Free Republic

A Florida judge this week sided with the state in a challenge by the Florida teachers union over rules that restrict what books and materials are available in classrooms. The union and two other advocacy groups sued the state in March, saying the way it interpreted a new law about school library books went further than the law intended, leading to censorship and book bans. The 2022 law requires districts to catalog every book on school shelves and create a formal review process for complaints. Some parents have asked for certain books to be removed from schools because of the...

0ver 300 Muslim children were kept off school for three days last week in a protest about “age-inappropriate sex education teaching” in a Manchester primary. Parents withdrew their kids from Birchfields Primary School in Fallowfield, Manchester, last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday over concerns about LGBTQ and other sexual content being taught in lessons. 5Pillars understands that a huge proportion of parents have lost trust in the school leadership because of what they perceive to be a lack of consultation. Some parents even told us that they have been prevented from organising meetings with venues cancelling at the last minute under...

Dos Pueblos High School will no longer include a blasphemous photo in the curriculum of a required course after parents and students pushed back.SANTA BARBARA, California (Thomas More Society) — A Santa Barbara, California, school has backed down after angering parents and students by including a blasphemous, anti-Catholic photograph in the curriculum of a required course for its International Baccalaureate Diploma. Thomas More Society attorneys have received a response from a lawyer for Santa Barbara Unified School District confirming that the profane “image will not be used in the Theory of Knowledge curriculum going forward” at Dos Pueblos High School...

Temecula’s conservative school board majority has blocked a history textbook because its supporting materials mention slain gay rights leader Harvey Milk. School board President Joseph Komrosky, who opposed the book, called Milk “a pedophile.” In response, the Temecula teachers union staged a rally and plans another, including before the next Temecula Valley school board meeting Tuesday, June 13. Last month, Temecula Valley Unified School District officials brought the adoption of a book called Social Studies Alive to the board and recommended it be approved for students in first through fifth grades for eight years. The textbook would be used starting...

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...

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...

Townhall Media/Madeline LeesmanOn Friday, the GOP-led House passed a Parents Bill of Rights despite Democrat opposition to it. The bill passed narrowly — 213 to 208 — with a handful of Republicans voting against it and no Democrats voting in favor of it. The Bill is designed to promote transparency by requiring school districts to publicly post curricula, including lists of books and other reading material that will be made available to students. Friday morning, ahead of the vote, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) expressed his support for the legislation on Twitter. The House is about to vote on H.R....

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,...

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...

District administrator calls for 'privileged white voices' to be dismissed from curriculum plans in CaliforniaA California district administrator involved in overseeing curriculum, Samia Shoman, called for "privileged White voices" to be removed from influencing against a far-left ethnic studies curriculum. Shoman oversees curriculum in the San Mateo Union High School district as manager of English learners and academic support programs. The email was dated March 2021 and was obtained via public record request by Zachor Legal. Shoman contacted the California state superintendent, Tony Thurmond, in March 2021. Shoman blasted "white voices" and said they should have no part in influencing...

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,...

School is starting, but don't count on getting answers about what your child is being taught. School administrators commonly lie or give parents the runaround. That explains the fireworks over Jeremy Boland, a Greenwich, Connecticut, elementary school assistant principal, bragging about how the school pushes kids to think in a "progressive" way that he hopes will make them Democratic voters.

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...

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."...

Khulia Pringle would seem an unlikely critic of the local Minneapolis Federation of Teachers. The St. Paul native embarked on a teaching career in the hope of improving a school system that she saw as failing her daughter. By the time she finished her training in 2014, she had grown so disillusioned with the public school system that she took a job with an education reform group, helping to recruit and place hundreds of tutors in schools across the state. While she shares the union’s emphasis on pushing for higher pay and smaller classrooms, the self-described liberal education activist says...