Free Republic

The trial over Irving ISD’s election system ended Wednesday after three days of testimony about race, math and the right to vote.U.S. District Judge Sidney Fitzwater must now decide whether Irving ISD’s setup illegally blocks Hispanics from electing their favored candidates. If he does, he could force the district to rewrite its election system for the second time in two years.Fitzwater ruled against the same plaintiffs—failed school board candidate Manuel Benavidez and his law firm, Bickel & Brewer—when they first sued Irving ISD in the late 2000s. The judge found that Hispanic residents were too few and far between to...

A newly released survey of 653 of California’s 1,058 school systems reports teachers were paid on average $84,489, while 33 administrators earned more than $250,000 in pay alone last year. The pay and compensation information was complied by The California Policy Center, a nonpartisan conservative public policy think tank that runs Transparent California, which posted the survey for the public to review at transparentcalifornia.com “We’re doing this because the public employs the public sector; and members of the public, as voters are being continually asked to approve tax increase and bond measures,” Policy Center Director Ed Ring said. “You can’t...

Inside Hoboken’s combined junior-senior high school is a storage closet. Behind the locked door, some mothballed laptop computers are strewn among brown cardboard boxes. Others are stacked one atop another. Dozens more are stored on mobile computer carts, many of them on their last legs. That’s all that remains from a failed experiment to assign every student a laptop at Hoboken Junior Senior High School. It began five years ago with an unexpected windfall of stimulus money from Washington, D.C., and good intentions to help the district’s students, the majority of whom are under or near the poverty line, keep...

James B. Sellinger, a former vice president for IBM’s North American operations, will serve as chancellor of education for the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s Department of Catholic Schools and Frank Bramble Sr., a member of the Board of Directors for Bank of America Corp., will serve as chairman of the archdiocesan school board, the archdiocese announced July 28. In the newly created position, Sellinger will promote the enrollment and fiscal health of the archdiocese’s nearly 50 Catholic schools. Bramble previously served as interim president of Calvert Hall College High School in Towson and as chairman of the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s Blue...

According to a recent study conducted at The University of Chicago, African American males haven’t advanced in American society one bit since 1971. The researchers used a variety of socio-economic indicators to arrive at their conclusions, and their work has credibility, since U. Chicago is among the world’s leaders in both Sociological and Economic research. The year 1971 is meaningful to me, since that was the year I was born. When I think about the fact that it’s our job as men to carry the torch and improve upon the achievements of the previous generation, these results seem to imply...

Bel Kaufman, a former New York City schoolteacher whose classic first novel, “Up the Down Staircase” — shot through with despair and hopefulness, violence and levity, all manner of bureaucratic inanity and a blizzard of official memorandums so mind-bendingly illogical as to seem almost Kafkaesque — was hailed as a stunningly accurate portrait of life in a gritty urban school when it was published in 1965, died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 103.

<p>I received a call from my sons’ school in March telling me that my oldest needed to be picked up early. He had been given a one-day suspension because he had thrown a chair. He did not hit anyone, but he could have, the school officials told me.</p>

Florida GOP state senator Alan Hays said he’ll propose a bill mandating that students in the 1,700 Florida public high schools and middle schools are to be shown the film unless their parents object. A Florida state senator plans to introduce a bill that would make Dinesh D'Souza's docudrama, America, required viewing for most teenagers in the state, The Hollywood Reporter learned on Friday. Republican Alan Hays said he’ll introduce in November his one-page bill that simply states that students in the 1,700 Florida public high schools and middle schools are to be shown the film unless their parents object....

We're no longer a nation of laws, we're a nation of men, specifically those men who were the first to figure out legitimacy is no longer a serious constraint, and there are no other constraints. Absent legitimacy it's a sprint to whatever irreducible power center presents itself. As in any other no-rules fight, the violent prevail over the peaceful and the homicidal prevail over the violent. This isn't mere looting, major assets, even national assets, are in play. Mexico for example, one of the most violent countries on earth, is conquering—not merging with, conquering—the southwestern US. National borders are always...

The issue plays into the president’s agenda of protecting students and providing an affordable college education — issues the administration also hopes will drive Democrats to the polls in November. The financial industry is clashing with the Obama administration over forthcoming regulations that are intended to protect college students from excessive bank fees. Still in its early stages, the proposal would extend the Education Department’s regulatory authority to deposit accounts opened under arrangements between universities and financial firms that adopt “campus cards,” critics say. The agency reasons that its jurisdiction includes those accounts, since they often serve as receptacles for...

By Matthew Burns Raleigh, N.C. — Gov. Pat McCrory on Tuesday signed legislation designed to replace the controversial Common Core academic standards in North Carolina public schools with standards drawn up by a new state commission. The standards were adopted by the state several years ago. But their implementation in the 2012-13 school year angered some parents, who said they were inappropriate in several areas. For the past year, those critics have been pushing lawmakers to repeal the standards. McCrory has supported Common Core in the past. Just last month, he said the push to repeal the standards "is not...

LONDON — A British government inquiry has found that hardline Muslims tried to impose an "intolerant and aggressive" Islamic agenda on some schools in the city of Birmingham, including separation of boys and girls in lessons and banning Christmas celebrations. Some of the majority-Moslem schools invited speakers with known extremist views to assemblies and promoted organizations that would be categorized as 'extremist' under government classifications, according to the report by Peter Clarke, former head of London Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorism Command. Hardline Muslims also tried to force schools to install governors and teachers who would support a conservative Islamic religious...

Many American colleges and universities are in the thrall of “diversity,” but none more so than my institution, the University of Wisconsin. This spring, the university adopted a new plan that, according to Board of Regents policy, “[p]laces the mission of diversity at the center of institutional life so that it becomes a core organizing principle.” That is, promoting diversity appears to be more important than teaching students. This Framework for Diversity and Inclusive Excellence sailed through our Faculty Senate without the least bit of attention, much less the “sifting and winnowing” on which it prides itself. Although much of...

SNIP Lee Hansen, a professor emeritus of economics at UW-Madison wrote in an op-ed piece for the John William Hope Pope Center for Higher Education, a North Carolina-based think tank, about the latest “diversity” plan for the UW-System’s flagship school. The plan, completed in May, is your typical left-wing platitudes about commitments to “compositional diversity,” “equity mindedness” “representational equity” and other things for what has become a sacred cow to liberal academia. But when you dig deeper into the definitions of these platitudes according to Hansen, you suddenly see that “representational equity” is being applied to levels never before seen....

The notion that black men need to act, dress or speak in a certain way to be “authentic” is something that "has to go," President Obama said Monday at an event promoting his initiative to aid young men of color. "The notion that there’s some authentic way of being black, that if you’re going to be black you have to act a certain way and wear a certain kind of clothes, … that has to go, because there are a whole bunch of different ways for African-American men to be authentic," Obama said. "You don’t have to act a certain...

Four fifth-grade girls in Salt Lake City have accused their teacher of touching them inappropriately. James Rolland Carter, 62, was charged Wednesday in 3rd District Court with two second-degree felony counts of sexual abuse of a child and two class A misdemeanor counts of lewdness involving a child. Carter’s school is not identified in the charges, but the address of the allegations matches Lincoln Elementary School. The Salt Lake City School District would not confirm any details of a case involving Carter, but spokesman Michael Williams said that an elementary teacher who was employed for 13 years "is under investigation...

FULL TITLE: Art teacher, 45, who engaged in sexually explicit conversations with 17 male students as young as 12 is sentenced to 15 years jail A high school teacher who engaged in sexually explicit conversations with male students, including asking them for semen-stained tissues to make art projects, has been sentenced to 15 years jail. Charles Reilly admitted he also instructed the 17 boys, aged 12 to 16, at New Jersey's Pine Hill Middle School how to masturbate over a five year period. Authorities said the 45-year-old soccer coach, who'd worked at the school for more than a decade, also...

Dr. Elaina George, an ear, nose, throat and chest specialist from Atlanta, told Charles Payne on FOX News today that the US could be facing a health crisis as the thousands of newly illegal children enter the classrooms this fall. “There’s an example in Maryland, where parents got a letter from the school that there children had been exposed to an illegal child who had TB who was one of their classmates. So this fall it is potentially possible that these children entering the school systems could be carrying all sorts of things, diseases that are not on the radar.”...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) called on state lawmakers Thursday to pass a bill in January that would repeal the Common Core standards and replace them with “standards set by people in Wisconsin.” According to the Wisconsin State Journal, Walker released a statement Thursday afternoon, just hours after two Republican state senators, Leah Vukmir and Paul Farrow, issued a joint press statement calling for a delay in the use of the Smarter Balanced Assessments (SBAC) that are aligned with the Common Core standards. Earlier in the year, Walker helped draft a bill that would create a state board to replace...

There are 51 schools that have been in the bottom 5 percent of the Michigan Department of Education's Top-to-Bottom rankings three years in a row. Of those 51 schools, four were charter public schools and three of those four were closed. Meanwhile, the conventional public schools on the list remain open. "Charter schools have traditionally been the only public schools that have been held accountable for their performance," said Michigan Association of Public School Academies President Dan Quisenberry. "If they fail their students, they're closed down. That's never happened with a traditional public school, ever. What we need is this...