scoring 6, she thinks is empty blather. Our instructions don't help me much: Ignore the handwriting. Read holistically, not analytically. Do not reread. Read supportively, and grade what's there, not what's missing. If the paper is absolutely illegible, or completely off-topic, give it to your table leader. Read the whole thing before making any judgment, since some papers improve greatly once the student gets going ... What is most...

2 + 2 = ? On Number 2 Pencil, Kim Swygert rounds up the controversies over graduation and promotion exams. Basically, everyone wants to blame the test instead of blaming the school for not teaching algebra or the student for not learning. Or they just blame racism: “I call it a testocracy,” said Ron Walters, the director of the African-American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland. He said that the tests used for high school graduation in Florida are culturally biased, as are most tests across the country now being used to measure the performance of schools, teachers and...

After a month long hiatus, I am back online. Activity on the Leftism on Campus ping list should resume today or tomorrow.

I became a Marxist out of sheer perversity. Well, perhaps that is unfair to my adolescent self: it was a mixture of conscientiousness and perversity. The official atmosphere in the California high school where I spent my junior and senior years was—hard as it may be to imagine this now—hysterically anti-communist. This was 1961, but the sixties as we know them had not yet begun. The doctrinal orthodoxy of the day was McCarthyism in its final, decaying phase. Accordingly, my senior civics class regularly showed us propaganda films, whose crudeness constituted a provocation to (not to say an insult to...

If you thought the New Left was dead in America, think again. Walk through just about any of the nation’s inner cities, and you’re likely to find an office of ACORN, bustling with young people working 12-hour days to “organize the poor” and bring about “social change.” The largest radical group in the country, ACORN has 120,000 dues-paying members, chapters in 700 poor neighborhoods in 50 cities, and 30 years’ experience. It boasts two radio stations, a housing corporation, a law office, and affiliate relationships with a host of trade-union locals. Not only big, it is effective, with some remarkable...

When opponents of school vouchers and faith-based social services initiatives argue that the Constitution forbids these programs, they often cite, as their authority, a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802 to a group of Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut. In the letter, Jefferson said that the First Amendment to the Constitution created a “wall of separation between church and state.” Jefferson’s Wall became the law of the land in 1947, when Justice Hugo Black invoked it in Everson v. Board of Education. The Wall, Black said, “must be kept high and impregnable. . . . We could not approve the...

For many years now, elite colleges—taking their cue from the Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision—have justified racial preferences in admissions by saying that they are necessary to ensure campus “diversity.” Get rid of preferences, “diversity” fans say, and top colleges will become minority-free enclaves; the spirit of segregation will be on the march again. The losers won’t just be the folks with the brown pigmentation, now exiled from the good schools, but all those white students who now will never get to know the unique perspective of people of color. Nonsense on all counts. Correctly understood, diversity encompasses the marvelous...

As soon as I qualified as a doctor, I went to Rhodesia, which was to transform itself into Zimbabwe five years or so later. In the next decade, I worked and traveled a great deal in Africa and couldn’t help but reflect upon such matters as the clash of cultures, the legacy of colonialism, and the practical effects of good intentions unadulterated by any grasp of reality. I gradually came to the conclusion that the rich and powerful can indeed have an effect upon the poor and powerless—perhaps can even remake them—but not necessarily (in fact, necessarily not) in the...

At a high school in prosperous Newton, Massachusetts, it’s “To B GLAD Day”—or, less delicately, Transgender, Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian Awareness Day. An advocacy session for students and teachers features three self-styled transgendered individuals—a member of the senior class and two recent graduates. One of the transgenders, born female, announces that “he” had been taking hormones for 16 months. “Right now I am a 14-year-old boy going through puberty and a 55-year-old woman going through menopause,” she complains. “I am probably the moodiest person in the world.” A second panelist declares herself an “androgyne in between both genders of society.” She...

On the evening of the historic day that Baghdad fell, Yale held a forum of professorial invective against the statesmanship that brought it about. Without skipping a beat, Yale’s anti-war professors, who yesterday claimed to oppose war in the interests of the Iraqi people, have now moved on to expressing lunatic conspiracy theories. Wednesday, we attended a “teach-in” sponsored by the Yale Coalition for Peace, the Muslim Students Association, and the Students for Justice in Palestine, among other groups. The panel of speakers included professors Ben Kiernan, Director of the Genocide Studies Program at the Yale Center for International and...

Under these two, mayoral control of Gotham’s schools threatens disaster. With hardly any public notice, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has handed the progressive-education movement near-total power and influence in the biggest school district in the country. Unless Bloomberg and his handpicked schools chancellor, Joel Klein, admit to some monumental blunders, discredited progressive methods for the teaching of the three Rs such as “whole language,” “writing process,” and “fuzzy math” will soon be enforced in every single classroom in 1,000 New York City schools. This is a disaster in the making, not least because the children in the targeted schools are mainly...

I have had problems with my joints, particularly in my hands, wrists, knees, and ankles, for several months now, coupled with a general feeling of ill health. I just got a voice mail from my doctor saying the blood tests they ran last week to screen for arthritis came back abnormal (they checked ANA, Sed rate, CBC, and rheumatoid factor). Twenty-three is young for this, but I suppose this is the influence of my mother's genes- Mom also had arthritis at a young age. Anyway, next stop is the rheumatologist. I only hope whatever this turns out to be, it...

One of the most radical statements that you can make in the American academy today is that "there is such a thing as objectivity." On the insensitivity abacus of politically incorrect felonies this statement is worth organizing a rally over but it still ranks slightly lower than a professor's announcement that this country is truly a land worth defending or that we should say the Pledge of Allegiance before the beginning of each class. Yes, it appears that the universities of today are dedicating themselves to a full-fledged guerrilla war against common sense. Let us first define our terms. Webster's...

Apologies for the frivolity, but I've seen many great anti-Michael Moore graphics and cartoons around the site, and I was wondering if we could consolidate them all into one place. ;)

The Michael Moore production Bowling for Columbine just won the Oscar for best documentary. Unfortunately, it is not a documentary. Bowling fails the first requirement of a documentary: some foundation in the truth. In his earlier works, Moore shifted dates and sequences for the sake of drama, but at least the events depicted did occur. Most of the time. Bowling breaks that last link with factual reality. It makes its points by deceiving and by misleading the viewer. Statements are made which are false. Moore invites the reader to draw inferences which he must have known were wrong. Dates are...

The Boston contingent of IAC-ANSWER has promised to hold an emergency rally at 5 P.M. at Government Center the day the war begins. Well, we are here. All Boston Area Freepers- if you can, we need you to come and help counter these lovers of totalitarian dictators! 5 P.M., Government Center, Boston Please meet me at the T stop for Government Center. I will be carrying an American flag with a Maryland flag attached.

I suppose I'm just asking for it, posting on the official Boston Public board- in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if my admission that I even watch Boston Public drives all of you to eject me from the Freeper fold. But I have a weakness for priggish amateur composers who know how to ballroom dance and use words like "courting" in everyday conversation. But, I'm just curious to know if any of you have fun arguing with people on other unrelated boards. Below is the current argument under the topic heading "President Bush is a terrorist." I'm going with the...

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | The setting, Glendora, California, in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains, is picturesque, the name of the school, Citrus College, is downright cheerful, and the title of the course, Speech 106, seems innocuous enough, but Rosalyn Kahn, the professor, found herself at the center of a political firestorm last week after she told her students that they could earn extra credit by writing letters to President Bush protesting the war with Iraq; when several students requested they be allowed to write letters to Bush supporting the war, Kahn informed them that such letters wouldn't be acceptable for...

In the Albert Camus novel, The Plague, a mysterious outbreak of disease lays waste to the North African town of Oran. There are many omens that foreshadow the fate of the town but none of the townspeople are able to decipher them before the dying begins. Similarly, America may be today threatened by a plague of it's own creation and it is known as "self-esteem for everyone." Like the characters in Camus' novel we are currently ignoring the portents of the plague that is all around us. This fuzzy, anti-intellectual idea of automatic self-esteem is denigrating the capacity of Americans...

New York’s chancellor Klein’s plan doesn’t compute. | 7 March 2003 “Come on, I need someone to take a chance. Who can start the puzzle?” It wasn’t working. We’d gone through six straight wrong answers, and now the kids were tired of feeling lost. It was only October, and already my fourth-grade public school class in the South Bronx was demoralized. Day after day of going over strange, seemingly disconnected math lessons had squelched my students’ interest in the subject. Then, quietly, 10-year-old David spoke up. “Mr. Clavel, no one understands this stuff.” He looked up at me with a...