Free Republic

If Minneapolis school officials and other educators across the country want to keep students safe, they should abandon student discipline policies based on quotas and eradicate notions of 'defunding the police.' Dangerous calls from activists to “defund the police,” including school police, were splashed across the headlines over the summer. Now officials in one school district at the forefront of the movement are having second thoughts.Minneapolis Public School officials were among the first to announce they were canceling their contract with local law enforcement for school security after the tragic incident involving George Floyd occurred in that city. That the...

I’ve been outraged by the cancelling of Columbus Day since 2009. Initially as Dewey From Detroit in Goodbye Columbus: What enters the classroom in one decade emerges as mainstream 15 years later… When you combine the social engineering principals of political correctness and social justice you get…a rejection not only of the explorer that made the building of our great country possible, but the political philosophy that made it a great country. In an era when few Americans bothered to ask “who watches the watchers” fewer still were concerned with “who teaches the teachers.” Unfortunately this is the answer to...

In-person attendance at some Big Apple schools is so low, instead of students, teachers expect to see tumbleweeds rolling down the hallways, staffers told The Post. Three weeks after Mayor de Blasio trumpeted the reopening of schoolhouse doors to kids from 3-K to high school, the city Department of Education refuses to publicly report any daily attendance data. But insiders working in largely deserted buildings revealed last week just how bad attendance has become. “Ghost town is definitely the right word for it,” a Brooklyn high school teacher said. “It’s very quiet.” The teacher said only a handful of students...

A teen has been arrested in the shooting death early Sunday of an Ohio State University student after an altercation outside an off-campus frat house, according to reports. Columbus police said they found the victim Chase Meola, 23, in an alley next to the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house.Police said Kinte Mitchell Jr., 18, was arrested a few blocks away and charged with killing Meola, The Columbus Dispatch reported.

France's president explicitly intends the move to stifle religious instruction of children.October 2, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — French president Emmanuel Macron announced on Friday morning that he intends to outlaw homeschooling for all children except those who have a health condition that would justify staying away from school. He also intends to step up control on private independent schools that receive no public funds, in particular through inspections on the curricula taught there, by more severely implementing a recent law that requires such schools to teach a “common core” defined by a high authority for education. The new law would come...

In recent years, education activists have adopted the argument that white supremacism and the misuse of mathematics explain racial inequality in educational attainment. “On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness,” University of Illinois professor Rochelle Gutierrez has claimed. In New York City, school officials and the mayor’s office have embraced this narrative. Schools chancellor Richard Carranza linked black and Hispanic students’ mathematics deficiencies to teachers’ implicit bias. Yet at the same time, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s education masterplan foresees offering algebra, a gateway to higher-level math courses, to all eighth-graders by 2022. Advocacy groups and even some academics contend...

... [T]he pandemic-era policies of many progressive jurisdictions are sabotaging basic civic goods, with anti-Trump zeal as an accelerant and with effects on minority communities that are likely to far outlast the Trump era. This means that for many African-Americans and Hispanics, a key legacy of 2020 may be a well-intentioned liberal betrayal of their interests, a hollowing-out of the institutions that protect and serve them, and the deepening of America’s racial inequalities even if Trumpism goes down to defeat. The most important part of this sabotage, which is the subject of an essential Alec MacGillis article for The New...

A high school principal in Florida who was fired last year after telling a student’s mother “not everyone believes the Holocaust happened” might be rehired this week. Superintendent Donald Fennoy has recommended that the Palm Beach County school board rehire former Spanish River High School Principal William Latson and give him $152,000 in back pay, news outlets reported. The board is set to meet Wednesday. The recommendation follows a Florida administrative judge’s August ruling that Latson should not have been fired. The school board voted 5-2 last October to fire Latson on grounds of “ethical misconduct” and “failure to carry...

A Zoom “strike,” in which parents withdrew their children from distance learning, swept across California the week of Sept. 28 to Oct. 2. It called for in-person classes to fully resume, as many schools across the state continue distance learning or only short periods of in-person teaching. Joseph Chang of Kern County was one of the parents who “Zoomed out.” He recently posted a photo on social media of his second-grade daughter crying in front of a computer, and it went viral. “I had literally people around the entire country and around the world reaching out to me,” Chang told...

Do not ever get between parents and their kids’ sports. This is an important lesson anyone who has ever witnessed someone go all momma bear at a local soccer match when a referee makes a bad call. Police often attend games to make sure overzealous parents don’t go crazy over minor offenses. With college futures on the line, some parents will not be ok with anyone disrupting their plans. This is a lesson Ammon Bundy failed to learn when he caused the cancelation of a Caldwell vs. Emmett high school football game​1​ so he could protest being asked to wear...

by Ron Kersten A sixth grade teacher threw a child out of virtual class and then belittled him for naming President Donald Trump as a person he "admired." Brendan Stanton, a middle school teacher at Perry G. Keithley Middle School in Seattle, deleted the child's answer and kicked him out of the online classroom for a whole period. Stanton then went on a rant about the president to sixth graders -- all caught on video. When the child's mother, a Hispanic woman, complained to him, he lied and misled her about what happened. Unfortunately for Brandon Stanton, the mother...

A teacher in a Tacoma middle school kicked a ten-year-old student out of his remote learning chatroom and scolded him for responding to a question about a person he admires with the answer “Donald J. Trump.” According to a report by KTTH afternoon host Jason Rantz at mynorthwest.com, Brendan Stanton, a teacher at P.G. Keithley Middle school, poses a “question of the day” each day to his sixth grade students. On Friday, he asked them, “Who is the one person you admire and why?” Students could write their responses in the online chatroom. A screenshot in Rantz’s story shows Elsy...

A Tacoma, Washington middle school teacher took great offense when one of his students named President Trump as a person he admires. The thing is, Perry G. Keithley Middle School sixth grade teacher Brendan Stanton asked his virtual class this very question — “who is the one person you admire and why?” I admire Donald J. Trump because he is making America great again. And because he is the best president the United States of America could ever, ever have. And he built the wall so terrorists couldn’t come into in the U. S. Trump is the best person in...

HONOLULU (AP) — Zan Timtim doesn’t think it’s safe for her eighth-grade daughter to return to school in person during the coronavirus pandemic but also doesn’t want her exposed to a remote learning program that misspelled and mispronounced the name of Queen Liliʻuokalani, the last monarch to rule the Hawaiian Kingdom. Timtim’s daughter is Native Hawaiian and speaks Hawaiian fluently, “so to see that inaccuracy with the Hawaiian history side was really upsetting,” she said. Even before the school year started, Timtim said she heard from other parents about racist, sexist and other concerning content on Acellus, an online program...

New York City on Wednesday will close public schools and nonessential businesses in parts of Brooklyn and Queens that have registered a week-long spike in coronavirus cases, as the city works to stop an increase in the virus after keeping cases down all summer. Mayor Bill de Blasio said during a news conference Sunday that all schools and nonessential business in neighborhoods within nine ZIP Codes would close beginning Wednesday. The neighborhoods are Far Rockaway, Edgemere, Kew Gardens, Kew Gardens Hills and Pomonok in Queens, and Borough Park, Gravesend, Homecrest, Midwood, Bensonhurst, Mapleton, Flatlands, Midwood, Gerritsen Beach, Homecrest and Sheepshead...

The student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison refused to publish an op-ed that arguing against the “defund the police” movement over the fear of backlash. The op-ed was penned and submitted by Tripp Grebe, who worked as a conservative columnist for the student paper, called the Badger-Herald. In it, Grebe criticized calls to defund and abolish police departments. The paper’s initial response: At the beginning of the fall semester, Samira Bhushan, an opinion editor at the paper, sent an email to Grebe, informing him that his stance too controversial and might invite “backlash.”

SMU beat No. 25 Memphis 30-27 on Saturday to stay unbeaten, but the school’s students weren’t there to see it. Police ejected the entire SMU student section — which numbered roughly 1,000 — late in the first half for not wearing masks or adhering to social distancing guidelines.

It’s not like this was a controversial position when you looked at the data. It’s not like there weren’t medical experts saying what The Washington Post has reported recently about schools in the COVID era. Instead, we got endless drama from teachers who didn’t want to work. We had to deal with their nonsense about dying on the job, how they’re signing wills in case they die, and the media did well in peddling the panic porn to make these people hysterical. Parents want their kids in school. And sorry, teachers, you need to get back to work. If you...

WICHITA FALLS, TX – A professor at Midwestern State University is facing some online backlash after a rather unsavory comment of his on Facebook (which detailed an adoration for cops being killed) wound up being broadcast and circulated.

A professor at Ohio State opted to take “anti-racist learning” after writing an article talking about his love of college football. OSUniversity professor Matthew Mayhew wrote an article for Inside Higher Ed touting the virtues of college football... Mayhew, a Higher Education professor at OSU, insisted that America’s universities should get back to “essentializing college football.” “Essentializing college football might help get us through these uncharacteristically difficult times of great isolation, division, and uncertainty. Indeed, college football holds a special bipartisan place in the American heart,” Mayhew wrote. “At a time when colleges and universities have been placed under extreme...