Monthly Archive for March, 2006

Datelined April 1, Education Gladfly has the latest in education news:

Next Friday, the American Enterprise Institute will host an event to celebrate the release of Frederick M. Less’s newest book, Hey Baby, Don’t be Stupid!, an elaboration of Less’s “tough love” theory of education reform. In his latest work, the twelfth so far this year, Less argues that failing schools need to do more to humiliate and mock their low-performing students. He writes, “If NCLB is designed to bring sunlight and shame upon bad schools, but the schools don’t pass that shame along to their students, how is this whole thing supposed to work? Tougher love, baby!” Less suggests, for example, that teachers make struggling youngsters the objects of class scorn by requiring them to wear scarlet “Fs,” or allow bullies to administer vicious wedgies and swirlies to academic underachievers.

See also Checker Finn’s no-holds-barred memoir, “A Million Little Pieces of Chalk,” and a Fordham report revealing “home-schooled youngsters receive as much as 8,459 percent less state and local money than their district school counterparts.”

Thousands of Hispanic students are walking out of Los Angeles schools to protest a federal bill that would make illegal immigration a felony. It’s The Wrong Protest, writes Xiaochin Yan in Pacific Research’s Capital Ideas.

Partly to blame is that for years basic skills such as reading, writing, and math have been obscured by multiculturalism, self-esteem, and other politically correct fads. Rather than teaching immigrant students how to assimilate into the civic mainstream of America and giving them the tools they need to make that better life, schools have instead let them pass from grade to grade without really keeping track of their progress or holding anyone accountable.

While only 11 percent of California 12th graders hadn’t passed the graduation exam by the end of 2005, the failure rate was 18 percent for Hispanic students and 30 percent for immigrants, Yan notes.

Betsy quotes Peggy Noonan on assimilating immigrants patriotically. Who’s at fault?

The politically correct nitwit teaching the seventh-grade history class who decides the impressionable young minds before him need to be informed, as their first serious history lesson, that the Founders were hypocrites, the Bill of Rights nothing new and imperfect in any case, that the Indians were victims of genocide, that Lincoln was a clinically depressed homosexual who compensated for the storms within by creating storms without . . .

You can turn any history into mud. You can turn great men and women into mud too, if you want to.

And it’s not just the nitwits, wherever they are, in the schools, the academy, the media, though they’re all harmful enough. It’s also the people who mean to be honestly and legitimately critical, to provide a new look at the old text. They’re not noticing that the old text–the legend, the myth–isn’t being taught anymore. Only the commentary is. But if all the commentary is doubting and critical, how will our kids know what to love and revere? How will they know how to balance criticism if they’ve never heard the positive side of the argument?

If I wanted to make the law more welcoming to immigrants, I’d turn the rally into a citizenship class and voter registration drive.

Update: Via Right Wing Nation comes Daily Spork’s story of Francisco’s talk in speech class.

With his plaid shirt tucked into his worn jeans and scuffed loafers peering from beneath tattered hems, Francisco’s first words were:

“I talk to you about important. America is important and why I love it.”

The giggles, the papers rustling, the chairs creaking…all came to a sudden halt. Suddenly, the classroom fell silent. Teachers yelling over the din couldn’t silence we the youthful mass. But Francisco’s soft, unobtrusive voice uttering the name of our nation as his beloved vaporized the commotion in the air.

“America is…” We waited while Francisco searched the air with his eyes in an effort to force his mind to remember the English word he had just written on his hand.

“…wonderful.” Through broken English and behind large, thick glasses, Francisco told of how he grew up on the streets of Mexico City and had a parrot that sat on his porch. He worked and worked and failed in love and decided to come to America. So Francisco applied for a green card.

And he got one exactly 3 years ago. This little nervous man whom no one would normally look at twice suddenly turned into something- I don’t know what. His smile overtook his nervousness and his eyes shone through his glasses. After 60 seconds of shuffling feet and hunched shoulders, Francisco clapped his worn hands together and looked upwards.

“Thank God for America! I love America!”

Americans love immigrants like Francisco.

Boys are the new victim class in education, writes Heather MacDonald in City Journal. But don’t expect girls to give up victim status. In the 21st century, everybody’s a victim!

Boys are poised to become the newest victim class, requiring a sturdy structure of advisors, trainers, and counselors just to get by. The requisite helping apparatus is already in place: the professions and academia overflow with committees on the recruitment and retention of minorities and women; they will undoubtedly be only too happy to expand their mandate to boys.

But what, you say, about girls’ hallowed victim status — how can it co-exist with a newly designated male oppressed class? Not to worry. The great thing about victim thinking is that it is not zero-sum; it is win-win. Each individual, each group, can be a victim in his or her or his/her own special way.

Though it’s tempting to use the gender gap to dismantle feminized progressive education, writes MacDonald, she has a better solution: Boys should study more.

A school board in a Pittsburgh suburb killed the challenging International Baccalaureate program “on the grounds that it is Marxist, anti-Christian, un-American and too costly,” reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Essentially, IB is seen as too internationalist, reports the Guardian.

(Anti-IB board members) object to the largely secular, multi-cultural bent of the curriculum and its emphasis on international institutions and pacts such as the United Nations, or the Kyoto protocol to reverse global warming, which opponents argue undermines American sovereignty and nationalism.

As for the charge of Marxism, this principally stemmed from the International Baccalaureate Organisation’s support for the Earth charter, a global set of aims devised in France in 2000, which, Trombetta was most concerned, called for people worldwide to protect the environment, oppose militarism and promote equal distribution of wealth.

And, (during the school board campaign), (Daniel) Iracki said: “Our country was founded on Judeo-Christian values and we have to be careful about what values our children are taught.”

(Mark) Trombetta, the board member who has received death threats from angry parents, had further complained that the IB tests “were developed in a foreign country.”

Well, yes. France.

In voting to end IB, board members stressed the cost.

Cathy Seipp is taking heat for writing about her daughter, who will finish high school in three years and, after a string of rejections, got into UC-San Diego (congratulations!) instead of “prostitute college.”

As a twice-weekly op-ed columnist, I wrote about my daughter all the time. I even wrote about the time she was run over by The Naked Guy (a 12th grader streaking through campus). Our deal was that if she had a problem with it, she’d tell me. She survived adolescence, even though all her teachers eventually figured out the connection. (She has her father’s last name, which is not “Jacobs.”) Some of them assigned my columns in class, which she seemed to think was unfair. She had enough of me at home.

When she was in college, two newspaper columnists wrote books about their school-skipping, drug-taking, out-of-control daughters. She asked me not to write a book about her. I accused her of failing to give me book material. Who wants a book about an honor-roll student who’s never been arrested or done heroin or neglected to say “please” and “thank you?” A butterfly tattoo on the ankle just doesn’t do it. At any rate, I’ve kept my pledge. No books about Allison.