Entries by R. Claire Friend
Progressivism, Unionization and Political Correctness Are Destroying Public Education
Even a brief glance at the 1908 7th and 8th grade reading lists or the 1895 Salina, Kansas 8th grade exit exam graphically illustrates the profound decline in public education produced as a consequence of the progressives who dominate our academic institutions and federal government. Less obvious is the threat this presents to the future of the American Republic. […]
The Real Cost of K-12 Education
The annual cost of K-12 education in the United States has increased steadily for decades. For 2015, the cost is about $600 billion. Fiscal reality has not diminished the demand by politicians and their powerful union cronies for even more money, a substantial portion of which would be earmarked to fund the high salaries of […]
Another Consequence of Unionized Education: Diversity Politics Supplants Academics
Social justice, climate change, racial inequality, immigration and world hunger have replaced the classics as the focus of the curriculum in America’s schools and colleges. The goal of public education has shifted from academics to cultural indoctrination. The problem, which has come to Orange County’s Foothill High School, one of the state’s most elite high […]
Palm Lane Reform Activists Win Court Ruling – District Immediately Appeals
The yearlong battle with the Anaheim City School District and Anaheim City Board of Education has ended. The parents of the 733 students enrolled at Palm Lane Elementary School have finally been granted the right to restart their decade-long failing school as an independent charter school. Judge Andrew P. Banks, Orange County Superior Court, issued […]
Charter School Gets to Continue Operations in Huntington Beach
Albert Einstein Academy of Literature, Arts and Science-Huntington Beach opened its doors to 164 K-5 students in August, 2014. The charter school, designated a Blended Learning Center, includes a home study program in addition to the tradition classroom program. The campus is an extension of AEA Santa Clarita, its authorizing authority. Current enrollment has expanded […]
Successful Charter School Denied Renewal Petition
Albert Einstein Academy for Letters, Arts and Science, Huntington Beach (AEALAS) opened its doors In August, 2014 to 164 K-5 students. [1] The current enrollment is 264. For reasons of expediency, its founding charter was authorized by the Agua Dulce Unified School District, where several other schools are located. Since its first days, the small […]
Report From Palm Lane – Court Battle Over Parent Trigger Begins
The Palm Lane Elementary School parents and their attorneys squared off against the Anaheim City School District and Anaheim City Board of Education on June 15th in Courtroom C11 in the battle to determine whether the parents will succeed in their efforts to restart the academically troubled school as an independent charter school. The parents are […]
After Parent Trigger – A Success Model for Palm Lane Elementary School
If the parent activists at Palm Lane Elementary School are successful in their battle to invoke SB54, the Parent Trigger Law, they would be well advised to study the network of high-performing charter schools in New York City founded by former teacher and City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz as the template for the school it must […]
Palm Lane: Right vs. Might
Palm Lane Elementary School in Anaheim, a failing school for at least the past decade, has become a battleground in the war against union power and its unconstrained efforts to retain absolute control over public education. At stake may be America’s future itself. Palm Lane parents, disheartened by the school’s abysmal academic record [1] and […]
Single-Parent Families and Educational Achievement: The Tragedy of Welfare
Project TALENT, a government-funded study that tracked the development of 364,000 high school students from 1960-1971, reported significant differences in the academic performance and adult achievement between children who were raised by an unmarried mother in a fatherless home and children who were raised by two biological parents. The results were independent of race and […]
Scholars and Scholarship: A Case for Charter Schools
Public and private charter schools have emerged as a striking exception to the dismal system of U.S. public education that has performed so poorly on international assessments of student performance such as PISA and TIMMS. Despite the virulent opposition to them by the powerful California Teachers Association, National Education Association and their political allies in […]
Unions – The Biggest Bullies in the School House
There has been a great deal of public attention on the problem of bullying in our public schools. Issues such as possible causes as well as appropriate administrative and legal remedies have been hotly debated across the country by educators, parents and politicians with varying responses. The focus of bullying heretofore has been limited to […]
Empowerment Scholarship Accounts: Arizona Creates Meaningful Change
The system of government-controlled public education has failed in its mandated task to prepare America’s youth for adulthood. High school graduates are grossly undereducated and unprepared for work, career and responsible citizenship. The failure is recorded in their poor scores on international assessments of academic competence. Numerous studies have demonstrated the continuing decline in high […]
One Size Fits All: The War on Excellence in Public Education
Women’s garments labeled one size fits all, generally a dress or blouse, bear more resemblance to a tent on slender women than to a stylish frock. It’s an illustration that we are all not the same, but different and have different needs. The same principle applies to education. Prior to the unionization of the teaching […]
The Divided States of America
A war against the financially privileged 1%. 47% of our fellow citizens on food stamps. 92 million of them out of work. [1] A real unemployment rate nearing 20%. [2] Have-nots protesting in city parks against Wall Street fat cats or in city streets for supersized wages to serve dollar burgers and tacos. The land of proverbial […]
Charter Schools: Reinventing Public Education
The destiny of a nation lies in the education of its youth. Both Jesus and Hitler understood that society is shaped by its children, for better or worse. In this country, the commitment of public education to social indoctrination of our youth instead of education has helped determine the downward trajectory of the American Republic. […]
Homeschooling and Its Importance for the Survival of a Free Republic
What do George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Booker T. Washington, Florence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and Sandra Day O’Connor have in common? They were all homeschooled as were countless other famous statesmen, scholars and scientists. [1] Children traditionally were taught at their parents’ knees. In […]
Common Core: A Trojan Horse?
The deceptively innocuous-sounding name belies the crippling effects a centralized K-12 education curriculum will have on the United States once it is allowed to take effect. Ze’ev Wurman, software architect, electrical engineer and longtime math advisory expert, feels Common Core is a federally-enforced “mediocre national benchmark” that “marks the cessation of educational standards improvement” and […]
American Public Education – At the Bottom of the Class
Prior to the focus on self-esteem rather than academics in the education curriculum, California always ranked highest in the nation on student achievement tests. Today, California ranks close to the bottom. In the words of a wag, so goes California, so goes the nation. His insightful admonition has come to pass. US 15-year old students […]
Ambitionless Nation
In colonial times, men and women were equal when it came to work. Both had chores and responsibilities from dawn to dusk. Women not only did housework, they milked cows, fed the pigs and chickens and helped tend the crops. Life was hard in colonial times. It made little difference whether the family lived in […]
Death Knell for Pell: A Taxpayer’s Justification for Pulling the Plug
Authorized by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 as the Higher Education Act to guarantee low-income minorities have the same opportunity for a college education as children in middle-class families, the program was renamed for Senator Claiborne Pell in 1980. Like most well-intentioned government programs, the projected costs for the new entitlement exploded and exceeded the funds […]
Welfare, Illegitimacy and Academic Failure: America’s True "Race to the Bottom"
A great deal has been written about the cost of welfare, rise of illegitimacy, decline in public education and racial differences in academic achievement. Very little has been written about the link between welfare and those phenomena. They are all direct results. Welfare affects a process known as maternal-infant attachments that is the psychophysiologic foundation […]
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