Free Republic

I-Team: French teacher at HISD school doesn't speak French HOUSTON - How do you teach a French class, if you don’t even speak French? The I-Team discovered that’s exactly what is happening at the Houston Independent School District’s Energy Institute High School in the 1800 block of Sampson Street. Sharonda White’s son Nathanial is a junior at the school. "I thought it was a joke, I couldn't believe this was happening,” White said. We asked her son about his classroom experience. I-Team: “Does your teacher speak French?” Nathanial White: “No sir.” I-Team: “Have you ever heard him speak a word...

Teacher isn’t fired after giving teen gifts, sending ‘love’ texts By Susan Edelman A Queens middle-school teacher let a 14-year-old student drive his car, gave him cash and expensive gifts, and exchanged hundreds of texts behind his parent’s back. But, over the objections of the outraged parents and principal, the teacher can keep his job, an arbitrator has ruled. James Rampulla Jr., 44, who taught at Irwin Altman MS 172 in Floral Park, sent some of the 513 texts to the boy after 11 p.m. and included the words “I love you,” according to evidence presented at the teacher’s administrative...

A new study released by the Boston-based Pioneer Institute finds that new technology development that has been encouraged through the use of federal grants has served to threaten children’s privacy by allowing the collection of data on every child. Authors of the study Emmett McGroarty, Joy Pullmann, and Jane Robbins make the case that by means of the nationalized Common Core standards, which states were lured into adopting through competitive grants in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RttT) stimulus program in 2009, the federal government has used grant funds to induce states to build identical, increasingly sophisticated student...