Lowered Standards and Dumbed-Down Schools

As the cost of public education steadily increases, the end product is less and less impressive.  For example, Could You Have Passed the Eighth Grade in 1895? ... or 1924?

Today's public school kids probably have never heard of Eli Whitney, the Wright Brothers, Plymouth Rock, Patrick Henry, Ben Franklin, Sherlock Holmes, geography, spelling, or good citizenship, but they probably hear a lot about Gloria Steinem, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Kwanzaa, Spotted Owls, the evils of Styrofoam, and how to do the Macarena.


Some Who Can't Teach Still Do.  Public school teachers are unhappy with the growing campaign to grade their performance.  They shouldn't be.  It's almost impossible to fire a union teacher, even those who are profoundly incompetent.

Back to the Classroom.  How bad are public schools?  Much worse than most people realize.  So bad that they blight the futures of the young people in them.  So bad that if we don't turn back the clock to real education, we will most certainly lose our republic.

Evil Educators.  The extent to which schools manufacture "a graduate" can be mind-boggling.  A recent NY Post story told of a student, Tatiana Reina, who "graduated" from a New York City high school after six years despite never showing up her final year, who flunked every course except Spanish.  But five days prior to the graduation ceremony, she appeared, took exams in health and chemistry, and Googled in her answers, but she still flunked.  Nevertheless, thanks to administrative pressures, she and another half-dozen students were given "Ds," and this brought the diploma.  In her words, "I got my diploma."  Supposedly, such chicanery is commonplace in New York's schools, where administrators are intensely pressured to massage their graduation rates.

Bad Students, Not Bad Schools  is an Emperor's new clothes book — it openly speaks the unspeakable:  America's education woes are caused by intellectually mediocre, unmotivated students, not "bad schools," rotten teachers, faculty curriculum, lack of sufficient funding and similar alleged culprits.  Alter the student population and push students harder, even if this means lowering their self-esteem and America's schools will thrive.  If mischief-makers refuse to learn, let them drop out!

The fruits of dumbed-down schools:
 The Age of the Yoyo.  The incompetents rule.  Mistake is piled on mistake.  Errors multiply as if they were living organisms.  We face a long, bleak prospect filled with ineptitude, idiocy, and failure, with no relief in sight, and I haven't even mentioned Obama yet.  While there may be a light at the end of this tunnel, somebody forgot to put in the bulb.

Magical Education and the Slide into Third-Worldism.  When combined with lax standards regarding "graduate" plus a hiring policy that legally makes degree ownership prima facie proof of competency, third-world chaos is inevitable.  Detroit, thanks to its freshly minted, home-grown "graduates," will instantly become known as the city where nothing works despite its "educated" workforce.  Compounding this dangerous fantasy is that handing out bogus diplomas is now a cottage industry.  Just dumb down courses and tests, give credit for mere attendance, permit failed students to "make up" a year of sloth with a can't-fail, two-hour test (called "credit recovery"), and water down graduation requirements to permit "A"s in phys-ed to wipe out failures in tough academic courses.

What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?  [Scroll down]  Of course, the "arguments" against slavery and discrimination would continue until laws and customs changed.  But this could happen only in a society that values argument.  Today, the progressives running education are doing all they can to see to it that students do not engage in such arguments.  They promote "alternative literacies" that dispense with complex prose in favor of snippets accompanied by sound and picture.  Great literary and historical figures are reduced to cartoon characters — and often literally in graphic books.  Instead of argumentative papers teachers assign blogs, journals, Power Point presentations, poster boards, group projects, community service projects, skits, and rap songs.  They especially promote such illiteracy to the "underprivileged."

Have Government Schools Become a Criminal Enterprise?  There is no doubt that American educators are engaged in a criminal conspiracy to dumb-down the American people.  Charlotte Iserbyt, in her definitive book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, has documented the process so thoroughly that there can be no doubt about the intentions of our educators and the fact that the conspiracy is being financed by the richest liberal foundations and the federal government.

Cheering Immaturity.  A graduating senior at Hunter College High School in New York gave a speech that brought a standing ovation from his teachers and got his picture in the New York Times.  I hope it doesn't go to his head, because what he said was so illogical that it was an indictment of the mush that is being taught at even our elite educational institutions.

The Kids Can't Read.  Forty percent of Atlanta eight-grade students tested Below Basic proficiency in reading on the 2009 edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal exam of academic achievement.  Essentially two out of every five Atlanta students heading into high school are functionally illiterate — unable to comprehend a work as simple as Anne of Greene Gables or even complete mathematical word problems such as "Marty has 6 red pencils, 4 green pencils, and 5 blue pencils."

Keeping Up with the University of Stupid.  [Scroll down]  The old subjects are deemed guilty of "Eurocentrism."  They encourage linear thinking.  They are remnants of the old patriarchy that values logic and skills.  Capitalists think those abilities are worth much more than the circular, emotive (illogical) thinking used in gender studies.  Philosophy, math, science, literature, and foreign languages do not encourage students to become social activists and community organizers.  They encourage students to study the structure of language, learn the philosophical and literary heritage of the West, weigh evidence, solve problems, innovate, express ideas logically, and seek truth.

D.C. Council set to tighten school-truancy standards.  The pending legislation, introduced by council member Tommy Wells, would replace rules made just last year by the Board of Education, which allow students to accrue as many as 25 unexcused absences before child welfare and judicial authorities intervene.  Mr. Wells' legislation cuts the number of days to 10.

The Editor says...
 When I was in the public schools, I think that number was two or three at the most — not ten, and certainly not 25.  But you know, if the fools would prefer to flip burgers, join the Army, or go straight to prison instead of graduating from high school, why not let them make that decision for themselves?

Betraying Our Children.  If it were up to me, the people in charge of "educating" schoolchildren in the state of New York would have their ticket punched and be on their way [to hell], for one simple reason:  they have completely betrayed generations of kids for nothing more than naked self-interest.  Harsh?  Consider that New York just raised its standard for passing sixth grade reading and math tests to the following:  on the reading test, 20 correct answers out of 39 questions gets one a passing grade; on the sixth grade math test, 20 out of 49 does the trick.  In other words, getting a grade of 51% on the reading test and 41% on the math test gets you promoted to the seventh grade.

NY passes students who get wrong answers on tests.  When does 2 + 2 = 5?  When you're taking the state math test.  Despite promises that the exams — which determine whether students advance to the next grade — would not be dumbed down this year, students got "partial credit" for wrong answers after failing to correctly add, subtract, multiply and divide.  Some got credit for no answer at all.

No teacher left behind.  In Normandy Crossing Elementary School near Houston, Texas a bonus of $2,850 was dangled before the poor starving teachers as an incentive to do the job they are already generously paid to do.  The standardized tests were administered as required.  ["]But when the results came back, some seemed too good to be true.  Indeed, after an investigation by the Galena Park Independent School District, the principal, assistant principal and three teachers resigned May 24 in a scandal over test tampering.["]  It seems that rather than actually resort to the antiquated notion of teaching their students, a number of progressive educators are finding it much more effective to provide exam answers from stolen tests or simply change the answer sheets.

An Ode to Citizen Journalists.  Why are newspapers published? ... During my thirty years in journalism, I've interviewed dozens of candidates who were hoping to be hired as a reporter or editor.  I asked each one:  Why are newspapers published?  In thirty years, no recent graduate of a journalism school has known the answer.

Win a soccer game by more than five points and you lose, Ottawa league says.  In yet another nod to the protection of fledgling self-esteem, an Ottawa children's soccer league has introduced a rule that says any team that wins a game by more than five points will lose by default.

New Design HS students earn gym credits by selling snacks.  Exercise-starved students from a lower Manhattan school are getting gym credits for working concessions at the Rooftop Films festival, the [New York] Daily News has learned.  "Selling drinks and popcorn at a movie is not physical education.  It's just not right," said Palmer Taylor, a gym teacher at New Design High School.

Welcome to Diversity University.  [The authors] would like to wish the class of 2010 and all the college students graduating around the nation over the next few weeks, good luck.  Good luck being unemployed. ... Now, about that job you think you'll be getting on Monday morning:  where does one get hired with a Bachelor of Arts in Organic Transgendered Native American Space Pottery?

Defining Dumbness Down.  As with its successful conquest of mainline Protestantism, the left has taken over the educational establishment via the long march through the institutions.  Admitted Pentagon bomber and alleged Obama ghostwriter Bill Ayers is well regarded by many in academe, as is radical leftist Professor Angela Davis, among many others.  These are not marginalized, fringe characters.  They represent the academic mainstream.  They run the joint.  The barbarians are not merely inside the gates; they control them….

California Dumbs Down Tests.  When it comes to education trends, as California goes, so goes the nation.  Which is all the more reason to be concerned about the latest effort in California to dumb down standards.  The University of California's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) has launched another salvo in its long-running war against the SAT, the test used by many colleges and universities to assess academic achievement among high school seniors.  This is only the latest in a series of moves by BOARS against the SAT, but this one may be a stalking horse to eliminate standardized tests in general, especially if they conflict with the goal of promoting racial and ethnic diversity.

Black Americans and Liberty.  [There is a] grossly fraudulent education delivered by the government schools that serve most black communities.  The average black high school senior has a sixth- or seventh-grade achievement level and most of those who manage to graduate have what's no less than a fraudulent diploma, one that certifies a 12th-grade level of achievement when in fact the youngster might not have half that.  If the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to sabotage black academic excellence, he could not find a more effective means to do so than the government school system in most cities.

Leaving Liberalism.  [Scroll down]  "I believe what feels good to me," proclaimed Mr. Twenty-Something.  A tiny bat darted from my physiology student's ear as he added, "The full moon's powerful gravity makes people behave weirdly."  I explained that our moon's gravity is unaffected by how much we see lit by the sun.  Briefly dazed, the student retreated to the protection of an air of superiority.  "That's your science."

Why I Am Enlarging My Carbon Footprint:  As a psychotherapist, I try my best to calm down my anxious clients.  But in this case, I inadvertently triggered a panic attack.  My twenty-something client Emma, a survivor of the Berkeley public schools, had a coughing fit during our session.  I helpfully got up to get her some water.  When I handed her a cup, she looked at it, incredulous.  Her voice quivering, she asked, "Is this Styrofoam?"  I said yes.  She stared at the cup, mesmerized by this forbidden fruit.  When she finally found her words, she said, "I've never seen Styrofoam before.  We learned in school that it kills baby birds."

More about environmentalism in schools.

Liberal bias has tainted schools.  "They don't want another voice in the room," Mr. Horowitz said.  "The teacher unions and the Democratic Party have a monopoly on the public school systems. ... Teachers get paid for showing up.  No one in the world gets paid for showing up."  And, he continued, "the kids fail and there's no incentive to teach."  The nation's capital is a microcosm of that comment.  The Washington Teachers Union has consistently rejected attempts to hold teachers accountable for undereducated students for two decades.  All the while, D.C. students in traditional schools have been stuck on the lower rungs of the regional and national academic ladders.

Even abusive public employees can't get fired.  Some of the most stunning articles I've read in a long while were in the Los Angeles Times' 2009 investigative series, "Failure gets a pass," which documents the near impossibility of firing unionized public school teachers in the massive Los Angeles Unified School District — even those teachers credibly accused of sexually molesting or harassing their students.

The soft bigotry of low expectations, blackboard jungle edition.  The Obama administration's Department of Education has announced that it will crack down on "civil-rights infractions" in public schools, including alleged disparities in the disciplining of white and black students.  The notion behind this initiative is that black students are disproportionately subjected to discipline they don't deserve.  That doesn't seem to be the case in the Philadelphia public school system, however.  There, as Abigail Thernstrom and Tim Fay report, it appears that African American students frequently harass and attack Asian students without consequence.

Artificial stupidity.  People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid.  Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities.  In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators.

2,000 grades raised at Chicago Public Schools' Hyde Park Academy.  Last school year at struggling Hyde Park Academy High, more than 2,000 grades were boosted at least one notch — including more than 870 F's that were changed to passing marks, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis shows.

'Fire Them All' At Central Falls High.  [Scroll down]  Now, if you want to talk about "immoral, unjust, irresponsible, disgraceful and disrespectful," then let's talk about the very public schools themselves, which have been overrun with a hotbed of teach-by-rote, look-say, "self-esteem" training and a tidal wave of other brain rot geared much more toward indoctrination and the obliteration of the conceptual faculty than it is to any kind of "education" — but don't ever expect a labor union to support the idea that rewards should be based on performance.

Self-Esteem, Self-Destruction.  Memo to that Massachusetts school where children in physical education classes jump rope without using ropes:  Get some ropes. ... Those Massachusetts children are jumping rope without ropes because of a self-esteem obsession.  The assumption is that thinking highly of oneself is a prerequisite for high achievement.  That is why some children's soccer teams stopped counting goals (think of the damaged psyches of children who rarely scored) and shower trophies on everyone.  No child at that Massachusetts school suffers damaged self-esteem by tripping on the jump rope.

Group Work = Group Think.  Collaboration, or working in groups, is a favorite pedagogical strategy of hung-over graduate teaching assistants, soviet indoctrinators, educators with advanced degrees, and social studies teachers too dumb to do anything else. ... Teachers seem to love "group work."  It gives them a sense of power over children and allows them to catch up on Facebook or their nails.  I have college students coming to class expecting to spend class time sitting in little groups to discuss their "feelings."  Today, students don't expect to learn — especially from a teacher or professor.

Does DPS leader's writing send wrong message?  The president of the Detroit school board, Otis Mathis, is waging a legal battle to steer the academic future of 90,000 children, in the nation's lowest-achieving big city district.  He also acknowledges he has difficulty composing a coherent English sentence.

Obama Bets the Farm on American Stupidity.  Decades of entrusting the federal government with our children's education has led, inevitably, to the dumbing down of an entire nation.  Our public school system has failed to provide the most basic and elementary skills, while at the same time functioning as a ministry of propaganda for left wing causes.  The hijacking of our schools has been going on for decades; we are now experiencing the repercussions.  Only in a thoroughly dumbed down America would Barack Obama's astonishing ignorance of American history have gone unnoticed.

The Liberal Plot against American Education.  [Scroll down]  A dot-connecting "eureka" moment occurred when I read a November 29, 2009 New York Times editorial titled "Over-Punishment in Schools."  In an instant, I now possessed a valuable clue — an Exhibit A — to offer the jury to demonstrate how liberals are intentionally destroying American education so as to "help" minorities.

Change We Can Believe In.  [Scroll down slowly]  The combination of a therapeutic curriculum, with an increasingly illiterate student, has resulted in a national disaster.  Hint:  when students arrive ill-prepared from dysfunctional families as was common in the last few decades, they need more math, grammar, and basics, not more self-esteem and "I am somebody" pep courses.

Berkeley High May Drop "White" Science Labs.  On international science tests, American students perpetually lag behind their peers in other developed countries.  A logical response might be to beef up science programs in government schools, but logic is hard to come by in skin-deep-only-diversity-obsessed bureaucracies.

Out-of-Control Multiculturalism at Berkeley High School.  Berkeley High School (BHS) might drop its science labs from its curriculum.  The reason?  Too many white kids — or not enough non-white kids, depending on your perspective — were taking these classes.

The Fallacy of "Fairness": Part II.  In Berkeley, as in many other communities across the country, black and Latino students are not performing as well as Asian and white students. ... According to the principal, "Our community at Berkeley High School has failed the African-Americans."  Therefore "We need to bring everybody up — that's what this plan is about."  Surely no one, not even in Berkeley, seriously believes that you will "bring everybody up" by eliminating science teachers.

Suspicious test scores widespread in Georgia.  One in five Georgia public schools faces accusations of tampering with student answers on last spring's state standardized tests, officials said Wednesday, throwing the state's main academic measure into turmoil.  The Atlanta district is home to 58 of the 191 schools statewide that are likely to undergo investigations into potential cheating.

400 teachers may face firing over test scores.  More than 400 teachers in the Houston school district have performed so poorly that their students have lost ground, according to HISD, and those educators' jobs could be on the line if they don't improve.  HISD Superintendent Terry Grier is asking the school board to give final approval today to a policy that would allow the district to fire teachers whose students don't make enough progress on standardized tests.

The Myth that Liberals Care About Education:  Actually, educating our kids comes last to the Left — behind indoctrinating students and supporting their political allies in the teachers' unions.  This is why the Left has supported laughable nonsense like teaching Ebonics and bilingual education programs.  It's also why the Left opposes vouchers and even merit pay for good teachers — because the teachers' unions don't want the sad sacks in their ranks to look bad by comparison.  Liberals love to talk about education, but education in what?  Global warming?  Gay marriage?  Self-esteem exercises — or reading, writing, arithmetic, science, and history?

Bankrupt mentality a cancer in Detroit.  Detroit is not bankrupt — not officially, anyway.  But it may as well be. The former mayor, forced to resign in disgrace, is back in court to defend his spending practices.  A member of his inner circle cops to a bribery charge, auguring more to come.  The city is borrowing money to pay its bills.  Public schools students deliver the worst performance in the 40-year history of a national standardized test, even as teachers angrily denounce proposals to inject accountability into their next contract.

Religious illiteracy alarms educators.  Half of American high-school seniors surveyed recently thought Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple.  A McGill University professor's reference to the patience of Job drew blank stares from students in his religion course.  An art history teacher in France found children were mystified by the "strange bird" (a dove representing the Holy Ghost) common in Renaissance paintings.  Until recently, such confusion was little more than fodder for faculty-room jokes, evidence of the increasing secularism of Western societies.

Degrees in Dishonesty.  College education is a costly proposition with tuition, room and board at some colleges topping $50,000 a year.  Is it worth it?  Increasing evidence suggests that it's not.  Since the 1960s, academic achievement scores have plummeted, but student college grade point averages (GPA) have skyrocketed.

Metro Teachers Learn Gang Communication.  With a growing gang problem in some Metro [Nashville] Schools, the district is trying be proactive by teaching teachers how gang members communicate, breaking down everything from signs, the colors and clothes, code words used in class and the rappers students idolize.

The Editor says...
 Why stoop to the level of the gangs?  Is anyone ever expelled anymore?

Do American Schoolkids Need 9/11 Education?  In Shira Engelhart's 4th grade class in Virginia, students asked why the pilots on the plane didn't just say "no" to the hijackers on 9/11.  In his journal, an elementary school student offered a possible explanation that the attacks were perpetrated by German soldiers during the period when there were frequent wars between the U.S. and Germany.  When Ms. Engelhart asked her class what happened on 9/11, eight out of 24 of her students knew that something bad occurred but were not sure what, while the rest of her class did not know the day is significant.  Some students responded that it was their sibling's or parent's birthday.  Elyse Ross, a teacher in New York City, said her school did nothing to commemorate or educate the students about the day.

75 Percent of Oklahoma High School Students Can't Name the First President of the U.S..  Only one in four Oklahoma public high school students can name the first President of the United States, according to a survey released today [9/16/2009].  The survey was commissioned by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs in observance of Constitution Day on Thursday.

The Truth of Thanksgiving.  I asked my students if they knew the original intent of the day we now call Thanksgiving.  To my consternation, these were a few of those responses:  "Isn't it to celebrate the final time we showed unity with the Indians before we massacred them?"  "I think some important document might've been signed that day, right?"  "Does it symbolize how the Native Americans taught white people how to cook?"  These are some of your nation's college students... participants in American high academia.  Our country may be in serious trouble.

In Loco Parentis.  Decades of entrusting the federal government with our children's education has led, inevitably, to the dumbing down of an entire nation.  Our public school system has failed to provide the most basic and elementary skills, while at the same time functioning as a ministry of propaganda for left wing causes.  Nobody can seriously argue that our kids are getting smarter.  Teachers unions have done yeoman's work tirelessly crusading against accountability.  Standardized tests, we are told, are inherently biased against disadvantaged students.  Social promotions are essential to safeguard self-esteem.

Fun with Numbers.  In his important 1988 book, Cultural Literacy, E.D. Hirsch warned that "children in the U.S. are being deprived of the basic knowledge that would enable them to function in contemporary society."  Two decades later, we see the tragic results of our near-total failure to heed Hirsch's alarm.  The basic information that most high school and college graduates don't know continues to astound those of us of all ages who managed to receive a pretty decent, often non-public education.

Niagara Falls puts 18 at 'head of class' rather than just one.  When Niagara Falls High School seniors graduate today, they may hear some encouraging words from the valedictorian of their class.  Then again, maybe they won't.  That's because no one really knows who ranked No. 1 in the class of 2009.  Niagara Falls High School is the first in Niagara County to get rid of class rankings and valedictorians, a decision officials say was designed out of fairness.

The Editor says...
 Apparently fairness, not excellence, is what really counts.  Are the Olympics unfair because only one gold medal is given in each event?  Does it matter who finishes first in the Boston Marathon?  These 18 students have some tough lessons to learn:  Lessons that aren't being taught in public schools.

High School Physics: Grade F.  Physics is the fundamental natural science. ... Yet the vast majority of high school graduates never take a course in physics and know almost nothing about the role of the scientific revolution in creating the modern world.  While this alone constitutes criminal negligence by educators, there is an even worse crime of which they are guilty:  the students who do take physics are indoctrinated with a fundamentally false view of science.

A fairly complete history of the SAT:
 The SAT and Its Enemies.  The SAT was originally an acronym for Scholastic Aptitude Test.  When critics objected to the word "aptitude," for reasons we'll consider in a moment, SAT came to stand for Scholastic Assessment Test.  Marketers soon realized that test and assessment have pretty much the same meaning, making "SAT" a kind of solecism, one of those repetitive redundancies that repeats itself — bad form for a test measuring verbal ability.  So they gave up trying to make an acronym altogether.  "Assessment" was dropped, and so was "test," and "scholastic" too.  Today the SAT is officially just the SAT; the letters don't stand for anything, as if the test-makers were too timid to declare what they're up to.

Fraud in Academia:  Academic fraud is rife at many of the nation's most prestigious and costliest universities.  At Brown University, two-thirds of all letter grades given are A's.  At Harvard, 50 percent of all grades were either A or A- (up from 22 percent in 1966); 91 percent of seniors graduated with honors.  The Boston Globe called Harvard's grading practices "the laughing stock of the Ivy League."  Eighty percent of the grades given at the University of Illinois are A's and B's.  Fifty percent of students at Columbia University are on the Dean's list.

Torture in America's Schools.  At a public school in West Virginia, a 4-year-old girl with cerebral palsy and autism "was 'uncooperative,' so teachers restrained her in a chair with multiple leather straps that resembled a 'miniature electric chair.'"  The girl was later diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder.  "At least one of the three teachers responsible" is still at the school.  At a Texas public school, a 230-pound "special education teacher" placed a 129-pound boy of 14 "into a prone restraint and lay on top of him because he would not stay seated."  The student died.  The case was ruled a homicide but no charges were filed.  The teacher "currently teaches in Virginia and is licensed to instruct children with disabilities."

Return of the useful idiot.  Capitalism over socialism would seem to be about as settled as opinion gets, ranking somewhere up there with the earth being round, penicillin being better than bleeding, and that Shakespeare fellow being rather talented.  Primary culprits in the survey were those under the age of 30, who gave the nod to capitalism over socialism by only a 37 percent to 33 percent margin, with a clueless remaining 30 percent "unsure."  Several decades of politically correct leftist indoctrination in our high schools and colleges has apparently taken its toll.

Our Fading Heritage: Civics Quiz.  Are you more knowledgeable than the average citizen?  The average score for all 2,508 Americans taking [this] test was 49%; college educators scored 55%.  Can you do better?  Questions were drawn from past ISI surveys, as well as other nationally recognized exams.

Do Away With Public Schools.  We could say … that children are the future.  And a mind is a terrible thing to waste.  Because we can't leave any child behind.  The problem with all these bromides is that they leave out the simple fact that one of the surest ways to leave a kid "behind" is to hand him over to the government.

The Return of the Fuzzies?  In the 1990s, the Math Wars pitted two philosophies against each other.  One side argued for content-based standards — that elementary school students must memorize multiplication tables by third grade.  The other side argued for students to discover math, unfettered by "drill and kill" exercises.  When the new 1994 California Learning Assessment Test trained test graders to award a higher score to a child with a wrong answer (but good essay) than to a student who successfully solved a math problem, but without a cute explanation, the battle was on.

The Entitled:  [Scroll down]  They may never thrill at a formula elegantly devised, a mission truly accomplished, a sentence well written, a simple procedure done with care every time, an experiment perfected, a form that perfectly follows function. ... But why should they be any different from what they are?  Raised in an age when self-esteem is all, they're told how great they are from K to 12 and may graduate without the faintest idea of what greatness is, or demands.

The Culture of Entitlement.  Our lives are filled with measures of achievement.  From cleaning our rooms as children and taking a driver's test as teenagers to annual job reviews through the course of a career, there are benchmarks of achievement that follow us through the entirety of our lives.  As we grow, these benchmarks become more numerous and the stakes become higher.  Curiously, these benchmarks are being consistently eroded in primary and secondary education, a stage of life when they should be most emphasized.  Standard benchmarks in educational achievement are increasingly falling by the wayside and the results are troubling.

The Cure for Poverty.  A generation or two of American school children have grown up without a clue about how wealth is created.  If they ever think about the people who organize and create businesses, the people who actually create wealth and carry out the innovations that cause the rest of us to prosper, they think in terms of responsibility for bad things like pollution, discrimination, and other crimes.

Overhauling D.C. School Overcome by Violence.  D.C. Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee has dispatched a team of administrators and extra security to an Anacostia middle school where three teachers have been assaulted, a 14-year-old was charged with carrying a shotgun and students have run the hallways discharging fire extinguishers. ... "Kids sitting on desks, coming into classrooms and knocking over books, cussing, running through the halls," said Timothy Favors, who has visited Hart on multiple occasions because his son, a sixth-grader, is getting poor grades after doing well at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School.  "This isn't a school I would recommend for anyone.  You could have a perfectly normal child, and he would get flipped here like a pancake."

Give Me That Old-Time Religion.  [Scroll down]  Suddenly, local lenders were toiling (if they survived) in the easier liar-loan world fostered by Congress, Fannie and Freddie and guys with great tans in Los Angeles.  The old public-school system, once a tight ship in countless towns, knew that game.  The schools learned to shove another class of semi-educated bodies into the street every June and call them "graduates" the same way lenders called zero-down-payment borrowers "homeowners."

Health and safety reaches 'ridiculous' new heights.  A survey of nearly 600 teachers revealed the most restrictive rules being imposed in an attempt to avoid injuries and lawsuits. ... Generations of youngsters who made things out of empty egg boxes will be dismayed to learn that some schools have banned them for fear of salmonella poisoning.  And many teachers reported bans on footballs, snowball fights, conker games and running in the playground.

Murdoch canes US teachers.  Rupert Murdoch has issued a combative challenge to the Obama Administration:  take on the American teaching unions to rescue America's failing education system.  Speaking at a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mr Murdoch said that the greatest challenge to ensure US competitiveness in world markets is investment in human capital — and the American public school system had failed its students.

Ignorance reigns supreme.  With limited thinking abilities and knowledge of our heritage, we Americans set ourselves up as easy prey for charlatans, hustlers and quacks.  If we don't know the constitutional limits placed on Congress and the White House, politicians can do just about anything they wish to control our lives, from deciding what kind of light bulbs we can use to whether the government can take over our health care system or bailout failing businesses.  We just think Congress can do anything upon which they can get a majority vote.

Postponing reality.  Some of us were raised to believe that reality is inescapable.  But that just shows how far behind the times we are.  Today, reality is optional.  At the very least, it can be postponed.  Kids in school are not learning?  Not a problem.  Just promote them on to the next grade anyway.  Call it "compassion," so as not to hurt their "self-esteem."  Can't meet college admissions standards after they graduate from high school?  Denounce those standards as just arbitrary barriers to favor the privileged, and demand that exceptions be made.

District gives students exam answers, half still flunk.  The school district of Rochester, N.Y., gave teachers and students exact copies of the questions and answers that would appear on a mandatory test, only to have officials deny wrongdoing and watch half the students fail anyway.

Cheating?  No Homework?  No Problem In Plano ISD.  What's the best way to educate our children?  Should it be that if they cheat, they always get a second chance?  What about late school work?  Should students be allowed to turn it in at any time, no matter how late?  One North Texas school district is considering some drastic changes like these.

Karl Marx is Not the Father of Capitalism.  Sen. Barack Obama won for a simple reason:  historical amnesia.  I once asked a room full of college students who the father of capitalism was.  Crickets began chirping as blank stares shot my way.  "Oh, come on," I prompted.  "Does anyone want to take a guess?"  Finally, one bold student blurted out, "Isn't it Karl Marx?" ... Sadly, this is a true story.

How to Fire an Incompetent Teacher:  Joe Klein is chancellor of New York City's public school system, a monopoly so heavily regulated that sometimes it's unable to fire even dangerous teachers.  The series of steps a principal must take to dismiss an instructor is Byzantine.  "It's almost impossible," Klein complains. … The regulations are so onerous that principals rarely even try to fire a teacher.

You Can't Be Half-Socialist.  Our shoddy educational curriculum that has left most younger Americans so deficient in the study of history that vast numbers of them think George Washington was a Civil War general, or a lumberman who chopped down cherry trees.  They have no real understanding of the economic system that allowed us to become the wealthiest and most powerful nation since the Roman Empire ruled most of the known world 2000 years ago.

Don't Know Much About History.  "Whenever the people are well-informed," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789, "they can be trusted with their own government."  No doubt the Founding Fathers' faith in self-government would be challenged today with the reality of how little Americans know about their heritage. ... Shockingly, in some cases students knew less at the end of their college years than when they first set foot on campus.

No Teacher Left Behind.  There are some truly shocking statistics about teacher training in this week's report from the Education Schools Project.  According to "Educating School Teachers," three-quarters of the country's 1,206 university-level schools of education don't have the capacity to produce excellent teachers.  More than half of teachers are educated in programs with the lowest admission standards (often accepting 100% of applicants) and with "the least accomplished professors."  When school principals were asked to rate the skills and preparedness of new teachers, only 40% on average thought education schools were doing even a moderately good job.

Three strikes and you're in!  Every year, hundreds of would-be classroom teachers fail the MTEL, the Massachusetts Test for Education Licensure.  According to Charles Glenn at the Boston University School of Education, independent evaluations of teacher tests like the MTEL put the skills required at the eighth- to 10th-grade level.  Unfortunately, this is still too high for about 40 percent of the test takers each year.  So last week, the Democrats of the Massachusetts Senate voted unanimously for a waiver program covering wannabe teachers who fail the test at least three times.

Testing, Testing.  These exams represent the first nationwide attempts to determine what the students know about American history and culture.  And this year's report is as sobering as last year's was.  "The overall average score for the approximately 7,000 seniors who took the American civic literacy exam was 54.2 percent, an F," the report says.  And at some leading schools, seniors scored worse than freshmen.  "Students apparently 'unlearned' what they once knew," the report says, a chilling example of "negative learning."

American Education Fails Because It Isn't Education.  The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America … was written by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, a former official at the Department of Education in the Reagan Administration.  While there in 1981 - 1982, Charlotte found the "mother lode" hidden away at the Department.  In short, she found all of the education establishment's plans for restructuring America's classrooms.  Not only did she find the plans for what they intended to do, she discovered how they were going to do it and most importantly why.  Since uncovering this monstrous plan, Charlotte Iserbyt has dedicated her life to getting that information into the hands of parents, politicians and the news media.

High Self-Esteem, Low Test Scores.  There are new studies and new polls that strongly suggest that we are breeding increasingly stupid kids here in America. … They have no idea why December 7, 1941, was a day of infamy.  They also don't know what "infamy" means.  What makes the situation even more pathetic is that these kids, for the most part, have a terrifically high opinion of themselves.

Don't know much about math.  Today's elementary education majors actually score below the math SAT average of the typical college-bound high-school senior — a serious problem if teaching math well first requires mathematical aptitude.  This comes from a startling June report by the National Council on Teacher Quality, which found that the average would-be elementary-ed major scored a 483 on the math portion of the SAT as compared with 515 for the average college-bound student.

Cash Cow Stampede:  Colleges of Education Not Up to Snuff.  The short story is that our colleges of education are giving Ph.D.s to researchers who aren't qualified to hold a Ph.D.  These people, in turn, are providing the research on which public school policy decisions and teacher training is based.  [Arthur] Levine surveyed deans, faculty, education school alumni, K-12 school principals, and reviewed 1,300 doctoral dissertations and finds the research seriously lacking.

Dumbing Down America's Colleges:  Wake Forest University, Bates, Bowdoin, and a few other small schools have recently decided to make the SAT optional for students applying for admission.  Their argument for getting rid of these tests is that it will fling open the doors to "diversity" among the student body.  Wake Forest President Nathan Hatch made the ludicrous claim that jettisoning the SAT would help the school, "move closer to the goals of greater educational quality and opportunity."

Goodbye SAT?  "By making the SAT and ACT optional, we hope to broaden the applicant pool and increase access at Wake Forest for groups of students who are currently underrepresented at selective universities," said Martha Allman, director of admissions, in the WFU's new release.  She argued that downplaying the role of standardized tests would demonstrate how the university values "individual academic achievement" and "talent and character."  The change is also supposed to help "diversify" college's application base.

The Editor says...
 Allow me to cut through the candy coating.  What's really happening here is that Wake Forest University is lowering its standards (to zero) in order to admit students who are not qualified for higher education, as another facet of "affirmative action."  The harsh reality is that some students do well in school (and on the SAT) and others do not.  Some will go on to be doctors and rocket scientists and others will someday push mops and brooms in America's gas stations and burger joints.  The worst thing the university can do is to homogenize the student body and presume that all incoming students are equally capable, when they are not.

What's Up, Doc?  The prestige of honorary degrees falls to record lows.  Maya Angelou, who regularly refers to herself as "Dr. Angelou," has honorary doctorates only, and no undergraduate degree to go with them.  As an African American and a woman, she may well have more honorary doctorates than anyone in the history of this strange ritual.

The War on Common Sense:  With Darwin as king of the classroom and conscience but a mute passerby, the Left hurls endless invectives at the United States, denouncing both its greatness and that of its Founders, and almost nobody says a word.  Some want to say something but they are too embarrassed, while others do not even know they are allowed to speak.

Good teachers are key to student achievement, but bad ones are hard to fire.  A Cleveland teacher would be the first to tell you that not much learning went on in his high school classroom last spring.  Students typically chatted with each other or joined an ongoing card game in the back of the room while he tried to get them to do their work.  Kids who weren't even supposed to be in the class walked in, sat down and were dealt a hand.  On a particularly bad day in March, one of the teens grabbed the teacher's briefcase — containing his medication and checkbook — and raced out the door and down the hall.

Memphis High School:  Reading, Writing and Bumping & Grinding.  The purveyors of porn have got to be chuffed after watching Memphis school kids hump (en masse) both the floor and each other during Mitchell High School's "talent show" this month.  Yep, it doesn't look as if sellers of smut are going to be taking an additional night job to pay bills anytime soon because they have formally tapped the teenage market.  At least in Memphis they have.  Good job, Memphis.

Dumb down class, asks principal memo.  The principal of an East Harlem high school last month stunned his staffers by suggesting they dumb down their classes. … One teacher who received the memo said she and her colleagues were "outraged," especially because the school is one of 200 where teachers will receive $3,000 bonuses if their schools improve.  "It's like bribery," she said.  "It's not the achievement.  It's just the grades."

NSU professor loses job in dispute over grades.  At the end of this semester, Steven Aird will lose his job as an associate professor of biology at Norfolk State University for giving out too many F's.  He is not going quietly.  Aird says his termination is part of a dumbing-down of academic standards at NSU — a move by administrators to intimidate faculty members into passing undeserving students and rewarding inferior work.

Palm Beach County School sued over 'shamefully low' graduation rate.  Calling Palm Beach County's high school graduation rate "shamefully low," the American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday [3/18/2008] sued local educators to churn out more diplomas.  In a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of parents and students, the ACLU accused the Palm Beach County School Board and Superintendent Art Johnson of failing to provide students with a high-quality education guaranteed under the state constitution.

The Editor says...
 Yes, but... (1) If not everyone gets a diploma, that means the standards are high already, and (2) if anyone gets a diploma, that means the diplomas are attainable by students who are willing to apply themselves.  Students who flunk out of school have only themselves to blame.  I almost flunked out of high school (it can now be revealed), but it was because I never cracked open a book.

Teens losing touch with historical references.  Twenty-five years after the federal report A Nation at Risk challenged U.S. public schools to raise the quality of education, the study finds high schoolers still lack important historical and cultural underpinnings of "a complete education." … Among 1,200 students surveyed, 43% knew the Civil War was fought between 1850 and 1900 [and] 52% could identify the theme of 1984.

Report:  Philadelphia schools unsafe, unjust.  Philadelphia public schools are unsafe places where students who commit violent crimes are rarely punished and rehabilitated and with a disciplinary system that is "dysfunctional and unjust," according to a report by the district's safe-schools advocate.  In a blistering 72-page document obtained by The Inquirer, Jack Stollsteimer describes a district where students who assault teachers or come to school with guns are not removed from classrooms, a violation of federal and state law.

Hillary Clinton:  When Bill Clinton returned to the Arkansas governor's mansion in 1983, he appointed his wife to lead the education-reform movement, the centerpiece of his agenda.  After holding hearings in all 75 counties, Mrs. Clinton was instrumental in raising the state sales tax by 1 percentage point, significantly increasing spending on primary and secondary education and establishing teacher-competency exams, which, it turned out, could be passed with eighth-grade language and math skills.  A decade-and-a-half after her reforms were enacted, 87 percent failed the state's 11th-grade exit exam in math….

Oregon Senate:  Former prostitutes should be able to teach.  Women who have been convicted on misdemeanor prostitution charges could be eligible for an Oregon teaching license, under legislation that passed the state Senate Friday [5/11/2007], 20-to-7.

More than half of minority teacher applicants fail test.  More than half of black and Hispanic applicants for teaching jobs in Massachusetts have failed a crucial state licensing test.  Since the start of the test nearly a decade ago, 52 percent of Hispanics and 54 percent of blacks failed the writing portion of the test compared to a 23 percent failure rate among white applicants.

Public Schools, Public Menace.  Public schools can cripple your child's ability to read.  Public schools can wreck your child's ability to do math, with "fuzzy" math curriculums.  Public schools violate your God-given parental rights to choose who teaches your child and what he is taught.

Would a name change help algebra students?  Would Algebra 2 be as difficult if it were called something else?  State Sen. Wayne Kuipers, R-Holland, recently told a gathering of Kent County school board members that he believes more students would pass the upper-level math course if it were called something less scary.

The Dumbing Down of America:  Trillions of dollars were thrown at the problem.  And if one judged by the asserted toughening up of courses and rising grades of seniors, it appeared we had made marvelous progress. … However, it is all a giant fraud, exposed as such by the performances of high school seniors on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams known as the "nation's report card."

Hand over the cell.  Principals in at least three suburban schools have searched students' cellphone text messages when they suspected the students of cheating, drug abuse or other school violations.  Officials in the Douglas and Jefferson school districts say policies that allow them to search lockers, backpacks and cars parked on school grounds also authorize searches of cellphones when there is a "reasonable suspicion" of wrongdoing.

The Editor says...
 The most practical solution to the problem of cheating via cell phones would be to blanket the school buildings with wideband RF noise to jam all cellular calls.  Or build the schools with screened walls and ceilings to prevent signals from entering or leaving.  Jamming is not permitted by the FCC; however, it is routinely done in other countries (e.g., Israel), where the overall benefit to society is more important than some individual's hurt feelings.  And in my opinion it should be done in this country, at least in middle schools, high schools, libraries, jails and prisons.  Jamming should also be permitted on private property such as restaurants, movie theaters, churches and museums.  But I predict it never will be, because the FCC will argue that police and fire departments need to be able to communicate everywhere, all the time.  That's just a red herring.  The government's greatest concern is control, not public safety.

Millersport school locked down briefly this morning after a mercury spill.  Officials locked down the Millersport Junior-Senior High School this morning after a mercury spill, which appears to be the result of a broken thermometer.

The Editor says...
 One broken thermometer and they lock down the school?  Incredible!  When I was in school, the science lab kept several pounds of mercury on hand for the old "homemade barometer" demonstration.  When I was a little kid, a broken thermometer was an opportunity to roll a little blob of mercury around in the palm of my hand -- until I dropped it and it disappered into the carpet.  If mercury is as dangerous as the over-reactive government nannies would now have us believe, how did any of us survive the 1960's?

States Help Schools Hide Minority Scores.  States are helping public schools escape potential penalties by skirting the No Child Left Behind law's requirement that students of all races must show annual academic progress.  With the federal government's permission, schools aren't counting the test scores of nearly two million students when they report progress by racial groups, an Associated Press computer analysis found.

Remedial U:  One might question whether a significant portion of college students should even bother signing up for post-secondary classes at all.  "Over one-third of first- and second-year college students have taken remedial courses," according to the College Board's Trends in College Pricing. … Of those who take such classes, two-thirds seek instruction in math while more than a quarter take remedial reading courses.  A tenth of those requiring remediation need guidance with study skills, which makes you really wonder why they are in college in the first place.

Teaching America:  Too many of our high-school students do not graduate high school, and of those who do, too many do not know the basic facts of their own country's history.  This year's National Assessment of Education Progress (our "Nation's Report Card") revealed that over 50-percent of our nation's high-school students — our population reaching voting age — are functionally illiterate in their knowledge of U.S. History.

No grades, no homework, no tests:  Students set the rules at this New York City school.  At this school, students don't get grades, don't have homework, don't take tests, and don't even have to go to class — unless they want to.  "You can do basically anything at any time, and it's just a lot more fun because sometimes when you need a break at regular schools you can't get it," said Sophia Bennett Holmes, 12, an aspiring singer-actress-fashion designer.

State faults teachers of English learners.  Hundreds of students in Arizona are trying to learn English from teachers who don't know the language, state officials say.  The kids are taught by teachers who don't know English grammar and can't pronounce English words correctly.  Last year, for example, a Mesa teacher stood in front of a class of language learners and announced, "Sometimes, you are not gonna know some."  A teacher in Phoenix's Creighton Elementary District asked her kids, "If you have problems, to who are you going to ask?"

Get A Public School Clue.  "Once as revered as Mom and apple pie, the public school brand has crashed and burned spectacularly since the 1970s, when the general public and most parents believed their children's schools were better than when they attended them," [Nora] Carr observes.  "Long-term studies by Public Agenda show that the percentage of the public expressing a 'great deal' or 'quite a lot' of confidence in America's public schools has declined from 54 percent in 1977 to just 37 percent in 2005."

Education and Citizenship:  The report finds that the typical undergraduate's familiarity with the history and institutions of the American regime improves negligibly during his or her college years, and it's not due to a lack of room for improvement.  What's more, the price tag attached to any given degree turns out to be relatively irrelevant when it comes to these subjects.  Students attending expensive schools do not generally score higher on the survey.

Lindsay Lohan offers words of condolence to Altman's family:  'Be adequite'.  Had she been on one of her legendary party benders?  Or was this Exhibit A for the indictment of America's education system? … Patt Morrison, a columnist with the Los Angeles Times, [called] the letter "alarmingly incoherent" and questioning what it was Lohan had learnt at the Long Island schools that gave her straight As.

Low scores + delays = spin.  Let's do the math.  North Carolina education leaders had planned — for a third time — to delay release of end-of-grade math test results for 3rd and 8th grade students.  They pushed the release to next Thursday — two days after Tuesday's election.  But, withering under the avalanche of skepticism over the reasons for delay, officials changed course.

Can You Say 'Good Morning Boys and Girls'?  Only If You're a Bigot.  If the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has its way, teachers won't be able to acknowledge that there are boys and girls in their classrooms.  Or that boys are any different from girls.

Physics By Induction:  The Genius of Learning Science The Proper Way.  It seems that science is not taught in the public middle schools today — it has been replaced by … hands on "experiments" which are really pointless diversions.  At the high school level, most students are exposed to some science, and most are required to take a physics class.  But these physics classes generally suffer from a serious [methodological] problem.

More Embarrassing Education News.  For many years North Carolina's Department of Public Instruction has set the cut score — the percentage of questions a student must get right to receive a proficient designation on end-of-grade tests — so low that on some tests students could meet the standard simply by guessing.

Scientifically Wrong, But Politically Correct:  Affirmative action for women and minorities is similarly pervasive in science textbooks, to absurd effect.  Al Roker, the affable black NBC weatherman, is hailed as a great scientist in one book in the Discovery Works series.  It is common to find Marie Curie given a picture and half a page of text, but her husband, Pierre, who shared a Nobel Prize with her, relegated to the role of supportive spouse.  In the same series, Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb, is shown next to black scientist Lewis Latimer, who improved the light bulb by adding a carbon filament.  Edison's picture is smaller.

How To Teach Your Child:  What It Means To Learn.  Pick up any grade school science textbook and you will see the same problem.  Page one usually displays in vivid color a diagram of the structure of an atom.  The chapter tells the students that an atom is a tiny unit of matter, that it has a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons, that the nucleus is surrounded by electrons, and so on.  The question that such books make no attempt to answer is:  Why should a child believe this drawing any more than he believes the Saturday morning cartoons?

Vote or Else.  Shocked to learn that only 37 percent of students vote, an English professor required her students to vote. ... George Leef of the John Locke Foundation disapproves:  "The job of an English professor is to teach English.  That's it.  Adding non-academic requirements to a course is objectionable, no matter how important the professor may believe them to be."

Colleges accused of failing civics test.  Seniors at UC Berkeley, the nation's premier public university, got an F in their basic knowledge of American history, government and politics in a new national survey, while students at Stanford University didn't do much better, getting a D.

Dumbing down democracy.  As part of a program to strengthen the understanding of America's history and political institutions — what it calls "civic literacy" — [the Intercollegiate Studies Institute] commissioned a survey of more than 14,000 randomly selected freshmen and seniors at 50 four-year colleges and universities nationwide.  The students were given 60 multiple-choice questions, testing their knowledge of US history, government, foreign affairs, and economics.  The results were atrocious.

'A' Is for Awful.  Self-evaluations by Michigan schools are meaningless.  Self-esteem has run amok.  The Detroit News reports:  "One Detroit elementary, for example, gave itself a perfect score for its facilities despite being closed in October because it started sinking into the ground."

Our gold-star world:  While parents and politicians have been pounding the table demanding greater academic performance in the "Three R's," social scientists, psychologists and education bureaucrats have slowly, but ingeniously reframed the battle onto more favorable turf.  Rather than compete head-to-head in a battle we cannot win, these dedicated teachers and administrators have elevated the importance of the one area where no country can compete with us:  Self-esteem.

When Teachers Flunk, They Sue.  By requiring minority teacher applicants to pass a basic competency test, the Board of Education of New York City may have discriminated against them, a federal court of appeals has ruled.  The test measures their mastery of basic college material, including science, math, history, and the arts, as well as written communication skills in an essay.  To pass, applicants must answer about 66 percent of the questions correctly and score at least 60 percent on the essay.  The applicants demonstrated their scores on the examination were consistently lower than white applicants, the court stated.  "Between 1993 and 1999, the average pass rate for white test takers ranged from 91% to 94%, while the average pass rate for African American candidates ranged from 51% to 62%, and the average pass rates for Latino candidates ranged from 47% to 55%," the court stated.  All of the minority applicants "tended" to do the worst on the essay section of the test, according to the court.

Lecturer calls for spelling amnesty on students' top 20 errors.  Faced with a flood of basic spelling mistakes, you might expect a university lecturer to demand his students pay more attention to the dictionary.  But one don is so fed up with having to correct his undergraduates' errors that he is calling for something rather more unorthodox — a spelling amnesty.

History Without History, Spelling Without Spelling:  Tiffany Charles got a B in history last year at her Montgomery County high school, but she is not sure what year World War II ended.  She cannot name a single general or battle, or the man who was president during the most dramatic hours of the 20th century.  Yet the 16-year-old does remember in some detail that many Japanese American families on the West Coast were sent to internment camps.  "We talked a lot about those concentration camps," she said.

Dumbed Down and Out in High School:  Some San Jose area teachers are dumping the D as a passing grade.  They say students who are doing the minimum to get by will just have to work a little harder.  California's public universities won't accept anything below C- on an academic transcript.

The English in Us:  In 1910, when Robert Frost taught at a high school in rural New Hampshire, he expected his students to memorize poems by William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Rudyard Kipling.  Today it is hard to imagine a high school teacher assigning a similar program. … Nowadays few high school and also not many college students have read Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, or Kipling.

Public Schools are Not Accountable to Parents.  The past several decades have witnessed the systematic "dumbing down" of public education:  the curriculum got diluted with non-academic subjects and frivolous activities; proven methods for teaching reading, writing, math, science and reasoning got replaced with unproven, inferior methods; and objectivity got sacrificed to "political correctness" propaganda, such as socialism, environmentalism, multiculturalism and moral relativism.

Tempers run high at school board meeting.  Attorneys for the Mountain Empire Unified School District have determined that a former teacher accused of molesting a 9-year-old girl in his class cannot be blocked from serving on the school board.

Math Instruction Doesn't Add Up.  California's standards call for students to learn algebra in eighth grade.  Yet the graduation exam was postponed because so many students were flunking the math portion of the test, which required only a 55 percent [score].  Only the hardest questions required high school math skills.

Civics survey:  engaged, but not informed.  Nearly one in four Oregon high school students surveyed identified Gov. Ted Kulongoski as a U.S. senator, and only one in four correctly identified Gordon Smith and Ron Wyden as the state's actual U.S. senators.

Felon kept job after principal got notice.  In May 2003, a probation officer told a Jackson Public Schools principal that a woman who works with children in an elementary classroom had just been convicted of dealing cocaine.  But William Patterson, then principal at Wilson Elementary School, didn't share the information with his superiors at the central office.

College stupidity:  Parents are paying an average tuition of $21,000, and at some colleges over $40,000, to have their children exposed to anti-Americanism and academic nonsense.  According to a 2000 American Council of Trustees and Alumni study, "Losing America's Memory:  Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century," not one of the top 50 colleges and universities today requires American history of its graduates.

Pacifists versus peace.  One of the many failings of our educational system is that it sends out into the world people who cannot tell rhetoric from reality.  They have learned no systematic way to analyze ideas, derive their implications and test those implications against hard facts.  "Peace" movements are among those who take advantage of this widespread inability to see beyond rhetoric to realities.

Academics KO Grammar Again.  [Nan] Miller taught writing at Meredith College in Raleigh for two and a half decades. … "From my conversations with senior faculty at both North Carolina State and UNC, I learned the following," she reports.  "The new English 101 is a continuation of the 'disastrous' public school trend to have students work in groups."  "The new English 101 continues the public school trend to go easy on grammar gaffes, so enrollees in upper level classes have 'startling' problems with correctness."  She means linguistically, not politically.

Q:  Where is the United Kingdom?  A:  You're standing in it.  One in five British children cannot find the United Kingdom on a map of the world, research has found.  The study ... also showed one in 10 children were not able to name a single continent and more than 20,000 children in London did not know they lived in England's capital city.

British schools told it's no longer necessary to teach right from wrong.  Schools would no longer be required to teach children the difference between right and wrong under plans to revise the core aims of the National Curriculum.  Instead, under a new wording that reflects a world of relative rather than absolute values, teachers would be asked to encourage pupils to develop "secure values and beliefs".

Leaving "School" Out of High School:  Most students will do what is expected of them, but so often more is expected on the athletic fields, in after-school clubs and jobs, in volunteer organizations, and in social circles than in the classroom.  School must be more of a priority in high school if students are to succeed in college and beyond.

The Race to the Bottom:  Keeping an Eye on State Standards.  While No Child Left Behind (NCLB) requires all students to be "proficient" in math and reading by 2014, the precedent-setting 2002 federal law also allows each state to determine its own level of proficiency.  It's an odd discordance at best.  It has led to the bizarre situation in which some states achieve handsome proficiency results by grading their students against low standards, while other states suffer poor proficiency ratings only because they have high standards.

Ex-dean says Harvard run like day care.  Harvard University leaders are running the school like "a day care center for college students," trying to dazzle undergraduates with concerts and a new pub, rather than teaching them to be responsible citizens, a former Harvard dean writes in a newly released book.

The Confusion on Campus.  It is hard not to get the feeling that there is something amiss at American schools. … Parents preparing to shell out a small fortune for their children's education will want to read [Harry] Lewis's book as they ask themselves:  What exactly are we paying for?

The Arrogance of the Not-My-Fault Generation.  Having worked in the field of education for most of my professional life, I find it incredibly frightening that teachers with perfectly honorable intentions can end up losing their jobs and schools lose money over incidents such as this.

Study Paints a Bleak Picture of Chicago Public School Grads' College Success.  Of every 100 freshmen entering a Chicago public high school, only about six will earn a bachelor's degree by the time they're in their mid-20s, according to a first-of-its-kind study released Thursday [4/20/2006] by the Consortium on Chicago School Research.  The prospects are even worse for African-American and Latino male freshmen, who only have about a three percent chance of obtaining a bachelor's degree by the time they're 25.

Birth leave sought for girls.  Kayla Lewis, a senior at East High School, asked school-board members last month to establish maternity leave for students who are new mothers.  Pregnant students in a Denver high school are asking for at least four weeks of maternity leave so they can heal, bond with their newborns and not be penalized with unexcused absences.

The Editor says...
 These ignorant girls are determined to give birth to illegitimate bastard offspring so they can get on the welfare state gravy train and blame society for their poverty.  Fifteen years later (maybe sooner) the cycle repeats.  The school is merely accomodating and enabling these girls, rewarding their negligence, ignorance and poor judgement.  Instead, the school officials should be ostracizing, humiliating and shaming them all for the betterment of society.

Dropout nation?  Time magazine's latest cover story, "Dropout Nation," illustrates a serious educational crisis — not in the nation's high schools, which are bad enough, but among the nation's writers and editors.  One critical lesson our schools have failed to teach aspiring journalists is that when something sounds too bad to be true, it probably isn't.

How Low Can We Go?  SAT scores dropped significantly this year.  Blame the schools, not the test. … Colleges and parents are wondering:  Is there something wrong with the new test?  Or are our children not being taught what they should know?

A new civil right:  I never knew — until "The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University" told me — that it was a civil right to get a high-school diploma now matter how little you know, and consequently to have a high-school diploma that certifies precisely nothing about your abilities and which therefore has roughly no value in the job market.

Giving out bad Marx:  Love, hate, war, jealousy, greed, charity, faith, hope, despair:  these are the universals of human experience, and great and ancient literature speaks to us about these themes from across the years.  Sadly, a small-mindedness has infected Australia's education system, producing an obsession with politics and power relationships that has infected the nation's classrooms like a mould.

Boca Raton high school eases penalties for students' swearing.  Students say they hear a lot of profanity on television, and a high school easing its penalties for swearing now says television is where they should look for model language.

Higher education in decline, Part II.  A professor said that while he was trying to help a student with a problem, he asked her, "What is 20,000 minus 600?"  He went on to say, "She literally could not answer without the calculator."  He rhetorically questioned, "Should a person receive a college degree that cannot answer that in their head?" … Such students are academic cripples and don't belong in college in the first place.

College Course Analyzes 'Sex and the City'.  The class has it all: oodles of talk about sex, man-hating theories (the most distinguished tradition of feminist scholarship), and academic standards so low that an anencephalic gorilla or a football player (presuming any difference between the two) can easily pass.

Who says there are no stupid questions?  People who actually have college degrees have asked me some equally brilliant questions, like the following:  "Why do you consider homosexuality to be abnormal simply because most people don't do it?  Or how about this one:  "Why do you talk about us trans-sexuals as if we are somehow different from other people?"  Perhaps my favorite is the following:  "What makes you think that all illegal aliens have broken the law."

What happened to history?  We rarely mention our forebears.  These were the millions of less fortunate Americans who built the country, handed down to us our institutions, and died keeping them safe.  Such amnesia about them was not always so.  Public acknowledgment of prior generations characterized the best orations of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, who looked for guidance from, and gave thanks to, their ancestors.  We rarely do.

George Washington, say who?  Tests, surveys and studies further confirm America's increasing ignorance.  A test of high school seniors, for example, found that only one in ten was proficient in American history.  A survey of fourth graders found that seven of ten thought the original thirteen colonies included Illinois, Texas and California.  Six of ten couldn't say why the Pilgrims came to America.  Only seven percent of fourth graders could name "an important event" that took place in Philadelphia in 1776.  When seniors at the nation's top 55 universities were asked to name America's victorious general at the Battle of Yorktown, only 34 percent named George Washington.

Study Shows Most College Students Lack Skills.  Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.  Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.

What's More Important — Performance in Sports or in Academics?  Students who do good academic work in high school and who are also good athletes get much more recognition for their sports achievements than they do for their academic work, even though they may have put forward the same high level of effort for both.

Canceled spelling bee reinstated.  A school superintendent in Rhode Island reversed a decision by administrators who canceled the district's annual spelling bee because they thought the event's awarding of just one winner violated the federal No Child Left Behind Act's aim that all children should succeed.

Equal Rights, Equal Opportunity, and Now Equal Outcome. For nearly half a century, we have gone through integration, suitability, equality, equity, adequacy, and now we are looking at equal outcome.  And, it doesn't seem to matter that the only way to accomplish equal outcome is by focusing all of the attention on the worst students and by lowering the standards needed to pass.  In addition, it means abandoning those students who are above the lowered standards.  The end goal is not to produce smart students but to produce equal students.  It is the only possible way to produce equality in learning — it's simply called "dumbing down."  It doesn't seem to matter that equality cannot be given or bought — it must be earned, and that's this the one thing that hasn't been tried.

Striving for mediocrity:  The war against excellence.  When my oldest son went through one of my towns "excellent" public middle schools, I was dismayed at the school's dismal lack of focus on academics.  The classes seemed more geared at social conditioning than at teaching anything challenging and interesting.  In a science class, my son learned no science at all in the first two weeks.  They spent lots of time discussing rules, getting along, self-esteem, and related watered-down gruel.

TV and Test Scores Don't Mix.  A new study finds that children who have TV sets in their bedrooms score lower on school tests than those who don't, according to the New York Times. … The issue may have more to do with parental control.  Parents may not be aware if their children are up all night watching television, or if they are watching inappropriate programming.

Gym lite:  Gym classes used to encourage physical fitness through calisthenics and dodge ball games, but now there's a new trend in physical education:  cup stacking.  Kids don't run or jump in this game, and no one suffers the humiliation of being last picked for the team.

Open education to innovation.  Quoting the Russian immigrant father of one of the five students selected to represent the U.S. in the International Physics Olympiad:  "I don't like saying this but math and physics are not the strong side of American schools."  He says that from what he has observed in his daughter's educational experience here, what U.S. students learn in twelfth-grade math classes, Russian students study in eighth and ninth grades.

Believe it or not.  Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., enforces an academic policy that defies belief.  "Success Equals Effort" (SEE) is a policy where 60 percent of a freshman's grade is based on effort and the rest on academic performance.  [For example...] Imagine that a freshman gets an A for effort in his algebra class but has virtually no grasp of the material, earning him an F grade.  Under the college's SEE policy, the student would be assigned a C for the course.

How Title IX is holding us back in Athens:  Should the gold medals be divided equally among the participating countries?  Of course not, nor should money be allocated equally to everyone who shows up.  Yet that is what Title IX regulations impose on our schools and colleges.

Public School Gets a Lesson In Work Ethic.  Day in, day out, students in American public schools … either witness failure go uncorrected or see it portrayed as success.  Finally, one problem too large to be ignored has prompted the very kind of action that will await many inadequately prepared students once they enter the adult workforce, particularly if they choose to embark upon a career in private enterprise where they will be forced to learn quickly that more is required from them than just showing up for work; results are demanded.

2 lazy 2 teach.  Have you checked your child's summer reading list?  Beware:  Some lame-brained school officials have decided to ditch the sonnets of Shakespeare for the tripe of Tupac.

Should We Have Government Schools?  While billions more dollars are poured into this system, children keep getting dumber and school campuses are becoming ever more dangerous places to be.  Can this really be accidental, or is there a more sinister plan for the "state's children"?

Panel Finds Environmental Education Lacking in Science.  A report issued April 2 [1997] by a panel of scientists, economists, and educators concludes that many environmental education materials used in the nation's schools do not give students enough science and economics to enable them to understand the complex environmental challenges of the next century.

National Teacher Certification Labeled a "Hoax".  Despite the exalted rank implied by the term "National Board Certified," the content knowledge required of K-12 teachers who want to earn such a title through the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is only that of an advanced high school class, according to a recent commentary published in the Teacher College Record.

"Science" and the Fictitious World Of Educators:  There is much more science used in repairing an automatic washer than there is in the study of astronomy.  Astronomers would more accurately be called hobbyists than scientists.  Most astronomers are not capable of building or making a telescope, or grinding their own lenses and mirrors.  Most astronomers do not know how to do anything except observe and describe heavenly bodies, and then arrive at false conclusions about the nature of our planetary systems — conclusions which they must alter every few years as new information is gathered.

To Study vs To Memorize:  The current educational system is built on the false assumption that memorizing a subject is the same thing as studying a subject.  Yet, in reality studying and memorizing are two very different processes.  To study something is to explore all of the possibilities of that thing.  To study a thing is to take it apart, look at the different aspects of it, weigh one aspect against another and draw some conclusions about the nature of that thing.

I Are a Student.  No wonder so many whining citizens loathe profit.  Profit points out in stark clarity their own shortcomings as they slink through life dependent upon the State and its immoral depredations on their betters.

"What luck for rulers that men do not think."
— Adolf Hitler    

Effective State Standards for U.S. History: A 2003 Report Card.  In the post-9/11 world, it's more important than ever for young Americans to learn the history of their nation, the principles on which it was founded, the workings of its government, the origins of our freedoms, and how we've responded to past threats from abroad.  Yet assessment after assessment and study after study shows that history is the core subject about which young Americans know least.

Needham High School Halts Publication of Honor Roll.  Needham High School has abandoned its long-standing practice of publishing the names of students who make the honor roll in the local newspaper.  Principal Paul Richards said a key reason for stopping the practice is its contribution to students' stress level in "This high expectations-high-achievement culture."

[The article above hints at the real reason, but never quite lays it out:  The honor roll is no longer published because it might hurt the feelings of the other students.  Keep reading...]

Schools banish class honor rolls:  Nashville officials fear underachievers could be offended.

In England...
 A show of hands 'can harm shy children'.  Asking pupils to put their hands up when they think they know the answer to a question in class could make quiet children fall behind, according to government advice.  Researchers have identified a group of youngsters aged between seven and 11 who struggle to keep up with classmates despite doing well in previous years.

Anti-intellectualism:  Why Nerds are Unpopular.  I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story:  there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular.  Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Cut on the Bias. Want to stop educators from dumbing down books and tests?  Laugh at them.

Textbook publishers do back flips to avoid offense.  Several years ago, a bias and sensitivity review panel working on contract for the federal government ruled that, when testing the reading comprehension of fourth graders, any mention of owls ought to be verboten.  The reason — that owls are taboo to the Navajo and might upset someone of that ancestry — may have seemed farfetched, had the panel not made an even stranger decision to eliminate a story about a dolphin.  That story was judged to be "regionally biased" and potentially confusing to kids who didn't live near an ocean.

"Buffy" class has a stake in education.  The lights dim, and on the classroom screen comes yet another installment of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the story of a hot blond babe who, for seven critically acclaimed seasons, Kung-Fu fought a relentless onslaught of demons plaguing Sunnydale, Calif.

The Historians vs. American History:  It is now obvious that American children know very little about the history of their own nation.  This past year the U.S. Department of Education released its History Report Card and the results were predictably awful: 57 percent of high school seniors flunked even a basic knowledge of American history, and only 10 percent tested at grade level.

Study says "Language police" are harming children.  Activist groups acting as "language police" are exerting increasing control over American schools, resulting in bored, cynical and "dumbed down" children, according to a three-year study of education policy.

Book review:  The Language Police —  How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.  Before Anton Chekhov and Mark Twain can be used in school readers and exams, they must be vetted by a bias and sensitivity committee.  The New York State Education Department omitted mentioning Jews in an Isaac Bashevis Singer story about prewar Poland, or blacks in Annie Dillard's memoir of growing up in a racially mixed town.  California rejected a reading book because The Little Engine That Could was male.  Diane Ravitch maintains that America's students are compelled to read insipid texts that have been censored and bowdlerized, issued by publishers who willingly cut controversial material from their books — a case of the bland leading the bland.

A Nation Still at Risk:  This month marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of one federal report that did not end up on a shelf gathering dust, but instead inspired significantly increased spending on public education, although this ultimately produced little progress in student achievement.  The report included two of the most famous statements ever made about the nation's public schools, that we were facing "a rising tide of mediocrity," and "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."

What's Wrong With Education Today:  Make-believe equality at the high school level fools nobody, least of all the kids.  White kids at Menlo-Atherton refer to the non-honors courses as "ghetto courses," while a black kid who enrolled in honors courses had his friends demand to know why he was taking "that white-boy course."

Making the Grade:  Michigan's public schools are upset at the prospect of being graded in the same way teachers grade students.

First Amendment survey finds knowledge lacking.  More than two-thirds of college students and administrators who participated in a national survey were unable to remember that freedom of religion and the press are guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Errors and Censorship:  U.S. textbooks tell distorted story.  For years, the textbooks used by most American children have been riddled with errors.  Recent publicity has once again brought to light the issue of factually incorrect yet politically-correct textbooks.

Textbooks are Politically Correct -- And Inaccurate.  The need to please or not offend every possible constituency has resulted in books that are inaccurate, trivial and boring.

California Offers Textbook Case of Political Correctness:  A textbook review process in California has changed or eliminated references to everything from the Founding Fathers to hot dogs, leaving many to charge the state with distorting history in the name of political correctness.

Why U.S. students flunk geography:  We didn't have TV or the Internet.  All we had were newspapers, magazines, school atlases, maps from gas stations.  Today's American students have television, the Internet, videos, travel books, magazines, atlases, CDROMs, and yet they seem to have a kind of cognitive block against learning geographic facts.

Modern Education Kills.  It makes us unfit to live.

Why Christians don't belong in government schools - Part 1:  "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."  The rantings of a right-wing fanatic?  No, it's the conclusion of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, convened 21 years ago by U.S. Education Secretary Terrence Bell.

Study Reveals Five Decades of "Dumbing Down" in American Education:  A new poll finds that American college seniors today are just slightly more knowledgeable than high-school graduates of half a century ago.

American education: Running hard, and last:  As the debate over how to fix America's schools continues with politicians beholden in one way or another to teachers' unions suggesting that it is the advocates of vouchers, tax credits and home schooling who are the true enemies of education, some recent statistics from the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are worthy of note.

Teacher on leave after distributing letter:  He says in a letter to other teachers that most of the poorly behaved students at the school are African-American.  "Class is something they do between the passing periods, lunch or nutrition break, when they chase each other in the hallways, into classrooms, yelling at the top of their lungs…"

Cognitive Child Abuse in Our Math Classrooms:  The central cause of our children's incompetence in math is not the schools' lack of "accountability," but their embrace of the whole-math approach, which undermines the student's conceptual capacity.

Study decries lack of teacher qualifications in public schools:  An estimated one in four public middle- and high-school classes is taught by a teacher not trained in the subject - and the problem is much worse in schools that serve poor and minority students.

Educated idiots:  John Taylor Gatto says in the September Harper's that our factory school system is doing exactly what it was designed to do when American educators copied it, in toto, from the Prussian model 150 years ago.  It is producing a populace of uncritical, barely-educated worker bees, suited mostly to punching buttons, consuming the latest new gadgets and mindlessly watching TV.

High Schools Flunk Science:  The vast majority of high school graduates never take a course in physics and know almost nothing about the role of the scientific revolution in creating the modern world.  While this alone constitutes criminal negligence by educators, there is an even worse crime of which they are guilty:  the students who do take physics are indoctrinated with a fundamentally false view of science.

Hey-Ho, Hey-Ho Government Schools Have Got To Go!  Before 1852 compulsory education did not exist in America, yet in 1812 Pierre Dupont published "Education in the United States", in which he stated that fewer than four out of every thousand Americans could not read and do numbers well.  Today, compulsory attendance in government schools is the Rule (quite literally), while the failure of that system to educate children has been documented time and again.

"Teaching to the test":  Unfortunately, most of the people who call themselves educators have not been doing much educating over the past few decades, as shown by American students repeatedly coming in at or near the bottom on international tests.

"Teaching to the test", Part II:  Educational philosophies that have been put to the test in other countries — Russia in the 1920s and China in the 1960s, for example — and which have failed miserably there, as they are now failing here, continue in vogue because there are no consequences for failure here.  Not so long as teachers have iron-clad tenure and get paid by seniority rather than results.

"Teaching to the test", Part III:  In the case of the dominant educational fads of our times, many have been tried out before in other countries.  Their failures there should have warned us that they were likely to fail here as well.

Dumbing Us Down : The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling:  This radical treatise on public education has been a New Society Publishers' bestseller for 10 years!  Thirty years of award-winning teaching in New York City's public schools led John Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory governmental schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders as cogs in the industrial machine.

Educational censorship: bland leading the bland:  "Sensitivity" censorship is a huge industry in the world of education.  Textbook publishers and testmakers hire people to draw up sensitivity guidelines.  In school systems there are more people who apply guidelines, and still more who review and argue about the censorship process.  Reviewers debated whether to censor a reference to Mount Rushmore, since Lakota Indians believe the monument intrudes on their sacred ground.  "Adopt-a-highway" litter control programs are controversial, too.  They may offend adopted children.

The "Fix" That's Destroying Education In America:  Without a strong basic education, today's children are mere pawns in the hands of those who have a far different world in mind than the one in which the first generations of Americans set the nation on its path to high achievement.

The hidden war on academic achievement:  The purpose of the federal Family Education Rights and Privacy Act seemed clear enough to the sponsors — Congress merely sought to bar public schools from releasing students' academic records to third parties without parental consent.  At least, that's what the congressmen thought their bill was for.  But that was before the trial lawyers got involved.

The Death of Math in America:  The shuttle leaves the earth because an extraordinary amount of mathematics and physics permitted its engineers and other technicians to create this marvel of modern science.  More math was required for its scientific payload.  Today, in America, we have to import foreigners who possess these skills because our national educational system has been under attack for over forty years, resulting in generations of Americans who cannot perform the most basic skills.

For public education -- America is history:  Unfortunately, young Americans are oblivious to their heritage.  Ignorance of our past has been carefully cultivated by the educational establishment.  The result is a cut-flower generation, severed from its roots.  The recently released survey of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (known as the nation's report card) shows nearly 60 percent of high-school seniors lack even a basic knowledge of U.S. history.

Masters of Their Own Souls:  an interview with John Taylor Gatto.

The "Gifted and Talented" Fraud:  "Gifted and talented" programs are simply more intensive indoctrination courses, not real academics.

California to Punish Excellence:  University of California Regents recently voted to change their admissions criteria.

Illiterate America:  Alan Caruba is frightened by how dumb graduates are today.  Judging by the numbers, people are plenty dumb.  "About 40 percent of college grads take no courses in English or American literature and nearly 31 percent have never taken a math course.  More than 56 percent can't calculate the change from $3 after buying a bowl of soup for 60 cents and a sandwich for $1.95.  Many cannot read and understand a simple set of directions."  The article referenced "Beer and Circus", a book by English professor Murray Sperber of Indiana University.  The book contends that "college kids are being fed a junk diet of alcohol, spectator sports and partying."

After 15 Years, Nation Is Still at Risk:  The indicators of educational inadequacy are manifold.  While more high school students today are enrolled in challenging academic courses, overall student achievement is essentially unchanged from 1983 levels.  Although college attendance is up, college remediation rates have soared, and 30 percent of incoming college freshmen require remedial courses in reading, writing, and mathematics.

Standardized Tests Reveal Grading Gap.

Racial and Ethnic Discrimination in Undergraduate Admissions Across the Nation:  Racial and ethnic preferences play a far more important role in admissions than has been previously acknowledged.  Blacks have far greater probabilities of admission than do similarly qualified whites at a large variety of schools, Hispanics have substantially greater probabilities of admission than do whites, and Asians have similar probabilities of admissions.  All of these conclusions take into account both test scores and grades.

Compulsory Government Education, By What Standard?  Unlike public school teachers, I don't blame the parents for the failure of the schools.  I blame the teachers who taught the parents.  The government schools are a complete and utter failure.  They should be closed.

Public Schools:  Turning Children and Parents into Peons.  Public education is the most expensive "gift" that most Americans will ever receive.  Government school systems are increasingly coercive and abusive toward both parents and students.  While politicians speak grandly of the supposed benefits of public education, government courts have ensured that parents and children have no legal rights to a decent education.

An Unbiased Eye for Education:  Equality of opportunity is what black America demands, not the false achievement of mandated equality of outcome.

National Testing:  Blueprint for Disaster:  There is an ominous parallel between federal control of the welfare system and the Clinton administration's attempt to nationalize American education through national testing.  The national dialogue on rigorous, challenging standards has just begun.  National testing, however, may effectively close the door on this dialogue:  National testing is a back-door attempt to impose national standards.  What sorts of standards might result?  It is unlikely that they would be based on rigorous and challenging content, as are the award-winning standards in Virginia.  Far more likely, nationally imposed standards would be dumbed down versions of political correctness.

Why dumb Americans are the best:  American education might be deemed a remarkable success... if you're a politician.  Walter Williams says, "[Politicians] prefer ignorant, uninformed and emotional clients and constituents."

Now I Know My ABC's:  Sixty-three percent of black fourth-graders are illiterate.  Someone besides Bill O'Reilly ought to be pounding the table over this remarkable and frightening statistic.

Dumb and dumber:  An invitation to a dialogue on America's intellectual capacity.  Back in the 1950s, the popular television show The $64,000 Question once showed a contestant six paintings and asked not only the artist and subject but also the name of the teacher with whom the artist studied.  As Professor Robert Thompson of Syracuse puts it, "In the '50s game shows, you had to know the exact answer.  Today we get multiple choice on a show whose title isn't even punctuated correctly."  Any doubt which direction we are moving?

Climategate Stunner:  NASA Heads Knew NASA Data Was Poor, Then Used Data from CRU.  These three datasets — from NASA GISS, NCDC GHCN, and CRU — are the basis of essentially all climate study supporting anthropogenic global warming.

Three of the Four Temperature Datasets Now Irrevocably Tainted.  The warmist response to Climategate — the discovery of the thoroughly corrupt practices of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) — was that the tainted CRU dataset was just one of four independent data sets.  You know.  So really there's no big deal.  Thanks to a FOIA request, the document production of which I am presently plowing through ... we know that NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) passed no one's test for credibility.  Not even NASA's.


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