Free Republic

Douglass Academy High School had 35 students with nearly 900 seats unfilled. None were proficient on the SAT. The Chicago Teachers Union wants to add at least eight staffers there and at every other school in the district at a cost of $1.7 billion. Only 35 students enrolled in Douglass Academy High School for the 2023-2024 school year, but the building can hold over 900 students. Logic would say it should be closed, but the Chicago Teachers Union prohibits closing it and other underused schools. In fact, CTU sees the 23 staffers at Douglass as inadequate. CTU’s new contract demands...

Last Friday, the National Education Association (NEA) abruptly cancelled its annual convention, scheduled for July 4-7, after just one day of official proceedings in Philadelphia. The shutdown of the Representative Assembly (RA) was in response to a strike by the union representing NEA staffers, the National Education Association Staff Organization (NEASO). Timing a three-day strike for the convention, NEA staffers based at the union’s Washington D.C. headquarters greeted delegates arriving at the Philadelphia Convention Center with picket lines. The NEASO contract expired June 30 and the staffers’ union staged the walkout as an unfair labor practices action. The NEA informed...

The president of the National Education Association (NEA) was mocked over the weekend for giving a "totally unhinged" speech that reminded critics of a comedy skit from a famous American TV show. NEA President Becky Pringle banged on the podium, flailed her hands in the air and screamed about winning "all the things" repeatedly at the NEA's Annual Meeting and Representative Assembly (RA) in Philadelphia. X critics compared the moment to an iconic scene with Dwight Schrute from "The Office." During the screechy speech, Pringle called for transformative social justice change in the education system in the pursuit of equity....

The National Education Association Staff Organizations (NEASO) announced Friday it is going on strike days ahead of a speech President Biden is supposed to make at the NEA’s annual convention. The NEASO said they were on a Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) strike against the NEA headquarters in Washington, D.C., filing two ULP complaints with the National Labor Relations Board. The group alleges the country’s largest teachers’ union has not bargained over unilateral changes, accusing the NEA of wage theft and failing to provide information regarding outsourcing $50 million to contractors. “The National Education Association has threatened to host its convention...

Schools in the progressive haven of San Francisco are facing a major budget crunch. Things are so dire that the district may have to actually close some schools. It’s amazing that these schools are having cash flow problems when you consider the taxes people pay to live there. Officials from the school district recently met with some financial experts who gave them some tough love. ... Late last week, two fiscal experts — appointed a few years ago to give guidance to the district — were authorized to suspend or reverse financial decisions made by the superintendent or school board....

For almost 400 years America has seen its citizens educating their children and themselves, though both the scope, structure and quality of education has changed somewhat during that time. For much of the history of the United States, education of children took place primarily at home, often along with private schools for some, and locally managed and supported schools for others. Education included the general ethos of Christianity and Biblical morality as well as academic subjects. The New England Primer and later, the nation-wide McGuffey's Readers (120+ million copies) were the primary instruments of education, and in helping to form...

The local teachers’ union encourages students to resist “Zionist bullies.” Portland, Oregon, has earned its reputation as America’s most radical city. Its public school system was an early proponent of left-wing racialism and has long pushed students toward political activism. As with the death of George Floyd four years ago, the irruption of Hamas terrorism in Israel has provided Portland’s public school revolutionaries with another cause du jour: now they’ve ditched the raised fist of Black Lives Matter and traded it in for the black-and-white keffiyeh of Palestinian militants. I have obtained a collection of publicly accessible documents produced by...

President Biden vowed on Friday that the federal government would cover the cost of rebuilding the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore – and that the work would be done by union labor, potentially setting up a funding fight with the conservative wing of the House of Representatives. Biden has promised from the outset that the federal government would pay for the bridge to be rebuilt. His comments on Friday came after the House Freedom Caucus — the conservative wing of the House of Representatives — released a series of conditions for federal funding for the bridge. The conditions include...

I'd think Joe Biden has to be sitting around wondering how he managed to put himself in his current position, but I'm not sure he even has the cognitive ability to process how bad things are. We've all seen the polls, which will likely tighten in a general election, but other factors are at play as well. ... The latest flashing red light comes courtesy of the National Education Association (NEA), the nation's largest teachers union. A far-left entity that has long served as a lynchpin for Democrat politicians, its members are now demanding Biden show support for Palestinian terrorists...

Utah ranked fourth in the nation for states with the largest political shift leftward between 2000 and 2020, according to research by a Brigham Young University sociologist.Comparing presidential election vote shares from 2000 to 2020, Utah had one of the largest swings leftward in the United States — behind only Vermont, Colorado and Alaska, according to Jacob Rugh, associate professor of sociology at Brigham Young University.Utah went from giving President George W. Bush 66.8% of the vote, compared to 26.5% for Vice President Al Gore in 2000; (R+40) to President Donald Trump receiving 58.1% of the vote and President Joe...

I apologize for being gross, but it's necessary. You have to be shocked into recognizing the moral horror of what a part of the nation's largest teacher's union is doing. It is unspeakable, but we have to speak about it. The most effective work that the irreplaceable Christopher Rufo does is simply to get documents from institutions, and post them in full to the web, so ordinary people can see what kind of corrupt, racist or otherwise depraved people run these institutions. His latest is from the LGBTQ+ caucus of the National Education Association (NEA), the country's largest teachers union,...

When teaching about U.S. elections or politics, many educators will strive for neutrality. They may insist these discussions have no place in the classroom, while others argue that standardization and a lack of time make them a non-starter. Even if there was an opening, the slightest hint of bias could attract the ire of an administrator or parent. In this hyper-polarized political climate, that's a line that’s easy to stumble across. All this neutrality or avoidance may work for the teacher - but what about the student? Alyssa Hadley Dunn, Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at Michigan State University, believes...

Parents in a Colorado school district expressed outrage after a report said the local teachers union sent out an email to its members instructing them to get rid of evidence of students' transgender information, according to a CBS report. The Jefferson County Education Association (JCEA) email explained to teachers that if they surveyed students on their gender identities, that information should not be stored in records, in a CBS report headlined, "Controversy erupts in Jefferson County after the teachers union tells educators to destroy evidence of student surveys regarding gender identity." The email said, "if you do a questionnaire, please...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSQ9P5MJXiM: NEA Gets Savagely EXPOSED For Illegal Funding Of Voter Fraud During 2020 Election. Last week former President Donald Trump was indicted in Fulton County for racketeering charges pertaining to the 2020 presidential election. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich recently praised the NEA for its work with teachers. However, this video exposes how the NEA used dues paid by its members to support radical activist organizations during the 2020 presidential election. The host in this video makes a great case about how the NEA funnelled money to organizations owned by Michelle Obama and Stacey Abrams and George Soros that...

One of the nation's largest teachers unions in America has reportedly offered instruction to teachers on how to insert lessons on gender identity into classroom discussions, according to a right-leaning public policy institute. The Defense of Freedom Institute, founded by two former Trump administration Department of Education officials, released a report earlier this month describing the topics promoted by the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. Before its Together Educating America's Children (TEACH) conference in July, DFI noted that AFT released a resolution on LGBT issues that touted "age-appropriate and inclusive" bathroom and locker room policies. In...

National Education Association is the most evil labor organization on the planet. All of the teachers’ unions are evil, but the NEA is the biggest, ... The teachers’ unions weren’t able to hide their nastiness from the public ... They did what they’ve always done — put their interests above those of the students and, as we are now finding out, doomed those kids to being forever behind. One of the more bizarre things we saw back then was the far-left regime in Chicago battling with the teachers’ union there to let the kids go back to school. Then-Mayor Lori...

Property-tax relief? Hardly. Proposition HH on this fall’s statewide ballot is really about growing government. And it attempts to do that by piggybacking on public outrage over skyrocketing property tax bills. The proposal’s purported property-tax “relief” — served up by Gov. Jared Polis and his legislative allies as one part of their dizzyingly complicated scheme — is a ruse. As with every attempt to play politics with a crisis, there’s a hidden agenda. And that agenda is to snooker Colorado voters into letting the state keep and spend billions of dollars in surplus tax revenue that otherwise would have to...

Chicago Public Schools has a school utilization problem. Over 34% are less than half full, 57% are underutilized, and 5% are overcrowded. Just 35% are at ideal capacity. The Chicago Teachers Union is preventing solutions. About 322,000 Chicago Public Schools students are set to return Aug. 21, with more than 1 in 3 students entering buildings less than half full. Nearly empty school buildings eat resources that should go towards students’ educations. Those educations are lacking when just 14% of CPS 3rd through 8th grade students from low-income families met proficiency standards in reading and 9% in math. School capacity...

Columbia Law journals are delaying admissions decisions in the wake of the Court's landmark ruling. The move highlights how the verdict could have implications beyond undergraduate admissions. Law journals at Columbia University Law School are delaying their masthead decisions in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling last week outlawing race-based college admissions, a sign that the ban on affirmative action is already having an effect beyond undergraduate programs. The law school's office of student services, which coordinates applications to all journals including the flagship Columbia Law Review, said Sunday that journal acceptances had been postponed until the school could...

...The education system’s failure to prepare non-white students for college admissions on the merits is not just an accident of Democratic one-party rule. It is a feature of Democratic machine politics. The two major teachers unions — the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — tell Democrats to jump; Democrats lack the spine to do anything but ask, “How high?”...