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An Indianapolis school district administrator announced he was fired Monday in the wake of a video he tweeted in early November in which he revealed district’s woke social justice educational agenda. Tony Kinnett, who served as the science coordinator for Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS), reported on Twitter he was fired for: •Sharing that IPS recorded children in required racial justice sessions •Not sending IPS the personal info of [journalists] @TietzKendall and @AndyMarkMiller •Quoting Dr. Payne’s racist comments to students •Sharing public filesIndianapolis Public Schools just fired me for: • Sharing that IPS recorded children in required racial justice sessions •...

I’m Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is BrokenIf you enjoyed Netflix’s “The Chair” – a lighthearted depiction of a crisis-prone English Department at an imaginary Ivy League college – you are clearly not in higher education. Something is rotten in the state of academia and it’s no laughing matter. Grade inflation. Spiraling costs. Corruption and racial discrimination in admissions. Junk content (“Grievance Studies”) published in risible journals. Above all, the erosion of academic freedom and the ascendancy of an illiberal “successor ideology” known to its critics as wokeism, which manifests itself as career-ending “cancelations” and speaker...

frustrated because what you signed up for was for students to learn. And it just ended up being a conversation about points all the time.” These days, the Alhambra High School English teacher has done away with points entirely. He no longer gives students homework and gives them multiple opportunities to improve essays and classwork. The goal is to base grades on what students are learning, and remove behavior, deadlines and how much work they do from the equation. The changes Moreno embraced are part of a growing trend in which educators are moving away from traditional point-driven grading systems,...

When the pandemic hit, school went online and learning seemed to be thrown to the wind. As the pandemic stretched on, many teachers were loath to return to the classroom because of apparent COVID fears. Parents began to question whether teachers were really concerned about or eager to foster their children’s learning, especially as they could see the learning loss that was happening … or rather, the learning that often wasn’t happening at all. Such fears were groundless, according to Cecily Myart-Cruz, head of the powerful United Teachers Los Angeles union. Myart-Cruz scoffed at the idea of learning loss in...

Martin Luther, to all faithful and godly pastors and preachers: grace, mercy, and peace be yours in Jesus Christ, our Lord. The deplorable, miserable conditions which I recently observed when visiting the parishes have constrained and pressed me to put this catechism of Christian doctrine into this brief, plain, and simple form. How pitiable, so help me God, were the things I saw: the common man, especially in the villages, knows practically nothing of Christian doctrine, and many of the pastors are almost entirely incompetent and unable to teach. Yet all the people are supposed to be Christians, have been...

In practice, media literacy is actually critical media literacy, indoctrinating students to adopt only leftist principles offered by leftist media outlets.K-12 instruction warped by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and related social-justice radicalism has become such a flashpoint that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland threatens federal retaliation against parent dissidents. Educrats are trying to quell the rebellion by changing definitions, such as the claim, “We’re not teaching CRT, we’re using culturally responsive teaching,” which is the same thing under a different label. Another tactic is to install anodyne-sounding curricular programs that accomplish subversive social-justice goals without alerting parents to the scam.One...

A high-ranking school official told teachers in Southlake, Texas that if they had books in their school about the history of the Holocaust, they should make sure that they have other books that “other perspectives.”On Friday, Gina Peddy, the Carroll school district’s executive director of curriculum and instruction, was leading a training session on which books teachers can have in classroom libraries. The session came amid an uproar over new regulations concerning curriculums teaching about race and racism and which books should be permitted into the classrooms and libraries. A staff member secretly recorded the session. Peddy discussed House Bill...

SAN FRANCISCO — Schools have welcomed students back to classrooms but face a new challenge: A shortage of teachers and staff the likes of which some district officials say they’ve never seen. Public schools have struggled for years with teacher shortages, but the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the problem. One school official in California calls it “the most acute shortage of labor” he’s ever seen. Similar scenarios are playing out across the country as schools cope with a spike in retirements and a need to hire more teachers, counselors, tutors and aides to help children make up for learning losses....

Dumbing down is something our public schools are good at. Cluttering up everyone's mind is a vital part of the process. Traditionally, education was focused on facts, information, details, content, learning, and knowledge, all of these hopefully leading to wisdom. Now we've gone to the other extreme. The students learn little, and they cannot connect one fragment of information to another. Classrooms are filled with chatter. The brains of students are overflowing with nothing much. This shift is bizarre. Wasn't it always assumed we were searching for the truth, for higher understanding, for the inner workings of reality, for the...

Pupils in the same class as a positive Covid case "will not routinely be asked to isolate and book a test", ministers have said. ... The move brings Northern Ireland into line with England, Scotland and Wales. Teaching unions had called for the move ... Low risk.. Studies have shown that the overall risk of children becoming severely ill or dying from Covid is extremely low. Mr Swann and Ms McIlveen also said that there was evidence that the "vast majority of those identified as school close contacts and sent home to isolate during the 2020/21 school year did not...

The inability of U.S. students to perform on par with the majority of other developed nations should cause alarm, given its implications for America’s global leadership. Instead, while other countries take their K-12 education seriously, American leaders are satisfied with pumping more money into an outdated system that continues to fail students and produced mediocre results. Here’s the sad truth. Twenty-five countries outperform U.S. K-12 students. Those leading the way are China, Hong Kong, Finland, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Canada. China’s students not only place first overall, but they dominate each individual subject as well. U.S. students straggle in...

I am in the process of uploading all my outlines and notes for the Gospel According to Matthew. In the process I must first convert my word files to pdf, while editing them to be more presentable. Converting them to a pdft makes it easier to get the file to work in the blog. Not all of the outlines will be the same, since the original files were created over a span of a couple of years from 2006 to 2008 using a couple different programs. I originally did them as I prepped for my Study Nights and Sermons I...

Mr. Gatto (along with Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt), blew the whistle on deliberate dumbing down (on the Prussian model, crushing the imagination of children because it caused them to lose to Napoleon). Mr. Gatto said that the children of the elites have no advantage over ghetto kids "who have never eaten off a tablecloth". The opposite: elite prep schools, the Groton, Brook, St. Albans, Episcopal High & Andover, produce the idiots who presume to rule us. (Thomas Sowell waxed eloquent about how stupid top experts are.) Point in fact (from Samuel Blumenfeld, "Crimes of the Educators"): John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded...

What teachers choose to cover (or not cover) during their limited classroom time will reveal what biases and agendas that educator has on American history.“Ladies and gentlemen: The story you are about to see is true,” declared the introduction to the classic television program “Dragnet.” “All we want are the facts, ma’am,” asserted police officer “Joe Friday” during his investigations. True stories; just the facts: it seems so straightforward, doesn’t it? Not when American social studies curricula are concerned.“I teach my students that [Thomas] Jefferson sat there and wrote ‘all men are created equal,’ but he made his money off...

One gifted 12-year-old is way ahead of the game when it comes to schooling. Mike Wimmer, from Salisbury, North Carolina, graduated from Rowan-Cabarrus Community College on May 21 with a 4.0 GPA and an associate degree. A week later, he graduated from Concord Academy High School with a 5.45 GPA as valedictorian.... ...Mike describes himself as a well-rounded person with an interest in all subjects, though he's always leaned more toward STEM fields. He calls himself the "math and science guy." "Technology in particular I like because it's limitless, and I can do whatever I want to with it," he...

<p>Currently, there are 17 COVID-related shortages in major and minor consumer products and medical supplies but expected to be resolved, albeit with price increases. Included are new cars, chlorine, lumber, pet food, homes, chicken, and hotdogs, to name a few. Most formidable is a fuel shortage — already in play due to the lack of gas truck drivers (see more on that below) — but exacerbated by the oil pipeline cyberattack, on the verge of becoming a national security threat. Now, after paying ransom, the pipeline is slowly reopening, but supply vulnerabilities remain.</p>

K-12 Redesign: Achievement Instead of Time [Editor’s Note: Other articles in the K-12 Redesign series: Perfect Time for a K-12 Redesign, A Financial Overhaul, School Calendar]The U.S. K-12 education system is based on time, not student achievement. Too many students exit the system logging the required time but not meeting learning proficiencies. A redesign that promotes students based on their competency, not the school calendar, is urgently needed.The flawed system utilizes time as the constant and achievement as the variable — students progress from one unit to the next based on teacher lesson plans and due dates instead of...

The path to progress is definitely not paved by destroying the epistemological framework bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment. Yet it is important to understand why many young people are more attracted to social justice-based decolonization demands than to Enlightenment era intellectual advancements. Social justice ideology appeals to young adults’ desire to establish their identity, independent from their parents, and an ideology that represents itself as subversive is compelling. Also, as young people become aware of injustices, they are understandably captivated by a movement that represents itself as the most righteous way to advocate for justice. For these reasons, it...

The loss of public trust in universities that has risen to front page news did not suddenly emerge in 2020. In 2018 the non-partisan Gallup organization found that, for the first time, less than half of Americans have “a lot of confidence” in higher education. Even more pointedly, Gallup reported that “No other institution has shown a larger drop in confidence over the past three years than higher education.” The loss of civic faith in higher education has been building for a while. American liberal arts education has lost its moorings. A 2012 article in Inside Higher Ed crystallizes the...

The subtitle of this article might be The Strange Semantics of Subversion. Oh, the irony of it all. I remember reading, years ago, that Liberals and Communists were on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Communists oppose individual freedom. On the other hand, liberal used to means someone who celebrates individual freedom, as in liberty, liberation, liberating, and libertarian. A Jeffersonian Liberal was anyone who honored all the ideas contained in our Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. That's simple enough. A big problem for the far-left, however, was that they hated all those ideas. They would kill millions...