Free Talk Live

In testimony to Congress Wednesday, US Education Secretary Arne Duncan made a startling claim: This year, up to 82 percent of public schools could "fail" the government's "No Child Left Behind" standards.

"No Child Left Behind is broken and we need to fix it now," he said, according to a transcript provided by the Department of Education.

Whistle blower, Charlotte Iserbyt ,author of, “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America” was the Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, under the Reagan Administration. In this video she speaks of the insidious, deliberate process of our school boards and educational systems to dumb down our children and to create a docile,compliant citizen.

Excerpts from the training manual> > “Innovations in Education, A change Agents Guide”

The American Civil Liberties Union is asking the U.S. Department of Education to investigate what it calls "unlawful" single-sex education programs in Birmingham's Huffman Middle School and another district in Idaho. The ACLU filed complaints with the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, saying the programs appear to violate federal law by forcing students into a single-sex environment with little or no alternative options, rely on harmful gender stereotypes and deprive students of equal educational opportunities merely because of their sex.

Everyone knows the US education system is broken, but why? And what can be done to possibly fix it?

A Florida state lawmaker is sponsoring a bill that would require teachers to give parents in Florida a grade for how involved they are with their child's education. Schools can only do so much. "We hold teachers accountable, we're holding students accountable, we're holding administrators accountable."
K-12 parents would be assessed, but only Kindergarten through 3rd grade would receive a satisfactory, unsatisfactory, or needs improvement grade.

American primary and secondary schools fail to educate because that is not their function, Dmitry Orlov writes. "Their function is to institutionalize children at an early age." In due course inmates of the U.S. education enterprise "will go on to other institutions - jails, psychiatric hospitals, the military."

The story of how 1 man is revolutionizing the education system. By putting out free videos online that students can watch and do problem sets at their own pace. The results are astonishing, with test scores and classrooms being turned on their heads (in a good way). An interesting look at how technology can provide for such an innovative solution to a complex problem - for FREE.

Ricci is professor of alternative learning at Nipissing University and an advocate of unschooling, a concept that's gaining popularity in both Canada and the United States thanks to frustration with the current public education system. In unschooling the child is in control of his/her learning. They are free to decide what they want to study, when they want to study it.

Since progressives want government to run health care, let's look at what government management did to K-12 education. While most every other service in life has gotten better and cheaper, American education remains stagnant. Spending has tripled! Why no improvement? Because K-12 education is a virtual government monopoly, writes John Stossel, and monopolies don't improve.