Education - Page 305

Jindal has heard the complaints of many parents in his state and has said that as a parent himself he could see the difficulties his own son was having with Common Core math. Ultimately, he unveiled an aggressive plan to eliminate Common Core in Louisiana, one that exposed how the state board of education and department of education can attempt to work around government rules and the state legislature in order to meet its own goals.

Are four-year colleges any better than community colleges? Americans don’t think so, according to a new Gallup survey that finds 66 percent of respondents rated the quality of community colleges as “excellent” or “good,” while 70 percent rated four-year colleges the same way.

The vice president of content and scoring management at Pearson North America agreed to a comparison of the training for scorers of the Common Core tests to how a restaurant chain monitors its employees’ work.

The Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) announced Monday that it has joined in filing a lawsuit against the governor of North Dakota and other officials that claims the state’s participation in one of the federally funded interstate Common Core test consortia and the implementation of the Common Core standards is unconstitutional and violates federal laws that ban federal control of public schools and curriculum.

The House Appropriations Committee’s draft of its fiscal year 2016 Labor, Health and Human Services (LHHS) funding bill “eliminates all funding for the controversial Family Planning Program, saving taxpayers nearly $300 million.” The bill would also substantially cut so-called “comprehensive teen pregnancy prevention programs,” but double funding for abstinence-centered or Sexual Risk Avoidance (SRA) programs.

A few days after the National Championship basketball game on April 6, many of the 600+ students living in Ogg Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison noticed a new bulletin board had gone up right near the first floor elevators, replacing one about volunteering, entitled “Let’s Talk About Sex(uality),” and it got students and parents talking from the day it went up until move out day.

A white Sacramento high school English teacher is refusing to teach Shakespeare to her minority students because she does not believe American teenagers should be subjected to reading classic literary works by a dead white man.

Parents from the north of Italy have organized a massive demonstration against gender ideology in schools called “Defend Our Children,” to be held this Saturday in the Saint John Lateran Square in Rome. The demonstrators will be protesting Italian educational programs that are meant to blur the sexual identity of children.

Some British state (government funded) schools are deliberately under-recording the instances of bad behaviour by students and even removing truculent pupils during government inspections, all to gain good ratings. The revelation has been made by the government’s ‘classroom Tsar’ Tom Bennett,

“[I]f graders around the country complain publicly that the new tests are not being handled fairly or competently,” Education Columnist Jay Mathews warns, “the debate will become more serious, and one of America’s most ambitious school reforms will be in jeopardy.”

Speaking to students in the United Kingdom, First Lady Michelle Obama highlighted her struggles growing up in the South Side of Chicago.

A newly-published report says that some parenting choices and attitudes can hurt the success of black students in school.

This week, a courageous civil rights champion by the name of Rachel Dolezal bravely revealed her true identity to the world: she is a black woman trapped in the body of a honky and has been tanning and getting weaves for the last ten years whilst president of her local NAACP chapter in order to live life as her authentic self and shake off her “crackersona.”

Republican leaders seem poised to resume attempts to convince the conservative base of their party that the bill will reduce federal involvement in education and return it to the states and localities.

Stanford University President John Hennessy just announced that he will resign next year after a 15 year run, shortly after the Stanford Business School was rated number one on the planet. By conversations on the web, Stanford is by far the most mentioned university, because most of the captains of Internet industry are its graduates.

A high school honors assignment art display that was supposed to provide a reflection on the meaning of “social justice” ended up furthering students’ indoctrination in the “#BlackLivesMatter” movement.

In the midst of a heated lawsuit alleging Harvard holds Asian students to a much higher standard during its admissions process, some college admissions counselors in California and elsewhere are coaching Asian American students to appear “less Asian” in an attempt to help them be accepted into the nation’s most elite schools.

At the end of last month the NUS hosted its Black Students’ Conference, which was much ridiculed by the right on Twitter for its hatred of white people that frankly made the dislike of men on show at the NUS

A gay student from San Diego State University wrote an open letter to Jerry Seinfeld, complaining that modern college audiences want humor that has a “context that spurs social dialogue” and which isn’t based on “archaic ideals.”

A recent article in The Economist reminds readers of the sobering reality that men are the primary victims of violence in the world and their situation is getting worse, not better.

A study being called the “most authoritative” review of the impact of the PBS series Sesame Street on children is scheduled to be released this month. In part, the report finds that the decades-old show is just as effective as preschool for educating little ones.

A Las Vegas strip club has posted ads for young high school women graduates from the “class of 2015” to audition to become strippers to pay college tuition.

En route from Sarajevo to Rome on Saturday, Pope Francis told reporters on his plane that parents should not allow their children to have computers in their bedrooms in order to protect them from both the “filth” of pornography and dependence on their electronic gadgets.

James Hubert Blake High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, is ending a decades-long graduation tradition in an effort, school authorities say, to recognize transgenderism.

Over the weekend, the NY Times published an opinion piece by writer Lee Siegel titled “Why I Defaulted on My Student Loans.” The piece goes beyond the descriptive promised in the headline to the prescriptive when Siegel suggests people “groaning under the weight of student loans” should follow his example.

The authors observe that regardless of the decision in Jindal’s case, state and local school boards are facing significant challenges in “the collapsing morale and educational achievement of their students,” and need to consider their own legal path to rid themselves of the Common Core boondoggle.

Unfortunately, the Common Core zombie is still around, and it will take another few years and another several million lost children before its death is acknowledged by all. Yet no matter how much more money is poured into it, and how much denial it faces, Common Core is effectively dead.

On June 9, Texas homeschool families will celebrate “Leeper Day,” set aside to honor the 1994 Texas Supreme Court decision on the landmark court case (Leeper v. Arlington ISD) that legalized homeschooling in the Lone Star state. Twenty one years later, it is the current governor, Greg Abbott, who has recognized this historical date.

Vox’s Amanda Taub says a piece the site published earlier this week about progressive identity politics on campus is “truthy” and doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Strangely, Taub’s rebuttal overlooks nearly all of the evidence which might suggest otherwise.

Porn star Mercedes Carrera described it earlier today as “a bad amateur sex tape from an attention-seeking histrionic.” She was being too generous… but let’s plough on.

The federal government has made a significant move to name monogamy and abstinence as “the most reliable way” to protect against sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

Released in April of 2013, the Next Generation of Science Standards (NGSS) have already been officially adopted by 13 states and Washington, D.C. Their promoters claim they are another “state-led” endeavor, “managed by Achieve,” the same progressive nonprofit that was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop and promote the Common Core standards.

Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) is injecting himself into the controversy over a Colorado charter school that refused to allow its 2015 valedictorian to give what the school calls a “disrespectful” and “inappropriate” address.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld appeared on ESPNU and ESPN Radio’s “The Herd with Colin Cowherd” on Thursday and spoke on how other comedians have told him to not do comedy at college campuses because they are so politically correct now. According

A progressive professor says his students have become enamored of a simplistic social justice politics that makes every discussion personal and therefore a potential “threat” to their identity.

A Stockton high school has stated that it is willing to republish the school’s entire yearbook because a female student challenged the school’s dress policy for her senior portrait, prompting her exclusion from the yearbook. Crystal Cumplido, a senior at