Free Republic

In practice, media literacy is actually critical media literacy, indoctrinating students to adopt only leftist principles offered by leftist media outlets.K-12 instruction warped by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and related social-justice radicalism has become such a flashpoint that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland threatens federal retaliation against parent dissidents. Educrats are trying to quell the rebellion by changing definitions, such as the claim, “We’re not teaching CRT, we’re using culturally responsive teaching,” which is the same thing under a different label. Another tactic is to install anodyne-sounding curricular programs that accomplish subversive social-justice goals without alerting parents to the scam.One...

SAN FRANCISCO — Schools have welcomed students back to classrooms but face a new challenge: A shortage of teachers and staff the likes of which some district officials say they’ve never seen. Public schools have struggled for years with teacher shortages, but the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the problem. One school official in California calls it “the most acute shortage of labor” he’s ever seen. Similar scenarios are playing out across the country as schools cope with a spike in retirements and a need to hire more teachers, counselors, tutors and aides to help children make up for learning losses....

Dumbing down is something our public schools are good at. Cluttering up everyone's mind is a vital part of the process. Traditionally, education was focused on facts, information, details, content, learning, and knowledge, all of these hopefully leading to wisdom. Now we've gone to the other extreme. The students learn little, and they cannot connect one fragment of information to another. Classrooms are filled with chatter. The brains of students are overflowing with nothing much. This shift is bizarre. Wasn't it always assumed we were searching for the truth, for higher understanding, for the inner workings of reality, for the...

The inability of U.S. students to perform on par with the majority of other developed nations should cause alarm, given its implications for America’s global leadership. Instead, while other countries take their K-12 education seriously, American leaders are satisfied with pumping more money into an outdated system that continues to fail students and produced mediocre results. Here’s the sad truth. Twenty-five countries outperform U.S. K-12 students. Those leading the way are China, Hong Kong, Finland, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Canada. China’s students not only place first overall, but they dominate each individual subject as well. U.S. students straggle in...

Mr. Gatto (along with Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt), blew the whistle on deliberate dumbing down (on the Prussian model, crushing the imagination of children because it caused them to lose to Napoleon). Mr. Gatto said that the children of the elites have no advantage over ghetto kids "who have never eaten off a tablecloth". The opposite: elite prep schools, the Groton, Brook, St. Albans, Episcopal High & Andover, produce the idiots who presume to rule us. (Thomas Sowell waxed eloquent about how stupid top experts are.) Point in fact (from Samuel Blumenfeld, "Crimes of the Educators"): John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded...

Perhaps worse than trite politicization of classic tunes is failing to pass on the wealth of a child's musical heritage. Here are some ways to start offering that audible feast to your child.Just as what you feed your baby (and eat while pregnant) trains her palate toward good food or junk food for life, what your baby sees and hears does the same for her artistic tastes. Kids raised on mental junk food have a harder time developing an understanding of and affinity for more complex, subtle, and nourishing brain foods later in life.Many parents nowadays pay immense attention to...

K-12 Redesign: Achievement Instead of Time [Editor’s Note: Other articles in the K-12 Redesign series: Perfect Time for a K-12 Redesign, A Financial Overhaul, School Calendar]The U.S. K-12 education system is based on time, not student achievement. Too many students exit the system logging the required time but not meeting learning proficiencies. A redesign that promotes students based on their competency, not the school calendar, is urgently needed.The flawed system utilizes time as the constant and achievement as the variable — students progress from one unit to the next based on teacher lesson plans and due dates instead of...

The path to progress is definitely not paved by destroying the epistemological framework bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment. Yet it is important to understand why many young people are more attracted to social justice-based decolonization demands than to Enlightenment era intellectual advancements. Social justice ideology appeals to young adults’ desire to establish their identity, independent from their parents, and an ideology that represents itself as subversive is compelling. Also, as young people become aware of injustices, they are understandably captivated by a movement that represents itself as the most righteous way to advocate for justice. For these reasons, it...

The loss of public trust in universities that has risen to front page news did not suddenly emerge in 2020. In 2018 the non-partisan Gallup organization found that, for the first time, less than half of Americans have “a lot of confidence” in higher education. Even more pointedly, Gallup reported that “No other institution has shown a larger drop in confidence over the past three years than higher education.” The loss of civic faith in higher education has been building for a while. American liberal arts education has lost its moorings. A 2012 article in Inside Higher Ed crystallizes the...

The subtitle of this article might be The Strange Semantics of Subversion. Oh, the irony of it all. I remember reading, years ago, that Liberals and Communists were on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Communists oppose individual freedom. On the other hand, liberal used to means someone who celebrates individual freedom, as in liberty, liberation, liberating, and libertarian. A Jeffersonian Liberal was anyone who honored all the ideas contained in our Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. That's simple enough. A big problem for the far-left, however, was that they hated all those ideas. They would kill millions...

Diversity, Inclusion and Equity policies have shown that they have failed the test dramatically. Rather than provide a better environment for students. This initiative is undermining other areas of education that could greatly benefit students from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Evidence from a 2018 study shows that in the North American case, the percentage of enrolled students per ethnic groups have been fairly consistent from 1990 to 2015. The researchers, suggest more diversity instead of changing the approach. Is that really a wise choice considering the record that shows such diversity efforts are mostly ineffective? The question to ask then are...

California has struggled for five years to create a politically palatable “ethnic studies” curriculum that would teach high schoolers how systemic racism, predatory capitalism, heteropatriarchy and other “structures of oppression” are foundational to American society. Now, after more than 82,000 public comments, and four major rewrites, the state Board of Education is expected to approve the latest version next week, clearing the way for lawmakers to make a semester-long course in the material a graduation requirement for all of California’s 1.7 million high school students.

*snip* As a former teacher of history, I have taught many students about the worst totalitarian movements around the world. As I ponder what is happening to our society and public education, I see many similarities to Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In America’s Cultural Revolution, the radical racialists of BLM and Antifa are leading the charge. These two avowed Marxist organizations are full of indoctrinated and disgruntled youth, like the Red Guards of Mao’s China. The campaign of destruction in many American cities and harassment of people minding their own business led by BLM and Antifa, is comparable to the terror...

I am conservative. I am also an educator. For a while now, I have felt an increasing need to report the sort of things that go on at Public School (and probably at private school although you don't hear about it). I share many concerns with other Freepers about our educational system, and it is these concerns that have made me decide to start publishing the garbage I receive from the left. My goal with this blog is to create a record of the comings and goings of public education for you all. This includes: -emails we receive -educational opportunities...

Boston Public Schools officials said that a program with advanced learning classes would be cancelled over concerns that the classes served disproportionate racial groups. The program known as Advanced Work Classes was intended to serve high-performing students in the fourth, fifth and sixth grade. Students are encouraged to study their subjects in a deeper and non-traditional manner. School officials became concerned when a report showed that the program was disproportionately serving white students, and underserving black and Hispanic students. The district analysis found that more than 70% of the students in the program were white or Asian, while nearly 80%...

We have never had a better opportunity to create an alternative to the crumbling, corrupt public school system. Conservatives must decide how to act and then act quickly. Throughout parts of the United States, children have not been in school for a year. Instead, they are expected to daily attend zoom classes. What that means in practical terms is that many kids sit somewhere at home, log in to class, turn off the camera, and go back to bed or play games on their phone throughout the “school” day. One young man I know is one of only two students...

There are currently two dominant narratives about K-12 education in America: The first is the fact that many teachers in huge urban school districts are refusing to return to their classrooms. The second is the fact that the schools that are back in business are using their power over people’s children to indoctrinate both the children and their families in hard-left ideologies, especially about race and sexuality.In many Republican-run regions across America, schools are back in session and nothing bad has happened. There hasn’t been a mass teacher or student die-off. Instead, the kids are once again learning and socializing...

Recent studies have shown that I.Q. scores have been declining in Western nations for decades. Evan Horowitz, director of research and communication at FCLT Global, wrote a post for nbcnews.com in which he stated: “A range of studies using a variety of well-established IQ tests and metrics have found declining scores across Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, France and Australia.” Horowitz added that this plunge in cognitive ability could well lead to “fewer scientific breakthroughs, stagnant economies and a general dimming of our collective future.” Duh.And there are others.These findings have led some to issue dire predictions of a general dumbing down...

The pandemic has highlighted a serious problem with K-12 education that we ignore at our own peril. Public K-12 education in this country suffers from a lack of effective competition that prevents market forces from working the way they should. What would happen if there was school choice in America today? Parents who are dissatisfied with the educational product their public schools provide could vote with their feet and take their tax dollars and their children to schools that offer better value. Opposition to school choice is highly regressive because the wealthiest families have the ability to pay twice for...

A learning focus popular in public schools has been converted into a vehicle for teaching critical race theory to elevate favored students based primarily on race.Parents normally send their children to school (or park them at the computer for pretend school) to learn academic disciplines, including English, math, science, and history. But in most public and some private schools, more and more time is being redirected from academic instruction to “social-emotional learning” (SEL)—the cultivation not of knowledge but of the “correct” attitudes, beliefs, opinions, and behaviors. If this weren’t worrisome enough to parents who thought that is their job, SEL...