Free Republic

Five-year-old Teague Pollard saying the Pledge of Allegiance before virtual school. Remember when we used to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day before school started. When I was in Girl’s State, we would get up every day at the crack of dawn, dress up and gather round the flag to say the Pledge of Allegiance. I, for one, believe that children who grow up not having any respect for this nation are bound to disrespect the country and its people. It’s important that they learn to take pride in their country and our flag. To illustrate my point, I...

On his Substack last week, Matt Yglesias tried to throw woke piranhas a bone by supporting the idea of picking what kids read in school according to the tired identity categories of race, sex, yadda yadda. The discussion resurfaced with a Wall Street Journal article noting teachers — like librarians, publishing houses, corporate news media, and the rest — banning books based on authors’ skin color and sexual preferences, now in the name of “antiracism.”This isn’t new. “Hey ho, hey ho, Western civ has got to go” was the chant Jesse Jackson led at Stanford University back in the 1980s,...

A New Hampshire woman has been arrested for sending pictures of a mutilated female body and threatening the family of a Michigan election official who refused to certify the results for Joe Biden. Katelyn Jones, 23, is accused of calling Wayne County chairwoman Monica Palmer a 'racist b****' and a 'terrorist' after she refused to confirm the 878,000 votes from Michigan's largest county. President Trump called Palmer on Tuesday November 17 after she revised her vote to express his gratitude for her support. The threatening violence through interstate commerce charges against Jones stem from an FBI investigation probing the fallout...

The Jefferson fiasco underscores how activist school leaders and alumni, from California to Massachusetts, are conspiring to recklessly overhaul school policies, education standards, and curriculum this year.FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. – After a crusade by educational arsonists targeting the nation’s No. 1 high school, America’s meritocracy is about to go up in flames. The Fairfax County School Board is set to vote Thursday night to gut the race-blind, merit-based admissions testing process at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. T.J. is a state-chartered magnet school legislated to serve academically gifted and advanced students. The school board plans to replace...

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court declined Monday to take up an appeal from parents in Oregon who want to prevent transgender students from using locker rooms and bathrooms of the gender with which they identify, rather than their sex assigned at birth. The case came from a school district near Salem, Oregon’s capital city. The federal appeals court in San Francisco had upheld a Dallas, Oregon, school district policy that allows transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity. Parents sued over the policy in 2017, saying it caused embarrassment and stress. A lower...

'The United States has reached a tipping point: The damage done to schoolchildren with scarce resources is likely to be irreparable.'As report cards begin to roll out for fall, public schools across the nation are reporting a massive increase in children failing classes, due to the majority going online and the chaos of rolling COVID closures. In Fairfax, Virginia, one of the nation’s largest districts, “the percentage of middle school and high school students earning F’s in at least two classes jumped by 83 percent: from 6 percent to 11 percent,” the Washington Post reported Tuesday. That’s nearly 10,000 children.Saint...

Better late than never. Perhaps because he believes Joe Biden will be inaugurated in January, Dr. Fauci is finally admitting that children do not get terribly ill from or transmit COVID-19 in any significant way. Weird, since Switzerland figured this out in April. Detailed genetic studies in Iceland showed that children were not passing the virus to adults in any significant numbers in June. And German researchers asserted that children could actually act as a brake on transmission within the community. ... Senator Paul correctly noted Sweden’s experience, which never closed their primary schools and did not see a spike...

By Right now in China, 195 million students K-12 are learning in-person in Chinese public schools. Meanwhile, millions of American public school students are learning in a failed remote system that can’t even keep track of thousands of students who haven’t shown up for class all year. In 2018, 15-year-olds in dozens of countries participated in the triennial Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The PISA test measures reading ability, math and science literacy, and other key skills. American scores are decidedly unimpressive, with students scoring in the middle of the pack for all categories. Most frighteningly, China beats the...

Handouts blamed the pandemic on racism and capitalism gave Chinese government a pass A District of Columbia public school teacher encouraged students to blame the coronavirus pandemic on racism and capitalism instead of China, according to a lesson plan obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Hardy Middle School teacher Caneisha Mills had her students host a "People's Tribunal on the Coronavirus Pandemic," whose "defendants" included racism, capitalism, and the United States government. "I wanted to … point out that the capitalist system was behind the pain, trauma, isolation, and destitution [my students] were facing," Mills said. "Capitalism, racism, and the...

Maryland's Montgomery County plans to spend more than $450,000 on an "anti-racist audit" intended to create "equitable outcomes for every student's academic and social-emotional well-being." According to a Tuesday memo from the county's superintendent of schools, Montgomery County Public Schools will award a one-year "anti-racist" consulting contract to the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium for $454,680. The consulting firm will investigate the district's culture, hiring practices, and pre-K-12 curriculum, which Montgomery County says should be tailored so that it "strengthens students' sense of racial, ethnic, and tribal identities, helps students understand and resist systems of oppression, and empowers students to see themselves...

An explosion at a religious seminary in Pakistan’s northern city of Peshawar has killed at least eight people and injured 136 others. The deadly blast took place at about 8.30 am at the Jamia Zuberia religious school in Dir Colony, where about 500 students were gathered to hear a lecture by influential cleric Rahimullah Haqqani. Most of them were between 20 and 30 years old and from the Khyber Pakthunkwa and Balochistan regions of Pakistan, as well as some from Afghanistan. A police superintendent, Waqar Azeem Kharal, said the explosion had been caused by at least five kilograms of high-quality...

A 15-year-old Pennsylvania girl is suing her local school district after she was suspended for wearing a ‘Women for Trump’ face covering and a ‘Trump the Sequel Make Liberals Cry Again’ t-shirt. Morgan Earnest, a sophomore at Mifflin County High School in the central Pennsylvania town of Lewistown, says in a lawsuit filed in federal court that her free speech rights were violated by school administrators. On October 1, the school district issued a new policy on clothing which banned students from wearing anything that contained political messaging, The Patriot News reported.

NAEP's changes might cause better test results, but they fundamentally alter the meaning of reading comprehension, which would hurt students. Much like the SAT adding an adversity score and the ACT allowing specific subject retakes, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the “nation’s report card,” is easing its standards to improve its numbers. As with the SAT and ACT, these changes carry significant implications for the way English is taught in American schools. This year, the NAEP’s governing board plans to change testing to “optimize the performance of the widest possible population of students in the...

San Francisco’s academically selective Lowell High School will admit students using a random lottery for next year’s freshman class, a decision made unanimously by the school board Tuesday after a divisive community debate.

Remote learning appears to have choked off some back-to-school spending—although the effects have been uneven. Data released from the Department of Labor on prices paid by consumers and received by businesses suggest that this years back-to-school spending was anemic in several categories. Consumers are still spending—prices rose by more than expected in September, a sign of healthy demand—but not on many categories that traditionally benefit from back to school shopping.

Want a painting of President Trump in your parking space? So be it. That's what a federal judge ruled Friday after a Louisiana teen's portrait of Trump sparked a brouhaha at his school, the Times-Picayune reports. "The painting of President Trump cannot reasonably be described as obscene or plainly offensive on its face, nor can it be construed as school-sponsored speech," US District Judge Eldon Fallon wrote, calling the Trump portrait a type of "pure political speech" the school can't prevent. The student, Ned Thomas, had the portrait commissioned after Pine Junior-Senior High School near Franklinton offered seniors the chance...

Our public schools are run, for the most part, by liberal administrators, and teachers are drawn, usually, from the lowest quadrant of academic ability among college graduates. There are exceptions, of course, but the overall level of instruction in the public schools is abysmal. And that isn’t the worst of it: teachers who are marginally able, at best, to teach the subjects for which they are nominally responsible often devote themselves to political indoctrination instead. Most such forays into left-wing mythology go unreported, but occasionally an enterprising kid turns on his phone and records a teacher’s rant. That happened a...

Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday that closing school campuses in the spring as the coronavirus pandemic took hold might have been one of the nation’s biggest “public health mistakes.” And, while appearing on the Drew Steele radio show, DeSantis equated people fighting the return of students to classrooms as the “flat earthers of our day.” Florida shut down school and college campuses in March, with students shifted to online learning. DeSantis and Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran have pushed heavily to reopen classrooms for the new school year. “In March we may not have had all the information, but in hindsight,...

A bull moose made an appearance at Woodland Middle School [Coeur d'Alene, Idaho] on Tuesday. Coeur d'Alene School District spokesman Scott Maben said the students were able to all safely leave when school let out, but release took about a half-hour longer than usual because the moose had hunkered down by the bike rack near the west entrance of the school. Coeur d'Alene Police and Fish and Game officials were on scene to ensure the animal was out of high-traffic areas. Students whose bikes were on the racks near the moose were assisted by officers. The students gave the officers...

When President Trump advocated reopening the economy, he warned that the lockdowns might have more of an adverse impact than COVID-19. Some assumed he was only talking about the economic implications but he also noted the risk of drug overdoses and suicides. We have seen increases in both of those types of deaths, along with significant mental health impacts.. the tragedy of extended lockdowns is compounded by people not seeking medical care. United Kingdom is noting this trend .. Unexplained deaths in private homes are nearly nine times higher than those from Covid-19 amid fears that many people are still...