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I have been teaching for over twenty years. Generally, I have been given either no curriculum or curriculum that was focused on skills, not specific texts. I would have to get those skills taught in whatever way I wanted to get there. Sometimes I was given more direction and that direction was generally pretty good including texts, key terms, supplemental stories, and suggested writing assignments. These directions were created at a school level by the teachers in the school. I helped write some myself. Mostly, I have had a lot of freedom in how I could achieve the learning goals....

I am considering a career change and think I would be a great teacher if i could survive the political arena. I am looking for comrades in arms. Are there any groups of conservative teachers that would be willing to organize to combine efforts to promote conservative thinking at your school? Would such a group survive?

As school begins in the coming weeks, parents of boys should ask themselves a question: Is my son really welcome? A flurry of incidents last spring suggests that the answer is no. In May, Christopher Marshall, age 7, was suspended from his Virginia school for picking up a pencil and using it to “shoot” a “bad guy” — his friend, who was also suspended. A few months earlier, Josh Welch, also 7, was sent home from his Maryland school for nibbling off the corners of a strawberry Pop-Tart to shape it into a gun. At about the same time, Colorado’s...

School had always been his safe harbor. Growing up in one of South Los Angeles' bleakest, most violent neighborhoods, he learned about the world by watching "Jeopardy" and willed himself to become a straight-A student. His teachers and his classmates at Jefferson High all rooted for the slight and hopeful African American teenager. He was named the prom king, the most likely to succeed, the senior class salutatorian. He was accepted to UC Berkeley, one of the nation's most renowned public universities. A semester later, Kashawn Campbell sat inside a cramped room on a dorm floor that Cal reserves for...

“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” – Michel Foucault Once upon a time in America, parents breathed a sigh of relief when their kids went back to school after a summer’s hiatus, content in the knowledge that for a good portion of the day their kids would be gainfully occupied, out of harm’s way and out of trouble. Those were the good old days, before school shootings became a part of our national lexicon and schools, aiming for greater security, transformed themselves into quasi-prisons, complete with surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols,...

In America, a good education is available everywhereThese days, it seems like everything is made into a political football. Perhaps the one thing we can agree upon is the importance of education for everyone. Currently in the United States, approximately 30 percent of the people who enter high school do not graduate. This was considerably less of a problem during the agricultural age or the industrial age, when all one needed to be successful financially was a strong back and a willingness to work. Now that we have advanced to the technological-information age, education has assumed paramount importance for success...

Learning, and thinking, are deeply social activities. This is not the traditional view (Rodin's iconic sculpture, "The Thinker," is conspicuously alone in his chin-on-fist musings), but it's the view that is emerging out of several decades of social science research. Our minds often work best in interaction with other people's minds, and there are particular kinds of relationships that are especially good at evoking our intelligence. One is the master-apprentice relationship, which I wrote about here. Another, of course, is the teacher-student relationship—but today I want to talk about the benefits of this relationship for the teacher. For thousands of...

One bizarre aspect of any discussion about public education is that everybody tiptoes around the real reason why the schools are mediocre. We spend billions of dollars. Millions of people work in this area. The whole country embraces public education. So why do we have low literacy rates, widespread ignorance among ordinary citizens about simple things, etc., etc.?? The people in charge can’t be trying to do a good job. Put another way, whatever it is these people mean by “education” is not what most parents want for their kids. John Dewey and everybody else in charge of public education...

Colleges around the country should be worried. The quality of online courses is catching up fast. Depending on whom you talk to, massively open online courses (MOOCs) will upend and democratize higher education, or are half-baked approximations of lectures that can never equal the classroom. Kevin Carey, the director of the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation put it to the test, spending four months taking two MOOCs, from start to finish. One, a Coursera Introduction to Philosophy was everything critics dislike, he says. Too brief, and with none of the problem sets, essays, or tests that make...

LANSING — Teachers couldn't blame the weather or inability to get the day off from work as excuses for the underwhelming turnout for what was billed as a "huge grassroots rally" for traditional public schools in Lansing Wednesday. Notice of the rally was posted on Facebook and progressive blogs, and notices were sent to 8,000 teachers and public education supporters, according to one organizer. Before the rally, 751 people said on Facebook that they would attend, and a popular liberal blog said turnout would be "huge," but a headcount put the figure at about 500 people. The crowd barely filled...

Some in the post-modern snobby, secular academy view these Christian faith-based perspectives as not being academically respectable. They hold to a rigid, narrow dogmatic “establishment of unbelief” (Marsden). Our faculty members, by contrast, think it is intellectually dishonest and stultifying to examine the large questions of truth, beauty, evil, community, the physical world and the human mind as though Christian religious ideas have nothing to say about them. So faith is foundational to everything we do here on this campus. My old friend the late Russell Kirk use to put it this way—As he watched students lining up, as they...

It's sad to say but seems entirely true: nothing good comes from our Education Establishment. They are all socialists or perhaps fascists. They never think in terms of "let's teach lots of wonderful stuff to kids of all ages." They think only in terms of diluting content. Here is their apparent plan: teach less and teach it badly so kids will dislike the subject forever. (Reform Math proves that point.) Americans really ought to think of their public schools as occupied territory, like France in 1943. We need more Resistance. Killing Common Core is a good start. People are always...

My wife wants to sign up my grandson for the ABC Disney website. Does anyone have any experience with this toddler Learning website? The website says it was developed by “Learning Professionals and Teachers” Such claims do not necessary inspire my confidence.

Unions such as Education Minnesota represent the greatest barrier to improving teacher quality. Teachers unions such as Education Minnesota consistently promote practices that undermine excellence in the classroom. Education Minnesota is the second best funded lobbying force in the state, eclipsed only by the National Rifle Association. Having aided the election of Gov. Mark Dayton and a DFL-controlled Legislature, Education Minnesota is vigorously calling in its chips. With Dayton and Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius as its agents, Education Minnesota has been hugely successful in disassembling the previous system of school accountability. Cassellius sought waivers from requirements that were effectively identifying...

Leaving aside the NSA snooping, which is apparently legal (if worrisome), it is easy to view the three scandals rocking the Obama administration -- Benghazi, IRS, and Department of Justice -- as disconnected instances of the abuse of power. But this is not necessarily so. Although apparently unrelated to each other in their planning and execution, the three controversies exhibit a shared sensibility -- and possess a common root. Each reflects a cardinal tenet of the powerfully reinforced brand of left-liberalism inculcated on university campuses in this country. {SNIP} The administration’s misleading of the public reflects a teaching that is...

The state's regional Education Service Centers no will longer issue lesson plans - and will forbid their use after Aug. 31 - for a popular online curriculum system that became a lightning rod for conservatives who criticized it as anti-American, legislators announced Monday. The move is expected to leave school districts across the state, including some in the greater Houston area, scrambling to replace CSCOPE, as the program is called, before the start of next school year.

When I mention online learning to my colleagues at Wesleyan University, most respond initially with skepticism. But based on my experience, I know that real learning can take place on the Web. I am currently teaching a massive online open course, or MOOC, on Coursera. Most MOOCs have great attrition, and mine is no exception: There were almost 30,000 students registered at the start, yet 4,000 remain active as we near the end of the semester. Unlike most MOOCs, which focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, mine is a classic humanities course. "The Modern and the Postmodern" starts off...

A Philadelphia mother wants her son’s high school teacher fired after he bought the teen the novel Fifty Shades of Grey for in-class reading. Maya Ladson says she was shocked to find a copy of the racy read in her 14-year-old’s book bag back on March 9. That shock turned to outrage when she found out how he got the book. “The minute I found out about it, it raised concern,” the mother told NBC10.com Thursday. “This is not OK to me. This is major.” Ladson's son, who is a 9th grade student at Eastern University Academy Charter School in...

More than 200 Wisconsin teachers and school administrators traveled to Green Bay last week to attend CREATE Wisconsin’s 2013 state conference. EAGnews decided to join them, to get a first-hand look at what the program, sponsored by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, is all about. State officials contend the CREATE program is nothing more than an effort to help teachers better understand and serve minority students. But as EAGnews previously reported, CREATE appears to have a much more broad and progressive agenda than simply working to close the achievement gap between students of color and their white counterparts. Many...

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...