Free Republic

New national standards prod schools to return to content-based education.The biggest new thing in American public education these days is a two-volume, 230-page, written-by-committee document called the Common Core State Standards. Forty-five states have pledged to the federal government that they will adopt the standards—which specify the math and English skills that students must attain in each grade from kindergarten to the end of high school—within the next several years. Some of these states genuinely believe that doing so will make more of their students ready for college and careers. Others are on board primarily because the Obama administration has...

Teaching for “social justice” is a cruel hoax on disadvantaged kids.In 1980, Bill Ayers and his partner Bernardine Dohrn came up from the underground—the Weather Underground, that is. It had been a wild ride for the Bonnie and Clyde of the sixties New Left. They first went into combat during the 1969 “Days of Rage” in Chicago, smashing storefront windows and assaulting police officers and city officials in the fantasy that they were aiding their Vietnamese allies by “bringing the war back home.” They spent the next few years planting bombs at government buildings around the country, including in restrooms...

The smart young are, of course, already trending conservative -- they've grown up with the hash my generation has made of love and marriage, and they have soldiered their way through the nonsense we have made of education. But way-left boomers turning right in middle age? Come on. But it's true. A woman around my age, a stalwart, a pillar, a lodestone of the ultra left-wing literary world on Canada's West Coast told me last week, that this year she was going to embrace her Inner Republican. An adorable new friend, Howie Siegel who spent the '70s naked and stoned...

Leftist political indoctrination in the classroom is now even more pernicious in K-12 education than it is on the university campus. While their protestations are often a sham, the higher education professorate at least pays lip service to the ideal of political neutrality in the classroom and of disinterested scholarship. When there have been revelations of professors egregiously indoctrinating students in leftist political views or intimidating conservative students (as in the Ward Churchill case) administrators have responded that these are isolated examples. When confronted with surveys showing that liberals outnumber conservatives in their humanities departments by a factor of 10-1...

New York City's ideal of public schooling as a means of assimilating all children into a common civic culture is under assault - not by teachers who care too little, but by those who, in a perverse way, care too much. The root of the problem is "social justice" education. It starts in teacher preparation programs, where rigorous training in math, science and literacy takes a backseat to theories about victimization and inequality. Teachers-to-be are told that conventional instruction is an outgrowth of capitalist oppression; "true" education helps students see the unfairness all around them and challenge society to change....

The big difference in the latest spate of horror stories about academic abuse is that they are taking place in lower grades. Sean Allen, a 10th-grader from Colorado who made national news when he taped his World Geography teacher’s political rant, spoke from experience, “I was flooded with similar stories from students across the nation,” he said at a conference on academic freedom. “We can’t simply deal with this on a case-to-case basis, we have to get to the root of it.” Sean firmly believes that the Academic Bill of Rights crafted by conservative author and activist David Horowitz gives...