Free Republic

Federal investigators have concluded that an Arizona district school board failed to protect a middle school student from antisemitic harassment by classmates. The US Department of Education said in a statement that the Tempe area Kyrene School District did not respond appropriately to months of antisemitic harassment experienced by an Altadena Middle School student, which was a violated of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. According to the investigation by the department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the harassment took place over the course of five months, both on school grounds and online and was perpetrated by nine...

CHANDLER, Ariz. - Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher, roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or on the floor. They are studying Shakespeare’s “As You Like It’’ - but not in any traditional way. In this technology-centric classroom, students are bent over laptops, some blogging or building Facebook pages from the perspective of Shakespeare’s characters. One student compiles a song list from the Internet, picking a tune by the rapper Kanye West to express the emotions of Shakespeare’s lovelorn Silvius. The class, and the Kyrene School District as a whole, offer what some see as a utopian vision...