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The U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing on the Student Success Act and the Encouraging Innovation and Effective Teachers Act on February 16, 2012.

WAKE UP AMERICA AT LOOK AT OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM!     Where do our "home grown: terrorists come from?  Just take a look at this video and you will have the answer.         This woman is a former Muslim convert to Christianity. Her life has been threatened as she speaks out.         Everyone needs to see this!!!     Who said this: "Give me the children and I will change society in 10 years?"  Adolph Hitler, and now, the Muslims!         PLEASE WATCH AND FORWARD:     http://bcove.me/07uefz8c ACT for America Foundation...

John C. Dvorak has been using, living, and writing about tech for decades. He’s seen many educational tech innovations come and go, and he doesn’t believe there’s anything that can resurrect the American Public Educational System. Dvorak believes technology can’t replace a good teacher. He also belives the teachers’ unions are too powerful and stand in the way of needed reforms. John was fortunate to home school two of his children, and while doing this involved a number of challenges, the results were as he expected, outstanding. However, homeschooling is not for everyone. There’s a large infrastructure in place to...

There is the subtle, but ever-present socialist indoctrination that is gradually turning our kids into passive, submissive, obedient government serfs. From the time a child enters primary school they are programmed to group-think. Individualism is discouraged, along with awarding grades based on individual achievement.

They raise chickens. They grow vegetables. They knit. Now a new generation of urban parents is even teaching their own kids. In the beginning, your kids need you—a lot. They’re attached to your hip, all the time. It might be a month. It might be five years. Then suddenly you are expected to send them off to school for seven hours a day, where they’ll have to cope with life in ways they never had to before. You no longer control what they learn, or how, or with whom. Unless you decide, like an emerging population of parents in cities...

In his State of the Union, President Obama stressed the importance of keeping manufacturing in America. The reasoning is that in order to continue to innovate and develop the next generation must-have products, the US needs manufacturing that uses leading edge technology. Nothing wrong with the reasoning, but it may be too late.

Excellent article adapted from a speech given by Charles Murray regarding the need for the Department of Education: THE CASE FOR the Department of Education could rest on one or more of three legs: its constitutional appropriateness, the existence of serious problems in education that could be solved only at the federal level, and/or its track record since it came into being. Let us consider these in order. (1) Is the Department of Education constitutional? At the time the Constitution was written, education was not even considered a function of local government, let alone the federal government. But the shakiness...

Hat Tip to Michigan Capitol Confidential: Teachers' Union Manual Shows How to Organize Illegal Strikes, Use Children During Bargaining This is evil, evil stuff. You want to know just how deep down the rathole that the school systems have gone? Take a look inside this crisis manual. On page 17 of the manual(searchable alternative link here) it says "Pick a target - personalize - and polarize the opposition" which is right out of Saul Alinsky. It was Horace Mann who said it best: We, then, who are engaged in the sacred cause of education, are entitled to look upon all...

Cleaning out years of projects and student art from her classroom was an emotional process for Teri Cowan, but she felt it was her only choice. Cowan worked for the Ector County Independent School District for 23 years, 13 of those years teaching Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate sophomore English at Odessa High School. She was teacher of the year for the 2010-11 school year at the high school and secondary teacher of the year for ECISD for the 1995-96 school year. As well as volunteering as the National Honor Society, prom and class council sponsors. Tuesday, Jan. 17, was

Third graders in in Gwinnett County, Ga., were given math homework Wednesday that asked questions about slavery and beatings. Christopher Braxton told ABC News affiliate WSB-TV in Atlanta that he couldn't believe the assignment his 8-year-old son brought home from of Beaver Ridge Elementary school in Norcross. "It kind of blew me away," Braxton said. "Do you see what I see? Do you really see what I see? He's not answering this question." The question read, "Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?" Another math problem read, "If Frederick...

GOOD INSIGHTS ON WHY MILLIONS OF KIDS CAN'T READ. (A FOLLOW-UP FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN EARLIER POST TITLED "FAKE READING THEORY IS THE SLAVE TRADE OF OUR ERA.") The country continues to be plagued by illiteracy. The reason is simple. The country continues to be under the heel of some of the most reckless and reprehensible “experts” imaginable. They make little children memorize the SHAPES of words, which most little children simply can’t do. Ergo, these children experience major reading and cognitive problems.  Don Potter, the phonics guru and as well a teacher in Texas, recently sent me this illuminating...

The Kindle and Nook may make for not only the most important advance in reading since Gutenberg, but also, quite likely, a major lesson in unintended consequences. Especially for the educational establishment, because for the first time in history, Americans should be able to envision a future without public-school teachers -- indeed, a future without public-school administrators or state departments of education with their rigidly enforced, politically correct social-transformation curriculum. A future without onerous school taxes, "education president(s)," self-preening school boards, or million-dollar classrooms. But most happily, a future without a single supercilious finger wagging in our face as we're...

Fake reading theory is the slave trade of our era. Conscience demands that it be opposed. A hundred books, perhaps two hundred, have been written on the reading wars. Finally those millions of words come down to a few dozen. English is a phonetic language and must be learned phonetically. Whole Word, the opposing theory, is a mirage, without merit. The great sophistry of the 20th century was to create the illusion that Whole Word could actually work or, one step lower, that there was a legitimate choice between the two approaches to reading, as there is between fahrenheit and...

American conservatives should think long and hard about where they send their kids to college. It’s a serious matter. After all, what can you become these days without a degree? If the Left has their way—if you obtain a college degree in due time—you WILL become a liberal. I fully realize that this has the potential to sound incredibly hypocritical coming from someone who is currently attending college – specifically someone who edits a publication comprised entirely of collegiate writers. But you’ll soon see why the awkward position I am in is entirely necessary.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 12, 2011) — New research published December 8 in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It's the kind of thing seen in Hollywood's "Matrix" franchise. Experiments conducted at Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, recently demonstrated that through a person's visual cortex, researchers could use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce brain activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve performance...

The Rev. John Becker, S.J., sat at the front of the classroom, paperback in hand, glasses pushed to the end of his nose. As he spoke, he looked intently from one student to another. “This semester, I am going to teach you how to read 'King Lear,'” he said. “It may be Shakespeare’s most difficult play. But it has a powerful message to tell.” When we were done reading “Lear,” the priest promised, we would not only understand it, but we would have learned the secret of understanding any thing written in English -- anything, that is, with a meaning...

The Education Question 1092. Speaking of education, what is the real reason for Catholic antipathy to our state schools? Whatever others may think of our public policy of free, compulsory, and secular education, Catholics cannot in conscience accept that system as being suitable for the education of Catholic children. The real reason is that the religious training of the children is not sufficiently provided for, the time allotted for religion being quite inadequate, even were it utilized. The State system demands the "3 R's," reading, writing and arithmetic. Catholic principles demand the "4 R's," religion, reading, writing and arithmetic; and...

The American tradition of public education began in one-room school houses when frontier farm families hired dedicated teachers to teach their children. When I attended public schools in the 1950s, I received an excellent education. American schools were rated the best in the world. Those schools prepared me for Caltech, and Caltech prepared me for a wonderful life in science. I owe my career and accomplishments to the great start I received in the public schools. Those public schools were locally controlled and locally funded. Teachers and parents worked together on the content of curriculum, student discipline, and all aspects...

A Virginia company leading a national movement to replace classrooms with computers — in which children as young as 5 can learn at home at taxpayer expense — is facing a backlash from critics who are questioning its funding, quality and oversight. K12 Inc. of Herndon has become the country’s largest provider of full-time public virtual schools, upending the traditional American notion that learning occurs in a schoolhouse where students share the experience. In K12’s virtual schools, learning is largely solitary, with lessons delivered online to a child who progresses at her own pace. Conceived as a way to teach...

... In a radical rethinking of what it means to go to school, states and districts nationwide are launching online public schools that let students from kindergarten to 12th grade take some—or all—of their classes from their bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens. Other states and districts are bringing students into brick-and-mortar schools for instruction that is largely computer-based and self-directed. In just the past few months, Virginia has authorized 13 new online schools. Florida began requiring all public-high-school students to take at least one class online, partly to prepare them for college cybercourses. Idaho soon will require two. In Georgia,...