Free Republic

Nearly three years after Gov. Rick Perry held a little-noticed meeting with regents from university systems around the state, it's game on in the fight for higher education. The college of liberal arts at the University of Texas...weighed in today, releasing a...rebuttal to the market-driven approach favored by the governor and some of his supporters. The centerpiece of the movement, known as the "seven breakthrough solutions" and promoted by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, calls for treating students as "customers," judging faculty by how many students they teach and how those students rate them, and de-emphasizing research that doesn't...

Beginning July 1, homework will officially be considered a racist form of grading in the Los Angeles Unified School District. How the hell is homework racist, you ask? According to the Los Angeles Times, the racial make-up and urban geographic of certain students can make homework a discriminatory way of grading for some students over others. The Blaze reported: “Beginning July 1, 2011, homework assignments will comprise no more than 10% of a student’s academic achievement grade,” a memo issued last month states. It goes on to lay out the reasoning: “It is unfair to penalize or reward students for...

Pupils are expected to use effective self-regulation skills to take responsibility for their learning success. Since the 1990s this has been the guiding principle in the Norwegian school system. Yet a new doctoral thesis from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, shows that this idea falls flat on its face in real life since relatively few pupils are up for the task. Since the 1990s, policy documents and visions in the Norwegian school system have largely been based on the idea of pupils and students at all levels taking responsibility for their own learning and skills. This guiding principle has even...

Vanessa Perez was a homework scofflaw. The Marshall High School senior didn't finish all of it — largely because she worked 24 hours a week at a Subway sandwich shop. Alvaro Ramirez, a junior at the Santee Education Complex, doesn't have his own room and his mother baby-sits young children at night. "They're always there and they're always loud," he said, explaining his challenges with homework. The nation's second-largest school system has decided to give students like these a break. A new policy decrees that homework can count for only 10% of a student's grade. Critics — mostly teachers —...

As futurists observe the usage and functionality of the internet, more and more of us have predicted an end to the relevance of Public schools. Well, the Khan Academy site may be the first clear indicator that public schools really are a dead institution walking. Imagine a future world where, via a home computer, laptop, tablet or even smart phone you can access your own personal curriculum of k-12 level class work complete with lectures, follow up questions and help? Imagine it also covers subjects that public school seldom covers, like the intricacies of how banking works? Well, a friend...

A few years ago when I was on the mission field, a fellow missionary said, “I don’t find the Old Testament much help in my work. So I seldom read it and have never really studied it.” When he saw my eyebrows go up a few inches, he added, “Look, my call from the Lord was to take Jesus to the people of this country who have never heard of Him.” Recently, a member of my Bible study said, “I suppose I should know more about the Old Testament, but I don’t really see what it has to do with...

I was in the gym yesterday. No sound. I’m reading the screen. The first three readings didn’t makes sense. What is there to do in Miami? I tried to force the sentence into that mold. I focused on each letter...Oh, they meant THEIR. Maybe it’s a small thing but I admit my head was spinning a little. This is Fox News. The world is watching. Supposedly a conservative network, so they should care about language. Presumably they hire only the best editors and writers. But these poor bumblers can’t write basic English. OMG! First, let’s congratulate the Education Establishment. I’ve...

Pope Benedict XVI / Photo Credit Mazur Vatican City, May 4, 2011 / 11:16 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Benedict XVI has revealed the theme for his next series of weekly Wednesday audiences.  “I want to start a new series of catechesis on a subject that is very dear to us all: the topic of prayer,” he told pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square May 6. Over the past two years Pope Benedict has been exploring the lives of the saints. That series of talks concluded last month. Hence the announcement of a new topic based on the request of the...

Last night I saw the future of education in Britain – and it worked. The occasion was the launch of Katharine Birbalsingh’s free school in Lambeth, South London. As a local parent I was naturally very interested in this because at the moment round these parts you have two options when your kids turn 11: either you consign them to the dustbin of whichever failing state school you’re unlucky enough to get them into. Or you consign yourself to an old age of misery and penury by forking out for one of the many excellent local private schools. Having just...

Food is vital for survival, yet less than 2 percent of America's population works in agriculture. That's a big change from 100 years ago, when over 40 percent of the workforce was toiling away on the farm. If I had been born at the start of the 20th century in Kansas, rather than at the end of the 1950s, no doubt my life would have been spent on the farm. Agriculture was labor-intensive then, requiring plenty of strong backs, human and animal alike. In addition to nearly half the human workforce, 22 million animals worked the fields. Now 5 million...

What Students Learn and Don't Learn By Phyllis Schlafly If you are attending college to get teacher certification, you will probably be required to attend classes on "multicultural education." This is supposed to bring diversity to the classroom and prepare teachers to teach pupils of various ethnic or national backgrounds. The textbooks in these courses typically include Teachers as Cultural Workers by Paulo Freire, a Brazilian socialist who preached that society is divided into oppressors and oppressed. Other required readings teach that Americans are an institutionally racist society and are designed to train teachers to create political radicals to...

The Grand Rapids Press recently interviewed public school teachers who asserted that their profession is losing respect and they are treated like scapegoats. Michigan Capitol Confidential looked at some of the comments made by the teachers and then examined what the typical compensation and benefits are for educators in their district with similar years of experience. Caledonia Public Schools: Quote to newspaper: “It used to be that teachers were treated with respect,” said Pat Gillies, a physical education teacher and coach at Caledonia High School. “I've been doing this 15 years, and I've seen a lot of changes. I just...

Andy Ferguson, one of America’s most engaging and perspicacious journalists, has not — as André Malraux said of Whittaker Chambers — returned from the hell of college admissions with empty hands. In Crazy U, his chronicle of his son’s senior year of high school — a year of college visiting, applications, essay writing, open-house attending, interviewing, financial-aid seeking, and waiting, waiting, waiting — is by turns hilarious, shrewd, and revealing. The “crazy” in the book’s title refers to our national obsession with college — a little piece of insanity to which Ferguson is more prone than most. Preoccupied by his...

A recent post about a new book by Denise Eide called “Uncovering the Logic of English” prompted more than 80 comments. One person in particular objected that phonics was not the entire answer, and argued that Sight-Words were easy to learn, and that many people read this way. I don’t think so. So I am always trying to figure out CLEVER NEW WAYS to explain this mess to all the confused parents out there, and the confused teachers in the schools. This new article points out quite simply that reading, as described and prescribed by the so-called experts in Whole...

Unionized teachers outnumber other government workers and run the schools in every state; why do we keep on accepting their decades of miserable results? A careless airline pilot, a lazy waitress, a crash-prone cabdriver, an unproductive salesman, an innumerate cashier will all have to find other work; poor teachers keep teaching and receiving raises as years go by and kids don't learn. Of course; they, with their unions, run the show. Adam Smith prophesied when he wrote The Wealth of Nations, saying of professors in 1776: If the authority to which he is subject resides in the body corporate, the...

[snip] The new Texas curriculum standards represent a hodge-podge of names motivated by partisan politics, the Fordham Institute said in its report. Civil rights groups protested the new standards, which they claim distort history and shortchange the contributions of minorities. The Texas chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the League of United Latin American Citizens filed a complaint last year with the U.S. Department of Education, asking the agency to take legal action if Texas tries to implement the new standards. The complaint still is being evaluated, a department spokesman said. [snip] "The State...

Teaching, Preaching, Healing     By Elder Jeffrey R. HollandOf the Quorum of the Twelve ApostlesJeffrey R. Holland, "Teaching, Preaching, Healing", Ensign, Jan. 2003, 33  Adapted from an address given at a Church Educational System religious educators conference at Brigham Young University on 8 August 2000.   We quickly and rightfully think of Christ as a teacher—the greatest teacher who ever lived or ever will live. The New Testament is full of His teachings, His sayings, His sermons, His parables. One way or another, He is a teacher on every page of that book. But even as He taught, He was consciously doing something...

The last two years have been another reminder that education is not equivalent to competence, intelligence or experience, let alone wisdom, as an administration of people who have hardly held actual jobs outside of academia have proven that they are very good at assigning blame and conducting internal rivalries, and absolutely terrible at everything else. William F. Buckley famous opined that he would "sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University". We have spent the last two...

Don’t Tell the Children: Homeschoolers’ Best-Kept Secret BY SHERRY EARLY Homeschoolers are a rather independent lot, almost cantankerously so. So to say that all homeschoolers do, well, anything, would be a mistake. However, I would venture to say that most homeschoolers love books. For most, books are the primary educational resource, although computers are running a close second these days. But don’t tell the children. You see, my homeschooled children and those of my homeschooling friends haven’t been let in on the secret that Books Are School. They sort of think our house is furnished with wall-to-wall books just...

The "Top 10 Worst Ideas In Education," according to new article on Improve-Education.org:::: -------------------------------------- Bill Gates said public schools are so bad they are a threat to the national economy and the society’s long-term survival. Why does he think this? What is it that most needs fixing? Herewith the 10 worst ideas in public education: 1) BOGUS READING INSTRUCTION --- Whole Word, Sight Words, and Dolch Words (there are many aliases) have created 50 million functional illiterates, for the simple reason that this method does not work. (No one learns to read fluently with Sight-Words. Some people learn to read,...