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New York considers ending literacy tests for prospective public school teachers because too many black and Hispanic applicants were failing The New York Post reports:State education officials plan to scrap a literacy exam given to prospective teachersAnd why are they doing this? The article continues:Sources said education officials also were concerned about the disparity between passing rates among white and minority candidates.In 2013-14, only 48 percent of aspiring black teachers and 56 percent of prospective Hispanic educators passed, compared to 75 percent of white candidates, the website Chalkbeat reported in February.And there you have it.The public school bureaucrats think that when...

He may have lost his bid for the Republican presidential nomination last year, but Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker remains the bete noire of the Left in one of its gestational cradles, particularly in the public school system. "The Occupy movement didn't start on Wall Street," Governor Walker told the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). "It started on my street." "The tipping point was when a bunch of protestors showed up dressed as zombies for a special Olympics event." Similarly, he was familiar with the type of treatment U. S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos recently received when...

MONCKS CORNER – The former chief financial officer of Berkeley County School District has confessed to taking nearly $400,000 from the district starting in July 2012, according to district officials. In addition to releasing details of the investigation, the board voted Tuesday to fire the accounting firm that gave it a clean audit just a month before Brantley Thomas, 60, was accused of misappropriating funds. The board also called Tuesday for an internal investigation into the district’s finances.

An Ionia Public Schools teacher declared she was quitting after having an emotional meltdown in front of her second-grade students. She then abruptly walked out of the school, according to documents obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request. But after the school accepted the verbal notice as a resignation, the teacher claimed she did not formally quit, causing a monthslong battle over her employment status. Anne Purdun, a second-grade teacher at Emerson Elementary, yelled profanities in her classroom while students were present on April 20, 2016, according to charges filed by the school for a tenure proceeding, obtained through...

To say that some people dislike Donald Trump may well be the understatement of the year. It's hard to imagine any duly elected president seeing so many protests in his first two months in office, yet here we are. It's so bad that now an 11-year-old in Annadale, New York, was docked 15 points on a homework assignment because she failed to answer a question demanding students bash Trump: Vincent Ungro, a dad from Annadale, New York, has an 11-year-old daughter who attends I.S. (Intermediate School) 75. She asked him for help with her vocabulary homework last Friday night because...

Homeschooling families throughout the nation are voicing opposition to a Republican-sponsored school choice bill that they say will ultimately result in regulation of homeschooling in the United States. Many parents who homeschool their children, as well as their numerous local and national homeschooling organizations, are protesting the bill, introduced by Iowa Rep. Steve King (R), and calling upon the members of Congress who are its sponsors to “leave homeschooling families alone.” School vouchers created by H.R. 610, the Choices in Education Act of 2017, “would be a slippery slope toward more federal involvement and control in homeschooling,” asserts William Estrada,...

That’s nice, but it can’t begin to compete with a Valentine’s Day letter written by some D.C. fourth-graders and sent to the Washington Post. Fact-checker Michelle Ye Hee Lee posted it on Facebook, explaining that the young students wanted it to “go to journalists.”

Hundreds of parents across the country have called on President Donald Trump to embrace Obama-era protections for transgender students that allow them use to school bathrooms in accord with their gender identity. In a letter sent to the president by the Human Rights Campaign late Tuesday, more than 780 parents stressed that “all students deserve equal access to a safe, welcoming school and a high quality education no matter who they are.” The call follows a decision by the Trump administration last week to abandon a defense of the guidelines that had been issued by the Obama administration. A court...

BANGOR, Mich. (NEWSCHANNEL 3) – More controversy is hitting the Bangor school system. On the same day two teachers resigned after video of school employees making inappropriate comments about students went viral, new video has surfaced of a Bangor High School teacher duct taping a student in class and there is now a criminal investigation underway. The school system confirmed that a teacher resigned Tuesday after admitting to duct taping a 16-year-old student in his desk. Police say the boy felt embarrassed and wants the teacher to be prosecuted. The video, taken by a student, shows the Bangor High School...

The Trump administration has dropped the federal government’s challenge to a nationwide injunction issued last year that blocked the fulfillment of Obama administration guidelines stating that transgender students’ access to bathrooms and other gender-segregated school facilities was protected under existing federal civil rights law. The injunction was issued in August by Judge Reed O’Connor of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Texas as part of a lawsuit filed by more than a dozen states over the Obama administration’s position that Title IX, the federal law that bans sex discrimination in schools, protects transgender students. Under that interpretation,...

With the aid of D.C. School and U.S. Education Department staff, Education Sec. Betsy DeVos eluded screaming protesters blocking the door of a D.C. public school where she was scheduled to meet with education advocates on Friday. […] After the meeting, DeVos issued a defiant statement, saying she won’t let protesters keep her from doing her job of improving the U.S. educational system: “I will not be deterred in executing the vital mission of the Department of Education. No school door in America will be blocked from those seeking to help our nation’s school children.” …

Roughly 381,000 kids were sent home this week from Chicago Public Schools with a partisan letter blasting President Trump and Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner. Chicago’s WGN reported Tuesday that officials with CPS angered parents by handing out letters that excoriate Republicans — and Republicans only — for budget problems. A letter distributed on Monday begins by saying that Mr. Trump and Gov. Rauner “attack those who need the most help” as a segue into the state’s financial woes. “CPS cannot run the school system that your children deserve with the funds we have,” the letter says. “Under the law, CPS...

A 12-year-old boy was in a coma over the weekend after being severely beaten by another student at a northwest suburban middle school Friday. Kenyon Woods Middle School Principal Lisa Olsem said the young boy was “assaulted by another student” just before noon. He suffered severe injuries and was taken to Presence St. Joseph Hospital in Elgin before being transferred to Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge. {SNIP} At the Elgin school district meeting Monday night, the student board member wore green, a symbol officials say is meant to represent hope. Others throughout the district wore the color in...

A 12-year-old boy in Missouri was attacked on a school bus by his peers for wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat—and was suspended from school as a result. A cellphone video of the incident shows Gavin Cortina of St. Louis being bullied physically and verbally by his peers for expressing his political beliefs on a hat Wednesday, the Daily Mail reports. “You want to build a wall?” one student yells in the clip. “You want to build a f—king wall?” Things escalated quickly after that, according to Gavin. “At one point, he just got so frustrated he pushed me,”...

Donald Trump promised to drain the swamp in Washington. This task is especially urgent in that large, malodorous part of the swamp known as Education. The Education Establishment makes everything murky and unproductive by an endless spew of jargon, incoherent theories, goofy methods, phony research, and new names for failed ideas. Finally, no two Americans can talk constructively about anything in education. It's as if they are talking across vast linguistic and cultural barriers, not over coffee at Starbucks. Education is now the fog-shrouded domain of dumbing down. Pervasive murkiness is a big part of the reason why so much...

A high school art teacher in Dallas posted an Instagram video of herself "shooting" an image of Donald Trump with a squirt gun and screaming "die" during Friday's inauguration. A copy of the video went viral on Twitter before the original source was identified.   The teacher has since deleted the video, but here's a copy:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp1A3VB6Fg8    

Public schools around California are bracing for a crisis driven by skyrocketing worker pension costs that are expected to force districts to divert billions of dollars from classrooms into retirement accounts, education officials said. The depth of the funding gap became clear to district leaders when they returned from the holiday break: What they contribute to the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, known as CalPERS, will likely double within six years, according to state estimates. CalPERS, a public pension fund with $300 billion in assets that is the country’s largest, manages retirement benefits for 1.8 million current and former city,...

Beginning Monday, the Black Lives Matter movement could become a curriculum topic in classrooms across the city. A Philadelphia School District teachers' group has planned six days of action this week, encouraging educators to introduce optional curriculum and activities - from "The Revolution Is Always Now" coloring pages for very young students to a science lesson about the biology of skin color for older ones. "This is a critical issue of our time - in our society, but also in our students' lives," said Charlie McGeehan, an English and history teacher and member of the Caucus of Working Educators, an...

Chris WellerJanuary 23,2017 Jessica Epting, a homeschool mother of four, with her kids in their home in the Bronx, New York During Betsy DeVos' recent three-hour confirmation hearing to become President Donald Trump's education secretary, charter schools came up no fewer than 60 times. Homeschooling was mentioned once. Charter schools have become a significant part of the US public-education system and now educate 2.5 million kids. But homeschooling has quietly experienced a surge in recent years too. Brian Ray, a homeschooling researcher at the National Home Education Research Institute, estimates the number of kids taught at home is growing by...

The law was passed in 1919 under pressure from the Ku Klux KlanA nun in Nebraska who teaches in a secondary school has been told that she is not allowed to wear her habit in the classroom.  37-year-old, Sister Madeleine Miller, was shocked to learn that, under a little-known law nearly a century old, habits were banned.  The vaguely worded ban prohibits teachers from wearing any sort of religious clothing, from burqas to yarmulkes.  “I could have been arrested, jailed, fined or had my license taken away if I had tried to teach,” Miller said on Tuesday.Now, state lawmakers are...