Free Republic

In New York City, the nation’s largest school district has lost some 50,000 students over the past two years. In Michigan, enrollment remains more than 50,000 below prepandemic levels from big cities to the rural Upper Peninsula. In the suburbs of Orange County, Calif., where families have moved for generations to be part of the public school system, enrollment slid for the second consecutive year; statewide, more than a quarter-million public school students have dropped from California’s rolls since 2019. And since school funding is tied to enrollment, cities that have lost many students — including Denver, Albuquerque and Oakland...

Schools are becoming indoctrination factories, trying to turn children against their country and their own parents' values. It's what the teachers unions intend. Amazingly, that's just fine with resident Joe Biden, who told a gathering of teachers and union bigwigs on April 27 that the kids are "yours when they're in the classroom." That wasn't just a Biden stumble. He repeated it for emphasis: "They are all our children ... They are not somebody else's children." Sorry, Joe. But parents have a right to know what their children are being taught, and to set limits. State legislators in at least...

Yes or no, do funds raised by public school levies give money to the teacher's unions?

NewsGuard, the establishment “news-rating” project that presents itself as a source of expert knowledge on which news sources can be trusted and which ones cannot, will be rolling out to millions of American schoolchildren due to a partnership with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Per Axios, the AFT will purchase NewsGuard licenses for all of its 1.7 million teachers, in a major deal for the news-rating project. NewsGuard has had a reputation as a project of the political establishment since its inception. NewsGuard maintains a list of news outlets it considers “trustworthy” and “untrustworthy,” data which it uses in...

In 2021, special interests groups and teachers unions worked their air-tight alliances with Democratic politicians to the bone, trying harder than ever to stop parents from having a say in the education of their children. But 2021 was also the year that parents fought back. Parents flocked to the polls in record numbers to elect Glenn Youngkin as Governor of Virginia in a massive upset. Youngkin kept his campaign promise and banned Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Virginia’s schools on his first day in office. In another victory, the Department of Education pulled the plug on a regulation that would...

You knew this fight was coming. Omicron is everywhere. It’s highly contagious. At this point, everyone is going to get it eventually. It’s not something that should cause embarrassment or shame. That feeling is only present because liberals decided to inject their moral superiority complex into this mess. The red states were the idiots. The rural folks were the morons who got COVID, not us. The elites took every word Fauci said as gospel. They wore 16 masks at a time. They wore moon suits. And the liberal Northeast is teeming with COVID. We’re breaking COVID records daily. Everyone is...

Parents in the Austin, Texas, area expressed outrage after a technology teacher read a Dr. Seuss-style poem mocking “evangelicals” and parents who have expressed concerns about books they call pornographic. Krista Tyler, instructional technology specialist at Grisham Middle School in the Round Rock Independent School District (ISD) read the poem at the Leander ISD school board meeting Dec. 16. “Everyone in Leander liked reading a lot/ but some evangelicals in Leader did not,” Tyler begins. “These kooks hated reading, the whole reading season./ Please don’t ask why, no one quite knows the reason./ It could be perhaps critical thinking causes...

Parents who never imagined running for office battled to win seats on local school boards last week; they won some, but lost many. Their fiercest opponents were the teachers unions. The media portrayed these school board races as culture wars, but more than anything they were struggles by parents to wrest control of the boards from self-serving unions. For decades, the unions have maintained a tight grip on who gets elected. No wonder school district decisions -- about budgets, masking, COVID closures, curriculum and teacher contracts -- protect teachers first. Never mind what's best for kids. That needs to change....

resident Joe Biden delivered a message and a warning to our country in a speech that I, along with many others, wholeheartedly agree with: "Any country that out-educates us will out-compete us." He is entirely correct. However, while his words are vital and motivating, they must be accompanied by actions. Biden delivered this speech in a city with the nation's worst school system: Baltimore City School District. The figures aren't simply stunning; they'll make your heart skip a beat and your stomach turn. In the Baltimore City School District, 41% of high school students have a GPA of less than...

HBO star said 'what's going on in the schools' was going to be 'the issue' in future elections... Bill Maher sounded the alarm Friday night about next week's Virginia gubernatorial election, which could go to Republicans for the first time since 2009. Maher began the show's panel discussion by pointing out that Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe "should walk away with it" since resident Biden won Virginia by 10 points and McAuliffe previously served as the commonwealth's governor, 2014-2018. Instead, Maher noted, the race is "neck and neck," with GOP challenger Glenn Youngkin over an issue that Maher reminded viewers he...

CRANSTON, R.I. (WJAR) — There is more fallout from the public records controversy in South Kingstown. The National Education Association Rhode Island (NEARI) and NEA South Kingstown (NEASK) filed a complaint in Rhode Island Superior Court on Monday to "protect teachers' privacy rights," NEARI Communication Director Stephanie DeSilva Mandeville shared Wednesday. "This action seeks to temporarily restrain the School Department from releasing any information related to these APRA requests," the union wrote in a statement. "NEARI believes many of these documents are not public records as defined under APRA and/or fall under APRA’s exclusions and therefore are not subject to...

We rightly criticize and condemn China for sending more than one million Uighurs – Muslims – to “re-education” camps. At the “camps” the Uighurs are “educated” in a process their Chinese elders describe as “washing brains, cleansing hearts, strengthening righteousness and eliminating evil.” Again, this is sick and wrong, a human rights abuse, something that should disgust us all. But we have our own, milder, version of “re-education” camps that indoctrinate, all for a supposed good, evolved cause. We call our re-education camps public schools. Here is one example, from Evanston, right outside of Chicago, of what first and second...

As I noted a couple of weeks ago, the largest national teachers’ unions—the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers—have essentially declared war on parents and students, doubling down on Critical Race Theory and the “LGBTQ+” agenda while continuing to advocate for forced masking and vaccination of children. In that column, I called on teachers of good will, true allies of students and parents, to abandon the unions and stop paying dues, which is tantamount to supporting their agenda. The battle lines have been drawn. They are either with us or against us. So much for teachers. But...

Editor's Note: This piece was authored by Garion Frankel.The fight against critical race theory (CRT) in classrooms is raging across America. Led by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and Reason’s Corey DeAngelis, parents and students around the country are pushing against the academic practice, which teaches children that thanks to their skin color, they’re inherently evil. It’s racism in its most obvious form. Enter Randi Weingarten, a lawyer, longtime union executive, and the current president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Weingarten has argued that those forces pushing back against CRT are part of “radical circles” that seek to...

America’s big teachers’ unions have essentially declared war on parents—and not just conservative, Christian parents: on all rational, fair-minded parents who are not completely on board with hateful, racist Critical Race Theory and other radical ideologies being pushed by the far-left unions. And that includes many minority parents. In a statement last week, the National Education Association declared CRT “reasonable and appropriate” and vowed to “fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric.” Well, okey-doke. If it’s a fight they want, I say we give it to them. Meanwhile, the American Federation of Teachers has for months been at the forefront of efforts...

The number of home school applications submitted to the California Department of Education (DOE) soared during the 2020-2021 school year, state data indicates. There were 34,715 private school affidavits (PSAs) for five children or less submitted during the most recent curricular year. In California, homeschools are recognized as private schools, and homeschooling families are required to submit an affidavit to the DOE annually. The most recent homeschool figures are more than twice as high as they were during the 2018-2019 school year, when 14,548 PSAs were filed. There were 22,433 PSAs filed during the 2019-2020 school year. “People are just...

America's largest teachers' union has announced it backs the teaching of critical race theory in schools, wants to hire staff to 'fight back' against those who oppose CRT, and has called for an October 14 rally to be held in honor of George Floyd's birthday. The National Educator's Association recently approved a resolution to promote critical race theory through its existing channels, work to 'fight back' against opponents of the practice. It also wants to assemble a team to teach it to union members and create a 'national day of action' to start a dialogue about systemic racism on October...

Even more stark is drop in enrollment among younger students: 13% for preschool and kindergarten.The number of students attending public schools during the 2020-2021 academic year fell by roughly 3% compared with the previous year. The data comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency that analyzes education figures. The 3% drop represents some 1.5 million students according to the preliminary report. A final report will not be available until next spring, according to the NCES. Figures come from reports generated by state departments of education. There were 51.1 million students enrolled in conventional and public charter...

The corrupt way in which California Governor Gavin Newsom rigged his recall election once again confirms why 1.7 million state voters signed the recall petition against him. Newsom and his fellow Democrats reduced the state to the Banana Republic of California with their shameful moves leading to the September 14 recall date. Ballots will begin flooding to Californians’ mail boxes — whether they asked for them or not under COVID-19 “emergency” rules — in mid-August because Newsom and his cronies changed the rules to move up the election by 30 days. ... Changing the date of the election to a...

My fellow New Yorkers, you know what we are doing is crazy: Unmask. It’s time. It’s long past the time. What happened to us? How are we entering summer 2021, with many of us still masked, despite all the evidence suggesting we should stop? There was never any need to wear masks outdoors. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci admits that, yet on every street there are people, often alone, continuing to wear a mask. Some stores continue to require masking, even as nearly 70 percent of New Yorkers are vaccinated. And our kids suffer most of all, as the science-denying teachers...