Free Republic

Project 2025, the policy agenda for Former President Trump’s potential first year back in the White House published by the far right conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, has been making waves recently. Some of the many destructive proposals within the agenda include the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education—along with federal education funding and any civil rights protections—and the diversion of public money to private school voucher programs instead. Make no mistake: The goal is to end public education. But dismantling our public schools isn’t just the plan if Trump is reelected—it is already happening. We are on...

The rate of sexual misconduct in public schools far exceeds the high-profile abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America.Every day millions of parents put their children under the care of public school teachers, administrators, and support staff. Their trust, however, is frequently broken by predators in authority in what appears to be the largest ongoing sexual abuse scandal in our nation’s history.Given the roughly 50 million students in U.S. K-12 schools each year, the number of students who have been victims of sexual misconduct by school employees is probably in the millions each...

Schools of education are among the most leftist, politicized jurisdictions on college campuses. Ed schools more often than not adopt the ideology of critical pedagogy to the exclusion of other ideologies, as Jay Schalin’s Martin Center report showed in 2019. Other scholars have shown the existence of the very same corrupting monoculture. Our recent report from the Claremont Institute shows how the University of Florida’s College of Education adopted an equity pedagogy model throughout its elementary-education curriculum after the 2020 riots. Schools of education are hardly the only discipline where leftist, critical ideology has become indistinguishable from professional standards. Sociology...

A newly approved law will enable Oklahoma public school students to receive off-campus religious instruction during the school day if they choose to. Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt signed House Bill 1425 into law Wednesday. The bill was passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature last month, with the Senate voting 38-7 and the House of Representatives voting 51-40.The law authorizes school districts’ boards of education to “adopt a policy that excuses a student from school to attend a released time course for no more than three class periods per week or a maximum of one hundred twenty-five class periods per year.”The...

As Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has pushed school choice initiatives, leading to a spike in charter and private school enrollments, public schools are shutting down. Across the state, public school enrollment is declining. Duval County Public School District, the sixth-largest school district in Florida and 20th largest in the country, is now considering campus closures due to dramatic dips in their enrollment. Broward County Public Schools, Florida’s second largest school district, has evaluated plans to close up to 42 campuses over the next few years. Miami-Dade county has also experienced a substantial decline in enrollment rates. Of the roughly...

Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans have spent years aggressively turning the state into a haven for school choice. They have been wildly successful, with tens of thousands more children enrolling in private or charter schools or homeschooling. Now as those programs balloon, some of Florida’s largest school districts are facing staggering enrollment declines — and grappling with the possibility of campus closures — as dollars follow the increasing number of parents opting out of traditional public schools.

The “massive immigration wave” on President Joe Biden’s watch is straining public schools across the United States, the Wall Street Journal details. Since 2021, the Journal reports, “as many as one million children … have arrived with their families or on their own” to the United States, most through the nation’s porous southern border where nearly eight million migrants total have been encountered thus far under Biden. As a result, public schools where migrant children are resettling have been hit with financial and staffing burdens they have not experienced before. Specifically, the Journal chronicles the school district of Stoughton, Massachusetts,...

Earlier this month, the U.K.’s National Health Service released the Cass Review, a report that urged Great Britain to pump the breaks on the experimental, sterilizing treatments marketed as “gender affirming care.” By contrast, earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Education issued its new Title IX regulations, which require public schools to facilitate a school-to-sterilization pipeline. According to the Biden administration, Title IX of the Civil Rights Act now requires schools to treat students who suffer, or claim to suffer, from gender dysphoria as though they were the opposite sex. As the Cass Review argues, this is essentially a...

If the Biden administration is trying to restore American parents’ confidence in the public school system, they sure have a funny way of showing it. Nowadays, one of the most significant causes of concern — and perhaps the deciding factor for most parents pulling their children out of public schools — has been the increasing woke indoctrination from the public school system, especially in regard to the ever-prominent LGBT agenda. And how is Biden’s Department of Education handling the increasing wariness of parents toward the public school system? By releasing on social media a video celebrating another made-up LGBT holiday,...

On a spring night in 2022, Ross Hill was trying to get several of his children—he has eight—tucked into bed for the night. *** “They were in tears because they didn’t want to go to school the next day,” said Mr. Hill, a 38-year-old teacher from Florence, South Carolina (pop: 39,958). Whether he knew it at the time or not, Mr. Hill’s family was part of a trend in the United States. A surprising number of children are miserable at school, research shows, and it’s a trend that began before the pandemic. For example, a 2020 Yale study that surveyed...

Benjamin Franklin once famously quipped, “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” Today, however, we can alter that to “death, taxes, and a slew of myths about teacher pay.”Leading the half-truth brigade, on March 4, a headline in My eLearning World read, “New Teachers Are Earning 20% Less Than They Were 20 Years Ago.” The piece informs us that if starting salaries for new teachers had kept pace with inflation over the last 20 years, a teacher just starting out would currently be making $53,303 per year. Instead, using data from the National...

It's no secret that the US military has repeatedly missed some or all of its recruitment goals over the past several years. Various reasons have been offered, ranging from low pay to low unemployment rates and better opportunities in the civilian world. Others have suggested that our endless wars in foreign lands act as disincentives to enlistment because of the higher risk that recruits will end up coming home in a body bag rather than reaching retirement. But during a recent hearing before the House Armed Services Committee, one Army veteran and former Senate candidate, Jake Bequette, offered a potentially...

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued a local school district, alleging it engaged in illegal electioneering by using official email accounts to encourage employees to vote for specific legislative candidates who opposed school choice vouchers. The lawsuit filed this week against the Denton Independent School District alleges a director of special programs and as many as two principals sent emails on official school district account encouraging employees to vote for legislative candidates who oppose school choice candidates. One of the email “encourages the staff of Borman Elementary School to vote in the Republican primary, even if the staff member...

There’s little that better highlights the moral bankruptcy of Chicago’s ‘equity’ agenda than a look at how CPS is treating two of its schools: Northside College Prep and Douglass High.CPS and union officials want to end selective enrollment at Northside, a diverse, top-performing school where blacks and Hispanics excel at the highest level. At the same time, those officials want to keep open Douglass High School, a nearly-empty, all-black neighborhood school that spends over $68,000 per student…and yet not a single one of its students could read or do math at grade level last year.That’s the official policy of CPS...

A pitfall of the fallen human mind is how narratives shape our perception of the world, even outweighing facts and common sense. For example, nuclear power is one of the safest ways to generate electricity. According to the Our World in Data report, nuclear is 99.8% safer than coal in terms of deaths per unit of power. Yet because of three dramatic accidents and the press surrounding them — Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima in 2011 — nuclear power is widely perceived as extraordinarily dangerous and in need of claustrophobic regulation. Similarly, a narrative pushed...

Diagnoses of “gender dysphoria” rose in every state except one over the last several years. South Dakota was the only state that did not see a rise in gender dysphoria diagnoses between 2018 and 2022, according to new data from Definitive Healthcare. In fact, South Dakota saw a 23% decrease in gender dysphoria diagnoses, while every other state saw their diagnoses rise by at least 6%. Last year, South Dakota restricted transgender medical interventions for minors. At least 23 states have similar bans, but they are only currently in effect in 14 states. South Dakota lawmakers also pushed for such...

An annual report from the Inspector General of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) revealed that millions of dollars worth of tech devices were reported lost or stolen “without appropriate search and recovery efforts.” The fiscal year 2023 annual report released Tuesday states CPS schools reported 77,505 tech devices as lost or stolen during the 2021-22 school year, totaling well over $23 million in original purchase price. The discovery, as a result of the district’s first post-COVID-19 inventory, calls the numbers “unacceptably high” and says the oversight process is in need of a “serious overhaul.” The report said the missing items included...

A public New York City elementary school is being accused of “Jewish erasure” because a map in one of its classrooms showed all of the countries in the Middle East except for Israel — which it labeled as Palestine. The map, labeled the “Arab World,” appears in a classroom at PS 261 in Brooklyn, where Rita Lahoud gives students lessons in the Arab Culture Arts program — which is funded by Qatar Foundation International, the American wing of the Qatar Foundation, a nonprofit owned by the country’s wealthy ruling family. It was manufactured by Arab education company Ruman and features...

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...

Memphis — An After School Satan Club plans to begin offering activities to children at a Tennessee elementary school following Christmas break, officials said, and the move immediately proved controversial. The Satanic Temple plans to host the club at Chimneyrock Elementary School in Cordova, news outlets reported. It will begin meeting on Jan. 10 in the school's library and run through the spring semester, according to an announcement Tuesday posted on social media.