Yesterday I wrote a column on the need to eliminate No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the massive federal program President George W. Bush signed into law in 2002 to overhaul America’s public schools and raise the standards for American education. That column was critical of NCLB because the program has failed to produce any significant achievement in public schools and is little more than a bloated national bureaucracy throwing money at states and local school districts.  I urged Congress to phase out NCLB immediately, not to re-authorize it.

Another day, another wasteful federal dollar spent.  This time the culprit is No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the massive federal education program passed with overwhelming bi-partisan support in Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush in January 2002.  NCLB was intended to improve education standards in America’s dismal public schools.  It should have been named No Bureaucracy Left Behind instead.

If one were to judge the Muslim Student Union (MSU) of the University of California at Irvine (UCI) solely on the basis of its self-description and its stated mission, one would have no inkling of the volcano of Jew-hatred that animates this organization. Founded in 1992 by a small group of Muslim students who “desired to establish an Islamic presence on campus,” MSU says it aims to provide a “community” or “family” atmosphere for Muslims enrolled at UCI, and to build “an environment that enhances good, discourages bad, and provides networks of resources, knowledge, people, and companionship to its members.”

The University of Maine is backtracking on a classroom teacher’s suggestion that students would get extra credit for burning a flag, or a copy of the U.S. Constitution.

A newly installed system to allow students at the College of William & Mary to report “bias” on campus anonymously is under fire as the latest version of a campus “speech code,” according to an independent newspaper on campus.

University of Delaware officials, who just a day earlier had defended a residence hall series of teachings on which WND reported that told students “all whites are racists,” today announced the program is being stopped. 

A mandatory University of Delaware program requires residence hall students to acknowledge that “all whites are racist” and offers them “treatment” for any incorrect attitudes regarding class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality they might hold upon entering the school, according to a civil rights group.

There is terrible news from California.  On October 12, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law three bills which, the opposition argues, introduce the radical homosexual agenda into educational institutions. Unquestionably the traditional purpose of public education is to teach reading, writing, mathematics and other fundamentals necessary for well-rounded intellectual development.  Instead, these institutions apparently will become miniature laboratories for redefining nature, implementing “gender theory” and experimenting with the effects of sexual lifestyles.

The Terminator is at it again. Only this time he seems bent on terminating what’s left of childhood innocence in California public schools.

I hesitate to write this, because my dear wife has always hated that I ever said such a thing a number of years ago. But it seems more relevant and maybe even needed right now, more than when I uttered it originally.

This column is about truth vs. expediency; rigor vs. regression; trust busting vs. academic monopoly, serious scholarship vs. affirmative action scholarship. This column is an addendum to last week’s column, “Is a college degree required for success?” and is about the scholarship of Arthur LaBrew and Eileen Southern – a comparative analysis exemplifying the shameful legacy of the liberal academy, their Stalinist control of the education bureaucracy, their defense of ignorance, slipshod scholarship, degree discrimination, liberalism run amuck and self-important elitism, all under the protection of the Ph.D. degree.

A school district in Colorado is being asked to rein in administrators because they have been confiscating and searching student cell phones, transcribing the text messages they find.

I spent Labor Day Weekend in majestic northwestern Michigan with family friends who have “summered” in the bucolic area for decades. The gentlemen whose house we stayed at, a retired distinguished professor of Chemistry at a local university, regaled my fiancee and me with many historic stories of the area as well as his life, including 29-year teaching career.

Once upon a time, schools emphasized the “three Rs” - reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic. But recently a “fourth R” seems to have entered the schoolhouse - radicalism. And teachers are increasingly the source of the radical ideas being peddled in America’s schools.

The Good For The Country Foundation - a newly formed patriotic philanthropy to educate in the public interest - has issued its first White Paper. It is titled How American Gun Control Is Adverse To The Public Interest In An Abuse Of Due Process.