Free Republic

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...