As 2018 wound down, our nation’s colleges and looniversities continued their campaign to bury our civilization under a mountain of idiocy.

At Penn State—where “Coach” Jerry Sandusky practiced pedophilia for umpteen years before they finally caught him in 2011—the resident sages are offering a new “examine relations between gender and agriculture” — that is, Ph. D. candidates — to “examine relations between gender and agriculture,” at the end of which, these suckers – er, students – will become “gender fellows.” Continue reading →

Teachers (have gone) on strike in the Los Angeles school district …

They have plenty of complaints. But what they don’t have is accomplishments.

Only 22% of fourth graders in the district scored proficient in math. Even a typical terrible inner-city school district has a 30% proficient rate.

Since 2003, 245,000 students have left the district in favor of better districts, or charter schools. Continue reading →

With this post, we begin the process of posting from our archives. The whereabouts of the author of the following column is unknown at this time. Theresa Harmon was a long time contributor to the early edition of the Federal Observer. Keep in mind that seventeen years have gone by, but in reality – little has changed. ~ Ed.

January 7, 2002 ~ We are constantly told that the state of “public” education is improving and that the test scores prove this is so. If you look at ACT and SAT scores, you might be inclined to believe this propaganda. If you check into the percentage of students taking “honors” classes in your local high school and receiving A’s, you might also be inclined to believe the rhetoric however, if you take the time to check into grade inflation and when and why scoring curves on tests such as the ACT and SAT were redrawn, you might be forced to an entirely different conclusion.

For instance, SAT scores have dropped 73 points since 1960 but, due to a little subversive maneuvering on the part of the educrats, the American public is blissfully unaware of it. You see, in 1985, every SAT test taken automatically had 100 points added to the overall score. That”s right, automatically added! Continue reading →

…raising expectations does!

[Image Credit: U.S. Air National Guard photo by Tech. Sgt. Dan Heaton]

Armed with a bachelor of science in elementary education, I charged into my career as a teacher. I was immediately exposed to students at three levels of public schools:

1. A rather wealthy district with an average IQ of 120.
2. A classic, middle-class school.
3. A school that is best described as a mini United Nations.

In the “UN” school, approximately 25 percent of students were new immigrants, 30-35 percent were American-born blacks, and the remainder were 40-45 percent Caucasian. The economic structure ranged from welfare to upper middle class. Continue reading →

The math exam that has made it difficult for hundreds of new North Carolina teachers to get their license could be phased out as early as February, based on a recent vote by a panel of state education experts.

In August, the state Board of Education learned that almost 2,400 elementary and special education teachers had failed the math portion of the licensing exam. Critics say the test requires middle and high school math skills that teachers of young children may not use, while failing to gauge whether licensing candidates will be effective teachers.

Those critics got a boost from a report presented last week to the state’s Professional Educator Preparation and Standards Commission. That report looked at more than 1,100 beginning teachers who have taken licensing exams created by the for-profit Pearson publishing company. It found that teachers who passed the math test on the first try didn’t get significantly better results with their students than those who failed at least once. Continue reading →

We have retired teachers who contribute to this site who will fully understand what you are about to read… but I suspect that many of our readers will as well. ~ Ed.

“You Big Dummy!”

Least-Educated State: California No. 1 in Percentage of Residents 25 and Older Who Never Finished 9th Grade; No. 50 in High School Graduates

California ranks No. 1 among the 50 states for the percentage of its residents 25 and older who have never completed ninth grade and 50th for the percentage who have graduated from high school, according to new data from the Census Bureau.

Texas ranks No. 2 for the percentage of its residents 25 and older who have never completed ninth grade and 49th for the percentage who have graduated from high school. Continue reading →

Some university and college students would rather concern themselves with radical politics than concentrate on their studies. That’s the opinion of a conservative commentator and former university professor.

Earlier this month, the student government at the University of California, Berkeley approved a resolution donating funds for the migrant caravan from Central America seeking entrance into the U.S. After a four-hour meeting, the Associated Students at UC-Berkeley voted unanimously to contribute $1,500 to migrants’ “pursuit of asylum and safety.” Continue reading →

Schools in Brighton have been ordered to teach children as young as eight that people “of all genders” can have periods, as well as to install sanitary waste disposal units in every toilet room.

The instructions were included in guidelines published by the local council earlier this month on ‘Taking a Period Positive Approach in Brighton & Hove Schools’, which assert there is “more work to do across all settings to prevent and reduce stigma related to periods and talking about periods”. Continue reading →

Detective Christopher Weber argued that Elisabeth Ann Johnson High School’s project was misguided.

Mt. Morris, MI – Law enforcement officers conducting a “drug sweep” at the request of a Michigan high school were surprised to find handmade “police brutality” posters plastered to the wall outside a social studies classroom.

Detective Christopher Weber posted photos of the posters on social media on Tuesday night, and blasted the school district for “perpetuating the narrative, lies and victimhood” regarding supposed excessive force by law enforcement. Continue reading →

“Research has determined that dyslexia and other reading disabilities stem from a core deficit in phonological awareness, a skill that is needed to associate spoken words with written language.” ~ Spalding Reading International

The underlying meaning of the term ‘dyslexia’ is almost always “has not yet been taught to read.” Traditionally, such poor readers were referred to simply as “bad readers.” It is time for educators to accurately define this overused term so that parents better understand the problems that their children are facing, and make better decisions even if those mean removing children from schools that fail to teach reading to enroll them in schools where full literacy is considered the achievable goal. Spalding Reading International defines the core deficit of such readers as phonological awareness. It is time that all schools employ teachers who know how to teach all children the skills for phonological awareness, then teach all children to read by teaching them to accurately use the complete system of phonics for both receptive and expressive literacy. Phonics is, and always has been, the code in which English speech is recorded for later reading. It is time to let both the students and their parents in on that secret. Continue reading →

These same kids will grow up, see people with more than they have, and cry that life isn’t fair. ~ Scott Black

Unless we fix it, our devolution into another failed socialist state—or worse–is virtually assured. Fifty years of carefully orchestrated ignorance and mediocrity is more than enough

[Recently], the American Thinker published a column by Bruce Deitrick Price entitled K-12: Six Steps to Reform Education Right Now. In it he offered up transparently useful reforms regarding the mastering of reading, writing, math, geography, history and science, all of which would lead inexorably to the development of critical thinking skills. “Immediately, we will start having educated children again,” Price asserts. All well and good save for one inconvenient reality: the premise is flawed. Half of America doesn’t want educated children. They want indoctrinated children. Continue reading →

I will let the teacher tell you what goes on…

Although the average education level of immigrants to the United States has been rising, the post-1965 immigration wave remains markedly less skilled than the native population. Immigrants currently account for 40 percent of all working-age Americans without a high school diploma, more than double their percentage of the general population. Continue reading →

“Yes,” according to psychology professor Jean Twenge, who says that the smartphone and social media are the cause… Continue reading →

Walter E. Williams, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Economics, George Mason University.

Much of today’s incivility and contempt for personal liberty has its roots on college campuses, and most of the uncivil and contemptuous are people with college backgrounds. Let’s look at a few highly publicized recent examples of incivility and attacks on free speech.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, were accosted and harassed by a deranged left-wing mob as they were leaving a dinner at Georgetown University. Sen. McConnell was harassed by protesters at Reagan National Airport, as well as at several venues in Kentucky. Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife were harassed at a Washington, D.C., restaurant. Continue reading →

John Taylor Gatto

“Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted — sometimes with guns — by an estimated eighty percent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880s, when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.” – John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. Continue reading →