Free Republic

America's downfall doesn't begin with the "low-information voter." It starts with the no-knowledge student. For decades, collectivist agitators in our schools have chipped away at academic excellence in the name of fairness, diversity and social justice. "Progressive" reformers denounced Western civilization requirements, the Founding Fathers and the Great Books as racist. They attacked traditional grammar classes as irrelevant in modern life. They deemed ability grouping of students (tracking) bad for self-esteem. They replaced time-tested rote techniques and standard algorithms with fuzzy math, inventive spelling and multicultural claptrap. Under President Obama, these top-down mal-formers -- empowered by Washington education bureaucrats...

Ask any college freshman what he knows about communism and he will likely engage in a word association game. “The red scare, McCarthyism,” he will blurt out, displaying lessons well-learned from his textbooks and teachers.One way to go beyond the idea of communism as evidence of paranoia, though, is to recall George Orwell’s Animal Farm. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” will be the phrase students recall. Students seem to get that “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” never works out in reality from this fictional work.This novel...

Stuck in a standoff with teachers unions, the San Francisco and Oakland school districts have abandoned efforts to bring in up to $15 million each to develop high-quality math classes for upper-elementary and middle school students. The two districts spent months preparing a joint application for the next round of federal Race to the Top funding - which required districts to incorporate student test scores, among other criteria, in teacher evaluations. And because of that critical clause, union leaders refused to sign, as required by the federal application.

Three years after the Department of Education announced a contest called Race-to-the-Top for $4.35 billion in stimulus funds, some parents, teachers, governors, and citizen and public policy groups are coming to an awful realization about the likely outcomes: • A national curriculum called Common Core; • Regionalism, or the replacement of local governments by federally appointed bureaucrats; • A leveling of all schools to one, low national standard, and a redistribution of education funds among school districts; • An effective federal tracking of all students; • The loss of the option of avoiding the national curriculum and tests through private...

Is Bill Ayers Influencing ‘Race to the Top’? A close colleague of the former terrorist is deeply involved in designing the president's program. byMary GrabarBio September 25, 2012 - 12:00 am Tweet What happened to Bill Ayers since his time in the spotlight during the last Obama campaign? We know that Ayers, along with wife Bernardine Dohrn and Code Pink leader Jodie Evans, supported the Gaza Flotilla, incited protests in Egypt with the Free Gaza Movement in 2010, and advised Occupy Wall Street protesters on strategy. After all, he’s had a lot of experience, having spent his youth bombing...

Just when the Indiana Legislature gives Governor Mitch Daniels (R-IN) a gift allowing him to sign a bill defunding Planned Parenthood it looked like the truce was over. Well, not quite.

Poor, poor President Obama! As his tenure in the White House progresses, he seems to get less and less popular. Case in point: nobody wants to invite him to their graduation! It seems that in 2010, the President (or one of his minions) came up with a scathingly brilliant idea for a competition. They called it the “Race to the Top Commencement Challenge” and it entailed finding the high school which best prepared its students for college and a future career. The winning school would win the, er, honor of having the President speak at its commencement ceremony. In its...

Last week in the State of the Union message, the President said that the responsibility for the education of children begins “in our homes and communities.” He is right about that. It is a self-evident fact that parents are the shepherds of their children’s upbringing, and that they have the first and most influence on their children. He is also right, in a sense, that schools and teachers share in the responsibility for the education of children. They share in that responsibility in that parents choose them to teach certain things to their children. But the President seems to be...

Education in America is run by the states. However during the last couple of decades Washington DC is moving strongly in direction of federalizing this realm of the social life. New Jersey runs its own system of education funded by the local taxes. Tax-payers in NJ also give money to the federal government in Washington DC. President Obama creates $4 billion ‘Race to the Top’ education program and tells NJ to compete for the funds. In the best case scenario the people of NJ will get part of their tax-money back. The rest will go for funding the bureaucrats...

Believe it or not, the federal government is giving Race to the Top education grants to school districts more notable for the voting blocs they represent than the scores that they post. “Consider the front-runner in round one–Delaware,” Amanda Carey points out in The Daily Caller.” The Senate seat left vacant by Vice President Joe Biden is up for grabs this coming November.” “And the Democrats want nothing more than to hold onto it.” “Similar examples can be found among the round two winners as well. “In Hawaii, the race at stake is in the 1st Congressional District, where Republican...

U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer says New York will win millions of dollars in federal education funding when "Race to the Top" program grants are announced Tuesday. The competition has instigated a wave of reforms across the country, as states passed new teacher accountability policies and lifted caps on charter schools to boost their chances of winning.

From the New York Times today: Many States Adopt National Standards for Their Schools How much money will be doled out? "The quick adoption of common standards for what students should learn in English and math each year from kindergarten through high school is attributable in part to the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition. States that adopt the standards by Aug. 2 win points in the competition for a share of the $3.4 billion to be awarded in September." Who's money was involved in the "effort" to get these standards adopted, but not in the actual award? "The...

I am surprised not one blog, most of all Gotham Schools has yet to mention this. The fact that the Post did I find shocking. In fact I didn't know about this until I spoke to a colleague just a few minutes ago. But I do have a big s**t eating grin now. I wonder if RtTT poster boys Whitney (I-684 Rest Area) Tilson and Thomas W. Carroll will even bother mentioning it. But it seems that the Children First mentality is alive and well still amongst the EDiots. It seems that in their whoring, er, I meant application to...

I was born and raised a Democrat. My grandfather was a precinct captain for Tweed (the political machine, not the DOE) back in the day. He did the grunt work. Registered voters in cemeteries, voted many times in many places on election day, and left turkeys on the doorsteps of the indigent just before election day. I believe in the principles of the Democratic Party even though I have a strong libertarian bent, and actually conservative on some issues. I am not one of these Originialists when it comes to the Constitution and the role of the federal government in...

Marcus A. Winters How New York Could Lose by Winning The state doesn’t deserve a dollar in Race to the Top funds. 5 March 2010 Surprise! Education secretary Arne Duncan announced this week that New York is a finalist in the first round of the Race to the Top (RttT) grant competition, the Obama administration initiative that will reward states with federal education dollars if they adopt a range of reforms. The good news is that the state is still in the running for up to $700 million in funding, money that would help fill some immediate budget gaps. The...

From the start of a nearly three-hour debate on the state's push for including St. Tammany Parish in the new federal Race to the Top program, it was evident the overwhelming majority of School Board members were leery about getting involved.The Obama administration unveiled Race to the Top last summer as a $4.35 billion education reform program aimed at getting schools to better track students' progress. In Covington late Tuesday, the St. Tammany School Board's final tally against particpating was 9-6, but even most of those who voted for board President John Lamarque to sign the partnership agreement did so...

Government: States are scrambling to rewrite educational laws solely to qualify for federal stimulus payouts. Is this pork really about helping schools — or extending federal power?The thickest slice of Congress' $787 billion stimulus package goes to the bureaucrats of the Department of Education. Under Secretary Arne Duncan, they now have $55 billion to play with — the biggest stimulus chunk for any federal department. With cash comes power. For the latest payout, $4.3 billion for a program called "Race to the Top," states have been told that to get their share, they'll have to accept two big changes. One...