Free Republic

Experts have consistently misdiagnosed and misdefined the problem of schooling to serve their own pocketbooks. The difficulty is not that children don't learn to read, write and do arithmetic very well - it is that kids don't learn at all the way schools insist on teaching. When we strip children of a primary experience base - as confinement schooling must do to justify its very existence -we destroy the natural sequences of learning which always put experience first. Only much later, after a bath of experience, can the thin gruel of abstraction mean anything. We haven't forgotten this, but there...

Arizona Charter Makes Top 100 List Written By: Vicki Murray Published In: School Reform News Publication Date: July 1, 2006 Publisher: The Heartland Institute When Newsweek released its list of the top 100 high schools in the nation May 1, a charter school in Tucson made history. BASIS Tucson--which started out as "Beginning Academic Success in School" eight years ago but is now called by its acronym--ranked third in the nation, the highest place achieved by any charter school since the list's inception in 1998. BASIS Tucson is the first Arizona high school ever to make Newsweek's top 100....

Myths aren't lies. They are beliefs that people adopt because they have an air of plausibility. But myths aren't true, and they often get in the way during serious problem-solving. This essay identifies seven common myths that dominate established views of education these days. Dispelling these misconceptions could open the door to long-awaited improvement in our nationÍs schools. The money myth If people know anything about public schools today, it's that they are strapped for cash. Bestselling books, popular movies, and countless lobbying groups portray urban schools as desperately underfunded, and editors of the New York Times write without fear...

Interview With Notre Dame's Father John Coughlin NEW YORK, JUNE 12, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Questions about the nature of Church-related universities resurfaced after a commencement speaker at a Catholic institution was booed when defending Church teaching on premarital sex and contraception. For insight into the identity of Catholic colleges in general, ZENIT turned to Franciscan Father John Coughlin, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame. He shared with ZENIT the essential characteristics of a Catholic university as laid out in canon law and the 1990 apostolic constitution "Ex Corde Ecclesia," and the need for a commitment to the priority...

Virtual high school offers real diplomas Students can graduate without ever attending brick-and-mortar schoolTuesday, May 9, 2006 By JESSICA BLANCHARD P-I REPORTER Starting this fall, earning a high-school diploma will be only a mouse click away. While several public school districts allow students to take classes over the Internet, the new "Insight School of Washington" will be the first in the state to permit students to graduate without having to attend a brick-and-mortar school for part of their education. The group of business executives, politicians and educators launching the school Monday touted it as an alternative for students who need...

As some know, I am a first grade teacher. I got GREAT feedback when I asked people for some great suggestions for books about the military for boys. Now I'm writing along the same lines. I'm asking if anyone knows of some good books on an elementary level about sports heroes, especially baseball, for boys. I would like to introduce next year's class to some. I grew up reading about my favorite baseball heroes like Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Jackie Robinson, Babe Herman (he reminded me of myself), Lou Gehrig, Christy Matthewson, even Ty Cobb. Every...

“Teaching to the test” is a common complaint of public school teachers whose students have an increasingly difficult time passing such examinations with the passage of every school year. “Teach to the test, please,” Richard Ferguson of the ACT advises, “because the skills we are measuring are the skills that are needed.” Ferguson spoke at a conference at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel here in which the ACT released its new report, which is entitled “Ready to Succeed: All Students Prepared for College and Work.” The ACT that Ferguson heads administers one of the two most widely-used college entrance exams in...

Dana Jean Maginn acts as a "coach" for remedial education students in Portland, Ore. (Photo by Motoya Nakamura) Colleges Rethink Remedial Education BY DELIA M. RIOS   To understand why a high school diploma is no guarantee that a graduate has what it takes to thrive in college, a short history lesson is in order: High schools were never designed to funnel mass numbers of young Americans into colleges and universities. Only a select number of students are on a rigorous track that prepares them to succeed in college. "We have a system that was really established in 1906...

The Global Education Conference held at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. last month was used to teach educators how to bring global issues into the classroom. But, when it came time to practice the logistics of coordinating a debate the political opinions of the teachers could not be suppressed. The organization that put together the conference, Americans for Informed Democracy (AID), claimed to be a non-partisan group established to “educate and engage Americans in global issues….[in order to] create a generation of Americans that will support a U.S. role in the world that is appropriate….” But what is appropriate? AID...

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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...

Trendy "isms" are incompatible with lasting knowledge WHAT is the best way to introduce young people to literature? Is it to reveal to them the joy of reading great writing, and how themes and plots developed even centuries ago can be an anchor for their lives in the modern world? Or is it to treat every work as a "text" no better than any other, dissect them all ruthlessly and examine the entrails for political, sexual and racial bias? This debate has flared up again this week, sparked both by John Howard's comments on the "gobbledegook" taught in Australian English...

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...

Scott Savage, reference librarian for Ohio State University --- suggested four best-selling conservative books for freshman reading......and is being investigated by the university - for sexual harassment. Three professors filed the discrimination and sexual harassment charges, saying the books Savage suggested -"The Marketing of Evil" by David Kupelian, "The Professors" by David Horowitz, "Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis" by Bat Ye'or and "It Takes a Family" by Senator Rick Santorum - made them feel "unsafe." Savage contends he made the suggestions after other committee members recommended books with a left-wing slant. The school's faculty voted - without dissent - to allow...

ONE of the world's leading authorities on Shakespeare's work, Harold Bloom, and the nation's pre-eminent poet, Les Murray, have declared literary study in Australia dead after learning that a prestigious Sydney school asked students to interpret Othello from Marxist, feminist and racial perspectives. "I find the question sublimely stupid," Professor Bloom, an internationally renowned literary critic, the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale and Berg Professor of English at New York University, said yesterday. "It is another indication that literary study has died in Australia." The question was an assessment task in March set for advanced English students in Year...

Last month, 500 angry schoolteachers assembled outside my office. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) was furious that "Stupid in America," a "20/20" show I did on education, suggested that some union teachers were lazy. They shouted that I didn't understand how difficult teaching was, and chanted, "Shame on you!" Randi Weingarten, head of New York City's union, took the microphone and hollered, "Just teach for a week!" She said I could select from many schools. "We got high schools, we got elementary schools, we got junior high schools!" I accepted. I even said I'd let the union pick the...

Thousands of Connecticut teachers, including some award-winning educators, could face new job reviews because they do not meet U.S. government standards as "highly qualified teachers," federal officials say. The U.S. Department of Education has issued a new monitoring report that throws into question the qualifications of more than 13,000 teachers, about 30 percent of the state's public school teaching force, state officials say. State education officials have vowed to challenge the report's conclusion that many teachers - especially older elementary teachers and those teaching social studies and special education classes - do not meet the criteria established under the federal...

In Martha Zoller's recent column, she writes that parents should assert the control that they have by right over the government schools we fund through our taxes. I couldn't agree more. But she makes one comment that merits a challenge: "America is tired of being told we have lousy parents, bad kids and we can’t do anything without the help of government ..." While I'd be the first one to dispute the effectiveness of government “help,” I have enough friends and colleagues who are public school educators to say with confidence that there are many, many good teachers out there,...

Article Launched: 3/10/2006 01:43 PM Controversial teacher keeps job By DenverPost.com A Cherry Creek social studies teacher will not lose his job, after a student went public with a tape recording of controversial comments the teacher had made in class. Superintendent Monte C. Moses said Jay Bennish will be reinstated to his job at Overland High School, and will be teaching on Monday. At a news conference this afternoon, Moses said Bennish doesn't deserve to be praised, nor does he deserve to be fired. "Jay Bennish has promise as a teacher, but his practice and deportment need growth and refinement,"...

On the Web site of an unofficial alumni organization at the University of California, Los Angeles, there are profiles "exposing" the university's "most radical professors" who "actively proselytize their extreme views in the classroom." These professors are described as "brainless" and are berated for never having left the "fantasy world of college." [snip] There are other disturbing examples today and throughout history. In Colorado and Indiana, as a result of widely publicized student allegations of left-wing bias in the classroom, several professors have received hate mail and at least one received a death threat. The number of organizations across America...