Free Republic

Before the election, we reported on the education establishment's befuddlement over the nascent political career of our president-elect. Since the election, we have seen college students acting out in response to the results, mostly in cities that Hillary Clinton carried. Yet if professors and students are still going through various stages of grief, the media which covers them, other than us, is still missing its deadlines. For example, in the issue they put out before the election, The Chronicle of Higher Education featured historians, sociologists and psychologists trying to unravel the Trump phenomenon. They're probably still working on it. "I...

Conservatives have been fighting Common Core national education standards for two years at the state level, but a massive bill steamrolling through Congress has the potential to cement some of the most despised elements of Common Core into federal law. The re-authorization and rewriting of No Child Left Behind – also known as ESEA, or the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 – has been placed on a fast track in the House and Senate. The remaking of No Child Left Behind will chart the course of the federal role in education for years to come. Sen. Lamar Alexander,...

Let me be the first to thank Senator Rand Paul (R-KY). Later this week, he will make some old bulls in the United States Senate very uncomfortable – and that is a good thing considering the Senate Establishment has never hesitated to expand government and spend taxpayer dollars. Senator Paul is planning to bombard a Health, Education, Labor and Pension (HELP) Committee markup with amendments -- many, many amendments. His target will be the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). As Vice President Biden would say, this is “a big [freaking] deal.” It would be the ninth...

Home: Where the school is Malcolm A. Kline, June 3, 2010 Apparently, staying at home not only helps you get over an illness, it can also help students recover from public schools. “Home schoolers scored 34-39 percentile points higher than the norm on standardized achievement tests,” the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) claims. “The home school national average ranged from the 84th percentile for Language, Math and Social Studies to the 89th percentile for Reading.” “The study also found that whether or not parents were teacher-certified had no impact on these scores.” Thus do home schoolers need to tread...

Section 9524 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act ("ESEA") of 1965, as amended by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, requires the Secretary to issue guidance on constitutionally protected prayer in public elementary and secondary schools. In addition, Section 9524 requires that, as a condition of receiving ESEA funds, a local educational agency ("LEA") must certify in writing to its State educational agency ("SEA") that it has no policy that prevents, or otherwise denies participation in, constitutionally protected prayer in public schools as set forth in this guidance.             The Fist Amendment requires schools to maintain a neutral...

The President's Education Agenda Was Left Behind The Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed by the U.S. House of Representatives would be better titled The Missed Opportunities Education Act. I voted against H.R. 1 because this legislation does little to improve the quality of education for Indiana students and creates an even more bloated federal bureaucracy. Our founding fathers enshrined in the Constitution the principle of federalism -- the notion that the federal government should involve itself only with those issues that states and localities could not resolve on their own. States and localities are closest to the needs of...

No matter how you look at it, federal involvement in education has been a failure. Nonetheless, with the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the federal presence is getting bigger, not smaller. Yet the seeds of revolt have been sown: Parents, educators, and legislators are increasingly restive, and the NCLB is likely to be a critical issue in the upcoming presidential election. So it's time to decide: Should the feds stay or go? In 1965, the year the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) — of which NCLB is the most recent version — was passed, the federal government spent...

There is no doubt that American educators are engaged in a criminal conspiracy to dumb-down the American people. Charlotte Iserbyt, in her definitive book, "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America," has documented the process so thoroughly that there can be no doubt about the intentions of our educators and the fact that the conspiracy is being financed by the richest liberal foundations and the federal government. John Taylor Gatto, in his book, "The Underground History of American Education," describes how the conspiracy operates in the schools. He spent 30 years teaching in public schools and knows intimately how the system...

NEA Seeks Release of Education Department Documents 7/31/03 11:29:00 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: National Desk and Political Reporter Contact: Daniel Kaufman, 202-822-7268, dkaufman@nea.org; Kathleen Lyons, 202-822-7213, klyons@nea.org; both of the National Education Association WASHINGTON, July 31 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Faced with stonewalling by the U.S. Department of Education to its request for government documents that deal with certain provisions of the federal education law, the National Education Association (NEA) went to court today to force the department to comply with federal law. The complaint notes that NEA filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request April 10 with the Department...

New York has created the first American gay-only public school, Harvey Milk High School. Thus, the line to cross for absurdity has officially been moved. Ironically enough, however, this issue actually illustrates how shady and inconsistent liberals are on almost identical and contemporaneous issues. For example, compare the special interests that support gay-only schools with their ideological stance on say, single-sex public schools. On May 8th the radically liberal organization NOW (National Organization for Women), which operates as a “women’s rights front group” as I call it, released their comments on the Department of Education’s intent to regulate on single-sex...

<p>It has been 20 years since "A Nation at Risk," the 1983 report on education in America, concluded that the "intellectual, moral and spiritual strength of our people" were threatened by a failing education system.</p> <p>The report recommended better-educated and -qualified teachers, regularly assessing teacher and student performance, and performance pay for better teachers. It also proposed a much stronger curriculum, particularly in math and English.</p>

<p>Education Secretary Rod Paige says he once had a low view of federal workers. He now thinks better of them — perhaps at least partly because of reforms he instituted within his own agency.</p> <p>When he arrived in Washington in 2001, he found an Education Department wracked with charges of criminal fraud, waste and abuse. "The Ernst & Young report said you guys can't count — you can't reconcile your books," he said. "Money was being lost. But all that has changed." Indeed, crimes have been charged, and accountability procedures have been introduced. Not long ago, for only the second time in its quarter-century history, the department received a clean financial audit.</p>