Editor's Note: These articles didn't appear in this order. I've attempted to create a theme starting with the importance of a real education where these kids actually learn something about history. A history that bears some resemblance to reality versus the ignorance and twisted values leftists have imposed on modern youth. The rest show the consequences of such ignorance as demonstrated in the articles about how complex the Middle East really is, and how the nation is being led by a bunch of corrupt incompetent stumble bums who are supported by a media that must be filled with lunatics. I wish to thank Alan for allowing me to publish his work.
By Alan Caruba
The 2010
introduction of Common Core, a set of requirements for what elementary and
secondary school children should know in math and English language arts, has
turned schools in one state after another into battlefields as its complexity
and other factors led to protests against it. Even so, by mid-2014, a NBC/Wall
Street Journal poll found that very nearly half of those asked about it hadn’t
even heard of it. A number of states, such as Missouri, Indiana, Oklahoma, and
South Carolina have withdrawn from it.
Schools today
are often under fire for one reason or another. Ever since the 1960s when
teachers unions began to secure more and more control, formerly the
responsibility of individual and state school boards, Americans have been
engaged in efforts to improve the elementary and secondary education systems.
Many have elected to home school their children. Others have pushed for school
choice to permit their children to attend a school that was clearly doing a
better job than the one to which their children were assigned.
As youngsters
settle into their classes, there are a number of trends worth noting.
Perhaps one of
the most interesting trends is the expansion of online classes into K-12. As
Ashley Bateman noted in a recent issue of School Reform News, “In 2013 ten million students of all
ages participated in more than 1,200 massive, open, online courses offered by
more than 200 universities.” Of value to self-motivated students in particular,
online classes are sure to find a larger audience of students who have grown up
in the virtual world of game playing.
Another trend
was noted by Marcy C. Tillotson, an education reporter for Watchdog.org. It is
the increasing demand for more and more data about each student who worry that
things done at a very young age like a schoolyard fight or emotional problems
will follow them into college when they have long outgrown the problems or
behaviors of childhood. Parents want to know what data is being collected and
who has access to it. As often as not, they cannot find out.
Increasingly,
school choice, a parent’s right to enroll their child in a selected public
school, a private or a parochial choice, has become an issue that makes it into
state legislature’s where some support and some forbid it. In Louisiana and
Texas, for example, school choice programs and scholarship credits have gained
support as a political issue. In Florida, the teachers union has initiated a
lawsuit “to eliminate school choice for many low-income students and
effectively kill a program to help students with autism and other special
needs.” In North Carolina, its Supreme Court rendered a decision that permits
more than 2,000 low-income parents to send their children to schools of their
choice.
Attention to the
quality of teachers, as opposed to letting tenure keep poorly performing ones
in the classroom, is a growing trend. Last year in California, a first of its
kind teacher quality lawsuit was decided in favor of the education reforms that
brought it, striking down tenure and a similar lawsuit has been announced for
New York.
As Ms. Tillitson
reported, “Vergara v. California struck
down state laws that required teacher layoffs based solely on seniority with no
regard to teacher effectiveness, gave teachers permanent status after two years
on the job, and made it difficult for school administrators to dismiss
ineffective teachers.” As this trend expands to other states, a major complaint
regarding poor performance will be addressed.
At the heart of
the issue of teacher quality are the programs that prepare them to teach. As
Ms. Tillotson noted, “A week after a California judge ruled on a case involving
teacher tenure, dismissals and layoffs, the National Council for Teacher
Quality released its annual report on another fundamental problem, the poor quality
of teacher preparation programs. The report found that, as a whole, the
programs need improvement. “Only a quarter of the programs expect aspiring
teachers to be in the top half of their college’s academic pool. On a 125-point
scale, the NCTQ ranked most programs as earning fewer than 50 points.
Increasingly,
the quality and content of various educational programs are being questioned
and challenged. One example is the College Board’s Advanced Placement U.S.
History Framework (APUSH) and the questions about who wrote the curriculum that
is taught to 500,000 students in more than 8,000 high schools every year.
When Larry
Krieger, a retired College Board-praised teacher and Jane Robbins, a senior
fellow at The American Principles Project asked the College Board who was the
author or authors of the program, all they got as a reference to a web page
listing 19 college professors and teachers who served on two College Board
committees but where not listed as authors, but as “Acknowledgements.” Kreiger
and Robbins call the history program “biased, poorly written, and ineptly
organized”; one that “has raised alarms from state and national leaders.” We
keep hearing about the importance of “transparency” but apparently the College
Board does not think it applies to them.
It has long been
known that U.S. schools tend to perform more poorly than those in other
nations. Joy Pullman, a research fellow of The Heartland Institute and
managing editor of School Reform News
reported that “According to two recently released studies, the schools
middle-income families send their kids to are not as good as parents think.”
“A national
study,” wrote Ms. Pullman, “found U.S. students whose parents have college
degrees perform worse than peers from comparable families in other countries.
In the United States, 43 percent of such children tested ‘proficient’ in math
on an international test, compared to 71 percent of comparable students from
Poland, 68 percent in Japan, and 64 percent in Germany.” Overall, U.S. students
performed better than those in only six countries.
Not
surprisingly, Ms. Bateman has reported that “Accepting federal mandates in
exchange for funding is the crux of the problem” of ever-growing educational
bureaucracies at the state level. “States report that 40 percent of the
paperwork burden they deal with is to comply with federal regulations,” said
Lindsey Burke, the Will Skillman Fellow in Education at The Heritage
Foundation.
When one
considers how much in tax revenue is collected for the purpose of educating our
youth, one would hope for better results, but fortunately there are many
individuals, parents, and organizations seeking to improve the quality of
education and our schools are going to remain battlefields for many years to
come.
Who Are the
Kurds? - As this is being written there is a battle going on
between the Kurds in a Syrian town on the border with Turkey, Kobani, and the
Islamic State (ISIS) militants that have seized a large area of northern Syria
and Iraq. ISIS is also moving south toward Baghdad. The only area they have not
been able to seize has been Iraq’s Kurdish region which has been virtually
autonomous from what is left of the Iraqi government. While the U.S., Britain and
France, along with several Arab states have joined to wage an air battle
against the forces of the Islamic State, the success of that effort is limited.
Meanwhile, in Kobani, the Kurds are wondering where is the rest of the world is
as they fight to defend themselves. It is an old, oft-asked question as they
have a long history of fighting Arabs, Iranians, and Turks who have frequently
oppressed them……
The Syrian
Rubics Cube - One has to have some sympathy for
those in the CIA or the White House folks charged with telling the President what
has been going on in Syria since 2011 when the opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s
dictatorship turned into a fighting war. It must have looked and felt like
playing with a Rubics cube where the competing groups and militias kept
changing all the time.
In his book, “Inside Syria”, Reese Erlich, a
Peabody Award-winning journalist and author of four books on foreign policy,
has a chapter devoted to the way the Syrian revolt took shape. “The
antigovernment demonstrations began in the southern city of Daraa in March
2011.” ….
Celebrating Yom
Kippur and Survival - If
you want to know the depth of Islamic intolerance and, indeed, hatred of other
religions then all you need do is think back to October 6, 1973 when Egypt and
Syria joined together in a massive coordinated attack on Israel. It was Yom
Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish year.
Yom Kippur, this year, occurs on Friday, Oct 3, and one can only hope it
does not become an occasion to attack Jews and their synagogues in the Middle
East and throughout the rest of the world. Anti-Semitism is a global
phenomenon, existing even in nations where Jews are hard to find. Those who
track it say that it is increasing…..
Obama's
Ignorance - From time to time I hear
President Obama described as “an evil genius”, but he is neither. He’s not
evil. He’s something much worse. He is a fool who thinks he’s a genius. This is not about his intelligence. No one
gets to be President of the United States without some degree of intelligence.
One suspects, however, Obama has always relied more on his charm and,
initially, on the illusion of his charisma, based on his depiction by an
adoring press. His charisma has disappeared,
even among the same press, but most abundantly among the American people of all
political persuasions who now regard him as one recent poll put it, the worst
President the nation has ever had……
President Ebola
- What does it tell you when Britain and France have stopped flights to
and from the nations in Africa where Ebola has become a threat and the United
States has not taken a similar measure? What does it tell you when the
President sends 3,000 U.S. troops on a “humanitarian” mission to West Africa?
It tells me he has put the U.S. at risk if any or a portion of these troops
return after having been infected. As always history has lessons that cannot be
ignored. In 1918 and 1919, there was a pandemic of the Spanish influenza that
caught nations by surprise, infecting an estimated 500 million people and
killing between 50 and a 100 million of them in three waves. It began in the
U.S. in March 1918 at a crowded army camp, Fort Riley, Kansas……
Goodbye Eric Holder -
In
a nation where there is a scarcity of good news, hearing Eric Holder give a
farewell speech upon his announcement that he will be leaving as the Attorney
General was surely welcome in some circles. I was never a fan of his because he
was in my opinion always more of a politician than someone with the
responsibility to enforce the laws of the nation. I
first took notice of Holder when, in the pre-dawn hours of April 22, 2000, as
the deputy attorney general serving under Janet Reno, he oversaw the seizure of
Elian Gonzalez, a seven-year-old whose mother had died in an effort to escape
Cuba and find sanctuary in the United States. Holder was doing what he had to
do after a court ruled that Gonzalez be returned to his father in Cuba, but I
thought then and still do that Gonzalez should have been allowed to remain with
his U.S. relatives…..
The Obamacare Disaster - By far the worst law passed by Congress in
2010 was the Affordable Care Act (ACA) otherwise known as Obamacare. It was
passed without a single Republican vote and as more Americans experience the
higher costs and other aspects of it realize how it has negatively affected
their lives, it should eventually be dismembered and ended. Obamacare
is progressivism written large and is an example of earlier examples. Obamacare
is a massive drain on government funding, particularly with regard to Medicaid.
Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965 and after 47 years they are
broke. Their unfunded liabilities are enormous…...
The U.S. is Becoming a Weaker Nation
-
The news that the U.S. Air Force,
joined at long last by some of the Arab nations most threatened by the Islamic
State (ISIS), began bombing their headquarters and military sites in Syria was
long overdue, but welcome. It took time because Obama had originally dismissed
ISIS as a threat. It no doubt took time to get Jordan, the
United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia to team with the U.S., but
missing from the action is Turkey that borders Syria and Egypt. Turkey has
become increasingly Islamist, but appears determined to stay out of the war
with ISIS. By initially refusing to provide arms to Egypt, Obama drove it into
the waiting arms of the Soviet Union, but has since reversed its policy and is
seeking to woe Egypt back as an ally. ….
