Free Republic

If you’re one of those people who believes there’s no such thing as a coincidence, you’re my kind of cynic. And yesterday was your kind of day: The Wall Street Journal, United Airlines, New York Stock Exchange…all with “computer glitches?” I think not.-Do you think it’s a coincidence that America’s spelling has deteriorated since we adopted Common Core standards? Pleaze diskuss amongst yerselves.That’s right, fresh crap every day.Posted from: Michelle Obama’s Mirror

Associated Press by Dr. Susan Berry7 Jul 2015216 On Monday 58 Wisconsin grassroots leaders signed onto an open letter to Scott Walker, asserting to the Republican governor and likely presidential candidate they want “no more games on Common Core.” At issue is the fact that while Walker proposed defunding the Common Core-aligned Smarter Balanced exam in his budget, the new “Badger Exam” that replaces it will also be aligned with the controversial standards, making it unlikely that many local school districts would opt for non-Common Core standards. In a statement to Breitbart News, parent and anti-Common Core grassroots activist Jeffrey...

Donald Trump ratcheted up the war of words with Jeb Bush on Tuesday, calling the former Florida governor’s support for Common Core education standards “pathetic” and his stance on immigration “baby stuff.” In an interview on Fox News Channel’s “On the Record,” Trump was asked whether he’d consider running as an independent if he didn’t win the Republican nomination. Trump responded that he believed he’d do well running a third-party candidacy but his intent right now is to run as a Republican. “I will say that I love the Republican Party [but] I think they’re making tremendous mistakes,” Trump said....

To see how Jeb Bush and Scott Walker are approaching the 2016 presidential campaign, listen to the background music in the web videos their respective campaigns released Tuesday. The soundtrack to Mr. Bush’s video is a series of simple piano scales, from low to high notes, representing the sort of happy-warrior optimism from a candidate who said he’d only seek the White House if he could do so “joyfully.” Mr. Bush narrates the video from footage acquired at his various campaign events. For Mr. Walker’s video – a setup to his planned campaign launch next Monday – the foreboding orchestral...

This is an age when Confederate monuments still stand; when white-privilege denialism is surging on social media;... And that’s looking only at race. Add gender, guns, gays, and God to the mix and the culture war seems to be raging along quite nicely. Yet from another perspective, much of this angst can be interpreted as part of a noisy but inexorable endgame: the end of white supremacy. Not long after his original book came out, Hirsch published the first of several editions of a Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. [T]he Internet has transformed who makes culture and how. [Thus, the] omni-American...

SENATE SET for July 7th The Senate Washington Cartel is poised to set a fast one to authorize No Child Left Behind: PUSH BACK! I don't know how to TWEET but please help by joining in!

Here’s what so-called “teachable moments” in academia generally miss—the decade those moments are in. “There is a revolution taking place in the United States,” Stanford researchers Travis Bristol and Claude Goldenberg write of their Edutopia course “Teachable Moments and Academic Rigor.”* “What started in Ferguson, Missouri has marched on to other cities and, as Pedro Noguera notes, ‘widespread poverty, chronic interpersonal violence, and a nonfunctioning economy where work is scarce’ are the root causes.” “Even while we, as a country, have barely begun to address the troubling meaning behind the incidents of violence between law enforcement and U.S. citizens of...

Ohio dropped the PARCC Common Core testing consortium Tuesday night after a series of complaints from educators and parents, including concerns from north central Ohio. Gov. John Kasich signed a compromise two-year budget which concurred with Ohio Senate and House leaders that the Math and English exams would end in Ohio. According to a report, Ohio spent $26 million in online and print testing last year. “The people of the state of Ohio seem to have spoken loudly that they don’t want the PARCC,” State Sen. Peggy Lehner told reporters.

Breitbart reports that, according to a new NBC/WSJ poll released yesterday, Jeb Bush is the current leader in the crowded field of Republican presidential candidates. According to the poll, Bush is supported by 22% of primary voters. Scott Walker is second with 17%, and Marco Rubio is third with 14%. Everybody else comes behind (this includes Ben Carson and Ted Cruz). Although I saw many conservatives on Facebook explode at this news, I’m not worried at all. You see, Bush has only two strengths: 1. He’s a Bush. This is a strength because it means instant name recognition. Additionally, although...

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in education continue to crumble when they encounter reality. “Not a single junior at Seattle’s Nathan Hale High School showed up to take this spring’s Smarter Balanced tests (SBAC—one version of the COMMON Core standardized tests), according to a school district spokeswoman,” according to the editors at Rethinking Schools. “Earlier this year, a group of teachers, administrators, parents, and students had agreed to boycott the standardized tests, but Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Larry Nyland threatened teachers with the loss of their teachers licenses if they didn’t administer the test.” “Under this pressure, the school’s...

A California high school where a majority of juniors opted out of Common Core testing has backed off of plans to ban the students from using the school’s parking lot and from taking part in senior class activities after parents and education groups raised a fuss. C.J. Foss, principal of Calabasas High School in Los Angeles County, last week sent an email to seniors-to-be announcing that certain privileges would be withheld from students who skipped the controversial test, which detractors say is an attempt to nationalize America’s public education system. Although the test, which critics say dictates curriculum, is widely...

The learning standards were new. The textbooks were not. So curriculum director Tammy Baumann and her team took the books apart, literally. Then they rearranged lessons, filled in holes with outside material and put it all together in what will be the K-2 math curriculum in the fall at her district in East Lansing, Michigan. It was a time-consuming but necessary response, Baumann said, to what appears to be a near-universal lament of teachers as they page through textbooks and websites: a lack of high-quality teaching materials aligned to the Common Core Learning Standards that have been adopted by most...

The new academic standards known as the Common Core emphasize critical thinking, complex problem-solving and writing skills, and put less stock in rote learning and memorization. So the standardized tests given in most states this year required fewer multiple choice questions and far more writing on topics like this one posed to elementary school students: Read a passage from a novel written in the first person, and a poem written in the third person, and describe how the poem might change if it were written in the first person.

Two hours before Jeb Bush was scheduled to address hundreds of people at the Hillsborough County Republican Lincoln Day dinner in Tampa, fifteen opponents of Common Core education standards stood outside the Pepin Hospitality protesting the former Florida Governor’s appearance. “I’m against anything that nationalizes education,” said Emma Jane Miller, a former private school teacher from Valrico who helped organize the rally. She’s also a member of the Hillsborough County Republican Executive Committee, and said she was unhappy that she didn’t have a say so on who the party chose to headline their annual fundraising event. “When Jeb Bush left...

HOUSTON – About 130 Houston student will attend a new Arabic immersion school next year, where they will learn to speak Arabic as they learn “to be truly global citizens.” “With kids who learn Arabic, as a parent you’re going to set them up for success, as a teacher you’re going to challenge them to do the best they can, but that skill of learning Arabic and being fluent in it really can be life-changing for a Houston kid,” Kate Adams, the principal of Houston Independent School District’s Arabic Immersion Magnet School, told Houston Public Media. “In addition to the...

A public school district in North Carolina is allowing the use of a controversial fairy tale about gay marriage to be read in its elementary schools despite widespread community opposition. Omar Currie, a former 3rd grade teacher at Efland-Cheeks Elementary School, read King & King—a book about two gay “princes” who fall in love and get married—to his third grade students in April after he said one student teased another by calling him “gay” in gym class. Currie resigned this week after the parents of three students filed written complaints to the school media review committee. Meg Goodhand, the assistant...

The first “debate” between Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway and Republican gubernatorial nominee Matt Bevin Friday wasn’t an exchange of ideas, but rather a pair of broad speeches limited to 15 minutes with only Bevin, by virtue of speaking last, given an opportunity at rebuttal. The two shared the stage for the first time as their parties’ nominees at the Kentucky County Judge-Executive Association/Kentucky Magistrates and Commissioners Association Joint Summer Conference at the Galt House in Louisville. Their pre-lunch remarks drew about 300. Both Conway and Bevin did their best to present their visions for the state in the allotted...

No, no, no! Another Bush?!” Such was my reaction, and that of many other conservatives, last year when rumors of a potential Jeb Bush 2016 candidacy began to surface. Words like “dynasty” and “legacy” were a constant. “What don’t you like about Jeb?” someone would ask, to which we would sputter the following nonsensical retort: “Hm, well — c’mon, a Bush?” Yet several realities began to dawn upon us: (1) in all the kneejerk reflectiveness against the idea of a Bush, we had hardly evaluated the man on his actual record; (2) the idea of “not another Bush” was a...

Photo: Teachers took time off school to attend a Muslim prayer session, courtesy of the taxpayer. /Photo: Lebanon Daily News Key questions: –Where is the separation of mosque and state? –If special accommodation is going to be made for Islam, where are the days devoted to Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Sikhism, Mormonism, Bahai’ism, et al? –Is this not a violation of the establishment clause? Taxpayer dollars are being used to fund dawah (proselytizing for Islam). Why aren’t these teachers being given a seminar by Robert Spencer and Ibn Warraq about the jihadic doctrine and Islam’s 1,400 year history of jihadi wars,...

Marcia Neal, chair of the State Board of Education, announced her resignation Thursday morning. In an interview with Chalkbeat Colorado, Neal said board dysfunction was one reason for her decision. “You know how dysfunctional we are, and that is really difficult for me,” Neal said. “I find it really difficult to deal with that.” ... Neal’s departure comes at the same time as education Commissioner Robert Hammond is preparing to leave the department. He announced his retirement, effective later this month, in late April. The composition of the seven-member board and the tone of its meetings changed after new members...