Education

I do hope so.  I have had great concerns as School Administrations have incrementally increased their reach and control far from the schools from years ago to the point where it seems that the Edu-Industrial Complex believes it is responsible for their students (vs Parents for their own children).  Witness the growth of pre-school day-care, post-school day-care, breakfast / lunch / dinners provided 365/year, health clinics, abortions when needed, and daycare for the kids’ kids.  With the advent of the Bullying laws, that reach was extended to any speech any where in real space and cyberspace.

In effect, Parents were being stripped of control and responsibility in one action after another.  Who knew it would be the First Amendment and the Third District Court that may have broken that lock that was rusting shut on parents?

From FIRE, the "money line" and great Executive Summary:

Is there a place where a student can go that’s far enough away from school grounds to allow that student to speak freely online? Every single one of the 14 judges on that court said ‘yes.’

Background:  

Yesterday, the full court for the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued two simultaneous opinions to resolve how much control grade schools and high schools may exercise over their students’ off-campus, online speech. In Layshock v. Hermitage School District and J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District, the 14-judge court delivered two landmark victories for free speech, holding that school officials cannot "reach into a child’s home and control his/her actions there to the same extent that it can control that child when he/she participates in school sponsored activities." In the cases, two students had been disciplined for creating parody MySpace profiles mocking their respective principals. The Third Circuit held that schools cannot punish students’ online speech simply because it is vulgar, lewd, or offensive.

Excerpts:

The full Third Circuit convened en banc to resolve this conflicting in-circuit precedent. Yesterday, the court decided in both cases that schools may not punish online, off-campus speech to the same extent that they may when dealing with in-school speech. The court thus concluded that the Supreme Court decision in Bethel School District No. 403 v. Fraser, 478 U.S. 675 (1986), which held that a high school may suspend a student for "lewd, indecent, or offensive speech and conduct" when such behavior conflicts with "essential lessons of civil, mature conduct," is inapplicable to online speech created off campus…

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SB67 (passed 273*-100): A bill to establish a committee to study school vouchers and school choice. Although, I voted for this bill, I wouldn’t mind seeing, as an alternative to more studies and committees, a resolution urging all members of the House and Senate to go down to their school district offices and apply to become a substitute teacher.

A lot of people like to talk about education reform, but unless you’ve spent some time in a classroom environment in New Hampshire (down in the trenches), you really can’t get a feel for what things are like. Are there problems with our state and federal education systems? Yes. Are they problems that can be fixed by shoveling more taxpayer dollars into the bucket? It’s been my experience that more spending is definitely not the solution.

How is it that in some public schools in New Hampshire, high school students taking high school level geometry and second year algebra classes can’t do simple multiplication without a calculator? In a nearby high school where 11th graders can’t divide 35 by 7 in their heads, I saw a lot of notices concerning our recent votes on the state budget, but not a lot of concern expressed over the fact that there are students a year away from graduating, who that lack the basic math skills that my daughters (Swasey School third-graders) have mastered at the age of eight?

Frankly, I don’t know what …

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Competency Based Education, coming to a New Hampshire school near you?

Bedford started using Competency Based Education a few years ago after the grand opening of their new high school. One of the first things parents noticed was the number of students failing their competencies and then were required to take summer school.

I think parents support a rigorous academic education for their children. If that means students cannot advance to the next grade or must attend summer school that might be a needed consequence. The question is, does Competency Based Eduction provide that academic rigorous course of study?

First, let’s look at where Competency Based Ed. came from. Competency Based Education is Outcome Based Education. Outcome Based Education is yet another attempt to reform a failing public education system. Outcome Based Ed. focuses on “learning outcomes”. But what are learning outcomes? I would suspect parents would automatically assume outcomes meant their children would master the academic content presented in a lesson. The parents would be wrong to make that assumption.

Some of the most vocal opponents to OBE point to a reform method that shifts focus away from academic content to one that focuses on attitudes, behaviors and values. In other words, the outcome may not always be that a student master long division. The outcome may require a student to alter their value system.

Two of the ten competencies that New Hampshire school officials now want students to master, and which the teachers are supposed to promote and measure, are the “ability to get along with others” and “self-management.” Many New Hampshire students are entering college in need of remedial education and now teachers have to focus on non-academic skills. It’s no wonder that many teachers will tell you privately, this is a waste of time and effort.

While these skills may be worthwhile in some classes,…

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More and more in the general culture, parents are becoming less and less involved in their children’s education – or so it seems or so we are led to believe.   So therefore, we are to leave Government Legislation the Media Education to "the professionals".  Nonsense – more and more I keep understanding why we need to keep the attitude of "hey, you work for us!" and not the other way around or to allow them to lead us by the nose.  More and more, we are expected to take what they say as gospel and just allow them to do what we believe to be the right thing.  However, it seems to be the case that every time I go to yet another site, there is another story of how our Educational system is not educating, but it is subverting the nation’s traditional value system.  This line from Ann Marie’s post nailed it:

The outcome may require a student to alter their value system.

Anti-Patriotic:

A most blatant example is that the Pledge of Allegiance is seen as being offensive (to someone) and should not be said by students:

So they went to the school, PS29, to change that. After spirited meetings with parents, teachers, and an “educational unit for kids,” the principal agreed to have the Pledge broadcast over the school’s loud speaker “for the first time in years.”

But here‘s what’s interesting. In New York, reciting the Pledge daily in schools is the law. The principal, then, isn’t doing anything revolutionary — she‘s just complying with what’s been mandated since just after 9/11.

Others, however, aren’t. The Daily News called 10 New York-area schools asking if they recite the Pledge regularly. Only half do.

"Only half do." At the risk of being labeled jingoistic, I found the idea that not saying the Pledge is absolutely amazing (on the idea of befuddling): "I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of American, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all".  Foundational issues, foundational philosophy.  Is it that much to ask that citizens support the country we live in?  Is that YOUR value?

Extra:
Red Skeltonhas a great take on the Pledge that is a must read.

Anti-capitalistic and Pro-Marxist:

There is no way that Marxism and socialism is congruent with the Founders’ vision.  Yet, more and more, the liberal socialism that is in the Ivory Towers of colleges and universities, pushed by the Boomer hippie generation, is migrating do the high, middle, and elementary school levels.  How many of you parents understand that Johnny and Janie’s teachers hate the system that 1) pays YOUR salaries and 2) uses your taxpayer dollars to teach your children that hatred?  Is that your value system?  Did our veterans fight and give their all fighting totalitarian countries just so that we would end up being one anyways?  What is it that your teachers are teaching your children – do you REALLY know or are you assuming?

More background here.  And don’t forget this from the Unions:

“High school is too late” to educate students about unions and workers, says Shuler, the daughter of union parents in Oregon who joined the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers as an activist and organizer after college. “We need to get into the elementary schools.”

Collectivism – it isn’t just…

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Last week we GraniteGrok and RLCNH told you about the Senate caving on the
budget, and now they are caving on parental rights issues:

The bill in question is drafted from these sections of the republican party
platform:

• Only parents can be entrusted to control the education of their children
• and choose schools that best suit their children’s needs.
• Laws should be implemented to encourage school choice and competition

and allow all parents to choose the best public, private, charter or home
school program for their children."

Yet the Senate is caving.  Please pick up the phone and call your senator.
You can find you senator here, just enter your town.

Guest post from NH Rep. JR Hoell (R-Dunbarton)

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You know, if these kinds of things keep happening, somebody’s gonna scratch the "Great" out of that tag line.  Heck, with this starting to be a pattern instead of a outlier, people are right to really start asking their local NEA union heads, their Superintendents, and their School Boards seriously hard questions.   I wrote here (concerning whose responsibility kids are in the daycare we owned):

Never did I think that we were that important to believe that we should or could supplant parents.

I also pointed out in that same post that there are teachers in Moultonboro, NH that "look down" upon the parents on the topic of attitudes; in fact, if I had been their boss, I would have pulled them aside after they had said what they did about their actual employers – the parents – to knock it  off:

…students are WAY ahead of the times, way ahead of parents on multiple issues especially when it comes to openness and sexuality…I disagree with having parent being allowed in.  I think that student are willing to talk about this because they have different views than their parents

And now, we know why – it seems that "Public Schools" teachers are going out of their way to teach their students differently than what their parents do on moral issues; we talked about this on Saturday’s show (emphasis mine) about what Diane Schnieder of both NEA (teachers union) and GLSEN (a militant pro-homosexual advocacy group whose founder, Ken Jennings, was Obama’ "Safe School" czar) gave as a talk at a UN conference:

“Oral sex, masturbation, and orgasms need to be taught in education,” Diane Schneider told the audience at a panel on combating homophobia and transphobia.  Schneider, representing the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers union in the US, advocated for more “inclusive” sex education in US schools, with curricula based on liberal hetero and homosexual expression.  She claimed that the idea of sex education remains an oxymoron if it is abstinence-based, or if students are still able to opt-out. 

Comprehensive sex education is “the only way to combat heterosexism and gender conformity,” Schneider proclaimed, “and we must make these issues a part of every middle and high-school student’s agenda.”  “Gender identity expression and sexual orientation are a spectrum,” she explained, and said that those opposed to homosexuality “are stuck in a binary box that religion and family create.”

Kids, forget your parents and your God – you only have to listen to me!

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