Free Republic

Arizona school districts are poised to violate state law next week when they use taxpayer dollars to send representatives to a politically motivated meeting where attendees will be encouraged to help overturn Arizona’s new universal school reform. This week, the Goldwater Institute asked the Arizona Attorney General’s Office to investigate this illegal behavior and put a stop to it.Arizona law clearly prohibits school districts from using district money or resources, such as personnel, to influence the outcomes of elections—including ballot initiatives and efforts to place measures on the ballot. Nevertheless, public school district employees will be attending the Arizona School...

A California teachers union is being accused of spying on parents after emails reveal the union was conducting opposition research on parent groups fighting for schools to reopen during the height of the COVID pandemic. The California Teachers Association (CTA) employed a researcher who emailed a parent arm of the local union in April 2021, hoping to dig up information on the motives of San Diego County parents who had successfully sued the state to reopen schools a month earlier. According to emails obtained through a public records request, the union was seeking to uncover “some of the ideological leaning...

This month, the Goldwater Institute called on the Arizona Attorney General’s Office to investigate school districts using district resources to send representatives to the Arizona School Board Association’s “Law Conference” to be held September 7-9. The Institute alleges that the event is “clearly geared toward a political objective: overturning Arizona’s recently enacted universal school choice reform.”ASBA member boards are also being asked to “take part in voting on the 2023 Political Agenda.”The Goldwater Institute’s request has prompted new interest in Arizona Revised Statute Section 15-511, which prohibits school districts from spending or using district school resources to influence the outcomes...

In a surprise to nearly no one, children’s reading and math scores have plummeted. National Assessment of Educational Progress, nicknamed “the nation’s report card,” results show the first-ever drop in math and the largest drop in reading in more than 30 years. Black children had an even bigger collapse in scores. Decades of educational progress undone. Poof. Horrific. Stupid. Unnecessary. We know the school closures did this. It wasn’t the COVID virus. It was the hyper-political reaction, from the left, on reopening schools during the pandemic. The orders came from the top. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued...

Charlie Crist, the Democrat candidate for Florida Governor, just announced that his running mate will be Karla Mats. Interestingly, her nickname has been “Karla Marx” due her public statement regarding Fidel Castro. It’s a weird position to take in a location to which people came to escape the squalor and depravity of communist Cuba under Castro. Her public praise of a communist dictator isn’t all she has going for her. She’s also the President of a teacher’s union, the United Teachers of Dade, which covered up for and protected a serial sexual predator for more than a decade. It was...

Three Tennessee school boards denied the application of the American Classical Academy, a K-12 charter school system affiliated with Hillsdale College that provides students with a classic liberal arts education. The American Classical Academy alleges that these decisions are politically motivated and based on its ties to Hillsdale, which is Christian and conservative, as well as comments made by Hillsdale’s president, Larry Arnn.The American Classical Academy filed appeals with the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission, a group appointed by the governor. In two statements of intent, the American Classical Academy said that the Rutherford and Madison school boards did not...

Florida Democratic gubernatorial nominee Charlie Crist has selected the president of the Miami-Dade County teachers union to be his running mate, placing education at the forefront of his campaign as he seeks to defeat incumbent GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis in November. United Teachers of Dade President Karla Hernandez-Mats was announced as Crist's running mate on Saturday during a campaign event held in Miami… "I'm excited to introduce to you a wonderful person," Crist said. "Karla is an amazing person. She really is." Describing her as a "loving" and "compassionate" teacher during his introduction of Hernandez-Mats, Crist said, "You know her,...

Troy, New York — Hudson Valley Community College(HVCC) in Troy is opting out and not following the official SUNY system-wide policy requiring all students who attend classes in person, to show proof of COVD-19 vaccination. The College claims that is is unfair to require COVID-19 vaccinations for students but not to faculty and staff. ... The Faculty Association disagrees and has offered to the College to negotiate COVID-19 vaccination requirements for faculty members through established collective bargaining procedures.

But as I said in the first sentence of this article, the biggest issue here is that what Biden is set to do is illegal. There is no federal provision that allows him to “forgive” student loan debt on the backs of taxpayers via the stroke of his pen. Nancy Pelosi is on record saying Biden doesn’t have that power. The Department of Education has said Biden doesn’t have that power. For the president to still attempt this move wouldn’t just be a pushing of the envelope. Rather, it would be a conscious, deliberate decision to commit an impeachable offense....

... Columbus City Schools, the state’s largest district with some 47,000 students, plans to start the school year remotely using non-union substitute teachers if CEA were to strike if a new contract agreement is not reached before school starts Aug. 24. District spokeswoman Jacqueline Bryant said the district has 600 substitutes who would be given the curriculum to teach remotely, according to information on a district webpage. ...

An agreement between the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers union and the school district states that White teachers will be laid off before teachers of color, regardless of their seniority. The agreement, which was reached to end a two-week teacher strike last spring, says that starting this school year, "if excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the district shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population."

A Minneapolis teachers union contract stipulates that white teachers will be laid off or reassigned before “educators of color” in the event Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) needs to reduce staff. After the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) and MPS struck a deal on March 25 to end a 14-day teacher strike, the two sides drew up and ratified a new collective bargaining agreement complete with various proposals. One of the proposals dealt with “educators of color protections.” The agreement states that if a non-white teacher is subject to excess, MPS must excess a white teacher with the “next least” seniority....

Potemkin villages” refer to the magnificent facades that Crimean governor Grigory Potemkin supposedly built in front of decrepit villages to impress Catherine the Great on her grand tour of the region. Today, there’s no better term than “Potemkin schools” to describe how educrats run public education in New York City. ... teachers at William Cullen Bryant High School in Queens complained that administrators forced them to pass failing students. Last year, a long-stalled investigation revealed that Maspeth High School in Queens repeatedly faked passing grades. In 2020, at Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill High School where more than 70% of the students...

A traumatic experience at a young age ignited a mission in Tim Ballard—to protect children from the dangerous world around them. He was trained by the Department of Homeland Security and now runs Operation Underground Railroad, one of the largest anti-trafficking organizations in the world. Tim combats child exploitation head-on, but as a father of nine, he encourages all parents to understand what makes a predator and how to protect their children.

As a teacher, I attended the National Education Association convention last week, and my worst fears were confirmed. Public schools are no longer a safe place for families who hold traditional values or for families who believe gender (as in male/female binary) is biologically determined. It was also evident that the teachers union is a lobbying arm of the Democratic Party.

Fox News Digital analysis of child sex crime data in school districts around the nation has found a minimum of 181 K-12 educators have been arrested on child-related sex crimes in the first half of 2022. Among those educators arrested were four principals, 153 teachers, 12 substitute teachers, and 12 teachers’ aides. The crimes ranged from child pornography to rape of students. “Arrests that weren’t publicized were not counted in the analysis, meaning the true number may well be higher,” Fox News Digital reported. According to the analysis, at least 77 percent, or 140 of the arrests, constituted alleged crimes...

When speaking to a friendly audience—the American Federation of Teachers—Biden couldn’t resist giving the game away. Did you hear the First Lady blow her dog whistle last week? Jill Biden, who insists on being called Doctor Jill Biden, made remarks in Boston before a gathering of America’s second-largest teachers’ union, the American Federation of Teachers. She let slip in her address something many of us have suspected for a long time. In educratspeak, she admitted that public education is really public indoctrination. As she pandered to teachers, Biden said: There is so much weight on all of you—but you carry...

TAMPA, Fla. -- Before a friendly audience of conservative moms, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday excoriated political opponents of wanting to “sexualize” children and warp kids’ understanding of race and history. The charged campaign rhetoric in remarks to the Moms for Liberty group was usual fare for DeSantis — and a major reason why he’s in the top tier of potential GOP presidential candidates who now sits on an unprecedented $130 million war chest. But the political backdrop was as atypical as unexpected: The day before his speech, one of the national teacher unions that opposes him released a...

Kids deserve better than 19-year-old amateurs.Arizona Governor Doug Ducey signed a bill earlier this week stipulating that students can begin teaching public school classrooms without having completed a college degree. This is a bad law, borne of staffing desperation and Arizona’s history of underpaying and under-preparing its teachers. Arizona ranks 44 out of 50 states for average teacher pay, with salaries much lower than those of other college graduates, according to a report from the National Education Association, last updated in April 2022. Arizona School Personnel Administration released a survey in February showing that teachers who did not meet state...

A volley of policy proposals has been put up for debate at the annual conference of the nation’s largest teacher’s union, including one that called for the organization to support making masks and COVID-19 vaccines mandatory in public schools. About 6,000 delegates of the National Education Association (NEA), who collectively represent more than 3 million employees in public education, convened in Chicago from July 3–6. It’s the first time they’ve assembled in person to debate on issues and set policy agenda since the start of the pandemic. Prior to 2022, anyone could use the NEA website to track the status...