Free Republic

A new course at Brown University has sparked controversy after it was offered solely to minority students. The teacher training class in mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) was recently made available only to students who identify as Black, Indigenous or Latino. Anyone who identifies as BIPOC, regardless .. if they are a student at Brown ... The exclusion of white and Asian students raised the ire of one anonymous Brown student, who was turned away from the MBSR program because they don’t identify as BIPOC. In a May 13 complaint filed with the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR), a “civil...

Students should be able to be comfortable in their own skin. They should also be able to express themselves with their clothes, incoming La Cueva High School senior Erica Ho says. But sometimes, students get in trouble for that expression. And more often than not, Ho says, it’s young women who are singled out – often by dress code enforcers who say their goal is to maintain a professional, “distraction-free” environment. “You come to school trying to express yourself, … you come to school trying to learn,” Ho said. “You’re not really thinking about if I’m showing too much skin,...

Union leaders representing more than 4,000 Portland teachers and other licensed educators say they will meet with Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero and other Portland Public Schools administrators in coming days to urge them to acknowledge ventilation issues in a significant swath of elementary and middle schools. - snip - The union’s questions are prompted by The Oregonian/OregonLive’s “Below the bare minimum” investigation, which found that nearly 500 of almost 2,000 classrooms in the district’s elementary and middle schools fail to meet experts’ bare minimum recommendations for fresh and filtered air. Many ventilation scientists set that minimum threshold at no less than...

<p>CLINTON, S.C. (WSPA) – Four students have been expelled and a fraternity has been removed following an investigation into an incident that happened at a women’s lacrosse game at Presbyterian College in February.</p><p>School leaders said on February 11, a group yelled racist remarks at the Howard University women’s lacrosse team.</p>

I’m a college professor, which is one of those jobs that people outside the profession love to ask you about. For the better part of a decade, most of those conversations have been about one thing: free speech. Are universities, once sites of pure, open intellectual discourse, no longer so pure? What is the future of this endeavor I’ve dedicated my life to, if my peers and I are afraid to speak our minds? In one way, this interest makes sense. An enormous amount of high-profile media coverage has been dedicated to what is said, or not said, on certain...

A University of Buffalo student is speaking out after she was chased by a woke mob at an event on campus with Lt. Col. Allen West, claiming she was scared for her life. Young Americans for Freedom President Therese Purcell joined "Fox & Friends First" Monday to discuss the incident and how the meeting spiraled out of control. "I was really afraid for my life since they physically assaulted my friend, and like I said, they were screaming, no peace," Purcell told co-host Todd Piro. "I don't think they were going to do anything remotely peaceful. They were a very...

Out of control. This is simply getting out of control. Again, I’m not a culture warrior. These were never issues that got me animated, but now it looks like we all must fix bayonets and skewer the freaks who are turning our places of learning into dens of sexual deviancy. This isn’t about LGBT folks. I don’t care about them. This is 2022—if you’re part of that community—good for you. It’s no longer a shocking detail or taboo. Younger conservatives don’t care either—the shock value is gone. This is about ending this grooming bit in our schools and the brainwashing...

ANALYSIS: Students no longer know how to relate to one another face to face College students are isolated. A Harvard study from last year found 61 percent of young adults ages 18 to 25 feel “serious loneliness,” with 43 percent of these respondents reporting increases since the pandemic. The Healthy Minds Study, which surveyed students at 36 schools during fall 2020, also found 66 percent felt isolated from others. Every month or so, I see a new post on my university Reddit board from a student, who has nowhere else to turn, asking how to make friends. The college subreddit...

New documents obtained through an open records request show how far Democrats in Georgia have gone in their attempts to demonize practices that make elections more secure and set themselves up for future victories by pushing their messages to the rising generation of voters. In short, the records uncovered show that an organization founded by Stacey Abrams partnered with Atlanta public schools to uncritically teach students that election security provisions such as requiring ID to vote are discriminatory in nature, while the lax protocols implemented amid the COVID-19 pandemic should become permanent. The lesson plans and curriculum used in the...

The State University of New York at Brockport said in a statement that the possibility of "large numbers" of police officers on-campus during an event featuring a convicted cop killer could be "traumatizing," and is allowing students to skip class during the day of the event.

In the annals of manufactured scandals by TV networks, one of the lamest examples was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ telling high school students at an event of his: “You do not have to wear those masks. I mean, please take them off. Honestly, it’s not doing anything, and we’ve got to stop this COVID theater.” “NBC Nightly News” tried to make this a story for not just one night, but two. It’s lame because it came after everyone took off their masks for the State of the Union address, after the “nonpartisan” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ruled against...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a troubling impact on the reading skills of school kids in the youngest grades. A series of new studies indicate that roughly one-third of the youngest school kids are behind on reading benchmarks, appreciably higher than before the pandemic. For kindergarten students nationwide, the percentage of students at highest risk for not learning to read rose 8 percent during the pandemic, from 29 percent in the middle of the 2019-20 school year to 37 percent in the middle of the 2021-22 school year, according to a study conducted by Amplify, a curriculum and assessment company....

The Latin School of Chicago appears to have been a breeding ground for critical race curricula that later gave excuses for political violence. lthough critical race theory has only come to the forefront of American politics in the last year, an email obtained by The Federalist dating back to 2016 proves the divisive ideology has been entrenched in American K-12 schools for much longer, sometimes where some least expect it. An email from Elizabeth Denevi, who at the time was the director of studies and professional development at the Latin School of Chicago, shows the private school injected CRT into...

During a portion of an interview with NBC on Thursday, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) for telling a group of students that them wearing masks was theater. At an event on Wednesday, DeSantis told a group of students, “You do not have to wear those masks. I mean, please take them off. Honestly, it’s not doing anything, and we’ve got to stop with this COVID theater. So, if you want to wear it, fine. But this is ridiculous.”

We yielded to irrational pandemic restrictions to get the next credential. Future leaders we aren’t. .... Harvard has required students to get vaccinated and boosted and test for Covid twice a week, hectored us to wear masks nearly everywhere, and banned students from several communal spaces, including dining halls ... More concerning than the administration’s heavy-handedness has been the zombielike response of the student body. I ask my friends, “Why do young, fully vaccinated students continue to tolerate these irrational Covid restrictions?” While many of my peers acknowledge the excess, they shrug it off. The prevailing mood on campus is...

As the mainstream narrative about the origin of COVID-19 falls apart, it’s time to put other widely accepted facts about the virus—and the devastating measures they were used to justify—under the same scrutiny. On March 13, 2020, the public school district where I teach announced that all classrooms and buildings would be closed for two weeks. Then two weeks turned into two months, and two months turned into over a full year without in-person instruction. My school serves a diverse population of low-income students in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is impossible to overstate the severity of this disruption...

On Monday, a group of high school students in the Chicago suburbs stormed out of class after being told they had to wear masks in order to participate in the classroom. In response to a temporary restraining order imposed by Sangamon County Circuit Court Judge Raylene Grischow, students walked out of schools across the state of Illinois on Monday. Jon J. Kerr, the publisher of The Kerr Report on Substack, posted a video of a mass exodus from Vernon Hills High School in Chicago on Twitter. Those children who refused to wear masks met with their principals and were allowed...

Yesterday, Allahpundit pointed out one of the early cracks in the blue wall of support for mask mandates, particularly in public schools. New Jersey’s governor seemed to be ready to throw in the towel and stop fighting public sentiment on the issue. Well, shortly after that, the push to put an end to the mandates appeared to start spreading faster than the Omicron variant. Three more blue state governors joined Phil Murphy in saying that mandates would be coming to an end either this month or in March. Oregon, Connecticut, and Delaware jumped on the bandwagon, with the governors of...

Are we returning to normalcy? The word "normalcy," as history buffs know, was used (but not invented) by our only journalist president, Warren G. Harding, to sum up his 1920 campaign. Normalcy was political shorthand for returning to normal times after a European war, prosecutions of peaceful protesters, sharp inflation and depression, terrorist bombings at home, totalitarian revolutions abroad and a pandemic influenza that killed, proportionately, more than twice as many Americans as COVID-19. Normalcy was popular, too. Harding won the popular vote 60% to 34%, the largest percentage margin in history. The fighting ended; the economy grew; political protesters...

Slides from a presentation to teachers at a Fairfax County Public School in Virginia indicate students who do not comply with mask rules will be provided a separate space and, if they remain non-compliant, may be removed by school security. The news comes as seven school districts in Virginia, including FCPS, are suing Governor Glenn Youngkin over an executive order requiring schools to give parents a choice to opt out of mask mandates. “Today’s action is not politically motivated,” the school boards stated in a press release announcing the lawsuit. “These seven school divisions would welcome the opportunity to collaborate...