Free Republic

I'd think Joe Biden has to be sitting around wondering how he managed to put himself in his current position, but I'm not sure he even has the cognitive ability to process how bad things are. We've all seen the polls, which will likely tighten in a general election, but other factors are at play as well. ... The latest flashing red light comes courtesy of the National Education Association (NEA), the nation's largest teachers union. A far-left entity that has long served as a lynchpin for Democrat politicians, its members are now demanding Biden show support for Palestinian terrorists...

An annual report from the Inspector General of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) revealed that millions of dollars worth of tech devices were reported lost or stolen “without appropriate search and recovery efforts.” The fiscal year 2023 annual report released Tuesday states CPS schools reported 77,505 tech devices as lost or stolen during the 2021-22 school year, totaling well over $23 million in original purchase price. The discovery, as a result of the district’s first post-COVID-19 inventory, calls the numbers “unacceptably high” and says the oversight process is in need of a “serious overhaul.” The report said the missing items included...

Once in place, it is nearly impossible to get rid of a public union. Florida governor Ron DeSantis found a clever way to make it possible...Union Decertification Legislation in FloridaIn May, governor DeSantis signed a bill that requires at least 60% of workers in a bargaining unit to be dues-paying members. United Teachers of Dade (UTD) did not hit the threshold.Also, unions also can no longer automatically deduct dues from paychecks, members have to opt in. Much of the dues are used for political purposes and resentment from many teachers has built up.Teachers Union Showdown in FloridaThe Wall Street Journal...

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and the Chicago Board of Education are following the lead of other major cities and eliminating gifted school programs in the name of achieving greater racial and social “equity.” Eleven “high-achieving selective-enrollment schools” will be eliminated, according to Chicago Board of Education CEO Pedro Martinez, to reduce “stratification and inequity.” As we have previously discussed, major cities with failing public education programs are erasing performance gaps in their schools by decapitating the top performers rather than elevating the performance overall. Other schools have also eliminated or lowered proficiency standards to achieve higher passage rates.According to the...

Stacy Davis Gates owes more than $5,500, but makes more than $289,000 ... The progressive president of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) owes thousands in unpaid utility bills despite making an eye-popping salary ... Stacy Davis Gates owes the city of Chicago $5,579 in unpaid water, sewer and trash bills as of Nov. 7, 2023, despite bringing home "at least" $289,000 a year. Documents uncovered by the group show Davis Gates started a payment plan for the amount in July 2023, but quickly defaulted. ... This latest revelation adds to the mounting evidence of her hypocrisy. She spurns responsibility and...

Barely six months after South Carolina lawmakers approved legislation allowing K-12 students to customize their education, the state affiliate of the National Education Association is attempting to force children to remain in assigned public schools. The South Carolina Education Association is the latest in a long line of education special-interest groups that oppose parental rights and have sought to limit students’ learning options through litigation. National teachers unions and their state affiliates have filed suits against parental choice in education in Arizona, Florida, New Hampshire, Ohio, Puerto Rico—the list goes on. Fortunately for children, the unions and other lobbying groups...

While the teachers flaunt their “righteousness” and fancy themselves activists, the more apropos term is “useful idiots” — they are unwitting accessories to an agenda that is antithetical to everyone’s best interest, including their own. The Fresno Teachers Association, a union with around 4,000 members, is headed towards a strike, largely because the superintendent of the Fresno Unified School District, Robert Nelson, hasn’t budged on allowing school parking lots to become homeless camps; as Nelson says, the proposal isn’t within the district’s “area of expertise.” But according to the president of the union, Manuel Bonilla, it is; from a new...

Parents in a Colorado school district expressed outrage after a report said the local teachers union sent out an email to its members instructing them to get rid of evidence of students' transgender information, according to a CBS report. The Jefferson County Education Association (JCEA) email explained to teachers that if they surveyed students on their gender identities, that information should not be stored in records, in a CBS report headlined, "Controversy erupts in Jefferson County after the teachers union tells educators to destroy evidence of student surveys regarding gender identity." The email said, "if you do a questionnaire, please...

Property-tax relief? Hardly. Proposition HH on this fall’s statewide ballot is really about growing government. And it attempts to do that by piggybacking on public outrage over skyrocketing property tax bills. The proposal’s purported property-tax “relief” — served up by Gov. Jared Polis and his legislative allies as one part of their dizzyingly complicated scheme — is a ruse. As with every attempt to play politics with a crisis, there’s a hidden agenda. And that agenda is to snooker Colorado voters into letting the state keep and spend billions of dollars in surplus tax revenue that otherwise would have to...

Chicago Public Schools has a school utilization problem. Over 34% are less than half full, 57% are underutilized, and 5% are overcrowded. Just 35% are at ideal capacity. The Chicago Teachers Union is preventing solutions. About 322,000 Chicago Public Schools students are set to return Aug. 21, with more than 1 in 3 students entering buildings less than half full. Nearly empty school buildings eat resources that should go towards students’ educations. Those educations are lacking when just 14% of CPS 3rd through 8th grade students from low-income families met proficiency standards in reading and 9% in math. School capacity...

In 2013, Chicago closed 50 nearly empty schools. Since then, the CTU has barred charters and other schools from using these empty buildings to provide schooling options for local students. After railing against these school closures, CTU leadership locked students out of full-time, in-person learning for 17 months during 2020-21. For Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to connect the public safety struggles of today to closing 50 virtually empty schools over a decade ago is particularly disingenuous, especially considering his peers at the Chicago Teachers Union kept students out of classes for 17 months. Many of the closed schools would not...

Viral video footage shows a California teachers union president who led school closures dropping his daughter off at a private school. Footage posted by the group Guerilla Momz shows Berkeley Federation of Teachers President Matt Meyer dropping his two-year-old daughter off at a private preschool. Meyer’s daughter’s face is blurred out. “Meet Matt Meyer. White man with dreads and president of the local teachers’ union,” the group tweeted Saturday. “He’s been saying it is unsafe for *your kid* to be back at school, all the while dropping his kid off at private school.” The video was filmed by Berkeley area...

Despite only spending a few years in the classroom, taxpayers could end up shelling out over $200,000 in a public pension for AFT president Randi Weingarten.Randi Weingarten has spent only a small portion of her career in the classroom despite leading the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the second-largest national teachers union in the United States. Trained as a lawyer, Weingarten taught full-time for just three years and was a substitute teacher for three more. However, according to a report by Freedom Foundation, a think tank, she will collect over 15 years' worth of public pension when she retires. That...

There is a reason why you know who Randi Weingarten, the leader of the second-largest teachers union in the country, is. She’s the one who threatened to strike if schools did not close in 2020. She is the one who said that school closures were not that big of a deal because “kids are resilient." She is the one who influenced the CDC to change its COVID-19 guidelines using almost her exact language. She is the one who introduced a campaign to bring Ibram X. Kendi’s simplistic ideas on race into “every classroom.” In other words, you know who Randi...

There are many reasons why so many US public schools remained persistently closed for well over a year, but at the top of the list is Randi Weingarten. She is the President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and served as the self-appointed and media-anointed spokesperson for teachers’ unions throughout the pandemic. Weingarten appeared regularly across national media outlets for well over two years, relentlessly touting the dangers of public schools and the risk to teachers from in-person instruction. She also painted anyone who advocated for schools to open as heartless and cruel. Now that it’s become clear what...

As Colorado kids struggle to recoup learning losses post-pandemic, teachers unions keep proving that’s not their priority. Standing at the center is the state’s most prominent teachers union — the Colorado Education Association. At the CEA’s statewide conference on April 22, the organization — which claims to represent teachers — took a brazen, ideological stance when it passed a resolution attacking capitalism for “inherently exploit(ing) children, public schools, land, labor, and resources.” Never mind how America’s free enterprise system enables businesses and homeowners to pour billions of dollars into our state’s education system through taxation, or the philanthropic contributions of...

Some of the people most strongly associated with promoting lockdown measures during the COVID-19 pandemic have recently sought to recast their positions. Examples include Anthony Fauci, former leader of the federal COVID-19 response, teachers’ union head Randi Weingarten, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Fauci seemed eager to shirk responsibility for the lockdowns when talking to The New York Times last week. “Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did,” he said. It was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that produced the lockdown recommendations,...

Baltimore’s failing schools. Recent test scores found that there were 23 schools in the city where not even one child was doing math at grade level. These included Elementary Schools, Middle Schools and High Schools. Those were the extreme low end but the numbers also showed that city-wide just 7% of 3-8th graders were doing math at grade level. Today, Fox News highlights a similar report coming out of Illinois from a conservative group called Wirepoints. In this case, there were 53 schools where not one child could do math at grade level. Granted this is a small number of...

New conservative Christian majority leads way on board’s 3-2 vote to prohibit critical race theory The teaching of critical race theory was banned in Temecula Valley schools after an emotional marathon meeting that drew hundreds to a Tuesday night, Dec. 13, session in a packed high school theater. Led by a new conservative Christian board majority seated at the beginning of the meeting, the school board’s 3-2 vote to prohibit such lessons came early Wednesday, Dec. 14. “A lot has been said tonight,” said newly elected trustee Joseph Komrosky, who proposed the resolution. “I’m here to keep a campaign promise....

Nearly 270 public educators were arrested on child sex-related crimes in the US in the first nine months of this year, ranging from grooming to raping underage students. ... roughly one arrest a day. ... The analysis looked at local news stories week by week featuring arrests of K-12 principals, assistant principals, teachers, substitute teachers and teacher’s aides on child sex-related crimes in school districts across the country. Arrests that weren’t publicized were not counted in the analysis, meaning the true number may well be higher. ... Stephen Kenion, who taught self-defense classes to Baltimore City Public School students, was...