Free Republic

U.S. teachers are nowhere near as diverse as their students. Almost half the students attending public schools are minorities, yet fewer than 1 in 5 of their teachers is nonwhite. New studies from the Center for American Progress and the National Education Association are calling attention to this “diversity gap” at elementary and secondary schools in the United States. The groups want more to be done to help teachers more accurately mirror the students in their classrooms. …

A retired school teacher with 30-plus years of service says he has to choose between food or medicine due to a law repealing tax exemptions for some pensions. But James Pearson, a 66-year-old retired teacher from Milford High School with 33 years of service, is likely collecting enough compensation from a pension and Social Security alone to put him above the average state income. He is also eligible for both Medicare and the state’s retiree health insurance, which should pay for most of the costs for medicine. Pearson has become the face of protesters complaining about the pension tax, being...

...The National Education Association (NEA), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), and National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), among other organizations were instrumental in bringing together teachers to provide specific, constructive feedback on the standards.

When you think about bullying in public schools, it's generally in the context of a bigger kid picking on a smaller kid.  According to Susan Kimball, a kindergarten teacher of 20 years in the Sikeston Public School District, it's administrators and fellow teachers bullying and intimidating her, all because she opposes Common Core. At yesterday's Senate Education Committee hearing, Kimball testified she has suffered from bullying and intimidation since she began speaking out about the controversial standards. [caption id="attachment_25492" align="aligncenter" width="639"] "You have no idea what I have been through over the past six weeks because of my stand." -...

When a Democratic president can’t count on full-throated support from the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teacher’s union, something may be very wrong with his education reforms. “At the 2013 NEA convention in Atlanta, union leadership promoted Common Core standards,” The Education Reporter reported. “Delegates introduced from the floor — but failed to pass — two measures that condemned Obama’s education policies outright and were critical of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan; both measures called on Obama to fire Duncan.” “Teachers’ representatives expressed dissatisfaction with Common Core (CC) at the 2013 convention and they have continued to do so,...

Democrats and many in the media routinely complain about money spent in politics, and they regularly lash out at conservatives and big business. Turns out, unions are the top spenders in politics. Twelve of the top 20 political donors from 1989 to 2014 have been unions, which overwhelmingly support Democratic causes, according to an analysis done by OpenSecrets.org's Center for Responsive Politics. Seven of the top 10 donors overall give almost exclusively to politicians or groups on the left. ActBlue, a political action committee that raises money for Democrats and progressive causes and features Michigan Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mark Schauer...

If anyone wanted to pick a time and place where the political left's avowed concern for minorities was definitively exposed as a fraud, it would be now — and the place would be New York City, where far left Mayor Bill de Blasio has launched an attack on charter schools, cutting their funding, among other things. These schools have given thousands of low income minority children their only shot at a decent education, which often means their only shot at a decent life. Last year 82 percent of the students at a charter school called Success Academy passed city-wide mathematics...

Unions are finding sneaky ways to exact dues — but workers are fighting back. Two Michigan teachers will finally be allowed to end their union membership in the Michigan Education Association and will be refunded any dues they paid during this school year, according to a settlement agreement signed this week. William “Ray” Arthur, a teacher and wrestling coach at Petoskey Senior High School, and Miriam Chanski, a Coopersville kindergarten teacher, tried to quit the teachers’ union after Michigan adopted legislation to become the 24th right-to-work state in the U.S. Both Arthur and Chanski wrote letters informing the MEA that...

Any visitor to North Carolina and California will know that the two states have their differences. The former is a typically “red state”; California is staunchly “blue.” Each has certain geographic, ethnic and cultural peculiarities, different demographic makeup, family income levels, and more. Yet perhaps the most surprising divide, one many wouldn’t expect, is that North Carolina appears to be a hotbed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD—especially when compared to California. A child who lived in North Carolina instead of California in 2007, according to U.S. academics Stephen Hinshaw and Richard Scheffler, was 2½ times more likely to...

Now that Karen Willmus can get health insurance through Obamacare, she plans to quit teaching 9th grade English at the end of the school year. The 51-year-old found policies on the Colorado state exchange for about $300 a month. That's less than what she's paying now for employer-sponsored coverage and less than half what she paid on the individual market in 2007.

HOUSTON, TX – The nation’s leading labor union will plan to spend $300 million in 2014 trying to unseat Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and four other Republican Governors. More: AFL-CIO to Target Walker, Other Governors People’s World reported that the AFL-CIO announced on Thursday morning during a press conference in Houston that they would spend money trying to unseat Governor Walker. Other Governors that the labor organization is targeting are John Kasich (R-Ohio), Tom Corbett (R-Pennsylvania), Rick Snyder (R-Michigan), and Rick Scott (R-Florida). The American Federation of Teachers backed the AFL-CIO’s plan. President Randi Weingarten said: “In many ways it...

APALACHIN, N.Y. — The State University of New York's Broome Community College ... Warren had served as chairman of the community college's Criminal Justice and Homeland Security program. He also was a former police officer and New York state-certified criminal investigator.

7 elementary school staff hire lawyers Fallsburg police investigating the reported discovery of heroin and drug paraphernalia in a faculty bathroom at Benjamin Cosor Elementary School say the refusal by a group of teachers to cooperate is hampering their probe. No one has been charged, but six teachers and an aide were identified as having used the men's room before a school staff member reportedly found a heroin baggie on Feb. 11. Just before the winter break in December, heroin and needles were reportedly found in the same bathroom. Each of the seven faculty members initially agreed to give urine...

Fairfax County Public Schools has discovered the administration mistakenly hired seven employees who were convicted felons, including a high school teacher who was once part of an international drug ring. School officials uncovered the mistake during a comprehensive search of hiring records that began in 2012 after a Madison High School special education teacher inquired if her previous conviction for helping to smuggle heroin into the United States would stall her promotion. That teacher, Deilia Butler, had joined Fairfax schools in 2006. She had admitted truthfully that she was a convicted felon on her paper application. So did the other...

Two of the most powerful unions in the country have voiced objections to a bill that would provide better background checks for teachers, Campbell Brown writes in a Thursday Wall Street Journal column. After the Government Accountability Office found “hundreds of potential cases of registered sex offenders working in schools” across the United States in 2010, the House passed a bill that would streamline the vetting process and close inconsistencies across state lines. The bill is a common sense measure, according to Campbell, yet powerful teachers unions are opposed to the new standards. Anyone with violent or sexual convictions against...

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...