Free Republic

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...

In a post back on March 23 (“Trying To Head Off New York’s Total Self-Destruction”), I took note of the recent issuance by a think tank called the Empire Center of a big Report titled “Next New York.” The Report shines a spotlight on one area after another where progressive New York politicians have implemented destructive and crazily-expensive policies. My March 23 post discussed the subject of energy policy. Before too much time has passed, I want to delve into at least one or two more areas. For today, it’s public education. The Next New York Report covers public education...

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...

230,000 children who failed to show up for class when public schools reopened after the pandemic. It’s a tragedy without parallel in American history as many of the no-shows are very young — K through 3rd grade. Critical skills learned in early education were not taught to these kids, who are now hopelessly behind. ... Consider the fact that 65% of American fourth-grade students can barely read. This is a result of a radical shift to a new way of teaching children how to read. What was wrong with the old way? Well, it was old. ... What exactly are...

Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s office said the Black Lives Matter at School toolkit released by a Virginia teachers union “will not be tolerated.” The Virginia Education Association’s Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action toolkit champions BLM’s 13 principles in the classroom. It uses kindergarten through 12th grade lesson plans made by the education branch of the Southern Poverty Law Center to teach students principles including “transgender affirming,” “queer affirming,” “restorative justice,” and “globalism.” The principles promote critical race theory, a racial lens that teaches students to deconstruct American society on the premise that its institutions are “systemically...

A California school district voted this week to ban Critical Race Theory from being taught in its schools. In a 3-2 vote, the Temecula Valley Unified School District in southern California voted to ban schools from teaching CRT. The vote came at the end of a marathon session on Tuesday night that ran into the wee hours of Wednesday morning; a new conservative majority had just been sworn in at the beginning of the meeting. “The TVUSD desires to uplift and unite students by not imposing the responsibility of historical transgressions in the past and instead will engage students of...

The nation’s largest teachers unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), declined by at least 59,000 members during the 2021-2022 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) disclosure reports. The NEA, the nation’s largest teachers union, lost 40,107 members while the AFT, the nation’s second largest teachers union, declined by 19,078, according to the DOL reports. The decline comes as public schools added 95,000 educators from September 2021 to 2022. ... The decline in the NEA’s membership leaves the union with 2,496,627 million educators, the lowest union membership since 2006, 74...

The National Education Association (NEA) appears to be playing clean-up after a tweet Saturday drew harsh criticism for claiming that educators "know better than anyone" what students need. The NEA, one of the largest teachers unions in the United States, later turned off replies to the tweet, but not before 5,000 people responded, including former education secretary Betsy DeVos, who simply stated "You misspelled parents." The National Education Association took issue with DeVos’ tweet, and noted the role of parents in shaping their children’s education. "Together, families and educators are an essential team for advocating for the resources and opportunities...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Teachers’ unions are pushing a radical Marxist-inspired agenda that is destroying public education in America. Over the past several years, the left has aggressively infected the minds of the youngest children with the tenets of critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology, while academic excellence has been shoved to the back of the bus. As a result, public schools are hemorrhaging students. In my home state of Minnesota, 2022 “marks the second consecutive year the state’s public school system has lost thousands of students,” the Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota think tank, reported in February. Why should parents...

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.

Jared Polis is running for president. He'll deny it. He has denied it. ... Polis has done little to nothing to ruffle the feathers of the teachers' unions... ... standing aside and letting municipalities do your dirty work for you. Polis let Denver Mayor Michael Hancock lead on coronavirus lockdowns and masks before imposing a statewide lockdown himself. Polis also signed a bill allowing cities and counties to enact stricter (but not looser) gun regulations than the state imposes. And there's nothing particularly libertarian about opening the door to public employees' unions in a traditionally non-union state like Colorado. ......

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?