Free Republic

A federal judge has ruled in favor of a Christian father seeking to have his kindergarten-aged child removed from classroom lessons teaching LGBT ideology, as litigation continues. In a Dec. 30 opinion authored by Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV, the United States Court for the District of Massachusetts sided with the father, identified as “Alan L.,” in his litigation against Lexington Public Schools over its inclusion of LGBT-related material in the kindergarten curriculum. The plaintiff, a father of a kindergarten student, alleges that the school district violated his “sincere and deeply held” religious beliefs as a “committed, practicing Christian” by...

The Chicago Teachers Union on Saturday promoted a protest of the Trump administration's action in Venezuela hosted by a who's who of far-left organisations, including a group that openly supports socialism. Activists from the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition, along with activists from the Party for Socialism and Liberation, organised just hours after news that Venezuela's socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro had been captured by U.S. special forces in a daring mission during the dead of night. By Saturday afternoon, protesters in cities across the nation came together with signs and promotional material made specially for...

Do parents have a right not to be lied to by a government school if their child starts undertaking a gender transition? That’s now a live legal dispute, and over the holidays a federal judge took the side of parents in a case from California. His ruling was stayed for now by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but one of these cases could make it to the Supreme Court. The California policies “are designed to create a zone of secrecy around a school student who expresses gender incongruity,” as Judge Roger Benitez writes. Children as young as two years...

YouTuber Nick Shirley returned Tuesday to one of the day care centers he profiled in a now viral video that accused the centers of millions of dollars in fraud. Shirley back in MinneapolisWhat we know: Shirley returned to the Quality Learning Center on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis on Tuesday afternoon as FOX 9 cameras were at the center. The center, which was mocked for having signage that misspelled learning as "Learing," appeared to have worked to fix its sign since the video was posted. Shirley was accompanied by the investigator featured in his YouTube video who had pulled records on...

How to spot saboteurs in K-12 The sabotage of K-12 education is easily implemented by rejecting good methods that work, while simultaneously forcing phony substitutes into classrooms. QED: our experts embraced a far-left ideology that prefers control and leveling. Weirdly enough, our Education Establishment ends up promoting an anti-education agenda. Here are the five most egregious examples of this totalitarian strategy in action: Sight-Words Versus Phonics. All the main European languages are phonetic. You first learn the alphabet, then the sounds represented by the letters; and then the blends of those sounds. This approach has always worked. It's the method...

Every December, the staff of the Martin Center share our higher-ed-reform dreams for the coming 12 months. Some are obvious; others are fanciful. We offer them all here in a spirit of optimism, for the reader’s enjoyment and edification. Turn to the Founders The Founding Fathers are a source of insight and wisdom that should be drawn on more frequently. Their writings on liberty and natural rights shed light on questions of human dignity. Their example of simultaneous restraint and boldness in the appropriate contexts provides a model of leadership. And their educational vision adds clarity to the purpose of...

WASHINGTON — Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin is hitting the brakes on $2.3 billion left in spending from the Biden administration’s electric school bus program — following backlash over New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s mandate and as the vehicles have been breaking down in the cold and failing to be produced in a timely manner to districts. Zeldin made the decision to review the taxpayer-funded program after $2.7 billion was already “frivolously wasted” under former President Joe Biden on thousands of electric buses, according to an agency spokesperson, working out to a price tag of roughly $318,452.45 per vehicle...

Some New York City teachers say it’s high time for a refresher on old-fashioned clocks. Tiana Millen, an assistant principal at Cardozo High School in Queens, said this year’s ban on smartphones revealed that many teens struggle to read traditional clocks. “That's a major skill that they're not used to at all,” she said. Overall, Millen said, the phone ban has been a major success at the school, and has helped kids focus in class and socialize at lunch. Foot traffic is moving more swiftly in hallways. Without eyes glued to their phones, more students are getting to class on...

Build Back Better is the next step in the increasing institutionalization of small children.The massive and historic entitlement-and-spending bill, Build Back Better (H.R. 5376), includes the “largest expansion” of government education since public high schools were established by the states more than “100 years ago,” according to President Biden. The bill was passed by the House at the end of November and is now the intense focus of the Democrat Senate and the Biden administration for passage before Christmas. Under the proposed legislation, the federal government would expand and then regulate not just public education but a good portion of...

Harvard is not cheap. Attending as an undergraduate costs $86,926 per year. On top of that, Harvard vacuums up staggering sums of taxpayer money, despite receiving $billions per year in donations and sitting on an endowment of $57 billion. But at least the students are learning something besides LGBTism, Critical Race Theory, and how to hate America. The New York Post reported last spring: The school’s math department is providing a new scaled-back math class for freshmen who are apparently arriving on campus lacking “foundational skills” in high school math basics like geometry and algebra. Why is it that students...

A new statewide survey shows New York’s bell-to-bell smartphone restrictions in schools are producing real results—fewer distractions, better classroom focus, and stronger student engagement. The findings come from more than 350 school administrators who responded to a survey in November after implementing the state’s new distraction-free policy earlier this year. The responses suggest that limiting phone use during the school day is already transforming learning environments across the state. One assistant superintendent in the Southern Tier called the shift “a game changer,” adding that students are “having conversations with each other” instead of looking down at their phones. Another principal...

Harvard professor torches Ivy League school over woke anti-white, anti-male culture in blistering essay A professor who spent 40 years teaching at Harvard University torched the Ivy League institution over its “exclusion of white males” in a searing essay announcing his retirement. In the piece titled “Why I’m Leaving Harvard,” history professor James Hankins said his decision to retire “was not a sudden one” and was made back in 2021 after two volatile years on campus, marked by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and George Floyd riots — the latter of which he said dramatically changed the school’s graduate admissions process....

The Trump administration’s FBI has released more than 100 additional pages of writings from Audrey Hale, the transgender shooter... These newly unclassified documents, part of a massive collection of notebooks and journals, offer a chilling look into the planning and financing of the assault that claimed the lives of three children and three adults. Hale, a biological woman who identified as a transgender man, used federal student financial aid, specifically Pell Grants, to fund the purchase of firearms used in the heinous 2023 attack. The FBI-released documents reportedly include Hale’s handwritten “Account Savings Record” page, tracking federal Pell Grant funds...

A Newsmax segment featuring California Assemblyman Kevin Kiley and Newsmax’s Joe Moeller focused on new findings of fraud and mismanagement across multiple California state programs, including community colleges, unemployment insurance, and social services, as outlined in the California State Auditor’s 2025 high-risk report. During the segment, Kiley highlighted what he described as a major discovery involving fraudulent applications submitted to California’s community college system. “Now the latest example that we’ve learned is that over a third of community college applications in the state were fraudulent. These were not real people, not real students, actually seeking a spot at one of...

New legislation would require schools to teach students about the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. According to the New York State Senate, the legislation will amend the Education Law to include instruction about the Jan. 6 insurrection as part of the state’s required courses regarding patriotism, citizenship, civic education and values, shared history of diversity, religious tolerance and human rights issues. The legislation, proposed by John C. Liu from New York’s 16th Senate District, is currently in the Senate’s Education Committee. If passed and signed into law, the amendment would take effect in July.

More than 4,000 elementary, middle and high schools across Korea have shut their doors as the country’s student population shrinks, new data shows. According to the Ministry of Education’s latest figures, revealed on Sunday by Rep. Jin Sun-mee of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, since 1980, 4,008 schools under 17 regional education offices nationwide have closed as of March this year. During the period, the number of enrolled students decreased from 9.9 million to 5.07 million. Elementary schools account for the majority of closures, with 3,674 shut down permanently, compared with 264 middle schools and 70 high schools. Over...

The New York Times rolled out another installment of its favorite genre — Ron DeSantis, Destroyer of All That Is Good™ — this time lamenting that New College of Florida, long a leftist sandbox where grades were optional, and gender theory reigned, has been rudely interrupted by a governor who thinks college should actually teach … well … college. “At the state school, gender studies is out. ‘The Odyssey’ is required reading. A Charlie Kirk statue is coming. Has one ideological bubble replaced another?” the Times hyperventilated. The Times paints the picture with a heavy brush: gender studies out, Homer’s...

More than 20 public middle and high schools in Seattle are facing scrutiny after reports that students were asked questions about gender identity and sexual orientation through a districtwide survey, without parents being informed of the survey’s content or how the responses would be used. According to National Review, the survey, known as the state’s “Check Yourself Survey,” is administered in every Seattle middle school and high school and includes questions that students as young as 10 years old are required to answer. The prompts reportedly touch on sensitive topics ranging from sexual attraction and gender identity to mental health...

In a request for opinion filed to state Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office on Dec. 12, Hancock asked whether schools could be excluded from the program if they were linked to a “foreign terrorist organization” or a “foreign adversary.” Hancock suggested schools that had hosted events for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group which Gov. Greg Abbott recently designated as a terrorist organization, would be affected. Abbott’s designation of CAIR as a foreign terrorist organization is part of an uptick in Texas politicians’ criticisms of Islam and the presence of Muslim organizations in the state. The...

The U.S. Department of Education has reported an end to more than $1 billion in attempted student aid fraud in 2025. These reforms were needed after the massive waste and fraud resulting from loosened rules during the Biden regime. “Federal investigators found nearly $90 million in aid had already been fraudulently disbursed, including over $30 million to deceased individuals and more than $40 million to bots posing as students,” according to a report from Campus Reform. That’s a lot of fraud, but it’s hardly surprising. Under Democrats, fraud and waste are rampant, as we learned in the era of DOGE....