Free Republic

DOGE: While teachers scrape by, union "executives" like Randi Weingarten gorge themselves on salaries nearly eight times higher, raking in close to $600,000 a year. They neither teach a single child nor train a single teacher. They are not educators, they are parasites, draining a system they pretend to serve. ... She also flies in a private jet.

A New Jersey law that removes a requirement for teachers to pass a reading, writing and mathematics test for certification will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2025. The law, Act 1669, was passed by Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy as part of the state’s 2025 budget in June in an effort to address a shortage of teachers in the state... Individuals seeking an instructional certificate will no longer need to pass a “basic skills” test ... Just months earlier, Murphy signed a similar bill into law that created an alternative pathway for teachers to sidestep the testing requirement....

Imagine dropping your child off in this man’s classroom, and there’s nothing you could say or do about it. Imagine walking into a supposedly professional environment and seeing a man dressed in women’s clothing and knowing this delusional weirdo is the person entrusted with teaching your child how to read and write. But it’s not just reading and writing and math. No, this is the kind of teacher who boasts about teaching your child “how to sissy that walk,” all while you’re paying taxes to fund this circus. Imagine your child, confused by their surroundings, asking questions about the rainbow...

Alaska’s Supreme Court justices on Friday reversed a Superior Court ruling that struck down key components of the state’s correspondence school program. Nearly 23,000 homeschool students may continue to use their allotments of state education money to pay for private school tuition until the Anchorage Superior Court reconsiders the case. The Supreme Court made its decision a day after oral arguments in an appeal of the ruling in State of Alaska, Department of Education and Early Development v. Alexander, in which plaintiffs argued that it is unconstitutional for public education money to be spent on private school tuition. The justices...

Schools in the progressive haven of San Francisco are facing a major budget crunch. Things are so dire that the district may have to actually close some schools. It’s amazing that these schools are having cash flow problems when you consider the taxes people pay to live there. Officials from the school district recently met with some financial experts who gave them some tough love. ... Late last week, two fiscal experts — appointed a few years ago to give guidance to the district — were authorized to suspend or reverse financial decisions made by the superintendent or school board....

It is hard to overstate just how much public education in the United States was permanently changed by extended school closures of 2020 and 2021. For an entire year, millions of students across the country were forced to attend classes via Zoom, wear masks that affected their cognitive abilities, and were generally socially isolated. At the same time, decision-makers in school districts from Virginia to California were pushing a political agenda that blatantly sought to shut parents out of the education of their own children. The swift and intense backlash from parents changed the politics of education forever. And documenting...

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is negotiating a new contract with the public schools system and is understood to be calling for an extra $50 billion to pay for wage hikes as well as other demands such as fully paid abortions for its members, new migrant services and facilities and a host of LGBT-related requirements and training in schools. To put the figure into context, the total base tax receipts for the state of Illinois last year were $50.7 billion.

Time to Change Our Language.. It is time to stop blaming “Covid” for breaking the economy, destroying businesses and livelihoods, and wreaking untold havoc upon families. It was not “Covid” that did this. It was not even the Chinese. It was our government. The government has conditioned us to blame the impersonal “Covid” for the destruction it wrought upon our businesses and families. We need to change the discussion by using the proper language to fix the blame where it belongs. Good generals can win a battle by picking the terrain upon which they fight. At Waterloo, Wellington forced Napoleon...

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...

Families are voting with their feet to charter schools, which are increasingly resisted by school boards and teacher unions. Diana Diaz-Harrison, above, started a charter in Arizona to fill a gap: no specialized services for children like her autistic son Sammy. . A vote by the Los Angeles board of education vote last month to ban charter schools from sharing space at 300 district campuses is the latest big-city attack against alternatives to struggling traditional public schools. With the strong support of United Teachers Los Angeles, school board members say the ban will protect black and Latino students from the...

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...

National Education Association is the most evil labor organization on the planet. All of the teachers’ unions are evil, but the NEA is the biggest, ... The teachers’ unions weren’t able to hide their nastiness from the public ... They did what they’ve always done — put their interests above those of the students and, as we are now finding out, doomed those kids to being forever behind. One of the more bizarre things we saw back then was the far-left regime in Chicago battling with the teachers’ union there to let the kids go back to school. Then-Mayor Lori...

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...

California’s statewide teachers’ union sent a letter June 27 to the Chino Valley Unified School board criticizing its recent decision to allow only government flags on school property—and threatening to take legal action against the board if the policy is not reversed. The board voted 4–1 June 15 to allow only the California and U.S. flags on school property. The California Teachers Association—with more than 300,000 members—in partnership with local union Associated Chino Teachers alleges in the letter the decision violates teachers’ right to free speech under the First Amendment as well as a state employment law. The union also...

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...

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...

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...

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...