Free Republic

<p>ATLANTA (AP) — Juwanna Guffie was sitting in her fifth-grade classroom taking a standardized test when, authorities say, the teacher came around offering information and asking the students to rewrite their answers. Juwanna rejected the help.</p> <p>"I don't want your answers, I want to take my own test," Juwanna told her teacher, according to Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard.</p>

"...The “Kids' Zone” of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) website, part of the Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, quotes communist leader Mao Zedong. The NCES is the“primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education in the U.S. and other nations.”..."

Shortly after I did my first TV special on education, "Stupid in America," hundreds of union teachers showed up outside my office to yell at me. They were angry because I said union rules were a big reason American kids don't learn. The union is a big reason kids don't like school and learn less. Union contracts limit flexibility, limit promotion of good teachers, waste money and make it hard for principals to fire even terrible teachers. But I was wrong to imply that the union is the biggest problem. In states with weak unions, K-12 schools stagnate, too. Education...

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War In the preceding “Know Thy Enemy” series - Prologue, I Education, II Media and III Celebrity Culture  - I’ve identified three sources which have exposed America to a very dangerous disease. The systemic cause is a virus that manifests itself as a...

The Obama campaign reinvented itself as SuperPAC Organizing for Action to push Obama’s agenda while trading donations for access to the guy in the White House. ($500,000 gets you in.) Organizing for Action’s headquarters is located inside the National Education Association building and it is unclear whether the organizing arm of the Chief Executive of the United States government is paying rent to the NEA or whether it’s getting the space as a contribution. OFA has refused to answer the question. The National Education Association is the largest labor union in the United States. It donated 18 million dollars last...

School Reform Commission Votes To Save Four Schools, 23 To CloseBy Chelsea KarnashPHILADELPHIA (CBS) – The School Reform Commission has voted to save four public schools from closure in Philadelphia. The four schools are Roosevelt Middle School, Taylor Elementary, Pierce Elementary and Robeson High School. Twenty-three other schools on the chopping block will close. "This was a difficult vote, but it focused on our goal to provide safe, high-quality seats while being fiscally responsible," said Pedro Ramos, Chairman of the School Reform Commission, in a release from the district. "By not taking action now, we would continue the deterioration...

A press release from gun-rights group Rocky Mountain Gun Owners announces that last night it gave a firearms class to 300 teachers in Colorado. There was no cost for admission. "Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, Colorado's largest grassroots gun rights organization, provided a free firearms training course for 300 Colorado teachers," the group says. "The 300 men and women braved snow and inclement weather to attend the four hour course focusing on firearms safety and handling, and Colorado gun laws." In a statement, the executive director of the group, Dudley Brown, says, "Colorado teachers have been beating down our doors to...

LOS ANGELES – Los Angeles police say a fourth-grade teacher has been arrested and charged with sexual abuse of 19 students and one adult. Police said in a statement that Robert Pimental, a teacher at George De La Torre Jr. Elementary in the Wilmington area, was arrested Wednesday. The 57-year-old left his position with the Los Angeles Unified School District at the onset of the investigation in March, after working for the district since 1974. Police say the abuse occurred at school. Pimental's bail has been set at $12 million. His arraignment date hasn't been set.

Let’s pretend that in the spring of 2012 Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, John Engler of the Business Roundtable, Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity, and Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association began to organize an assembly of right-leaning groups. Let’s pretend that in the months since there had been not one but two meetings where these luminaries joined with representatives of Christians United For Israel, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Tea Party Express, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and the American Petroleum Institute to discuss strategy and promote a series of “structural...

I've used 'bwahahahaha' several times recently in response to Liberal hypocrisy, so can't use it this time. Mother Jones says this "invite-only and off-the record" meeting is the kind that "conspiratorial conservative bloggers dream about." Those in the meeting pledged BIG MONEY to supposedly remove BIG MONEY from the politics they are trying so hard to dominate. The whole affair is known as the "Democracy Initiative." At the end of the day, many of the attendees closed with a pledge of money and staff resources to build a national, coordinated campaign around three goals: getting big money out of politics, expanding...

It’s not always fun and easy being a young Republican, let alone an enthusiastic Mitt Romney supporter. Whoa: The parents of the Charles Carroll High School student ridiculed and ordered by her teacher to remove a t-shirt supporting Mitt Romney sued the teacher and school district on Friday, claiming the act violated the girl's civil rights. Filed in federal court in Philadelphia, the suit says the district ignored Samantha Pawlucy's right to free speech, let other students threaten and harass her and subjected her "to emotional distress, simply because she exercised her First Amendment rights." Fernando Gallard, a spokesman for...

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten issued the following statement in reaction to National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre’s press conference today: After remaining silent for an entire week following the Newtown massacre, the NRA’s first comments were to call for more guns in our schools and our society. This is both irresponsible and dangerous. No matter how much money the NRA spends or propaganda it tries to spread, one thing is clear—the NRA is not serious about confronting the epidemic of gun violence in our nation. Schools must be safe sanctuaries, not armed fortresses. Anyone who...

Teachers’ Pensions Are a Half-Trillion ShortBy Kevin D. Williamson December 14, 2012 11:15 A.M. The habitual overpromising and underfunding of government-employee pensions is a fiscal powder keg in an economy full of sparks — and a new report estimates that teachers’ pensions alone are underfunded by nearly a half-trillion dollars. **SNIP** Note that the savings per teacher derived from the reform of eligibility rules runs $450,000, or more than two and a half times the average net worth of a retirement-age U.S. household. The real value of the average teacher’s retirement benefits in low-cost Wyoming is pushing the $1 million...

Terrorist turned teacher Bill Ayers appeared at a recent Big Apple gathering of “Change the Stakes,” an anti-testing group comprised mostly of teachers and parents. At least two employees of the New York City Board of Education were there as well. EAGnews obtained exclusive video of the event and will be releasing more clips in the coming days. But first we would like to present Ayers’ statement on the power of radical socialist educators in today’s public schools. It should send chills down every parent’s spine. SEE THE VIDEO HERE. Ayers explained to his audience that leftists wrongly put...

The chickens have come home to roost. The first generation of students swaddled in the insanity of the self-esteem movement have emerged on the scene as arrogant, self-absorbed twits with an exaggerated sense of entitlement and self-importance. In short, they’ve been spoiled. Potentially, they’ve been ruined. The idiocy of social engineering in the classroom is again bearing catastrophic results. Here’s how we know. A group of five university professors has evaluated more than 16,000 personality profiles of college students gathered over the last 24 years. What they’ve discovered is that today’s young people have dramatically different self-concepts than the two...

<p>ON the first day Douglass High School students walked the halls of their new building, the Oklahoma City School Board chairman at the time stood before students with a message of hope.</p> <p>“The investment they made in you is one we expect to pay off for years to come,” Cliff Hudson said that day in January 2006. He was referencing voter support of MAPS for Kids, which paid for the new Douglass and hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of capital improvements throughout the district.</p>

"The unbridled growth of crony unionism and government corruption will destroy the United States as we know it." This statement may strike many as sheer hyperbole. But its author, Mallory Factor, a political scientist at The Citadel, knows whereof he writes. His new book, "Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind" (New York: Center Street), makes a credible case, and a well-sourced one, that our country may be in the early stages of a ruinous dystopia, courtesy of public-sector unions. In pursuing their interests, argues the author, these labor organizations hold taxpaying citizens hostage to unsustainable wage/salary, pension,...

This Saturday, the Midwest Marxist Conference was held at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. The event was teeming with teachers who spoke about the new found bond between the radical socialists and their Teachers Union. The all-day event, which collected money to support Chicago Socialists and featured a communist bookstore, provided students on-campus along with the radical left community to plan the next phase in their activism. After the opening plenary, breakout sessions addressed more specific topics like the history of the Democratic party, education, and case studies in Russia. In these sessions, speakers continued to celebrate the use...

The Oakland Education Association might want to consider changing its name. The teachers union was one of six unions in California that refused last week to support their school district application for millions of dollars worth of federal funding offered by the Race to the Top program. Without union support, the districts could not qualify for the grants, which - if won - would have paid for high-quality math programs for fourth-through-eighth-grade students. Clearly the union placed the welfare of its membership above that of the students, so it's somewhat misleading that it calls itself an "education association." The big...

Education turned into a key issue in Wednesday’s first presidential debate between President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney. Their visions could not have been more divergent and stark.Romney called for putting federal education dollars into the “backpack” of the student, empowering parents to pick the educational option that best meets the needs of their child.Obama called for hiring 100,000 new teachers, a familiar refrain during his first term in office. A champion of government school bailouts, Obama emphasizes more teachers, as opposed to insisting on more effective teachers, and refuses to endorse the idea of freeing students to choose...