The useful things in life, like how to balance a checkbook and how to stop spending when the balance is zero seem to escape many people. But our third graders can get a condom on a banana in the wink of an eye.

Teach them to do what; turn our kids into liberal wards of the State?

My suggestion to improve public education would be to purge all the various and sundry
levels of communists from the system. America haters have no business teaching their filth to our kids...

The problem is that tougher requirements for teachers will be administered by the existing educational establishment.

The teachers will sit in a room listening for a few hours and then get a certificate.

Possessing the certificate will mean they get a pay raise. There will be no change in their competence.

Or they will get the certificate by completing some online course. There will be no right or wrong answers, the questions will be about how their self-esteem.

Rush had a teacher on last week who told of having to embrace the theory of "White Privilege", absorb it and be willing to pass it on to students in order to get the teaching degree. A.) not true & B.) not helpful.

Michelle Malkin has just begun a series about "The Race to the Top" and it is chilling. Years ago, the complaint was that curriculum had been pushed down from 2nd to 1st grade, etc. Now it is being pushed up, or delayed. Instead of learning to add in 1st. grade, students will not be expected to add until 2nd grade. Curriculum changes from K-12 and it sounds like teachers will be expecting less and somehow be getting better scores.

This is not a blueprint to compete academically with other countries. Every school district should take a very careful look at the proposed Nationwide curriculum and dumbed-down expectations.

Until the students don´t come from "babydaddies" and "babymamas" but from intact families, nothing will change. Society has broken down, and there are entire swaths of our culture in which education is not valued.

I did a study some 20 years ago that discovered that only 16% of the employees in one of America´s major city´s school district were full-time classroom teachers. Moral: nothing good is going to happen in education until that number is above 90%. There is no relationship between our "educational systems" and teaching kids to live effective, rewarding lives, not as long as most of the employees in our schools are bureaucratic dead weight.

The curriculum has been pushed down, at least in the early grades. Kindergarteners are expected to know the alphabet and read some words before they start school. The K curriculum is what 1st grade used to be. Some Head Start and preschool programs now look K-1st grade, with parents doing a good bit of the pushing for more and more academic (and inappropriate) content. I cringe to see little children used as pawns to appease parents and bureaucrats who only care about standardized test scores. (I don´t blame all parents, just those who inappropriately push their little ones). We are creating burnout for school right from the start.

As for the new teacher assessments, these are far more rigorous in many ways and have added another layer of work (some legitimate, some make work) onto teacher educators. One good thing coming out of the NYS Education Department is a call for higher GPA´s for students in teacher prep programs - something my colleagues and I have requested for years - always turned down by administrators who don´t want to lose tuition dollars. I am not optimistic that this will happen.

It is true that critical theory is being pushed everywhere. Not all students buy into it, but too many don´t have the knowledge and discernment to see the problems with it.

Talk to your Republican governors who are supporting the Common Core Standards. Both parties are complicit in meddling in areas not allowed by the Constitution.
Ramona (the Pest)

We need to bust the national teachers´ unions.

Then, have zillions of regular Americans (aka, conservatives) apply for any and all teaching slots.

I am seriously considering doing this in now my ´later´ years.

*2+2 still equals 4.
*Political Correctness has left the building.
*America can return to it´s former greatness.
*Common sense still works--just watch me.

Etc.