Category: Education

rottenapplecore

Education · Politics

0

How Common Core Caused Moms to Become Activists

School teachers all over the nation are quitting their profession, often due to being forced to abandon what they considered an excellent education system and change to one they consider inferior. The faulty system they refer to is the new and highly controversial Common Core. Susan Sluyter recently provided her reason for resigning after 25 years of teaching. She stated “I have watched as my job requirements swung away from a focus on the children, their individual learning styles, emotional needs, and their individual families, interests and strengths, to a focus on testing, assessing, and scoring young children, thereby ramping up the academic demands and pressures on them.”

Read more

pullmanPetrilli-150x150

Education · Featured

2

Joy Pullmann vs. Mike Petrilli on Common Core

Despite its deep effects on the character of our nation, conservatives and the general population often ignore what children are learning except when their own are in school, so I thank everyone reading this debate and my worthy, tenacious opponent, Mike Petrilli, for your time and attention. National Common Core testing and curriculum mandates are destructive, overall, but one good side-effect is creating the opportunity to discuss what children will learn, and why.

Read more

More

affirmative_action

Education · Featured · Politics

0

More Heat than Light: Understanding Affirmative Action and Why it Does Not Work

For the past several years, the policies that favor certain minority groups at the level of college admissions and public employment, commonly called affirmative action, have been on the back foot. Laws and constitutional amendments in various states, most notably in the liberal stronghold California in 1996, have restricted or banned outright the practice of discrimination on the basis of race, whether favoring the majority ethnic group or a minority. These movements ought to be welcomed by supporters of liberty. Our nation is founded on the principle of equality before the law. It seems inherently unjust to favor one group over another because of the color of their skin or ethnic history. It is doubly unjust that the organization engaging in such practices be the government to which we all pay taxes and from which we are meant to expect equal treatment and consideration.

Read more

No-United-Nations

Education · Government · Politics

0

Common Core Dates Back to the Marxist-Socialist Paradigm of UN Charter

The United Nations Agenda 21 has quietly changed the makeup of our cities and rural areas through highly questionable tactics, clothed in lofty adjectives such as “smart growth” and “sustainability,” as we’ve written previously. Agenda 21 activists have quietly initiated laws that allowed the government to confiscate our land, water, private property, and wilderness areas. Their ultimate goal is to strip Americans of personal rights and freedoms, creating a socialist future and eventually a one-world government. Not a pretty picture!

Read more

dv1453015.jpg

Education · Featured · Government

1

Troubling Parallels: New Math De Ja Vu and the Common Core

Storm clouds have been gathering around the Common Core for some time. Until now, most of the critical attention has been on the political ramifications of the program, that it centralizes and federalizes teaching, diminishing the power of parents to participate in the educational process. When the criticism does turn to the content of the curriculum, it usually focuses on social studies, such as Joy Pullmann’s excellent account of the Common Core’s trashing of the Constitution and Founding Fathers. Yet the Common Core’s treatment of math is proving to be even more questionable.

Read more

Common-Core-Rally

Education

0

Core Opposition Will Grow

Your editorial “Rotten to the core” (March 23) pointed out a truth that many news articles omit or gloss over – namely, that opposition to the national Common Core standards crosses partisan and ideological lines. That is one reason to remain optimistic about the prospect for eventual repeal, despite anti-Common Core bills stalling out recently in Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina.

Read more

obama-hope1

Education · Featured · Government · Health Care

0

Twin ‘Botched’ Government Programs: Obamacare and Common Core

Who could forget about the botched ObamaCare roll out of last fall by the Obama administration when on September 26 Obama said, “… most of the stories you’ll hear about how ObamaCare just can’t work is just not based on facts. Every time they have predicted something not working, it’s worked.” But when people did start shopping for insurance coverage on October 1, Healthcare.gov crashed.

Read more

patch_schoolyard

Education

0

Schools Should Deregulate Recess

Schoolyards are getting as regulated as the U.S. economy. A Colorado school, like many others, recently banned the game of “tag.” When kids run away from each other, they may trip, fall, and hurt themselves. A New York school banned kids from using balls during recess, but not during sports events, because “unstructured play with hardballs” is dangerous, school leaders said.

Read more

cash-teacher-penny-stock

Economics · Education · Featured

0

Top Three Barriers to Paying Teachers $90k a Year

Matt Damon made headlines a few years ago when he went on an expletive-laced screed about teachers’ poor (not his word, but close) salaries. It’s personal to him because Damon’s mother is an early childhood education professor.

Let’s agree with Damon that good teachers should earn a lot. The job can be very demanding, and it is crucial to society. So what would it take to pay teachers a great salary — say, something around $90,000 a year or more? That’s actually possible, without raising taxes or adding to the great American debt mountain. Here are three major barriers to that.

Read more

SchoolClosure

Education · Featured · Government · Politics

0

New York’s War on Charter Schools

Charter schools offer many cities a palatable mechanism for offering greater choice to families in the field of education. They do take some public funding, and they often rely on state infrastructure to operate, but these qualities ought to be weighed against the alternative, which is incompetent and corrupt state monopoly of education, especially in cities with greater levels of low-income households. The choice alone has helped revitalize competition in one of the most sclerotic and venal arms of the government apparatus. With the proven enhanced performance, wide popularity, and general social improvements charter schools provide it would seem like a no-brainer for city government to support.

Yet in New York City, the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, has been waging all-out war against the burgeoning charter school movement in his city.

Read more

common-core

Education

1

Big Business Targets Common Core’s Band of Mothers

The special interests behind national curriculum and testing mandates are pouring millions into public relations and lobbying this spring after parents across the country began to oppose and destabilize their big project. Friday, Politico reported that the Business Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce are buying pricey ads on Fox News and mobilizing their state chapters to keep lawmakers in line. The same day, Bill Gates joined George Stephanopoulos to continue branding the Common Core mandates as a catalyst for improving U.S. education. Gates has joined with left-leaning philanthropies on a communications push worth more than $2.35 million.

Read more

olympics

Education

0

How to Give Kids an Olympics-Worthy Education

Did you know a few simple new laws could help every U.S. kid access the same kind of education available to young Olympic athletes?

Scads of high-performing young athletes complete their academics online, many through private and public programs such as California’s Capistrano Connections Academy of Kaplan’s college-prep program. It’s the only way they can fit academics into their grueling training schedules.

Read more