Education In Peril

The Texas public school system is embroiled in a major battle over efforts to re-write our history and remove references to our Judeo-Christian heritage from their textbooks. The Texas State Board of Education will soon finalize the language that publishers use to align their textbooks to current "acceptable standards." Many of the suggestions that are coming forward are shocking:

• · Replacing the term "American" with "Global Citizen."
• · Stating that students need to be shaped "for responsible citizenship in a global society."
• · Removing all references to Daniel Boone, General George Patton, Nathan Hale, and Columbus Day.
• · Replacing "expansionism and free enterprise" with "imperialism and capitalism."

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education,
Labor and Pensions said he voted for the No Child Left Behind Act
(NCLB) in 2001 because it offered a framework for shining a spotlight
on high-poverty schools. Teachers in the trenches respond showing they are better informed than Harkin who will wait until 2011 to fix a system that has been broken for nearly a decade:

A special education teacher responds to Harkin, “I have a rather large problem with a school system that does not allow me to create a truly individualized education for my special education students because they
are required to be in the general education classroom. I teach students who are reading at a 1st grade level in a 7th grade classroom and they are expected to perform at the same rate as everyone else. I found that
helping even one child at a time is completely impossible in the school system that we have right now.”

Another teacher responds, "One size does not fit all. It doesn’t work in the shoe store, and it certainly doesn’t work in the classroom. Our system is becoming more and more broken. When legislators rail that... Read complete article