Free Republic

Supporters of Rick Ledesma and Madison Miner, members of the Orange Unified School District's Board of Trustees, who are targets of a recall campaign by a coalition of politicians and public employees' unions, rallied in Orange, California during the first weekend in March, 2024. Ledesma and Miner are conservatives who favor academically rigorous curricula, parent's rights and charter schools and oppose the ideological indoctrination of students. The rallies took place in Orange, on Chapman Avenue on Friday, March 1, and at the traffic circle in the heart of Old Town Orange the next day. On Sunday, March 3, they held...

The culture war has come to the streets of Anaheim, California, where two conservative members of the Orange Unified School District Board of Trustees are fighting an attempt to recall them. Rick Ledesma and Madison Miner are outspoken defenders of parental rights and of keeping parents informed about their children’s health and safety. They support the adoption of rigorous scholarly and academic curricula. They seek to prevent overtly racist and divisive ideology from seeping into the classroom and also to keep sexually explicit materials out of school libraries. And they support charter schools. In doing so, they have ruffled feathers...

California has grand ambitions for ethnic studies. By 2025, the state’s public high schools — about 1,600 of them — must teach the subject. By 2030, students won’t be able to graduate high school without it.... But even in a liberal state like California, scholars, parents and educators have found themselves at odds over how to adapt the college-level academic discipline for high school students, especially because of its strong views on race and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.... Ethnic studies focuses on four groups: Black Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans. It aims to critique various forms of oppression and...

On January 13, 2024, more than a thousand people led by A. J. Hurley of the White Rose Resistance, a Christian activist group, gathered in Miller Park in Fontana, California to rally in favor of parents’ rights. They demanded that the Fontana school district adopt a parent notification policy in which children could not be socially transitioned without parental consent. They also called out Planned Parenthood for its sex education curricula related to sexual identity. After rallying in the park, the crowd marched through the streets of Fontana in a noisy but orderly demonstration.

Shelby Kretz, a teacher who runs an organization that helps teach K-6 children about social justice issues, has called parental rights laws “dangerous.” In a recent TikTok video shared online, Kretz said “parents rights in education can put LGBTQ+ youth in danger.” “Do you know if there are any bills or school board candidates in your area that are focused on parents’ rights in education? If so there’s a good chance they might be putting trans in LGBTQ plus youth in danger,” she says in the video.

One would have to be living under a rock to ignore the sickening carnage of October 7, the latest outrage in a horrific terrorism campaign that Hamas has been waging against innocent civilians in Israel for over thirty years. In 1993, all but a tiny sliver of American society, the containing its most radical and foreign elements, recognized Hamas as a monumental evil that must be eradicated without equivocation or regret.But thanks to the toxic brew of mass immigration and K-12 indoctrination, the America of 2023 is a very different place. Now, college professors applaud bestial acts of rape, murder,...

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on September 12, 2023, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. The transgender movement is pressing its agenda everywhere. Most publicly, activist teachers are using classrooms to propagandize on its behalf and activist health professionals are promoting the mutilation of children under the euphemistic banner of “gender-affirming care.” The sudden and pervasive rise of this movement provokes two questions: where did it come from, and how has it proved so successful? The story...

Over the Christmas weekend, Chicago surpassed the 750-murder mark for 2016. But as blacks lay dying on the streets of Chicago’s South and West Sides, a Black Lives Matter offshoot is more interested in traveling overseas to learn “resistance” from terrorists. The Dream Defenders bills itself as “an uprising of communities in struggle, shifting culture through transformational organizing.” But an investigation conducted by the Haym Salomon Center reveals the group’s embrace of anti-Semitism and collaboration with a State Department-designated terror group. In August, Black Lives Matter singled out Israel for condemnation, declaring it an “apartheid” state engaged in “genocide.” These...

The current education system is changing and many are of the opinion that it's not for the better. Parents are reconsidering their decision to send their children to school and are opting for homeschooling as a more convenient and quality alternative. A former teacher, who goes by @mindfull.mentor on TikTok, smartly shared a series of videos explaining what children would be missing out on if they were homeschooled. Contrary to the train of thought, the videos call out the exhausting practices and systems schools follow, indicating why homeschooling is the better pick. The former teacher said, “If you decide to...

The Biden administration has funneled more than $730 million to a United Nations organization for refugee assistance in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that harbored personnel who have incited violence against the Jewish people *** The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has been accused in recent years of employing educators who “regularly call to murder Jews” and teach from textbooks “that glorify terrorism, encourage martyrdom, demonize Israelis and incite antisemitism,” according to a March joint report by the non-governmental organization UN Watch and the Israeli non-profit Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education. The...

In this video I discuss the new grading standards being pushed in Portland Public Schools which would essentially destroy education completely.

A Colorado public school diversity teacher said in private emails that he was struggling with the urge not to "burn things down" which didn't represent equity, according to records reviewed by Fox News Digital. Casey Menninger is a diversity teacher in Jefferson County Public School District's Foster K-8 school. Menninger was involved in crafting the curriculum for other teachers to present to their classes. Menninger wanted classes to be focused on bad things done by White people.

A divided Georgia school board upheld a decision to fire a fifth-grade teacher who read a picture book to her students about gender identity amid ongoing discussions nationwide about the content kids are exposed to in the classroom. Katherine Rinderle, who has been employed as a teacher for a decade, read the book My Shadow is Purple to her students at Due West Elementary School in Cobb County in March, prompting complaints from parents. The book uses colors to represent the concept of gender identity, as the main character's shadow is purple, but for others, their shadow is blue or...

The Temecula Valley (California) School District's board is facing legal challenges over a ban on critical race theory instruction after its then-new conservative majority voted 3-2 to end the allegedly divisive curriculum in its schools last December. "The vague Resolution hinders Temecula educators’ ability to teach State-mandated content standards, prepare for the coming academic year, and support rather than stifle student inquiry. In turn, Temecula students are deprived of the opportunity to engage in factual investigation, freely discuss ideas, and develop critical thinking and reasoning skills," the lawsuit reads. "While harming all schoolchildren, the Resolution in particular injures children of...

Vice President Kamala Harris slapped down Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ invite to hash out their curriculum spat. “Extremists attempt to divide our nation with unnecessary debates. But I have news for them: We will not be distracted — and we will not be deterred,” Harris tweeted Tuesday. “There is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate the undeniable fact: There were no redeeming qualities to slavery.”

A prominent civil rights figure who helped craft Florida’s African American history standards has blasted Vice President Kamala Harris’ assessment of the curriculum as “categorically false.” Dr. William Allen, former chairman of the US Commission on Civil Rights, says Harris was way off when she claimed in a speech last week that the standards suggested slavery was beneficial to black Americans. “The only criticism I’ve encountered so far [on the new curriculum] is a single one that was articulated by the vice president, and which was an error,” Allen, who is black, told ABC News in footage touted by Florida...

It appears the battle over Florida’s black history curriculum has entered into a new phase. A fiery debate was ignited over parts of the state’s educational standards on chattel slavery. Now, the discussion has continued to rage on the airwaves and interwebs.The debate centers on a line in Florida’s standards which reads: “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some cases, could be applied for their personal benefit.”Democrats in Congress are now taking a questionable step in response to Florida’s curriculum. The Congressional Black Caucus is now calling on the Biden administration to use federal power to possibly compel...

During my time in law school, on rare occasions, a student would be called on and either hadn’t read the case material or was utterly clueless about what they’d read. On those occasions, the professor would either move on to another student and ask a second student to explain why the first student was mistaken. Or the professor would ridicule the student with something like: “That’s not remotely what the facts are. Did you read the case?”On Tuesday, Megyn Kelly had Dr. William B. Allen on as her lead guest. In 15 minutes, Dr. Allen took apart the nonsense disseminated...

Should elected local school boards decide what kind of education the children of their district should get, or should Gavin Newsom? Newsom, as he always does, says 'me.' Here is his latest strongarm of Temecula Valley Unified School District, as described by Yahoo! News:Days after Gov. Gavin Newsom threatened to fine a Southern California school district $1.5 million over its rejection of a state-approved social studies curriculum, the school board unanimously voted to adopt a compromise version of the curriculum on Friday.The Temecula Valley Unified School Board held an emergency meeting to adopt the elementary curriculum, though it will pull...

TEMECULA, Calif. (AP) — A Southern California school board has voted to approve a social studies curriculum for elementary students, resolving a dispute with Gov. Gavin Newsom over lesson plans that mentioned the state’s first openly gay elected public official.