Free Republic

Chicago’s Democrat Mayor Brandon Johnson nominated seven appointees to the city’s board of education early last week after the previous board collectively resigned in early October. The move stunned the city and the rest of the nation. The drama is the latest sad episode of Chicago’s downward spiral, thanks to its Democrat mayor and the teachers union.The direct cause of the previous school board resignation was sparked by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) contract negotiation. With more than 30,000 members, the CTU is one of the nation’s most powerful teachers unions. The CTU’s current demands included “a 9% annual raise,...

On October 1, 2024, Leandra Blades, president of the Placentia-Yorba Linda (Calif.) Board of Education appeared at a candidate forum at Travis Ranch School in Yorba Linda and recounted what she and her colleagues achieved over the past four years. A former police officer who was reluctant to seek elective office, Blades recalled how she was persuaded to run for a seat on the Board of Education by concerned parents who wanted “a voice in their children’s education.” So she threw her hat into the ring and was eventually elected to the Board in 2020. At the time, the schools...

The Democrat Party is pushing to increase “literacy” on climate change-related material in America’s schools while students are performing poorly with respect to actual literacy. The party’s education platform mentions the importance of “climate literacy” for American K-12 students several times, emphasizing the purported need for students to be able to understand and interpret information relating to climate change. Meanwhile, the average reading score for both fourth and eighth grade students in 2022 had fallen by three points relative to 2019, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). “We will equip students with the knowledge and skills to...

Improved focus, higher quality family time, more social interaction, and less anxiety are all products of a week-old cell school phone ban in Iowa that’s convincing officials there to spread the good news. “Do it. Do it. It’s not as bad as you think,” Gateway High School Principal Aaron Ruff said, offering advice for schools considering limits on student cell phone use. “I think parents are well aware of what cell phones are doing to their kids. They’re seeing it at home. I think parents are behind this.” Ruff and others in the Ottumwa Community School District recently explained to...

Colorado’s new LGBTQ social studies standards, which include first grade lessons on LGBTQ history, transgenderism, and the rainbow flag, is age-inappropriate and pushes a radical agenda, some parents in the state complain. “I don’t want my first grader learning anything about LGBTQ issues at all in school,” a Colorado father of a first grader who asked to remain anonymous told The Daily Signal.

Seven major school districts in New Mexico responsible for thousands of children have policies to help them change sex identity in class without their parents finding out, DailyMail.com can reveal. Parents Defending Education (PDE), a conservative campaign group, uncovered details of the stealth transgender policies from public records requests. The unearthed documents show how teachers are directed to help trans students change their names, pronouns, clothing, and sex identity at school, without their parents' knowledge. Trans activists say such guidelines are vital, as some kids need protection from old-fashioned moms and dads who won't accept their desire to change sex....

Big Apple college campuses are woefully unprepared to respond to the fresh wave of “potentially dangerous” anti-Israel protests expected when students return to the classroom this fall, CUNY cops warned. The CUNY officers, who blame a systematic dismantling of the public university system’s police forces for the lack of preparation, sounded the alarm after violent demonstrations erupted at campuses across the city in response to the Israel-Hamas war. “The university is going into this under fire – they have no idea what’s going to happen. There’s no preparation,” a CUNY officer speaking on condition of anonymity told The Post. CUNY...

California’s Alameda Unified School District ethnic studies curriculum required students to assess their own level of privilege as they were taught Critical Race Theory and extreme gender theory. Students were given handouts including “My Relationship with Privilege and Oppression,” which asks students “whether you are privileged or oppressed.” White, male, Christian students without a criminal record are singled out as the epitome of privilege. The document lists 29 different identities and characteristics—including race, ethnicity, nationality, sex, religion and education level—that are used to determine one’s alleged level of privilege or marginalization. “Who am I as an intersectional human being,” it...

A California judge has ruled that teachers were right to punish a seven-year-old girl over a Black Lives Matter drawing because 'she's too young to have First Amendment rights.' The first grader was banned from recess and drawing pictures at Viejo Elementary in Orange County after she added the words 'any life' below Black Lives Matter on a picture she drew and and gave to a black friend. The picture showed the words 'Black Lives Matter' with four round shapes in various different tones of brown, beige and yellow, which was intended to 'represent her friends' who were 'racially-mixed'.

Drive an hour south of Nashville into the rolling countryside of Marshall County, Tennessee — past horse farms, mobile homes and McMansions — and you will arrive in Chapel Hill, population 1,796. It’s the birthplace of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped found the Ku Klux Klan. And it’s the home of Todd Warner, one of the most unlikely and important defenders of America’s besieged public schools. And yet, one May afternoon in his office, under a TV playing Fox News and a mounted buck that he’d bagged in Alabama, he told me about his effort to halt Republican...

Pray for the kids of Wayne, NJ: If the “adults” running its schools are any indication, they’ll grow up unable to recognize evil, let alone fight it. We’re looking at the apology from Mark Toback, Wayne’s superintendent, after a question on a middle-school quiz identified the Islamic State as a terrorist group, drawing heat from the radical, anti-Israel group Teaching While Muslim. The question: What is the name of “a terrorist organization that commits acts of violence, destroys cultural artifacts, and encourages loss of life in order to achieve its goal of global rule under strict Islamic Sharia law?”

WASHINGTON - A recent study has named Gallaudet University as the most dangerous campus in America. According to data obtained by the Parrish Law Firm from Campus Safety, the D.C.-based university for the deaf and hard of hearing topped the list with a staggering 1,110 incidents per 1,000 students. The study analyzed various factors, including hate crimes, criminal offenses, and categories under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) reported between 2018 and 2022. It took into account campuses of different sizes by converting the raw data into the number of incidents reported per 1,000 students. They ultimately determined the rankings...

The left-wing Labour Party may look to scrap government guidance telling schools to teach children that there are only two biological sexes, which would easily be overturned given the failure of the Conservative government to put the policy into law. Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson said that if elected — as is widely predicted to happen — a Labour government would review guidance from Rishi Sunak’s government which told educators to refrain from teaching far-left gender ideology as a fact. This included the theory that people can somehow be born into the wrong body, can change their sexual identity, or...

Schools in the progressive haven of San Francisco are facing a major budget crunch. Things are so dire that the district may have to actually close some schools. It’s amazing that these schools are having cash flow problems when you consider the taxes people pay to live there. Officials from the school district recently met with some financial experts who gave them some tough love. ... Late last week, two fiscal experts — appointed a few years ago to give guidance to the district — were authorized to suspend or reverse financial decisions made by the superintendent or school board....

In Minnesota, 50% of students cannot read at grade level. If we were to apply the traditional academic grading scale to that outcome, the public education system in the state would get a solid F.. That abysmal performance was the topic of much debate during this term of the Minnesota legislature, prompting the Democrat trifecta to pass “the READ Act,” an effort to replace the failed “whole language” method of literacy training with traditional phonics education. “Whole language” is an absolute joke, recognized even by many on the Left as a toxic methodology that fails students. In essence, “whole language”...

For almost 400 years America has seen its citizens educating their children and themselves, though both the scope, structure and quality of education has changed somewhat during that time. For much of the history of the United States, education of children took place primarily at home, often along with private schools for some, and locally managed and supported schools for others. Education included the general ethos of Christianity and Biblical morality as well as academic subjects. The New England Primer and later, the nation-wide McGuffey's Readers (120+ million copies) were the primary instruments of education, and in helping to form...

The local teachers’ union encourages students to resist “Zionist bullies.” Portland, Oregon, has earned its reputation as America’s most radical city. Its public school system was an early proponent of left-wing racialism and has long pushed students toward political activism. As with the death of George Floyd four years ago, the irruption of Hamas terrorism in Israel has provided Portland’s public school revolutionaries with another cause du jour: now they’ve ditched the raised fist of Black Lives Matter and traded it in for the black-and-white keffiyeh of Palestinian militants. I have obtained a collection of publicly accessible documents produced by...

Hillsborough County just floated a ballot referendum last election to lump teachers into the "first responder" category to allow them to share a proposed additional homestead exemption, in an effort to keep talented employees from "leaving for greener pastures". How about that? Stupid voters passed it.

Gov. Kathy Hochul is calling for a ban on kids using smartphones in school — the latest in a campaign against technology she feels is harming children in New York. The proposal would only allow kids to carry simple “dumb” phones in schools that can send texts but can’t access the internet, the governor told The Guardian in an interview published Thursday. The call for the smartphone ban comes as the self-professed “first mom governor” of New York is pushing for a ban on “addictive” social media algorithms that she says target kids. “Our kids are being pulled into a...

Premier Blaine Higgs is defending his decision to ban a sex education group from provincial schools despite acknowledging not having seen the entire presentation that provoked criticism from some parents. Higgs told reporters Tuesday that he made the decision, announced in a message posted to the social media site X last Friday night, after being sent a screenshot from the presentation given in several schools last week. "I was sent the presentation, the screen shot," he said, before correcting himself: "I was never sent the entire presentation." Asked if his ban was based solely on the screenshot, Higgs said, "Next...