Free Republic

The Democrat Party is pushing to increase “literacy” on climate change-related material in America’s schools while students are performing poorly with respect to actual literacy. The party’s education platform mentions the importance of “climate literacy” for American K-12 students several times, emphasizing the purported need for students to be able to understand and interpret information relating to climate change. Meanwhile, the average reading score for both fourth and eighth grade students in 2022 had fallen by three points relative to 2019, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). “We will equip students with the knowledge and skills to...

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...

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...

I'd think Joe Biden has to be sitting around wondering how he managed to put himself in his current position, but I'm not sure he even has the cognitive ability to process how bad things are. We've all seen the polls, which will likely tighten in a general election, but other factors are at play as well. ... The latest flashing red light comes courtesy of the National Education Association (NEA), the nation's largest teachers union. A far-left entity that has long served as a lynchpin for Democrat politicians, its members are now demanding Biden show support for Palestinian terrorists...

An annual report from the Inspector General of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) revealed that millions of dollars worth of tech devices were reported lost or stolen “without appropriate search and recovery efforts.” The fiscal year 2023 annual report released Tuesday states CPS schools reported 77,505 tech devices as lost or stolen during the 2021-22 school year, totaling well over $23 million in original purchase price. The discovery, as a result of the district’s first post-COVID-19 inventory, calls the numbers “unacceptably high” and says the oversight process is in need of a “serious overhaul.” The report said the missing items included...

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...

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...

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...

Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), is in Ukraine. Miguel Cardona, the Secretary of Education in the Biden Shipwreck, is worried about contraception for children. Your children were kept out of school for two years. Their reading and math scores are in the septic tank. This is not an accident or incompetence. And not us let forget that the Attorney General Merrick Garland considers complaining parents to be domestic terrorists. The elites of our country are intentionally destroying your children. You cannot sit this one out. Randi Weingarten (AFT) had the gall to Tweet that she...

SEATTLE (AP) — Red-shirted teachers and staff in Seattle Public Schools took to the picket lines instead of the classroom on what was supposed to be the first day of school Wednesday, striking for the first time since 2015 over issues that include pay and educational support for students who have struggled with years of pandemic learning. Contract talks, which began months ago, continued. It was unclear how long the walkout might last, leaving many parents to scramble for alternative childcare. The city said it would open recreation centers for children in kindergarten through sixth grade beginning Monday. “We encourage...

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."