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"I worry that in a lot of cases students who are homeschooled are not getting the kind of the breadth of instruction experience they would get in school, they're also not getting the opportunity to build relationships with peers unless their parents are very intentional about it," said Education Secretary John B. King Jr. "And they're often not getting those relationships with teachers and mentors other than their parents. I do worry whether home school students are getting the range of opportunities we hope for for all kids," he said slamming the system.

The unpopularity of the Common Core educational standards is not causing its proponents to rethink it but to rebrand it. "In 2010, every state but Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia adopted Common Core State Standards, a set of requirements for what elementary and secondary school children should know in each grade in math and English language arts," Joy Pullmann writes in the second edition of Common Core: A Bad Choice for America, published by the Heartland Institute. "Five years later, three in five Americans said they don’t know if Common Core is in their local schools." "While 25 states have...

A 24-year-old former substitute teacher from Iowa who was arrested in July after admitting to a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old student says he had swept her off her feet with love notes scribbled on Post-Its. Mary Beth Haglin, of Cedar Rapids, has been charged with misdemeanor sexual exploitation by a school employee in connection to her six-month tryst with a male student at Washington High School. On Wednesday, Haglin pleaded not guilty to the charge in writing, and her trial date has been set for November 14. If convicted, she could face up to two years in prison and...

Thank goodness for Michigan’s fifth-graders. The results are in for statewide student tests administered last spring, and fifth-graders provided the highlight: More than half made a score deemed ‘proficient’ on one of the four subject-area tests administered. But not by much. Specifically, 50.6 percent of fifth-graders scored ‘proficient’ or better in English, saving the state from having the majority of every grouping of grade and subject branded as less than proficient in English, math, science and social studies. The fifth-graders’ math test was one of 18 grade and subject groupings covering students from third to 11th grade in those four...

When music class begins this week at Toronto’s Donwood Park elementary school, Mohammad Nouman Dasu will send a family member to collect his three young children. They will go home for an hour rather than sing and play instruments – a mandatory part of the Ontario curriculum he believes violates his Muslim faith. The Scarborough school and the Toronto District School Board originally had offered an accommodation – suggesting students could just clap their hands in place of playing instruments or listen to acapella versions of O Canada – but not a full exemption from the class. After a bitter...

Nearly a third of four-year-olds are too unfit to start school: Sedentary lifestyles means some youngsters cannot walk in a straight line Spending too long in car seats and playing on iPads affects basic skills Many youngsters have trouble with balance and co-ordination as result Some cannot crawl on hands and knees or throw bean bags through hoops This is affecting their ability to learn in class say researchers Too many four-year-olds are not ‘physically ready’ to start school amid increasingly sedentary lifestyles and over-reliance on screens, a new study has revealed. They are struggling with basic balance and co-ordination...

A four-year-old child in NSW is transitioning their gender before their first day of preschool as new data shows a steep climb in the number of children with gender dysphoria. The child is the youngest of a number across the state currently transitioning, while at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital 250 children, some as young as three, have been referred for assistance by the gender dysphoria unit, the Daily Telegraph reports. Where the child is from or their birth sex has not been revealed. "We have a number of ­students who are going through gender transition in our schools, with the...

FULL Title: "SC high school bans American flags at football game, feared it could be used to ‘taunt or be unsportsmanlike’" TRAVELERS REST, S.C. – School officials’ decision to ban students from displaying the American Flag at a recent football game is creating controversy in a South Carolina school district. On Friday, Travelers Rest High School principal Lou Lavely banned students from carrying American flags into a football game against Berega High School, because a lot of students at Berega are Hispanic. Lavely contends the American flag could have been used to taunt those students, WNCN reports. “Some events at...

A recent study by an Oklahoma think tank found that teachers’ salaries in Michigan are the highest in the nation when adjusted for the lower cost of living here. When salaries are adjusted to reflect the difference between prices here and the national average, Michigan teachers on average earned the equivalent of $69,888 in the 2015-16 school year. The study was authored by Byron Schlomach of the Oklahoma-based 1889 Institute, a free-market think tank. Schlomach said in an email he used salary data from a National Education Association survey. Michigan’s average teacher salary when unadjusted is $63,878, ranking 10th nationally....

Portland Public Schools officials are rethinking a district ban on rap music on buses after allegations of racism. The district had banished hip-hop from its buses, deeming the genre "inappropriate." Teri Brady, senior director of transportation at Portland Public Schools, sent a directive to bus drivers in March forbidding "religious, rap music, or talk show programs." The memo included a list of acceptable stations, broken down into three genres: pop, country and jazz. Parent Colleen Ryan-Onken obtained a copy and it circulated in August among outraged parents, prompting the district to walk back the directive in statements released Wednesday.

An official for the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) told a U.S. Department of Education bullying summit on Friday that 15.3 percent of high school students in DCPS identify as either gay, lesbian, bisexual or “questioning” — i.e. not sure of their sexuality. DCPS Health and Wellness Director Diana Bruce cited statistics from a 2012 survey which also found that “6.2% of D.C. middle school youth identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual” and “8.9% of D.C. middle school youth identify as questioning or not sure” regarding their sexual identity. …

This belongs in the you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff category: In Florida (you knew it was Florida, didn’t you?), some third-graders — including honor students — are being forced to retake third grade because their parents decided to opt them out of the state’s mandated standardized reading test this past spring. An undetermined number of third-graders who refused to take the Florida Standards Assessment in reading have been barred from moving to fourth grade in some counties. A lawsuit filed by parents against state education officials as well as school boards in seven Florida counties says counties are interpreting the state’s third-grade retention law...

Just when we thought the right to homeschool had been firmly established in California, all of our members in the San Benito High School District received a letter saying, "[U]nder California Law, a home school is not a private school, nor is it a lawful alternative to public school … ." The private school exemption has been used by California homeschoolers since the revival of the movement in the late ’70s. Many school districts and the California Department of Education took the same position that the San Benito High School is now taking. But despite years of official opposition in...

What can we do to reform Fairfax County Public Schools? There is certainly a lot to do! This is a list of 11 reforms which would decimate the entrenched FCPS Mafia, promote greater parent involvement, and protect Constitutional principles. --- All readers of ResistanceMedia are IMPLORED to contact the FCPS school board and send them a link to this article with a message about how these reforms are needed. A referendum on these reforms is needed, and we will be considering a campaign to put some of these reforms on the ballot in an upcoming referendum. By clicking this link,...

"On the last day of school, Principal Darlene Cameron of Star Academy-PS 63 in the East Village gave her small faculty a chart defining racist and non-racist institutions and asked them to think about where their school fits in. A non-racist institution, among other things, is conscious of and aims to wipe out a culture of “white power,” “white privilege” and “inherent white advantage.” “We fit into the category of white power and privilege!” a white teacher at the K-5 school told her colleagues." "The concept that whites enjoy everyday benefits simply because of their skin color has become the...

If the Chicago social-studies teacher Gregory Michie waits for a textbook to teach his students about the Black Lives Matter movement, the first seventh-graders to hear the lesson won’t be born for another seven years. Despite the historical implications of that movement, bureaucratic timelines all but quash any possibility that students might learn about today’s events from an actual history textbook in the near future. According to Anthony Pellegrino, an assistant professor of education at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, many school districts receive new books on a seven-year cycle. However, in some states, schools don’t receive new books for 10...

Royce Mann, an eighth grader from Atlanta, Ga., took the Internet by surprise with his poem called, “white boy privilege” that he wrote and recited at his school’s poetry slam contest in May. In the video recently posted by his mother on YouTube, 14-year-old Mann expresses his thoughts on race, gender and equality issues. He began the poem by saying how grateful he was to have been born a white male and said that he loved his “white boy privilege.” “Dear women, I’m sorry, dear black people, I’m sorry… Dear everyone who isn’t a middle or upper class white boy,...

A Texas teenager faces a felony forgery charge all because the $10 bill he found on the floor of his high school came up as fake cash on the lunch lady’s counterfeit testing pen when he used it to pay for a ham sandwich and chips. ...the lunch lady turned the $10 bill over to a campus police officer, who later wanted a statement from the teen. The officer called his mother and she said “not without me present,” according to Hunter. The family also received a “Consent to Deferred Prosecution” form to sign, which essentially places a minor into...

During an end-of-the-year class party at a New Jersey elementary school, a 9-year-old boy said something about brownies and was subsequently questioned by a police officer who was called by the school to investigate an incident of racism. It was another student that accused the boy of saying something "racist," but the boy's mother said he was talking about "snacks, not skin color," according to Philly.com. "He said they were talking about brownies. Who exactly did he offend?" the mother, Stacy dos Santos, asked incredulously. When the boy's father was contacted later in the day, he was informed that the...

In the English language, a certain type of baked chocolate dessert is known as a "brownie." This is very problematic, of course, because a lot of people have brown skin. If you say the word "brownie" out loud, you might hurt the feelings of a person with brown skin. And that's bad. That's why we have the police. On June 16, police were called to an unlikely scene: an end-of-the-year class party at the William P. Tatem Elementary School in Collingswood. A third grader had made a comment about the brownies being served to the class. After another student exclaimed...

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on Tuesday proposed overhauling the state’s education funding formula to provide all public school districts with a flat rate of $6,599 per student. Calling it his “Fairness Formula” in policy statements on Tuesday, Christie said aid for special needs students would continue even with any potential formula change. Schools are funded through property taxes, which in New Jersey are some of the highest in the nation because of the state’s “unaffordable and broken school funding formula propped up by special interests and misguided Supreme Court precedent,” Christie said in a statement. …

...the University of Miami received a donation in late April from a wealthy atheist to endow what it says is the nation’s first academic chair “for the study of atheism, humanism and secular ethics.” ...established after years of discussion with a $2.2 million donation from Louis Appignani, a retired businessman and former president and chairman of the modeling school Barbizon... ....“I’m trying to eliminate discrimination against atheists,” said Appignani, 83, a Florida resident. “So this is a step in that direction, to make atheism legitimate.” ....It took some persuading for the University of Miami to agree to create a chair...

Anti-Semitic incidents in New England are up more than 100% this year, according to numbers released this week by the Anti-Defamation League. In 2015, an average of five such incidents occurred each month, while so far this year, there have been over 10 each month. The increase is “fueled by vandalism, harassment, and other acts at schools and colleges,” reports the Boston Globe. “Clearly, people are acting out on some long-held stereotypes and hatred toward Jews,” said Robert Trestan, director of the New England Regional Office of the ADL, “and it’s designed to send a message of intimidation. We’re increasingly...

The Philadelphia School District will add two Muslim holidays to its calendar and the city will create a task force to study doing the same for the city’s calendar, officials announced Tuesday. “Philadelphia’s history is based on being a place where religious freedom is part of its founding ethos,” Mayor Kenney said at a news conference in City Hall. “Our city was built on the idea that while we may be different in nationality and ethnicity, the city welcomes all to worship and practice the faiths of our culture or our choosing.” The two holidays are Eid al-Fitr, celebrated after...

A veteran English teacher at Flushing HS says she was so terrified when a student charged at her and threatened to beat her with a heavy cast on his arm that she blurted out in self-defense, “If you hit me, I’ll kill you.”

Urban school districts from Los Angeles to Philadelphia are experiencing declining enrollment in traditional public schools as more parents enroll their children in charters, depleting millions in per-pupil funding from district budgets. In states experiencing population growth, such as Arizona, charter schools help relieve overcrowding. But for districts that are struggling financially, the student flight is costly. …

Reality has seemingly escaped us all. On Tuesday, The New York Times published a bizarre piece intent on mainstreaming transgenderism. A 16-year-old “boy,” AJ Jackson, informs us all about “his” period, “his” plight with tampons and bathrooms. “There were practical issues, When he had his period, he wondered if he should revert to the girls’ bathroom, because there was no place to throw away his used tampons,” writes Anemona Hatocollis of the Times, describing Jackson’s period struggles. “But he had started feeling like an intruder in the girls’ bathroom, and the single bathrooms were so far out of the way...

Portland public schools ban textbooks that cast doubt on climate change | Fox News The Portland Public Schools board voted last week to ban any materials that cast doubt on climate change, the Portland Tribune reported. According to the resolution passed May 17, the school district must remove any textbooks and other materials that suggest climate change is not occurring or that says human beings are not responsible for it. “A lot of the text materials are kind of thick with the language of doubt, and obviously the science says otherwise,” said Bill Bigelow, a former Portland public school teacher...

HENRY COUNTY, Ga. -- A vicious attack in an elementary school bathroom sends a 6-year-old to the emergency room, and her parents tell police it was a fifth grade girl who attacked her. The girl was at home recovering Thursday night, but her mother says she knows exactly who attacked her 1st grade daughter. She warned the school that the fifth grader was a danger last week. Cheryl Tackett says she is trying to comfort her 6-year-old daughter Lanira, but she can hardly get the words out herself. “I just started crying,” she said. “I couldn’t do anything but cry.”

The Obama administration is planning to issue a sweeping decree telling every public school district in the country to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity, the New York Times reported on Thursday. The letter to school districts that will go out on Friday describing what they should do to ensure that none of their students are discriminated against is signed by officials of the Justice Department and Education Department, according to the Times.

Barack Obama's transgender regime has officially carried its demands for your child's compliance with sexual deviancy to the level of an imperial directive: Public schools must permit transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity, according to an Obama administration directive issued amid a court fight between the federal government and North Carolina. The guidance from leaders at the departments of Education and Justice says public schools are obligated to treat their transgender students in a way that matches their gender identity, even if their education records or identity documents indicate a different sex. The...

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, doesn’t talk all that much about education issues, but when he does, it is usually about the Common Core, rankings and spending. And usually he is wrong, wrong and wrong. In one Trump ad this year, he hit all three in just a few sentences: “I’m a tremendous believer in education. But education has to be at a local level. We cannot have the bureaucrats in Washington telling you how to manage your child’s education. So Common Core is a total disaster. We can’t let it continue. We are rated 28th in the...

Global warming alarmists who claim that the science is settled on climate change are partially right: Public schools have reached a verdict on it. "A nationwide survey of 1,500 U.S. middle and high school science teachers, conducted by the National Center for Science Education and published in the February 12 issue of Science, found half of the teachers who discuss climate change in the classroom ignore evidence of the role of natural factors," H. Sterling Burnett writes in School Reform News. "The survey found approximately 70 percent of middle school and 87 percent of high school science teachers discuss global...

I-Team: French teacher at HISD school doesn't speak French HOUSTON - How do you teach a French class, if you don’t even speak French? The I-Team discovered that’s exactly what is happening at the Houston Independent School District’s Energy Institute High School in the 1800 block of Sampson Street. Sharonda White’s son Nathanial is a junior at the school. "I thought it was a joke, I couldn't believe this was happening,” White said. We asked her son about his classroom experience. I-Team: “Does your teacher speak French?” Nathanial White: “No sir.” I-Team: “Have you ever heard him speak a word...

Illinois' public school districts are roughly $20 billion in debt, a staggering figure fueled in part by decades of special deals in Springfield that have given districts exemptions so they can keep borrowing beyond limits set by law. Today, that debt exceeds long-term school borrowing in most other states. It equates to about $10,000 for every Pre-K to 12th-grade public school student in Illinois... All the borrowing is a drain on taxpayers who have to repay the debt, as well as school budgets that must steer billions of dollars annually to principal and interest payments — money that could be...

Parents of fourth-graders at an Oregon elementary school were 'furious' to discover that their children - some as young as nine - had read an explicit sex education book featuring cartoons of sex acts and masturbation, Fox 12 Oregon reported Thursday. In a letter to parents, Hudson Park Elementary School admitted that copies of 'It's Perfectly Normal,' a guide to sexual health aimed at children ten and up, were passed around to students. . . . The book is aimed at children aged 10 and up, and features cartoon depictions of male and female teens and adults. Acts featured in...

A recent blockbuster expose on the Pakistani public school system has some eye-opening news for the non-Muslim world. In the wake of the Easter bombings in Lahore, Pakistan the people of the world complained that the Pakistani government wasn’t doing enough to push back against the Muslim extremists in their country. In response, the government has promised to crack down on militant terrorism that has entrenched itself in certain corners of their country. Here’s the problem with these promises… the “extremism” isn’t just found with the radical terrorists. In Pakistan, radical Muslim “extremism” isn’t actually that extreme. In fact, it’s...

If you’re glued to the trashy, monotonous 2016 horserace, just like the presidential candidates still insisting they will end Common Core you will have missed that the cornerstone of President Obama’s education policy has already become a tombstone. That’s right: Common Core is dead. The big postmortems will roll out in a year or two, but it’s already clear this education monstrosity is eking out its last gasps. Not that many normal people paid much attention to the biggest shift in U.S. education for decades, to hear Buzzfeed tell it in the recent video below. To recap, Common Core is...

Deviancy had indeed been defined down—way down. The most troubling thing to me, however, was that it hadn’t yet bottomed out. Though I never heard of these gay sexual acts being taught in Maine, they were in Massachusetts. “Fisting” was not only described, it was actually recommended to ninth graders at a special conference workshop paid for, in part, with state funds and delivered by three Massachusetts state employees. It was, of course, ignored or played down by the mainstream media. The keynote speaker at the conference, Kevin Jennings, later became President Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar,” to deal with bullying.

News channel KJCT8 in Colorado is reporting that atheist and satanic groups are going to be circulating atheist, secular and satanic literature to middle and high school students in Delta County, Colorado. In December, Gideons made Bibles available for students at public schools in Delta County. That led to a student complaint, and led to secular groups such as the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Western Colorado Atheists and Freethinkers and the Satanic Temple to apply for similar distribution. …

GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump believes education is one the most essential functions of the U.S. government. It’s right up there with security and providing health care for the nation, he told a crowd in Wisconsin Tuesday night. Yet Trump has called for the elimination of the Department of Education, meaning he would destroy the agency responsible for doing what he claims is so important for the country. On Tuesday, Trump appeared at a CNN town hall in Milwaukee, a week before the state’s primary election. An attendee asked what he views as the “top three functions of the United...

(CNN) — Thirteen current or former principals with the Detroit Public Schools were charged with bribery Tuesday in an alleged kickback scheme, which couldn't have come at a worse time for the troubled school district.

Minnesota public schools encourage students to pray, but only if they’re Muslim Well this is just plain hypocritical: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/how-one-minnesota-school-district-handles-a-rising-immigrant-population/How one Minnesota school district handles a rising immigrant populationMarch 23, 2016In the district’s middle and high schools, Muslim students have access to private rooms with prayer rugs for the five daily prayers.

Michigan’s Board of Education has drafted a set of guidelines that asks schools to allow students to make their own decisions regarding which bathrooms they use, the gender by which they want to be identified, and the names by which they’d like to be called. The guidelines, which seem to explicitly remove parents and doctors from the decision-making process, have been signed by State Superintendent Brian Whiston.

The nation is spending about $46 billion less than what it needs to keep up its school buildings, according to a report Wednesday that pointed out disparities in state support for infrastructure. The report by a trio of school facilities groups said the country needs to keep better track of the state of its schools and find new funding sources for their upkeep so that local districts that now bear the heaviest funding burdens don’t have to divert money from instruction. “U.S. public school infrastructure is funded through a system that is inequitably affecting our nation’s students and this has...

Editor's note: You can watch the documentary at the bottom of this article. GILBERT, Arizona, March 23, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) -- If you’re a parent who’s been told that your child’s sex-ed program at school is comprehensive, evidenced-based, age-appropriate, and that it promotes healthy relationships, then you, and every other parent who’s been sold the same message, have essentially been lied to. That is, according to a powerful new documentary that’s exposing what producers say is a “deceptive agenda� behind sex-ed programs being pushed not only in schools across the globe, but also by multiple United Nations entities and government bodies. ...

BOSTON, March 14, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) - A bill that would allow adult biological males to shower or change alongside young girls has earned the endorsement of two prominent teachers unions in Massachusetts. State legislators are considering a bill that would specifically open all public restrooms, shower facilities, and locker rooms to transgender people. "An Act Relative to Gender Identity and Non-Discrimination" (H.B. 1577) would add "gender identity" to the state's protected classes able to access all public facilities, such as private changing areas. Lawmakers specifically exempted "lawfully sex-segregated facilities" when it passed a 2011 ordinance granting transgender people protected legal...

Chcago Public Schools officials told principals on Wednesday that the district is "short of the necessary cash for the remainder of the school year" partly because of a pension payment of nearly $700 million due this summer. ... Last month, principals had to absorb $26 million in midyear budget cuts to district-operated schools. Principals tapped internal accounts, cut planned technology and textbook purchases and didn't fill vacant positions to avert layoffs. On Wednesday, principals were told to hold off on $45 million budgeted for "non-personnel" expenses. The district said it wants to save another $10 million through a limit on...

Police are investigating a North Texas mother’s claim that two 8-year-old boys sexually assaulted her 8-year-old son during a school bus ride to an elementary school on the northwest side of Fort Worth. On Fri., Feb. 19, NBC DFW reported that the unidentified parent expressed frustration that little has been done by the school or local authorities following the alleged incident. Although the date of the purported sexual attack remains unclear, the mother said the other two boys pulled down her son’s pants, performed a sexual act, then beat up her son, a first grade student at Northbrook Elementary in...

In a recent story about political polarization, The Washington Post quoted a Michigan teacher who claimed the Mackinac Center for Public Policy is out to destroy public education because it has published the salaries of particular teachers. Erin Mastin, a teacher with Boyne City Public Schools, was portrayed in the article as someone concerned about divisiveness, and who believes the political system is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful. From the article: She could feel the influence of money in politics in her classroom, she said. In recent months, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a conservative Michigan-based...