Free Republic

We hear a lot about bullying as if it’s as common as cheering at a football game. But who is really the Big Bully in our public schools? Who is throwing their weight around all the time? More specifically, who is insisting on the use of bad methods that never seem to work better this year than 10 years ago? Who is making lame excuses for poor performance so that nothing seems to get better? Who fills the air with propaganda and sophistry so that no one can think clearly about the issues facing us? Consider Whole Word. Rudolf Flesch...

Though I have written about the fact often, it bears repeating that the National Education Association and its affiliates are employers. Between them they hire thousands of workers to perform a variety of tasks. Virtually all of these workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements in which the teachers’ union is management – bosses, to put it plainly. Union employees use the contract to set salaries, benefits, working conditions and protections against arbitrary actions by union executives.About 500 people work at NEA national headquarters in Washington, DC. A handful of unions represent them, the largest being the National Education Association...

When Matt Knapp was hired as a teacher in the Saginaw Public School district 11 years ago, he said he was given paperwork to sign to be a union member. "Oh, no," Knapp said he told the district employee. "I'd rather not be in the union." To his surprise, he was told it was a condition of employment. That changed last year when Michigan became a right-to-work state, which allows union members the freedom to choose whether they want to pay dues or fees to the union. When that happened, Knapp said he approached his union about how to opt...

This past week the most prominent teachers' unions made it painfully obvious, they are on the side of the sex offender, rapist, and murderer who has been convicted. They are not now (and pretty much never have been) on the side of your child. They claim to represent the interests of teachers. Yet I am hard pressed to find an average teacher who feels like the unions have done pretty much anything for them. The average teacher just feels the pinch when the union bosses take the dues from their paychecks and threaten any who dare to "get out of...

You would think the bureaucrats who run government schools would want to focus on the basics, such as teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. After all, no nation spends more per pupil on education than the United States. And based on some Cato Institute research, I suspect the OECD estimate of about $15,000 per student is a low-ball estimate of the burden on American taxpayers. So what do we get for all this money? To be blunt, the results are miserable, with Americans ranking well below average compared to our overseas competitors. Here are some comparisons on both literacy and numeracy...

“Number sense,” courtesy of Common Core? We don’t know the source of that math problem, but based on what we’ve seen elsewhere, it has all the hallmarks of Common Core math. Now try your hand at this third-grade math problem, also reportedly from a Common Core lesson: Common Core: It’s For the Children™.

The school district in Little Rock, Ark. has announced plans for a dress code that will require teachers to wear underwear. Every single day. Female teachers will have to wear bras, too. An Aug. 29 letter from the Little Rock School District’s Office of the Superintendent to all employees explains that the dress code will officially go into effect in the fall of 2014. “Foundational garments shall be worn and not visible with respect to color, style, and/or fabric,” the letter reads. “No see-through or sheer clothing shall be allowed, and no skin shall be visible between pants/trousers, skirts, and...

Outgoing Ohio Education Association (OEA) President Patricia Frost-Brooks was paid a total of $998,949 from 2008-2012, the first five years of her six-year tenure. Thanks to union contracts that existed long before many current teachers were hired, the vast majority of OEA’s revenue comes from more than $450 per year in dues deducted automatically from tens of thousands of Ohio teachers’ paychecks. Based on OEA’s annual report to the U.S. Department of Labor, the union collected over $58 million in dues and “fair share” fees in 2012. While Frost-Brooks has benefited the most from OEA’s generous officer and executive salaries...

The Janczewski family is fighting the local school district in Rose, Michigan after it emerged that a male teacher molested their 8th grade son and then — unbelievably — six other teachers spoke out against the 15-30 year sentence the man received. “Neal has plead (sic) guilty for his one criminal offense but he is not a predator,” Harriet Coe reportedly wrote. “This was an isolated incident. He understands the severity of his action and is sincere in his desire to make amends…” John Janczewski, the father of the victim, spoke on the Glenn Beck radio program Monday about all...

This is a story that SCREAMS for attention. In Michigan a family has been, and continues to be, brutalized by a systemic rot within the school system. A rot that perpetrates, and unbelievably as it sounds, excuses CHILD RAPE – despite the community outrage. This just came onto our radar screen. However, a cursory review shows this storyline has a similar disposition to the Penn State, Sandusky scandal. The Janczewski’s son was brutally raped over a period exceeding three years (2006-2009) by his middle school math teacher, Neal Erickson. Years later, in 2012, an anonymous tipster alerted authorities to video...

L.A. Unified and seven other California school districts on Tuesday won relief from some strict and costly provisions of federal education law. Besides Los Angeles, the school districts are Long Beach, Santa Ana, Fresno, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco and Sanger.

The Wisconsin school teachers protests and attempts to recall Gov. Walker resulted in not only losing the battle but instead helped to further new laws across the US that allow teachers to drop union membership. Now the National Education Association (NEA) and other teacher unions are seeing a decline of those willing fill the coffers of these organization.

It was the kind of meeting that conspiratorial conservative bloggers dream about. A month after President Barack Obama won reelection, top brass from three dozen of the most powerful groups in liberal politics met at the headquarters of the National Education Association (NEA), a few blocks north of the White House. Brought together by the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Communication Workers of America (CWA), and the NAACP, the meeting was invite-only and off-the-record. Despite all the Democratic wins in November, a sense of outrage filled the room as labor officials, environmentalists, civil rights activists, immigration reformers, and a panoply of other...

Move over Trayvon Martin. Big Labor has a new favorite group of victims of social injustice - the teaching staff of Lewis County, West Virginia. Citizens have been complaining to school board members about the “way teachers dress,” according to school board president Paul Derico. As a result, the school board unanimously passed a dress code for teachers, banning blue jeans, faded jeans and shorts. Of course the teachers union is not taking this grave injustice lying down. Union officials have threatened to sue the board. "We're disappointed in the actions of the board. We don't believe it's in the...

Chicago Public Schools officials announced late Thursday that 2,113 teachers and other employees would be laid off Friday, largely due to a giant pension obligation increase that’s straining the system. “In fiscal year ‘14 we’re facing a historic deficit of $1 billion that is driven primarily by a $400 million increase in our annual teacher pension payments,” said CPS spokesman Becky Carroll. “Absent pension reform in Springfield, we have very few options available to us to close that gap, and that has resulted in bringing this crisis to the doorsteps of our schools.” Of those being laid off, 1,077 are...

<p>EFFERSON CITY, Mo. – Missouri schools will be encouraged to teach first-graders a gun safety course sponsored by the National Rifle Association as a result of legislation signed Friday by Gov. Jay Nixon.</p> <p>The new law stops short of requiring schools to teach the Eddie Eagle Gunsafe Program. But by putting it in state law, Missouri is providing one of the stronger state-sanctioned endorsements of the NRA-sponsored firearms safety course, which the group says is taught to about 1 million children annually.</p>

NEW YORK (MainStreet)—Secretary of Education Arne Duncan defended his Common Core standards during an address at the annual convention of the American Society of News Editors at the end of June. He admonished his critics. Secretary Duncan noted ...

Speaking to all 3,000 of the assembled "progressive activists" at this year's Netroots Nation conference, National Education Association vice president Lily Eskelsen Garcia boldly declared a "prophecy" about the eternal destiny of NRA and Second Amendment supporters, and of politicians and lobbyists working to promote gun rights: "I'm not an ordained minister; I'm not a theologian, but these guys are going to hell." Wow. Going to hell for supporting the Second Amendment? That type of radical thinking might explain the very high incidence of ridiculous cases involving over-zealous school officials misinterpreting and wrongly enforcing "zero-tolerance" rules--and doing so without exercising...

Educators boogie to 'When it's over you ain't gon need ya vibrator' (WARNING: This story includes a video and rap song lyrics of a sexually explicit nature and may offend some readers.) At its 2013 national convention in Atlanta last week, the National Education Association encouraged teachers to dance to a sexually explicit rap song that featured the “N”-word and declared, “When it’s over you ain’t gon need ya vibrator.” The NEA, a nationwide labor union that represents public school teachers, played the song titled, “Wobble,” by V.I.C. at its “Raise Your Hand” conference – which was publicized as an...

As if more evidence were needed about the tragedy of black education, Rachel Jeantel, a witness for the prosecution in the George Zimmerman murder trial, put a face on it for the nation to see. Some of that evidence unfolded when Zimmerman’s defense attorney asked 19-year-old Jeantel to read a letter she allegedly had written to Trayvon Martin’s mother. She responded that she doesn’t read cursive, and that’s in addition to her poor grammar, syntax and communication skills. Jeantel is a senior at Miami Norland Senior High School. How in the world did she manage to become a 12th-grader without...