An autistic kindergarten boy is being homeschooled, and his teacher has been suspended for asking his peers to vote on whether he could remain in the class.  Alex Barton, 5, lost the vote 14 to 2.

A court has told Yuba Community College officials to halt their enforcement of rules banning a student’s Christian testimony while the dispute over their threat to expel him moves through the court system, according to the Alliance Defense Fund.

John McCain and Barack Obama have largely avoided discussing immigration during the presidential campaign. But when it comes to the legal side of the issue, they both seem to support the status quo: an official policy centered around low-skilled, predominately Hispanic immigrants. A forthcoming book shows just how misguided that policy is, especially in light of the nation’s current economic woes. The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies, by Patricia Gandara and Frances Contreras, offers an unflinching portrait of Hispanics’ educational problems and reaches a scary conclusion about those problems’ costs.

Hundreds of educators have endorsed a letter opposing the “demonization” of Williams Ayers – the domestic terrorist who helped launch Barack Obama’s poliltical career, and whose relationship with the Democratic presidential candidate continues to be major controversy – arguing that frequent reports of his involvement in domestic bombings are “designed to intimidate free thinking and stifle critical dialogue.”

THE citizens of the world who hate America are going to love the latest agitprop released this week by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union. In a document titled “A Violent Education: Corporal Punishment of Children in US Public Schools,” the left-wing groups seek to paint a horrifying portrait of the nation’s classrooms as Abu Ghraib-like torture chambers.

...Government officials are embarrassed to acknowledge that, despite the unending billions of dollars poured into the public schools over the past 50 years, a bunch of uncredentialed yokels are showing them up. Their hostility is understandable, really. Homeschoolers are a threat. With often extremely limited funds, they persist in putting out sharp, polite, balanced, astoundingly well-educated young adults. Gosh, I’d be threatened, too.

As Muslim Student Association (MSA) chapters have become increasingly influential at universities and colleges around the country, critics have charged that it is a hate group that sympathizes with the international jihad and promulgates an anti-American and anti-Semitic ideology in its campus actions. In response, the MSA has claimed that it is merely another religious and cultural group similar to Hillel, a club for Jewish students, or the Newman Club for Catholics.

A university student who challenged his school’s “speech code” and won a ruling in federal court that it was vague, overbroad and stifled student speech, including his Christian views, is continuing his battle with Temple University because the school has – three years after he completed it – declined to provide a grade on his master’s thesis, thus effectively denying him his degree.

Only a year after banning all negative messages about homosexuality in public schools throughout the state, the California Legislature now is ordering school children to celebrate “gay” lifestyle choices.

An appeals court in California has ruled that state law does permit homeschooling “as a species of private school education” but that statutory permission for parents to teach their own children could be “overridden in order to protect the safety of a child who has been declared dependent.”

Activist Communists who advocate the “elimination” of the system of capitalism and who blame problems ranging from “homophobia” to “sexism” on the free market system soon will have unfettered rights to California’s public schools and facilities unless Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger stops a plan already approved by the legislature.

One day my husband came into my office with a calculator in hand. “I just heard something on the radio about television viewing,” he said, “but I don’t think I’m figuring this correctly. I have to be wrong. According to my calculations, if you watch two hours of television a day …” He began punching calculator buttons. “… then that’s 730 hours a year – divide by 24 – that’s 30 solid 24-four hour days of doing nothing but watching television!”

The New York Times is determined to show that women are discriminated against in the sciences; too bad the facts say otherwise. A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests,” claims a July 25 article by Tamar Lewin - thus, the underrepresentation of women on science faculties must result from bias. Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science, shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges. Either the Times is deliberately concealing the results of the study or its reporter cannot understand the most basic science reporting.

The nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, attracted 9,000 delegates to its annual convention in Washington, D.C., over the Fourth of July weekend. Delegates sported buttons with provocative slogans such as “Gay marriage causes Global Warming only because we are so hot!” “Hate is not a family value,” “The ‘Christian Right’ is neither,” and “Gay Rights are civil rights.”

For three years in these columns, I have implored teachers to recognize what excellent jobs they have and to cease complaining. Well, here is an issue I believe teachers can rightfully remonstrate about.