Two New Mexico high school students who organized what became thousands of kids to walk out of class this week appeared on national TV Thursday to explain why they did it — and describe the ugly reality that is Common Core.

Students across the country are required to take an annual Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC test, which is aligned with Common Core standards. For students in New Mexico, scoring on PARCC exams determine 50 percent of their grade.

The tests “don’t encompass the learning styles of many different other students and that kind of leaves people out,” Guiney added.

He predicted that if all schools switch to the Common Core teaching style the PARCC tests are geared to, “some students are going to stop going to school.”

The Maryland parents under investigation over letting their children walk home by themselves have been found "responsible for unsubstantiated child neglect" by local child protective services.

Danielle and Alexander Meitiv said they received a letter last weekend notifying them of the Feb. 20 decision in a case that has garnered national debate over parenting styles and philosophy. They plan to appeal the finding but said they first consulted with an attorney before commenting publicly Monday.

Officials began investigating Meitiv and her husband after someone called police last Dec. 20 to report that their children — Rafi, 10, and Dvora, 6 — were walking home from a playground about a mile away from their house in Silver Spring, a Maryland suburb outside Washington, D.C.

Police had also received an anonymous call about the kids two months earlier, on Oct. 27, after the kids were playing at a closer park, just blocks away from their home. That case was later dropped by CPS.

A “Confronting Campus Rape” discussion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Monday night delved into the rights of the accused versus the rights of the accuser, a panel discussion during which participants suggested campus rape victims are largely mistreated and dismissed.

Some in the audience even suggested that the accused should not be innocent until proven guilty, and the emotionally charged talk included suggestions by UW-Madison professor Anne McClintock that “men on campus … are at greater risk of being assaulted on campus than they are of being falsely accused of a rape” and that “this university does expel students for plagiarism, but not for rape.”

A UW-Madison student on the panel who described herself as a rape survivor said she had, however, successfully gotten the first male student ever expelled from UW-Madison for rape.

Not enough American exceptionalism

Testifying against the bill earlier this month, Kansas National Education Association general counsel David Schnauer called the legislation “a solution looking for a problem,” arguing that its real effect would not be to protect minors from harmful materials, but to undermine “legitimate educational programs and curriculum.”

Hell No, We Won’t Go –1967
No Way, We Won’t Pay –2015

Fifty years ago students burned their draft cards to protest an immoral war against the people of Vietnam. Today it’s a different kind of war, immoral in another way, waged against young Americans of approximately the same age, and threatening them in a manner that endangers not their lives but their livelihoods.

There are at least four good reasons why America’s young adults – and their parents – should take up the fight against financial firms who are holding high-interest student loans that total more than the nation’s credit card debt, and more than the total income of the poorer half of America.

The history of Europe is being taught to pupils in a ‘distorted’ way in order to promote the EU, a leading British historian has claimed.

Professor David Abulafia, of Cambridge University, said the ‘soft push’ for further European integration that had been seen in French and German education was beginning to ‘creep in’ to British classrooms.

I examined seventh-grade “Civics in Practice” and it contained numerous factual inaccuracies. For example, on Page 100 it states, “The Constitution can be changed in two ways; formally by Amendment, and informally by Government.” This notion of dictatorship is enhanced by eighth-grade textbook “United States History,” which states on Page 185, “The President issues Executive Orders. These commands have the power of law.”

While some called us book-burning Nazis, Page 274 of “Civics in Practice” states, “Citizens must be alert to propaganda” and glittering generalities is a “type of propaganda which often uses words such as freedom and patriotism.” This world government indoctrination is augmented on Page 425, where a geographical map of North America eliminates the United States, and places our great nation in nine new “cultural nations.”

For pointing this out, one public speaker at the School Board textbook workshop called us “narrow-minded, racist Bible-thumpers.”

The public educational system is totally broken, and if you need proof look no further than considerations of the Colorado Board of Education to allow local districts to cut science and social studies from graduation requirements.

Incredibly, these “proposed reductions…stem from the group’s conclusion that the bar should be college readiness, not success.”

This week an Oklahoma legislative committee voted overwhelmingly to effectively ban the teaching of Advanced Placement U.S. history classes. The bill’s author, Rep. Dan Fisher (R), said that state funds shouldn’t be used to teach the course — which students can take to receive college credit — because he believes it emphasizes “what is bad about America” and characterizes the United States as a “nation of oppressors and exploiters.” Fisher’s proposal to replace the ready-made, nationally used, college-recognized AP curriculum — studied by hundreds of thousands of high school students each year — with a homegrown substitute would cost the state an estimated $3.8 million.

After several hours of debate on Tuesday night, the student government at the University of Toledo in Ohio shut down a hearing on a resolution to divest from firms abetting Israel’s crimes.

Just before the vote was to take place by the student senate, the university’s Student Judicial Council, part of the student government, announced that it had ruled a resolution calling for divestment “unconstitutional” on the grounds that it was “discriminatory” and “one-sided.” The ruling allowed no recourse or debate and the entire vote was then scrapped.

As The Electronic Intifada reported, the university administration had insisted that discussions relating to the resolution be conducted in a secretive manner.

An innocent male student was reportedly banned from entering large areas of his liberal-arts school in Oregon after a female classmate accused him of slightly resembling a rapist she encountered months prior in another state.

According to Professor Janey Halley, who detailed the incident in an article for the Harvard Law Review, the unnamed male student was forced to abide by the restraining order despite being found innocent during an extensive school investigation.

“I recently assisted a young man who was subjected by administrators at his small liberal arts university in Oregon to a month-long investigation into all his campus relationships, seeking information about his possible sexual misconduct in them…” Halley wrote.

Calling the investigation “an immense invasion of his and his friends’ privacy,” Halley stated that the ensuing punishment resulted in the near-complete dismantling of his education at the college.

At the Unviersity of Toledo in Ohio tonight, student activists will argue in favor of a resolution to divest from US companies profiting from Israeli violations of Palestinian rights.

But the university administration is mandating that they must do so in a “closed meeting,” preventing both the resolution’s supporters, opposition and the general public from hearing presentations to the student government.

The resolution voting process will also be done by secret ballot, meaning that the student body won’t be able to know how their representatives voted on the resolution.

Southampton University has rejected calls to cancel a conference on Israel and international law, after the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC) said it would "have a detrimental impact on cohesiveness."

The conference, 'International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism', is billed as "the first of its kind", and is being organised by Southampton-based academic and former Israeli Oren Ben-Dor, and Palestinian-American law professor George Bisharat.

According to the Jewish News, several "Jewish community leaders" have expressed their "opposition" to the conference and "lodged protests with the university's vice-chancellor."

I started a PhD program in Environmental Engineering because I worried about climate change. It didn’t take long for me to become a skeptic.

My first paper, a study about precipitation intensity over the U.S., was rejected by reviewers because it contradicted the climate model projections. Though they could find nothing wrong with the methodology, they decided observational data must be flawed because climate models couldn’t possibly be wrong and wrote that the paper could not be published.

People inflation and technological upheaval are some of the primary culprits behind widespread unemployment. It’s time to become generalists again.

Professor John McAdams is being stripped of tenure by Marquette University for writing a blog post that administrators characterize as inaccurate and irresponsible.

Academics all over the United States ought to denounce the firing of the 69-year-old, a Harvard Ph.D. who taught courses on American politics and public policy. If tenure can be taken away based upon one controversial blog post, what protection does it offer? How many tenured professors will censor themselves from participating in public conversation to avoid a similar fate? Marquette has violated core academic values, regardless of what one thinks of McAdams' commentary or the shabby treatment of the graduate instructor he was criticizing (who deserves sympathy for the horrifying torrent of misogyny others directed at her).

The campaign for divestment from companies that assist and profit from Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights took a big step forward in California this weekend.

The board of the University of California Students Association (UCSA) passed two resolutions at its 8 February meeting in Los Angeles urging university governors to divest from companies including Boeing, Caterpillar and Hewlett-Packard that make weapons and systems Israel uses to commit violations of Palestinian rights.

What’s the problem? Well, Cohen is not only a well-known scholar, he is a prominent public intellectual and commentator on U.S.-Russian relations. Recently he has criticized in print and on television U.S. and European policy in Ukraine. This has led some journalists and “pundits” (but few, if any, scholars) to claim that he is “Putin’s American toady,” as The New Republic put it. He has also been branded an “apologist,” a “useful idiot,” and a “dupe.”

A 9-year-old in Texas was suspended after Kermit Elementary School officials called it a threat when the boy, Aiden Steward, told a classmate he could make him “disappear” with a ring forged in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional Middle Earth’s Mount Doom, the Odessa American reported.

The Stewards had just watched “The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies” days earlier and Aiden was just using his imagination to reenact some of his favorite scenes on the playground.

There are now daily stories emerging of police officers assigned to schools assaulting and abusing children, indicating that the epidemic of police brutality in America is more far reaching than previously thought.

Today’s woeful tale is set in Houston, Texas where a former student of South Houston High School is suing the Pasadena Independent School District and an offending police officer after it emerged he had received a severe beating with a baton merely for cussing at the cop.

"No state . . . shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." So says the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution, a document held dear by Carl Cohen, a professor of philosophy and longtime champion of civil liberties who has devoted most of his adult life to the University of Michigan. So when Cohen discovered, after encountering some resistance, how his school, in its admirable wish to increase minority enrollment, was actually practicing a form of racial discrimination—calling it "affirmative action"—he found himself at odds with his longtime allies and colleagues in an effort to defend the equal treatment of the races at his university.

A professor who was fired from a tenured position at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign because of his tweets criticizing the Israeli government’s bombing of Gaza last year has filed a civil rights suit against the University and its top officials, saying that his firing violated his First Amendment right to free speech and other constitutional rights, and basic principles of academic freedom.

Minnesota’s largest school district is discussing screening high school students for depression and anxiety in the classroom.

Last night, the student government at the University of California at Davis voted in favor of a resolution to divest from corporations profiting from Israel’s occupation.

In a landslide vote — eight voting yes, two against and two abstaining — the student government at UC Davis recommended that the University of California system’s governing body divest from Caterpillar, G4S, Veolia Environment and Raytheon.

The divestment victory comes just months after the UC Davis administration appeared to be receptive to efforts by the Anti-Defamation League — a leading Israel lobby group — to treat boycott, divestment and sanctions efforts as “hostile events” that the university should deem security threats.

Recently, major changes came to school lunches because of the efforts of the First Lady, Michelle Obama. The USDA claims that “the new standards align school meals with the latest nutrition science and the real world circumstances of America’s schools.”

It was only recently that dozens of teenagers posted their lunches to social media, specifically calling out Michelle Obama for the reforms she pushed.

Common Core-aligned report cards are now grading students based on their “sensitivity to others,” as well as “grit” and “gratitude” across California.

Instead of having standard grades based on students’ proficiency in classes alone, these “detailed reports” now report whether students are sensitive and assigns them a grade.

The University of Pennyslvania is now offering a “Wasting Time on the Internet” class that will earn students credit.

The class, literally named “Wasting Time on the Internet,” is being taught by Professor Kenneth Goldsmith this Spring 2015 semester. In 2010, Professor Goldsmith also taught “Uncreative Writing: Robotic Erotica/Erotic Robotics: Scribing a Non-Expresssive [sic] Sexuality.”

Goldsmith writes for his new class that “students will be required to stare at the screen for three hours, only interacting through chat rooms, bots, social media and listservs.

“Distraction, multi-tasking, and aimless drifting is mandatory,” the description adds.

The Obama administration said it would drop a plan to tax so-called 529 college savings accounts, after the proposal sparked widespread criticism over its potential impact on the middle class.

From her hometown in India in 2010, Bhanu Challa said she had no reason to doubt that Tri-Valley University was a legitimate American school where she could pursue a master's degree. Its website featured smiling students in caps and gowns and promised a leafy campus in a San Francisco Bay Area suburb.

Months later, her hands were in cuffs as federal investigators questioned her motives for being in the U.S. Authorities told her that Tri-Valley was a sham school. It was selling documents that allowed foreigners to obtain U.S. student visas, and in some cases work in the country, while providing almost no instruction, according to federal investigators.

We look to a day when people will not be judged by the content of their character, but by the color of their skin.

And the configuration of their chromosomes.

This seems the hope of a panel of professors and activists at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, assembled to improve campus race relations and tackle matriculator misogyny. And relating to this they put forth an idea:

Women and blacks should be called on first in classroom discussions.

Arizona State University is now offering a class that details the problems that “whiteness” has caused in the United States.

Under the same program that has been criticized as “militarizing” local law enforcement, campus police departments have ramped up their armed presence, with Florida State University getting a Humvee and other university officers carrying semi-automatic rifles.

Nearly all police at universities are now armed, with weapons ranging from handguns to pepper spray. About two-thirds of public and private campuses employed armed officials during the 2011-2012 school year, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report released Tuesday.

A school trip to the see the historical civil rights drama ‘Selma‘ by a high school history club has been cancelled by the school superintendent over concerns over language, reports WAFF.

DeKalb County school superintendent Hugh Taylor cancelled the outing by students at the predominately minority school, saying he was concerned about obscene language and “racial profanity” in the Oscar-nominated film.

Taylor was elected DeKalb County school superintendent in 2013 despite concerns that he sends his own four children to a private Christian academy.

“When they first come in my door in the morning, the first thing I do is an inventory of immediate needs: Did you eat? Are you clean? A big part of my job is making them feel safe,” said Sonya Romero-Smith, a veteran teacher at Lew Wallace Elementary School in Albuquerque. Fourteen of her 18 kindergartners are eligible for free lunches.

She helps them clean up with bathroom wipes and toothbrushes, and she stocks a drawer with clean socks, underwear, pants and shoes.

From the Washington Post article: Majority of U.S. Public School Students are in Poverty

It’s a recovery so lopsided only Timothy Geithner or an oligarch could love it. Since 2008, U.S. economic policy has concentrated on funneling as much money as possible to billionaires, keeping the poor alive and submissive through government programs, and squeezing the middle class to death while at the same time holding out the carrot of hope that things will return to how they were before (they won’t).

Following is a deeply disturbing excerpt from a civil lawsuit filed by a Caltech professor against Caltech, often named the world’s top research university. Caltech’s official name is the California Institute of Technology.

According to the lawsuit, a small coterie of Caltech professors and administrators ignored Israeli spying and theft of taxpayer-funded U.S. technology and then retaliated against the professor for reporting it.

Caltech Provost Edward Stolper, who has ties to Israel and received an honorary degree from one of its universities, seems to have been one of those leading the charge.

A Dutch university banned a public meeting on the academic boycott of Israel scheduled to take place yesterday.

Although the board of the VU, a university in Amsterdam, had originally given permission to the meeting, it decided to forbid the event at the last minute.

In a statement, Jaap Winter, the chairperson of the VU board, made an apparent reference to the recent attacks on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and on a Jewish supermarket in Paris.

According to Winter, the “civil unrest” created by “the events of last week” evoked “feelings of exclusion and insecurity” around the public meeting.

The state of California has just passed bill AB499, which will permit minor children as young as 12 years old to be vaccinated with sexually transmitted disease vaccines like Gardasil without parental knowledge or parental consent. This means that if you live in California, school or medical personnel would be allowed to vaccinate your child against an STD without your ever knowing it.

Last month, news reports a group of fourth-year dental students had created a private Facebook group known as the "Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen," and were posting comments promoting raping and drugging fellow female students exploded like a cluster bomb over the campus.

Young people in Britain have become a lost generation who can no longer mend gadgets and appliances because they have grown up in a disposable world, the professor giving this year’s Royal Institution Christmas lectures has warned.

Silence isn't something people usually associate with middle school, but twice a day the halls of Visitacion Valley School in San Francisco fall quiet as the sixth, seventh and eighth grade students meditate for fifteen minutes.

And school administrators tell NBC News that the violence outside of the school, which is situated in one of San Francisco's poorest neighborhoods, was spilling into the school and affecting the students' demeanor.

"The kids see guns on a daily basis," the school's athletic director, Barry O'Driscoll said, adding, "there would be fights here three-to-five times a week."

With a typical schools days filled with mayhem, O'Driscoll was skeptical when the San Francisco Public School District introduced a meditation program, called "quiet time," to four of its schools, including Visitacion Valley.

Teachers unions have often opposed the creation of educational standards in principle, but Common Core often comes under fire from the Right because its compliant textbooks recommend strange methods for learning math that are perhaps not well-suited to children's formation in the subject. It has also given rise to reading lists that exclude timeless classics in favor of contemporary drivel.

It has been said that children are our future, and right now the vast majority of our children are being “educated” in public schools that are rapidly being turned into indoctrination centers and prison camps. Our children desperately need to focus on the basics such as reading, writing and math, but instead a whole host of politicians, “education officials” and teachers are constantly injecting as much propaganda as they possibly can into classroom instruction. Instead of learning how to think, our children are continually being told what to think. Not only that, our children are also being trained how to live as subservient slaves in a Big Brother police state. Today, nearly everything that children do in public schools is watched, monitored, recorded and tracked. Independent thought and free expression are greatly discouraged and are often cracked down upon harshly.

Control of the struggling York City School District in Pennsylvania has been handed over to the state, effectively paving the way for public education in that county to be provided exclusively by a private company.

State officials had previously said that, if approved for a receivership (as a state takeover is called), they would bring in Charter Schools USA, an 'education management company' based in Florida, to operate the district.

A four-year-old little boy was handcuffed and then shackled by the local sheriff and taken away in a squad car, after the principal at Nathanael Greene Primary School failed to calm him down.

Back in October the boy allegedly threw blocks, climbed over desks, hit, scratched, and kicked the principal and the director of special education. Unable to gain control of a 4-year-old, the school made the ridiculous decision to call a sheriff’s deputy who is assigned to the schools.

“The boy was out of control, basically, throwing his arms around and kicking– trying to kick the deputy, trying to run away, and the deputy felt that putting the handcuffs on him was for his safety as well as everybody else’s,” County Sheriff Steven Smith said.

Tracy Wood, the boy’s mother, says the school called her to pick up her son, but when she got there, police had already taken him to the station.

Homeschooling, once steeped in negativity and subject to eyebrow-raising naysayers, is fast-sweeping the nation as an alternative educational method that comes with higher graduation rates than traditional schooling.(1) In fact, there are approximately 2.2 million students in the United States who receive home education, and experts note that its popularity has continued, rather than waned, through the years. These students have been found to score up to 30 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests.

Only to be followed by the good news of today;

The multitude of anti-Israel incidents, the aggressive discourse and the fact that almost every public event dealing with Israel, Judaism or the Middle East is accompanied by a loud public argument, instinctively deters many people from dealing with Israel, even in fields which have nothing to do with the conflict.

Publishing giant Pearson Inc. is set to rake in billions of dollars in profits related to the implementation of the Common Core standards, but the corporation is now dealing with legal problems exposing some of its suspicious methods that have led to its status as the King of Common Core.

The Pearson Charitable Foundation states it is closing following “a decision by Pearson plc to integrate all of its corporate responsibility activities and functions into its business as a way to maximize social impact and to no longer fund the Foundation as the primary vehicle for its philanthropic and community activities.”

The truth is, however, that corporate Pearson is closing down its charitable foundation following problems with the law that have exposed some of its methods in acquiring business.

Israeli-American real estate mogul Adam Milstein recently made headlines when it emerged that he had solicited funds on behalf of two student senate candidates at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) who espouse strong anti-Palestinian views.

When asked about the donations, which had reportedly been funneled through UCLA’s chapter of the Zionist campus organization Hillel, by Mondoweiss’ Alex Kane, Milstein feigned ignorance: “When I make a donation to the UCLA Foundation or what have you, I don’t know what they’re doing with the money.”

However, Milstein’s claims were swiftly belied by emails discovered by Chloe Hunt of UC Berkeley campus newspaper The Daily Californian.

A worksheet designed to raise awareness of racial differences has some students crying foul, reports KPRC-TV.

The assignment asked students to consider whether White Privilege exists and how it might affect their lives.

“I was shocked, I thought it was a joke,” said a student, who didn’t want to be identified. “There was a white privileges handout and a white privileges checklist and a white privileges quiz to see how privileged you are as a white person.”

Students at Lone Star College, Tomball were given a list of 20 statements about race and asked to check off which applied to them.

With school districts around the nation dropping the federal nutrition program backed by Michelle Obama, despite the fact that doing so means a drastic reduction in funding, it is clear that many affected by its mandates are not on board. Students have staged protests against the insufficient, unappetizing fare being offered in lunchrooms, administrators cite the loss in revenue associated with reduced school lunch participation, and parents lament the dearth of choices being presented.

Columbia Law School is permitting students claiming to be impaired due to the emotional impact of recent non-indictments in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner matters to postpone taking their final exams.

Since those days the battles have become ever more ferocious, with the much more timid pro-Israel groups at America and Europe’s leading universities being clobbered by Students for Justice in Palestine, Israel Apartheid Week and BDS.

A high-tech, $219,000 conference table purchased by Kean University raised eyebrows on the school's campus, where some students questioned whether the expense was warranted.

The 22-foot oak table was specially manufactured by a company in China, where Kean recently opened a campus, and serves as the centerpiece of a new conference center.

A US political satirist staged a social experiment at a prestigious university. Waving an ISIS flag was met with no negative reaction, but with an Israeli flag he got a less-than-warm reception from the students.

Fredericton High School’s dress code calls on all members of the education community to dress in a modest and appropriate manner.

But the Fredericton Youth Feminists say the code unfairly targets young women and promotes the idea that sexual assault should be blamed on the woman.

Two county councils in southeast England have asked local teachers to inform police about students suspected of Islamic extremist connections. The request shows authorities’ concern at young Britons joining the Islamic State’s cause.

Police officers in Florida surprised students, teachers and parents Thursday with an active shooter drill. And by “active shooter drill,” we mean that a Winter Haven middle school went into lockdown as two armed police officers burst into classrooms, guns drawn, leaving the unsuspecting children terrified — and their parents furious.

According to Fox affiliate WTVT, officials at Jewett Middle Academy e-mailed parents to inform them of the drill, after it took place. By that point, WTVT reports, cellphones were already filling up with texts from frightened students, who thought there was a real shooter in the school.

In a later statement to The Post, spokesperson Jamie Brown for the Winter Haven police department said they were only aware of one student who texted a parent during the exercise.

Angry parents in Chickasha complain their kids aren’t getting enough to eat at school. The Holton family says the meal the district calls a “Munchable” is ridiculous and family members say it needs to change.

The meal that daughter Kaytlin Shelton took a photo of Monday consists of lunch meat, a couple crackers, a slice of cheese and two pieces of cauliflower. Schools in Chickasha serve it every other week.

Florida parents and students were frightened by an unannounced active shooter drill that took place at a middle school Thursday, but officials and police defend not giving prior warning.

“We actually thought that someone was going to come in there and kill us,” Lauren Marionneaux, a seventh grade student at Jewett Middle Academy, told WTVT-TV.

The news station reported that two police officers, one armed with an AR-15, rushed into Lauren’s classroom during the drill.

Instead of loaning students money, the federal government could just pay for their tuition, without causing any significant economic problems.

Last month, Lower Saxony became the final state in Germany to abolish tuition for all students at public universities. Meanwhile, in the United States, student loan debt has passed the $1 trillion mark. The burden is now becoming increasingly heavy for middle-class and wealthy students, but especially for those from lower-income backgrounds. This injustice has spurred many organizations, like the Occupy Wall Street offshoot Strike Debt, to do what they can to pay off student debt on their own.

It appears the concept of no consequences is now deeply embedded in the American society. As Student loan debtloads surge ever higher – and opportunities grow ever lower – NBC News reports a rather stunning 24% of Millennials said they expect their loans will ultimately be forgiven, according to study released Wednesday by Junior Achievement and PwC US. That helps to explain why delinquency rates are at record highs - aside from the massive debtloads and no high-paying jobs – as students see bankers rigging every market in the world with little to no consequence, one can only imagine the lessons being learned.

A black teacher in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, is out of a job after suggesting whites should “kill themselves” in a profanity-laced tweet directed at “dumb crackers” critical of her support of the racially charged protests in Ferguson, Missouri.

Vinita Hegwood, who teaches English at Duncanville High School, has been placed on administrative leave without pay and will be fired at the next meeting of the school board, according to district officials.

The truth is, not surprisingly to some, that Common Core is very racist and very political.

According to Dr. Pook, he helped write it to balance the scales because he, and many others, are benefiting from some mythical 'white privilege' that was not earned.

No, it's not about uniform and effective educational standards that benefit our children.

This is about a leftist agenda and yet another shining example of the trainwreck called political correctness.

Dr. Pook's startling admission is contained within the video below:

The school, which is number two in the nation, offered a seminar on anal sex on Tuesday aimed at promoting a holistic understanding of that specific type of intercourse despite the fact that it is widely considered taboo.

Harvard University is coming under fire from some quarters for having conducted class-attendance research that involved the use of video cameras in 10 lecture halls holding some 2,000 students.

While aggregate attendance was the goal of the research and individuals reportedly were not identified, criticism has resulted because the students were not told about the cameras.

Harvard computer science professor Harry Lewis tells the Boston Globe: “You should do studies only with the consent of the people being studied.”

Last week, 15 school districts across California began serving their students school lunches made from foods grown in California and prepared freshly just for them.

“We are going beyond the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act,” said Jennifer LeBarre, executive director of the Oakland Unified School District’s (OUSD) Nutrition Services. President Obama signed it into law by in 2010 and it was championed by his wife, Michelle Obama.

Using the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre as its justification, the Obama administration has recently given the psychiatric business and pharmaceutical industry a major gift by quietly introducing a behavioral and mental health program in public schools throughout the United States.

Introducing psychiatric explanations and methodologies into school environments guarantees a growing customer base for the psychiatric profession and pharmaceutical industry. Alongside government’s increasing control of healthcare, the technocratic surveillance and management of everyday thought and behavior is likewise emerging as part of what is deceptively termed “wellness.” In reality such efforts ensure an ever-expanding bureaucracy, handsomely line the pockets of a select few, and further normalize a culture of learned helplessness and control within an environment that already privileges conformity as a matter of routine.

Noting that U.S. college costs have gone up 500% since 1985, the Washington Post recommends seven countries where U.S. students can go to college for free without bothering to learn the language of the natives or anything so primitive.

These are nations with less wealth than the United States has, but which make college free or nearly free, both for citizens and for dangerous illegals visiting their Homelands.

How do they do it?

Three of them have a higher top tax rate than the United States has, but four of them don’t.

What does the United States spend its money on that these other countries do not? What is the largest public program in the United States? What makes up over 50% of federal discretionary spending in the United States?

If you said “war,” it’s possible you were educated in a fine foreign country.

State-level K-12 education spending has fallen dramatically in many states since 2008. In that time, 29 states cut per pupil spending, shifting the burden of financing education to local school districts and, in many instances, forcing schools to cut costs and even teachers.

The relatively new tracking technology allows schools to more accurately follow student attendance, lunch purchases and students who ride buses, but lawmakers in many states have banned specific types of student data collection over privacy concerns, Governing.com reports.

"This year, Florida became the first state to ban the use of biometric identification in its schools. Kansas said biometric data cannot be collected without student or parental consent. New Hampshire, Colorado and North Carolina said the state education departments cannot collect and store biometric data as part of student records.

The school says they had agreed with the parents to keep the case confidential to protect the child, and were surprised when Thomas and Ria shared the details with other parents, and then organised a press conference, to reveal what had happened. Thomas and Ria say they weren’t satisfied with the response of school officials, who they say had advised them against reporting the assault to the police.

Following the claims, six Indonesian cleaners, five men and a woman, were arrested. One of them died while in custody; the police say he committed suicide. The four other men all admitted to the crime, but have since retracted their statements, saying they were obtained under torture. Their lawyers also argue the medical examinations of the boy do not show evidence of rape. Their trial began early September.

Fans were startled by the heavy presence of police officers, drone surveillance, and warrantless checkpoints upon entry at the local high school football game.

The prison-like security at Summerville High School was called “the reality of the world we live in today.” As students and fans filed into the homecoming football game on Friday, October 24th, 2014, they were forced to place their belongings in a bin for police examination, then walk through a metal detector. Stadium-goers were restricted from bringing certain items into the stands.

Fans also were quick to notice the conspicuous presence of police officers mixed among the crowd and perched on the rooftops, surveillance drones whirring overhead, and even SWAT team members ready for action.

The security bonanza was imposed because school district officials had allegedly been tipped off that rival gangs might fight at the game, WCIV reported. No incidents of violence were reported.

Over the weekend of October 11-13 over 300 young Jews, as well as some Palestinians, convened at Harvard for the inaugural conference of ‘Open Hillel’. Open Hillel is a movement of Jewish students on campuses across the United States to demand that Hillels (campus Jewish organizations) refrain from preventing critical discussion of Palestinian rights from happening amongst Jewish students and the rest of the campus community.

Germany made international news last week when they decided to eliminate college tuition entirely (before this, it was less than €1,000-- the equivalent to $1,300-- per year). Meanwhile in the United States, the average per-year tuition cost was $8,655 for an in-state 4-year public college, $21,706 for an out-of-state 4 year public college, and $29,056 for a private 4-year college. The average American college student will graduate with more than $27,000 in debt, and college costs in the U.S. have gone up more than 1100% since 1978 with little sign of leveling off.

In light of Germany's actions, we decided to highlight 5 countries whose approaches towards financing higher education put ours to shame.

NJ Advance Media, citing interviews with victims, has reported that the freshman players were held down while other players inserted fingers into their rectums and then their mouths.

I am going to use this space once again to talk about the despicable un-hiring of Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois (I wrote about the Salaita case and what I called The Incivility of Palestinians, last month as well).

I am going to do this because, despite the fact that the academic boycott of the University of Illinois continues apace (there is even, it seems, the rise of a progressive Jewish-identified contingentchampioning Salaita), facile comparisons of Salaita’s case and circumstances with those of various unsavory others are also proliferating.

These comparisons are so thick-headed, so tin-eared, so ham-fisted, that they nearly defy imagination.

While many have slammed the CDC and the federal government for refusing to impose a flight ban on travelers from West Africa entering the United States, some liberals who signed the petition agreed that it would be “racist” to do so and that Ebola victims should be allowed to roam free across America.

Lunch meat, a couple of crackers, a slice of cheese and two pieces of cauliflower qualified as lunch in Chickasha Public Schools Monday.

Chickasha lunchStudent Kaytlin Shelton took a photo of the skimpy lunch and showed it to her parents.

“It makes me want to take that and take it to the Superintendent and tell him to eat it for lunch,” the girl tells Fox 25.

“I can go pay a dollar for a Lunchable and get more food in it,” her father, Vince Holton, says.

“I have a bachelor of science degree in electronics engineering which included extensive study in differential equations and other higher math applications,” he wrote. “Even I cannot explain the Common Core mathematics approach, nor get the answer correct.

“In the real world, simplification is valued over complication,” he added, signing the letter as a “frustrated parent.”

Some parents and teachers are divided on the initiative, with one commenter writing on KSDK’s Facebook page: "I can't help my third and fifth graders with their homework because they have to follow ten extra steps to come up with an answer that I was taught how to do in two steps.”

Nebraska Watchdog has discovered new training documents that have been given to Lincoln, Nebraska middle school teachers that are meant to train teachers to avoid using gendered terms such as “boys and girls.”

One document, entitled “12 easy steps on the way to gender inclusiveness,” tells teachers to never “use phrases such as ‘boys & girls,’ ‘you guys,’ ‘ladies and gentlemen,’ and similarly gendered expressions to get kids’ attention.” It also suggests a few “gender neutral” alternatives for teachers to use such as “campers,” “athletes,” or even “purple penguins.” (Yes it actually says purple penguins in the training document)

The Dearborn Heights District 7 Board of Education chose a less severe punishment for the honor student who was initially expelled after a pocketknife was found in her purse at a football game.

On Monday, after two hours of deliberation, the board voted 6-0 to allow Atiya Haynes to take online classes. She then will be able to graduate with her class in 2015.

The decision still came as a blow to college-bound Haynes, who participated in numerous extracurricular activities including sports.

School officials discovered the knife as she was exiting a bathroom at the game when they searched her purse.

Haynes says the pocketknife was a gift from her grandfather who gave it to her for protection because her summer job required her to ride her bike from southwest Detroit to Dearborn.

Chancellor Phyllis Wise, the top administrator who fired Steven Salaita from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after complaints from pro-Israel donors, is facing allegations from academic peers of unethical conduct that may stretch back two decades.

Evidence has emerged of several instances of duplicate publishing – a widely condemned form of unethical behavior sometimes called “self-plagiarism.”

It occurs when an author publishes the same research or the same or substantially similar paper in multiple venues without acknowledging the fact, in effect passing off the old research as something new.

Michael Davis' block in Los Angeles used to have huge trees on both sides of the street, so big they created a canopy. "They were beautiful," says the 17-year-old high school senior. "They covered the whole top of the block." But recently, he says, the trees were cut down. In their place, there are now bright lights and security cameras. Davis is a youth leader with the Community Rights Campaign and its student club Taking Action, which organize around the school-to-prison pipeline, mass incarceration, and the criminalization of black and brown communities in Los Angeles. Having the trees on his block replaced with cameras and lights was just one sign of what Davis describes as a nationwide trend of police militarization against communities of color.

A conservative watchdog group that monitors liberal-left bias and extremist indoctrination on university and college campuses in the United States released a report and video on Tuesday that shockingly revealed that students at one of the nation's most prestigious and influential institutions of higher learning believe their own country is more evil than a terrorist army marching through Iraqi and Syrian cities and towns killing, torturing and enslaving thousands of people.

Kids across America no longer have to wait until college to plan on being a part of the National Security Agency. In fact, they could start preparing for their NSA careers as early as age 13.

The NSA has began sponsoring cybersecurity camps for middle and high school students, agency recruiter Steven LaFountain told CNBC’s Eamon Javers in a recent interview. Six prototype camps launched this past summer, and the NSA hopes to expand the program to some 25 schools and, eventually, to have a presence in schools in all 50 states.

The camps, LaFountain told CNBC, teach “low-level programming… where most cybersecurity vulnerabilities are” and sponsor activities like a “wireless scavenger hunt” in which 10th graders were dispatched to hunt down “rogue access points.” The general idea is to eliminate “threats out there on the Internet”

“The students are really, really into it,” LaFountain added.

A new report charges that Pennsylvania charter school operators have engaged in fraud and abuse amounting to about $30 million.

It was released today by several non-profit groups including the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), Integrity in Education, and ACTION United. The report is called, Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania’s Charter Schools.

The report claims that within the past 17 years, charter school operators in Pennsylvania have abused the system of at least $30 million. It also asserts that state agencies, charged with overseeing charter schools, are not up to the job of weeding out fraud and abuse.