Category archive: Education
‘Educator’ arrogance
By Chuck Roger • March 14th, 2010 10:02 pm
We have a new definition of “nuisance,” courtesy of the Congress, Arizona school district. Holding employees accountable to their employer constitutes a “nuisance.” Specifically, the district’s attorney claims that four district parents’ requests for records which are supposed to be in the public domain anyway, and also those parent’s requests for investigations into the clandestine [...]
College level leftwing indoctrination
By Chuck Roger • March 8th, 2010 10:05 pm
David Horowitz recently audited a political science class at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Horwitz documents the left-ness of university faculty. In his analysis, he provides a definition of indoctrination. Indoctrination is presenting opinion to students as though it were scientific fact or as though no rational, decent, and moral person could have any other [...]
Cut out the dead wood, give the tree life
By Chuck Roger • February 21st, 2010 10:13 pm
With school-related unemployment running well below general unemployment, Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey observes that: …one can’t help but conclude that keeping teacher jobs at all costs truly isn’t about the kids, but the adults either employed in education, or trying to get the votes of those employed in education. …we have added teachers in droves [...]
Where will this teachers’ union wake-up call lead?
By Chuck Roger • February 16th, 2010 10:13 pm
In a Rhode Island town with high school graduation rates below 50% and teachers earning nearly three-and-a-half times as much as the average worker, the teachers’ union rejects the school superintendent’s request for teachers to work an extra 25 minutes a day. Soooo… the superintendent fires all the teachers. That’s quite a wake-up call for [...]
Minnesota’s frigid cold has produced some scatterbrained agenda hounds
By Chuck Roger • February 3rd, 2010 10:21 pm
A University of Minnesota “study” has come up with some recommendations for education policymakers. Before we proceed, let’s understand that although unstated, the “researchers” present findings appear to be motivated by the thoroughly discredited contention that humankind’s technological carbon emissions cause “global warming.” You won’t find this stated outright anywhere in the UM paper, but [...]
Illiteracy–what we get with ‘liberalized’ education pushed on America by ‘progressives’
By Chuck Roger • December 9th, 2009 2:11 am
High school grads can’t read or do math. According to progressives, the solution must be to respond to “students’ increasingly complex and diverse needs” instead of addressing what generated those “complex and diverse needs” in the first place. In Minding the Campus, Sandra Stotsky and Ze’ev Wurman report that some progressive organizations want to: …allow high school [...]
Dumb schools
By Chuck Roger • December 8th, 2009 2:15 am
Government control of schools continuously degrades quality, wastes funding, and generates loud whines for more and more funding. The journal Education Next provides an analysis. But their solutions don’t go far enough. Public schools need accountability, tougher curricula, merit-based teacher performance evaluation and compensation structures, and a good dose of Adam Smith economic realism.
Inattentive in class
By Chuck Roger • December 10th, 2008 4:38 am
I thought I’d snuck the sketch of the fighter jet over to Frank Reese without her seeing me do it. But, “Wham!” That wooden ruler slams my knuckles. Sister Mary Aquinas runs a tight third grade. I’ll get home late, again, because I’ll be held for detention, again, because the nun caught me screwing off, [...]
