Free Republic

Now that the 2019 Academy Award nominations have been announced, it's time to begin the handwringing over what the Oscars got wrong. Since, for the first time in decades, I haven't watched any of the movies nominated (I tried to watch Black Panther, but found it so boring I fell asleep about twenty minutes in), I am going to direct my outrage at the continued snubs of actors and actresses who are really good at their craft. Ranked below are the best living actors and actresses who have yet to win an Oscar for acting. Frankly, it's astounding that Jared...

New Yorkers like to think they are more sophisticated than us common folk. Perhaps they define sophistication as a big expensive ineffective school system. “City high-school grads pay at least $63 million a year for remedial classes, thanks to a school system that hands them worthless diplomas,” The New York Post claims.

At the Modern Language Association’s 2015 convention in Vancouver, Canada, Susan O’Malley, currently an English professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), lamented that remedial education could not be stopped in New York. She blamed remedial education for the drop in black student enrollment in Harlem and Queens. It’s not only students in those two boroughs that are in need of remedial education. “We are spending billions of dollars trying to send students to college and maintain them there when, on average, they read at about the grade 6 or 7 level, according to Renaissance Learning’s latest report...

Researchers are scratching their heads over the massive number of college dropouts. “During a five-year period, more than $9 billion was spent by state and federal governments to support students at four-year colleges and universities who left school before their sophomore year,” according to the American Institutes for Research (AIR). “California, Texas and New York led the nation in government spending on students who dropped out before their second year.” “Every fall, first-year college students receive significant funding from colleges, states and the federal government,” said Dr. Mark Schneider, an AIR vice president. “And every spring, hundreds of thousands of...

Attempts to reform higher education usually result in the object of those efforts digging in its heels. “The aversion to applied learning has grown stronger since A Nation at Risk came out [in 1983],” Georgetown’s Anthony Carnevale said at the National Press Club on September 29, 2010. “A good 40 percent of Americans don’t do well in traditional pedagogy,” he avers and “four to five percent of BAs are in the liberal arts.” Carnevale heads the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown. Nevertheless, according to Carnevale, the professoriate argues that “American education exists for some other purpose than...

CAPping Off Failure by: Daniel Allen, March 23, 2009 Experts and pundits warn that if we do not improve our college graduation rate, our nation’s power and status may decline more quickly, in comparison to the rise of other powers in an increasingly multi-polar world. The Center for American Progress (CAP) hosted a panel on March 18th to discuss fast-track and early college programs among low-income and minority students, and how current legislation can help the country’s youth achieve their potential. CAP invited two sponsors of the Fast-Track to College Act, a bill that would increase federal spending directed at...