It’s a fact. Most of today’s school children can barely read or write. They can’t perform math problems without a calculator. They barely know who the Founding Fathers were and know even less of their achievements. Most can’t tell you the name of the President of the United States. It’s pure and simple; today’s children aren’t coming out of school with an academics education.

It is this reporter’s opinion that we Americans must now take a serious look at our educational system. Recently I interviewed Tom DeWeese, president of the American Policy Center and editor of the “The DeWeese Report.””

"…We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply…” (Iserbyt 9).

Despite that candidates like Mitt Romney have outspent Mike Huckabee 20 to 1 on the campaign trail, Mike has a 2 to 1 lead over Romney in Iowa and is placing No. 1 in some national polls. 

The debate over public education grows more heated. Regularly, reports are released showing that the academic abilities of American students continue to fall when compared to those in other countries.

One cold morning, I drove a dozen miles to the southeast corner of Marion County, Indiana, on a business excursion. As a writer, military historian for the Indiana War Memorials Commission and a former Los Angeles teacher, I was told that an elementary school had a 30 foot replica of the 285 foot Civil War Monument that has resided in downtown Indianapolis for more than a century. I also went to see how a middle-class, Middle America school of similar size compared to the inner-city LAUSD school I toiled at for three long years.

It’s Still Elementary (ISE), a retrospective documentary featuring the motivations behind and public’s response to the controversial 1996 It’s Elementary (IE) film on homosexuality, premiered Wednesday, November 28th at none other than the National Education Association’s (NEA) Washington, D.C. facility. Groundspark Staff Producer Sue Chen publicly thanked former NEA President Bob Chase at the event for his long-time support of the It’s Elementary project during his time in office, saying “thank you so much for your courageous leadership on [It’s Elementary]. It took real guts. . .for the NEA to be out in front on these issues.”

Three Arizona schools make U.S. News and World Report Top 100 - U.S. News and World Report just published its annual ranking of the top 100 public high schools in America.

Raging ideological battles in both California and Iowa reached new levels last week when students packed up their backpacks and left their public schools. In California, parents staged a two-day boycott, pulling students from state schools in protest of SB 777, a bill force-feeding children perverse material and videos vile enough to garner an R-rating in the local multiplex. Meanwhile in Iowa, distressed parents removed up to 200 students after one public high school sponsored an event encouraging students to bend their gender by cross-dressing.

...I got a morale boost this week reading about the way a large group of parents in Iowa responded when their government school district imposed a “cross-dressing day” on their kids. 

New group signals “the end of the beginning” of the anti-school choice movement - Democrats for Education Reform is a new group that is making a big splash. On November 19, the group held an event in which U.S. Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) stressed the importance of parental choice and innovation in education. Clyburn, the House Majority Whip and the highest-ranking African-American in Congress, supports both charter schools and tax credits for middle-class families.

It is this reporter’s opinion that it is time to take a look at the plight of a battle-scarred substitute teacher in the Los Angeles barrios.

In a tersely worded statement issued on November 1st, University of Delaware President Patrick Harker brought an end to an Orwellian reeducation program run through the Office of Residence Life and affecting thousands of students living in residence halls at the University of Delaware. Published accounts of the residence life education program and publicly available documents show it to be a systemic model of leftist and politically correct indoctrination, foisted on vulnerable students by a publicly-funded university. Although the program has now been temporarily dismantled because of the adverse publicity it received, the very existence of such an insidious indoctrination camp at one of our public institutions of education should be a wake-up call to all Americans about the lengths that college administrators will go to enforce their ideology on the students under their charge.

Did you remember to buy a present for your boss last month on Boss’s Day? The teachers of the Susquehanna Township School District in central Pennsylvania didn’t experience the embarrassment of forgetting the chief because two of their colleagues, who happened to be union representatives, bought the principal a gift. When they repeatedly asked the other teachers to kick in $3 to recover the $200 they spent, some of the teachers balked. At the annual meeting of Pennsylvanians for Right to Work last week, a young eighth-grade math teacher, Ryan Mellinger, noted the irony of the teachers’ negative response to the union representatives’ cajoling for contributions.

The Seattle School District has backtracked on a statement that racists are “whites” after “numerous concerns” were expressed over the description, according to the district’s website.