Did you happen to read Jen Hatmaker’s hilarous viral blog post, “Worst End of School Year Mom Ever?” Hatmaker wrote:

“We are limping, limping across the finish line, folks. I tapped out somewhere in April and at this point, it is a miracle my kids are still even going to school. I haven’t checked homework folders in three weeks, because, well, I just can’t. Cannot. Can. Not. I can’t look at the homework in the folder. Is there homework in the folder? I don’t even know. Are other moms still looking in the homework folder? I don’t even care.”

She went on to list part of her to-do list for the end of the school year:

“The emails coming in for All Of The Things – class gift, end of year letters, luncheon signup, party supplies, awards ceremonies, pictures for the slide shows, final projects – are like a tsunami of doom. They are endless. I mean, they will never ever end. There is no end of it. I will never finish and turn it all in and get it to the (correct) Room Mom and get it all emailed and I am pretty sure the final week of school will never be over and this is the end for me.”

Oh my word! If you’ve ever wondered if you have what it takes to homeschool, reading Hatmaker’s blog post ought to at least convince you that sending your kids to school is no walk in the park, either. Or maybe you are on that hamster wheel and as you look toward another exhausting school year next fall, you wonder if your family will survive.

Looking back on our years of homeschooling, fourteen consecutive years in all, the most common thing I heard from people who found out we were homeschooling was, “I could never do that, I’m not _______ enough.” The blank was usually something like consistent or disciplined or patient. I understand completely because before we began our homeschooling journey, I was the mom who made comments like that to other parents.

“Arming teachers” with guns is a subject often fraught with emotion and one that can divide communities into different “camps” — usually into the stereotypical left vs. right, NRA vs. gun-control arguments. But the issue is much more complex and nuanced and even those usually on the same side of the gun control debate disagree about whether teachers should carry guns in classrooms.

Ohio is no exception as the state grapples with school safety a year after T.J. Lane killed three classmates and paralyzed another in a shooting at Chardon High School.

“Twenty-two seconds from the time he shot the first shot until he left the school building. Twenty-two seconds.”

That’s how Superintendent Joseph Bergant described the shooting at Chardon High School. He spoke at an Ohio State Board of Education (SBE) meeting earlier this month and said that Lane fired the first shot through his backpack and killed the student next to him.

“How do you guarantee the safety of 3000 students in a school building?,” Bergant asked. “You can’t.”

The Chardon district had a comprehensive plan for what to do in the event of an active shooter. They practiced so that students, parents, and teachers knew exactly how to respond. That training included role playing — even discharging a firearm in the building — practice reunification with parents, and parents receiving text messages to make sure the notification system was operational.

Bergant said, “Teachers had more anxiety when we did the crisis drill than on the day of the shooting.”

Despite all the preparations, the shooting only ended as quickly as it did because of the heroic actions of teacher and football coach Frank Hall who risked his own life by charging Lane — while dodging bullets — and chasing him out of the building.

Metal detectors. Uniformed police officers (euphemistically called “school resource officers”), buzzer systems at the school entry, armed teachers, brave and burly football coaches, duck and cover drills. No single solution or combination of protective measures will guarantee the safety of children when there is an evil murderer bent on snuffing out human lives. Arming teachers is not “the” answer to preventing — or stopping — active shooters.

But are they one solution that could help to make kids safer? Are there legitimate safety concerns about arming teachers? And who should decide if teachers should be armed with guns in schools?

Subjected to criminal prosecution for homeschooling their six children, Uwe and Hannelore Romeike fled Germany in 2008. U.S. Immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman granted the family asylum in 2010, only to see his decision overturned in 2012 after it was targeted directly by the Obama administration.

On Tuesday, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the administration’s denial of asylum granted to the Romeike family.

Fox News reported:

“The Obama administration is basically saying there is no right to home school anywhere,” said Michael Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association. “It’s an utter repudiation of parental liberty and religious liberty.”

The Justice Dept. is arguing that German law banning home schooling does not violate the family’s human rights.

“They are trying to send a family back to Germany where they would certainly lose custody of their children,” Farris told Fox News. “Our government is siding with Germany.”

“Germany continues to persecute homeschoolers,” said Mike Donnelly, HSLDA Director of International Affairs. “The court ignored mountains of evidence that homeschoolers are harshly fined and that custody of their children is gravely threatened—something most people would call persecution. This is what the Romeikes will suffer if they are sent back to Germany.”

So, you want to pitch a TV show — a sitcom no less! Or maybe you’re just an armchair TV enthusiast, a mental writer playing out episodes of the ideal sitcom in your head. Whether your concept is ideal or idyllic, if you want to get it off the ground, you need to get your head out of the clouds and start viewing your human reality in terms of numbers — good numbers. Take a tip from Seth MacFarlane: Be sure to include an African American, a disabled character, and an Asian reporter if you want to stand a chance in TV land.

In other words, start counting your minorities.

It’s all in the spirit of being fair that we view people based on their color, class, gender, or physical ability. Not only is it fair, it is super easy to follow the 4-step program for crafting your perfectly pitch-able TV sitcom.

So, get out your calculators and get ready for a math lesson in how to write a situation comedy for television!

I recently wrote about an event called Occupy the DOE, where many of the speakers espoused radical views on education and society. While I disagreed with the extreme left-wing views of many of the speakers, I didn’t disagree with everything said during the 4-day event. In fact, several times I had to remind myself that I wasn’t listening to a Tea Party event or homeschool conference as speaker after speaker railed against high-stakes testing and the Common Core.

Parents and activists from across the political spectrum object to excessive testing and the implementation of Common Core in their states; there is much common ground to be found. But it’s important to dig beneath the surface and consider exactly what you’re signing up for when you join a movement to eliminate high-stakes testing or block the Common Core. Some groups have more than just the best interest of your child as their top priority and you may inadvertently be drafted into the public school monopoly-protection movement.

A group called “United Opt Out” organized the Occupy the DOE event in front of the Department of Education in April. Their mission statement claims that they are “dedicated to the elimination of high stakes testing in public education,” saying that high stakes testing is

destructive to ALL children, educators, communities, the quality of instruction in classrooms, equity in schooling, and the democratic principles which underlie the purposes of public education.

There is a lot to unpack in that statement, but hyperbole aside, many parents whose children attend public school do have legitimate complaints about high-stakes testing and its negative influence on education. In fact, the testing culture is sometimes cited as a reason parents remove their children from public schools for homeschooling or private schools. As states march forward with the implementation of the Common Core standards, teachers, parents and even many unions fear that schools will double-down on the worst aspects of the testing culture and lose even more local control, so in many aspects, parents and activists on both side of the political spectrum can find areas of agreement.

Timothy Slekar, a former teacher, is now an associate professor of teacher education at Penn State Altoona. At the Occupy the DOE rally he described a parent-teacher conference where he and his wife were told that their son had failed a writing test because of a technicality. They felt that the formulaic requirements of the writing test were stifling their son’s creativity and they decided then to opt out of all future high-stakes testing for their son. “This disastrous system was forcing his teachers to comply with the powers that be.” He said,

The [tests] were forcing Luke to parrot sentences in a pre-ordained structure so that a low-paid temp worker would be able to score it. … Our son was not going to take part in a system that forced the teachers to comply with educational mandates constructed by politicians. … We were opting out.

Did you happen to catch “Occupy the D.O.E. 2.0” at the Department of Education over the weekend? If you missed it, you’re not alone. It didn’t receive quite the attention some of the other Occupy events have received and it was only an “Occupy” event if by “Occupy” you mean people congregating in soccer-mom chairs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. (with an hour break for lunch) and evening entertainment at Busboys & Poets at 5th and K Street. And hotels at night.

The Thursday-Sunday event was sponsored by United Opt Out, a group whose main mission is to convince teachers and families to opt out of high-stakes testing and to “resist all market-based reforms that seek to privatize and destroy public education.” The lineup of speakers included a collection of academic elites, union leaders, community organizers, teachers, and students. They only managed to attract a few dozen activists, which is why you probably didn’t see much about it on the news. But it’s important to hear what they had to say because these leaders in the education movement will have an important voice in shaping the schools many of our children and grandchildren will attend in the future.

While the speakers who were associated with United Opt Out were on-message, documenting their complaints about standardized testing and the corporate interests pushing the Common Core, other speakers attempted to work this message into their standard stump speeches and this is where it seemed to merge with your typical Occupy rally: There were dozens of different complaints and few (if any) solutions proposed.

As you might expect at a faculty lounge Occupation, there was plenty of radical rhetoric and Utopian vision-casting. (Most of the livestreamed videos are archived here, and you can read the speaker bios here.)

Shaun Johnson is a former public school teacher and online radio show host at the Chalk Face. He thinks teachers are too “meek” and need to get angry:

It’s finally about time that we start getting pissed off and angry…Nothing’s going to change unless people start cracking some skulls. I’m sorry, so, if you don’t get angry and go out there and start speaking out and not be so afraid, then nothing’s going to change. Because there’s a lot of money out there working against us. And we don’t have that kind of money. We don’t have that kind of political power. So we’ve gotta do something. Throw our bodies on the machine. But something’s gotta change. Something’s gotta give. And like I said, we’ve gotta start cracking some skulls.

It might be a good time to point out that they actually do have “that kind of money.” The NEA was the top contributor to state and federal races in 2008, with $45 million, more than 90% going to Democrats. And that doesn’t include tens of millions the teachers’ unions spend on political activity that is reported to the Department of Labor and doesn’t show up on campaign finance reports.

Johnson also led the crowd in a profanity-laced guessing game about the names of charter schools. He implied that kids using at-home charter schools are spending their days engaged in cybersex. “What are you doing with your hands?”

“Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky

Click here for the first three in Part One.

Perhaps the best explanation for the Nostradamus-like talents of Fyodor Dostoevsky can be found in this telling quote from a personal letter he sent a friend upon embarking on a career as a writer. Old Fyodor was an astute student of the human condition, but his motivation did not stem simply from academic purposes or from the fact that he wanted something, like political power.

Dostoevsky, believe it or not, actually valued life and wanted to live it more fully. He sought to realize his own purpose and function, and then to share his findings. He believed that just because we can’t know everything about our existence and the ongoing tale of humanity does not mean we cannot know anything. Nearly all of us say we want to find answers; most prematurely resign from the hunt.

Fyodor never did. And as a result, his novels remain as relevant today as they were 150 years ago.

In the first half of this essay on the 20th century sociopolitical nightmares that Dostoevsky predicted in his novels, we identified three specific areas of the culture that the great Russian writer correctly foresaw would suffer under the rise of secularism and socialism: the institution of the family, the private religion of the people, and the value such a nation puts on human life.

Today we will take a peek under the hood of three more important areas of society that would ultimately sit under judgment of the prophetic pronouncements Dostoevsky made in his impressive body of work:

• Economics of Envy: The War on Private Property
• Idolizing the Intellectual: The War on Higher Education
• and Social Engineering: The War on the Individual

Should parents take over failing schools? Currently, seven states have “parent-trigger” laws, which empower parents to take control of the fate of low-performing schools their children attend. Depending on the state, parents can vote for various options when schools are failing their children: They can vote to convert to a charter school, replace teachers and administrators, have the state take over the school, or even close the school altogether.

Last year’s movie Won’t Back Down, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis, told the story of a group of parents who took over their children’s failing school. “Inspired by true events,” it illustrated with heartbreaking clarity the frustrations parents—and often teachers— feel when children become lost in bureaucracies and schools where it seems rigor mortis has set in. Not surprisingly, the movie was panned by unions and other anti-school choice activists.

In California, the only place parents have actually pulled the trigger on a “Parent Empowerment” law, it has been tried twice. The first attempt was the Compton Unified School District, where fewer than half of students graduate from high school and just 2% attend college. Under the California law, parents can use the trigger law if a district has failed to meet adequate yearly progress three years in a row and is in “corrective action” status under the federal No Child Left Behind law. It seems like a no-brainer that a major overhaul was in order, but it will surprise no one that when Compton parents organized to call for change, the unions and administration objected. Strenuously. They promised that reforms were right around the corner and that they just needed a little more time for their programs to work. It’s understandable that parents grew tired of waiting for promised reforms that might never come while their children languished in lousy schools.

In order for parents to take control of a school, they must file a petition with signatures from 50% of the parents of each targeted school. Parents chose to try out the California law on McKinley Elementary School, ranked in the bottom 10% of schools in the state. They turned in signatures from 62% of parents in the district and that’s when the claws came out. The school district demanded that parents verify their signatures in person and—I am not making this up—that parents show photo identification. Some parents claimed the schools threatened them with deportation, and others said teachers told children the school would be closed or the kids wouldn’t receive special education services if the parents succeeded. Some parents rescinded their signatures. Board members claimed “outside groups” pressured the parents to sign the petition. Leaders of the trigger movement dispute that claim, as does the state school board president. The board also said the petition was “materially non-qualifying” and rejected it on a technicality with a 7-0 vote, saying it cited the wrong education code and didn’t contain correct information about the charter school operator they had selected.  Despite pro bono legal help, parents failed in their bid to reform the school.

Something vile and horrific happened in a courtroom in Ohio last week, and as I’ve reflected upon the event, I’ve been disturbed by the thought that we have become a nation of compliant sheep that no longer produces citizens capable of standing up to injustice.

At a sentencing hearing for school shooter T.J. Lane, who gunned down six high school students, killing three and paralyzing one from the chest down, Judge David Fuhry gave Lane three life sentences in prison, to be served consecutively.

In what should have been a day of closure and justice for the families of the victims and the community of Chardon that suffered so much in the wake of the school shooting last year, a courtroom full of people stood by and allowed T.J. Lane to victimize the families in a base, contemptible way that likely added exponentially to the heavy burden the families already bear.

The courtroom for Lane’s sentencing hearing on Tuesday was packed with families of the victims, students, teachers, and members of the media. As the hearing began, Lane slipped off the button-down shirt he was wearing, revealing a t-shirt onto which he had written “KILLER” with a marker. A collective gasp filled the courtroom. As the families of the victims gave their statements, Lane smiled and leered at the families, almost seeming to enjoy the moment.

After the sentence was read, Lane had the opportunity to make a statement. At that point, he said something so horrific that I’m not even going to write it here, simply to spare you if you haven’t already heard it. (You can read it and watch the video here.) Trust me, you will have to bleach your soul once you hear it. It should be added to The Book of Things That Shall Never Be Repeated. Then Lane flipped the families the middle finger as a parting shot and said, “F*** all of you!” As a mother, I had a visceral — almost physical — reaction. I almost vomited, thinking about the pain his contemptible words caused the families and how they’ll never be able to scrub them from their minds.

People called talk-radio programs that day to vent their anger. Along with vicious prison-retribution wishes, caller after caller said they would have been arrested had they been in the courtroom. They wouldn’t have stood by while Lane visually and verbally tortured the parents.

WTAM host Bob Frantz said: “I would have been shot dead today. I would have leapt tables to get to that kid.”

And yet.

Everyone stood by and let it happen.

“Action is for mass salvation. He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has a peculiar conception of ‘personal salvation’; he doesn’t care enough for people to be ‘corrupted’ for them.” — Saul Alinsky

“The hell with charity. The only thing you’ll get is what you’re strong enough to get.” — Saul Alinsky

Parents rightly admire and appreciate their children’s teachers, but they don’t always understand the radical labor organizations running the plays behind the scenes in negotiations with their local school boards. Unfortunately, beloved teachers sometimes get caught up in the guerrilla tactics championed by Saul Alinsky and other radical community organizers.

Alinsky, considered the founder of the modern community-organizing movement, is in many ways the leader of modern-day teachers’ unions. His 1971 book Rules for Radicals has influenced negotiations between unions and school boards for 40 years, and whether parents realize it or not, their communities have often been at the mercy of his radical organizing methods. Alinsky’s main goal was to strip power from the “haves” and give it to the “have nots” based on his notion of fairness and social justice.

Gaining power is a zero-sum game in Rules for Radicals. Either you have it or you don’t. If you don’t have it all, you must continue to work until you do, using whatever means available to you, while maintaining the illusion of the moral high ground. “You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments,” Alinsky said. More:

It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral; a world where “reconciliation” means that when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it, then we have reconciliation.

Until his death in 1972, Alinsky conducted training for NEA UniServ personnel. Ten years later, during a strike in Ravenna, Ohio, that dragged on for five long months (the longest in the state’s history), strike manuals were found titled “Strategy Uniserv Directors” that outlined the Alinsky-style program for negotiations. The same strategies are still in use today.

I used to hate politics. Then I met Ann Coulter.

In case you haven’t seen PCU, allow me to explain: I am only one of many in my generation who grew into adulthood harboring a strong desire to avoid all forms of political discussion. For many of us growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, the deafening liberal attacks coming across cable news, talk radio, and then the internet defined politics as a source of talking-head tsuris and therefore best avoided at all costs.

The unavoidable reality hit when I enrolled in grad school and promptly learned the phrase: “Everything is political.” And that was before I got the chance to interview the prospective film studies professor who declared himself a communist without blinking an eye.

Critical theory, my chosen area of study, comes in many forms. The most memorable (and popular) being a series of schools based on race/ethnicity/gender/sexual demarcations that could easily be classified under the heading “White Men Are Coming To Get You Studies.” All theories are taught under the general pseudo-philosophical guideline of postmodernism. I could spend entire articles trying to explain that one.  Instead, I’ll just let this handy little comic do it for me.

Nothing I learned made sense yet all of it was accepted as holy. Any time I would question these ideas I would receive furrowed brows, gobsmacked expressions, or simply be told in so many words that I just “didn’t get it.” These reactions probably wouldn’t have bothered me so much except for the fact that they were coming from the professor who would sign off on my thesis, providing me with the paperwork I needed to graduate and get the hell out of Dodge.

Hell. I was in hell. Instead of being taught how to think, I was paying to be told what to think. Waiting in the airport for my flight back to campus after winter break, I contemplated throwing in the towel. And then, I heard an angel’s voice and a bright light beckoned me to the bookstore in the terminal…

Okay, not totally. But I do know for a fact that finding Ann Coulter’s Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right on my way to the plane was a divine appointment. Three hours later I landed on solid ground and felt my feet beneath me for the first time in 18 months. Finally, someone was making sense.

Perhaps if conservatives had had total control over every major means of news dissemination for a quarter century, they would have forgotten how to debate, too, and would just call liberals stupid and mean.

Ann waited until page 2 to verbalize the crux of the problem I’d been facing: This liberal professor had total control and, therefore, could demean and dismiss me whenever he liked.

Or so he thought and so did I, until I met Ann Coulter.

When the substitute teachers arrived at the Strongsville police station for background checks, striking teachers greeted the “SCABS” with aggressive screaming and taunting. The applicants had to be escorted into the building by police officers.

“Go home, SCAB!”
“Have some integrity!”
“Get an honest job!”

One union member said, “We’re trying to scare them off in hopes that something positive can come out of this.”

Something positive “for the children,” no doubt.

Several white men screamed at a black woman, with one shouting:“Don’t do it, honey; it’s not all about you,” and “Rosa Parks would be ashamed.”

No doubt there is an important history lesson “for the children” in this mob scene.

Strongsville, Ohio, a normally quiet suburb just south of Cleveland, recently became Ground Zero in the public-sector union war. Earlier this month, after months of failed negotiations, teachers voted to strike when the school board submitted their “last best offer” to the Strongsville Education Association (SEA). With the high-stakes Ohio Graduation Test looming the week of March 11th, the 6000-student district hired substitute teachers to fill in during the strike. Not surprisingly, this didn’t go over well with the union teachers, who decided to intimidate and harass anyone who crossed the picket line — “for the children.”

Laura Rowley, a parent with students in the district, described her experience registering to be a substitute teacher:

I can’t put into words how these EDUCATORS behaved in front of the police station. Blocking the entrance, screaming in my face, calling me a b**tch, pounding on the doors of the building, going on and on…every other word was mother f*cker, dumb piece of s**t—I swear I was walking thru [sic] death row. Really it made me sob—I’m embarrassed that these are the people that are teaching my children. We had to have police escorts to leave the building, is this [sic] beyond crazy. Honestly, I am afraid to send my kids to school tomorrow.

She added, “There were subs crying and hyperventilating, thought they were going to call an ambulance.”

One parent who drove by the scene that day told Bob Frantz on WTAM radio, “I heard the most foul language and I thought my car was going to be mobbed.”

Was that really “for the children”?

With over 40 million views, this video captures the essence of the article you are about to read.

A funny thing happened “on the way” as I was contemplating writing this piece. While listening to a Christian radio station the announcer said, “Jesus is the reason for the season.”

At that moment this very familiar phrase hit me like a thunderbolt. For not only is “Jesus the reason for the season,” but Jesus is the reason our world, nation, history, culture and society are the way they are.

So regardless of whether you believe in Jesus, practice another faith, or are devoid of faith, Jesus has impacted you by virtue of the fact that you are alive.

For no person has affected mankind – past, present and future –more than this Jewish teacher who lived over 2000 years ago, whose birth we will celebrate with great fanfare.

Although Jesus’ life, death and resurrection were the impetus behind His followers’ establishing Christianity, the world’s largest religion itself is only the starting point for the influence Jesus spawned in countless non-religious venues as people over the centuries were moved and motivated by Him to express themselves in a multitude of ways that we continue to see played out everyday across the planet.

With so many examples of Jesus Christ’s effect on mankind it is impossible to even mention them all in this short piece — the purpose of which is to not only enhance your celebration of “the reason for the season” but to also increase your awareness of just how much Jesus impacts the world around you every day of the year.

If after reading this piece you are moved to delve deeper into this topic, I recommend a book published in 1994 that has since become a “modern classic,” What If Jesus Had Never Been Born?, co-authored by the late Dr. D. James Kennedy and the still very much alive Jerry Newcombe.

This book had a profound influence on me as it oriented my thinking about Jesus in ways that I had never contemplated.

So here in alphabetical order is only a short, incomplete list of the most obvious “non-religious” aspects of how Jesus Christ has impacted the world.

Victoria Soto, the Sandy Hook Elementary teacher slain in the Newtown massacre is being praised the world over as a hero – and rightly so. But is America being taught the true lesson of Soto’s sacrifice?

The reactions to the massacre in Newtown do not illustrate our culture’s value of human life so much as our desire to engineer the society in which we live. Whether the call for more gun control or less, the root of the argument is the same: human beings can create a perfect society through government, despite the fact that history has repetitively shown the exact opposite to be true.

Social engineering, an outgrowth of the industrial revolution, values human beings as assembly-line manufactured cogs in a wheel. Designed for a specific task, these human cogs are trained through government programming to follow bureaucratic blueprints for the creation and maintenance of a perfect society. This Marx-meets-manufacturing perspective may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but it continues to emerge over the course of human history. Ideas that sound innocent in theory are enacted with deadly results. Take, for example, one of the most grossly influential theories of social engineers in the late 1800s: Eugenics. This mad “science” that sprouted from Darwin’s Theory of Evolution posited that human beings could be determined “inferior” or “superior” based on their genetic makeup. This racial theory had as much influence on Margaret Sanger as it did Adolf Hitler. Both sought to engineer a “perfect” society and whether abortion or Holocaust, the result has been the same: A deadly lack of respect for the sanctity of human life.

It took less than an hour after we first learned about the events in Newtown for commentators to begin pontificating about gun control laws. We were never given an opportunity to mourn the dead. Those murdered were not valued as human beings, but as cogs to be used in the mechanical argument over the definition of a government-created perfect society. Even later arguments regarding mental health services were voiced under the auspices of government-funded programming more so than removing the stigma from, and promoting treatment for mental disease. Little to nothing has been said about the violent video games the shooter played, or the fact that his mother was a “Doomsday Prepper” like those seen and mocked on reality television. I wonder, when those comments finally make their way around the round tables, will that conversation also be guided by the advocacy of greater government regulation on media as well?

In the meantime, a nation mourns in silence, taught by example to channel their emotions into angry demands for government action, leaving little room for the comprehension — let alone teaching — of personal responsibility for the life of another human being. The real lesson of Newtown is the one that is being missed: Individuals are responsible to make the choice to value the sanctity of human life.

via Obamacore: The White House Takes the Schools – By Stanley Kurtz – The Corner – National Review Online.

President Obama’s bid to control what your children learn in school is surely one of the most important and disturbing of his many transformative plans. Not only is Obama’s attempt to devise what is in effect a national K–12 school curriculum arguably unconstitutional and illegal, the fact that most Americans have no idea that the new “Common Core” (a.k.a. Obamacore) even exists may be the most troubling thing about it.

Today’s Washington Post features an article on the controversy being kicked up by the new English curriculum that 46 states and the District of Columbia are just now waking up to. Not coincidentally, this new education war is hitting less than a month after Obama’s re-election, just in time to prevent the public from taking the most effective step it could have to block the changes. You have to get nearly to the end of today’s Post article even to get a hint of the fact that Obama is the real force behind the new curriculum. Following that link takes you to an article that more frankly lays out Obama’s role in commandeering the substance of what’s taught in the nation’s schools. The print version of this September 21, 2012 article featured a more revealing headline than the web version: “Education overhaul largely bypasses Congress.”

Read the rest at National Review and everything else from Stanley Kurtz.

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image courtesy shutterstock / Valerii Kotulskyi

Related at PJ Lifestyle:

8 Reasons Homeschooling Is Superior to Public Education

The 15 Best Books for Understanding Barack Obama’s Mysterious Political Theology

Education Meltdown: Why Won’t Back Down Could Be This Generation’s China Syndrome

France’s Socialist President Calls for End of Homework

via Pencils Down? French Plan Would End Homework : NPR.

In the name of equality, the French government has proposed doing away with homework in elementary and junior high school. French President Francois Hollande argues that homework penalizes children with difficult home situations, but even the people whom the proposal is supposed to help disagree.

It’s 5:30 p.m. and getting dark outside, as kids pour out of Gutenberg Elementary School in Paris 15th arrondissement. Parents and other caregivers wait outside to collect their children. Aissata Toure, 20, is here with her younger sister in tow. She’s come to pick up her 7-year-old son. Toure says she’s against Hollande’s proposal to do away with homework.

“It’s not a good idea at all because even at a young age, having individual work at home helps build maturity and responsibility,” she says, “and if it’s something they didn’t quite get in school, the parents can help them. Homework is important for a kid’s future.”

….

There’s another big reason the French government is making changing school policy a top priority, Gumbel says.

“The French are discovering — to their horror — that their performance internationally has been declining over the last 10 years. The French actually are performing [worse] than the Americans in reading and science,” he says.

This is a huge shock, Gumbel says, to a country that long considered itself an education pioneer.

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Related at PJ Lifestyle:

8 Reasons Homeschooling Is Superior to Public Education

via The Future of School Choice | Hoover Institution.

If you were designing a K-12 education system from scratch, with no preconceived notions, and taking full account of the breathtaking technological innovations that have made possible a high-quality, highly personalized education for every child, what would that system look like?

Chances are that it would look little like the hidebound, bureaucratic, expensive, top-down, one-size-fits-all, command-and-control, inefficient, reform-resistant, administratively bloated, special-interest manipulated, obsolete, impersonal bricks-and-mortar system that represents the most disastrous failure of central planning west of Communist China and south of the United States Postal Service.

And yet, that is the system to which the vast majority of American schoolchildren are consigned. Little wonder that American high schoolers rank 21st out of 30 economically advanced nations in science literacy and 25th in math. Our nation cannot continue to thrive so long as our schools are pumping out mediocre graduates who cannot compete effectively in the world economy.

The proliferation of school choice—through open public school enrollment, magnet schools, charter schools, school vouchers, and scholarship tax credits—has expanded educational opportunities and competition within American K-12 education. Charter schools, in particular, often provide world-class educational programs to a growing number of children, and they sometimes offer individualized, technology-based programs.

But most existing school choice programs provide variations of the same nineteenth-century model that continues to dominate K-12 education: classroom-based instruction in a bricks-and-mortar setting. The school choice programs operate within a system in which the vast majority of funding is directed toward school districts, based on student counts. Charter and voucher programs make that funding transportable to particular types of alternative schools, but do not give families full control of funding to maximize opportunities for their children.

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Related at PJ Lifestyle:

Education Meltdown: Why Won’t Back Down Could Be This Generation’s China Syndrome

The Waiting for ‘Superman’ of the New Atheists

If you claim to care about the state of American public education and don’t see the new Daniel Barnz film Won’t Back Down, please find the nearest child in your general vicinity and apologize to them for being a part of the problem.

Then go and find Michael Douglas, Jane Fonda, and the ghost of Jack Lemmon to let them know that Hollywood has finally produced a new film that will replace The China Syndrome, the feel-good film of the ’70s that got nuclear energy banned. If we play our cards right, Won’t Back Down will become the movie that could become the one teachers and professors reference when discussing the positive impact pop culture can have on public policy. More on this in a minute.

There are two reasons behind my overwhelming endorsement of the movie which opened nation-wide last week.

The first is simple: It’s a really well-made, well-acted, well-crafted piece of cinema.

Writer/Director Barnz has assembled an excellent cast — Maggie Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis and Holly Hunter — and constructed a compelling story about the crisis in education. Set in the inner city of Pittsburgh, Won’t Back Down chronicles two mothers’ (Gyllenhaal and Davis) seemingly Sisyphean task of taking on the teachers’ unions.

Gyllenhaal’s feisty character is Jamie Fitzpatrick, a single mom who works multiple jobs to provide for her young daughter, a 2nd grade student at John Adams Elementary who suffers from dyslexia. Davis deftly portrays Nona Alberts, a world-weary teacher at the same school who wallows in a toxic mixture of disgust and mounting guilt over a broken system and her own second-best effort in the classroom.

Neither woman is perfect, but both desperately want the quintessential American dream for their kids: a dynamic education that will lead to better lives than their own.

Holly Hunter plays a conflicted union boss who serves as the on-screen voice of the average American who sees and hears about the failures of public education, but isn’t quite sure how to remedy it.

While the film is a tad bit predictable in its “David vs. Goliath” template, Won’t Back Down breathes new life into the under-dog story audiences appreciate. Barnz’ storytelling abilities grab and hold your attention for the entire 121 minutes, and if the subject matter weren’t so “controversial” in the progressively hallowed hills of Hollywood, someone from the project would have a serious shot at an Oscar nod.

First Lady Michelle Obama teaches Dr. Oz how to do the Dougie Dance.

In yesterday’s Daily Briefing about the dreadful media coverage of the attacks in Benghazi, Erick Erickson coined the term “conventional wisdom machine” to describe the mainstream media. The conventional wisdom machine efficiently turns out flimsy facts, sometimes with a flourish.

Vying for a spot on the list of the top 10 most ill-timed political stories, on September 12, 2012, First Lady Michelle Obama appeared on The Dr. Oz Show, and when he posited, “The greatest threat to national security that we have is obesity,” she said, “Absolutely.” Yes, on the day after the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, when we awoke to learn of our Libyan ambassador’s murder and embassies burning, both reminding us that we continue to face dire national security threats, the first lady appeared on television declaring body fat our #1 concern.

What threat did the first lady imagine? Obese people aren’t accepted into the military. True, insufficient military personnel threatens national security, but the size of our military force means nothing if we do not send them to the right place. It was just such an egregious error that cost Ambassador Stevens his life the previous day.

In addition, the interview contained some inappropriate elements. While the administration twists itself into knots not to offend Islam, the interview is titled “First Lady Michelle Obama’s Health Crusade.” And for a final flourish of cluelessness, Mrs. Obama taught Dr. Oz how to “Dougie,” which, according to the lyrics of the song, is a dance meant to blow off mean “niggas” and attract hook-ups with “bitches.”

Any single one of those items would be cause enough for raised eyebrows. Taken together, they are dumbfounding. And they all come before the substance of the interview, an obesity epidemic. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, we don’t have one.

My children are back in school, and I am able to return to my school day routine of reading The Transom after my older set get on the bus and my twins get dressed and make their beds. Admittedly, I don’t always make it to the end of the newsletter in one sitting, but the end is the best part. After the wonky political and economic news summaries, The Transom has an interesting links section, a slightly more serious version of Debby Witt’s Odd Links at The Corner.

This gem recently greeted me: “In a Mass Knife Fight to the Death Between Every President, Who Would Win and Why?”  Perhaps because I have an eight-year-old son who took to the discussion like a moth to a flame when I discussed it with his uncle and father over dinner, this struck me as a very promising history lesson plan… one that the PC/we-need-feminized-men guardians would never allow.

This is an excellent example of the type of discussion that would engage young boys (and old ones based on the comment threads) but send experts and some moms into frets of whether it promotes aggression. Boys can’t even talk about theoretical fighting. When the boys get bored, rather than face that boredom is one of aggression’s main fuel sources, we drug them and congratulate ourselves that the little girls are doing so well.

I will grant that a knife fight is a bit harsh for a school lesson, but the game is easily modified to a survival island scenario, like Christ White posted. Both posts and comments are chock full of intriguing — and highly memorable — assertions. Think of the research possibilities!

Barbara Oakley, author of Pathological Altruism, has a blog post up at Psychology Today entitled “Engineering—The Smart Career Choice for People Who Love Psychology”:

Follow your passion. That’s become the mantra of today’s society. It’s also a potential pitfall.

The issue is that people often have similar underlying passions. This means they flock to the same careers. And this means lots of competition—often for very low level jobs centered on our most elementary passions. ….

So if you’re smart, you love people, and you want to study psychology, do yourself a favor. Avoid well-meaning advice from humanities and social science professors to “follow your passion.” Instead, run the other way and develop new passions.

Oakley suggests that psychology majors think about engineering. It certainly makes sense in today’s job market where degrees like psychology or sociology at the undergraduate level are often worthless.

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Cross-posted at Dr. Helen’s blog.

The 2010 documentary Waiting for “Superman” accomplished a rare feat for a film on a topic as politically charged as America’s failing public education system: it earned enthusiastic praise from both conservatives and progressives. Meredith Turney at Townhall explained why:

It’s hard to know what to expect when an avowed liberal takes on the controversial issue of school choice. Director Davis Guggenheim is the director behind “An Inconvenient Truth,” the global warming film that lionized Al Gore. Guggenheim also directed the Barack Obama biographical film played at the 2008 Democratic National Convention and the Obama infomercial that aired on television during the 2008 presidential campaign. His liberal bona fides are stellar. So it’s only natural to anticipate a school choice documentary that defends the status quo and toes the party line blaming lack of funding for the woeful state of America’s government education system.

Prepare to be surprised.

In the opening moments of the film, Guggenheim freely admits that he betrays his liberal beliefs every day when he drives past three public schools on his way to drop off his children at their private school. His children’s education is so important, he’s unwilling to risk their future success on the abysmal education record of government schools. It’s a refreshingly honest admission and the rest of the film follows suit.

Over the course of the film, Guggenheim explores in depth why today America spends more on education than ever before, only to earn weaker results than past decades. It’s an engaging, thoughtful documentary made by a man with the courage to confront one of his party’s strongest financial backers, the teachers’ unions.

In the end I left the film more disappointed than most. Yes, Guggenheim articulated many aspects of the issue but he chickened out when it came time to offer solutions. The film ends leaving one thinking that in spite of the film’s careful dissection of the problems, education remains a mysterious, ever-present big problem with many potential paths forward.

“But wait a second,” I thought as the credits rolled. “This isn’t complicated. The film showed that teacher union contracts make it next-to-impossible to remove bad teachers.” Recall the famous “dance of the lemons” sequence showing how rather than fight through the bureaucracies to fire a weak tenured teacher, administrators just pass around their failures, condemning students to waste a whole year of their life with an instructor who can’t perform:

If principals could just fire the bottom 10% of teachers then the problem would be solved and fewer kids would be stuck years behind because they had the bad luck of receiving a burned-out teacher who won’t do their job. Simple.

Guggenheim may have managed to find the problem, but solving it requires a much deeper confrontation than he’s willing to do yet. Because to really recognize this as the core of the issue means that a) most of the blame falls on the political party he made a career supporting with propaganda, and b) it affirms the unpopular, politically incorrect, conventional wisdom that free-market principles work better than government bureaucracies to raise the quality of life of impoverished minority children. But Guggenheim cannot yet look at himself and how his own views contribute to the problem he’s critiquing.

University of Gloucestershire Religion Professor David Webster’s delightful polemic Dispirited: How Contemporary Spirituality Makes Us Stupid, Selfish, and Unhappy does the same thing on the subject of the irreligious life. Like Guggenheim’s documentary Webster can slice and dice the problem. He skillfully dissects the intellectual and ethical problems of ala carte spirituality and a sizable sector of the New Age movement in both the United States and his home in the United Kingdom. But when it comes time to take the medicine to cure what ails us, he flinches, unwilling to go where his own words should lead him.

via Let’s Pay Students to Learn | Hoover Institution.

The numbers reported by the Nation’s Report Card of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that approximately two-thirds of American public school students achieve below grade level in reading and mathematics. This is old news, and yet reform efforts over three decades have yielded insignificant improvements. Why? And what can be done?

The needed resources and technologies are here. The U.S. is near the top of the list in per student spending on public schools and is well known for its advanced technologies. Little used educational technologies could transform our schools from their deplorable status into successful institutions that would bring the vast majority of American children to grade-level performance. Among the technologies available, two in particular, used wisely, show substantial effects: incentives and automated tutoring.

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More on education at PJ Lifestyle:

This Is The Way The Higher Education Bubble Ends…

3 Reasons Higher Education Is Broken — and How To Fix It