Free Republic

On Wednesday, H.B. 305, authored by Representative Frank Hoffmann (R-Monroe), passed through the Louisiana House of Representatives by a bi-partisan vote of 91-6. The bill had 35 Representatives join as co-authors. prolifestudents33H.B. 305 states that no individual or organization that performs elective abortion or its affiliates may provide instruction or materials in public elementary and secondary schools or in charter schools that receive state funding. Benjamin Clapper, Executive Director of Louisiana Right to Life, said the following about the vote: “We commend the Louisiana House of Representatives for passing H.B. 305 to protect the children in our state-funded school system....

On Wednesday Tracy and Mary Finney of Marietta, Georgia were met by a police officer outside their children’s public school and informed they were trespassing on school property because they opposed the school’s process of testing all children. The Finneys, whose children attend West Side Elementary School, had decided to opt their children out of Georgia’s state test, the CRCT. ~~~snip~~~~ Meg Norris, an organizer of United Opt-Out Georgia, told Breitbart News she is “shocked” at how the mandates to test children are being enforced in Georgia. “It’s happening in schools all over Georgia,” Norris said. “Even children who are...

A Pleasant View, Utah high school teacher is now on paid leave after she asked her students to come up with a bunch of slang terms for their genitalia as part of a course called “Adult Roles and Financial Literacy.” The genitalia brainstorm session occurred on Friday at Weber High School. The teacher is Ashley Williams, reports The Salt Lake Tribune. “We had some students who reported to administration that a teacher was having an exercise where they were put into groups, male and female, to come up with names for genitalia,” Weber School District spokesman Nate Taggart told the...

LINCOLN, Neb. —Parents from a Lincoln elementary school were astounded when their children came home with a flyer about how to handle bullies. The flyer had the following rules: Treat the person who is being mean as if they are trying to help you Do not be afraid Do not verbally defend yourself Do not attack If someone physically hurts you, just show you are hurt; do not get angry Do not tell on bullies Don’t be a sore loser Learn to laugh at yourself and not get “hooked” by put-downs Lincoln Public Schools addressed the flyer on its Facebook...

A hot-button issue among educators appears to be “equitable access” to effective teachers, a buzzword at a recent event at the Center for American Progress (CAP). There was a brief introductory presentation of CAP’s research, in conjunction with the American Institutes of Research (AIR), on how to broaden minority student access to effective and high-quality teachers. AIR’s director of the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders, Angela Minnici, called for more data collection and plans on the state and district level. She pointed out that “Data is very important in this conversation” and said that “we’ve been talking about this...

A children’s book that is part of the Common Core curriculum portrays white voters as racists who would never vote for Obama for president. The book called, “Barack Obama,” says: “Some people said Americans weren’t ready for that much change. Sure Barack was a nice fellow, they said. But white voters would never vote for a black president,” the book reads. This is in spite of the fact that millions of whites voted for the sitting president. Follow TLR on Google+ Common Core’s implementation has gotten off to a rocky start. States like Indiana have opted out of the unified...

Why did Alex Hribal do it? Why did the 16-year-old sophomore at Franklin Regional High School in Murrysville, Pennsylvania stab and slash 20 of his classmates (and a security guard), leaving at least four of his victims in critical condition? WTAE in Pittsburgh reports that “investigators continue to explore bullying as a possible motive.” NBC News cites criminologists who suggest Hribal was driven “by rage and adrenalin.” The Associated Press reports “[t]he boy’s family is just as puzzled as police about what triggered the attack.” But there is an obvious explanation of Hribal’s murderous rampage, which has been ignored by...

Video is only 3:15 minutes long. A short graphic presentation of the nine big flaws in public schools. Suppose someone is asking the question, well, what can we do, where do we start? Here's a list of nine places to start. ---------------------------------------------- Personally I like trying to radically simplify things. That is especially appropriate in education. What these professors spend their time doing is creating so much confusion, disinformation, propaganda, alibis, excuses, lies, etc., etc., etc., finally no ordinary citizen knows what to think about the subject anymore. And that's how the Education Establishment wins. At some point you have...

Normally I don’t have any special affection for the TV show 60 Minutes. So trust me when I say I was overwhelmed by the show on March 30. I wish every student in middle school or high school could see this program. They would see heroism, genius, ethics, inventiveness, capitalism at its best, visionary talent, the future unfolding, all the things they need to see. The first segment was about a young manager of a brokerage firm. He saw trading irregularities he didn’t like, and did something about it. (Most of us won’t understand the math but you will quickly...

While the U. S. rushes to completely nationalize education, allegedly to improve test scores, America’s nearest northern neighbor, Canada, is taking a different approach. “I don’t know why Americans don’t adopt the Canadian approach to education,” Jason Clemens of the Canadian Fraser Institute said last weekend at a seminar in Chicago. In Canada, there is “no federal role in education,” Clemens said at the Friday conference sponsored by the free-market Atlas Network and the Illinois Policy Institute. Both spending and governance of education in Canada are “entirely provincial,” Clemens said. While, over the past two decades, Canada’s national government achieved...

Hispanic evangelical leaders are speaking out after a federal appeals court ruled that New York City has a constitutional right to bar religious groups from using public schools for worship services after hours. The National Latino Evangelical Coalition, a group of over 3,000 Hispanic evangelical churches, immediately expressed its disagreement with the ruling Thursday. "This decision is absolutely unnecessary and whimsical. How is allowing for certain worship practices but not worship services consistent with the First Amendment?," Gabriel Salguero, president of NaLEC, said in a statement. "Worship in empty school buildings in no way undermines the non-establishment clause." The ruling...

Check out this video and feel your head spin like Linda Blair as you watch the teacher go into a very, very complicated and convoluted method (algorithm?) to solve the very, very simple subtraction problem 32 – 12 = 20. Source.

Earlier this week, I wrote about a 9-year-old North Carolina boy who was being teased at school for wearing a “girlie” My Little Pony backpack to school. Administrators at Hyatt Elementary initially tried to solve the problem by telling Grayson Bruce to not wear his beloved backpack, telling him was a “trigger for bullying.” But then a social media firestorm ensued. Grayson’s mom, Noreen Bruce, launched a Support for Grayson Facebook page, attracting over 70,000 fans, and people all over the world wrote in messages telling the boy that his love for My Little Pony is awesome. Men posted images...

I wish my Irish eyes could be smilin’ on St. Patty’s Day. But New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has stoked my Irish temper. And that’s no blarney. As an Irish lassie, I should be at the bar drinking green beer. Instead, I must be more austere. For Billy Boy is threatening to close New York’s charter schools by denying them the ability to “co-locate” or share real estate with public schools. The New York State Legislature is in the midst of budget negotiations that will impact the future of charter schools in New York and could also set a...

Bill Gates, the multi billionaire who does not have an earned college degree or teaching certificate, never taught a day in the classroom, never worked in an educational system or one room school house is comparing the education of children to electrical outlets.

In a Breitbart column insisting that Ronald Reagan was not as assertive as commonly believed on military and foreign policy issues, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) mentions, in passing, “I met Ronald Reagan as a teenager when my father was a Reagan delegate in 1976.” . But his father, Ron Paul, is hardly a Reaganite today. Indeed, he is now claiming that Crimea has a right to leave Ukraine and join Russia, and that U.S. sanctions against the Russian regime are “criminal.” “That’s just people looking to start a war,” Paul said. “This is criminal, it’s stealing and will just aggravate...

Control.If an article could consist of one word this article would be finished.The government knows that it’s in trouble, in more trouble than the administrations that came before it. Government spending is out of control and the fact that the country is still actually afloat is simply down to the privately owned, and inappropriately named, Federal Reserve buying up government debt like it’s going out of fashion.The government knows that more and more people are waking up to the possibility that we are going to face a major crisis in our lifetime. Awakened people are far more difficult people...

The Kansas Supreme Court said Friday the state’s current public school funding levels are unconstitutional. In the much-anticipated ruling, the court said Kansas’ poor school districts were harmed when the state made the decision to cut certain payments when tax revenues declined during the Great Recession. The Supreme Court sent the case back to district court for more review to “promptly” determine what the adequate amount of funding should be, but didn’t set a deadline for a hearing. It did, however, set a July 1 deadline for legislators to restore money for two funds aimed at helping poorer districts with...

<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...