Free Republic

The largest teachers union in Florida sued Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday over his administration's push to fully reopen all public schools next month - even as the number of coronavirus cases in the state is spiking. The Florida Education Association accused DeSantis and other state officials of violating a state constitutional mandate to keep public schools "safe and secure." The union asked a state court in Miami to halt the governor's reopening edict, according to a copy of the suit obtained by NBC News. The lawsuit, filed in state circuit court, names several defendants: DeSantis, state Education Commissioner Richard...

Thousands of union workers left their jobs on Monday in an effort to support initiatives to dismantle racism in a protest that was dubbed the Strike for Black Lives. The protest was organized by union groups including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of Teachers, United Farm Workers, and the Fight for $15 and a Union, alongside social justice groups including the Movement for Black Lives, U.S. Youth Climate Strike Coalition, and the Center for Popular Democracy. The protest took place in over 25 major cities across the country, including New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Seattle, and...

As states and municipalities pursue phased reopenings of economic and social life amid the novel coronavirus, workers are headed back to work. But some workers are finding teachers unions to be an unexpected impediment to their own resumption of something-like-normality. The burden of the unions’ obstinacy will likely fall hardest on suburban professional women, forced to choose between their careers and supervising children forced to “learn” through “distance learning” — a euphemism for government school systems’ pathetic substitute for classroom instruction. The unions argue that subjecting children to inferior home-based, video conference schooling is necessary to protect them and the...

. . .We have to link these fights in a new and deeper way than ever before,” said Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, which represents over 2 million workers in the U.S. and Canada. . .The service workers union has partnered with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the American Federation of Teachers, United Farm Workers and the Fight for $15 and a Union, which was launched in 2012 by American fast food workers to push for a higher minimum wage. . .

... In a series of conversations with the Washington Examiner over recent weeks, the union officials, all registered Democrats, expressed alarm at Biden’s shift to the left on energy policy while giving him some benefit of the doubt that they would not grant to more liberal candidates such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, who pledged to ban fracking during the campaign. Biden has promised to end new fracking leases on federal lands, where only 13% of natural gas was produced in 2017. But he has struggled to overcome a gaffe during an exchange with Sanders in a March debate,...

Thomas Sowell is a truth seeker who grew up in Harlem and is one of the wisest men of our times. In his new book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies — published on June 30, 2020, his 90th birthday — he exposes the hypocrisy of our politicians, teachers’ unions, and public school bureaucrats. To do so, Sowell compares New York City’s charter schools to its public ones. For example, Success Academy (47 New York City schools) and KIPP Academy (15 NYC schools), both public charter schools, have established the best K-12 schools in Harlem and have demonstrated the ability to...

or Laila Barakat’s children, school will be home, like other students in their district. But they won’t participate in distance learning. Their teachers will be mom and dad. Barakat has decided to homeschool her three school-aged children – one in first grade, one in transitional kindergarten, and one in pre-kindergarten – instead of connecting them to an online classroom. “We just decided to take the leap,” said Barakat, a stay-at-home mom and freelance writer in Elk Grove. “At first it seemed like a radical thing, and now more and more people are doing it.” Read more here: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article244232657.html#storylink=cpy

Well yeah, the Los Angeles United School District teachers will continue to get paid for providing “remote” teaching lessons online. Unlike the parents who won’t be able to return to work since the little darlings will be home all day. My problem with teachers’ unions has always been that they are a tax payer funded entity (via teacher-paid dues) serving as a political entity that lobbies for progressive positions. In the past they’ve at least pretended to be “all about the children.” But the truth eventually slips out as it did recently when the United Teachers Los Angeles, a...

The Los Angeles Unified School District’s next school year will begin Aug. 18, but students won’t be returning to their classrooms, District Superintendent Austin Beutner announced Monday. “While the new school year will begin in August, it will not start with students at school facilities,” Beutner said. “The health and safety of all in the school community is not something we can compromise. The news about the spread of the virus continues to be of great concern.” The superintendent said the five-month school closure has been the longest in recent history for the nation’s second-largest public school system, but the...

United Teachers Los Angeles, a 35,000-strong union in the Los Angeles Unified School District, made those demands in a policy paper it released this week. The organization called on local authorities to "keep school campuses closed when the semester begins on Aug. 18." -snip Yet the union goes even farther than those requests, calling for "local support" in the form of defunded police departments and the shuttering of charter schools.  Police violence "is a leading cause of death and trauma for Black people, and is a serious public health and moral issue," the union writes. The document calls on authorities to "shift the astronomical...

Teachers' unions across the United States are resisting a push from the Trump administration and House Republicans to reopen schools amid the coronavirus pandemic, instead opting for remote learning that experts say presents major risks to children. President Trump on Wednesday threatened to cut federal funding for schools that fail to reopen in the fall, echoing a recent bill proposed by Reps. Jim Banks (R., Ind.) and Tom Tiffany (R., Wisc.). Multiple states have followed suit—Florida announced Wednesday that it will require schools to hold in-person classes beginning in August, and Gov. Ralph Northam (D., Va.) in June unveiled a...

Destroy the ‘Public’ Education System By David Harsanyi July 7, 2020 6:30 AM It’s largely a left-wing propaganda machine that funds Democratic politicians and entrenches racial segregation. ‘Public” schools have been a catastrophe for the United States. This certainly isn’t an original assertion, but as we watch thousands of authoritarian brats tearing down the legacies of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, it’s more apparent than ever. State-run schools have undercut two fundamental conditions of a healthy tolerant society. First, they’ve created millions of civic illiterates who are disconnected from long-held communal values and national identity. Second, they’ve exacerbated the very...

MANHATTAN - As the coronavirus continues to spread around the country, New York is preparing for the financial crisis left in its wake. Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Balsio issued a stark warning if the city doesn't get financial help. "If we ever got to the point of having to activate that layoff plan for the fall, we're talking 22,000 employees, that's a vast, vast number of people," de Blasio said during a press conference. For weeks protesters have called on the mayor and city council to defund the NYPD. With the 2021 city budget due next week, hundreds of people...

For decades, there has been widespread anxiety over how, when or whether the educational test score gap between white and non-white youngsters could be closed. But that gap has already been closed by the Success Academy charter school network in New York City. Their predominantly black and Hispanic students already pass tests in mathematics and English at a higher rate than any school district in the entire state. That includes predominantly white and Asian school districts where parental income is some multiple of what it is among Success Academy students. New York’s charter school students are predominantly black and Hispanic,...

For my internet video this week, my staff showed me clips of violent cops. It's not just Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd's neck for almost nine minutes -- it's the other cops who just watch. It's the Buffalo cops who floored a protester and simply walked by as he lay unconscious, bleeding out of his ear. It's a cop in Philadelphia, swinging his baton into protestors, the Atlanta police needlessly tasing two college students, the NYC cops beating a bicyclist and dozens of cases where police lied about what they'd done until body cams or cellphone cameras revealed the...

The focus of so much of the recent George Floyd protests has been on police violence against demonstrators and others, but in New York City, the union that represents NYPD detectives is turning the tables. "If you assault a New York City Detective and there are no consequences from the criminal justice system, we have to have other means to protect our detectives," said Paul DiGiacomo, president of the Detectives' Endowment Association, which has represented some 19,000 current and former detectives. He vowed to sue any protestor, rioter or looter who attacked its members. "It's heart-wrenching because they are out...

Does every town and city in our country have a teachers union? What if all of the red voting towns and cities kicked out the teachers unions out of their schools? We would not be empowering them with our tax money and our schools would not be places of leftist indoctrination.

No one wants to watch an innocent man suffocate under the knee of a cop while bystanders plead for his life. Yet millions now have that haunting image seared into their memory. The question to ask in response is simple: what could have been done to prevent this? While I’m in quarantine and can’t see my students, I imagine their predominantly minority faces and wonder how can I keep them from a similar fate? Policy recommendations to prevent another tragedy like the one that befell George Floyd have ranged from defunding the police to ending qualified immunity and military surplus...

<p>Waiting for someone in the media to ask and waiting for the democrat governors and mayors to provoide answers.</p>

BOSTON (CN) — Former Vice President Joe Biden won the endorsement of the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest coalition of labor unions, on Tuesday, in a development that could help him in union-heavy swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Biden is “the embodiment of goodness and decency,” said Richard Trumka, president of the 12.5 million-member organization, in a video. The endorsement was not unexpected....