Free Republic

The Back to Ebonics movement has been around for a couple of decades. It gained some traction in the seventies during the era when everything Black was pronounced as beautiful. Emerging from the ugliness of segregation and Jim Crow laws which did see the systemic evisceration of the dignity of Black individuals, the Black is Beautiful slogan was understandable from the standpoint of psychological preservation. Ebonics—the Black Vernacular that is believed to capture the unique and singular way many Blacks speak—was regarded by many as a means of also protecting the dignity of Black self-expression. Few in academia, or in...

If you support a school system that won’t teach children to read, do math, learn the simplest events in history, or understand the most ordinary facts about the world we live in, you’re guilty of child abuse. Maybe not sexual child abuse but certainly academic child abuse, education child abuse, cultural and intellectual child abuse, cognitive and psychological child abuse. You're guilty. Look at the evidence. It's the size of Texas. To flee from your guilt, you might try to deny the undeniable, and believe the unbelievable, for example, that the Education Establishment cares about improving education. That's funny because...

I recently wrote how public educators and unions were methodically killing public education. The best example this week comes from New York where a school board committee has solved the dismal math and reading scores for children in the system . . . they lowered the standards. This is not the first system to gut its standards rather than improve its quality of education. As teachers and unions object to school choice, they continue to make the case for private education. Parents are increasingly voting with their feet. The board is simply calling the lack of proficiency “the new normal”...

I guess this is one way to deal with public schools utterly failing to educate: just lower the standards for what counts as proficient.New York state has decided to permanently lower the math and reading proficiency standards due to the dramatic fall in test scores since the COVID lockdowns destroyed children’s educations. A committee has reported that student performance has been permanently damaged and that lower competence has become “the new normal.”New York will make it easier for students to reach “proficiency” on state math and English language arts tests, calling last year’s lower scores the “new normal.”A scoring committee...

K 12: Excuses, excuses, always excuses For many decades, the Education Establishment has shown itself unable or unwilling to improve public schools. I suspect they actually prefer wallowing in failure; this serves their ideological goals – namely, Americans should settle for mediocrity because that's how we make the world more equitable.A big topic now is how will students recover from the Covid pandemic. Sounds reasonable, but the Washington Post ran a long article full of double talk: on the one hand this, on the other hand that. This smorgasbord of expert opinions pointing in every direction gives each teacher and...

Can’t say “queer” anymore! Authoritarians at Puffin just made hundreds of changes to Roald Dahl’s books. Here are some examples.By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)February 19, 2023This article from the Telegraph lists a huge numbers of the changes that publisher Puffin has recently made to Roald Dahl’s books.Dahl himself has been dead for decades, so he had nothing to do with these changes. I’m certain that when he wrote his original text, he put a tremendous amount of thought into the words that he chose. I’m guessing that he would probably drop dead from a heart attack if...

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced changes to the U.S. naturalization test on Wednesday, reducing the difficulty of the English-speaking section and editing the civics section to make the test easier for citizenship applicants.

Episode 76: Dyslexia is a Fancy Word for Sabotage ======================================= Ladies and gentlemen… 1: INTRODUCTION: every year our public schools spend more billions to help children become readers. But nothing works. Scores remain flat. The majority of children do not learn to be good readers Common sense tells you that your school officials do not know what they're doing. Don't let your children be sabotaged. Insist on phonics. The official story is that a fifth of all children suffer from a brain disorder which they have named dyslexia. In fact, the phonics people say that so-called dyslexia is usually not...

Did you ever wonder what it would be like to live under communism? Well, now you know. The last two years have seen a parade of dumb and dumber policies, the kind you expect in totalitarian dictatorships. The distinguishing traits are as follows: rulers show contempt for their serfs; policy wonks concoct endless stream of counterproductive ideas; and casual cruelty hurts everyone, day after day. Here are a dozen examples. Think back to Biden's decision to shut down the pipeline bringing petroleum from Canada. Could anything be more irrational than shutting down a functioning pipeline, thus causing higher prices for...

Emily Hanford became famous over the last several years for talking constantly about the Science of Reading. That's where children learn to read in the simplest, most efficient way and go on to enjoy many hundreds of books. Long story short, what she means by the Science of Reading is phonics — nothing less, nothing else. The problem is that the left in our country forced phonics into oblivion starting in 1931. So what was going on for those 90 years from 1931 to now? A titanic and quite stupid con, that's what. Basically, the professors of education at Harvard...

Target, the leader in wokeness took a 90% loss over the same period last year after they overstocked on clothing and accessories for transgenders. For some strange reason, they decided that there are many more transgenders than there actually are. As a result, they had to lower prices in order to lower their inventory that just wasn’t selling. Target had previously shot themselves in the foot after letting people use the bathrooms and changing rooms according to how they identified.In the second quarter of this year, Target reported earnings of $183 million in second-quarter net income after earning $1.82 billion...

(BACKGROUND: When a local group wanted to start a new school some years back, they asked me to write a proposal. Here is that proposal, which anyone may use for ideas and inspiration.) A new private school is coming to your neighborhood. You can be involved with the school in several ways— parent of a student, investor, donor, volunteer, and community support. To create something we can all be proud of, that's the goal. AlphaAcademy serves boys and girls in Grades K-9. The overarching concern is preparing students for success throughout life. The school favors a traditional curriculum and classical...

Potemkin villages” refer to the magnificent facades that Crimean governor Grigory Potemkin supposedly built in front of decrepit villages to impress Catherine the Great on her grand tour of the region. Today, there’s no better term than “Potemkin schools” to describe how educrats run public education in New York City. ... teachers at William Cullen Bryant High School in Queens complained that administrators forced them to pass failing students. Last year, a long-stalled investigation revealed that Maspeth High School in Queens repeatedly faked passing grades. In 2020, at Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill High School where more than 70% of the students...

The scariest part about the devastating report into cheating at Maspeth High School is how the Department of Education has responded to such scandals. The biggest issue, to them, is not that Maspeth’s principal graduated students who didn’t pass classes. Or that students were fed answers to tests. It’s that grades and tests even exist. According to texts acquired by investigators, the administrator writes: “What’s worse, her thinking she can’t do it or that’s she’s smart?” In short: The DOE wants to take what Maspeth did and make it policy.

A review of peer-reviewed studies suggests regular COVID 19 mask wearing increases risk of mental retardation. Studies affirm what independent medical doctors are increasingly saying – mask wearing mandates are not only unscientific, but contrary to good health and can be deadly! Below, we show how the scientific literature finds that prolonged mask wearing impedes brain function. Top medical doctor, Britain’s Dr Vernon Coleman, is Britain’s best-selling medical author for several decades and has repeatedly warned how dangerous mask wearing really is – it can even be deadly to some. He tells us: “Masks cause hypoxia and hypercapnia – and...

“We are in for a big surprise down the road,” Dr. Stephanie Seneff predicts.RAIR Foundation USA is honored to present an exclusive interview with prominent scientist Stephanie Seneff about her take on the impact of mRNA vaccines. RAIR also features Scientist Madeline Weld, Ph.D., Physiology and Biology who has graciously used her background to write about the interview for RAIR’s readers (scroll down).Dr. Seneff serves as Senior research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and is the author of Toxic Legacy, How the Weedkiller Glyphosate Is Destroying Our Health and the Environment. The MIT scientist wrote a...

Our Education Establishment brags about its wonderful doctrines and the many advances seen in our public schools. The real story is quite the opposite, and chronicles a steady and unnecessary decline. Notre Dame Professor Patrick Deneen says that many students at even the best schools are know-nothings and cannot state who won the Civil War. Deneen concludes that such dismal ignorance could not possibly be accidental. Ergo, it's what our schools are designed to do—i.e., stupefy young brains with cultural amnesia. Students emerging from high school, after 12 or 13 years in classrooms, remain shockingly ignorant. That's nearly 10,000 hours...

Random selection is not generally an approach that most people opt for in the selection of doctors or even restaurants or a movie. However, it appears to be the new model for some in higher education. Former Barnard College mathematics professor Cathy O’Neil has written a column calling for “random selection” of all college graduates to guarantee racial diversity. It is ever so simple: “Never mind optional standardized tests. If you show interest, your name goes in a big hat.” She is not the only one arguing for blind or random admissions. Recently, University of California President Janet Napolitano announced...

The Virginia Department of Education is taking steps to end advanced diplomas in the name of equity. Leslie Sale, director of the Virginia Education Department's office of policy, on Tuesday announced an exploratory effort to review Virginia's diploma and graduation requirements in a live-streamed meeting with the department's Special Committee to Review the Standards of Accreditation. "These recommendations include developing measurable plans to close the persistence of achievement gaps, close opportunity gaps that disproportionately impact Black students and other students of color, diversify Virginia’s educator force, and support professional development for administrators and educators focused on culturally inclusive and responsive...

The Five Universal Laws of Human Stupidity We underestimate the stupid, and we do so at our own peril. Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. No matter how many idiots you suspect yourself surrounded by, Cipolla wrote, you are invariably lowballing the total. This problem is compounded by biased assumptions that certain people are intelligent based on superficial factors like their job, education level, or other traits we believe to be exclusive of stupidity. They aren’t. Which takes us to: Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent...