Free Republic

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...

cops were forced to remove Reed Bender from a Mitchell school board meeting in South Dakota because he refused to wear a mask.. A district mandate from July says people must wear masks on school property .. But Bender refused to put one on or leave the building in Mitchell, South Dakota.. He told cops: 'Force me out. You're going to have to drag me out'.. When he refused cops threatened him with a stun gun and dragged him out.. His wife Teri Jayne Bender is supporting him on Facebook saying 'we got this'.. She says she supports 'maskers and...

Almost two-thirds of young American adults do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the Holocaust, a new survey has found, revealing shocking levels of ignorance about the greatest crime of the 20th century. According to the study of millennial and Gen Z adults aged between 18 and 39, almost half (48%) could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during the second world war. Almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they...

A SCHOOL in Westchester, New York, has come under fire for a cartoon that was handed out to students depicting modern-day cops as slave owners and the Ku Klux Klan. Christopher Moreno, who teaches 11th graders at Westlake High School, handed out a sheet containing a series of cartoons. The cartoon was previously handed out to students in Texas. The first cartoon is a panel of five depictions of a man kneeling on a black man. The man kneeling over the handcuffed black man is depicting in various outfits, including as a member of the KKK, a slave owner, a...

It all started in February 2017, when Katarina Ristić, then an eighth-grade student at the Emerson School in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, along with four other schoolmates, was given the task of doing a project on “Bosnian Genocide.”A seminar paper by a 14-year-old girl of Serbian origin, Katarina Ristić from Chicago, on the topic of “Bosnian genocide”, stirred the spirits in her primary school, but also opened the way to fight for justice, which resulted in removing propaganda that portrays Serbs in a bad light. and accuses Serbia of committing genocide and killing 200,000 people in Bosnia.Naturally,...

A Democrat bureaucrat finally said what we all have known to be the truth: the Wuhan virus limitations that Democrat politicians and bureaucrats have imposed on Americans will go away after the election because that was the plan all along. As 2019 ended, the Democrats knew that Trump was cruising to re-election. He'd kept his base because he kept his promises about the wall, trade deals, the military, abortion, and our Second Amendment rights. Best of all, he'd supercharged the economy with tax and regulation cuts. The surging economy enticed other Americans who had not voted for Trump in 2016...

by Samantha Foster The manipulations of Democrats to use the COVID-19 issue for political gain are being exposed, one by one. As outraged citizens demand schools, salons, gyms and other businesses re-open, Democrats keep citing the "danger" and "risk" of doing so. But the public has seen the lies exposed in recent weeks. They seethed as Nancy Pelosi got her hair done while all other S.F. salons were shuttered by law. And private gym owners were enraged when they found out that gyms in California government buildings have been open for months, while theirs have been kept shut tight....

During a speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) panned the Senate Republican coronavirus relief proposal for not meeting needs on “safe elections,” among other things and criticized the “poison pills” that will “never” get the support of Democrats like the bill’s school choice program and corporate immunity. Schumer said the GOP’s proposal “is completely inadequate, and by every measure, fails to meet the needs of the American people, with no money for rental assistance, nutrition assistance, the Census, safe elections, and so many other things. The bill, amazingly, will do almost nothing to...

Eleven people were arrested and three officers injured Friday after the third night of riots in Rochester over the death of Daniel Prude. Rioters set fires, vandalized property, and threw objects at police, who declared the unrest an unlawful assembly after the evening started peacefully, reports said. More than 300 miles away, protesters in New York City also turned violent, resulting in an unspecified number of arrests, according to reports. Friday’s protest in Rochester started off peaceful but soon turned contentious and police declared an unlawful assembly. Officers fired tear gas and pepper balls at the rioters in an attempt...

An 11-year-old and a 12-year-old student in Colorado were temporarily suspended from school after they were spotted with an Airsoft gun and a toy gun, respectively, during their online lessons. Story 1: 11-year-old Maddox Blow, who goes to Bell Middle School in Golden, Colorado, told the FOX31 Problem Solvers that he finished a quiz early at one of his online classes and got bored waiting for the others, so he took his Airsoft gun and started fidgeting with it. The teacher noticed Blow playing with the Airsoft gun several hours after the lesson while reviewing the recordings. According to an...