How did we get here at this existential crossroads? Ask the communist agitators, school indoctrinators, Hollywood, and community organizers whom parents entrust their children to every day

How did our society get where we are today? Where did this profound hatred, disrespect for authority, for the rule of law, disdain for their own country, utter laziness, entitlement, anarchy, and anti-Americanism come from, especially in the younger generations who shape the future of our country?

There is no simplistic answer. The default answer is always horrible parenting or lack thereof. Parents spend less and less time with their progeny as the government takes over their education at a very early age, or are in need of behavioral reeducation themselves. Older fathers with pony tails and mothers going through menopause are raising terror children who have never been spanked or made to behave like normal, rational human beings. They scream in restaurants and public places at hours when they should be in bed while the parents try to talk to them in a calm voice to the exasperation of everyone around them, trying to enjoy themselves while celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, interrupted by howling brats. Continue reading →

Read Full Story: Canada TOO???

There are some subjects one thinks would be immune from the input of social justice warriors. While social studies are ripe for their meddling—as are literature and even science these days—a subject like math should be resistant to their tampering. Well, one would think that.

Unfortunately, a report at Campus Reform shows that such an assumption would be wrong.

“Teaching Social Justice through Secondary Mathematics” is a six-week online course designed by Teach for America and offered through EdX, which provides free online classes from top universities such as Harvard University, MIT, and Columbia University. Continue reading →

Netflix’s recent announcement that it would be producing a second season of Thirteen Reasons Why has raised new questions about the disastrous state of the US public school system and its effects on the economy.

“Hey, it’s Hannah Baker,” says the show’s protagonist, played by a stunning Katherine Langford in the opening episode. “Get settled in. Because I’m about to tell you the story of my life. More specifically, why my life ended.”

The Thirteen Reasons’ portrait of how a stifling, bureaucratic system progressively cuts this teenage girl to pieces, eventually driving her to death, provides a dramatized, insightful reflection on (another) emerging lost generation. Continue reading →

Six schools in Baltimore have exactly zero students who are proficient in math and English.

WBFF reports Project Baltimore led an investigation and discovered five Baltimore City high schools, along with one middle school, do not have any students who scored high enough to be deemed “proficient” in math and English on state testing.

The schools that did not have a single proficient student are Booker T. Washington Middle School, Frederick Douglass High School, Achievement Academy at Harbor City, New Era Academy, Excel Academy at Francis M. Wood High, and New Hope Academy. Continue reading →

If you know anything about New Orleans public schools, you probably know this: Hurricane Katrina wiped them out and almost all the schools became privately run charters.

Young children play outside in the fog at Crocker College Prep, an elementary school in New Orleans. ~ Clarence Williams/WWNO

Many of those schools subscribed to the no excuses discipline model — the idea that if you crack down on slight misbehavior, you can prevent bigger issues from erupting.

That was also true of Crocker College Prep, an elementary school in New Orleans. It had strict rules about everything. Students had to sit up straight at their desks, eyes tracking the speaker. They had to walk the halls in silence and even wear the right kind of socks. Students who broke these rules, or acted out in other ways, were punished.

The thing is, students across New Orleans face high rates of exposure to trauma, but school discipline policies have rarely accounted for that.
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A plane passenger asked a teacher a kind of rude question about her job.

She responded eloquently!

It’s annoying when people mistakenly think your job is really simple.

Most people’s lines of work are more intricate and multilayered than those who don’t do that work would guess. So most of us can think of a time someone reductively assumed that our jobs are very simple (whether it’s writer, janitor, stay-at-home parent, or any job really). Continue reading →

Great teaching has long been seen as an innate skill. But reformers are showing that the best teachers are made, not born

To The 11- and 12-year-olds in his maths class, Jimmy Cavanagh seems like a born teacher. He is warm but firm. His voice is strong. Correct answers make him smile. And yet it is not his pep that explains why his pupils at North Star Academy in Newark, New Jersey, can expect to go to university, despite 80% of their families needing help to pay for school meals.

Mr Cavanagh is the product of a new way of training teachers. Rather than spending their time musing on the meaning of education, he and his peers have been drilled in the craft of the classroom. Continue reading →

Once again, Metropolis Café returns to its roots – the ‘Village of the Damned’ so to speak. Shortly after The Federal Observer went on-line in July of 2001, we began receiving columns from the author of the following post – Carl Worden. Although what follows was originally posted in March of 2010 – the message remains – the Public Fool System is STILL a Rip-Off. ~ J.B.

Carl F. Worden

If a manufacturer produces sub-standard or unsafe products, as in the current Toyota debacle, you can take your sub-standard or unsafe product back for repair or a complete refund, but when a public school district produces sub-standard students, there is seemingly no recourse. You cannot send your kid back to school, even if s/he cannot read comprehensively or perform basic math. Further, there is no means to recoup the property taxes the parents paid to support the public school system their failing child attended. Continue reading →

Once again, Metropolis Café returns to its roots – the ‘Village of the Damned’ so to speak. Shortly after The Federal Observer went on-line in July of 2001, we began posting columns from a very accomplished, learned and opinionated (rightfully) teacher – Linda Shrock-Taylor. Linda is now retired, but her words and her ‘lessons’ have not retired. We are thankful to still have a selection of her archives and will continue to post them on this site. After all – her words are the KEY to the future. ~ J.B.

Hear ye, hear ye! The 2009 award for the most Stupid Educational Fad goes to all schools where spelling is no longer being taught; with special “Fickle Finger of Failure” prizes to administrators, school boards, state school boards, departments of education, and all others who believe that teachers should officially stop teaching spelling as if trashing of the last vestige of actual academic instruction in America should be celebrated.

I suggest that in the last 50 years, American public schools have not taught enough spelling to even make a ‘stoppage’ worthy of media coverage. Instead of making announcements, these criminals should sign confessions down at their local police departments. Frankly, schools have long been attempting to hide their educational crimes of omission, and of teacher inefficiency, by forcing students to memorize lists of spelling words for Friday tests. Continue reading →

2 + 2 may in fact be worth more than 3!

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It is common sense knowledge that facilities do not produce well educated students. The one room schoolhouse with outhouses for toilets produced much better educated students than today’s Taj Mahal’s. Why?

Example in the 5/23/17 TR article “School to hire Consultant”.

We are told by School Board member Talicia Richardson the usual educanto newspeak designed to say a lot and explain nothing. “We are making a great decision to MOVE FORWARD”.
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Halsey Junior High School (P.S. 85, Brooklyn, N.Y,)

“Progressive Education” came to my school when I was a student at Halsey Junior High School in the 1940s (P.S. 85, Brooklyn, N.Y,). Principal Stella Sweeting was thrilled as a little girl getting a doll house for Christmas, but the rest of us, teachers included, thought this “experiment” in schooling was silly. Oh, it was fun to cut classes and paint murals in the hallways – the brainstorm of class buddy Bob and I that, to our surprise, was approved.

Such “official cheating” didn’t faze those with A’s and B’s in their subjects – we’d catch up later (in high school maybe?) – but what of the students who might stumble from such sliding and find it difficult to overcome the challenges ahead? While this loosening of educational standards at Halsey was, in a word, pleasant, most of my teachers took a dim view of a theory of education that not only ditched authority and tradition but dismissed academic achievement as well – the stance of early 20th Century Marxist education reformers with a mission to prepare America for a socialist future. Why did the “progress” they envisioned in their “progressive” educational method of indoctrination include dumbing? Continue reading →

Schools have always been devoted to passing knowledge forward to the next generation. Not now.

The Education Establishment treats knowledge as if it were a toxic spill that must be kept away from students. Board up the windows; tape the doors; wrap the buildings in three-mil. plastic.

This might sound comical or far-fetched. But I assure you that the Progressives in charge of our schools are methodical about using any pretext to minimize contamination by knowledge. Everyone should wonder why. Continue reading →

This is amongst the many lessons taught to my 5th Grade glass at the Crestwood Elementary School in Northbrook Illinois by our teacher, Donald Adair in the late 1950’s. “Never stop searching for the TRUTH,” he always told me. And I learned the lessons of history – through him.

Oh come on now – a bit of laughter is good medicine (and this isn’t even our Health Site).

“We are investing something like 98 percent of our national philanthropy in supply, and at best 2%  in demand, and we’re not seeing equity-focused systems change happen quickly enough.” ~ John King, president and CEO of Education Trust, past U.S. secretary of education

“My mother says if you’re not part of the huddle, you’re not in the game. Parents are not in the game. We’re on the sidelines and we want to know how to get in.” ~ Dawn Foye, parent leader, Boston

Over the past three decades, philanthropy has been catalytic in funding scalable innovations that demonstrate all students can achieve academically. But we have also learned that the supply of these innovations cannot reach their full potential without “actionable demand” that removes the political and policy barriers preventing innovations from being embraced broadly by school systems.

We deliberately use the term “actionable demand” because there is widespread “latent demand” for great schools in all communities, regardless of socioeconomic makeup. All communities care equally about the education and future of their children. But caring is not the same as power. Continue reading →