Free Republic

Across the country, people found alternatives in home schooling, private schools and charter schools.

Parents fighting critical race theory are making a fundamentally flawed assumption: That the government entities to which they appeal are responsive to them.Following a wave of parent outrage at finding their children’s public schools pushing racism under the guise of antiracism this past school year, states have begun to ban the ideology. Parents are engaging with local school boards all across the country, demanding they stop teaching racial division and start educating children. The outrage is not just among Republicans, but also Independent and even Democrat voters, making Democrats nervous enough that the Biden administration recently pretended to backtrack.What's going...

A new study from the University of Missouri found the unanticipated transitions to virtual schooling due to COVID-19 exposed the lack of digital resources among Black families in the United States, including access to Wi-Fi and technological savviness. As two-thirds of the country's Black children are born into single-parent households, the findings help explain the extensive stress virtual schooling caused for many Black families trying to keep their children learning and engaged online while at home during the pandemic. "What we found was parents and caregivers often felt disempowered in the rapidly changing environment, as they did not necessarily feel...

District officials in San Diego evidently believe that the practice of grading students based on average scores is racist.K-12 students in large public school districts across the country spent much of the fall semester at home, a less-than-ideal result of the COVID-19 pandemic. But Zoom learning was hardly the only significant change to the education system. Some school districts are embracing trendy but dubious ideas about how to fight racism in the classroom. The San Diego Unified School District, for instance, moved this fall to abolish its traditional grading system. Students will still receive letter grades, but they won't reflect...

In the age of COVID, parents are taking a stand against public school identity politics and indoctrination by removing their kids. December 19, 2020 (FRC Action) — With school shutdowns, logistical complexities with online classes, and rampant uncertainty due to the coronavirus, it's been a monumentally difficult year for students, their parents, and teachers. But there has been a silver lining in all of this: more and more parents are having their eyes opened to the leftist agenda that has embedded itself in many of our nation's public schools. Just last week, a school board in Fairfax County in northern...

It’s an indictment of Republican leadership that President Trump, who like most businessmen knows nearly nothing about education, still has better political instincts on this. When schools shut down this spring, Congress sent them $31 billion — nearly half its annual schools outlay — for sanitation and online learning, even though students weren’t in schools to theoretically contaminate them and online learning barely happened for millions of children. The vast majority of this money has not even reached schools yet.Nevertheless, the Wall Street Journal reports that education special interests are demanding, through their Democrat representatives, nearly half a trillion in...

Married parents were about 20 percent less likely to be depressed than unmarried parents, and they spent more time home-educating their kids, during coronavirus lockdowns. Worry and stress rose to a historic high during the Covid-19 panic, at least since the financial crisis of 2008-2009, according to recent survey evidence from Gallup. Parents of young children had an added responsibility of teaching their children while schools and daycare were closed.Compared with parents who handled these alone, married parents spent more time teaching their children at home, according to an early June survey from the Census Bureau that tracks Covid-19’s effects...

The question is: What makes you think things are any better during the rest of the school year you don't see? Governors’ decisions to shut down schools may be the least science-informed of all the coronavirus impositions we’ve had to endure nationally over the past few months. As the Wall Street Journal recently noted: A recent study from Australia identified only 18 cases (nine children and nine staff) across 15 schools, and only two of the infected children’s 863 close contacts at the schools became ill. Another review last month, published by the Royal College of Paediatricians and Child Health,...

Discard brick and mortar universities! 1) Free or nearly free education exists **NOW**! The missing ingredient is private systems of certified testing. Should it cost a quarter of a million to become a doctor or engineer? The more reasonable cost is a tenth of that. Most of the material needed to be mastered in the STEM fields is**ROTE** and changes little from year to year. It can be learned at home through the Internet and used textbooks. Yes, some fields require laboratory and clinical rotations. These need a brick and mortar setting....BUT... these experiences can be found or created outside...

The California Department of Education approved controversial sex education guidelines for public school teachers Wednesday that encourage classroom discussions about gender identity and LGBT relationships, but removed five resources and books, including one that explains sex to students as young as kindergarten. LGBT advocates praised the new recommendations for giving attention to a community that is often left out of sex education policies. But some parents and conservative groups assailed the more than 700-page document as an assault on parental rights, claiming it exposes children to ideas about sexuality and gender that should be taught at home.

Here is video of Fox News' Megyn Kelly telling Democrat Rep. Jerrold Nadler, "Let me educate you," about the facts regarding the supposed CIA "torture" interrogations. Kelly was talking with Nadler about former Vice-President Dick Cheney's criticism of Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama for going forward with investigations of Bush-era CIA operatives who interrogated terrorist suspects. Kelly was "educating" Nadler about the idea that CIA agents should be subjected to investigation when they were following legal advice at the time. She also educated him that Career Prosecutors at the Department of Justice looked into this five years ago...

Today my son brought up that they're having a "Peace Day" "celebration" tomorrow at school with stations to do things at. Such as "painting rocks with peace signs" and origami (wanted to do "peace" sign but wouldn't work he thinks). I.e., looks like they're pushing the stupid UN idea and of course, the hippie norm.

Students study Aristotle and John Locke, while learning farming, construction and wilderness skills. No $45,000 tuitions here. Tuition maxes out at $10,000 for a residential master’s degree, $7,000 for residential undergraduates.

Months after the Obama administration spent $19 million to register new immigrant voters that will likely support Democrats in November, it’s dedicating an additional $10 million in a final push as the presidential election approaches. The money is distributed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the Homeland Security agency that oversees lawful immigration, to organizations that help enhance pathways to naturalization by offering immigrants free citizenship instruction, English, U.S. history and civics courses. Officially, they’re known as “citizenship integration grants.” Since 2009 USCIS has doled out $63 million in these grants to prepare more than 156,000 resident immigrants in...

The bootcamps promise 12-week immersive training programs, but critics say high job placement numbers may not be credible. Will federal loans help or undermine credibility and costs? To many students and career-changers hoping to gain programming skills and break into the lucrative tech world, coding bootcamps can seem like a promising option. Since 2012, such bootcamps have offered hands-on, intensive technical training in as little as 12 weeks, boasting job placements as high as 98 or 99 percent once students complete the program. But while advocates pitch them as an alternative to a traditional degree program, critics point to their...

While more people know what the Common Core State Standards are than last year, a majority of them oppose the standards, according to the 46th edition of the PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools. Overall, the wide-ranging survey found, 81 percent of those polled said they had heard about the common standards, compared with 38 percent last year. However, 60 percent oppose the standards, generally because they believe the standards will limit the flexibility that teachers have to teach what they think is best. Last year's poll did not specifically ask respondents whether or not they...

In a recent paper, Lubinski and his colleagues caught up with one cohort of 320 people now in their late 30s. At 12, their SAT math or verbal scores had placed them among the top one-100th of 1 percent. Today, many are CEOs, professors at top research universities, transplant surgeons, and successful novelists. That outcome sounds like exactly what you’d imagine should happen: Top young people grow into high-achieving adults. In the education world, the study has provided important new evidence that it really is possible to identify the kids who are likely to become exceptional achievers in the future,...

WASHINGTON – A German home-schooling family facing deportation following the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear their appeal is being allowed to stay in the U.S. The Department of Homeland Security has granted the family “indefinite deferred status,” their attorney confirmed to Fox News. That means the Romeike family, who claim the German government is persecuting them because they want to raise their children in accordance with their Christian beliefs, can stay in the United States without the threat of being forced return to their home country, the family’s legal team told Fox News. The family moved to Morristown, Tenn., in...

The [Romeike] family arrived in the US in 2008 and settled in Tennessee. In 2010 a state court granted their request for asylum but two years later the Obama administration called for a review and a higher court overturned the decision. The Romeikes' only hope of staying in the US now rests with the Supreme Court which still hasn't decided whether to hear their appeal.

The Department of Education has partnered with billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Institute to promote a global education initiative that seeks “a world where each and every person on Earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge.” Education Secretary Arne Duncan kicked off a $25,000 “Why Open Education Matters” competition that will give a cash prize for the best short video explaining the benefits of what is known as Open Educational Resources, or O.E.R., for students, teachers and schools.