Free Republic

The white students gathered around the fire, speculating why parts of the book were not already engulfed in flames. “It’s a hard cover!” shouts one male student in a video amid laughs as ripped-out pages burn, torn from a novel written by a Hispanic author who had suggested white people are treated differently in society. That angered some students at Georgia Southern University. In response to Jennine Capó Crucet’s talk on the Statesboro, Ga., campus Wednesday, where she focused her discussion on white privilege, students gathered at a grill and torched her novel “Make Your Home Among Strangers” — about...

A 12-year-old Kansas girl was arrested – as in, hauled out of school in handcuffs, charged with a crime, and was handed a court date – for making a “finger gun” and pointing it at fellow students. According to the Kansas City Star, police in Overland Park “hauled her out of school in handcuffs, arrested her and charged the child with a felony for threatening” after the middle-schooler pointed the “finger gun” at other students before pointing it at herself. Johnson County District Court documents obtained by the Kansas City Star claim the child “unlawfully and feloniously communicated a threat...

A high school in Ohio has promised to do away with the titles of homecoming king and queen after two girls were voted by their peers to win the "popularity contest." At Friday night's football game, Milford High School named two female students "homecoming royalty," according to a press release shared on the district's Facebook page. While the school has typically named a male student "king" and a female student "queen" at their homecoming events, Milford Exempted Village School District will now use the term "homecoming royalty" following the groundbreaking results. The choice to describe the two students who received the most votes from the student body...

Last week, Google announced its intent to join Apple, IBM, Microsoft, and more than 350 other private sector companies in the Pledge to America’s Workers Initiative. Through this program, the White House and its private sector partners have committed to providing Americans—from recent high school graduates to those nearing retirement—with a pathway into the skilled workforce of the future, bypassing the traditional four-year college track. The current K-12 to college pipeline is failing to prepare students for that workforce, and for many, is instead leaving them saddled with debt that prevents them from accessing the training and skills necessary to...

Bishop Samson Shukardin said minorities are 'considered infidels and they are depicted negatively' in school textbooks Religious bigotry in Pakistan schools is forcing Christian parents to give their children Islamic names – according to a bishop there. Bishop Samson Shukardin of Hyderabad told Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) that Christian children and other faith minorities were using different names to prevent them from being subjected to abuse. He said: “Many minorities give their children Islamic names so they will not be singled out as Christians and become potential targets for discrimination in primary or secondary schools...

Baltimore: “Homeschooling Starts in Public School.” ??? by Scott Woodruff • October 4, 2019 The city of Baltimore has once again created conflict by unlawfully demanding that homeschool families enroll in public school. I addressed this issue less than two months ago and believed it was resolved. It was disappointing to see it surface again. A family moved to Maryland from another state and decided to homeschool their children in Baltimore. They filed a proper notice of intent, but a local official told them: “You need to enroll your children first in the local public school, and then un-enroll them...

Drexel University must pay the federal government nearly $190,000 to cover the strip club spending habits of a former professor, according to a settlement announced Monday. Over a 10-year period, Chikaodinaka Nwankpa, the former head of Drexel University’s electrical engineering department, burned hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funds meant for energy, science and naval research. The $190,000 settlement, which must be paid by the university, will help the school stave off a lawsuit by the federal government.

In 1935, Alice Jackson was denied admission to the University of Virginia.  When she asked why she was denied, university officials were frank. She was denied admission because she was black, they told her, as well as "for other good and sufficient reasons not necessary to be herein enumerated.”Eventually, the plight of Alice Jackson and James Meredith at Ole Miss and others would lead to a broad national consensus that denying admission to a public college because of the race of the applicant was both illegal, but also immoral.Everything old is new again.  In Virginia, universities are once again...

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold... When Yeats wrote his famous lines in 1919, he was describing the chaos in Europe after World War I. The world had exploded into pieces; communication among them was difficult. Even though life feels safer now, we nonetheless have the same uneasy sensation that deceit has become ordinary. People say one thing, mean the opposite. The center cannot hold. President Trump complains a lot about the dishonesty of fake news. The fascinating thing is that the bearers of Fake News, such as CNN, flip the story so...

A public library in the Midwest has invited a drag queen known for his adult entertainment show titled “Gender Fluids” to read to toddlers during its Saturday story hour on multiple occasions. Billing himself as “Miss Richfield 1981,” Russ King is a drag artist who has previously been photographed in a sacrilegious pose, spread eagle on top of what looks like an altar beneath a large cross at St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco. King’s website and Facebook page display many disturbing photos of him dressed in garish clothing in exaggerated feminine poses, sometimes with nearly naked or naked...

Blacks destroy school systems and schools,” read one letter to county officials about the busing plan. “Black families (as a core group) don’t value education like other cultural groups,” read another. “The Black Community needs to take responsibility for the behavior of its people,” a third declared, “or the white man will take them back to place where they don’t want to go.” Don’t worry, though. The writer insisted they were not being racist. These letters were written in recent months in response to a Howard County (Maryland) Council resolution calling on the county school system to desegregate its schools....

A social media post about a message projected on a Hephzibah High School classroom whiteboard referencing the Confederate flag has resulted in a teacher being placed on administrative leave. The post from a parent of a student shows the projection that includes a Confederate flag and the statement, “a sticker you put on the back of your pickup truck to announce that you intend to marry your sister. Think of it like a white trash ‘Save The Date’ card.” It was reportedly used as an example of a story within a story. According to the Richmond County School System, an...

San Diego MassResistance parents who were protesting a horrid “Drag Queen Story Hour” at the library strongly stood up to a rabid crowd of LGBT activists who came to intimidate and harass them with anti-Christian bigotry. In fact, the LGBT activists were clearly surprised and disheartened that the parents were ready for them.

A massive police presence and the lockdown of three college campuses in Davie led to the eventual discovery of a man with a colorful toy gun that apparently launched the incident. About 1 a.m. Friday, Davie police tweeted out a picture of the gun that was found after the lockdown had been lifted. An officer found the man walking with the toy gun on Stirling Road, police said. Davie police conducted an extensive search of the FAU campus while helicopters flew overhead. Police presence was heavy throughout the area just south of Interstate 595 and Davie Road.

One of the most common beliefs about American education is that teaching is an "underpaid" profession. Think tanks purport to calculate the "teacher pay gap." The media run stories about teachers taking second and third jobs to pay the bills. Politicians call for across-the-board raises. They all see raising teacher pay as a matter of simple fairness, as well as a way to attract better teachers and improve educational outcomes. They are all misguided. The highly publicized "pay gap" that dominates news headlines is the product of a simplistic methodology that, when universally applied, suggests that nurses, firefighters, and other...

INDIANAPOLIS - The U.S. Justice Department is supporting Catholic Church leaders in Indianapolis who are being sued over the firing of a teacher in a same-sex marriage. Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband says the First Amendment protects the free exercise of religion and gives faith-based schools the right to associate with some people and not others. The government filed a statement Friday in Marion County court. Joshua Payne-Elliott says the Archdiocese of Indianapolis illegally interfered in his contract with Cathedral High School where he had worked for 13 years. The school fired him in June on orders from the archdiocese....

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) announced Tuesday it will push for aggressive expansion of access to higher education in the upcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA). The CHC put out a list of priorities for higher education, including increasing college accessibility and affordability, support for teachers, oversight of the higher education system, and renewed support for Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) as well as diversity in education. Congress is expected to debate reauthorization of the HEA when it comes back from recess mid-October. The landmark law sets guidelines for how federal funding is distributed in higher education. The CHC's...

Elizabeth Warren’s rise in the polls (and Joe Biden’s stumbles) will start obscuring what the first eight months of the presidential primary campaign revealed to many: the Democratic Party is fractured along lines of ideology, identity, and age (if age is not a subset of identity). A new survey suggests college-educated whites are driving fissures into the Democratic rank-and-file.Even before the presidential cycle started in earnest, it was becoming apparent that Democrats have an “upstairs / downstairs” coalition, in which a relatively small elite drive policy in ways that do not always serve the interests of the party’s traditional...

A new Illinois law requires Illinois schools to teach kids of all ages about the contributions of the LGBTQ community, the Chicago Tribune reported last month. Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker signed the Inclusive Curriculum Law August 9; it mandates that public schools teach students as early as possible about contributions lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people have made to U.S. state and national history. The details about why it passed and who passed it demonstrate just how much the LGBTQ lobby is targeting children to focus on a specific ideology, excluding others — with taxpayer dollars. While the bill...

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) made an appearance on BET's new series "Young Gifted and Broke" to talk about the Democrats' plan to cancel all outstanding student loan debt. According to Omar, the system is stacked against immigrants and it's time for Wall Street to bail the American people out of debt. "My family, we didn't really recover. We went through the private loan system. I didn't really know anything about it. That's my fault. People talk about financial literacy but they also prey on people like me," fellow panelist and author Michael Arceneux said. "That's an important piece because a...