Free Republic

These days, people are having a harder and harder time discerning the difference between a public school and a prison. Believe it or not, there are a few subtle differences that can be discerned with a trained eye! Our writers drew from their extensive experience going to both public school and prison to bring you this handy infographic. Enjoy!

A Georgia mother has been arrested following a violent attack against a 61-year-old preschool teacher. The alleged assault occurred Wednesday at St. Teresa of Avila Catholic Church in Grovetown. An attorney who says he is representing the teacher gave our team an exclusive video of the attack in question. In it, you see a woman, who the attorney identifies as Kasey Brooks, attack her son’s teacher June Barrow at St. Teresa of Avila Catholic Church. Her attorney reached out to me after I knocked on Barrow’s door to ask her about the incident that has many of you talking. The...

The public school system in America is in crisis — the worst crisis since the forced bussing and integration issues of the 1970s. Simply put, parents and students have lost faith in the school system to educate. They doubt whether the schools have the best interests of their students at heart. This poisonous doubt is having a tangible effect on enrollment. Despite the fact that public education is free, parents are sending their children to private schools with more reliable, more predictable policies. Enrollment in public schools nationwide declined by 3 percent last year. But it was the numbers for...

West Shore School District Superintendent Todd B. Stoltz plans on sharing a revised safety plan this week, with most COVID-19 mitigation efforts considered optional. In a letter posted to the district website, Stoltz said the administration has been closely monitoring the Pennsylvania Department of Education, Department of Health and other regulatory agencies for updates on appropriate safety precautions for the upcoming school year. Stoltz said he will be presenting the district’s new safety plan for approval by the Board of School Directors on Thursday. The plan includes: All schools will be open five days a week for in-person instruction No...

More than two dozen public schools and school districts are pushing what critics say is a toxic kids' book that features a "[W]hiteness" contract with a devilish figure.

In Virginia, Loudoun County Public Schools officials were warned Friday to revoke their suspension of a teacher for declining to use students’ preferred pronouns or face further legal action. Tanner Cross, who taught at Leesburg Elementary School, was suspended after speaking publicly May 26 during a school board meeting in opposition to the system’s proposed policy that teachers must use the pronouns preferred by students rather than the pronouns consistent with their biological sex. Cross was informed May 28 that he was being suspended “pending an investigation of allegation that [he] engaged in conduct that had a disruptive impact on...

Last month a Baltimore TV station aired a report about a local high school that was doing an extraordinarily bad job for students. The report focused on one student (his name was withheld) at Augusta Fells high school who had been absent from class about half the year and had only passed three classes in four years. And yet this student had been promoted through the grades year after year. The most shocking part of the story was that the student’s 0.13 GPA placed him solidly in the middle of his class. In Maryland, schools receive funding per student. The...

A popular Charlotte-area teacher was killed in shootout with a Mexican drug cartel last week in Alamance County, North Carolina, the sheriff's office said during a news conference Wednesday. Barney Harris, a basketball coach at Union Academy in Monroe, was well-loved and respected, but Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson said, on the side, Harris was involved in the "dangerous and deadly" drug world. "I can tell you right now, when we are dealing with the Mexican drug cartel, someone is going to die as a result of this," Johnson said. Police said Harris and his brother-in-law Steven Alexander Stewart, of...

Democrats want to use stimulus money to make you into the people populating Disney's cartoon 'Wall-E.' Instead, turn it into a weapon for antifragility.Democrats’ fifth round of “coronavirus” “stimulus” will soon hand another $1,400 in government debt, plus interest, to every American man, woman, and child in 90 percent of U.S. households. It’s clear this is yet another round of hush money meant to keep Americans quiet and distracted while Democrats restructure the United States into a larger version of their failed uniparty state, California.While COVID times have been obviously worse than the four years of prosperity and freedom under...

In many school districts across the nation, public school teachers still don’t want to go back to work. Private sector workers have long been hard at work in kitchens, at construction sites, and in hardware and grocery stores. Meanwhile, from Seattle, to Los Angeles, and to Berkeley, California, Teachers' Union representatives insist they simply can’t be expected to perform the on-site work in the expensive facilities that the taxpayers have long been paying for... This week, for example, some schoolteachers in Colorado’s Jefferson County turned out to protest the district’s plan to return to limited in-person learning later this month....

A veteran Bronx superintendent once praised by Chancellor Richard Carranza for her successes in the classroom claims her career was derailed by his “equity” agenda — forcing her to take a demotion in a desperate bid to preserve her pension, according to a $150 million lawsuit. Karen Ames, a 30-year Department of Education employee, says she was targeted by Carranza’s “Disrupt and Dismantle” campaign to oust or marginalize longtime employees because she is over 40, and Jewish. “The agenda of Chancellor Carranza and his senior leadership team was euphemistically touted as an ‘equity platform’ but in reality, it was a...

Writing in the Charleston Gazette, a retired teacher and former mentor of West Virginia’s only PBS News Hour Student Reporting Lab slammed charter and private schools, comparing them to Islamic schools from whence the terrorists who attacked America on 9/11 came. In a piece titled, “Charter schools, vouchers will erode what unites us,” Susan Johnson lauds public schools, writing, “The American public school is where we learn to be Americans.” In May 2020, Education Next reported that some public schools across the nation were adopting the 1619 project into their curriculum, noting, “Schools or school districts in Chicago; Newark, N.J.;...

The radical Chicago Teacher’s Union is defying the school board that has ordered teachers to return to in-person instruction. But the teachers claim the schools aren’t safe to work in, and on Sunday, they voted overwhelmingly to continue to teach remotely.This isn’t sitting well with many parents — especially minority parents — in the 355,000-student school district. They aren’t stupid. They know their kids are falling farther and farther behind white suburban kids because there just isn’t any substitute for in-person learning.But teachers are resisting because the plans and procedures to keep teachers safe — the same plans and procedures...

If you had any doubt that hard-left ideologues run government school systems in many (most?) places, take a look at Fairfax County, Virginia's most populous county, with over a million residents, one of the richest counties in the United States with an average household income well over one hundred thousand dollars. The educrats who run the Fairfax public schools have advised parents there not to hire tutors or organize informal homeschool "pods" to replace the shuttered schools because some parents cannot afford to do so, and that would be "unfair." Fairfax County (map credit: Home By School). I am...

The parents don't even know what's going on because it's all at school,' says a fourth grade teacher in an interview. 'The parents question very little and they just assume the teacher knows what they're doing.' A world without textbooks or homework and where getting the wrong answer is celebrated may sound like an elementary student’s dream, but if such a fantasy becomes a reality, it would damage a generation of young minds. That is, however, exactly what is happening in many public elementary schools.Recently, I spoke with a fourth-grade teacher from the midwest, who shared her experience witnessing the...

Nicole Griggs, has been a teacher at Steinert High School in New Jersey for the last 15 years and today she made it on the headlines for all the wrong reasons. She was caught on camera telling students who were playing football in the park that they should “die a long, painful death” from the coronavirus. From the Trentonian: A math teacher at Steinert High School was caught on video this week shouting at a group of teenagers playing football in the park that they should “die a long, painful death” from the coronavirus. The teacher was identified by multiple...

Kevin Huffman, a former education commissioner of Tennessee and partner at a nonprofit which promotes public schools, has written an op-ed in The Washington Post bashing homeschooling. In “Homeschooling During the Coronavirus Will Set Back a Generation of Children,” he claims that the children sent home due to the coronavirus causing school closures are going to suffer academically. But he isn’t even talking about real homeschooling. He is referring to distance learning, where the kids are taught online by their teachers. He cites a report which found that “Full-time virtual schools are not a good fit for many children.” Unlike...

Now firmly established in many public libraries across the nation, drag queen story hour is branching out to new territory: public school. “In an effort to continue to strengthen and enhance inclusiveness and diversity in our school, the first grade will be taking part in a ‘Drag Queen Story Hour!'” the notification read. Apparently, this is not the first time a drag queen has visited the school to read to young children. The upcoming drag queen visit, slated for Feb. 24, will only be the latest in a series of drag queen interactions that has seemingly taken place over “years.”

A former high-ranking city Education Department official who interacted daily with the chancellor invited a 14-year-old boy to a “whirlpool suite” in a Wisconsin hotel, prosecutors revealed Friday, slapping the former principal with enticement of a minor and possession of child porn charges. David Hay, 39, was busted in an undercover operation led by cops in the Neenah Police Department, which is 100 miles north of Milwaukee. Until he was fired earlier this week, Hay served as deputy chief of staff for city schools Chancellor Richard Carranza. He lives in Brooklyn but has roots in the Badger State. SNIP “Into...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has a plan for public education, and it starts with parents. "If you think your public school is not working, then go help your public school," she told the National Education Association (NEA) as she touted her stance against charters. "Go help get more resources for [your public school]. Volunteer at your public school. Help get the teachers and school bus drivers and cafeteria workers and the custodial staff and the support staff, help get them some support so they can do the work that needs to be done. You don't like the building? You think...