Free Republic

A reader sent me a link to this story, and the more I looked into it, the more it struck me that it is a microcosm of the relationship between ordinary citizens and people who work in government. In the eyes of many people in government, citizens are resources to be farmed for fun and profit. Politicians and many government workers make virtuous noises about being "public servants," but the reality is that they, as with most people, are looking out for themselves. As long as you understand that, you can develop the appropriate attitude toward government: buyer beware. The...

(This is an April 2024 article, relevant because the new school year has started in Seattle and the high school kids are being pulled out of advanced classes now.) SEATTLE - Many parents within Seattle Public Schools are flabbergasted by the district's decision to shut down 11 schools dedicated to highly capable learners. They include three elementary, five middle schools, and three high schools. The "cohorts" at these schools keep the students together so teachers can focus on their advanced needs. There are hundreds of students learning at these schools, far above their grade level. .... Typically, these schools have...

In Minnesota, 50% of students cannot read at grade level. If we were to apply the traditional academic grading scale to that outcome, the public education system in the state would get a solid F.. That abysmal performance was the topic of much debate during this term of the Minnesota legislature, prompting the Democrat trifecta to pass “the READ Act,” an effort to replace the failed “whole language” method of literacy training with traditional phonics education. “Whole language” is an absolute joke, recognized even by many on the Left as a toxic methodology that fails students. In essence, “whole language”...

For GOP lawmakers who view public education as a quasi-socialist project, the gaping hole in state budgets left by subsidizing private school tuition is a feature, not a bug. Bait-and-switch is an old retail tactic. You lure customers in with promises of a deep discount, only to inform them that the deal has a catch. The real price tag, it turns out, is quite a bit more. Though it took supporters of school vouchers a while to catch on, they’ve learned quickly that the trick works just as well in education policy as it does in retail sales. Pick a...

A teacher fired over her concern for a student’s welfare is not going down without a fight. Bonnie Manchester, whom MassResistance reported is a Christian, was sacked from a middle school in Ludlow, Massachusetts, back in 2021 after informing a female student’s father that the school was secretly referring to his daughter as a boy. Two years on, Manchester is filing a $10 million lawsuit against Ludlow, its school board, current and former school district superintendents, and several former school employees.

Nearly as many college students support Hamas as they do Israel amid the raging Middle East war, a new survey claims. The online poll of 609 college students by Intelligent.com found that 22% of respondents sympathize with Hamas while 26% side with the Israeli government. That means about 1 in 5 of college students back a militia group designated a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union for its warfare against the Jewish state. Meanwhile, 82% said they sympathize with Palestinian civilians, while 72% feel for Israeli civilians, the poll found.

A transgender high school tennis coach has been rehired following a controversy that occurred in the girls' locker room. The board of the Gettysburg Area School District in Pennsylvania voted 6 to 2 on September 5 to renew tennis coach Sasha Yates' contract. Yates' employment came under scrutiny after an incident in the fall of 2022 when the coach changed clothes in the girls' locker room, reports PennLive. The principal for Gettysburg Area High School, Jeremy Lusk, sent a letter to Yates about concerns raised with the administration about professional boundaries. Sources familiar with the matter say Yates did change...

Western Heights Public School District in Oklahoma has reportedly hired a drag queen known as Carmen Deveraux, who works at Oklahoma City night club The Boom, as a kindergarten classroom assistant. The school previously defended its August decision to hire Dr. Shane Brent Murnan as an elementary school principal at John Glenn Elementary. Murnan is a drag queen who performs under the name Shantel Mandalay and has an arrest record for child pornography, the Substack newsletter V1sut first reported. In 2001, while working as a fifth-grade teacher at Will Rogers Elementary School in Stillwater, Oklahoma, Murnan was arrested two weeks...

Manley High School, for example, has a capacity of nearly 1,300 students, but just 64 kids attend the school and only 2 percent of the kids can read at grade level. And Uplift High School – where operational spending is about $30,400 per student – has just as many employees, 54, as there are students, 55. Despite that 1v1 ratio, only 3 percent of students are proficient in reading. And Douglass High School has both a principal making $147,000 an assistant principal making $122,000 – all for managing just 44 students.

A Maryland district court denied parents’ appeal to reinstate an opt-out policy in Montgomery County Public Schools on Thursday. The case, Tamer Mahmoud v. Monica B. McKnight, hinged on whether the district’s May decision to rescind its opt-out policy for LGBT curricula violated parents’ right to direct the religious instruction of their children. The court concluded that, “the plaintiffs’ asserted due process right to direct their children’s upbringing by opting out of a public-school curriculum that conflicts with their religious views is not a fundamental right.” Parents sought a preliminary injunction that would authorize opt-out options once school begins on...

There are so many arguments about teacher pay. Everywhere in the country, Democrats are shilling for more teacher pay which is really a sell-out to the Teacher’s Union. Democrats fight school choice at every single turn. They hurt underprivileged and poor kids when they do. Yet, many of those same people active in killing school choice send their kids to private schools. No one is saying teachers do not provide a service. The reason they are paid what they are paid is that they are unionized, and it’s simply not that difficult to become a teacher compared to say a...

To the editor: A letter to the editor written by an educator of more than 30 years suggested three strategies to attract young people to the teaching profession. As a fellow educator of more than 30 years, I was horrified. The writer's first suggestion was to remove the one year of graduate education required to obtain a teaching credential by folding it into a bachelor’s degree. Finland, Germany and other European countries require a master's to teach. Educators need more, not less, training. The second suggestion was to restore authority and order to classrooms. Studies show that authority and order...

I recently observed a class for armed defenders in Colorado schools. These defenders put themselves between a murderer and our kids. There are obvious parallels between strength training and self-defense training. In both cases, we make the most progress when we face the right amount of resistance and risk failure. This is what I saw.

Educators at Palisades High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, called it “Right to Read Day”—a contest where students were encouraged last month to “fight back against censorship” by reading and making videos about frequently banned books. But many of the books promoted in this contest were laden with pornography, including graphic rape scenes, pedophilia and anal sex between minors. Headline USA learned this from Wendy Hawley, a concerned parent of a student at Palisades; and Brooke Weiss, a substitute teacher at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and the head of North Carolina local chapter of the non-profit organization Moms for Liberty. “When I...

Parents of an Ohio fifth-grader say their son’s First Amendment rights were violated when he was coerced during class into making a pagan idol, that is, the likeness of a spirit worshiped by Native Americans. Students at one of Lexington Local Schools’ elementary institutions were instructed in class to make a Kachina doll, used by the Hopi Indians as a “sacred object” to teach children about spirits believed to have “special powers,” such as curing the sick, as the class worksheet explains. “What type of luck does your doll bring?” says the worksheet, which instructs the students to create the...

There are several features of the pandemic policy response that still astonish me. It does not surprise me that bureaucrats couldn’t suppress, control, much less eradicate, a respiratory virus by scrapping the Bill of Rights. What I cannot get over is all the ways that the response ended up achieving the opposite of what it was supposed to do. The planners, mostly of the Progressive left perspective, ended up totally discrediting the very things they have heretofore championed. What they did was unbearably idiotic even when judged by whether and to what extent they bolstered the institutions they had previously...

If someone punches back once after being poked at repeatedly for months and months without consequence, who should get in trouble? Allison Arnall Davis recently went viral after her son Drew received out-of-school suspension for beating up another boy. On Facebook, Allison explains that she's not mad at Drew for doing what he did because the boy Drew beat up has been tormenting him for months. Her son finally fought back against the bully who has been torturing and threatening him while the school has sat back and done nothing. Allison's post has prompted an impassioned discussion about bullying, school...

What is wrong with our cities? What is wrong with our government? What is wrong with our culture? What is wrong with our society? Who or what is poisoning the minds of our children?

A 'drag mom' and former elementary school teacher has been sentenced to less than a year in prison after being convicted of felony child abuse crimes. Kelsey Meta Boren, 31, pleaded guilty to 11 counts of encouraging child sexual abuse in the first degree last month. She previously worked as a teacher for the Fern Ridge School District, in Oregon, but was suspended following the allegations coming to light last year. Before her arrest she regularly posted several images of herself with an 11-year-old girl on her Instagram, claiming to be her 'drag mom'. Boren was sentenced to 330 days...

Parents in Oregon are calling to replace a local school board following reports of a sexually explicit book in the curriculum and at least two instances where a teacher organized activities discussing sexual acts. Fox News Digital previously reported how health class students who missed coursework at Churchill High School in Eugene, Oregon, were asked via Canvas, an online learning management system, to complete a 10-point assignment titled "Fantasy Story." Parents in Oregon are calling to replace a local school board following reports of a sexually explicit book in the curriculum and at least two instances where a teacher organized...