Free Republic

The education story of the year has been the “Southern Surge.” An intrepid group of southern states have led the nation in post-pandemic recovery. In a decade, Mississippi moved from 49th to seventh in the nation on fourth-grade reading scores, despite remaining the poorest state. According to Harvard’s 2024 Education Recovery Scorecard, Louisiana is the only state to recover to 2019 achievement levels in both reading and math, while Alabama matched pre-Covid scores in fourth-grade math alone. All other states continue to lag prior achievement levels. Much of this success has rightly been credited to a handful of commonsense reforms:...

THIBODAUX, La. -- The teasing was relentless. Nude images of a 13-year-old girl and her friends, generated by artificial intelligence, were circulating on social media and had become the talk of a Louisiana middle school. The girls begged for help, first from a school guidance counselor and then from a sheriff’s deputy assigned to their school. But the images were shared on Snapchat, an app that deletes messages seconds after they’re viewed, and the adults couldn’t find them. The principal had doubts they even existed. Among the kids, the pictures were still spreading. When the 13-year-old girl stepped onto the...

FIRST ON FOX: A conservative, Trump-aligned legal group filed a civil rights complaint alleging that a school district in Colorado is using race as a major factor when determining disciplinary procedures and has retaliated against administrators who attempt to push back. America First Legal (AFL), founded by top Trump advisor Stephen Miller, filed a civil rights complaint asking the Department of Education and the Department of Justice to investigate Cherry Creek School District, alleging it is in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In its complaint, AFL cites a specific instance in which a Black...

ERIE COUNTY, N.Y. (WIVB) — On the heels of a statewide mandate requiring all school bus purchases in New York State be electric by 2027, parents in the Lake Shore Central School District are speaking out, claiming some bus drivers are turning the heat down, or off completely, in an attempt to conserve battery life on their electric school buses. WIVB News 4 has received several calls from concerned parents in the school district, which covers parts of Angola, Brant, and Derby, regarding their child’s bus trips to and from school, claiming they’re coming in freezing when they get home...

16-year-old Andrew Meismer was stabbed to death at a Texas school by his 18-year-old classmate Aundre Matthews on Wednesday morning. Matthews allegedly has a history at the school that includes violent altercations. The Harris County DA’s office on Friday charged Matthews with murder after he fatally stabbed Meismer with scissors during a fight at Ross S. Sterling High School. Meismer was airlifted to a hospital on Wednesday, but he died from his injuries. Goose Creek Superintendent Dr. Randal O’Brien addressed the fatal stabbing. “After careful consideration, the administration decided that the best way to serve our students and faculty in...

As we go about our daily lives, termites keep busy in the darkness, eating away at the foundations of our homes until they have been destroyed from within and are ready to collapse. Similar work is performed by teachers unions. The New York Post reports on the “neopronouns” and “xeopronouns” the National Education Association pushed at a recent indoctrination session entitled “Advancing LGBTQ+ Justice”: Neopronouns are “new” “pronouns” such as “xe/xem/xyr,” and other letters randomly shoved together. Xeopronouns are for “conceptual identities” such as “cat/cats/catself.” Because if a boy can identify as a girl, a girl can identify as a...

Four teachers at a Wisconsin school have been accused of locking children in a pitch-black 'dungeon' as a cruel punishment tactic. A lawsuit launched by the furious parents of three children at Thurston Woods Public School in Milwaukee accuses the staff members of traumatizing their children. Filed on December 8, the legal document alleges that between 2022 and 2024 the teachers would routinely place young children in a boiler room to scare them. 'When asked about 'the dungeon' by their parents, some students would become so scared, stressed and upset that they would begin to cry,' the lawsuit reads. 'Students...

According to Campus Reform, “In a bold move aligning with federal directives, the Regional School Unit 24 school board in Sullivan, Maine, voted to reaffirm a policy that limits bathroom access and athletic participation to students’ biological sex.” This demonstrates that utilizing the power of the federal government to ensure normalcy and basic rights is effective. “The decision, originally made in October, echoes President Trump’s executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” and places RSU 24 among a growing number of districts nationwide reinforcing sex-based distinctions in public education.” WABI is reporting that around 100 community members filled a...

A Minnesota high school has threatneed to suspend students who talk positively about Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE) agents. Paul Paetzel, the principal at Edina High School in Minnesota, has warned that making reference to the work of ICE agents and President Trump’s policy of mass deportations goes against the “culture” that his school is trying to foster. He wrote in a letter parents: I want to speak directly and proactively about the culture we are committed to creating at Edina High School. As we continue to grow as a community, it is essential that we are clear about the...

In early 2020, the University of California set the tone for the rest of the country when its regents voted to drop SAT and ACT admissions requirements through 2024. That decision, initially framed as a pandemic necessity, quickly reshaped admissions nationwide. By late 2022, roughly 1,750 schools, or about 80 percent of U.S. universities, had adopted test-optional policies, according to Forbes.“It’s a sea change in terms of how admissions decisions are being made,” Robert Schaeffer, of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, told NBC News.“The pandemic created a natural experiment.”Five years later, the results of this “natural experiment”...

A San Diego school district is under fire for providing a curriculum that teaches young students about nine genders and 30 sexual orientations. Parents have objected to a slideshow featured on the San Diego Unified Schools (SDUS) website entitled 'LGBTQIA+ Terms you should know'. The resources outlined definitions for nine gender identities including transgender, non-binary, genderfluid and agender. The slides also included a graphic showcasing more than 30 'LGBTQ Youth Sexual Orientations' including graysexual, queer, asexual and pansexual. SDUS is the second largest district in California and services more than 121,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. It is unclear...

Imagine sending your seventh-grader off to school one morning, believing that the adults in the room will protect their innocence. Now imagine that same child coming home shaken because their teacher selected and projected graphic sexual images onto the classroom Smart Board, images so explicit that even the teacher admitted, on the spot, that “some of them were inappropriate.” *** Under the banner of an “art project,” Ms. Gates instructed the entire class to visit an unvetted, unfiltered website. No content warning. No parental notification. No age-appropriate safeguards. Just a free-for-all link that immediately served pornography to a room full...

In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading. Many teenagers are assigned few full books to read from beginning to end — often just one or two per year, according to researchers and thousands of responses to an informal reader survey by The New York Times. Twelfth-grade reading scores are at historic lows, and college professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts. Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future,...

The video also showed the black student running back up to the stabbing victim after the attack screaming “white b*tch!” before he was stopped by another individual. Charges in the stabbing were pending after the incident.

Where moonbats have been allowed to dominate it, education is not about education; it is about moonbattery. This includes introducing prepubescent children to sexual depravity: A Maryland middle school presented a slideshow to 6th graders celebrating “Transgender Awareness Week” where the children were given a lesson that included “advice for coming out” and “8 tips for being nonbinary.” This time it isn’t Baltimore but Bethesda. Westland Middle School is a public school financed by taxpayers. Indoctrination included “a video that was produced by the LGBT educational resource provider Pop’n’Olly.” In no sane world would an “LGBT educational resource provider” be...

The number of Gen Z college freshmen who are entering universities without high school math skills is skyrocketing — as SAT scores are plummeting, a stunning new report has found. Even more shocking — many of the students can’t even do middle-school level math, meaning their skills are fifth grade or below. Experts say this phenomenon, combined with steadily rising high school graduate rates, show that the country is suffering a massive grade inflation problem. The University of California San Diego, for instance, has reported a staggering 30-fold increase in the number of students unable to do basic arithmetic over...

My 11-year-old son joined the elementary school band, and so I went to the parents’ orientation night held at a local high-school. As the night went on it became obvious why young men rage against the larger social system and why they might find a character like Nick Fuentes attractive. The classrooms were inundated with DEI messages and trans pride flags. On the walls there were posters, stickers and decorations that all invoked the various totems of diversity. Black Lives Matter messaging, decolonization messaging, LGBTQ+ messaging and basically every sort of race and gender social justice messaging you can imagine...

Malevolent kooks at the University of Minnesota are not the only educators in this Somali colony who really don’t like the native population. The state’s largest teachers union, Education Minnesota, offers professional development courses on such topics as Interrupting Whiteness: The “racial equity trainings” can be brought “to your building” when requested by Education Minnesota members, the union website explains, and offer instruction on topics like “Culturally Responsive Teaching With a Racial Justice Lens” and “Cultural Competency.” “Racial justice” is Liberalese for antiwhite race hate. “Cultural competency” entails subordinating American and European culture to less successful ones. In a state...

Upset father: ‘My son had no idea what any of this meant, but he knew that it was weird and sick and gross’ A 6th-grade student survey created by the Oregon Health Authority for asks participants, among other things, their “gender identity,” “sexual orientation,” and if they are “transgender.” The first question under the “Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation” section offers choices such as “Demigirl/Demiboy,” “Genderfluid,” and “Agender”; the second includes “Pansexual,” “Asexual or Aromantic,” and “Something else that fits better (Please tell us more).” “Demigirl/demiboy” is defined as someone who “partially identifies as a girl/boy or with femininity/masculinity, but...

Trust is like a bridge built over years but burned in moments. For generations, American parents have walked their children across that bridge each morning, delivering them into the care of teachers and administrators who promised to guard them like their own. But what happens when the guardians become the very danger parents sought to protect their children from? Across Colorado, that bridge is collapsing. School districts that once partnered with families in raising children have transformed into ideological fortresses, operating in shadows and silence. Parents send permission slips for field trips, imagining museums and monuments. They pack lunches and...