Free Republic

A Berkeley middle school teacher who was accused of instigating a violent clash with neo-Nazis in Sacramento this summer is back at it, recorded in a deranged rant at a Berkeley protest against Milo Yiannopoulos shortly before violence erupted Wednesday. Yvette Felarca, a social studies teacher at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, attended a protest against Yiannopoulos’ scheduled speech at the University of California Berkeley Wednesday, when she spoke out against the Breitbart senior editor’s controversial views and called on protesters to prevent him from speaking “by any means necessary.” In a video posted to YouTube on Thursday, Felarca...

A former middle school gym teacher was arrested Monday for a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old student, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said Monday. Shawnetta D. Reece, 40, of Blairsville, was sexually involved with the student in 2013, the agency said in a news release. Reece was arrested after the Union County Sheriff’s Office received information on the alleged relationship, and asked the GBI to assist with the investigation. “The student was moving from the 8th grade into the 9th grade during this time,” the news release stated. “As a result of the investigation, Reece has been arrested for child...

Faculty members from the eight Ivy League schools poured over $2.5 million into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, a figure over 150 times larger than the approximately $15,000 spent to help elect President Donald Trump, The Daily Caller News Foundation calculated Saturday. Faculty at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Brown spent a total of $2,609,943 on Clinton’s campaign and $15,190 on her general election rival, Trump, according to data culled from The Center for Responsive Politics. Harvard University employees contributed the most money to each candidate, spending $770,685 and $4,009...

This fall, some Colorado teachers will return to school armed with knowledge—and guns. Laura Carno, author of “Government Ruins Nearly Everything: Reclaiming Social Issues from Uncivil Servants,” is bringing advanced firearms training to school teachers. “Can government stop school shooting[s]? The answer is no … How do we as a community keep our kids safer if we say government is not the right place to fix that problem?” Carno . ... Her answer is a training program called the Faculty/Administrator Safety Training and Emergency Response, or FASTER. Carno’s nonprofit Second Amendment advocacy group, Coloradans for Civil Liberties, planned to bring...

The president of the country's largest labor union, Lily Eskelsen Garcia of the National Education Association, told delegates at her organization's annual gathering that they would not work with the Trump administration because the president and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos could not be trusted to do what is in the best interests of children. Eskelsen Garcia just addressed the 96th NEA Representative Assembly meeting in Boston, accusing President Donald Trump of residing "at the dangerous intersection of arrogance and ignorance" and labeled DeVos as "the queen of for-profit privatization of public education." She said in part: "Let me say this...

I’m on the road, traveling out West, doing a little hiking, a little sightseeing, a lot of thinking. I just sat down with my laptop and a cup of coffee under the blue skies of Wyoming, thinking about how much I will learn in these 4½ weeks. That’s the same chunk of the school calendar reflected on our students’ progress reports. Just over four weeks — about 23 days, almost a month.(snip) One of the first questions people on the road ask is about your occupation. That’s always an easy ice-breaker. I reckon I don’t yet look retirement age, so...

TORONTO, June 21, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — The Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association is tweeting support for the international pro-abortion Women Deliver conference to be held in Vancouver in 2019. OECTA tweeted on June 14: Just announced! @WomenDeliver, the largest global conf. on the rights of women, will be hosted in Canada this year: But Women Deliver, funded in part by the United Nations, advocates for global “sexual and reproductive health and rights” for women. Lest there be any doubt what that means, the Women Deliver website notes: Realizing these rights requires meeting the need for modern contraception, and sexual and...

Zero proficiency in math, English in probe of 6 inner-city schools. In an astonishing outcome, an investigation of six Baltimore schools found not a single student passed the state’s proficiency test in the subjects of math and English. ... In February, columnist Thomas Sowell, noting “most public schools in most low-income, inner-city neighborhoods produce educational outcomes that are far below the outcomes in other neighborhoods,” observed that many teachers who use unorthodox methods to reverse that trend encounter opposition from the education establishment. He said that in his 40 years of observing successful minority schools, he was struck “by how...

Vili Fualaau says he still loves former-school-teacher-turned-wife Mary Kay Letourneau – but being married to a registered sex offender is simply bad for business, according to Radar Online. SEE ALSO Mary Kay Letourneau splits with student-turned-husband Mary Kay Letourneau splits with student-turned-husband Fualaau said he and Letourneau are still happily together and he merely filed for a legal separation from her May 9 because he believes it will make it easier for him to get a license to distribute “Cigaweed” marijuana cigarettes.

It's going to take much more money to keep Chicago's schools open through June than previously revealed, top Emanuel budget aide Carole Brown says. The Chicago Public Schools actually need $596 million to keep schools open the rest of the school year, and not just the $129 million officials have publicly discussed, a top aide to Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Tuesday. ... Brown said all options are on the table to find the cash needed to stave off an early closing of schools that CPS CEO Forrest Claypool has warned might be needed but that Emanuel has ruled out to...

A Boone County school teacher says she let students Thursday see and one student photograph her at school wearing a jacket saying “Tuck Frump,” with letters composing the f-word highlighted in white. Cheryl Judy, who’s now receiving backlash online, said she only briefly revealed the anti-President Trump statement at school to about six to eight high school students. . . . She said she’s been a West Virginia public school teacher for about 23 years, 13 or 14 of those in Boone. She said she’s also the secretary for the Boone branch of the American Federation of Teachers, one of...

The progressive media, and their left-wing allies, have been on an endless binge of Trump-bashing that began even before Donald Trump took office as president. This Trump derangement syndrome results from the fact that during the campaign, and later when he was elected, Trump took firm hold of the national debate and reshaped it in his image. But progressives have their own dueling national narrative, one which they are trying to reassert through the use of allegations of Russian collusion and through a war on "fake news." Nicholas Kristof, in an opinion piece for The New York Times, argues that...

The United States could reduce Pentagon spending by over a trillion dollars in the next decade-spending $5.2 trillion rather than the currently planned $6.3 trillion- by adopting strategy of military restraint. That’s the bottom line of a study I produced along with several colleagues as part of “Developing Alternative Defense Strategies 2016,” an exercise organized by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, where groups from five think tanks used CSBA’s “Strategic Choices” software to reimagine the U.S. military budget.The others all increased military spending. The teams from the Center for New American Security and the Center for Strategic and...

A Florida high school math teacher made a miscalculation when she let a 14-year-old drive her to Waffle House while she was drunk, authorities said. Terra Virgin, 32, was arrested Sunday night on charges of child neglect and permitting an unauthorized minor to drive after her car was pulled over in Tampa with the teen behind the wheel. Virgin, a teacher at Freedom High School, had five beers but had a craving for a meal and convinced the teen to give her a ride, authorities said. "The adult that was in the car was quite inebriated and she was aware...

President Trump’s budget "blueprint" for the U. S. Department of Education recommends a 13 percent decrease in spending for the agency, but provides few details on how he will reach that goal. Nevertheless, the details that the Trump Administration does provide have already drawn the ire of the education establishment. The blueprint promises to preserve and protect special education and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Meanwhile, the blueprint claims the new administration "eliminates or reduces over 20 categorical programs that do not address national needs, duplicate other programs, or are more appropriately supported with State, local, or private funds,...

A married Texas teacher who allegedly had a sexual relationship with a student grinned in her mugshot after her arrest. Sarah Fowlkes, 27, a former teacher of anatomy and physiology at Lockhart High School, was arrested on Monday for her alleged contact with a 17-year-old student.

A 27-year-old anatomy teacher in Texas was arrested Monday, accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a 17-year-old student..... Wearing an ear-to-ear smile, Fowlkes looks like she’s posing for a new Facebook profile photo instead of a jailhouse mug.....Fowlkes turned herself in to police in Lockhart, Texas, about 35 miles from Austin, where authorities charged her with having an improper relationship with a student at Lockhart High, a second-degree felony....

Frightened teachers at a Sydney primary school have revealed students are showing signs of extreme radicalisation at a young age, saying they have been traumatised by threats of beheading and other violent behaviour. Students as young as in Year 5 are making the threats and pressuring peers into reading the Koran at Punchbowl Public School in Sydney's southwest, the Daily Telegraph has reported. Documents given to the newspaper reportedly reveal that at least three staff members have taken stress leave, received counselling and been paid compensation after bullying from Islamic students.

At a time when the United States has plummeted in the global rankings of education standards, one of the country’s largest states is poised to scrap a test designed to measure the reading and writing skills of people trying to become teachers. Citing the fact that an outsized percentage of black and Hispanic candidates were failing the test, members of the New York state Board of Regents plans to adopt a task force's recommendation to eliminate the literacy exam, known as the Academic Literacy Skills Test, given to prospective teachers. The move to do away with the test has been...

Officials at the New York State Board of Regents believe it is more important to be politically correct than to ensure that the individuals educating New York’s students have a mastery of the English language. Associated Press reports that the Board of Regents plans to scrap a literacy test for potential teachers today because too many non-whites are failing the test. Critics claim the test is making it difficult to achieve diversity within the teaching profession. The test in question is the Academic Literacy Skills Test (ALST), which “measures whether a prospective teacher can understand and analyze reading material and...