Free Republic

A Louisiana federal judge on Wednesday permanently blocked the federal government from enforcing its mask and vaccine mandates for children and teachers in public preschool. The Head Start program, which provides early education to infants, toddlers, and kids preparing for kindergarten, cannot require that any adults or students in the applicable centers or daycare be vaccinated against Covid-19 or wear masks, U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty ruled. The regulation applied to children as young as two years old, Doughty noted, both indoors and outdoors during activities that involve close contact with other people. The court rejected the argument...

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...

FIRST ON FOX: Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, a Democrat, told teachers’ unions that they would be his "first" call for education policy should he get elected. While taking questions during a January speaking gig at a Pennsylvania State Education Association Political Institute event, Fetterman said that, if elected, he would be a staunch ally of teachers’ unions. His comments had not been reported previously. "I’m not going to sit up here and pretend that I know exactly what’s needed, I’m going to turn to you," Fetterman said. "If you send me to Washington, D.C., you’ll be the first people...

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...

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."

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...

United Teachers Los Angeles made a bold and revealing statement about its radical political principles when the union endorsed Ron Gochez for L.A. City Council this month. The endorsement is significant for a couple of reasons. First, Gochez is an extreme left-wing L.A. teacher known for racist, anti-American rants. He also has decades-long ties to the African People’s Socialist Party—which is very open and passionate about its hatred of Jews, whites, Barack Obama, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, Koreans, basically everyone. Second, the UTLA didn’t have to endorse him. The union’s leaders wanted to. …

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.

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...

The National Education Association passed a resolution during their annual Representative Assembly in Chicago that would allocate thousands of dollars to conduct opposition research on 25 organizations that are supposedly attacking gender identity and sexual orientation freedoms in public schools. "NEA shall compile research to create fact sheets about the largest 25 organizations that are actively working to diminish a students' right to honesty in education, freedom of sexual and gender identify, and teacher autonomy," the resolution said. NEA's resolutions are called new business items (NBI) and represent the teachers' union's opinions and beliefs. They also open the door to...

The Goldwater Institute is a leading free-market public policy research and litigation organization that is dedicated to empowering all Americans to live freer, happier lives. We accomplish real results for liberty by working in state courts, legislatures, and communities nationwide to advance, defend, and strengthen the freedom guaranteed by the constitutions of the United States and the fifty states. The following column is by Nicole Solas, a mother in Rhode Island and a client of the Goldwater Institute.I’m just like any parent—when I enrolled my daughter in kindergarten, I wanted to know what she would learn. In response, our school...

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...

Though student mask mandates are expiring in California and Los Angeles County this week, students who attend the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) must remain masked—leaving parents and students frustrated. Lisa Sanchez, whose daughter is in LAUSD, called the situation a “never-ending battle.” “We’re very upset that the school hasn’t lifted the mandate sooner,” Sanchez told The Epoch Times. “District officials claim to follow the science—yet the science has spoken—and here our kids are still masked.” The state’s largest school district cannot change its indoor mask requirement without first negotiating an existing contract with the teacher’s union, United Teachers...

A Chicago mother who the teachers' union claimed died when a COVID-positive student was sent home to quarantine as they rallied for more COVID protocols actually died of alcoholism, it emerged on Monday. Denisha Henry, the 32-year-old mother of an eighth-grade student at Jensen Elementary Scholastic Academy in the East Garfield Park district of Chicago, died on September 24.

In Democrat cities across America, the word is out: It’s time for masks to go...except on children. Teachers’ unions are adamant that it’s just better for those kids to keep hiding their faces. ... As you contemplate the unions’ adamant stand about masks on students, consider that children almost invariably experience COVID as a mild cold (“Data collected by the American Academy of Pediatrics shows that just 0.1% to 1.5% of child COVID cases resulted in hospitalization and 0.00% to 0.01% resulted in deaths”) and they’re unlikely to infect others. Consider, too, that children by nature hate having their faces...

A Seattle teachers union is pushing for keeping the district's school mask mandate in place until May, despite the state and county no longer requiring masks, arguing that the forced masking ensures a sense of "safety and normalcy." Seattle Education Association President Jennifer Matter told NPR-affiliate KUOW that the mask mandate should remain until at least May 1, two weeks after students return from spring break, saying there "should be no rush to lift the mask mandate." "We have people who are immunocompromised, we have pregnant educators, we have educators who have children of their own that are under 5...

The high wages of teachers in Boston, where nearly 3,000 are paid six-figure salaries, reflects the strength of their union and suggests that a district plagued by “chronic underperformance” may be more geared toward the adults running it than the children it serves, watchdogs say. A Herald analysis of payroll data found that 2,905 teachers earn more than $100,000 annually, compared to the average per capita income of $44,690 in Boston in 2019, the most recent year for which the U.S. Census Bureau has statistics. Those teachers earned six figures in a city where 18.9% of the population – about...

On Thursday, schools in Douglas County, Colorado closed after hundreds of teachers called in sick to protest against several actions carried out by the newly-elected school board, which became majority conservative in November. According to local outlet CPR News, by mid-day Wednesday, there were around 1,500 unfilled teacher absences for the following day. In total, there are about 3,300 licensed teachers in the school district. The district then canceled preschool through high school classes because “the number of absences has impacted our ability to provide a safe and supervised learning environment for students,” according to a tweet posted by the...

A group of Chicago parents this week sued the city’s teachers union over its refusal to teach classes in person.The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) voted on Tuesday night to only teach classes remotely, arguing the rise in COVID-19 cases and an alleged lack of protective measures made it too dangerous to instruct students inside classrooms.Chicago Public Schools (CPS) deemed the action an illegal work stoppage and canceled classes for three consecutive days as officials negotiated with union leaders. CTU and city officials also filed competing labor complaints.The lawsuit, filed in Cook County circuit court, offers a similar view of the...