Free Republic

... [T]he pandemic-era policies of many progressive jurisdictions are sabotaging basic civic goods, with anti-Trump zeal as an accelerant and with effects on minority communities that are likely to far outlast the Trump era. This means that for many African-Americans and Hispanics, a key legacy of 2020 may be a well-intentioned liberal betrayal of their interests, a hollowing-out of the institutions that protect and serve them, and the deepening of America’s racial inequalities even if Trumpism goes down to defeat. The most important part of this sabotage, which is the subject of an essential Alec MacGillis article for The New...

Nearly 20 percent of millennials and Gen Z in New York believe Jews caused the Holocaust, according to a new survey released Wednesday. The findings come from the first-ever 50-state survey on the Holocaust knowledge of American millennials and Gen Z, which was commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. For instance, although there were more than 40,000 camps and ghettos during World War II, 58 percent of respondents in New York cannot name a single one. Additionally, 60 percent of respondents in New York do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust....

New York City residents still dependent on public schools received good-ish news this week. The teachers' union—which threatened to strike unless the city met its demands for COVID-19 precautions—finally came to an agreement with Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard A. Carranza. Under the deal, union leaders get to say they protected their members' interests, while city officials get to claim that schools are safer than ever. And parents get to figure out what to do with their kids during unplanned days of idleness as the beginning of classes is pushed back a week and a half. "Under...

A school district near Buffalo, N.Y., delayed the beginning of its school year on Friday for students learning remotely, releasing a statement blaming the move on dozens of resignations and sick leave requests from teachers in the district. In a statement released Friday, the Williamsville Central School District said that students learning remotely or through hybrid models would see their school years delayed indefinitely. Those returning to in-person hybrid learning models would apparently see their classes start on Tuesday. The statement blamed the decision on 90 school employees who requested sick leave absences due to COVID-19, as well as the...

The American Federation of Teachers union boss Randi Weingarten claimed at the union's annual convention that teachers were so terrified of going back to school that they were "quitting in droves" and "making their wills". The AFT threatened that its members would go on strike if they were expected to go back to actually doing their jobs and teaching in a classroom. In New York City, the United Federation of Teachers, which is affiliated with the AFT, marched with cardboard coffins and fake body bags. Some union teachers wore skeleton t-shirts. A Halloween skeleton attached to a garbage bag held...

It’s back-to-school season, but millions of students won’t be going back to the classroom. Teachers are fighting tooth and nail to prevent reopening public schools for in-person learning — in the name of safety. Yet our just-released study suggests that these reopening decisions have more to do with influence from teachers’ unions than safety concerns. In New York City, the Department of Education’s proposal to offer families a hybrid of part-time in-person instruction and remote learning starting Sept. 10 met with fierce opposition. Teachers’ groups poured into the streets to protest the plan, including with props such as fake body...

Conservatives and fair-minded liberals are alarmed that high schools are drawing up plans to teach the “1619 project,” the New York Times ’ revisionist account of race and the American founding, in history classes. The reality is turning out to be worse. The largest state in the union is poised to become one of the first to mandate ethnic studies for all high-school students, and the model curriculum makes the radical “1619 project” look moderate and balanced. Last year California’s Assembly passed its ethnic-studies bill known as AB 331 by a 63-8 vote. Then the state department of education put...

Why does the public education system continue to fail America’s children? Policy experts have pondered this question for decades. Most say the answer is complicated, requiring a nuanced, collaborative approach. But not The New York Times. It found the problem, and it’s simple: white parents. The solution? “Try, whenever possible, to suppress the power of white parents.” That quote comes from the Times’ podcast “Nice White Parents,” which chronicles the history of a single public school in New York. Specifically, the host, Chana Joffe-Walt, decides to look into the racial history of this school. Her first finding: Many parents who...

A year after it was sent back to the drawing board, California’s ethnic-studies model curriculum is back. The last version, released in May 2019, was radical and jargon-laced. Even many progressives found it fringy. On Aug. 13, the state Education Department presented a new, toned-down draft to the curriculum commission. Not only does it suffer from the same conceptual problems as before, but during their meeting, commissioners directed the Education Department to resuscitate unpopular parts cut from the 2019 draft. The curriculum is moving toward adoption in March by the State Board of Education. Legislation is also advancing to make...

Nearly two dozen Bronx principals say they’d love to have outdoor classrooms — if only they didn’t have to worry about their students getting shot or picking up used drug syringes off the ground. The day after Mayor Bill de Blasio and schools Chancellor Richard Carranza crowed about turning city parks and streets near schools into classrooms amid the coronavirus, principals in the borough’s District 7 fired off a blistering letter. “Our District has been in the grips of a wave of gun violence that is dangerously affecting and can further exacerbate the safety conditions for all members in our...

School closures have affected over 55 million K–12 students in the U.S. since March as the nation deals with the coronavirus pandemic. Although numerous private schools and day care centers have adjusted to the pandemic and reopened, many public school districts and teachers unions are fighting to remain closed in the name of safety. In fact, 85 percent of the country's 20 largest public school districts have already announced that they will not be reopening schools for any in-person instruction as the school year begins. Some have noted these reopening decisions often appear to be driven by politics rather than...

New York mayor Bill de Blasio insisted on Thursday that the city was prepared to reopen its public school district, one day after the city’s largest teachers union threatened to strike if its demands regarding the reopening were not met. Educators “know kids are suffering right now. They need support, they need what educators can give them, they need positive adult role models and counselors….They need that desperately,” de Blasio said at a press conference. “It cannot be done the same way remotely even slightly.” The mayor continued, “We may be talking about a whole school year we don’t have...

Prominent Democrat politicians have started making huge concessions on reopening schools. Back in May, Democrats pounced after President Trump supported reopening. Despite the data finding precisely the opposite, it quickly became the Democrat-media complex line that opening schools this fall would be preposterously dangerous to children and teachers.In July, when New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled a plan to put the city’s 1.1 million school kids back in schools half the week and “online learning” the rest of the week, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo picked a public fight with him, saying, “If anybody sat here today...

Jeanne Hedgepeth, a Palatine High School, Illinois, social studies teacher, has been fired over one of her social media posts after the Township High School District 211 board members voted 5-2 to terminate her employment. “I am about facts, truth-seeking and love,” Hedgepeth wrote in the Facebook post that led to her termination. “I will speak on any topic I choose because I live in a free country. I find the term ‘white privilege’ as racist as the ‘N’ word. You have not walked in my shoes either so do not make assumptions about me and my so called privilege....

In an abject show of selfishness and political bias, teachers unions are trying to hold the country hostage over baseless COVID-19 fears. It’s not enough that public school teachers and the college professors who train them are increasingly prone to teaching leftist absurdities like “2+2=5” or presenting the mendacious 1619 Project as legitimate American history. Teachers unions are now trying to blackmail the entire country into meeting a set of leftist political demands for reopening the schools this fall, using COVID-19 as their excuse.Of course, the pandemic certainly presents challenges for re-opening schools, but other sectors of society have managed...

For most Americans the coronavirus is a scourge. But teachers unions seem to think it’s also an opportunity—to squeeze more money from taxpayers and put their private and public charter school competition out of business. That’s the only way to read the extraordinary effort by national and local union leaders to keep their members from returning to the classroom. Last week Randi Weingarten, leader of the powerful American Federation of Teachers, declared support for “safety strikes” if local unions deem insufficient the steps their school districts are taking to mitigate Covid-19. And on Monday an alliance of teachers unions and...

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...

The pandemic has left everyone with lots of give and take. In educating our children, however, don't let teachers' unions take from our children to give to themselves. As the Wuhan virus pandemic persists and wild rhetoric along with it, teachers unions are threatening to strike if schools reopen, but they’re also pushing to limit online teaching. These unions have long incentivized all the wrong things in education, but demanding teachers be paid to do virtually nothing is a new low. As a New York Times headline announced this week, teachers are “Wary of Returning to Class, and Online Instruction...

In a time of social strife and ahistorical grievance narratives, a properly informed patriotism is sorely needed to restore our national sense of unity. In response to numerous schools adopting a history curriculum based on The New York Times’s 1619 Project, Sen. Tom Cotton proposed a bill that would deny them federal funding. The 1619 Project is a series of essays asserting that the United States was founded on slavery and that its institutions continue to discriminate against black Americans. The curriculum is designed to introduce these arguments and themes to the classroom.Several prominent historians have criticized the 1619 Project’s...

As the nation heads toward a chaotic back-to-school season, with officials struggling over when to reopen classrooms and how to engage children online, teachers’ unions are playing a powerful role in determining the shape of public education as the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage. Teachers in many districts are fighting for longer school closures, stronger safety requirements and limits on what they are required to do in virtual classrooms, while flooding social media and state capitols with their concerns and threatening to walk off their jobs if key demands are not met. On Tuesday, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union raised...