Free Republic

The parents don't even know what's going on because it's all at school,' says a fourth grade teacher in an interview. 'The parents question very little and they just assume the teacher knows what they're doing.' A world without textbooks or homework and where getting the wrong answer is celebrated may sound like an elementary student’s dream, but if such a fantasy becomes a reality, it would damage a generation of young minds. That is, however, exactly what is happening in many public elementary schools.Recently, I spoke with a fourth-grade teacher from the midwest, who shared her experience witnessing the...

Where did all the men go? Once the vast majority, they now make up just over 40 percent of the nation's college students. And it’s not just college. Women dominate high school honor rolls and make up more than 70 percent of class valedictorians. And where are the men going? [snip] Experts used to explain away the college gender imbalance by noting that men had plenty of high-paying job opportunities to them in manufacturing and construction, but then came the last recession. The numbers are staggering: 78 percent of the jobs lost since 2007 were held by men, leaving one...

Good friend is a teacher in Westborough, MA, public schools. Told me that when either student or staff tries to open Free Republic, you get "Site Contains Unsuitable Material. Contact IT Manager." But DumpsterUnderground, Slate, etc. come up just fine. Westborough accepts both state and federal (your) money. Our tax dollars being used to censor conservative opinion.

It takes a big man to teach small children. At 6 feet 5 inches tall, Josh Reineking towers over his kindergarten students at Stephens Elementary School, but it's actually his large heart and patient, steady manner that keep his lively charges learning, and in line. It doesn't hurt that he finds it easy to laugh, and thinks on his feet. Oh, and he also doesn't mind folding up like a Swiss Army knife to fit in a kindergarten-size chair. "My friends, my friends. Hands up for a message," Reineking says quietly and firmly as his class of 5-year-olds begin squirming...

Equity and Race Relations White Privilege Conference For the first time, Seattle Public Schools are sending students from four high schools to attend the annual White Privilege Conference, sponsored by the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, the University of Denver, Teaching Tolerance, Study Circles Resource Center, The Matrix, Center for Judaic Studies, GLSEN, and many more organizations. Speakers include Geneva Gay, Peggy McIntosh, Joy Leary, John-Paul Chaisson-Cardenas and many others who are actively engaged in anti-racism. This year's conference takes place in Colorado Springs from April 18th through the 21st. There are workshops designed specifically for youth, as...

The “Weekly Standard” profiled libertarian-leaning conservative and political commentator turned documentarian Evan Coyne Maloney, whose new documentary about the leftist ideological indoctrination and pervasive political correctness in the US higher education system is called “Indoctrinate U”. Saturday May 19, CSPAN ran a segment about his film on the network’s “Washington Journal”, but CSPAN posts footage of the shows online (when they have it up, I'll post it. His spot is at the two-hour mark). You can see a clip of his film on YouTube as well as the film's website, Indoctrinate-U.com. “Indoctrinate U” focuses on the pervasive trampling of free...

GLENDALE, Ariz., May 7, 2007—The Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD) has placed a professor on forced administrative leave and has recommended that he be terminated for e-mailing a Thanksgiving message to his colleagues last November. On the day before Thanksgiving, Professor Walter Kehowski sent out the text of George Washington’s “Thanksgiving Day Proclamation of 1789” and a link to the webpage where he’d found it—on Pat Buchanan’s web log. After several recipients complained of being offended by the e-mail, MCCCD found Kehowski guilty of violating the district’s Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) policy and technology usage standards. Kehowski then contacted...

SACRAMENTO, April 26, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Students in at least three school districts around the Sacramento region were suspended for peacefully expressing their views last week about the Day of Silence - a day during which homosexual activist students, with the approval of schools, hand out pro-homosexual literature.  The Day of Silence is an annual event staged in April at many high schools. Students are encouraged to go the entire school day without speaking as a protest against harassment of gay and lesbian students, and to "demand change." Approximately thirty students at Rio Linda alone were sent home, suspended or...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A week ago, I pondered whether public-school integration was dead. I got my answer Monday as I sat in the audience listening as the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court probed and prodded on the matter of race. Diversity, as a tool of public education, is dead as a doornail. It was in the air. The elegantly gilded courtroom turned somber as one justice after another dismissed the notion of purposeful diversity efforts in public education. Someone next to me whispered they had just seen the widow of former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. As a...

Commission report finds scant evidence of educational and social benefits of diversity. WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Less than one week before the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral argument in two significant cases involving the use of racial benefits to reduce minority isolation in elementary and secondary education, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights today issued an important briefing report on The Benefits of Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Elementary and Secondary Education. The report finds that social science studies provide scant proof of the benefits for racial and ethnic groups attributed to diversity in elementary and secondary education. Specifically, the Commission...

Education is a subject I find hard to contemplate without losing my temper. In the present-day U.S.A., education is basically a series of rent-seeking rackets. There is the public school racket, in which homeowners and taxpayers fork out stupendous sums of money to feed a socialistic extravaganza in which, when its employees can spare time from administration, “professional development” sabbaticals, and fund-raising for the Democratic Party, boys are pressed to act like girls, and dosed with calming drugs if they refuse so to act; girls are encouraged to act like boys by taking up advanced science, math, and strenuous sports,...

University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman is offering students an interesting lesson: Never let the law prevail over your own vanity. Just one day after Michigan voters overwhelmingly passed Proposal 2 - thereby ending racial and gender preferences in the state's public sector, Coleman said she'd do everything possible to avoid incorporating racial equality into her school's admissions policies.

The state's highest court ruled Friday that the University of Utah has no right to ban guns on campus, rejecting the argument that prohibiting firearms is part of the school's power to control academic affairs. Writing for the 4-1 majority, Utah Supreme Court Justice Jill Parrish said case law "is incompatible with the university's position." "We simply cannot agree with the proposition that the Utah Constitution restricts the Legislature's ability to enact firearms laws pertaining to the university," Parrish wrote. In a dissent, Chief Justice Christine Durham said policies that are reasonably connected to the school's academic mission are within...

A US student who sued school officials after he was made to censor his T-shirt that labelled President George W Bush "Chicken-Hawk-In-Chief" and a former alcohol and cocaine abuser won an appeal yesterday to wear the shirt to school. The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favour of Zachery Guiles, who through his parents claimed his free speech rights had been violated. School officials made him put duct tape over parts of his T-shirt that showed a Bush image surrounded by cocaine, a razor blade, a straw and a martini. Guiles, who as a seventh grader in 2004...

How the Schools Shortchange Boys, by Gerry Garibaldi In the newly feminized classroom, boys tune out. Since I started teaching several years ago, after 25 years in the movie business, I’ve come to learn firsthand that everything I’d heard about the feminization of our schools is real—and far more pernicious to boys than I had imagined. Christina Hoff Sommers was absolutely accurate in describing, in her 2000 bestseller, The War Against Boys, how feminist complaints that girls were “losing their voice” in a male-oriented classroom have prompted the educational establishment to turn the schools upside down to make them more...

Leftist political indoctrination in the classroom is now even more pernicious in K-12 education than it is on the university campus. While their protestations are often a sham, the higher education professorate at least pays lip service to the ideal of political neutrality in the classroom and of disinterested scholarship. When there have been revelations of professors egregiously indoctrinating students in leftist political views or intimidating conservative students (as in the Ward Churchill case) administrators have responded that these are isolated examples. When confronted with surveys showing that liberals outnumber conservatives in their humanities departments by a factor of 10-1...

PHILADELPHIA - Temple University, accused of discriminating against those with conservative viewpoints, has approved a new grievance procedure and will publicize it to students this fall. Temple's Board of Trustees voted last week to enact a uniform policy at its various schools for students with complaints about academic freedom, spokesman Raymond Betzner said. The state Legislature held a two-day public hearing on the subject at Temple last year, but school officials do not believe there is a widespread problem. During the hearing, now-retired Temple President David Adamany said he had not received a single complaint on the subject in his...

The big difference in the latest spate of horror stories about academic abuse is that they are taking place in lower grades. Sean Allen, a 10th-grader from Colorado who made national news when he taped his World Geography teacher’s political rant, spoke from experience, “I was flooded with similar stories from students across the nation,” he said at a conference on academic freedom. “We can’t simply deal with this on a case-to-case basis, we have to get to the root of it.” Sean firmly believes that the Academic Bill of Rights crafted by conservative author and activist David Horowitz gives...

The public education system has tremendous influence in shaping the views of millions of young Americans. In many cases, the public school system is the only exposure that many children have to the Bill of the Rights. It is imperative, therefore, to ensure that our nation's teachers are enlightening our young people and teaching them correctly about our rights and the meaning behind them. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of educators in the United States appear to promote an anti-gun agenda or, at the very least, prefer not to teach the Second Amendment in its true light. We base this opinion,...

THIS is my last education column after four years.... The columns about teachers generated the most mail... As readers know, I’m not a fan of No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal law aimed at raising education quality. Instead of helping teachers, for me it’s a law created by politicians who distrust teachers. Because teachers’ judgment and standards are supposedly not reliable, the law substitutes a battery of state tests that are supposed to tell the real truth about children’s academic progress. The question is: How successful can an education law be that makes teachers the enemy? Even No Child’s...