Free Republic

ALBANY, N.Y. - An Albany, New York high school English teacher who asked students to imagine they were Nazis and give reasons why Jews were evil may be disciplined, a school district spokesman said on Friday. Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard was expected to personally apologize on Friday to families of Albany High School students who were given the writing assignment, said Ron Lesko, a spokesman for the district. Vanden Wyngaard issued an apology in the press on Thursday night after a local newspaper reporter showed school officials the assignment, which had been published on the paper’s website. Lesko confirmed that...

New national standards prod schools to return to content-based education.The biggest new thing in American public education these days is a two-volume, 230-page, written-by-committee document called the Common Core State Standards. Forty-five states have pledged to the federal government that they will adopt the standards—which specify the math and English skills that students must attain in each grade from kindergarten to the end of high school—within the next several years. Some of these states genuinely believe that doing so will make more of their students ready for college and careers. Others are on board primarily because the Obama administration has...

New Teaching Standards Delve More Deeply Into Climate Change Under proposed new national science standards, students would learn concepts more thoroughly, including how human activity is driving global warming. By Teresa Watanabe April 9, 2013 The politically touchy topic of climate change will be taught more deeply to students under proposed new national science standards released Tuesday. The Next Generation Science Standards, developed over the last 18 months by California and 25 other states in conjunction with several scientific organizations, represent the first national effort since 1996 to transform the way science is taught in thousands of classrooms. The multi-state...

I just heard another Republican politico, a state senator here in Georgia, at a meeting, claim that Common Core is not a federalized education curriculum, but a “state-led” education reform initiative. He could have been reading from a press release sent by the Obama Department of Education. In reality, Common Core was attached to millions of dollars in stimulus funds that were dangled by the feds before the states in a contest called “Race to the Top” during the 2009 economic crisis. The attached Common Core standards were not even written when states signed up. Writing the standards and attached...

Yeah, yeah. I know a lot of people have a problem with Glenn Beck. To be honest, I do too, sometimes.But this is something worth listening to. He lays out how we are being intentionally distracted in order to slip the truly insidious agenda contained within the stimulus packages, Common Core and other Progressive initiatives.

Glenn has spent a lot of time over the past few weeks exposing some of the education initiatives in states across the country that are indoctrinating kids into the radical progressive agenda. Today, Glenn discussed an issue tied into Common Core that many people aren’t aware of: data mining.“We cover many important stories and topics on this program, but I don’t think any could be more important than what we are covering tonight: the progressive takeover of America’s schools,” Glenn said.Glenn spent the opening minutes of the monologue reviewing the scary pieces of legislation that have allowed the government access...

CARSON CITY — Gov. Brian Sandoval has said his administration has two top priorities: education and economic development. When it comes to education, Sandoval has used both the bully pulpit of his office and his budget to call for school choice, ending social promotion, expanding full-day kindergarten and improving funding for programs targeting English-language learners. But Sandoval and his administration have been largely silent on one key issue important to education advocates, school districts and Democrats: reining in class sizes. That’s not to say he’s ignoring it completely.

<p>Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender literature are included in the California Department of Education's newest reading list for students,prompting complaints from critics who say a leftist agenda is being pushed on kids, the San Jose Mercury News reported.</p> <p>Controversial topics have been introduced to California students in the past, but this is the first time the state has put forth works celebrated by the Stonewall Book Awards, which since 1971 has recognized LGBT literature, according to the newspaper.</p>

Conservatives are in an uproar over Common Core, an educational curriculum being forced upon the states by the Obama administration, which is scheduled to be mostly implemented this year in the 46 states that have adopted it. Common Core eliminates local control over K-12 curriculum in math and English, instead imposing a one-size-fits-all, top-down curriculum that will also apply to private schools and homeschoolers. Superficially, it sounds good. It creates universal standards that supposedly educate all children for college. But along with the universal standards come a myriad of problems, which the administrators of Common Core are disingenuously denying. The...

In February, Texas announced that the state, along with the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum (TESCCC,) would enact major changes to the controversial curriculum management system dubbed CSCOPE.

Don't just get your Kids out of Public Schools. Get the public schools out of Your State. The very Concept of public schools is Obsolete... (video)

Barack Obama did not bring us to this first circle of hell on his own. He was aided and abetted by 1) an education system with a relentless propaganda agenda, 2) a media oligopoly that has completely abrogated its First Amendment responsibility and 3) a celebrity dominated culture that is largely a product of the first two. We begin today with a look at: I. The Education System In a previous post I covered how the public education system fell under the thrall of postmodernism – simply a new name for all the old socialist/communist/relativist claptrap. Some of the...

Have you ever stopped to wonder why conservative ideology is having such a hard time gaining traction with our younger generations? Many of you will know where I am headed with this, but I believe it is time we took a long and hard look at the education system in this country. Could it be we have abdicated our rights as parents and leaders of our community to educate our children as we see fit? It may be happening in places where we would least expect it. Let us take a look at an example from Michelle Malkin, in the...

President Obama ended his State of the Union speech on a warm and fuzzy note by calling for pre-K programs for almost all children. The best thing he could do for pre-kindergarten children is to make sure he doesn't hang trillions of dollars of debt around their necks, but that isn't the route he is taking. Instead, Obama wants to provide government daycare for all preschoolers who live in households where the income is below approximately $47,100. He doesn't call it daycare or babysitting (which is a more accurate term); he calls it early childhood education. Early childhood education means...

[Summary: To dumb down the public schools, our elite educators often rely on sophistry.] Disingenuous. Paradox. Counterintuitive. Sophistry. Counterproductive. These five words always fascinated me. They suggest unexpected warps in a common-sense grasp of the world. Something is out of kilter, weird, defective, or whacko. American public education in the 20th century--which has been characterized as “deliberate dumbing down”--is impossible to discuss without constant recourse to these quirky words. They point to deception, but done with art and flair. Rod Sterling captured the resulting sense of disorientation: “You unlock this door...Beyond it is another dimension....You’re moving into a land of...

Teacher job satisfaction has hit its lowest point in a quarter of a century, and 75 percent of principals believe their jobs have become too complex. The findings are part of the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: Challenges for School Leadership. Conducted annually since 1984, the survey polled representative sampling of 1,000 teachers and 500 principals in K-12 schools across the country. Only 39 percent of teachers described themselves as very satisfied with their jobs on the latest survey. That's a 23-percentage point plummet since 2008, and a drop of five percentage points just over the past year. Factors...

Accessible Pudding What is the solution for the crumbling education system? We all can say “School was far better when I was going to school than now.”, but kids are learning about bigger things these days at a younger age. So why is the United States not number one when it comes to education? Many would blame the Bush/Kennedy Bill “No Child Left Behind”, but I think it’s more than that. For many sitting on a education board, or working within the DOE (Department of Education), or those politicians that believe throwing money at something, like if they’re trying to...

From a history teacher: I am anxiously awaiting the next installment in your Rotten to the Core series. As a history teacher, the Common Core Standards don’t have much of an impact on my teaching (yet – and to my understanding). The whole of this program seems to be shrouded in edu-speak and double talk (which are mostly the same). In addition to the Common Core, we were given an intro to another change coming to my district… and from what I’ve seen, it is spreading to districts across the country. The new model for teaching is Strategic Planning Strategies...

E. D. Hirsch, Jr. A Wealth of Words The key to increasing upward mobility is expanding vocabulary. WInter 2013 A number of notable recent books, including Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality and Timothy Noah’s The Great Divergence, lay out in disheartening detail the growing inequality of income and opportunity in the United States, along with the decline of the middle class. The aristocracy of family so deplored by Jefferson seems upon us; the counter-aristocracy of merit that long defined America as the land of opportunity has receded. These writers emphasize global, technological, and sociopolitical trends in their analyses. But...

...“I, along with 3 million educators across the country, proudly support our members’ efforts in saying ‘no’ to giving their students a flawed test that takes away from learning and is not aligned with the curriculum,” said National Education Association President Dennis van Roekel...