Free Republic

Public School Teacher To North Carolina Senate: 'I Am Embarrassed To Confess: I Am A Teacher' Caroline Moss “I am embarrassed to confess: I am a teacher.” That was the subject line of an email Sarah Wiles, a science teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina, sent to all 170 members of the North Carolina General Assembly last week. Wiles talked about her concerns that teachers were not being paid enough. She says she personally has only seen a pay increase once in six years, even though she says she loves her students and has always gone above and beyond to do...

The Democracy Alliance, a top-secret collective of ultra-rich left-wing political donors, has a new member — Randi Weingarten, who heads the labor union that represented Douglas County teachers until two years ago when the district went union-free. ... Weingarten is president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), an arm of the AFL-CIO whose affiliates include the Douglas County Federation. ... Ben DeGrow, Independence Institute senior education policy analyst, said Weingarten’s joining the Democracy Alliance shows that the union is using dues collected from teachers to pursue an extreme political agenda. ... Unlike other school districts, Douglas County no longer...

Update: The principal and four teachers at Cayuga Elementary School in Philadelphia's Hunting Park section have been charged with fostering a culture of cheating on standardized state tests there over a 5-year period, Attorney General Kathleen Kane announced Thursday. Kane said the educators changed student answers, provided test answers to students and improperly reviewed Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) test questions before giving the tests. After the cheating stopped in 2012, the schools test scored dropped dramatically, Kane noted. In 2008-09 state proficiency tests, Cayuga's fourth graders excelled: 88.8% pass math and 83.9% pass reading. By 2012-13, the most...

U.S. teachers are nowhere near as diverse as their students. Almost half the students attending public schools are minorities, yet fewer than 1 in 5 of their teachers is nonwhite. New studies from the Center for American Progress and the National Education Association are calling attention to this “diversity gap” at elementary and secondary schools in the United States. The groups want more to be done to help teachers more accurately mirror the students in their classrooms. …

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten, who was paid $543,150 last year, defended her compensation by claiming her pay is $360,000 and other reported expenses simply prove the union’s “transparency.” As part of a series of April 28 Twitter posts demanding Congress hike the federal minimum wage to $10,10, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) District 1199 quoted from a January column Weingarten wrote for The Huffington Post. “Justice means that hardworking people must have access to a living wage,” Weingarten wrote. AFT paid Weingarten $556,981 in 2012 and $543,150 in 2013. When her 2013 pay was pointed out...

One concerned teacher took matters into her own hands after she says the school's principle and district leaders ignored her concerns. She placed hidden cameras in a special needs classroom, and the abuse she caught was extremely disturbing.

Next thing you know, cats and dogs might start sleeping together. In today’s brave new world, teacher responsibilities seemingly grow by the hour. With classroom responsibilities that now include nutrition, character development, parenting, sex education and family counseling, the very last thing teachers need is ignorant, anti-scholarship, disrespectful politicians stripping them of their ability to exercise their professional judgement. Teachers, just as other performing artists, need certain freedoms to create, improvise and respond to the needs of students, just as musicians need flexibility to play to their unique audiences. Teacher union’s have long argued that a smaller class sizes offers...

SANTA FE, N.M. – For decades, it’s probably the most troublesome question facing education: Why are results for U.S. public school students so mediocre, despite the billions of taxpayer dollars spent? Andrew Coulson thinks he’s got the answer: Because there is no discernible correlation between spending and outcomes. “The takeaway from this study is that what we’ve done over the past 40 years hasn’t worked,” said Coulson, director of the Center For Educational Freedom at the CATO Institute. “The average performance change nationwide has declined 3 percent in mathematical and verbal skills. Moreover, there’s been no relationship, effectively, between spending...

Six years ago, Brendan Eich contributed $1000.00 to the Proposition 8 campaign in California that sought to preserve marriage between one man and one woman. Eich recently became chief executive officer of the Mozilla Corporation. Mozilla, part of the Mozilla Foundation, oversees pieces of the Mozilla web browser Firefox -- an open source rival to Internet Explorer, Safari, and others. Half the board resigned when Mozilla named Eich the CEO. The online dating service OKCupid called for a boycott of Mozilla. Contributing to an unpopular cause six years ago -- during a time the left claimed "dissent is patriotic" --...

The nine student plaintiffs in the case – known as Vergara v. California - are challenging two main areas of state law: permanent employment and dismissal statutes the plaintiffs say make it difficult to get rid of bad teachers, and the seniority-based layoff system, which they say makes it hard to keep good, less-senior teachers during difficult times.

When you think about bullying in public schools, it's generally in the context of a bigger kid picking on a smaller kid.  According to Susan Kimball, a kindergarten teacher of 20 years in the Sikeston Public School District, it's administrators and fellow teachers bullying and intimidating her, all because she opposes Common Core. At yesterday's Senate Education Committee hearing, Kimball testified she has suffered from bullying and intimidation since she began speaking out about the controversial standards. [caption id="attachment_25492" align="aligncenter" width="639"] "You have no idea what I have been through over the past six weeks because of my stand." -...

Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn today proposed making permanent the temporary income tax increase he signed into law three years ago, fully framing the debate over his fall re-election bid against Republican Bruce Rauner who wants the tax hike rolled back. Delivering his budget proposal for the fiscal year that begins July 1, Quinn sought to offer some sweeteners for keeping the tax increase—including a doubling of the tax credit for lower-income workers and offering a flat $500 property tax rebate to benefit homeowners. "As a result of our hard work to restore fiscal stability -- from spending reductions to pension...

BRUNSWICK, Ga. — A judge granted bond, set at $50,000 in cash, to a former teacher charged with having sex with several students. The judge set bond for Lori Quigley for all three counts she faces. Police arrested Quigley a week ago at her Georgia home. She resigned from her math teaching job about a week before her arrest.

Stanford Report, March 22, 2014 Michelle Obama underscores the importance of global education and beams into Stanford from Beijing Speaking at the Stanford Center at Peking University in Beijing on Saturday, Michelle Obama said study abroad allows students to realize that countries all have a stake in each other's success. Following her remarks, she held a conversation with students on the Stanford campus via a high-tech videoconference. Michelle Obama promoted study abroad programs during a speech at the Stanford Center at Peking University in Beijing on Saturday, then encouraged Stanford and local high school students sitting in Palo Alto to...

PUEBLO COUNTY, Colo. - Middle school students moved their lesson from the classroom to the shooting range. It wasn’t your typical field trip. A group of students in Pueblo County was firing live ammo and learning about gun safety. "I'm very excited, today we're going to come out here on the gun range and shoot a little bit. The past week we've learned about the revolutionary war," said Jonah Statezny, a Craver middle school student. "My favorite part is shooting guns. When I was little we used to go to the shooting range," said another student, Danielle Cooper. ... Appleseed...

As long as the kids are away, teachers can play, a panel of judges said Thursday, ruling that educators shouldn’t be fired for having sex with one another — even in their classrooms. The Manhattan appellate judges said foreign-language teachers Alini Brito, 34, and Cindy Mauro, 38, were treated too harshly when they were dismissed for engaging in a topless classroom tryst inside Brooklyn’s James Madison HS in 2009.

Erica Connor's eyes widen as she reads the four-page letter purportedly outlining a plot by Muslim fundamentalists to take over state education. ... Erica has added her own concerns about the Islamisation of state schools in Britain to those of dozens of teachers, classroom assistants and school staff to whom we have talked following widespread reports of the letter in the media. The document — entitled Operation Trojan Horse — originates in Birmingham and was leaked anonymously to a Sunday newspaper. It purports to outline a strategy of identifying schools in Muslim neighbourhoods, ridding them of non-Muslim heads and parachuting...

**SNIP** Late last week, it came to light a class of seventh-grade female students at Stephen Decatur Middle School had been required to make clay models of male genitalia as part of the Family Life and Human Development program taught in county schools to students in grades 5-11. While most agree the course, which teaches students about their changing bodies and making good decisions, is an important one for the students, few agreed making clay models of the male reproductive organs was an appropriate component of the program. **SNIP** Luzier said the girls in the class made life-size male genitalia...

A fortnight ago, my column focused on how Philadelphia's schoolteachers have joined public-school teachers in cities such as Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles, Columbus, New York and Washington in changing student scores on academic achievement tests. Teachers have held grade fixing parties, sometimes wearing rubber gloves to hide fingerprints. In some cases, poorly performing students were excused from taking exams to prevent them from dragging down averages. As a result of investigations, a number of schoolteachers and administrators have been suspended, fired or indicted by states attorneys general. Most of these cheating scandals have occurred in predominantly black schools across the...

These kids should learn write from wrong. Earlier this month, The Post exposed a scheme at Manhattan’s Murry Bergtraum HS for Business Careers in which failing students could get full credit without attending class, but instead watch video lessons and take tests online. One social-studies teacher had a roster of 475 students in all grades and subjects. Red-faced administrators encouraged a student letter-writing campaign to attack The Post and defend its “blended learning” program. Eighteen kids e-mailed to argue that their alma mater got a bad rap. Almost every letter was filled with spelling, grammar and punctuation errors.