Free Republic

Greenfield Schools Bethany Stotts, April 14, 2010 In a recent American Enterprising Institute (AEI) Education Outlook, Senior Fellow Frederick Hess suggests that the K-12 system should adopt “Greenfield” schooling practices in order to enhance educational entrepreneurship. “‘Greenfield’ is a term investors, engineers, and builders use to refer to an area where there are unobstructed, wide-open opportunities to invent or build,” he writes in the April publication. “It is not a term one hears often in K–12 education. This is no surprise.” Hess argues that educational entrepreneurs today are often siphoned into resource-intensive “whole school” models. “Some reformers are fascinated by...

No Stimulus Left Behind Malcolm A. Kline, March 2, 2010 The Bush Administration’s education reforms doubled education spending but not test scores or graduation rates. The Obama Administration’s proposals might make No Child Left Behind look like school choice. “Because we know that about 12 percent of America’s schools produce 50 percent of America’s dropouts, we’re going to focus on helping states and school districts turn around their 5,000 lowest-performing schools in the next five years, the president said on March 1, 2010 at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. “We’ll not only challenge states to identify high schools with...

Redefining Public Education Bethany Stotts, December 2, 2009 In the November Education Outlook issued by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), senior fellow Frederick Hess issues an ambitious set of K-12 educational reforms which, he argues, would modernize teacher hiring practices and public education. “Ultimately, the goal is to rethink the teacher challenges of the 21st century,” writes Hess. “While we should recognize that institutions change slowly and celebrate incremental advances, we should not allow that to obscure the goal: to recruit the most promising talent and then foster a more flexible, rewarding, and performance-focused profession,” he later adds. In the...

The head of a U. S. government task force on higher education suggests that if the Ivory Tower cannot get its act together, it may face a version of what the health care industry is confronting—HMOs. “The American Association of Universities criticized our tone,” Charles Miller said on October 25th at the Capital Hilton. “They said that 17 of the top 20 universities in the world are in the United States.” “They quoted a Shanghai University ranking,” he told the audience. “Isn’t it ironic that the only ranking they could use that showed them in a good light came from...

In preparation for the new school year that is set to begin on Monday,teachers,principals,and even parent coordinators are being subjected to endless hours of “professional development.” In fact, hundreds of millions of dollars, an unprecedented amount anywhere, will be spent every year to train these staffers. So that us ordinary folk can keep up with the Bloomberg educational “reforms,” I humbly submit this short “professional development” course to help parents and taxpayers understand what is really going on. The new uniform literacy curriculum is actually not a curriculum at all.

Reprinted from NewsMax.com The Failure of the American Education System Steve Farrell Saturday, Nov. 20, 2004 They never stop nagging. The latest and greatest on education coming out of the mouth of the Anybody But Bush Party is that “No Child Left Behind” is synonymous with “No Money Left to Pay for It.” They’re referring to unfunded mandates. Now, just in case some of you aren’t sure what that means, an unfunded mandate is when the federal government tells the states: “Here’s a new law. Comply with it or else. And oh, by the way, YOU have to pay for...

HUNDREDPERCENTER For love of God & Country The Indoctrination of America's Youth by Malachy Joyce HundredPercenter By the time you complete reading the contents of this page, you will be shocked. HundredPercenter has taken an in depth look into New York State's regents examinations for Global history, U.S. history & Government, for the years 2000-04. Within the contents of the examinations, you will find incontrovertible evidence of a scary liberal bias, with many questions being anti-capitalist, anti-government, anti-chrisitan, and outright anti-american. The regent exams, which are publicly funded, are part and parcel of an attempt by the left in America...

<p>Parents of inner-city school children locked in failing public school systems should be given school vouchers to attend private or public schools elsewhere, a coalition of black clergy leaders said yesterday.</p> <p>"For the 26 years I have been in New Jersey, there have been a host of public school reform proposals, a multitude of major state Supreme Court rulings and billions of dollars spent to achieve parity and improve test scores," said the Rev. Reginald T. Jackson, executive director of the Black Ministers Council. "Yet, the fact remains, that with few exceptions, urban schools and most minority students still do not meet minimum state standards or receive a quality education," Jackson said, speaking at a news conference in Trenton.</p>