Free Republic

RICHMOND — The arrest of a middle school teacher on suspicion of child sexual abuse this week has raised questions about the West Contra Costa Unified School District's hiring practices, because the teacher was hired while police were investigating him. Ron Guinto, 32, of Vallejo, was arrested about 7:45 a.m. Wednesday in the parking lot of Mira Vista Elementary School. The seventh-grade English and science teacher is expected to be charged with 11 counts of lewd acts on a child under 14 years old, two counts of forced oral copulation and one count of assault with intent to commit sodomy,...

The single most important aspect of education is reading.   If children are not reading, their entire education comes to a halt. That’s what has happened in millions of lives.  All the statistics for many decades reveal a curious surprise: our public schools don’t actually know how to teach reading or, more likely, they pretend not to know.  This is a bizarre scandal, especially given that children have been learning to read for thousands of years, and 100 years ago this country was thought to be moving toward universal literacy.   An odd thing happened circa 1931. The Education Establishment pushed look-say (or...

When people speak of a legacy, they usually mean something other than what the late economist Milton Friedman and his wife, Rose, left behind, namely the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice (edchoice.org). The foundation has just released a small book entitled "The ABC's of School Choice: The comprehensive guide to every private school choice program in America." The Friedman philosophy can be summed up in two sentences, which are posted on their web page: "School choice gives parents the freedom to choose their children's education, while encouraging healthy competition among schools to better serve families' needs. School choice lets parents...

School students should be given a “European Union education” in the classroom to tackle “ignorance” and growing public Euro-skepticism, according to an election manifesto signed by Angela Merkel and eight other of Europe's leaders. The European People’s Party (EPP), the EU’s biggest political grouping, is convinced such a program would improve the public image of Brussels, which has never been lower. Its manifesto for May’s European elections calls for the introduction of “EU education in schools across Europe in order to prepare the next generation for future challenges and to nurture a European approach”. […] Rather than scaling back the...

Let’s put the Common Core to the test. Specifically, let’s look at a pilot standardized examination created by Smarter Balanced, one of the two testing consortia formed to create exams aligned to the Common Core, the educational regimen that prevails in forty-five states in the nation. We shall leave aside the questions of why everyone has been so quiet about what these tests will look like and whether states outsourcing testing to unaccountable agencies that will in turn dictate the curricula of the schools constitutes a gross violation of the principle of local control. For now we shall simply try...

School officials at a public elementary school in Chicago are ordering teachers to sign students up for “designated restroom times” when entire, overcrowded classes of little kids must use the bathroom each day. The rationale for the draconian pee policy is to improve the school’s dreadful results on Common Core-related standardized tests. An anonymous teacher at the unidentified pre-K-8 forwarded a memo concerning the policy to Anthony Cody of Education Week. The memo reportedly went out to all faculty members at the school last week. “Welcome back and Happy New Year!” the memo reads. “In order to maximize student learning...

The Michigan Education Association is going to arbitration to try to force the West Branch-Rose City school district to pay a former teacher who was convicted of molesting a student a $10,000 severance buyout. The father of the victim is outraged, calling the union’s efforts on behalf of the sex criminal “ludicrous” and saying any school money due to the teacher should go to his son, who is “out there trying to make it in this world all messed up.” Neal Erickson, a former math teacher at Rose City Middle School, was convicted this summer of raping a young student...

Johnny Jones who attends school in Fawn Grove, Pa., was suspended from school for a day after he made an imaginary bow out of his pencil, pulled back an imaginary string and shot his imaginary arrow. That was back in October and now his parents are deciding on whether or not to bring legal action. Ten-year-old Johnny Jones was disciplined under the school's zero-tolerance weapons policies. Apparently he asked the teacher for a pencil and while he was walking back to his seat, a classmate held his folder up like an imaginary gun and "shot" at Johnny. Johnny played along...

On Wednesday, the Rutherford Institute announced it has come to the defense of a 10-year-old boy who was suspended under a school zero tolerance policy for shooting an imaginary "arrow" at a fellow classmate, using nothing more than his hands and his imagination. Additionally, Rutherford Institute says the student has been threatened with expulsion for his make-believe actions, which were a response to another student "shooting" an imaginary gun at him: "Johnny Jones, a fifth grader at South Eastern Middle School, was suspended for a day and threatened with expulsion under the school's weapons policy after playfully using his hands...

A new book, “The Art of Rube Goldberg,” has just been published. Even though Goldberg died four decades ago, his name and fame are as great as ever. His comic genius was to show simple things made immensely complicated. This image of a nuclear bomb to kill a fly, as it were, perfectly captures a lot of the evils in our modern world. Things are over-designed, over-legislated, over-regulated, over-dictated, over-everything. Except successful. Which brings us by perfect segue to our public schools. People are always saying we don’t spend enough money. Probably we’re spending twice as much as we need...

A Tennessee father of two found himself under arrest after attempting a school pickup on foot last week. The school policy is to wait in the car. “It’s ridiculous,” Jim Howe, a professional drag racer, tells Yahoo Shine, adding that he is “absolutely considering” legal action against the school.

<p>A Pennsylvania high school industrial arts teacher allegedly raped a 16-year-old student in a back room at the school and authorities have not ruled out the possibility of additional victims and charges in the case.</p> <p>Todd McCullough, a 28-year-old teacher at Saltsburg High School, was arraigned Thursday on rape and related charges in connection to the April 2012 incident that state police say occurred in a back room near the shop where McCullough taught. But police only learned of the alleged assault last week after another student told school officials she was hearing rumors that she was “next on the list” of McCullough’s potential targets, Trooper John Matchik said.</p>

D.C. High School Will Consider Banning Redskins Clothing The principal of Wilson High School in Washington, D.C. will discuss with the school's students a potential ban on Redskins clothing. “I do plan on having a discussion with my student council officers and representative to get their take on this idea,” Wilson High School principal Pete Cahall said, according to WJLA.com.

Every day our staff at EAGnews wrestles with the following questions: “What are our children being taught in school?” and “How is the information they’re learning going to change America?” Those are important questions to ask, particularly since government schools in more than 40 states will soon be teaching students a curriculum that’s aligned to the new Common Core national standards. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about Common Core. One of the biggest is, “What kind of ideas are leftists going to try and slip into your child’s classroom through the Common Core experiment?” There’s no...

Well, America: if you thought the people behind the Common Core couldn’t possibly be any more moronic or tone deaf, you were wrong. A Common Core worksheet handed out this year in a sixth-grade history class in Bryant, Ark. required students to ditch two amendments from the Bill of Rights, reports EAGnews.org. Students were also told to plug their rights eliminations by creating “a visual aid that could act as a clear representation of your proposal.” EAGnews says the assignment is part of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, an attempt by educrats to standardize various K-12 curricula across the...

The weapons-at-school hysteria generally peaks with a suspension. Not so for a high school student in Georgia who is facing felony charges because the contents of a tackle box in his car. 17-year-old Cody Chitwood was busted during a random sweep of the Lassiter High School parking lot by police and this student who has never been in trouble before now faces prosecution, large fines, prison time, and the loss of his plans to join the Air Force in the future due to a hysterical overreaction that has resulted in his arrest. Cody Chitwood, 17, is a senior at Lassiter...

“The schools [utilizing Common Core]… are organized in a highly centralized government-run system. They [Common Core courses] have the following characteristics in common: they are overwhelmingly secular in orientation; a common school is provided through at least grades seven or eight; little or no tuition charge is made; schools are mostly coeducational; the curricula are tightly prescribed, as are the textbooks...students are offered few electives…” Sound familiar? Although this sounds like Common Core, with the exception of the inserted text, it’s actually a description from “Common Features of Education System in Communist Nations.” Common Core is a top-down national curriculum...

A student at a high school in Anaheim Hills said administrators ordered her to change out of a T-shirt that promoted the National Rifle Association. Sophomore Haley Bullwinkle said when she wore her NRA shirt to Canyon High School last month, she landed in the principal’s office for violating the school’s dress code that forbids offensive, violent or divisive clothing. “They were treating me like I was a criminal,” she said. “I was not allowed to wear that at school because it promoted gun violence.” The shirt, which was a gift from Bullwinkle’s father when he became a card-carrying member...

A pretend game of cops and robbers landed a Florida elementary school boy with a very real suspension after he made a pretend gun with his thumb and index finger. The mother of 8-year-old Jordan Bennett said her son was only playing with his friend at Harmony Community School in St. Cloud. She fears his one-day suspension, which was handed down Friday, wrongly labels Jordan as a violent person. “There was nothing in his hand. He used his thumb and index finger,” Bonnie Bennett told WKMG-TV. “It was a game. He made no threatening advances or threats to harm anyone....

Yet another student has landed in trouble for having something that represents a gun, but isn’t actually anything like a real gun.This time, the student is 12-year-old Joseph Lyssikatos, a student in advanced math who had perfect attendance last year. The seventh-grader made the mistake of bringing a ridiculously small, silver keychain shaped like a gun to Alan Shawn Feinstein Middle School in Coventry, R.I, reports local NBC affiliate WJAR.The two-inch keychain fell out of Lyssikatos’s backpack while he was at school.After another kid picked it up and displayed it to other students, a teacher intervened and impounded the keychain.Apparently fearing that the...