Free Republic

[Summary: Public schools are crippled by an abundance of counterproductive ideas.] -- Sugar is sweet and fun to eat. But too much of it will kill you, just as having sugar in the gas tank will damage your car. We see the same contradiction in education. All new ideas are sold to the public as tasty treats and nutritious as well. In fact, they invariably turn out to be poisonous. Our Education Establishment seems to operate “labs” every bit as destructive as meth labs. Let’s call these laboratories “sugar labs.” That’s where our top-level educators concoct the too-sweet gimmicks that...

Whereas over 80% of Americans support external, high-stakes, standardized testing as the best method for determining what students are learning; discovering their academic deficiencies, so that they may be remedied; and in deciding whether to promote students from grade to grade; you’d never know it, to listen to the socialist, establishment media or the progressives and constructivists who have taken over university departments of teacher education and the nation’s public schools. One such progressive is Kevin Kumashiro. Kumashiro, who is the “director of the Center for Anti-Oppressive Education, a resource center for educators, leaders, students and advocates base in California,”...

Article takes the controversy over the Ground Zero photograph of the three white New York firemen raising the flag, as its point of departure. The New York City Fire Department planned -- without input from the public -- a statue of the three firemen, in which the identities of two firemen was changed to a black and a Hispanic, respectively. A massive petition campaign got the FDNY to back down, but will not in any way commemorate the three white firemen. The article shows that the Ground Zero controversy was just the tip of an iceberg that had been growing...