Free Republic

There is one constant throughout the past 100 years. Professors of education came up with ever more exotic schemes and nomenclatures for how education should be organized, even as these schemes confused students and destroyed achievement. Each scheme had a catchy name (Open Classroom, Life Adjustment, Multiculturalism, Constructivism, Common Core) and a phalanx of resistance-is-futile jargon. Somehow the proposals didn’t translate into gains. One might cynically conclude that the jargon was a goal in itself (to get a grant, to build a career, to impress ordinary citizens). You may even suspect that the larger purpose of all these schemes is...

Detroit recruiters can hire online teacher training graduates to help fill about 200 classroom vacancies this fall. Education reporter Koby Levin follows up on her Chalkbeat Detroit preview of the desperation move: Detroit’s main district is proceeding with a plan to hire teachers who are certified but have received no training in the classroom — adding an element of controversy to efforts to fill hundreds of teacher vacancies by the end of summer. The board of education on Tuesday approved a hiring plan proposed by Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, signaling that the district will lean partly on programs that offer so-called...

Working from home certainly seems to be increasing in popularity, and it’s not hard to see why. Not only does it mean you can stay in your pajamas, but you’ll also save money in gas and — perhaps the best part — no actual co-workers you have to pretend to like. Dozens of companies are jumping on the stay-at-home bandwagon, like Xerox, Philips and even The Disney Store. While many of these jobs are in customer service, some are for things you probably didn’t know you could do from home — like teaching. Qkids is looking for college students, teachers,...

Teachers have long supplemented their incomes by tutoring. And there’s perhaps never been a better, or easier, time to do it than right now. The reason: China-based online education companies are in an apparent race with each other to hire U.S. teachers who’d like to work from home this summer and, using their webcams, “teach cute kids” the English language — in the marketing parlance of one of those companies, Beijing-based VIPKid. If you doubt that’s true, you haven’t been looking at the classifieds. Just today, five-year-old VIPKid i — which reportedly raised $200 million in fresh funding last summer...

LAS VEGAS – Adrian Calabano, 23, left his native Philippines to fill a void of teachers in a Nevada suburb. He said he sold his car to pay for his flight and hefty administrative fees so he could get a salary several times higher than he would receive in his homeland. But his salary is still lower than an average American teacher. He was hired to teach sixth grade special education class at Greenspun Junior High School in Henderson, Nev., a suburb of Las Vegas. “My salary is much better than what I receive and get from the Philippines,” he...

Amazon.com's Alexa has a little something to teach your kids about manners. After receiving feedback from some parents concerned about how voice assistants are affecting their kids attitudes, the company updated Alexa to reward children who asks for things nicely. Kids are some of the biggest fans of voice assistants, with some learning to talk to Alexa, Apple's Siri or Google's Assistant before they can form full sentences. But some parents have worried that having voice assistants around the house will make their children more rude, since the youngsters can bark out demands for a favorite television station or song...

A Canadian high school switched to “Africentric Math” to attract black students to go into Science, Technology, Engineering and Math(STEM) fields, according to Canadian Broadcasting’s(CBC) Wednesday report. Nova Scotia’s Auburn Drive High School math teachers are skipping their previous eurocentric approach to teaching mathematics so black students will gain more interest in the subject, the CBC reported. Teachers are adopting an Afrocentric lens to teach mathematics, based on incorporating African history and culture to make math classes resonate with their students. Auburn High School is working with the Imphop’s Legacy Academy, a program encouraging black students to get interested in...

“I have had enough bullshit,” wrote Notre Dame sociology professor Christian Smith in a recent piece about the systemic problems of American Higher Education. “The manure has piled up so deep in the hallways, classrooms, and administration buildings of American higher education that I am not sure how much longer I can wade through it and retain my sanity and integrity.” This forward, in-your-face commentary on the state of today’s higher education caught the attention of many in the realm of the Ivory bell tower, but should also serve as a wake-up call to those who don’t follow higher ed...

Rudolf Flesch, in his 1955 book, noted that "things have changed in the last 10, 20 years. For the first time in history, American parents see their children getting less education than they got themselves. Their sons and daughters come home from school and they can't read the newspaper; they can't spell simple words like February or Wednesday; they don't know the difference between Austria and Australia. The fathers and mothers don't know the reason for this, but they know that something terrible has happened to their most precious dreams and aspirations[.]" Isn't it beautiful – the way Flesch perceives...

Samantha Cox, a 24-year-old teacher at Lake Central High School in the town of St. John near the Illinois border, was arrested on Wednesday for possession of a controlled substance and drug paraphernalia. The English teacher was allegedly caught doing drugs after students filmed her with a phone from outside the classroom, according to Fox 32 Chicago.

Outspoken feminist Camille Paglia says the current generation of hyper-sensitive, safety-seeking college students was gradually created by the downward spiral of public education that has left them ignorant of history and geography and focused, instead, on viewing America as an evil nation. (snip) Paglia said: What has happened is these young people now getting to college have no sense of history of any kind. No sense of history. No world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of history. So, they think that the whole world has always been like this, a kind of nice, comfortable world where...

In place of academic excellence for all, the district’s primary mission is now to ensure that students think correctly on social and political issues — most importantly, on race and “white privilege.” District leaders enshrined this new mission in EPS’s “All for All” strategic plan, adopted in 2013. The plan mandates that, going forward, the EPS must view “all teaching and learning experiences” through the “lens of racial equity.” If “equity” meant “treating kids equally,” all thinking Minnesotans would support it. In this context, however, it’s code for racial identity politics — a simplistic blaming of “white privilege” for the...

Leslie Mancillas believes everyone has a story worth telling. The Santa Rosa Junior College professor and author has worked with her students over the past few years capturing their stories of hardship, hope and triumph in anthologies. Gearing up for her latest student compilation, Mancillas finds herself reflecting about surviving childhood abuse in a memoir she hopes to finish next summer. Her mother beat her and two siblings while hooked on amphetamines and barbiturates, Mancillas said, which had been prescribed for weight loss and sleep. The amphetamines gave her mother — a petite hospital nurse — super strength, she said....

The fourth-grade tradition of building a California mission out of Popsicle sticks and sugar cubes is being pushed aside by the state as history lessons change to reflect all cultures and more accurately depict the past. A new framework for the curriculum at K-12 public schools means less research into the floor plans of the mission at say San Juan Capistrano, and more time looking at what life was like for both the missionaries and the native people of California.

A first grader at a California charter school was sent to the principal’s office this week after she accidentally “mis-gendered” a transgender classmate in what’s being called a “pronoun mishap.”This Isn’t the First Time We’ve Heard of Rocklin The incident occurred at Rocklin Academy, a school rocked by controversy after a kindergarten teacher led an in-class discussion on transgenderism that included a “gender reveal” for a little boy who was transitioning to a little girl.For kindergartners.Parents were furious because they were not informed in advance and were not given the chance to opt-out their five-year-olds from the classroom transgender...

Hundreds of websites broadcast the same misguided message: children must memorize Sight-Words. This message is false. Probably the most aggressive falsehood is that such memorization is easy to do. One popular site proclaims this malarkey: “Because many Sight-Words are phonetically irregular, tend to be abstract, have limited visual correspondence, or even easily understood definitions, students must memorize them to read quickly and fluently.” Note the casual tone: “Students must memorize them.” The school certainly wouldn’t ask children to do something difficult or impossible, would it? Yes, it would! And therein lies the essence of the hoax. In the context of...

I’m on the road, traveling out West, doing a little hiking, a little sightseeing, a lot of thinking. I just sat down with my laptop and a cup of coffee under the blue skies of Wyoming, thinking about how much I will learn in these 4½ weeks. That’s the same chunk of the school calendar reflected on our students’ progress reports. Just over four weeks — about 23 days, almost a month.(snip) One of the first questions people on the road ask is about your occupation. That’s always an easy ice-breaker. I reckon I don’t yet look retirement age, so...

I teach in a mixed comprehensive in a constituency where on 8 June over two-thirds voted Labour, where an overwhelming majority voted Labour in the most recent mayoral vote, and where Labour has been the largest party on the local council for decades. A large majority of staff at our school vote Labour. As a Labour supporter, this thrills me; as a teacher, it makes me question whether my school is doing enough to help our students appreciate other viewpoints. As teachers, we are bound by the 1996 Education Act to present different political beliefs impartially and to not promote...

A teacher at a public high school in Alabama sent his students home with a summer reading list chock full of conservative authors from which to choose, including Ann Coulter, Ronald Reagan, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, and libertarian John Stossel. But parents became concerned that it leaned too far right and so now, the kids don’t have to read anything over the summer.

100 percent employment for grads in ‘teaching positions’ Aspiring teachers who yearn to push social justice principles onto their students have until June 25 to apply for Evergreen State College’s Master in Teaching (MIT) program. The two-year program is based at Evergreen’s campus in Tacoma, Washington, half an hour from the recent racial controversies at its main campus in Olympia. MIT promises to prepare the next generation of K-12 educators not only to do their jobs as teachers, but to incorporate social justice into every aspect of their curriculum. The program’s philosophy is simple: One of the paramount goals of...