Free Republic

Under a new set of guidelines rolled out last week by Chicago public schools, children will now be required to address transgender students and employees by their preferred name and pronouns — or face the consequences. Transgender students and employees can choose their preferred bathroom, locker room, name and pronouns, and everyone else is required to affirm the individual’s new identity, according to the guidelines.

In recent months, Detroit Public Schools has been rife with turmoil: districtwide teacher sickouts, sensational pictures of widespread deplorable building conditions, an employee kickback scandal, reports of misappropriated federal funds, and now … more sickouts. While unions and bureaucrats in the debt-ridden district wrangle over adult issues, costing DPS students thousands of hours in learning time, the city’s 100 charter campuses have pressed ahead uninterrupted with the business of educating students. They represent a broad range of quality, but on average provide students with an additional two to three months of important learning gains, according to the best research. National...

In the debate about a state bailout for the Detroit school district, the greatest divide may be the future of charter schools in the city. Democratic lawmakers have often shown a bias against charter schools, and did so again this week. Rep. Sarah Roberts, D-St. Clair Shores, proposed an amendment to a bailout bill (House Bill 5384) that may effectively ban new or expanded charter schools in the city of Detroit. A charter authorizer would be required to overcome a new layer of red tape. Specifically, authorizers would have to get a determination by the state Superintendent of Public Instruction...

he 2016 presidential campaign has hardly lived up to the ideal of a civil exchange of ideas facilitating a peaceful democracy. But a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center suggests that the acrimony from the campaign trail may be having a broader, negative effect on society — particularly in American schools. An online survey of 2,000 educators – one that the center notes wasn’t scientific – found half saying they witnessed an increase in “uncivil political discourse” during the 2016 campaign. Two-thirds of respondents said their students – particularly Muslims, immigrants and children of immigrants – openly expressed...

HOUSTON (KTRK) -- When you think of felony forgery your thoughts might turn to Al Capone or Bonnie and Clyde shooting it out with the Texas Rangers. Not for some local school cops. For one day, public enemy number one when it came to forgery was 13-year-old eighth grader Danesiah Neal at Fort Bend Independent School District's Christa McAuliffe Middle School. Now 14, Daneisha was hoping to eat that day's lunch of chicken tenders with her classmates using a $2 bill given to her by her grandmother when she was stopped by the long arm of the law. "I went...

If they care more about students than teachers’ unions, every school district in the country needs to pay attention to this: When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker gave the boot to teachers’ unions, liberals predicted a disaster of apocalyptic proportions: Teachers quitting, slack-jawed, uneducated students meandering down vacant downtowns that closed shop. It turns out, though, that Walker’s “Act 10” may have been the best thing to happen to schools and teachers in decades. That’s because not only is teacher pay up for the best students, but without burdensome union rules, school administrators are empowered to make real changes they need...

At the heart of the current debate over the future of public schooling in Detroit is a proposed entity called the Detroit Education Commission, various forms of which appear in different proposals. The most recent version is included in a Detroit Public Schools bailout bill passed by the state Senate. Half the Republicans and all but three of the Democrats in the Michigan Senate voted to approve a seven-member commission appointed by the Detroit mayor. Among its powers, the commission would be able to veto any new public school from opening in the city. Critics say the veto would apply...

In 2014 the Detroit City Council passed and Mayor Michael Duggan approved a resolution that banned the city from selling any one of 53 closed Detroit school district school buildings to a public charter school for a period of five years. The action raises questions about the mayor's impartiality in a plan recently approved by the state Senate. The plan would give Duggan a key role in whether school choice in the form of charters keeps expanding in Detroit or becomes a dwindling remnant. The resolution was part of a deal the city made with Detroit Public Schools to forgive...

Do you think the ACLU will be suing any time soon?  Because there’s a catch.  Brendan of Supreme Patriot noticed something: Buried deep in a PBS article about how the St. Cloud, Minn., school district is accommodating a large Somali population was a telling example of religious bias. While public schools have appropriately been barred from leading students in corporate Christian prayer, this district is going out of its way to satisfy the desires of the Muslim community. PBS approvingly writes: In St. Cloud’s middle and high schools, the district allows prayer time for students, including Muslim students, as...

A northern New Jersey school district has voted to adopt a policy allowing transgender students to use restrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity. The Pascack Valley Regional High School District voted 6-1 to pass a policy they say is designed to protect transgender students' rights. The district said the policy is needed to comply with anti-discrimination laws.

Thank you for the opportunity to share my thoughts concerning the challenging state of education in Detroit. Since its inception the Mackinac Center for Public Policy has advocated policy solutions that expand freedom to help improve the quality of life for all Michigan residents. In this case, the residents are thousands of Detroit Public Schools students, who are receiving an inferior education that will not prepare them adequately for life and career. Many are crying out for something better. They need to see hope. There are challenges and constraints within the political process, not to mention the other obstacles that...

To accommodate the perceived wishes of a very small number of people, the federal government and many states are placing women and girls at risk of rape and assault in restrooms. There are about a mere 700,000 transgender individuals in the U.S., or 0.3% of the adult population. As John Hinderaker correctly notes -- that makes them almost as rare as unicorns. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that allowing men who decide they really want to be women to use women’s restrooms is a dangerous idea: not to the wise men of Charlotte, North Carolina who passed an...

Beaumont police say a teacher was arrested Friday after video on Twitter showed her slapping a student on the head. [Snip] Hastings was arrested and charged with assault. She has been released on bail at this time. Ozen High School has placed Hastings on administrative leave, and the school district has released this statement:

The Michigan Senate passed a package of bills that would rescue Detroit Public Schools financially. Among other things, it includes $48.7 million to keep the insolvent district afloat until the end of the current school year, which is considered a down payment on a larger bailout that includes $515 million in debt forgiveness and another $202 million for transition costs. The debt forgiveness is not the most controversial part of the package; the state is already on the hook for this money and the district has no way to repay it. A more contentious part of the rescue plan is...

The Michigan Department of Education’s refusal to incorporate students’ economic backgrounds into how it ranks school districts plays a role in a controversial discussion about a rise in the percentage of minority students in a western Michigan school district. The Holland Sentinel recently did a story that said that giving parents the freedom to choose where to send their children has “fragmented” Holland Public Schools in terms of the racial makeup of its students. The story quotes Superintendent Brian Davis as saying his district is like an urban district in a suburban community. The article cites population data that shows...

Homosexuality became an issue early in my teaching career with the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, which coincided with my return to the classroom from an administrative position in 1979. The outbreak was a major news story and I covered it in the current events portion of my classes. We had only one nurse for six schools in our Fryeburg, Maine district and she asked if she could come into my social studies classes so we could teach sex education together. She believed my presence would make it easier on the boys. She was a conservative, Catholic woman and...

Aside from defrauding American taxpayers, the Gülen organization has an even more ominous objective in the United States. The organization is one of the country’s largest recipients of H1-B “specialty occupation” visas, which it uses to import Turkish teachers into its charter schools, supposedly because local U.S. talent is not available to fill math and science teaching positions in its charter schools. The Gülen organization illegally threatens to revoke these visas unless the Turkish teachers agree to kick back part of their salary to the organization. More importantly, the Turkish teachers in Gülen organization charter schools are evaluated not on...

A secretive Islamic movement is trying to infiltrate the U.S. military by establishing and operating publicly-funded charter schools targeted toward children of American service personnel. That charge may sound like a conspiracy theory from the lunatic fringe, but it is real and it is happening right now. The most immediate threat is in Nevada, where Coral Academy of Science Las Vegas (CASLV) is currently negotiating with the United States Air Force to locate a charter school at Nellis Air Force Base, with classes starting this fall. What is not widely known is that CASLV is part of a nationwide organization...

Legislation passed by the Republican-controlled Michigan Senate made this past Tuesday “a bad day” for school choice in the city of Detroit, according to one education insider. By a 21-16 vote, the body passed Senate Bill 710, part of a Detroit schools bailout and governance package that among other things gave the insolvent district a $300 million line of credit with the state. That was not controversial, but provisions establishing the nature of public education in Detroit are, especially their consequences for future school choice efforts in the city. “This was a bad day for parents and students, as we...

Michigan Education Association President Steve Cook recently chimed in with the union’s views on what to do with the insolvent and academically failing Detroit Public Schools. Detroit teachers are actually represented by a different union, but the MEA is still the state’s largest and most influential teachers union. Some of Cook’s claims deserve a closer look: The state is to blame for all of the DPS debt Cook wrote: “A state House plan seeks to pay the DPS debt incurred under state control.” In November 2005, voters elected a new Detroit school board to replace a committee the Legislature had...