Free Republic

Imagine if, as you chat with your child’s first-grade teacher and ask about how he decided to embark on a career in education, he told you, “I walked out of jail and into my first teaching job.” Imagine him telling you that his days in jail and violent protesting were formative to his teaching philosophy. But the teacher who brags about such beginnings is now a “Distinguished Professor of Education.” Despite his specialty as “Professor of Curriculum and Instruction,” he trains future teachers to dispense with curricula and discipline, as well as tests and grades. His many books appear on...

Former Gov. Jeb Bush, considering a run for president in 2016, looks to be returning to his political roots -- and a place of political influence -- by helping to host an education conference next month in Tallahassee. The conference is to focus on education policies he pushed while in the Governor's mansion. Gov. Rick Scott, Florida Senate President Andy Gardiner and Florida House Speaker Steve Crisfulli will take part, too, one of Bush's education foundations announced today. That suggests that conference aims to impact legislation that will be debated in the upcoming session of the Florida Legislature. Bush's Foundation...

(Dec 5, 2013) In an article published on Monday that advocates for Common Core standards, the Associated Press presents what amounts to the typical talking points for supporters when faced with criticism that Common Core is a federal takeover of education. The standards were created by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to improve academic achievement and increase accountability. President Barack Obama and his administration embraced them. Actually, Barack Obama did not simply “embrace” a concept that others developed; instead, the very roots of Common Core are in the early ideas generated by him...

The federal mandate to test U.S. school kids annually was at the center of a Senate panel’s work on Wednesday to fix the long outdated No Child Left Behind education law. […] Many educators and parents have complained that the law led to teaching to the test and too much test preparation, but supporters of the mandate such as civil rights and business groups said it’s a critical way to ensure that historically underserved groups of students are learning before it’s too late to help them. […] Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee,...

Last year, government scientists tell us, was the hottest year on record. This news is terribly — what's the word? — inconvenient. No, not for polar bears or drought victims or coastal dwellers. It's inconvenient for politicians across the country who, despite whatever data or overwhelming scientific consensus might be proffered, insist on denying global warming. In recent weeks, West Virginia has snatched national headlines for its attempts to doctor school science standards to discredit climate change. The sixth-grade science curriculum, for example, was amended so that, rather than having students "clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the...

Four in 10 U.S. college students graduate without the complex reasoning skills to manage white-collar work, according to the results of a test of nearly 32,000 students. The test, which was administered at 169 colleges and universities in 2013 and 2014 and released Thursday, reveals broad variation in the intellectual development of the nation’s students depending on the type and even location of the school they attend. ... many still graduate without the ability to read a scatterplot, construct a cohesive argument or identify a logical fallacy. The exam, known as the Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus, measures the intellectual gains...

More than a third of public school students in Connecticut are in poverty, according to a new bulletin. As for the rest of the country, the Southern Education Foundation said low-income students are now a majority. Mississippi led the nation with 71 percent. It was followed by New Mexico at 68 percent. “No longer can we consider the problems and needs of low-income students simply a matter of fairness,” wrote Steve Suitts, SEF's vice president. “Their success or failure in the public schools will determine the entire body of human capital and educational potential that the nation will possess in...

Government curricula can thus make children believe whatever they want them to believe through subtle and subliminal brainwashing The Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, wants to have “equity” in education and to replace the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) with a new law that would include government-funded preschool. The sooner the collectivist indoctrination starts, the better. NCLB already cost taxpayers $25 billion in 2014. Government failed miserably with Head Start but the taxpayers’ memories are short. Sec. Duncan wants to throw $1 billion more to the Title I program to low-income school districts with no guarantee that it will make...

Democrats will appoint Muslim to the House Intelligence Committee who said US schools should be like Islamic madrassas and warned law enforcement that 'Allah will not allow you to stop us' House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is set to appoint a Muslim lawmaker to the Intelligence Committee, congressional aides said Tuesday, giving him access to some of America's most closely held secrets in the war on terror. The move will come as the world is still grappling with an al-Qaeda death squad's massacre last week of journalists at the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, executed because they had published a...

Tea Party champion and conservative firebrand Ted Cruz may be ready to embrace his libertarian side – and he may need to, if he hopes to find a path from Iowa to the White House. As it turns out, the death of the Liberty Movement in Iowa may have been greatly exaggerated. While an establishment resurgence in 2014 spearheaded by Governor Terry Branstad succeeded in purging the Ron Paul element from the leadership of the Republican Party of Iowa, members of the state’s robust and often-boisterous Liberty Movement are turning their attention to greater things – namely, the 2016 presidential...

A tidbit buried at the end of a Romney adviser’s longish rationalization of why Mitt Romney may yet again run for the GOP’s nomination suggests Romney does not think Jeb Bush has what it takes to win the GOP nomination. BuzzFeed reports: According to one former adviser, the biggest political question Romney will be considering as he makes his decision is whether Bush will be able to make it to the general election. “Look, Jeb’s a good guy. I think the governor likes Jeb,” the adviser said. “But Jeb is Common Core, Jeb is immigration, Jeb has been talking about...

With a little less than two years to go until the 2016 presidential contest, GOP contenders are staking out positions on the Obama Administration’s Common Core education reforms that are markedly to the right of putative front runner Jeb Bush: • “Most of us believe in less federal government and more decentralized government, particularly with education,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, said on “The Kelly File” on Fox News. “For Jeb Bush to run in the primary will be very, very difficult. If you’re going to be for a national curriculum — for Common Core, for No Child Left Behind —...

Nine months from now, Republican candidates for president will meet on the stage of the Reagan Presidential Library (with the old Air Force One providing great visuals) for the first debate of the 2016 race. It seems likely that among those in attendance will be at least four -- Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee and Jeb Bush -- who support (or once supported) the Common Core. Republicans are about to find out what's been percolating among the grassroots. Properly undertaken, a debate about Common Core could be healthy for the party and the country. Or it could be an...

It’s interesting that the people who are usually in a fruitless search for Republican fat cats have failed to notice the actual ones for whom Common Core math actually does add up. On September 20, 2013, Michelle Malkin reported that former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s “educational foundation, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, is tied at the hip to the federally funded testing consortium called PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), which raked in $186 million through Race to the Top to develop nationalized tests “aligned” to the top-down Common Core program.” “One of the Bush...

Mike Huckabee’s once-loyal conservative base may not be there for him in 2016 if he chooses to run again, and his complicated history with Common Core could prove to be the biggest reason why. A lot has changed since the former Arkansas governor last ran for president in 2008. Considered the conservative alternative to John McCain and Mitt Romney at the time, Huckabee enjoyed early success in the Republican primaries that year, winning the Iowa caucuses and a handful of primaries in his native South. He parlayed those victories into a popular weekly Fox News show, ensuring his continued public...

<p>Jeb Bush’s rapid moves to jump-start fundraising and organizing for a possible 2016 presidential run are accelerating the timelines of other prospective GOP candidates and creating tumult within the still-forming field.</p> <p>The actions by the former Florida governor, whose leadership PAC and super PAC were unveiled Tuesday, have put pressure on other contenders to reconsider how and when they will jump into the race.</p>

Full title: Denver: Schoolgirls Forced to Wear Headcarves, “Ankles Must Be Covered” on School Trip to Denver Mosque Sharia in the classroom. School girls at a Douglas County public school in Colorado are being forced to cover up from head-to-toe to visit a mosque on a school mandated Common Core trip. There are no requirements to visit a Greek Orthodox cathedral or synagogue.Here again we see that anywhere American law and Islamic law conflict, it is American law that has to give way. The subjugation and oppression of women are enshrined under the sharia. Young school girls should not be...

Jeb Bush will have to overcome a number of hurdles in order to secure the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 2016. The most significant of these seems today to be the conservative base’s antipathy towards Bush’s positions on a variety of critical policy matters. But the former Florida governor clearly not concerned about the conservative base. He is, however, deeply concerned about winning the support of the Republican donor class and the press. On Wednesday, the media cooed over the political savvy evidenced by Jeb Bush’s decision to release 10 years of personal tax filings. That the political press...

Allow me to unite America’s Left, Right, and Center in just three words: No, Jeb, No! Former GOP Florida governor Jeb Bush made the obvious official this week when he announced on Facebook and Twitter that he’s “actively exploring” a 2016 White House run. Of course he’s running. That’s what inveterate politicians do. Well, I hate to break it to Jeb, Inc. There’s no popular groundswell for Bush Part III. None, zip, nada. Independents, progressives, and conservatives are all weary of the entrenched bipartisan dynasties that rule Washington and ruin America. Only in the hallowed bubble of D.C. and New...

I settled on my New Year’s resolution while giving a lecture to 85 masters students. It was one kid who unintentionally suggested the idea. He was sitting in the back row, silently pecking away at his laptop the entire class. At times, he smiled at his screen. But he rarely looked up at me. I had a choice. I could disrupt the class to single him out. Or I could do what most teachers in higher education do: just ignore it. After all, these students are adults, and they have to take a final exam. Do I have to be...