Free Republic

WASHINGTON — For all the differences between the sexes, here's one that might stir up debate in the teacher's lounge: Boys learn more from men and girls learn more from women. That's the upshot of a provocative study by Thomas Dee, an associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College and visiting scholar at Stanford University. His study was to appear Monday in Education Next, a quarterly journal published by the Hoover Institution. Vetted and approved by peer reviewers, Dee's research faces a fight for acceptance. Some leading education advocates dispute his conclusions and the way in which he reached them....

A national group is asking Arizona's public universities to require at least one United States history course of every student before graduation. American History currently isn't a required course at any of the state's major public universities. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has written letters to Gov. Janet Napolitano and 20 state lawmakers, asking them to pressure college regents and administrators to make the change. "The flag doesn't mean all that much if you don't know how it got there," trustees member Charles Mitchell said. "What use is the Constitution if you don't know how it was written?"...

Experts have consistently misdiagnosed and misdefined the problem of schooling to serve their own pocketbooks. The difficulty is not that children don't learn to read, write and do arithmetic very well - it is that kids don't learn at all the way schools insist on teaching. When we strip children of a primary experience base - as confinement schooling must do to justify its very existence -we destroy the natural sequences of learning which always put experience first. Only much later, after a bath of experience, can the thin gruel of abstraction mean anything. We haven't forgotten this, but there...

China, number one again; it has turned out more Ph.Ds last year than any other country in the world. But a Ph. D. does not a good teacher make. Quality of teaching is being seriously questioned in China. Professors are caught up in 1. The publish or perish mentality 2. Raising funds and 3. Attending conferences, making them absent from class. Gee, it sounds like the same problem there is with traditional colleges in America, no? As a result, China has had some problems with plagiarism in the recent past. In the near future, the Chinese universities are likely to...

Arizona Charter Makes Top 100 List Written By: Vicki Murray Published In: School Reform News Publication Date: July 1, 2006 Publisher: The Heartland Institute When Newsweek released its list of the top 100 high schools in the nation May 1, a charter school in Tucson made history. BASIS Tucson--which started out as "Beginning Academic Success in School" eight years ago but is now called by its acronym--ranked third in the nation, the highest place achieved by any charter school since the list's inception in 1998. BASIS Tucson is the first Arizona high school ever to make Newsweek's top 100....

Apollo Group is the biggest of the ForPro education groups. It owns the University of Phoenix. Yesterday its stock fell 2 percent after reporting lower third-quarter profits because of higher costs. Corinthian Colleges is another of the big players. It, too, reported a loss of 3 cents/share. DeVry lost 15 cents, and Educational Services lost 3 cents/share as well. Everybody's trading down, albeit down very little. Does this mean that the quality of education provided by these groups has also dipped? Are students losing out 2% on their classes? or 3 cents/dollar they spend on their tuition? Hardly. One of...

It used to be, well, perhaps it still is, that Indian students did their darndest to come to the US to go to grad school, learn business, or master the technology of the computer. Now, there has been a turn. American college grads are opting to go to India. A stint working in India can be quite an addition to a young worker's resume. India's high-tech and banking companies need skilled workers. A company like Infosys, which has grown from 500 workers to 50,000 workers in the past dozen years, has hired many young Americans. Of course, the biggest obstacle...

Online learning will continue to grow for several reasons. The first reason is because of the advent of high-speed Internet. Anybody with a home PC can now take a course online. If you have a laptop, you can take your course online and take it with you to the coffice (coffee house/office). That is where I am writing this. PCs and Macs are also becoming more affordable. For the price of one credit hour at some schools, a student can now buy a good desktop Dell or Gateway PC. There is no more driving to school, finding a parking place,...

Enrollments in online courses are increasing 10 times faster than traditional enrollments. Let's see, every time someone visits a campus, takes a tour, visits a book store, eats in a cafeteria, looks at an empty gym or stadium, and then sits with a counselor for an hour or so, and then finally signs the enrollment form...10 people sign up online! Uh...gee...I wonder ...If I were a school, where should I apply my time and effort? Hard question. Schools like Arizona State University expect enrollment in at least one online course to soar from 15,000 to 100,000 within the next five...

Former Toyota President Shoichiro Toyoda has founded Kaiyo Academy, a $175-million school that he modeled after Britain's Eton Academy -- a school that boasts 19 British Prime Ministers among her alumni and the second-in-line to the throne, Prince William. In Japan there is dissatisfaction with the 'dumbing-down' of its curriculum. Four years ago, the government cut 30% of the workload off the elementary and junior high school curriculum. Toyota's Kaiyo academy is attractive for many reasons. 1. It is backed by Toyota. 2. It is focusing on developing kids who can do more than just pass exams. 3. It is...

Myths aren't lies. They are beliefs that people adopt because they have an air of plausibility. But myths aren't true, and they often get in the way during serious problem-solving. This essay identifies seven common myths that dominate established views of education these days. Dispelling these misconceptions could open the door to long-awaited improvement in our nationÍs schools. The money myth If people know anything about public schools today, it's that they are strapped for cash. Bestselling books, popular movies, and countless lobbying groups portray urban schools as desperately underfunded, and editors of the New York Times write without fear...

The box contained magic. Oh, it didn't say that; rather, it said things like,"1/32nd Scale", "A Revell Kit", and had words like "Flying Fortress" emblazoned fearlessly across the top. Pictures of dreadful and desparate combat over Berlin warned the faint of heart that they were passing through friendly lines, across the no-man's land of imagination, and entering into ... the Free-flight Zone. Believe me- the box contained magic. Lovingly peeling off the cellophane, my friends and I paused to savor the treasures within. We were seldom disappointed. Inside were hundreds of pre-formed plastic parts, which, under the tender ministrations of...

VIRGINIA BEACH-Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson is warning that, according to God, storms and possibly a tidal wave will pound America's coastline this year.

by Stephen Pohl Other Articles by Stephen PohlContact this Author Liturgy, Learning and the Language of the Catholic Faith 05/18/06 In the past decade there has been much written in the field of education about learning styles. Some of us are primarily auditory learners, others visual, tactile or kinetic learners. Great teachers recognize different learning styles and deliver the message in more than one manner. In This Article...Ahead of Its TimeLearning the Catholic LanguageGetting the Message Across Ahead of Its Time This has led to an explosion of “multimedia presentations” in many learning environments, whether it is the traditional school context,...

Dana Jean Maginn acts as a "coach" for remedial education students in Portland, Ore. (Photo by Motoya Nakamura) Colleges Rethink Remedial Education BY DELIA M. RIOS   To understand why a high school diploma is no guarantee that a graduate has what it takes to thrive in college, a short history lesson is in order: High schools were never designed to funnel mass numbers of young Americans into colleges and universities. Only a select number of students are on a rigorous track that prepares them to succeed in college. "We have a system that was really established in 1906...

In their fight against school reform, organized teachers in the Aloha state are running into adversaries they probably did not anticipate—car salesmen. “The push for a rigorous, common-core curriculum did not come from the teachers’ union—who testified against the bill, nor the Board of Education, but rather from the Hawaii Automobile Dealers Association (HADA),” according to Laura Brown of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. “HADA President David Rolf testified that the reason for his organization’s push was initially the rejection of reimbursement claims for warranty work done on cars by the Detroit manufacturer, because the written claims submitted by the...

Trendy "isms" are incompatible with lasting knowledge WHAT is the best way to introduce young people to literature? Is it to reveal to them the joy of reading great writing, and how themes and plots developed even centuries ago can be an anchor for their lives in the modern world? Or is it to treat every work as a "text" no better than any other, dissect them all ruthlessly and examine the entrails for political, sexual and racial bias? This debate has flared up again this week, sparked both by John Howard's comments on the "gobbledegook" taught in Australian English...

The big difference in the latest spate of horror stories about academic abuse is that they are taking place in lower grades. Sean Allen, a 10th-grader from Colorado who made national news when he taped his World Geography teacher’s political rant, spoke from experience, “I was flooded with similar stories from students across the nation,” he said at a conference on academic freedom. “We can’t simply deal with this on a case-to-case basis, we have to get to the root of it.” Sean firmly believes that the Academic Bill of Rights crafted by conservative author and activist David Horowitz gives...

Scott Savage, reference librarian for Ohio State University --- suggested four best-selling conservative books for freshman reading......and is being investigated by the university - for sexual harassment. Three professors filed the discrimination and sexual harassment charges, saying the books Savage suggested -"The Marketing of Evil" by David Kupelian, "The Professors" by David Horowitz, "Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis" by Bat Ye'or and "It Takes a Family" by Senator Rick Santorum - made them feel "unsafe." Savage contends he made the suggestions after other committee members recommended books with a left-wing slant. The school's faculty voted - without dissent - to allow...

ONE of the world's leading authorities on Shakespeare's work, Harold Bloom, and the nation's pre-eminent poet, Les Murray, have declared literary study in Australia dead after learning that a prestigious Sydney school asked students to interpret Othello from Marxist, feminist and racial perspectives. "I find the question sublimely stupid," Professor Bloom, an internationally renowned literary critic, the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale and Berg Professor of English at New York University, said yesterday. "It is another indication that literary study has died in Australia." The question was an assessment task in March set for advanced English students in Year...