Free Republic

Dr. Sandra L. Stotsky, professor emerita at the University of Arkansas, recently said that Renaissance Learning’s latest report revealed that a large number of college freshman are reading at a seventh-grade level. Stotsky, who received her Ed. D. from Harvard, is a well-known and respected figure in the world of education. She served on the Common Core Validation Committee in 2009-10 and, along with colleague James Milgram, professor of mathematics at Stanford University, refused to approve Common Core’s standards, which she called “inferior.” In a recent interview with Breitbart Texas, Stotsky said: We are spending billions of dollars trying to...

It so happened that an 11-year-old boy came home from school one day and told his parents that the first European white people who came to America were so mean that they tried to kill the Indians by giving them blankets with smallpox germs. The boy’s father tried to use this as a teachable moment. He asked his son to think if that made sense, even if the first white settlers were that evil. How would they avoid getting smallpox themselves? The boy then let it be known that the American Constitution was written by the Iroquois Indians. The father...

Every year it gets worse. It seems that the community college that both my daughters have attended is steadily becoming a hotbed of liberal teachers. This time it's an America hating, military hating, obama loving history professor. Im sick of this crap and I'm making a stand. I wanted to get with the freeper brain trust to plan the best course of action. I havent done anything. I suspect if I complain to the dean nothing will happen, because I think the nut doesn't fall far from the tree. I'm sure someone out there has experience dealing with this sort...

[Summary: Decline in American public schools is best explained by the far-left politics of our Education Establishment. These people prefer mediocrity.]-- Historically, Socialism and Communism were sometimes synonyms. But generally there was a sense that Socialism was softer. If you had enough power, you moved on to Communism, which was more coercive. One intellectual summed up the matter this way. Socialists persuade you with speeches. Communists persuade you with guns. In the days after the Russian Revolution, American leftists expended billions of hours trying to describe the perfect society. Fundamentally, all the debates turned on how much power the central...

Many view America's education as a failure, but in at least one important way, it's been a success -- a success in dumbing down the nation so that we fall easy prey to charlatans, hustlers and quacks. You say, "Williams, that's insulting! Explain yourself." OK, let's start with a question or two. Are you for or against global warming, later renamed climate change and more recently renamed climate disruption? Environmentalists have renamed it because they don't want to look silly in the face of cooling temperatures. About 650 million years ago, the Earth was frozen from pole to pole,...

Oklahoma recently took action to protect the state's children from the federal education bureaucracy by withdrawing from Common Core. Common Core is the latest attempt to bribe states, with money taken from the American people, into adopting a curriculum developed by federal bureaucrats and education "experts." In exchange for federal funds, states must change their curriculum by, for example, replacing traditional mathematics with "reform math." Reform math turns real mathematics on its head by focusing on "abstract thinking" instead of traditional concepts like addition and subtraction. Schools must also replace classic works of literature with "informational" texts, such as...

Sixty years ago, Benjamin Bloom came up with what he said was a superior way to categorize educational goals and activities. The Taxonomy was famous for reducing everything to six steps: remembering; understanding; applying; analyzing; evaluating; creating. Note that "remembering" (or "knowing") is the first and LOWEST step. Bloom concocted this taxonomy to describe education at the college level. College professors, however, ignored the Taxonomy. Meanwhile, the people in charge of our public schools put this thing on a pedestal. Why? Because the Taxonomy scorned what had always been considered the most important step: knowing information. Bloom and his Taxonomy...

According to the latest international rating of education in 65 countries, American public schools are in a free fall. The overall rank of the U.S. is 29th in the world — behind the Slovak Republic, Russia, and Vietnam. Asia dominates the top 10. Shanghai, China, is the international leader, followed by Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, South Korea and Macao. Including Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, four of the top six are Chinese. These are some of the results of the educational research division of the Organization of European Cooperation and Development (OECD) called the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA),...

I've brought up education issues before. I've tried to help other people's children with school difficulties and dealing with school administration. I have an Education background. My first child is a HS student and even with all of the public school problems we encounter, she enjoys her school (for the most part) and it is a small enough place where everybody pretty much knows everyone else. My daughter has nearly a 4.0 average. I went to the same school and was happy and grade obsessed. I never could understand how people thought HS was "hard". I must have been obnoxious....

[For all teachers and parents]-- Malkin Dare, a lifelong teacher and education reformer, is the founder of the Society for Quality Education in Ontario. She is a big voice for sane education in Canada and throughout the world. Dare summarized her educational philosophy in an article titled “Ten Keys to Success: Fundamental Principles of Teaching.” That article is condensed here to the main points. Please, parents and teachers, read this material and discuss it. ---------------------- 1. Almost all students can learn: Obviously, there are a few students who, because of a severe disability, are prevented from learning certain things. For...

A college education historically has been the route to a better-paying job and a satisfying career. But currently, more than half of college graduates are “underemployed” in jobs that don’t require a college degree. Why the growing disconnect? Certainly, the main reason is our economy’s slow recovery. But I believe another reason is the lack of substantive learning in many students’ college studies. And while not unique in this regard, the failure to prepare students to adequately perform in degree-required jobs is evident in the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Minnesota. Every year Vascular Solutions hires recent college graduates...

One of the weaknesses of the school model of education is that it squeezes out great books that don’t fit neatly into one or another of those artificial divisions of learning we call “subjects.” We don’t start with, “What books have had a deep impact in shaping what I am?” But with “What subjects am I supposed to be teaching, and which books will help me teach them?” I don’t teach my children subjects—I seek to instill in them wisdom. Which means I have them read the books that gave me wisdom.

I can't send my kids to public school.  This is a national shame. Both I and my wife are the products of public school.  I still remember a few of my high school teachers who encouraged me, and taught me more about life than just the curriculum in the classroom.  My kids won't be going to public school though. It's not about the teachers.  Most teachers work hard, care deeply about their students, and do their best to educate our kids.  By educate, I mean not just teach the material, but help our kids understand what learning is, and help...

Video is only 3:15 minutes long. A short graphic presentation of the nine big flaws in public schools. Suppose someone is asking the question, well, what can we do, where do we start? Here's a list of nine places to start. ---------------------------------------------- Personally I like trying to radically simplify things. That is especially appropriate in education. What these professors spend their time doing is creating so much confusion, disinformation, propaganda, alibis, excuses, lies, etc., etc., etc., finally no ordinary citizen knows what to think about the subject anymore. And that's how the Education Establishment wins. At some point you have...

Google and other search engines have changed the way we use the Internet, putting vast sources of information just a few clicks away. But Lindsley professor of psychology Daniel Wegner’s recent research proves that websites—and the Internet—are changing much more than technology itself. They are changing the way our memories function. Wegner’s latest study, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips,” shows that when people have access to search engines, they remember fewer facts and less information because they know they can rely on “search” as a readily available shortcut.

In the last year there have been a lot of conservative rumblings against the new progressive education agenda called Common Core. This is yet another in a long line of new progressive initiatives since they created modern government education a century ago. The last was Outcome Based Education, which as usual failed to produce increased learning or test scores unless the tests were dumbed down. You say that it was a failure, the progressive left views this a success. The goal of American government education has never been about learning, it’s been about indoctrination. It’s about separating the next generation...

Have you had enough of the testing tyranny? Join the club. To be clear: I'm not against all standardized academic tests. My kids excel on tests. The problem is that there are too damned many of these top-down assessments, measuring who knows what, using our children as guinea pigs and cash cows. College-bound students in Orange County, Fla., for example, now take a total of 234 standardized diagnostic, benchmark and achievement tests from kindergarten through 12th grade. Reading instructor Brian Trutschel calculated that a typical 10th-grade English class will be disrupted 65 out of 180 school days this year...

In a Breitbart column insisting that Ronald Reagan was not as assertive as commonly believed on military and foreign policy issues, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) mentions, in passing, “I met Ronald Reagan as a teenager when my father was a Reagan delegate in 1976.” . But his father, Ron Paul, is hardly a Reaganite today. Indeed, he is now claiming that Crimea has a right to leave Ukraine and join Russia, and that U.S. sanctions against the Russian regime are “criminal.” “That’s just people looking to start a war,” Paul said. “This is criminal, it’s stealing and will just aggravate...

One of the fascinating things about journalism is looking at the factual data that both sides of a controversy agree on and finding that the facts support the critics’ viewpoints. For example, the Thomas Fordham Institute has been, more or less, supportive of the Obama Administration’s Common Core education reforms. Nevertheless, in their progress report on it, the relatively right-of-center think tank paints a rather dismal picture of CC2014: “Teachers and principals are the primary faces and voices of the Common Core standards in their communities; “Implementation works best when district and school leaders lock onto the Common Core standards...

These kids should learn write from wrong. Earlier this month, The Post exposed a scheme at Manhattan’s Murry Bergtraum HS for Business Careers in which failing students could get full credit without attending class, but instead watch video lessons and take tests online. One social-studies teacher had a roster of 475 students in all grades and subjects. Red-faced administrators encouraged a student letter-writing campaign to attack The Post and defend its “blended learning” program. Eighteen kids e-mailed to argue that their alma mater got a bad rap. Almost every letter was filled with spelling, grammar and punctuation errors.