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An unrepentant terrorist heads a key division of a leading U.S. education research association that has immense influence over what our children's teachers study in education school. William Ayers, the unrepentant former SDS Weather Underground bomber of the 1960s, was recently elected by the American Education Research Association (AERA) as vice president and head of its division of curriculum studies. Apparently, AERA members have no qualms about selecting Ayers, a man who to this day remains dedicated to destroying America, to lead one of their organization's most important divisions. Perhaps they think Ayers is merely a "professor of English," as...

Barack Obama complains that he’s been unfairly attacked for a casual political and social relationship with his neighbor, former Weatherman Bill Ayers. Obama has a point. In the ultraliberal Hyde Park community where the presidential candidate first earned his political spurs, Ayers is widely regarded as a member in good standing of the city’s civic establishment, not an unrepentant domestic terrorist. But Obama and his critics are arguing about the wrong moral question. The more pressing issue is not the damage done by the Weather Underground 40 years ago, but the far greater harm inflicted on the nation’s schoolchildren by...

Most people believe that the purpose of schools is to ensure that young people learn the skills and knowledge they will need to succeed in life. Accordingly, they expect teachers to impart skills and knowledge to their students. The objective of our teachers, first and foremost, should be their students’ academic achievement. That view, however, is not generally accepted in schools of education, where the great majority of teachers receive their training. The philosophy that dominates schools of education—in North Carolina and across the nation—stresses the importance of objectives other than academic achievement, such as building self-esteem and multicultural awareness....

In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice "from local to global level." This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn't long in coming. The Council on Social Work Education, the national accreditor of social work education programs, says candidates must fight "oppression," and sees American society as pervaded by the "global interconnections of oppression." Now aspiring social workers must commit themselves, usually in writing, to a...

Education is a subject I find hard to contemplate without losing my temper. In the present-day U.S.A., education is basically a series of rent-seeking rackets. There is the public school racket, in which homeowners and taxpayers fork out stupendous sums of money to feed a socialistic extravaganza in which, when its employees can spare time from administration, “professional development” sabbaticals, and fund-raising for the Democratic Party, boys are pressed to act like girls, and dosed with calming drugs if they refuse so to act; girls are encouraged to act like boys by taking up advanced science, math, and strenuous sports,...

Letting the PC slip showBy Mona CharenFriday, October 13, 2006 You've probably never heard of Teachers College, but it has profoundly affected your life and is now affecting your children's lives. TC is the graduate school of education at Columbia University and laboratory of most of the "reforms" that have corroded K-12 education over the past 50 years. New math, whole language, open classrooms, outcome-based education -- you name the fad and it probably originated in Morningside Heights in New York. Teachers College is the most influential graduate education program in the country, and like so many leading schools, it...

Schools of education have gotten bad grades before. Yet there are some truly shocking statistics about teacher training in this week's report from the Education Schools Project. According to "Educating School Teachers," three-quarters of the country's 1,206 university-level schools of education don't have the capacity to produce excellent teachers. More than half of teachers are educated in programs with the lowest admission standards (often accepting 100% of applicants) and with "the least accomplished professors." When school principals were asked to rate the skills and preparedness of new teachers, only 40% on average thought education schools were doing even a moderately...

Teaching for “social justice” is a cruel hoax on disadvantaged kids.In 1980, Bill Ayers and his partner Bernardine Dohrn came up from the underground—the Weather Underground, that is. It had been a wild ride for the Bonnie and Clyde of the sixties New Left. They first went into combat during the 1969 “Days of Rage” in Chicago, smashing storefront windows and assaulting police officers and city officials in the fantasy that they were aiding their Vietnamese allies by “bringing the war back home.” They spent the next few years planting bombs at government buildings around the country, including in restrooms...

New York City's ideal of public schooling as a means of assimilating all children into a common civic culture is under assault - not by teachers who care too little, but by those who, in a perverse way, care too much. The root of the problem is "social justice" education. It starts in teacher preparation programs, where rigorous training in math, science and literacy takes a backseat to theories about victimization and inequality. Teachers-to-be are told that conventional instruction is an outgrowth of capitalist oppression; "true" education helps students see the unfairness all around them and challenge society to change....

Personality Test: The dispositional dispute in teacher preparation today, and what to do about it by William Damon 09/08/2005 The standards of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Excellence (NCATE) are of critical import for America's future teaching corps and for K-12 education in general and will wield disproportionate influence for decades to come. Over the past fifteen years, 25 states have outsourced the approval of teacher preparation programs to NCATE by adopting or adapting its standards as their own; the other 25 have various "partnerships" with the organization. Which makes it all the more disturbing that central to...

WHAT is the best way to raise standards and to ensure that students are well educated? Forget about more money and smaller classes. Why not, as Newsweek has argued, close the schools of education? Those schools, instead of giving beginning teachers a mastery of their subject matter, especially in areas such as primary literacy and numeracy, are more concerned with inculcating politically correct values. The late 1960s and '70s was not only about Woodstock, moratoriums and flower power: equally important was the Left's long march through the institutions and the way education was targeted as a key instrument in the...

Jan. 16, 2006 issue - The surest, quickest way to add quality to primary and secondary education would be addition by subtraction: Close all the schools of education. Consider The Chronicle of Higher Education's recent report concerning the schools that certify America's teachers. Many education schools discourage, even disqualify, prospective teachers who lack the correct "disposition," meaning those who do not embrace today's "progressive" political catechism. Karen Siegfried had a 3.75 grade-point average at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, but after voicing conservative views, she was told by her education professors that she lacked the "professional disposition" teachers need. She...

10/24/05 By John Leo Class(room) Warriors The cultural left has a new tool for enforcing political conformity in schools of education. It is called dispositions theory, and it was set forth five years ago by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education: Future teachers should be judged by their "knowledge, skills, and dispositions." What are "dispositions"? NCATE's prose made clear that they are the beliefs and attitudes that guide a teacher toward a moral stance. That sounds harmless enough, but it opened a door to reject teaching candidates on the basis of thoughts and beliefs. In 2002, NCATE said...

Prospective teachers are expected to have the correct 'disposition,' proof of which is espousing 'progressive' political beliefs. The surest, quickest way to add quality to primary and secondary education would be addition by subtraction: Close all the schools of education. Consider The Chronicle of Higher Education's recent report concerning the schools that certify America's teachers. Many education schools discourage, even disqualify, prospective teachers who lack the correct "disposition," meaning those who do not embrace today's "progressive" political catechism. Karen Siegfried had a 3.75 grade-point average at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, but after voicing conservative views, she was told by...

Teaching for Teachers Who Needs Education Schools ...For decades, education schools have gravitated from the practical side of teaching, seduced by large ideas like "building a caring learning community and culture" and "advocating for social justice," to borrow from the literature of the Hunter College School of Education, part of the City University of New York. ... But critics say that ill prepares teachers to function effectively in the classroom. Attrition statistics tell the dismal story: 14 percent of teachers leave the classroom in the first year, nearly half by the fifth year. Today, education schools face pressure to improve...

My mother is a teacher and has started working on her Masters Degree. One of her courses is on Family Therapy and she has to plot out her extended family as part of the course work. "Family Themes" was one of things she needed to write down so she asked me for ideas about some of our family themes. I started to look through her textbook to get a better idea of exactly what they wanted. Here is just some of what I found: The Expanded Family Life Cycle Individual, Family, and Social Perspectives Third Edition Edited by Betty Carter...