Free Republic

[Author's note: a checklist for what all schools should offer, and thus a guide to identifying bad schools, which won't have any of the recommended items.] UNFORTUNATELY, SINCE THE TIME OF JOHN DEWEY, many schools have been obsessed with social engineering, and indifferent to what might be called intellectual engineering. This mistake in emphasis needs to be corrected. The goal of education is not indoctrination but to take each child as far as each child can go. Genuine education is the cement that holds the people in a society together, and connects past, present and future. ONLY WHEN CHILDREN acquire...

Parents fighting critical race theory are making a fundamentally flawed assumption: That the government entities to which they appeal are responsive to them.Following a wave of parent outrage at finding their children’s public schools pushing racism under the guise of antiracism this past school year, states have begun to ban the ideology. Parents are engaging with local school boards all across the country, demanding they stop teaching racial division and start educating children. The outrage is not just among Republicans, but also Independent and even Democrat voters, making Democrats nervous enough that the Biden administration recently pretended to backtrack.What's going...

[SUMMARY: All levels of education influence each other. College professors can greatly help higher education by joining the fight to improve secondary education.]-- No school is an island; each school, each sector of education, is connected to the others. Influences flow between them. It’s reasonable to think a nation’s educational institutions will rise and fall together. College professors may hope they can retreat to an ivory tower, untouched by the mediocrity in our public schools. Some professors may believe they are an intellectual aristocracy, and as such cannot be contaminated by the rabble below. However, the contamination relentlessly spreads and...

SUBJECT: Conservative Case Against "Charter School" Amendment I am a fan of our local Milton representatives in the Georgia legislature and their passion to reform public K-12 schools. School choice, competition and other reforms are long overdue, and more "funding" for status quo won't solve anything. Having said that, no conservative leaning voter who believes in local control and real reforms should be voting for the proposed constitutional amendment on charter schools. It is fundamentally against principles of conservatism. State government take over of decisions away from "elected" local school boards is just wrong, no matter the stakes. While defeating...

A recent report from the Cato Institute highlights a different type of competition fostered by school choice: public versus private. As Adam Schaeffer discusses in the report, charter schools, since they are government subsidized, are enticing parents away from the private education sector and back into the public school system. This increases the number of students on the education rolls and thereby leads to increased taxpayer costs. “We [Schaeffer and Richard Buddin] estimate that charter schools took approximately 190,000 students from private schools between 2000 and 2008,” writes Schaeffer. “These students required an additional $1.8 billion in annual public expenditures.”...

Nearly a decade after Mayor Bloomberg’s school reforms, New York City students show little progress.The only reasonable conclusion to draw from this week’s report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is that reading and math achievement by New York City’s students is dismal and has remained so for almost a decade. Known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” the federal test compares progress by fourth- and eighth-graders in 21 large cities. A mere 24 percent of all New York City eighth-graders read at the NAEP proficiency level (and only 12 percent of black and Hispanic students). In eighth-grade math,...

Last week, President Obama seemed surprised that some public school students attend classes in trailers...

In the past year, 46 states grappled with budget deficits of more than $130 billion. This year could be worse as federal recovery dollars dry up. And yet, for education reform, 2011 could be the best of times. California, to name one example, bridged its $25.4 billion budget gap by cutting billions from public education. It is now forced to cut another $18 billion to fill its current deficit. State executives and legislatures face severe choices and disappointments that could undo political careers and derail progress. On the bright side, public support is building for a frontal attack on the...

President Obama is leaning hard on the nation's schools, using the promise of more than $4 billion in federal aid -- and the threat of withholding it -- to strong-arm the education establishment to accept more charter schools and performance pay for teachers.

Old School Policies Challenged by: Jesse Masai, October 20, 2008 A new book, The Future of Educational Entrepreneurship: Possibilities for School Reform, is now laying out the future of educational entrepreneurship, including possibilities for school reform. In the timely volume, the American Enterprise Institute’s director of education policy, Frederick Hess, and a select team of analysts and reformers examine how to create conditions favorable to K-12 education reform. “The most intriguing reforms in K-12 education today are entrepreneurial ventures such as the New Teacher Project, New Leaders for New Schools, the KIPP Academies, and New Schools for New Orleans, which...

Barack Obama has been backing off post-partisan rhetoric on education, looking more like a stick-in-the-mud Democratic regular on schools and less like the reformer who supported test-based accountability and performance pay for teachers. The Chicagoan had bucked teachers' unions and other stodgy liberals, supporting charter schools in Illinois and mentorship programs in Washington, Josh Patashnik writes in the New Republic. But a campaign-hardened Obama is sounding more like a traditional lefty, waffling when the issues get tough and even employing an advisor who has worked to kill the avant-garde Teach for America (which subverts certification standards cherished by unions). Patashnik...

As we approach the start of another school year, it might be good to think about school reform. What follows are some ideas that do not require government action to be implemented. They only require common sense.

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...

Educators who oppose standardized testing and vouchers claim to have the best interests of students at heart but it is a claim worth examining. “The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has promoted high-stakes testing for school accountability,” Monty Neill of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing writes. “Its claim was that without ‘accountability,’ the public will abandon public education, and that the use of standards and tests would lead to educational improvement.” “This was never a good argument, though it appeared to address the justifiable anger directed by racial minorities and low-income communities against second-class educational opportunities.” Fair...

Imagine taking a teaching position with no training at one of the worst urban schools in Philadelphia. Now imagine that the building was crumbling and rat infested, your 6th grade class was struggling with illiteracy, you had no textbooks, curriculum or guidance, and violence and obscenities were daily phenomena. Christina Asquith doesn’t have to imagine those things; she lived them. In 1999, with burning questions about why inner-city Philadelphia schools (and those in other cities) were failing, Asquith joined the ranks and became a teacher with no formal training at a time when the schools were desperate for them. Before...

THE PRESIDENT'S RENOVATION STRATEGY Renovation strategy? That's one word you could use. Today George Bush begins a series of speeches trying to turn more public support for the war on terror in general and the war in Iraq in particular. It's an effort to rebuild his approval numbers. We've seen this before. The public becomes restless, and George Bush launches a series of speeches about the war in Iraq. Today Bush will talk about the global war on terror at George Washington University. I'm still a supporter of the Iraqi war. I still believe that Saddam Hussein had to be...

For the last seven years as governor of Florida, I've worked with thousands of educators, policymakers, parents and students to reform public education in our state. The reality of reform is vastly different from the theory, and change is a lot harder than it looks. But there are a few rules, you might say, for real reform that make it possible. • The first rule is that when you run for office, you need to say what you're going to do and then do what you said you would. Candidates who aren't willing to take political risks won't take the...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Please direct press contacts to Dr. Hermione Z. Gringold, Assistant Vice Superintendent for Public Affairs, 1-666-834-9000, ext. 13 Taskforce to Homeschool Texas School District Administrators On Effective School Management Plantagenet, Texas/ April 15/Chistenewswire/ Plantagenet Independent School District Dr. Adolphus Reich-Neeley, chairman of the Plantagenet Independent School District School Board, and Thelma Mae Tomkins, principal of the Tomkins Home School in Muleshoe, Texas, announced today that Plantagenet ISD has accepted an offer by a multicultural homeschool taskforce led by Principal Tomkins to homeschool the Plantagenet district administrators on effective school management. “It has become apparent that Plantagenet ISD...

Reprinted from NewsMax.com The Failure of the American Education System Steve Farrell Saturday, Nov. 20, 2004 They never stop nagging. The latest and greatest on education coming out of the mouth of the Anybody But Bush Party is that “No Child Left Behind” is synonymous with “No Money Left to Pay for It.” They’re referring to unfunded mandates. Now, just in case some of you aren’t sure what that means, an unfunded mandate is when the federal government tells the states: “Here’s a new law. Comply with it or else. And oh, by the way, YOU have to pay for...

Petition drive seeks to limit sex education By JACKIE BURRELL Contra Costa Times WALNUT CREEK - The same man who led the drive to put Gov. Gray Davis' recall on the state ballot in 2003 now has received state approval to circulate petitions for a proposition to severely restrict sex education in public schools. The petition language released Wednesday by Secretary of State Kevin Shelley's office and written by Attorney General Bill Lockyer's staff is straightforward, calling for a ban on sex ed in kindergarten through sixth grade and for daily parental permission slips for older students. But the actual...