Free Republic

Twilight For Seniors Malcolm A. Kline, March 4, 2010 A Utah Republican legislator has proposed scrapping senior year of high school to save state funds. “According to the unwritten constitution that governs ordinary American life and makes possible a shared pop culture that even new immigrants can jump right into after a few movies and a trip to the mall, the senior year of public high school is less a climactic academic experience than an occasion for oafish goofing off, chronic truancy, random bullying, sloppy dancing in rented formalwear and interludes of moody, wan philosophizing (often at sunrise while still...

Still Stuck on Stupid Malcolm A. Kline, March 3, 2010 With literacy on all levels (i.e., without adjectives or with—scientific, historical, civic, etc.) on the wane, public officials everywhere scratch their heads over what to do about it while concocting schemes such as the one devised by the school board in the city Tony Bennett sings about. “San Francisco high school students, just months out of middle school, can start earning San Francisco State college credit this fall through a ninth-grade ethnic studies course,” Jill Tucker reported in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 1, 2010. “Currently, five ethnic studies...

Advanced Placement for Dummies by: Deborah Lambert, July 15, 2009 Should AP classes be available for everyone, regardless of their skill sets? Absolutely not, says Laurie Rogers, author of the book, Betrayed, who noted in EducationNews.org that she thought it was a “really stupid idea.” A theory among educators is that even if the kids aren’t qualified, “they’ll learn just by being there.” In fact, many educators think in terms of “equity,” “opportunity” and the fact that these classes are “challenging” the kids. Rogers disagrees, especially about math. While young children usually enjoy math and science, Rogers says that “by...

College administrators are scratching their heads trying to figure our how the straight-A students they accepted tanked on the SATs. “The University of California system, for instance, reported a 15-point drop in applicants’ scores but no corresponding dips in other measures of their quality, such as class rank and grade-point average,” Eric Hoover reports in the September 8th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “At La Salle University in Philadelphia, SAT scores fell an average of 15 points for applicants and about 10 points for admitted students even though officials had not altered their admissions strategies.” “Robert G. Voss,...

Who knows of any high schools that require all students to take semester courses of chemistry, physics, biology, and earth science in 9th and 10th grades? I've heard of schools that cover all four disciplines in 9th grade, which still allows three years for the more serious student to take more in-depth courses in the three core sciences. But I've not been able to find schools teaching a semester-only curriculum for two full years. Public schools in Portage Michigan are abandoning their college preparatory curriculum in favor of mandatory semesters for everyone, and many parents are upset, not just because...