Free Republic

The American Federation of Teachers lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on, and even suggested language for, the federal agency’s school-reopening guidance released in February. The powerful teachers union’s full-court press preceded the federal agency putting the brakes on a full re-opening of in-person classrooms, emails between top CDC, AFT and White House officials show. The emails were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative watchdog group Americans for Public Trust and provided to The Post. The documents show a flurry of activity between CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, her top advisors and union...

As a parent in the Central Bucks County School District, I became worried about my children’s future as I watched them struggle with remote learning after the district closed down due to Covid-19. When the local public health director came out with new guidance in the summer saying that kids could safely attend school in-person, I was elated, as were hundreds of other parents. But then the superintendent backtracked and said schools wouldn’t reopen in the fall. Controversy erupted. The health director was maligned in the press, and families were left wondering when or if things would ever return to...

Throw billions of dollars at school districts in California, and what do you expect?A group called Reopen California Schools got access to online memos from teachers’ unions in California and discovered that in some districts, enriching their members weighs heavier on their priorities than, say, PPE equipment or programs to help children recover from their prolonged absence from the classrooms. Here is what the teachers’ union in Dublin, CA, a well-to-do suburb east of San Francisco is discussing:CA school district (@DublinUSD) is paying its teachers $2,500 bonuses with state and federal aide money, even suggesting staff could use the money...

Are you unhappy with your children's K–12 education? Do you believe that your children are subjected to indoctrination? If you answered yes to either question, there are alternative educational options worth considering.If you live in a state with an education savings account (ESA) education savings account (ESA) or school voucher program, you should take advantage of the program and send your child to an outstanding school that you can afford. If you do not have access to an ESA or school voucher program, and you are not satisfied with your child's school, you may want to consider other options, such...

You cannot make this up. Actually, nothing is shocking anymore. What if I were to tell you that a teachers’ union president quarterbacked an effort to keep schools closed, but then was caught dropping his daughter off at an in-person preschool? You’re probably not shocked. We have a class of people who think the rules don’t apply to them. It has infested the political class. It reeks of it on the Hill. And public-sector unions are no different. It should make parents’ blood boil (via KQED):Parent groups are crying "hypocrisy" after a video surfaced showing the president of the Berkeley...

As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urge that schools open, many teachers unions are saying no. “Amidst a global pandemic, the likes of which none of us has ever seen, the school district is hellbent on forcing thousands of educators into unsafe school buildings held together, in some places quite literally, by duct tape,” Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Jerry T. Jordan said in response to his city’s push to reopen buildings that have been closed for about a year, The Washington Post reported. Teachers there took to the streets in protest rather than go back to the...

Late Monday evening Los Angeles County health officials announced some long-awaited good news. In a statement, they said the region had reached the required threshold of Covid-19 cases per 100,000 to allow students back into classrooms. The issue has been a contentious one throughout the pandemic with many parents wondering why private schools were allowed to reopen and, if there had been no pattern of outbreaks at area schools, why public schools were not allowed to follow. LA Public Health @lapublichealth Public Health Expects to Reach the Threshold Required to Reopen Schools. Dozens of Elementary Schools will be Permitted to...

PITTSBURGH — One year ago, Lena Carson was pulling straight A's at the city's Creative and Performing Arts School across the river from her parent's home. She also swam every day at the local YMCA in preparation to compete at the annual state competition and enjoyed the everyday social life of a teenager. Today, she is sitting at home. Again. It has been nearly a year since she walked into CAPA, a magnet school she had to earn admission to through a portfolio of her work, and interacted with her teachers or friends. Her daily swims are gone, along with...

Fairfax County schools are set to reopen classrooms for in-person learning this month, but thousands of teachers plan to continue working from home. Fairfax County Public Schools plans to have students and teachers return to classrooms on February 16. However, 2,300 of the district’s 15,000 teachers many teachers will continue to instruct their classes virtually even while their students are physically present in the classroom. Because of this, classroom monitors will be present in the classroom with children during class. So far, 645 classroom monitors have been hired, and the school district needs 205 more, Fox 5 DC reported. The...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reiterated on Wednesday that schools can safely reopen even if teachers are not vaccinated against COVID-19. Last week the CDC weighed into the ongoing debate over whether to reopen schools for in-person instruction, noting that schools that are currently welcoming students into classrooms with certain safety precautions in place have had only “scant transmission” of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The CDC team reviewed data from studies in the United States and abroad and found the experience in schools different from nursing homes and high-density work sites where rapid spread has...

Shouldn’t Chicago just get it over with now and make Chicago Teachers Union President Jesse Sharkey the mayor? He’s already the boss. And he’s the one acting like the mayor of Chicago. He dictates terms. And Mayor Lori Lightfoot? She’s that kid being bullied in the schoolyard by Sharkey and his pals. But there is no school, is there? There’s been almost no in-person learning for about a year. And remote instruction really isn’t school. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say it’s safe to open public schools, that children are being hurt by not being in class. And...

Teachers’ Unions Are a Criminal RacketMaybe that’s a little harsh. Actually, when you consider that I usually refer to the National Education Association as “the most evil labor organization on Earth” the &# I’ve long been uneasy about heaping blanket praise on any given profession. I’ve met too many members of our species, and conferring blanket sainthood on any group is just not a bright idea. Nobody gets a pass from me. Or from my good friend and colleague Kira Davis.If public-sector unions are a cancer eating away at America, the teachers’ unions are stage 4. Yet they’ve been elevated...

The Chicago Teachers Union continues to stage a standoff with City Hall after the union voted to reject in-person learning on Monday. The Board of Education had required K-8 teachers to return to schools so they could be prepared for a return to in-person learning on Feb. 1. But because the CTU didn't comply, the city has announced a delay to the teachers' start date to Wednesday in order "to resolve our discussions without risking disruption to student learning.” Chicago Public Schools explained how remote learning is putting strains on students, both in terms of their education and finances. The...

Now that the election is over, Democrats are trying to shift gears from pandemic theater to reopening the economy. But they're finding their own propaganda is difficult to reverse. The reopening of the nation started up almost immediately after the 2020 election. Vaccines “miraculously” became available. The CDC and WHO started changing their recommendations. Politicians who were adamantly opposed to reopening in any form were suddenly calling for businesses and schools to open. The COVID-19 pandemic had played its role in removing President Trump from office, so now they need to reverse course and try to fix the economic mess...

Chicago’s teacher’s union voted on Sunday to defy Chicago Public Schools administration and refuse to return to in-person teaching even though pupils are due back in classrooms on February 1st. Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has been locked in a power struggle with the union for some time, with teachers and union brass insisting that it is not safe for teachers to return to classrooms, even though Chicago’s private schools have been in-person for months. At one point, the Chicago Teachers Union, or CTU, suggested that any plan to return to in-classroom teaching would be both racist and sexist. As the...

Lockdowns are merely forced gatherings.. Author and statistician William M. Briggs argues that lockdowns don’t work because they force people to gather in fewer places like supermarkets and therefore spread viruses faster than if people were allowed to spread out. Writing for LockdownSkeptics.org, Briggs states, “A lockdown will spread this bug faster than allowing people to remain at liberty.” The author notes that a lockdown is not the same as a quarantine. Under lockdown, people only have a limited selection of venues at which they are allowed to gather, meaning those locations are busier and therefore make a virus more...

WASHINGTON — Erik Prince, the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents. One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly...

An association of left-wing organizations is currently planning out strategies for what they believe would be a political dogfight should Joe Biden win November's election by a small margin. The group, comprised of more than 50 groups, including MoveOn, Color of Change and the American Federation of Teachers, calls itself the Fight Back Table and recently launched their Democracy Defense Nerve Center. According to the Daily Beast, members of the group held a Zoom call last week in which they discussed how they can plan for Election Day and then coordinate large-scale civil disobedience and what one participant called "mass...

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...

Why does the public education system continue to fail America’s children? Policy experts have pondered this question for decades. Most say the answer is complicated, requiring a nuanced, collaborative approach. But not The New York Times. It found the problem, and it’s simple: white parents. The solution? “Try, whenever possible, to suppress the power of white parents.” That quote comes from the Times’ podcast “Nice White Parents,” which chronicles the history of a single public school in New York. Specifically, the host, Chana Joffe-Walt, decides to look into the racial history of this school. Her first finding: Many parents who...