The Federal Department of Education has sent a letter to Washington’s Superintendent of Public Instruction removing Washington State’s waiver from some of the No Child Left Behind’s costly requirements……Federal funding for education is like a drug. Let us clear our minds of the notion that federal money is something we absolutely need and remember that before 1965 schools functioned well without it. […]

A Batavia High School teacher, John Dryden, was disciplined for explaining to his high school students that they had Constitutional rights protecting them from answering personal questions on a survey the school was conducting. The survey was not anonymous. Current and past students of Mr. Dryden rallied around him in support. A report of disciplinary […]

Thomas Sowell, author of Inside American Education,  has been following education for decades.   He explains that John Dewey re-defined the role of a teacher.. “…not as a transmitter of a society’s culture to the young, but as an agent of change — someone strategically placed, with an opportunity to condition students to want a […]

Of course we all want our children to have teachers who are compassionate, flexible, perceptive, good communicators, and experts in the subjects which they teach.  In other words, we want our teachers to be almost superhuman. Under the Race to the Top initiative of which the Common Core State Standards are a part, the desired […]

Reward good teachers and get rid of bad teachers–sounds like a good idea right? But in this era of re-defined terms nothing is as it seems. The problem is how “good” and “bad” teaching are defined. Read this commentary by Kyle Olson who examines just one of the many problems with teacher evaluations.

Bar-coding and data-archiving information on your children in a free country? In the USA? Don’t say it couldn’t happen. It already is happening. Read J.R. Wilson’s article from Education News .

“In the ‘you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff’ category, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is spending about $1.1 million to develop a way to physiologically measure how engaged students are by their teachers’ lessons.”

Make way for the techno-educrats. Diane Ravitch’s blog reveals their plans for “galvanic skin response” monitoring.

Teachers are the latest scapegoat in the attempt to improve education. Bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. and legislators in Olympia are devising ways of assessing students and collecting student data for evaluating teachers and principals. Bureaucrats should allow districts the freedom of local control and allow those closest to the students to find appropriate solutions.

Veteran teacher Bob Dean describes what unintended consequences are likely to occur in his commentary in The Columbian.

The disturbing education issue that is not being mentioned in the media or by policy makers is the massive amount of personal information that will be collected on every child, all in the name of “education.” Ultimately, the government will have archived massive amounts of personal information about every person from birth.