Free Republic

Diana Lam, New York City's Deputy Chancellor fir Reading and Learning, was canned on Monday last, forced by her boss, Chancellor Joel Klein, to resign her $250,000 job. Faithful Conning Tower readers could not have been surprised because I had written these prophetic words in this space a mere three months ago. Diana Lam will get her walking papers soon, and the lamentable Mr. Klein will follow her. True, I hadn't figured she would be busted for having commanded that her husband be hired ASAP as a supervisor at a neat $100K salary while ignoring his lack of certification for...

What a monumental task it is, making New York City's public school system worse, but worry not, it's well underway. Diana Lam, Deputy Chancellor for Teaching and Learning, and her boss, former Microsoft antitrust prosecutor, Joel Klein, Chancellor, have already installed a reading-writing program based on a "child-centered" Progressive education theory exposed as preposterous more than seventy years ago. It is a program that utterly and proudly ignores all scientific evidence of the past four decades concerning the process of representing--encoding and decoding--the sound units, phonemes, of language. Scientists in a number of disciplines now know quite well how children...

Whereas over 80% of Americans support external, high-stakes, standardized testing as the best method for determining what students are learning; discovering their academic deficiencies, so that they may be remedied; and in deciding whether to promote students from grade to grade; you’d never know it, to listen to the socialist, establishment media or the progressives and constructivists who have taken over university departments of teacher education and the nation’s public schools. One such progressive is Kevin Kumashiro. Kumashiro, who is the “director of the Center for Anti-Oppressive Education, a resource center for educators, leaders, students and advocates base in California,”...