Free Republic

'Mom, it's like instead of them telling us how to not do it, it's like they gave us a road map'! Parents are outraged after discovering their children were being taught about “mutual masturbation” and “anal sex” in their Oklahoma public middle school. Students in Jay, Oklahoma, were given sex-ed handouts from Lighthouse Pregnancy Center teaching that there are “four types of sex.” The graphic sex lesson handouts were culled from a program called “Shape, Sexual Health Awareness, Prevention and Education.” Comprehensive Sex Education came to Jay Middle School in Oklahoma last week. https://t.co/4eAzPeyG1w pic.twitter.com/Ps3yPJU5lS ​ ​ — ShannonJoy (@ShannonJoyRadio)...

Attendee: Courses teach 'Christians and Jews were always better off under Muslim rule'! The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school district in America, is co-sponsoring a “professional development” workshop for K-12 teachers to “Learn about Islam and the Arab World” – and the district has apparently partnered with an anti-Israel group for lessons on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Learning about Islam and the Arab World” is the topic of a two-part course that began Oct. 14 and will continue Oct. 21. It is being led by LAUSD teachers Richard Jessel and Rosa Melendez, according to a posting on the...

The NFL is going to bankroll a “social activism boot camp” for professional athletes in February, according to a new report.“The league has agreed to finance a social activism boot camp at Morehouse College in February,” ESPN’s Jim Trotter reported on Monday.The boot camp will reportedly take place over two days and will include professional athletes from other leagues besides the NFL. “And then, the organizers of that curriculum will work with the players throughout the year to try and teach them to get their message out and be most effective with it,” Trotter added.The NFL has also reportedly agreed to...

Safety, religious bias, sexualization of the classroom are factors bolstering school-choice argument! In his newly published book, The Corrupt Classroom, Lance Izumi of the Pacific Research Institute illustrates how the public school classroom has become increasingly politicized, with liberal teachers indoctrinating students with an anti-Trump and leftist agenda. Izumi makes the case that while many school choice supporters rely on academic school performance data to show that public schools are failing, there are many other equally important reasons to support it. "Many parents, for example, are rightly concerned about the growing politicization of the classroom," Izumi explains. "Far from being...

Gay rights groups told a California state commission Wednesday that they object to several of the textbooks that could be recommended for use in schools, saying the books don’t include enough information about the contributions of LGBT Americans. The state Department of Education is preparing to update textbook recommendations for the first time since California became the first state to require teaching about the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. A coalition of LGBT rights groups said the books should not merely include a token reference to San Francisco civil rights icon Harvey Milk but integrate the contributions...

What is the role of the education system in our children’s lives? It seems that it’s constantly changing. Once upon a time, it involved teaching our children things like reading, writing, math, science, history — typical subjects to prepare them for the real world. Now, liberals are seemingly adding more and more to the curriculum, and not everyone is happy about it. Parents were reportedly furious after learning that the San Diego School Board of Trustees partnered with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, to launch an anti-bullying campaign. The campaign involves educating children about Islam, with the purported...

Parents warned of elementary educators' 'brazen' indoctrination plan! The influential Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., is warning parents of “brazen” indoctrination plans being pursued by teachers, even in elementary schools. The latest instance, FRC explains, is in Florida, where a fifth-grade teacher sent home a note to parents mandating that students use only politically correct pronouns in class. “One thing that you should know about me is that I use gender neutral terms. My prefix is Mx. (pronounced Mix). Additionally, my pronouns are ‘they, them, their’ instead of ‘he, his, she, hers.'” The Tallahassee Democrat newspaper reported math and...

Ironically the radical left protests pumping hormones into cattle and poultry, yet they applaud when it’s done to a child “Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”—G.K. Chesterson Concerned parents of school-aged children know that sexual revolutionaries and cultural Marxists are destroying our public schools and universities. But Charter schools were thought to be safe from these dark ideological radicals. Sexual revolutionaries and cultural Marxists believe that there are no differences between men and women, and that “male” and “female” are merely social constructs.

UNDERSTANDING EACH OTHER   In an era marked by ubiquitous technology, the idea of teaching empathy through video games holds a certain appeal. But can gaming really improve understanding? “Dys4ia” isn’t your typical video game. There are no bosses to defeat or weapons to supe-up. On their face, the challenges are even more simple than the game’s pixelated graphics: Try to squeeze into an ill-fitting shirt; Find an empty stall in the women’s restroom. And unlike most games, “Dys4ia” cannot really be won. That’s because “Dys4ia” is more than a game. It’s an autobiographical depiction of a transgender woman’s journey...

Is there a way to consistently and accurately measure students' ability to do things like recognize emotions, solve peer conflicts, and exercise self-control? What if they don't even realize those things are being measured? The winners of a recent design challenge took a crack at it, proposing everything from analyzing students' subtle behaviors when taking computer-based tests to asking them to play video games that simulate real-world experiences and gauging how they respond. The contest winners responded to a prompt from a working group that is seeking to advance conversations about measurement. That group includes the Collaborative for Academic, Social,...

Last week brought news of three troubling incidents entangling children as young as five in the ever-sprawling transgender agenda. First, as The Federalist’s Joy Pullmann detailed, a California charter school, Rocklin Academy, began the school year with the kindergarten teacher reading students a book about transgenderism. After story-time ended, a male classmate suffering from gender dysphoria changed clothing and reappeared in a “gender reveal” as his “real” self—a “girl.” Parents only learned of the “lesson” when their confused and upset five-year-olds returned home that day. The parents showed up in force at their school board meeting to chastise the administrators...

When a federal judge in Tucson ruled a state law unconstitutional this week, it ended a 10-year saga that once consumed Curtis Acosta's life — but also led to ethnic studies programs across the country. “This has been a hard journey to get to this point,” Acosta said when we met last month, the same week he was testifying in the case and under a gag order. "It's like, 'don't mess it up now.'" It was the second time Acosta had gone to court in an attempt to restore Mexican American studies at Tucson Unified School District. The first suit,...

An elite charter school in California has been rocked by scandal since the end of the last school year, when a kindergarten teacher read her class a pair of books advocating transgender ideology, and a male kindergartener was reintroduced to the class as a girl. Now first-graders at Rocklin Academy Gateway risk a trip to the principal’s office if they refer to their transgender classmate by the wrong name or gender pronoun, said Karen England, executive director of the Capitol Resource Institute, a pro-family group based in Sacramento.

Angry parents stampeded a California charter school board meeting Monday after a teacher read her kindergarten class picture books about transgenderism to affirm a gender dysphoric classmate. During the class, parents say, the gender dysphoric boy also switched clothes to look more like a girl in a “gender reveal.” Parents were not notified beforehand of the discussion or the classmate’s psychological condition, and learned about it when their confused kindergarteners arrived home from school that day. “The kindergartners came home very confused, about whether or not you can pick your gender, whether or not they really were a boy or...

Parents in Rocklin, California were horrified to discover that a teacher led a kindergarten-age classroom discussion on transgenderism that included introducing a five-year-old who was transitioning from male to female. Children at Rocklin Academy were subjected to readings from two storybooks about transgenderism. At some point, the teacher introduced a classmate who changed clothes for the big gender reveal. "These parents feel betrayed by the school district that they were not notified," Capitol Resource Institute's Karen England told CBS News in Sacramento. "The kindergartners came home very confused, about whether or not you can pick your gender, whether or not...

Parents are finding fewer and fewer ways to protect their children from being used as guinea pigs inside an experiment constructed by unelected bureaucrats. If you had argued pre-Obergefell that de-sexing marriage would lead to drag queens leading preschool storytime in public libraries and public schools hounded into hiding their mandatory sex ed curriculum from parents after a settlement requiring trans-friendly “education” starting in kindergarten, you would have been called an unhinged bigot. How could what two consenting adults do privately have any effect on whether five-year-olds are told they should consider cutting off their penises? Preposterous. Fear-mongering. Wild-eyed insanity....

Parents beware: A program called Challenge Day that applauds a culture of victimhood is planting the leftist agenda into young minds under the guise of anti-bullying education. The program uses the power of peer pressure and groupthink to impress upon high school students the idea that everyone is a victim. Challenge Day is no small initiative. According to the program’s website, it has been held at more than 2,200 high schools nationwide and reached millions of students. Challenge Day purports to teach tolerance and acceptance, yet nearly every member of its board of directors and Global Leadership Council is politically...

'It's a system deliberately designed to handicap the individual' It’s no surprise to hear that America’s education system is in disarray, with Common Core dumbing down young students, faith absent from education and underpaid teachers increasingly unfit to serve as effective educators. But all of that is by design, contends Alex Newman, an international journalist and co-author of “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.” He recently appeared on the “Revealing the Truth with Rabbi Walker” Web TV show to discuss the issue. Newman believes the government education system is not built to...

For the first time in Harvard University’s history, the majority of students accepted into the incoming freshman class are not white, a milestone for an institution that prides itself on educating future presidents, CEOs, and world leaders. But Harvard’s push to broaden the diversity of its student ranks comes as the Trump administration intensifies its focus on affirmative action policies and suggests it will investigate how colleges shape the racial makeup of their campuses. The US Justice Department is preparing to redirect resources from its civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to...

San Jose State University is taking no chances with free-thinking freshmen and transfer students, and has mandated microaggression and diversity training with a minimum $250 price tag in its Frosh Orientation. The training is a one-day orientation on campus and focuses on videos depicting skits of microaggressions performed by student actors and encompasses areas such as culture, ethnicity, gender, race, religion and sexual orientation. No portion of the fee is optional and students must participate in every aspect of the day’s programming to be eligible to register for fall classes.