Free Republic

One of my kids would like me to thank Michelle Obama. She wants me to keep it on the low down and not give any identifying characteristics that may get said kid in trouble so I thought I'd post here. Not that no one reads FR, but I doubt kids school board does! Because Mooch changed the school lunches to basically nothing and had the vending machines stripped to carrot strips that go bad in a day, my kids sports team started selling candy and protein bars on the black market. They raised enough to go to a very prestigious...

Roughly 12 hours after Chesapeake High School's senior class graduated, vandals returned to the Pasadena school and caused significant property damage, Anne Arundel County Police said. Investigators are now searching for four people who appeared on security camera footage from Tuesday night, spray-painting graffiti, jamming locks and causing other damage, according to The Capital. . Police believe it was a senior prank, police spokesman Lt. Glenn Shanahan said. The vandalism caused $2,000 in damages, schools spokesman Bob Mosier said. The suspects, wearing what appear to be masks or face paint, arrived at the school that night, police said. Three of...

A teacher at Encinal High School in Alameda, Calif., allegedly told his tenth-grade students to find their parents’ sex toys and condoms and take selfies with them for extra credit. A local CBS affiliate reports that two of the students’ mothers, Kimberly Cobene and Evangeline Garcia, had heard about the assignment from a counselor at the school. “It was to go into your parents’ private drawers or whatever to seek out sexual toys or condoms, or anything of that nature and to take a selfie with it,” Cobene said. According to CBS, the school administration has tried to play off...

It wasn't greed that caused the mortgage mess. In large part, the mess was the product of government policies designed to increase home ownership among the poor and ethnic minorities. Today Peter Wallison points out how Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHA created a demand for bad mortgages that encouraged mortgage brokers to generate millions of them. From the Wall Street Journal: Mortgage brokers had to be able to sell their mortgages to someone. They could only produce what those above them in the distribution chain wanted to buy. In other words, they could only respond to demand, not...

he College Board, the private company that produces the SAT test and the various Advanced Placement (AP) exams, has kicked off a national controversy by issuing a new and unprecedentedly detailed “Framework” for its AP U.S. History exam. This Framework will effectively force American high schools to teach U.S. history from a leftist perspective. The College Board disclaims political intent, insisting that the new Framework provides a “balanced” guide that merely helps to streamline the AP U.S. History course while enhancing teacher flexibility. Not only the Framework itself, but the history of its development suggests that a balanced presentation of...

Government, corporate, and education elites, often supported by religious leaders, have championed both the Common Core standards and amnesty for illegal immigrants, issues that have long been enmeshed in the progressive agenda that includes labor and education. In Part I, we examined how Marc Tucker, president and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), was instrumental in the 1990s in helping the Clintons establish the direct funding route from the federal government to state governors and their appointees, circumventing local school boards and state legislatures – the very reason state boards of education, most of them...

Is there any wonder why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and scores of elites from both political parties are ardent champions of both amnesty for illegal immigrants and the Common Core centralized educational standards? Both issues are related, have been enmeshed for years in the progressive agenda that includes labor and education, and could be close to being fully realized were it not for grassroots groups of Americans joining together against the status quo of government, corporate, and education elites. The relationship between Common Core and amnesty could readily be...

A Native American student who sued his California school district because it refused to let him wear an eagle feather to his high school graduation will be able to wear the sacred item after all. Attorneys for Christian Titman and officials with Clovis Unified School District reached an agreement that allows him to wear the feather in his hair during the Thursday ceremony and attach it to his cap for the traditional tassel turn, said Rebecca Farmer, a spokeswoman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, one of the groups representing Titman. The district confirmed an agreement was...

A married mother of two was fired from her job as the kitchen manager at an elementary school in Colorado for giving lunches to students who didn’t have money, CBS Denver reports. Della Curry was the manager at Dakota Valley Elementary School near Aurora. She told CBS Denver that she would see students — who often times weren’t signed up for free lunch programs — crying because of hunger and no lunch money. “I had a first grader in front of me, crying because she doesn’t have enough money for lunch,” Curry told CBS. “Yes, I gave her lunch.” Typically,...

LONGMONT, CO (KDVR/CNN) - Parents of Evan Curry are outraged after their teenage son is outed by his high school principal just before graduation. The parents say their son wasn't only forced out of the closet - he was silenced when he planned to come out to his family and friends during his valedictorian speech. The principal at Twin Peaks Charter School called Alise Curry and Don Young to tell them their son, the valedictorian, would not be allowed to give the speech at graduation. The principal also informed them their Evan was gay. "I think it goes without saying...

Anxiety has now surpassed depression as the most common mental-health diagnosis among college students, according to The New York Times. A recent study of more than 100,000 students by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State found that more than half of students seeking help at campus clinics report anxiety as an issue, and nearly one in six college students has been treated for anxiety in the past year, according to the American College Health Association. Mental-health counselors on campus attribute numerous factors to this rise, namely academic pressure from a much earlier age and compulsive social-media interaction....

Your Social Security Number can be stolen in under an hour. And hundreds of website run by the government, universities and financial institutions among other companies are at fault. ... ... ... It works essentially in the following way. Is my victim's SSN 123-45-6789? No! Is my victim's SSN 123-45-6790? No! Is my victim's SSN 123-45-6788? Yes! ... ... ... Very commonly all the hacker needs is: A victim’s last name A victim's birth date A vulnerable website the victim uses. ... ... ... Are any big players exposing SSN’s? I have a list of hundreds of websites who are...

Out on a sunny Berlin balcony, Tim Keeley and Daniel Krasa are firing words like bullets at each other. First German, then Hindi, Nepali, Polish, Croatian, Mandarin and Thai – they’ve barely spoken one language before the conversation seamlessly melds into another. Together, they pass through about 20 different languages or so in total. It can be difficult enough to learn one foreign tongue. Yet I’m here in Berlin for the Polyglot Gathering, a meeting of 350 or so people who speak multiple languages – some as diverse as Manx, Klingon and Saami, the language of reindeer herders in Scandinavia....

Despite the left’s efforts to convince us that Obama’s relationship with William Ayers was irrelevant... the facts that prove otherwise are plenty and can no longer be ignored. To understand the agenda (and lies) at the core of our new national standards, you have to go back to why many on the right were concerned about Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers to begin with – their work on education reform. The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), a progressive education reform model rooted in the social justice pedagogy of John Dewey and Paulo Freire, was expanded by President Obama and communist...

“Was George Washington any different from Palestinian terrorists trying to protect their country?” “Was Jefferson a hypocrite? Did he really think of a slave as a sub-human while writing the Declaration of Independence?” These questions were written for use in the classroom by Grant Wiggins, a Pearson Education author, partner, and Common Core professional development trainer. In partnership with the Council of Chief State School Officers, Pearson Education provides lessons, texts, professional development, and other resources to states implementing the Common Core State Standards.

Teaching school age children how to be politically correct far exceeds educating them. In education, indoctrination has become a lucrative cottage industry, because it can count of the support of generous government grants. Rather than school kids wanting to talk about the family’s next planned trip to Disneyland, they will be probing the size of their parents’ carbon footprint, per the instructions of their classroom teacher—and coming up with creative ways to shrink it.

A group of students at Los Altos High School want California history textbooks revised, claiming the current textbooks don’t tell the whole story. The students claim the version of American history taught in California classrooms is at best incomplete and at worst biased and inaccurate: failing to adequately cover the experiences, accomplishments and frequent mistreatment of communities of color and women. “There’s definitely value at looking at the good things we have done, there’s definitely value at being proud of those things, and there’s even more value in acknowledging what we haven’t done correctly,” one of the students said. Members...

BEDFORD, KY (WAVE) – Several parents are fired up after hearing a student's hot lunch was dumped in the trash in front of her classmates because her lunch account was past due. Parents claim Bedford Elementary School did something it preaches against: In their words, "bullying" the child, not to mention wasting food to embarrass her. On May 20 an elementary school lunch was packed with a hidden punch a child never saw coming. "Someone came and took her lunch while she was sitting there with her friends and everybody else," said the girl's aunt, Leslie Chilton, who also happens...

Watching PBS? Might want to ask the kindergartners to leave the room. In a May 27 piece for tax-funded PBS, NewsHour producer Saskia de Melker argued “The case for starting sex education in kindergarten.” In her piece, she held up the Netherlands as an example for the United States in “sexuality education” – for those as young as 4-years-old to learn “honest conversations about love and relationships.”

On a recent bright spring morning, students admitted to the Barnard College Class of 2019 gathered on campus. As blue-and-white balloons fluttered in the breeze, the prospective freshmen attended panels and lunched on the lawn, chatting animatedly with current students. There were, of course, young women from a variety of backgrounds, but at least one category wasn’t included: transgender women. Barnard, like other women’s colleges, has traditionally admitted only students born female. But that might be changing. Next week, Barnard’s trustees are expected to vote on an issue that has arrived loudly and emphatically on the front burner for women’s...