All I know is that the US is getting their butt kicked in the international PISA tests in math, science, and reading. We used to be first and now we are in the middle.

Either our kids are getting dumber or our schools are letting them down.

The standards ARE developmentally inappropriate. Do some goddamn research.

Anonymous wrote:
^ Everyone has an agenda. The question is which agenda will serve students best.

Well, not theirs.

^ Everyone has an agenda. The question is which agenda will serve students best.

I didn't say conspiracy theorists. I said wackos. In any case, they certainly have an agenda.

^I honestly don't see a big problem with that.

This was part of a speech given to a man who was receiving an award.

Yes, this probably is offensive to the radical left, but it's not wacky. I don't see any aliens.

This man has both masters and PhD degrees from UC-Berkely. He went there during the riots. I understand how he became a conservative because I went to UW Madison after the riots there. There are as many problems with the far left as there are with the far right. But, that being said, it doesn't mean that the guy who has come after him (the current president) cannot do research. Wood has a PhD from Harvard. These guys are hardly conspiracy theorists.

Anonymous wrote:
^How do they look wacky?

Everything looks wacky to you.

How do they look wacky? Did you click on the link?

http://www.nas.org/articles/A_Tribute_to_Stephen_H_Balch

The Free Speech Movement was lighting a fuse, and today there are many who look back fondly from their perches amid the ruins and praise those who brought the dynamite.


While in a milieu where others indulged an ever-growing and sometimes savage anger at their own society, you recognized that in a hard and perilous world, American society offered an unusual degree of comfort and security. When others began to revile comfort and security themselves as unworthy, you turned your formidable skepticism to what exactly these life-on-the-edge existentialists had to offer by way of alternatives.

In effect, you turned your back once and for all on the deepest and most alluring component of the radical vision: that markets are the enemy of a fuller, better, more just and fulfilling order. Did this make you a conservative? A neo-conservative? You shy from such labels. It made you a dissenter from the growing orthodoxy of the academy and it gave you a new willingness to explore other forms of intellectual dissent.

Look long into this fire, and you see nothing but the capacity of intellectuals to twist their minds in fawning approbation around almost any repugnance or any tyranny that announces itself as the next thing in humanity’s aspirations for freedom and justice. Hollander ends by saying that he has faint hope for the future, but he conjures out of his imagination an intellectual who, having read this long litany of the self-deluded conspiring to undermine their own society, will say, “I must act.”

And you did. Hollander, you have said, conjured you up. This was your conversion. Hollander gave you the charge not to be passively acquiescent in the decline of Western civilization but to rise against it.

With Midge Decter’s encouragement, you founded in 1982 a spin-off group, the Campus Coalition for Democracy, which spoke directly to academics who were drawn to the neo-conservative vision of the Cold War. (Midge Decter!)

all right, that's enough of that, you can read the rest for yourself.

You equate the word "conservative" with wacky. You really don't understand free thought very well, do you?

^How do they look wacky?

Everything looks wacky to you.

They look pretty wacky to me.

http://www.nas.org/articles/A_Tribute_to_Stephen_H_Balch

FOUNDING
NAS was founded in 1987 by Dr. Stephen Balch and others. For several years before that the founding members had been meeting under the name Campus Coalition for Democracy. Balch at the time was a professor of political science at John Jay College. NAS was created to confront the rising threat of politicization of colleges and universities and to summon faculty members back to the principles of liberal education and disciplined intellectual inquiry.

You can google Peter Wood (the author of the article) yourself. He's a professor emeritus of Duke University. He wrote the article. But here are other things being studied by the National Association of Scholars (of which he is the president). It looks a bit left leaning to me, but you can decide how "wacky" they are:

http://www.nas.org/authors/peter_wood

Anonymous wrote:

Read:

http://education-curriculum-reform-government-schools.org/w/2014/04/dumbed-down-sat-will-align-with-common-core-to-achieve-social-justice/

Who is education-curriculum-reform-government-schools.org, and why should I believe what they say?

Read:

http://education-curriculum-reform-government-schools.org/w/2014/04/dumbed-down-sat-will-align-with-common-core-to-achieve-social-justice/

Anonymous wrote:

Shoring up the foundations has to be a grass roots effort.

The college system is still good. Plenty of people fail out of that system. The college system is very competitive. They still have high standards. But it could be ruined by doing things like dumbing down the SAT and ACT (which are now based on the K-12 system instead of on what colleges want to see). Gee, wonder why that happened?

Who says that the SAT and ACT have been "dumbed down", and according to what criteria?