Stunning! This Public School Teaches Kids to Love America
    
Andrew Burns grew up in New Jersey. He worked in the World Trade Center. Some of his friends died in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

For the past 15 years Mr. Burns has been teaching eighth-grade social studies at West Middle School in Greenwood Village, Colorado. But the events of that day so many years ago made a profound impact on the school teacher.

“Some of my friends died on 9/11 and I want my kids to know that freedom isn’t free,” he said during an interview on “The Todd Starnes Radio Show.” “I just love America. I love the freedom I have here and I know it wasn’t free.”

And that is the lesson he teaches eighth graders for an entire year — a simple phrase written on a chalk board: freedom isn’t free. The students spend the rest of the school year proving the statement.

“I want the next generation of kids to learn that [freedom is not free],” he said. “You see the World War II generation passing away and the sacrifices that an entire generation made to preserve peace. Those who are serving today and have served continue to provide for us. [The] kids have got to know that.”

Mr. Burns teaches his kids about the American Revolution and the Civil War. On Veterans Day, a service member visits the classroom to talk about life in the military. They send care packages to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they even raised money to buy a puppy for a veteran suffering from PTSD.

“That’s been our service project for the last few years,” he said on my radio show. “We’re up to about four puppies.”

Now many of you may be pleasantly dumbfounded right about now — a public school that actually teaches kids to love America and to respect our military. It’s a beautiful thing.

But there’s more to this classroom lesson about patriotism, and you might want to secure a handkerchief.

Long before Mr. Burns arrived at the school children would visit nearby Fort Logan National Cemetery — the final resting places for many of our fallen heroes. And he could not think of a more poignant place to conduct the last day of class on the last day of school.

Freedom isn’t free.

Standing among the fallen soldiers, the student read the Gettysburg Address and Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” They learn about the history of the cemetery and participate in a flag-folding ceremony.

“We talk about the solemnity of the place and to have the kids look around and see the uniformity of the headstones and to see that this is the cost of freedom,” Mr. Burns said.

This is the cost of freedom.

One by one the eighth graders walk among the fallen placing more than 4,000 American flags at the headstones of our heroes.

“It’s the last lesson of the year,” he said. “We take the students to Fort Logan National Cemetery to try to put an exclamation point on that message.”

A few days after I interviewed Mr. Burns I received a message on our Facebook page from a listener. It turned out his father had been buried at Fort Logan, and the students at West Middle had placed a flag at his dad’s headstone.

“I would like to thank you for such a wonderful thing to do for the students, community and veterans at rest,” the man wrote.

Longtime listeners of my radio show know there are a lot of wrong in American public schools. But in Greenwood Village, Colorado, there is a public school that is doing something right.

We live in the greatest nation in the history of the world — an exceptional nation. We are that shining city on a hill, a beacon of hope for people seeking freedom.

And we have a responsibility to teach future generations that our freedom comes with a price — paid for by our fellow countrymen who voluntarily put their lives on the line to defend the Constitution.

President Reagan once said freedom is just one generation away from extinction. But I believe the Republic is going to be just fine so long as we have teachers like Andrew Burns and academic institutions like West Middle School teaching future generations that freedom isn’t free.

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Mickey Mouse degrees: selling out education

British universities must stop promising career prospects over intellectual enrichment

If one of my students told me they were going to read International Business Strategy at Anglia Ruskin University, I would probably advise them to make a better choice.

International student Fiona Pok Wong could have used this advice before enrolling on that course. After three years at Anglia Ruskin, she graduated with a first-class degree in 2013. Recently, she sued Anglia Ruskin for awarding her what she calls a ‘Mickey Mouse degree’ and for making false promises about the quality of the career prospects that would follow. She received £60,000 in an out-of-court settlement, though her claim was never upheld in court and was settled without any admission or underlying suggestion of liability from Anglia Ruskin University.

This is not the first lawsuit of its kind. Last year, Faiz Siddiqui lost a case against Oxford University in the High Court. He blamed the university’s inadequate teaching for his failure to achieve a first-class degree. The presiding judge in Siddiqui’s case warned students of the risks and hurdles of taking this kind of legal action against universities.

However, it has been clear for some time that in higher education, the winds of change are blowing in the opposite direction. For instance, the Office of the Independent Adjudicator, a body set up to review student complaints, recently ruled that students should be refunded at least 50 per cent of their tuition fees for teaching time lost when lecturers go on strike.

It was only a matter of time before someone with sufficient financial and legal resources would take a university to court for a ‘mis-sold’ degree. Now the Higher Education Policy Institute is warning that more value-for-money claims will follow.

It is difficult to blame students for taking such a mercantile approach to tertiary education. For the vast majority of undergraduates, you can’t get a degree without a loan of £50,000 – a big price tag. When a degree represents such a large financial burden, students are bound to ask themselves if it’s all worth it.

What’s more, outside of the top-tier Russell Group universities, quality of teaching is becoming very patchy. In some places – including some higher up the food chain than Anglia Ruskin – it can be appalling.

Mickey Mouse degrees are just the tip of the iceberg in a culture that has reduced getting a degree to a necessary, mechanical step in one’s career. The value of a degree is routinely based, by those at all levels of education and outside it, on future wage-earning potential.

The question of what is of value in a modern university is an important one. Faculties and departments do everything they can to sell their wares on promises of higher wages, glamorous careers, foreign travel and exclusive professional networks. They aggressively target foreign students in particular because of the higher revenue they bring in, while subject courses are often drawn up not on the basis of their academic value but of their commercial viability.

What this latest case demonstrates is that those going to university just to get a prestigious job are likely to be unlucky and out of pocket. But it also reveals that, increasingly, universities are unable to convince young people of other reasons to attend.

The true value of a university education is to be found in the sheer joy – and occasional terror – of the intellectual experience. And this cannot be measured in financial gain. Sadly, with such poor-quality teaching becoming the norm in so many places, those who want to go to university for the right reason – the thrill of learning – stand to be the most disappointed of all.

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College Costs Are Out of Control. Here’s What Can Be Done

American colleges and universities are failing in one of their most basic missions: to equip students with the tools they need for a career.

Many students graduate ill-prepared to earn a living and pay off the debt they’ve accumulated getting their degrees—40% of those who start college don’t finish within six years.

Additionally, students are often subject to indoctrination into socialist ideology. They face hostility toward opinions that don’t conform to the predominantly leftist thinking on campus.

They’re also immersed in identity politics that pit students of different backgrounds against one another.

Despite these problems, colleges continue to raise tuition. Because federal loan money is handed out with little scrutiny as to the student’s ability to pay it back, colleges have had free reign to raise prices at levels often double the inflation rate.

Flush with all that money, their first spending priority often isn’t the classroom but the bureaucracy.

From 1987 to 2012, America’s higher education system added more than half a million administrators, doubling the number of administrators relative to the number of faculty.

To pay for these ever-increasing costs, students are borrowing more money and taking on more and more debt.

And with federal loans accounting for much of the $1.5 trillion in outstanding student loan debt and more than a million people defaulting on their loans, taxpayers are picking up much of the tab for this broken system.

So, what’s the solution?

While politicians often suggest throwing more money at the problem, that will only make things worse.

In fact, the surest way to stop the sharp rise in both college tuition and student debt is to get the federal government out of the student loan business.

That cuts off the open spigot of money that has allowed colleges to increase costs virtually without limit.

Restoring private lending will make the loan market more responsible and cause colleges to rein in costs, creating more affordable choices for students.

Private lending will also limit taxpayers’ exposure to billions of dollars in loan defaults.

One emerging private lending solution is coming from colleges themselves in the form of income share agreements.

Such agreements allow students to obtain financing from their schools and pay it back based on a percentage of their income after graduation.

That means their monthly loan payments are lower when their income is lower, ensuring that loan payoffs are more affordable, or that they can pay them off quicker when their income is higher.

This system allows students to see—before they take on debt or choose a major—what types of careers will allow them to pay off their loans quicker and what kind of future they are investing in.

This kind of cost savings and transparency is a win for students, for taxpayers, and for fiscal sanity.

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