Free Republic

Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is taking on a new role in education, less than a month after she left office. Beginning this fall, Lightfoot will teach a course at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health tentatively titled "Health Policy and Leadership," according to an announcement from the school. Lightfoot, who left office on May 15 after losing re-election, will serve as the Richard L. and Ronay A. Menschel Senior Leadership Fellow at the school beginning at the end of August. The Menschel program, according to the school, "offers a rare opportunity for those who have recently served...

The refrain across much of the Deep South for decades was “Thank God for Mississippi!” That’s because however abysmally Arkansas or Alabama might perform in national comparisons, they could still bet that they wouldn’t be the worst in America. That spot was often reserved for Mississippi. So it’s extraordinary to travel across this state today and find something dazzling: It is lifting education outcomes and soaring in the national rankings. With an all-out effort over the past decade to get all children to read by the end of third grade and by extensive reliance on research and metrics, Mississippi has...

If someone punches back once after being poked at repeatedly for months and months without consequence, who should get in trouble? Allison Arnall Davis recently went viral after her son Drew received out-of-school suspension for beating up another boy. On Facebook, Allison explains that she's not mad at Drew for doing what he did because the boy Drew beat up has been tormenting him for months. Her son finally fought back against the bully who has been torturing and threatening him while the school has sat back and done nothing. Allison's post has prompted an impassioned discussion about bullying, school...

I reviewed five of the most commonly used AP U.S. History textbooks that cover all the way through the Trump presidency. Used every day by high school students in college-level history classes, the books all contain anti-Trump editorializing, false narratives, and employ selective editing to leave out significant stories that occurred during the Trump presidency. The books all appear on the College Board’s list of textbooks that meet the AP Course Audit curricular requirements. Nearly all of the textbooks claim “Russian meddling” was responsible for the 2016 election of Donald Trump, despite that narrative being debunked through multiple studies and...

For decades IQs were climbing in the Western World. It was called the “Flynn effect.”Average IQs were defined as 100 in each succeeding iteration of the IQ test, as by definition the average was normed to 100. But if you rescored earlier IQ tests based upon prior norms, the average IQ would have increased by about 15 points or one standard deviation.In other words, if you took an IQ test in 1942 and scored 100, by today’s scoring you would have an IQ of 86.That is, until the past 10 or so years. In the past 10 years, IQs have...

Is the humanities degree going the way of the dodo bird? An article in The New Yorker, “The End of the English Major,” posits as a eulogy for the bustling humanities programs of yesteryear, citing dwindling investment and a generational shift toward science and technology and degrees that can be monetized. Faculty members at the Graduate Center, however, say that while the article is a clarion call, the death of the humanities is exaggerated. The desire and need to study the human past remain strong. Scholars shared their views on the current state and future of the humanities: Tanya Agathocleous,...

Recent reports attribute the nationwide low reading proficiency for K-12 students, in part, to progressive curricula from teachers colleges. Progressive approaches to teaching reading, one education advocate said, come from a 'desire to ... move away from what had been thought of as the drudgery and pain of institutional style education.' ... Recent reports show that school districts are ditching progressive curricula from teachers colleges and returning to best practices for reading. The nationwide low reading proficiency for K-12 students is attributed, in part, to these curricula. Though Campus Reform has identified teachers colleges as sites of social justice and...

Faced with the undeniable fact city kids attending charters schools do far better on state exams than those stuck in the regular public-school system, critics routinely complain that charters “teach to the test” — as if that’s somehow a bad thing. Tests, after all, measure what kids are supposed to learn. Schools that don’t “teach to the test” effectively aren’t teaching at all. In other words, the critics are just avoiding the fact that public charter schools work — and, most embarrassing to the vested interests that depend on the regular system, work far better for lower-income minority children. Indeed,...

California school district is using lesson plans designed by its Black Lives Matter Task Force (BLM) to help teach 7th graders about their implicit bias during Black History Month, according to the curriculum obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. In an effort to address “issues related to racial justice,” Anaheim Union High School District (AUHSD) requires 7th through 12th grade teachers to use a curriculum created by the schools’ Black Lives Matter Task Force, a coalition dedicated to creating equity for African American students and staff within the district, according to screenshots of the curriculum obtained by the DCNF....

A lovely aphorism holds that education isn’t the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. But too often, neither are pails filled nor fires lit. One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading. Reading may be the most important skill we can give children. It’s the pilot light of that fire. Yet we fail to ignite that pilot light, so today some one in five adults in the United States struggles with basic literacy, and after more...

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...

A student brought cotton balls to Diablo View Middle School allegedly to mock the celebrations of Black History Month, school officials said.

I grew up in Minnesota when it was a very nice, normal place; a time when the unofficial state motto was “30 Below Keeps The Riff-Raff Out,” and the meanest thing about it was that lady who scowled at Mary Tyler Moore tossing her hat into the air on TV.But in a couple years, Christians will not be allowed to work as public school teachers. Neither will Muslims or Jews. The reason for this religious bigotry is new teacher licensing rules that will require teachers to personally affirm transgender ideology. Biology, genetics, endocrinology, physiology and anatomy have shown that, with...

Bashing the parents of the students you teach, especially those who fought to get kids back into your classroom and freed from irrational and harmful totems like face masks, is apparently a good career move for some New York City schoolteachers — and profitable, too. Bobson Wong, a 17-year veteran math teacher, was just awarded $20,000 and the MfA Muller Award for Professional Influence in Education for “influencing the teaching profession in exceptional ways” and his “ability to have a positive impact within [his] school community and drive change outside of [his] own classroom.” On Twitter, meanwhile, Wong regularly and...

For Tiffany Sorya, the path to becoming a homeschooling tutor to celebrities and other one-percenters was hardly intuitive. During her first years at Portland State University she admits that she was a “horrible” student. But by the time she graduated she had turned things around and was making such high grades that friends would ask, “How did you go from failing O(rganic) Chemistry to acing O Chem?,” she recalls. For fun, she started tutoring friends who needed help. But when the now 36-year-old, first-generation Cambodian American with Instagram-chic style (she has over 306,000 followers) graduated and moved to Los Angeles,...

We should stop teaching history in our schools. The way history is now being taught leads to a racist society, perpetuates white privilege, and overlooks the contributions of women and minorities. I ask school districts to immediately remove history curricula, books, and materials that unfairly communicate history until suitable alternatives are developed. Enslaved people built our young nation and made possible an economy that would throw off the control of the most powerful country then on earth, Great Britain. But, oh, at what a price. According to Bennett Minton in The Washington Post, some schools across the country intend to...

According to the Center of the American Experiment, the changes will impact teacher licensure programs and “require aspiring educators to ‘demonstrate’ ideologically driven content in their coursework to obtain their teaching license.” This goes for educators who end up teaching at private schools, too. -snip- In another section on “planning for instruction,” the draft standards say a teacher should “create opportunities for students to learn about power, privilege, intersectionality, and systemic oppression in the context of various communities and empower learners to be agents of social change to promote equity.”

The largest teachers’ union in the country recently proposed that its summer 2022 reading list for students include a book that defends the act of disrespecting the National Anthem by kneeling for it before sporting events. As reported by The Daily Caller, the National Education Association (NEA) lists the book “Why We Fly” on its website for suggested reading in August of 2022, as students prepare to return to school. The book includes marijuana use by teenagers and focuses on two cheerleaders who decide to kneel for the National Anthem after being inspired to do so by a football player...

In the fall of 2021, it appeared that Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Terry McAuliffe, would rather easily defeat his Republican challenger, Glenn Youngkin. But the election turned dramatically once a number of parents voiced their opposition to the racially-themed material that was being taught in schools. They didn’t think it appropriate to tell students that America is an irredeemably racist country and that white people hold power and use it to oppress minorities. These parents, of all races, had found out that, despite official denials, concepts embedded in Critical Race Theory (CRT) had been smuggled into school curricula. At this...

Aguest at a private reception last week with Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee secretly recorded the event and then sent the recording to a local media outlet. News Channel 5 then ran a hit story about Arnn’s accurate remark that “teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.” Selected 30-second clips from the two-hour recording that betrayed event-goers’ confidence were next quickly amplified in state media, including the state’s biggest leftist outlet, The Tennesseean. This pressure campaign on Thursday caused a Tennessee public school to drop its use of...