Junk schools exposed: "Nearly two-thirds of 2004's graduating high school seniors now enrolled in Houston-area [TX] community colleges are taking remedial classes because they weren't prepared for college. ... Although the problem is generally worse among school districts with high poverty levels, such as Houston and Aldine, some of those with wealthier populations, including Spring Branch and Katy, face the same predicament. And it's not just community college students who are struggling. Even those attending four-year universities lack many of the basic skills necessary to tackle college-level work as freshmen. A report released this spring by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board found that half of the state's 2001 high school graduates needed remedial help in college."




ACADEME STILL LOVES COMMUNISM

And they proclaim it

Communism was an abject failure in the Soviet Union, Cambodia, and Nicaragua. In textbooks, doctoral dissertations, and campus lectures, it works flawlessly. College students have such choices as Amherst College's "Taking Marx Seriously" and UC-Santa Barbara's "Black Marxism." Such classes don't just represent the views of lone, eccentric academics longing to expand their diminishing base of fellow believers. Entire institutions of higher learning seek to mainstream Marxism by endowing academic chairs, establishing scholarship funds, and dedicating buildings in honor of long-dead communists - in some instances, with taxpayer dollars.

Fifty years ago, Alger Hiss was serving the final months of a prison sentence for perjuring himself about his life as a communist spy. Today, Bard College honors the disgraced State Department official with an Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies.

An institute at Harvard, a dormitory at the University of Hartford, and UMass-Amherst's skyscraper library are among the things named for W.E.B. Du Bois on American campuses. Du Bois eulogized Stalin as a "great" and "courageous" man and called the Soviet Union's intolerance of religion its "greatest gift" to humanity. The propagandist, who is currently doted upon by scores of colleges and universities, won the Lenin Peace Prize in 1959, shortly thereafter joined the Communist Party, and then renounced his American citizenship.

Singer, actor, and athlete Paul Robeson proudly accepted the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952. Penn State and Rutgers now proudly feature campus cultural centers bearing the name of the fervent communist. Columbia University has a civil liberties chair that strangely honors Corliss Lamont, an apologist for Stalin, Mao, and their B-list impersonators.

Harry Bridges, leader of the West Coast International Longshoreman's and Warehouseman's Union, was an underground communist. This was strongly suspected for the 40 years that Bridges ran the union until his retirement in 1977. It is known definitively today. He perjured himself repeatedly about involvement in the party, excused Stalin's atrocities, and subordinated the interests of union members to the dictates of the Soviet Union. No matter - the University of Washington houses a Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, as well as an academic chair named for the Australian Stalinist.

In the 1990s, UMass-Amherst gave the Communist Party's official historian Herb Aptheker an honorary degree, the University of California awarded three-time Communist Party vice-presidential candidate Angela Davis $90,000 and its highest academic honor, and a branch of the City University of New York even doled out Ho Chi Minh scholarships until an uproar put a stop to it.

Just as the massive class time dedicated to Marxism isn't matched by any discernable professorial interest in offering courses on the teachings of Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, or Milton Friedman, the number of communists institutionally honored on campuses is predictably unmatched by tributes to Whittaker Chambers, Ronald Reagan, J. Edgar Hoover, or other prominent anti-Communists. Too many faculty and administrators want students (most of whom have no memory of the struggle between the West and communism) to believe the bad guys were the good guys in the Cold War.

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.

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