Free Republic

The Los Angeles Unified School District is training teachers and staff that "merit" and "individualism" are concepts rooted in "whiteness" that must be challenged in schools. LAUSD required all employees to undergo "implicit/unconscious bias training" guided by Tyrone Howard, a critical race theory advocate and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, prior to the 2021-2022 school year. The training materials, which were obtained by Fox News Digital through a California Public Records Act (PRA) request, instructed educators to work toward being "antiracist" by challenging whiteness at school, which Howard argued exists in the concepts of "merit" and "individualism."...

...This was to be the successful road back to normalcy for public schools. But after two large COVID-19 surges, a year of angry school board meetings, parents claiming teachers were grooming kids for abuse, and fights over everything from mask mandates for students to what books they can read, teachers were already at a breaking point with nearly 500 quitting even if it meant losing their license. On top of all of that, Texas passed a law last year prohibiting teachers from discussing “a widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs," the state's so-called "critical...

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie reacted Friday to New Jersey schools planning to teach gender identity to children. The Republican former presidential candidate blasted his successor, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, for embracing "crazy liberal policies."

Many of us who have been involved with the conservative side of politics often reminisce about the days when Republicans and Democrats got along better and could hang out socially. We’ve all heard the story about Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill being able to enjoy a drink together after a long day of going at each other. That’s so last century. A big reason for that is that the 21st-century Democrats have gone completely bat you-know-what leftist crazy. It’s easy to have a beer with someone you disagree with over tax policy; not so much with someone who wants to...

A school in San Diego County claims it has removed a “Wheel of Privilege” graphic from its professional development training materials after the image was exposed on social media and parents objected. The image was touted as part of professional development training by the Black Mountain Middle School in Poway Unified School District (PUSD), according to the Californians For Equal Rights Foundation (CFER), whose executive director posted the graphic on Twitter. The “Wheel of Power/Privilege” teaching tool was designed to rank people by power and privilege based on skin color, body size, and gender identity, as well as citizenship, language,...

An Indianapolis school district administrator announced he was fired Monday in the wake of a video he tweeted in early November in which he revealed district’s woke social justice educational agenda. Tony Kinnett, who served as the science coordinator for Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS), reported on Twitter he was fired for: •Sharing that IPS recorded children in required racial justice sessions •Not sending IPS the personal info of [journalists] @TietzKendall and @AndyMarkMiller •Quoting Dr. Payne’s racist comments to students •Sharing public filesIndianapolis Public Schools just fired me for: • Sharing that IPS recorded children in required racial justice sessions •...

I’m Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is BrokenIf you enjoyed Netflix’s “The Chair” – a lighthearted depiction of a crisis-prone English Department at an imaginary Ivy League college – you are clearly not in higher education. Something is rotten in the state of academia and it’s no laughing matter. Grade inflation. Spiraling costs. Corruption and racial discrimination in admissions. Junk content (“Grievance Studies”) published in risible journals. Above all, the erosion of academic freedom and the ascendancy of an illiberal “successor ideology” known to its critics as wokeism, which manifests itself as career-ending “cancelations” and speaker...

frustrated because what you signed up for was for students to learn. And it just ended up being a conversation about points all the time.” These days, the Alhambra High School English teacher has done away with points entirely. He no longer gives students homework and gives them multiple opportunities to improve essays and classwork. The goal is to base grades on what students are learning, and remove behavior, deadlines and how much work they do from the equation. The changes Moreno embraced are part of a growing trend in which educators are moving away from traditional point-driven grading systems,...

When the pandemic hit, school went online and learning seemed to be thrown to the wind. As the pandemic stretched on, many teachers were loath to return to the classroom because of apparent COVID fears. Parents began to question whether teachers were really concerned about or eager to foster their children’s learning, especially as they could see the learning loss that was happening … or rather, the learning that often wasn’t happening at all. Such fears were groundless, according to Cecily Myart-Cruz, head of the powerful United Teachers Los Angeles union. Myart-Cruz scoffed at the idea of learning loss in...

Martin Luther, to all faithful and godly pastors and preachers: grace, mercy, and peace be yours in Jesus Christ, our Lord. The deplorable, miserable conditions which I recently observed when visiting the parishes have constrained and pressed me to put this catechism of Christian doctrine into this brief, plain, and simple form. How pitiable, so help me God, were the things I saw: the common man, especially in the villages, knows practically nothing of Christian doctrine, and many of the pastors are almost entirely incompetent and unable to teach. Yet all the people are supposed to be Christians, have been...

In practice, media literacy is actually critical media literacy, indoctrinating students to adopt only leftist principles offered by leftist media outlets.K-12 instruction warped by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and related social-justice radicalism has become such a flashpoint that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland threatens federal retaliation against parent dissidents. Educrats are trying to quell the rebellion by changing definitions, such as the claim, “We’re not teaching CRT, we’re using culturally responsive teaching,” which is the same thing under a different label. Another tactic is to install anodyne-sounding curricular programs that accomplish subversive social-justice goals without alerting parents to the scam.One...

A high-ranking school official told teachers in Southlake, Texas that if they had books in their school about the history of the Holocaust, they should make sure that they have other books that “other perspectives.”On Friday, Gina Peddy, the Carroll school district’s executive director of curriculum and instruction, was leading a training session on which books teachers can have in classroom libraries. The session came amid an uproar over new regulations concerning curriculums teaching about race and racism and which books should be permitted into the classrooms and libraries. A staff member secretly recorded the session. Peddy discussed House Bill...

SAN FRANCISCO — Schools have welcomed students back to classrooms but face a new challenge: A shortage of teachers and staff the likes of which some district officials say they’ve never seen. Public schools have struggled for years with teacher shortages, but the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the problem. One school official in California calls it “the most acute shortage of labor” he’s ever seen. Similar scenarios are playing out across the country as schools cope with a spike in retirements and a need to hire more teachers, counselors, tutors and aides to help children make up for learning losses....

Dumbing down is something our public schools are good at. Cluttering up everyone's mind is a vital part of the process. Traditionally, education was focused on facts, information, details, content, learning, and knowledge, all of these hopefully leading to wisdom. Now we've gone to the other extreme. The students learn little, and they cannot connect one fragment of information to another. Classrooms are filled with chatter. The brains of students are overflowing with nothing much. This shift is bizarre. Wasn't it always assumed we were searching for the truth, for higher understanding, for the inner workings of reality, for the...

Pupils in the same class as a positive Covid case "will not routinely be asked to isolate and book a test", ministers have said. ... The move brings Northern Ireland into line with England, Scotland and Wales. Teaching unions had called for the move ... Low risk.. Studies have shown that the overall risk of children becoming severely ill or dying from Covid is extremely low. Mr Swann and Ms McIlveen also said that there was evidence that the "vast majority of those identified as school close contacts and sent home to isolate during the 2020/21 school year did not...

The inability of U.S. students to perform on par with the majority of other developed nations should cause alarm, given its implications for America’s global leadership. Instead, while other countries take their K-12 education seriously, American leaders are satisfied with pumping more money into an outdated system that continues to fail students and produced mediocre results. Here’s the sad truth. Twenty-five countries outperform U.S. K-12 students. Those leading the way are China, Hong Kong, Finland, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Canada. China’s students not only place first overall, but they dominate each individual subject as well. U.S. students straggle in...

I am in the process of uploading all my outlines and notes for the Gospel According to Matthew. In the process I must first convert my word files to pdf, while editing them to be more presentable. Converting them to a pdft makes it easier to get the file to work in the blog. Not all of the outlines will be the same, since the original files were created over a span of a couple of years from 2006 to 2008 using a couple different programs. I originally did them as I prepped for my Study Nights and Sermons I...

Mr. Gatto (along with Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt), blew the whistle on deliberate dumbing down (on the Prussian model, crushing the imagination of children because it caused them to lose to Napoleon). Mr. Gatto said that the children of the elites have no advantage over ghetto kids "who have never eaten off a tablecloth". The opposite: elite prep schools, the Groton, Brook, St. Albans, Episcopal High & Andover, produce the idiots who presume to rule us. (Thomas Sowell waxed eloquent about how stupid top experts are.) Point in fact (from Samuel Blumenfeld, "Crimes of the Educators"): John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded...

What teachers choose to cover (or not cover) during their limited classroom time will reveal what biases and agendas that educator has on American history.“Ladies and gentlemen: The story you are about to see is true,” declared the introduction to the classic television program “Dragnet.” “All we want are the facts, ma’am,” asserted police officer “Joe Friday” during his investigations. True stories; just the facts: it seems so straightforward, doesn’t it? Not when American social studies curricula are concerned.“I teach my students that [Thomas] Jefferson sat there and wrote ‘all men are created equal,’ but he made his money off...

One gifted 12-year-old is way ahead of the game when it comes to schooling. Mike Wimmer, from Salisbury, North Carolina, graduated from Rowan-Cabarrus Community College on May 21 with a 4.0 GPA and an associate degree. A week later, he graduated from Concord Academy High School with a 5.45 GPA as valedictorian.... ...Mike describes himself as a well-rounded person with an interest in all subjects, though he's always leaned more toward STEM fields. He calls himself the "math and science guy." "Technology in particular I like because it's limitless, and I can do whatever I want to with it," he...