HOMESCHOOLING: AN INTERESTING EMAIL JUST RECEIVED:

An increasing number of homeschoolers are finding the Internet and weblogs such as yours to be an immense resource in terms of both educational materials and support. The Old Schoolhouse Magazine recognizes this, and desires to work hand in hand with homeschoolers from all over the world to provide top notch resources to encourage and equip one another.

The Old Schoolhouse Magazine has a readership of almost 100,000 and distribution across the US in Borders, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Hastings & many other locations, along with thousands of subscribers. In addition to our print magazine, our website ( www.TheHomeschoolMagazine.com ) offers info for every state in the US managed by state coordinators who keep homeschoolers uptodate with homeschool happenings and support groups that they can get involved in. Our website also features a monthly e-devotional, and links to free curricula on the net, product reviews, and much more.

We have also recently decided to join the weblog craze by creating the site, www.HomeschoolBlogger.com. HSB will offer weblogs free of charge to all interested homeschoolers. The site will host, as well as provide easy to use templates for users. We believe that this is a great way to combine resources into one site, and further reach the homeschool community. It is a brand new site, and already we have over 100 blogs set up, including ones by popular authors and leaders such as Diana Waring and Christine Field.

What we would request from you is that you would consider listing The Old Schoolhouse among resource listings on your website. We are also offering a spring promotion for all new 2 year subscribers that offers 19 free gifts (valued at $300) from homeschool companies if this is something you would like to let your readers know about. For additional information on our promo, feel free to check out http://www.thehomeschoolmagazine.com/subscribe/promo_subscribe.php

We also would welcome you to join our weblog community at www.HomeschoolBlogger.com. We will be advertising the site both in our print magazine and on them main company website. Many other well known homeschool websites (A to Z Homeschooling, for example) will also be advertising our weblog site. Lastly, TOS Magazine will frequent the current blogs for possible writing opportunities in the print magazine. If you have a current blog, feel free to duplicate it daily on the new HSB site - the premium COMMUNITY for homeschool blogs. Here is one example of this sort of duplication: http://homeschoolblogger.com/spunkyhomeschool

Please consider this invitation to join with us in providing the best resources available to homeschool families. If I can answer any questions for you, or provide you with additional information, please feel free to contact me at your convenience.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Jessica Harvey
Secretary to the Publishers
Customer Service Resolution Center Supervisor
The Old Schoolhouse Magazine, LLC
207-469-0695

JHarvey@thehomeschoolmagazine.com
www.TheHomeschoolMagazine.com




FREE SPEECH FOR REPUBLICANS ATTACKED AT CAL STATE

A group of professors interested in preserving academic freedom wants the Cal State San Bernardino administration to consider if the College Republicans are abusing their right to protest. Campus President Albert Karnig held a forum for students and faculty Tuesday night to discuss which First Amendment rights students are allowed to exercise. He said the university would be wrong to censor fliers distributed by the group but said professors might want to consider legal action if they think the College Republicans have slandered or libeled them. The College Republicans are calling for students to boycott the Perspectives on Gender course offered by the university because they say professors promote a liberal, feminist and pro-homosexual agenda and academically punish students with different beliefs.

Ryan Sorba, president of the College Republicans, handed out fliers in the winter quarter asking students to skip the class. Now he is distributing fliers with a "Professor Watch List' of professors that students should boycott. The list has three names the co-instructors for the Perspectives on Gender class. "Basically they give bad grades to students if they don't agree with their opinions,' Sorba said.

"It's been an attack on my integrity,' said associate professor Marcia Marx, one of the named instructors. "I also feel personally threatened. If you talk about someone with respect to ideology, that's one thing. But to discuss grading practices and about unfair distribution of grades based on agreeing or not agreeing with a point of view is another thing entirely.'

Sorba said he gets nearly a dozen e-mails every quarter from students in the class saying the instructors deduct grades from papers if an argument is presented that does not support pro-homosexual views.

Karnig said he took seriously assertions that someone's expressed beliefs would hurt their grades but suggested the students file grievances.

Aurora Wolfgang, Women's Studies coordinator, said only two or three grievances pertaining to the Perspectives in Gender class have been filed in five years. Of those complaints, she said, none has suggested that a difference in ideology contributed to a lower-than-deserved grade, though in one complaint a professor had disregarded some sources in a paper as not credible. The class has a regular enrollment of about 240 students per quarter, she said. "It's a class where we have to turn people away in droves,' Wolfgang said. "If this effort has been affecting us at all, there are people right behind the people dropping out who want to take that spot in the class.'

But professors are not concerned about the enrollment figures. By singling out whichever three instructors teach this course each quarter, the reputation of the individuals and institution suffers, said Nancy Rose, an instructor named in the flier. "Most of this is being perpetuated by someone who hasn't taken the class,' Rose said. "(Sorba) is saying things that are not true. It's much easier to make things up.'

Many students at the forum defended the professors and said the university should stop the attacks. Others said the group's complaints were not being taken seriously enough by the administration. Several asked Sorba about joining the organization.

Psychology professor Gloria Cowan said at the forum Sorba has no right to publicly humiliate instructors.

Sorba said he attended a class last summer to observe the teaching, though instructors said he did more to disrupt lessons. At the class, Sorba said he heard instructor Cindy Paxton say there is no evidence transvestites suffer from a mental disorder, though a Gender Identity Disorder is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Paxton is also named on the flier. Paxton said he had no right to be in the class at all and that his description of the events was not accurate. The named professors say they can handle criticism of their teaching methods, but they said Sorba's attacks reach into slanderous territory. "I don't think libel is free speech,' Marx said.

Source




A SOVIET TEACHER'S COLLEGE IN NEW YORK

Brooklyn College's School of Education has begun to base evaluations of aspiring teachers in part on their commitment to social justice, raising fears that the college is screening students for their political views. The School of Education at the CUNY campus initiated last fall a new method of judging teacher candidates based on their "dispositions," a vogue in teacher training across the country that focuses on evaluating teachers' values, apart from their classroom performance.

Critics of the assessment policy warned that aspiring teachers are being judged on how closely their political views are aligned with their instructor's. Ultimately, they said, teacher candidates could be ousted from the School of Education if they are found to have the wrong dispositions. "All of these buzz words don't seem to mean anything until you look and see how they're being implemented," a prominent history professor at Brooklyn College, Robert David Johnson, said. "Dispositions is an empty vessel that could be filled with any agenda you want," he said. Critics such as Mr. Johnson say the dangers of the assessment policy became immediately apparent in the fall semester when several students filed complaints against an instructor who they said discriminated against them because of their political beliefs and "denounced white people as the oppressors."

Classroom clashes between the assistant professor, Priya Parmar, and one outspoken student led a sympathetic colleague of the instructor to conduct an informal investigation of the dispositions of the student, who the colleague said exhibited "aggressive and bullying behavior toward his professor." That student and another one were subsequently accused by the dean of the education school of plagiarism and were given lower grades as a result.

Brooklyn College, established in 1930, is a four-year school within the City University of New York. The college enrolls more than 15,000 students, and the School of Education has about 3,200, including 1,000 undergraduates. Driving the new policies at the college and similar ones at other education schools is a mandate set forth by the largest accrediting agency of teacher education programs in America, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. That 51-year-old agency, composed of 33 professional associations, says it accredits 600 colleges of education - about half the country's total. Thirty-nine states have adopted or adapted the council's standards as their own, according to the agency.

In 2000 the council introduced new standards for accrediting education schools. Those standards incorporated the concept of dispositions, which the agency maintains ought to be measured, to sort out teachers who are likeliest to be successful. In a glossary, the council says dispositions "are guided by beliefs and attitudes related to values such as caring, fairness, honesty, responsibility, and social justice."

To drive home the notion that education schools ought to evaluate teacher candidates on such parameters as attitude toward social justice, the council issued a revision of its accrediting policies in 2002 in a Board of Examiners Update. It encouraged schools to tailor their assessments of dispositions to the schools' guiding principles, which are known in the field as "conceptual frameworks." The council's policies say that if an education school "has described its vision for teacher preparation as 'Teachers as agents of change' and has indicated that a commitment to social justice is one disposition it expects of teachers who can become agents of change, then it is expected that unit assessments include some measure of a candidate's commitment to social justice."

Brooklyn College's School of Education, which is the only academic unit at the college with the status of school, is among dozens of education schools across the country that incorporate the notion of "social justice" in their guiding principles. At Brooklyn, "social justice" is one of the four main principles in its conceptual framework. The school's conceptual framework states that it develops in its students "a deeper understanding of the quest for social justice." In its explanation of that mission, the school states: "We educate teacher candidates and other school personnel about issues of social injustice such as institutionalized racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism."

Critics of the dispositions standard contend that the idea of "social justice," a term frequently employed in left-wing circles, is open to politicization. "It's political correctness that has insinuated into the criteria for accreditation of teacher education institutions," a noted education theorist in New York, Diane Ravitch, said. "Once that becomes the criteria for institutions as a whole, it gives free rein to those who want to impose it in their classrooms," she said. Ms. Ravitch is the author of "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn."

A case in point, as Mr. Johnson of Brooklyn College has pointed out, is the way in which the term was incorporated into Ms. Parmar's course, called Language Literacy in Secondary Education, which students said is required of all Brooklyn College education candidates who aspire to become secondary-school teachers. In the fall semester, Ms. Parmar was the only instructor who taught the course, according to students. The course, which instructs students on how to develop lesson plans that teach literacy, is built around themes of "social justice," according to the syllabus, which was obtained by The New York Sun. One such theme is the idea that standard English is the language of oppressors while Ebonics, a term educators use to denote a dialect used by African-Americans, is the language of the oppressed.

A preface to the listed course requirements includes a quotation from a South African scholar, Njabulo Ndebele: "The need to maintain control over English by its native speakers has given birth to a policy of manipulative open-mindedness in which it is held that English belongs to all who use it provided that it is used correctly. This is the art of giving away the bride while insisting that she still belongs to you."

Among the complaints cited by students in letters they delivered in December to the dean of the School of Education, Deborah Shanley, is Ms. Parmar's alleged disapporval of students who defended the ability to speak grammatically correct English.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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