Free Republic

<p>A Minnesota public high school was so committed to obeying its fire drill policy to the exact letter of the law that it forced a female student–dressed only in a swimsuit, and sopping wet–to stand outside in the freezing cold for ten minutes. As a result, she suffered frostbite.</p>

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Officials at a Northern California high school acted appropriately when they ordered students wearing American flag T-shirts to turn the garments inside out during the Mexican heritage celebration Cinco de Mayo, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the officials' concerns of racial violence outweighed students' freedom of expression rights. Administrators feared the American-flag shirts would enflame the passions of Latino students celebrating the Mexican holiday. Live Oak High School, in the San Jose suburb of Morgan Hill, had a history of problems between white and Latino students on...

Nevada education officials are making it easier for students to pass a math proficiency test that's required for graduation but has proved tough for high schoolers. State board of education officials announced Wednesday that they would implement a pass score of 242 on the 500-point math portion of the high school proficiency exam.

Days after a great-grandfather brought the wrong boy home from school, the boy's mother is calling administrators incompetent and demanded that the school take action. Angela Stone said her 5-year-old son was waiting for the bus at Sterling Community School on Friday when a man walked up to him and mistook the little boy for his own great-grandson and brought the boy to his house. Only then did he realize he had the wrong child. "Once the grand great-grandmother sees the boy and removes his hat, she realizes it's not her great-grandson and calls the school to say the great-grandfather...

FULL TITLE: Kindergarten teacher suspended after two of her students, aged five, are caught 'having sex' in school bathroom A kindergarten teacher has been suspended from her job after two of her students were found ‘having sex’ while naked in her classroom's bathroom. Kelly Mascio, who has been teaching for more than 15 years in Mullica Township, New Jersey, has been suspended with pay since the incident on September 30. According to a police report, Mascio found the two five-year-olds - a boy and girl – naked in her in-classroom bathroom. They told her they were ‘having sex.’ Scroll down...

This week's award for Biggest Common Core Jerk goes to Missouri GOP state legislator Mike Lair. Parents, teachers and administrators who object to the government education "standards" racket -- which usurps local control, impedes academic achievement and undermines family privacy -- have politicians on the defensive. The only thing these Fed Ed flacks and hacks can respond with is cowardly condescension. Lair, chairman of Missouri's House Appropriations Committee on Education, inserted an $8 budget line item to mock Common Core critics as tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists. Lair's item reads: "For two rolls of high-density aluminum to create headgear designed to...

The current textbooks being used in public schools today, that your children are reading, memorizing and being tested on, are inaccurate, revisionist, anti-American, racist, climate change propaganda based on fake science, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, pro-Islam, Marxist, globalist, pro-Socialism/Communism, pro-homosexuality, pro-abortion, and sexually explicit. Below is a list of examples and… who wrote the Pearson Publishing textbooks, that TN schools are now using. (Related story, as of Dec. 2013, Pearson Foundation fined millions for violating laws. Story here.) During August of 2013, scores of TN volunteers reviewed the 72 books on the State textbook list – 39% were declared acceptable for TN...

“I trudged the several blocks home from school, satchel in hand. It was a beautiful, golden afternoon, and I was ready for some adventure. I had a little homework, but that could wait until after supper. My parents knew that kids needed time to play and there was only so much daylight left. My best friend and I spent the afternoon exploring in the nearby woods and seeking out “evil” boys to annoy. We got home in time for supper and had plenty of time to finish our homework before bed. I don’t remember ever being stressed about tests and...

Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC and former Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville said that children belong to all of us. No, they donÂ’t. IÂ’ve seen what happens to children when they are owned by the state. State ownership of children leads to neglect. It cripples children, so donÂ’t do it. That is so glaringly obvious that I wonder why Harris-Perry and Reville say otherwise.IÂ’ve cleaned up the mess of state owned children. My son came from an Eastern European orphanage. Many children died there. He was examined by a foreign doctor before he was given an immigration visa. His medical...

CHICAGO, Il.— Criticizing Chicago school officials for being overzealous, misguided and incapable of distinguishing between an impotent toy and a dangerous weapon, The Rutherford Institute has come to the defense of an 11-year-old boy who was suspended from school after he voluntarily turned in a non-firing plastic toy gun that had been forgotten in his jacket pocket. Caden Cook, a sixth grader at Fredrick Funston Elementary School, was suspended for allegedly violating the school’s weapons policy against dangerous objects, in addition to being ordered to undergo counseling, and subjected to intimidation tactics, interrogation, and dire threats by school officials—all without...

Education savings accounts, or ESA’s, are like scholarships, where 90% of what the state would pay per student would be given to parents in a bank account-like program. The parents can use the additional funds to pay for private school tuition or other education expenses, which in Arizona amounted to about $3,000 per pupil. The program was initially started as one to help special needs students, but was expanded to adopted children, children of military families and students from failing public schools. The Heritage Foundation’s recent panel, “Education Savings Accounts: The Future of School Choice,” featured a panel discussion of...

Alert parents are becoming aware that sexual abuse of students by teachers is not just an occasional problem rather something that is happening in every state in America. However some administrators choose to ignore sexual misconduct and even when it is discovered perpetrators often go unpunished.

I know that dissatisfaction, or rather, deep, deep hatred, for public schools and universities is fairly commonplace around here and the need for massive overhaul in the educational system from kindergarden to the graduate level is one of the top priorities for many Freepers. And so there has been talk about the rise of online educational systems, to use as key examples Open Course Ware, EdX and the Kahn Academy. There has been talk of the extent to which they will replace teachers on other forums and so I figured it was worthy of a separate thread. This is also...

Another case of political correctness gone awry: a school in Brooklyn has decided to scrap its gifted and talented program after accusations that the program was not "diverse" enough. Citing a lack of diversity, PS 139 Principal Mary McDonald informed parents in a letter that the Students of Academic Rigor and two other in-house programs would no longer accept applications for incoming kindergartners. “Our Kindergarten classes will be heterogeneously grouped to reflect the diversity of our student body and the community we live in,” McDonald told parents in a letter posted on the photo-sharing site flickr and obtained by Ditmas...

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. - A Rutherford County elementary school teacher faces animal cruelty charges for shooting her neighbor's cat. Katherine Duke, a fourth grade teacher at Wilson Elementary School in Murfreesboro, admitted to police she shot the cat Thursday afternoon because she was tired of it using her children's sandbox as a litter box. The cat's owner rushed it to a veterinarian where the animal had to be euthanized. Duke, 41, was charged with animal cruelty and booked into the Rutherford County. She has since been released on a $2,250 bond and is scheduled to appear in court March 4.

As those in power continues to hang onto the 19th century model of education or accept Common Core indoctrination for their students, parents are moving toward becoming the “deciders” as they chose charter and private schools, homeschooling, and online programs, it is leaving thousands of empty school buildings all across America. According to a recent study among the cities with vacant school buildings are

In Governor Christie’s efforts to solve New Jersey’s education problems, yesterday he visited the Dudley Family School in Camden to discuss some of his plans for school programs in the Garden State. ......................................................... One of the big education announcements that he made in Camden is plans for an after-school dinner program for kids in six of the city’s schools. Research has shown that when kids are hungry, that affects not just their academic performance, but also their behavior.

And that's an improvement. According to a new report released by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a non-profit educational organization, 59 percent of campuses around the country severely restrict free speech. These campuses maintain restrictions on students through speech codes and other policies. Here are the main findings from the report: 59% (58.6%) of the 427 schools surveyed have speech codes that clearly and substantially restrict protected speech. (FIRE labels these “red light” schools.) Another 35.6% have “yellow light” policies that overregulate speech on campus. This represents a nearly 17% decline in red light schools from six years...

Y’know, when I was a wee lad growing up in West Texas, public schools weren’t all that bad. We started our day off with the pledge of allegiance, said prayers during football games, actually studied our nation’s founding docs, sang patriotic songs, and we celebrated the true meaning of both Christmas and Easter. In addition to that pro-American bliss, nearly everyone and their dog graduated. It’s true. Dogs were actually graduating from school back then. I know. Weird, eh? Indeed, out of our large graduating class there was only one drop out and that was my childhood buddy who left...

he Daily Caller’s worst teacher of the week is a no-brainer this time: it’s Thomas Washburn, an Arizona kindergarten teacher who was yelling at all the kids in his class. Then, when one little girl got scared and hid her face in her shirt, Washburn allegedly removed her shirt completely, leaving her naked from the waist up. The little girl is six years old, reports local television station KTVK. The incident occurred on Wednesday at Adams Elementary School in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa. Police say Washburn, 54, was hollering at the 25 kids in his class for some reason....

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...

Now they want to psych test your little children. What is New York going to do with that information?A bill introduced by State Senator Margaret Markey, A8186-2013, calls for an amendment to education law to mandate psychological screenings for students in public schools as part of the required health certificate.The law reads that a mandatory health certificate “shall also state that a psychological examination was performed and that the child is mentally fit to permit attendance at school.�That’s not all. The bill further reads: “Each such certificate shall also state the student’s body mass index (BMI) and weight status category.�What...

New Mexico lawmakers want to lower the bar for high school graduates. The state already has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country. The new plan establishes two kinds of diplomas—the current diploma of “excellence,” and a “general” one. …

A recent report on a school in Queens, N.Y., is so unbelievable, so terribly sad, that it has left many readers practically speechless. A public school in Far Rockaway Queens, N.Y., has been accused of operating under unacceptable conditions (image source Google Maps) From students reportedly being forced to attend class in vermin-infested “temporary classrooms” that “smell like urine” to Principal Marcella Sills, 48, apparently being a frequent no-show, public school (PS) 106 in Far Rockaway, N.Y., is a “school of no,” according to the New York Post.The students don’t get gym or art classes, one source said. Instead, many...

TRENTON, N.J. — New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will propose extending the public school calendar and lengthening the school day in a speech he hopes will help him rebound from an apparent political payback scheme that threatens to damage his second term and could cut short any ambitions to run for president. According to excerpts of his State of the State address obtained by The Associated Press, Christie, an early front-runner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, will make the case Tuesday that children who spend more time in school graduate better prepared academically. Details of the plan will be...

<p>ROSWELL, N.M. (AP) - Police say there has been a shooting at a Roswell middle school in New Mexico.</p>

Let me begin this post with a personal anecdote. True story: I was once arrested for participating in an abortion protest. It was a standard banana-republic arrest and charges were dropped because there was no basis for arresting us. But I got to spend a night in jail—a rather light version where all us pro-lifers got to sack out together. The room was quite familiar to me—the paint, the décor, the cinderblock wall underneath. It was the same as every American schoolroom I had ever been inside. Moving on to what might seem like a different subject: What a great...

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. – News reports of frosted pop tart guns! Paper guns! Bubble guns! Pointed finger guns! Bang, bang, you’re dead! OMG! sound the alarm These days, everything’s a federal offense, so to speak, and no institution is ratcheting up the war-of-words like public education. This winter, public school administrators in Thousand Oaks, CA attended a “safe school” and “threat assessment” workshop, a collaboration of the local Ventura County Department of Education and the Ventura County Sheriffs where the education code was redefined to include a 21st Century list of words, phrases and expressions that can hurt. Literally. Yes,...

A 2013 study on Michigan charter public schools done by Stanford University and a recently released study by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy showing that charter schools do a better job serving low-income students than public schools was disparaged by US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as “off target.” The studies indicated that charter schools enroll a larger proportion of students from low-income families (70%) than public schools (55%). On top of this, the Stanford study found that black and Hispanic students did significantly better in reading and math when in charter schools than their peers in conventional public...

A Chattanooga, Tennessee mom is suing Hamilton County Schools after it was discovered that Apison Elementary School was strip-searching her five-year-old special needs daughter on a daily basis without her consent. The young girl with special needs was diagnosed with congenital herpes while attending school, and despite being given consent to return to school by a doctor, school officials decided that they needed to check to see if the child had legions. So, for a few weeks, a school nurse would check the young girl’s body to make sure there weren’t any new outbreaks. The girl’s mother, Brandy Madden, says...

On December 4, 2013 Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.5-million member American Federation of Teachers(AFT), spoke on C-Span about bullying, particularly of gay students. Ms. Weingarten said, with surprise in her voice, that she doesn't understand why gay students are still bullied in public schools, because in 2013, "It's cool to be gay." She also said she is gay, and now speaks about it openly.As a psychotherapist, I tell clients that being surprised by another person's behavior often results from erroneous assumptions about the person, usually because you see them as you want them to be rather than as they...

School Omits 'Christ' from 'Silent Night,' Upsetting Parents By Beth Greenfield, Dec 20, 2013 Christ has officially been removed from Christmas. At least that was the case at one middle school on Long Island, New York, where its holiday-concert chorus sang a version of "Silent Night" that had all references to "the savior" and "holy infant" removed by school administrators. But the effort to avoid alienating people seems to have backfired. "It's offensive," one father of a student at the Ralph J. Osgood Intermediate School in Kings Park told CBS New York. "If you're going to remove words to not...

Christmas in Connecticut feels a little less Christmas-y in one high school after a teacher told students they could not decorate the classroom door with Santa Claus or Christmas trees. “This is political correctness run amuck,” an outraged mom told me. Her child attends Fairfield Ludlowe High School. The entire school is involved in a door decorating contest. This is what happens when you allow the patchouli and granola crowd to teach our kids.Students in her child’s class tossed out some ideas for a Christmas-themed door. One student suggested a Christmas tree and another student suggested a Santa Claus-inspired fireplace...

More than half of the third graders at Three Lakes Academy in the Upper Peninsula failed to score proficient on the state reading test in 2010-2011. But none of the school's 14 third-graders were held back. At Howell Public Schools, none of the 35 third-graders who didn't rate proficient at reading were held back. However, a proposed bill would require those students show they are proficient at reading before advancing to fourth grade. House Bill 5111 would hold back third grade students who were not proficient in reading on the state assessment. The bill grants exemptions for students with a...

HILTON HEAD ISLAND, SC — A Hilton Head Island High School substitute teacher admitted she sent an inappropriate picture to a student, kissed him and asked him to buy marijuana for her, according to a Beaufort County Sheriff's Office report released Saturday. Margaret Ann LaMantia, 23, was charged Tuesday with contributing to the delinquency of a minor and disseminating harmful material to a minor, according to the jail log. During an investigation of the incident, LaMantia, a long-term Spanish substitute at the school, told deputies she and a 16-year-old male student in her class began talking around Nov. 25. They...

The mother of a girl involved in the case of a 6-year-old Colorado boy who was suspended for giving a classmate unwanted kisses says the school did the right thing. [Snip] First-grader Hunter Yelton was given a two-day suspension, with a sexual harassment infraction on his discipline record. The boy's mother said the "sexual harassment" mark was too harsh.

Not only is the “knock out” game spreading across the nation… But now grade school kids are getting in on the “fun.” A group of grade schoolers attacked a Peoria man on the street this week. Knockout Game(VIDEO-AT-LINK) CI New Now reported: A violent game is trending nationwide –even grade school students are playing. It is called the “Knock Out” game. The goal is to knock someone out — with a single blow. Generally, the victims are unsuspecting – waiting at bus stop or just walking down the street. There have been hundreds of cases nationwide, and police say it...

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...

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...

6-Year old boy suspended for kissing girl on cheek.Their war on little boys in elementary schools continues unabated. Little children are being punished with suspensions, expulsions, and permanent damage to school records based on standards of conduct carried into elementary schools from the adult world. Typically, but not exclusively, the insanity is directed at little boys for alleged violation of zero tolerance gun and sexual harassment policies. KRDO reports: A Canon City school six-year-old boy has been accused of sexual harassment and the school suspended him for kissing a girl on the cheek and hand. **snip**The Principal is defending the...

The media are currently filled with reports of students in the U.S. scoring poorly on international tests. The Program for International Student Assessment, which compares 15-year-olds in most industrialized countries, reports that American students dropped from 25th to 31st in math, 11th to 21st in reading and 20th to 24th in science. The solution consistently offered for these low rankings is to spend more money on schooling. But numerous studies examining the billions of dollars we've spent on education in the last decade show that money has not improved the performance of U.S. students, and higher-scoring foreign countries spend far...

Propaganda: A lesson plan for third-graders linked to a controversial federal education initiative makes sure America's next generation does not forget who is the one we have been waiting for. During the Soul Train Awards in 2012, comedian and actor Jamie Foxx exhorted a wildly cheering crowd to "first of all (give) honor to god, and our lord and savior Barack Obama," exhibiting the all-too-widespread hero worship that casts rational thought aside and labels even legitimate criticism as virtual blasphemy. The same cult of personality is creeping into lesson plans and reading materials being created under the guise of the...

A ten-year-old boy has reportedly been suspended from school after he ‘fired’ an imaginary bow and arrow at another pupil. Johnny Jones, a fifth grader at South Eastern Middle School in Fawn Grove, Pennsylvania, is said to have been suspended for one day after making the gesture and now faces expulsion. According to the Rutherford Institute, which is defending the youngster, Johnny was accused of breaching the school’s regulations on using weapons, even though the bow and arrow were not real. He was reprimanded after the girl he ‘fired’ the bow at notified a teacher.

Coming soon to a classroom near you… nazi jew homework A new Common Core writing assignment asks students to think like a Nazi and explain why Jews are evil. This story first broke back in April: The Times Union reported, via Poor Richard’s News: Think like a Nazi, the assignment required students. Argue why Jews are evil. Students in some Albany High School English classes were asked this week as part of a persuasive writing assignment to make an abhorrent argument: “You must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your...

I was astonished recently when one of my stepdaughters arrived home from public high school in Washington state with a red ribbon painted on her cheek. Sex education in the schools – which conservatives have tried to limit to abstinence-only – has now gone well beyond simple education. Today's students are being coerced into promoting and acting out the politically correct views taught them. It is being done so sneakily, using the authoritative stamp of approval by the public schools, that even my conservatively raised children were cajoled into participating. There was no way to pull your child out of...

Season’s greetings are the talk of the town these days in Texas. The state passed HB 308, legislation referred to as “The Merry Christmas Law,” back in June. It, in part, states that “A school district may educate students about the history of traditional winter celebrations, and allow students and district staff to offer traditional greetings regarding the celebrations including (1) “Merry Christmas”; (2) “Happy Hanukkah”; and (3) “happy holidays.” I, uh, guess they forgot Kwanza. KDFW Fox 4 News is reporting that Texas State Representative Pat Fallon (R) thinks a Texas school is running afoul of this law.

A public university sent an email to alumni highlighting the esteemed research of one of its professors — research that notes many similarities between the old Ku Klux Klan and its modern-day equivalent, the tea party. The University of Washington’s email to alumni asked the question four separate times: “Is The Tea Party like the Ku Klux Klan?” Christopher Parker, a UW political science professor, argues in a new book that there are major similarities. The book is titled “Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in Contemporary America.” “In this commentary from Professor Christopher Parker...

The scores are in from the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment, which, every three years, tests 15-year-olds from the world's most advanced countries. For the United States, the report card is dismal. The U.S. ranking has fallen to 17th in reading, 21st in science, and 26th in math. Florida, one of America's diverse mega-states, competed separately in the PISA exam, and scored below the U.S. average. In the academic Olympics, the American superpower is a mediocrity. Ranked one through seven in test scores in reading, science and math were Shanghai-China, Singapore, Hong Kong-China, Taiwan, South Korea, Macau-China, Japan. Also...

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...

You would think Hempstead Middle school principal Amy Lacey was asking to see the “papers” of the 50% Hispanic students at her school as this story is now getting national attention. But all she did was announce that students can not speak Spanish while in class to avoid disruption. The students make it sound like horrible discrimination and apparently the school district agrees. She has been placed on paid administrative leave and the school district is bending over backwards to apologize for the principal’s actions. But some residents of Hempstead (outside of Houston) agree with the principal according to KHOU11: