“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 →

Leftist educators are corrupting the young.

Teachers at Highlands Elementary, a school in Edina, Minnesota, are indoctrinating five-year-olds in order to radicalize them and encourage them to become activists obsessed with race.

Public school teachers across America already saturate students with information about racial injustice in America in a nonstop barrage of historic facts and ahistorical nonsense. And in the culture at large, the media, politicians, and the entertainment industry can’t stop talking about race. The last thing any young student in America needs is to be taught about is race. Race matters only to radicals.

Leftists believe you have to get ’em while they’re young and impressionable. Continue reading →

Parents, create ‘Havens at Home’ for all your school aged children. They are no longer being taught at school, but only brainwashed by the surrealistic politics of the progressives.

It’s time to kick Progressive Politics 101 out to the curb, into the gutter where it truly belongs.

Progressive Politics 101 is no longer a bunch of political bigwigs sitting around Congress deciding how the lives of the citizenry should be lived. PP 101’s taken over front row centre as the dominating factor in the NEWS of the day, which, in reality, is nothing more than Hollywood style entertainment.

Progressive Politics 101 is a never-ending television series, the Kardashians of saturation publicity, coming at us every day, driving utter nonsense into the thinking sphere. Unfortunately, having already polluted the minds of the adults who watch it, it now leaches out to confuse, disorient and depress innocent, little children. Continue reading →

Hilariously literal test answers prove that children are a LOT more intelligent than they appear (and their creative responses will make you laugh out loud)

Every adult will recall that sinking feeling that came with turning over a test paper at school and realising you don’t know the answer to the question.

But as these laugh-out-loud pictures prove, children can sometimes come up with the most genius responses when left stumped.

Diply has shared a collection of the cheeky, imaginative and downright comical wrong answers given by clueless students when faced with a tricky question.
Continue reading →

It’s the public schools that are failing, more than the job market. Last summer set an all-time record of 5.9 million unfilled jobs. Manufacturing job openings were at the highest level in years, with 300,000 new jobs becoming available each month.

A Wall Street Journal interview with the CEO of United Technologies, Greg Hayes — who famously caved to Trump and kept the Indiana Carrier plant in the U.S. — has some surprising information about jobs and American workers. His company has jobs for machinists, with only a high-school degree required, that pay $100K a year. The jobs are going begging. Applicants cannot read or do math.

“I’ve got thousands of job openings.”

Do you really?
Continue reading →

Publisher’s Note: At Metropolis Café, we are fans of neither Horace Mann nor John Dewey. Although Mann had some interesting opinions (and some were damned good), the direction of both of these individuals – were of a Socialistic bent toward Indoctrination – not Education. ~ J.B.

Horace Mann

Getting your picture on a U.S. stamp, even a one cent one, requires that you have accomplished something significant. In the case of Horace Mann of Franklin Mass., he accomplished notable things in the early 19th century in three different fields— law, politics, and finally education,only to return to politics once more, this time as a U.S. Representative (previously he had only been involved in Mass. politics). In 1837, Mann became the president of the Massachusetts Board of Education, which was in fact the first such Board in any state in the U.S. and he served on that Board for twelve years. In his fourth year, he produced the essay now known as ‘the Art of Teaching’ which in fact was part of his report to the Board of Education. The essay is about educating children, but it has in some respects a quality to it that would apply to any sort of education and any age of student in any day and age. I intend to review some of the major points of the essay in this post. Continue reading →

If you watch TV, you are seeing ads for a new Alien movie (i.e., Alien Covenant). All hail Ridley Scott. This will be the sixth in the franchise. One thing all of the entries have in common is that a ghastly alien emerges, often with pointy teeth and covered in drool, from an egg or an astronaut’s chest.

This signature sudden, unforgettable moment is the essence of the cinematic covenant. An entirely hostile organism will burst out somewhere when you least expect it and kill you.

That has to remind us of the year 1931, when the Education Establishment sprang its own alien on the country. With no testing, no proof of concept, no incremental introduction, and certainly no humility or shame, a small clique of education professors abolished common practice and, almost overnight, forced an alien method upon this country. Thus began the appropriation (that’s Commie euphemism for conquest) of the U.S. via illiteracy.

If you want to understand what we are up against when it comes to improving our schools, you have to reflect on how far a small group of ideologues will go to impose their destructive theories. Apparently, there’s no limit. Continue reading →

I’m sure it’s a different list of “behinds” for your child, but they’re there nonetheless, and the pressure to make sure your child isn’t behind the other kids weighs on you like a ton of bricks. We all want our kids to show up to kindergarten like an old, learned professor: “Ah yes, the alphabet.”

I came across the article quoted above the day I started and finished Thomas Sowell’s brief and accessible volume Late-Talking Children, a largely anecdotal text based on a parents group he started after writing about his own son who didn’t talk until nearly four years of age. When public school teachers tried to label his son (“classify” in contemporary terms) Sowell put his foot down, and thank God he did. His son’s success story (childhood late talker to successful computer scientist) along with many others in the book written in 1997 support the growing backlash against public education, in particular what we’re doing with kids under 6 years old. Continue reading →

As an advocate for education reform for the past 35 years, a co-founder of a very successful charter school, a lifelong Republican, and the most recent past president of the Arizona State Board of Education, I have never been more embarrassed, outraged, disappointed, and angry to call myself a Republican. How on earth do the Republicans in the state Legislature who voted for the Empowerment Scholarship Account (voucher) bill, or our governor, who signed it, look in the mirror and in good faith, not understand what they have just done.

This is an outrageous attack against public education. This out-and-out transfer of state taxpayer money to private education through “school choice” is just what it seems, political rhetoric and very bad financial policy. It even blurs the separation of church and state line defined in the U.S. Constitution by our founders. Public education has been the equalizer for 150 years of economic growth and assimilation of immigrants into the culture that we enjoy today. This is an insult to the hundreds of thousands of students who do not have the resources to pay the additional thousands of dollars for the tuition these private schools will be charging above the state subsidy, and without the opportunity of a quality education provided in their local schools where due process and common goals of expectation drive the continued development of economic expansion for everyone, not just a privileged few. Continue reading →

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on April 26 that is ostensibly aimed at curtailing unlawful federal meddling in K-12 education across America. But it may not actually accomplish that much, depending on how top education officials implement it.

“Previous administrations have wrongfully forced states and schools to comply with federal whims and dictate what our kids are taught,” Trump declared. “But we know that local communities do it best and know it best.”

According to the order itself, the goal is “to restore the proper division of power under the Constitution between the Federal Government and the States and to further the goals of, and to ensure strict compliance with, statutes that prohibit Federal interference with State and local control over education.” Whether that will happen, though, remains to be seen. Continue reading →

Americans are often expected to have some level of higher education before they enter the workforce. These political leaders are asking: Shouldn’t government help them along?

A student at a community college in New York meets a potential employer at a state job fair Andrew Burton/Getty

CHICAGO — A surge of innovation in states and cities is building momentum for what could become a seismic shift in American education.

Just as the country came to expect in the decades around World War II that young people would finish at least 12 years of school, more local governments are now working to ensure that students complete at least 14 years. With that change, political leaders in both parties are increasingly acknowledging that if society routinely expects students to obtain at least two years of schooling past high school, government has a responsibility to provide it for them cost-free. Continue reading →

Although it is often viewed as a radically new idea, the vast majority of parents in this country have been participating in a system of school choice for years.

For example, there are more than 40 school districts in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. Assuming each district has at least two campuses at each grade level, a typical family has a choice of about 80 public schools — provided the parents can afford to buy a house in any neighborhood and are willing to drive a considerable distance to work.

How well does this system work? Better than you might think. Two decades ago, a study by researchers at Southern Methodist University and the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank found that North Dallas houses near higher-ranking elementary schools sold for about 20 percent more than houses near lower-ranking schools. The authors concluded that the market for education works surprisingly well. Parents can discern quality and the market charges a premium for it. Continue reading →

New Orleans is the nation’s largest and most complete experiment in charter schools. After Hurricane Katrina, the State of Louisiaana took control of public schools in New Orleans, and launched a nearly complete transformation of a public school system into a system of charter schools. Though there are spots of improvement in the New Orleans charter system, major problems remain.

Many of these problems were on display in New Orleans when the NAACP, which last year called for a moratorium on charter schools until issues of accountability and transparency were addressed, held a community forum in New Orleans on charters. The New Orleans hearing, which can be viewed here, featured outraged students, outraged parents, and dismayed community members reciting a litany of the problems created by the massive change to a charter school system. The single most powerful moment came when a group of students from Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools took the podium and detailed the many ways the system has failed and excluded them from participating in its transformation. Continue reading →

Arizona public schools will get new letter-grade ratings for the first time in three years this fall, and the state will calculate them in ways both different and similar.

Schools will still be graded on an A-F scale under the new accountability system adopted by the Arizona State Board of Education on Monday. The grades, particularly for elementary schools, still will be largely tethered to standardized-testing results.

But the added wrinkles to the new grading rubric — such as including career-technical program completion rates for high-school students — are ones education leaders hope to build on in the coming years to lessen a perceived over-reliance on student test scores. Continue reading →

One of the most effective tools our elite use to get their way is education. Or let me rephrase that, indoctrination. We see all through our so called ‘education system’ that what the elites want taught is not really for the benefit of the American people. It is for the benefit of the global society.

America used to be #1 in education. It was #1 because it was based on a devotion to our God. All elementary schools up to high schools used a book called The New England Primer. It taught math, spelling, morals and everything else out of scripture. The Bible was THE school book. As our schools grew other books were brought into the classroom so the author of the First Amendment, Fisher Ames thought it was necessary to make sure that the original school book was retained: “If these [new] books … must be retained, as they will be, should not the Bible regain the place it once held as a school book?” Continue reading →

Teacher Bans Cross and Forces LGBT Agenda on Students

The bullying behavior of Lora Jane Riedas is outrageous and unconstitutional

TAMPA, FL—Liberty Counsel sent a demand letter to the Hillsborough County Public Schools regarding a teacher who has prohibited Christian jewelry, is engaging in outrageous LGBT political activism in her classroom, and punishes students who do not agree with her LGBT propaganda.

Lora Jane Riedas, a math teacher at Riverview High School, placed LGBT rainbow stickers on her students’ notebooks. Riedas’ classroom décor blatantly promotes a pro-LGBT agenda. Riedas retweeted, apparently during the school day, “favorite queer web series for kids” from “huffpostqueer” stating: “Here’s how to talk to kids about what it means to be an LGBTQ ally.” She is part of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network’s (GLSEN) Leadership Institute. Continue reading →

During the War Between the States, for example, trigger warnings had an entirely different meaning

For years, we have watched American history disappear in academe. It turns out that we’re not the only ones who have noticed.

“I think in some ways I knew more American history when I finished grade school than many college students know today,” best-selling historian David McCullough said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “And that’s not their fault—that’s our fault.” Continue reading →

The Teacher Union’s Dirty Little Secret

For those of us old enough to remember its beginnings, the United Negro College Fund’s iconic “A mind is a terrible thing to waste” campaign is still haunting. It began in 1972 with images of black students shut out of college classrooms, and ended with an almost undeniable appeal: donate to UNCF so that black kids can get an education.

But 45 years later, we’re still wasting minds. Many are black, but almost just as many are brown. In any poor California community, kids trapped in teachers-union-dominated classrooms are the least likely Californians to read or perform basic math at grade level. They are also the least likely to graduate from high school, much less go on to college. And now we have learned that beyond “terrible,” a mind is undeniably a dangerous thing to waste. Continue reading →

“LA breakdown – and let me out…”

The Los Angeles teacher unions, the L.A. Unified School District bureaucrats, and all their court eunuchs in Sacramento know they can’t take on charter schools directly anymore. They’re just too popular. So they have cooked up a way to stop them through death by a thousand cuts. Through a series of proposed regulations, they now mean to make charter schools every bit as horrible as public schools. Since they can’t beat them, it’s all about dragging their rivals down to their own level.

That’s the story in the Los Angeles Daily News, which reports that the Los Angeles Unified School District got an earful from angry parents who see right through their new efforts to kill off charter schools. The ugly details:

Charter school parents, students and administrators packed the meeting room at the Los Angeles Unified School District board meeting Tuesday to voice opposition to state legislation they said will hurt charter schools. Continue reading →