Education

Before anyone seeks to level a criticism for picking on someone's mistake, let's imagine what the press, which is so desperate to pin anything on Ted Cruz that one of its members recently tried to hold him responsible for others' comments on his Facebook page, would do to him if he made the error recently elected New Jersey Senator Cory Booker made two days ago on Twitter — and has yet to…

For the 25th consecutive year, the Media Research Center has recognized the absolute wackiest media quotes in our annual “Best Notable Quotables of 2013,” as selected by our panel of 42 expert judges. The first time this prize was offered, in 1989, then-CNN pundit Linda Ellerbee won for comments delivered on the June 2, 1989 edition of PrimeNews: “‘These boat people,’ says the government of…

The Declaration of Independence? Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?  Meh. That's so, like, 18th century.  No, Ed Schultz has come out with a new declaration of what he calls the Four Pillars of American Life: health care, jobs, education and equality. Schultz promulgated his manifesto on the year-in-review episode of his MSNBC show today. View the video after the jump.

Earlier this morning, Joe Newby at NewsBusters posted on the Denver Post's scrubbing of the word "socialist" from a fellow student's description of Karl Pierson, who police say shot two other students and then took his own life at Arapahoe High School on Friday. The Post story originally said that classmate Thomas Conrad described him as "a very opinionated Socialist." Sometime later, the Post…

Wow! File this one under: what would have been the MSM reaction to a conservative who had made the same un-PC statement?   On today's Morning Joe, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, discussing the way American children have fallen behind children in other countries in academic achievement, and are coddled, handed trophies for non-achievement and protected from stress, said: "stress…

Advocates of Common Core State Standards love to point out how 45 states and the District of Columbia have voluntarily adopted this new national public school regimen. What they're not telling you, however, is how federal and state funds were used to muscle its adoption or how expert reviews and efficacy shortfalls have prompted political and educational action in at least 17 of those states to…

In Part 1 of my series on the Common Core State Standards being infused into 45 state public school systems, I revealed how the feds spent $350 million of taxpayer money, giving grants and waivers to muscle states and local school districts to accept the standards. And that was after 2009, when feds awarded, in the Department of Education's words, "governors approximately $48.6 billion ... in…

I don't want to go overboard here, but most of the print establishment press deserves a bit of grudging credit in the Arne Duncan "white suburban moms" controvery. Most of them aren't characterizing the gutless attempt by Barack Obama's education secretary to back away from his spiteful, condescending, bigoted comment Friday as an apology — because it wasn't. In a Monday post at the…

Last week, I explained what the Common Core State Standards are and how, despite the federal government's saying it's staying out of the classroom standards business, there is much evidence to show that the feds are intricately linked to them. The first way I demonstrated that was by pointing out that the feds have spent $350 million of taxpayer money, funding and giving grants and waivers to…

Will yet another example of rhetorical intemperance by an Obama administration official get a free pass? So far it mostly has. A Washington Post item by Valerie Strauss at its "Answer Sheet" blog quotes a dispatch from Libbly Nelson at the Politico, but does not link to it. I couldn't find a related original story by Nelson at her Politico archive or in a Politico search on Education…

As NewsBusters reported, former Florida governor Jeb Bush pounded public school activist Matt Damon in August for putting his kids in private school. Damon gave CNN's Jake Tapper a rather lame excuse for this in an online segment of their interview Friday while claiming, "I'd eat my shoe if he could name a Bush that ever even walked into a public school" (video follows with transcript and…

The student health care plan offered by Bowie State University, Maryland's oldest historically black college, is an example of one of those "substandard" plans President Obama, the Affordable Care Act's architects, and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have been determined to extinguish. Well, they've gotten their way. Rather than continue a plan whose costs would have gone from $54 to $900 per…

In 2007, a group of governors and state education chiefs got together to try to remedy the declining and degraded U.S. public academic system. Their goal was to establish a new set of standards that better prepared kids for college, careers and their ever-changing, hyper-connected and globally competitive world. In short, as a result, the Common Core State Standards were born.

Recently declared Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis had a really, really bad opening round of campaign appearances. Naturally, the national press, which swooned over the Fort Worth Democrat's ultimately failed filibuster against a common-sense pro-life law in the Lone Star State's legislature, pretended not to notice. They had local help. On Wednesday, At The Monitor in McAllen, Texas…