Free Republic

San Francisco gives parents a say in where their children go to school — and that is leading to less diversity [snip] A federal judge ordered desegregation, and in 1971 San Francisco put children on buses that crisscrossed the city so they could be in multiracial schools. The plan almost immediately ended racial isolation — but it also helped drive families out of the district and into the suburbs or into private schools. Many Chinese families resisted integration, boycotting district public schools and creating their own private “freedom schools” for their children instead. From the 1960s to 1983, the school...

Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children I used the verb “stupefying” to describe a long process in our nation’s schools that has produced several generations of Americans, dumbed down and resulting in more than half who are functionally illiterate, nor can do math, and, as a recent headline reported “Student’s Results in Social Studies Stagnate.” “U.S. middle-school students’ performance on social studies didn’t improve much between 2010 and 2014, federal test scores released Wednesday (April 29) show, underscoring concerns about the uniformed citizenry and workforce.” When it comes to U.S. history, the...

Watch: Michelle’s Race-Baiting Shredded By Black Guy Who Gives Her A Must-See History Lesson VIDEO B. Christopher Agee May 18, 2015 at 2:32pm In a recent installment of Zonation, host Alfonzo Rachel reacted to Michelle Obama’s recent commencement address at Tuskegee University. As Western Journalism reported, the first lady used the forum to spread a message of victimhood among black graduates. “I’m disappointed that the students at Tuskegee University didn’t get up and walk out on Michelle Obama’s speech,” Rachel said. “It’s like the graduates spent all that time at the college and didn’t learn anything worth a hard donut.”

<p>MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Gov. Scott Walker's proposal prohibiting the state superintendent from forcing local school districts to adopt Common Core academic standards is up for a vote in the Legislature's budget committee.</p> <p>The Joint Finance Committee was scheduled to act on the proposal Tuesday.......</p>

NEW ORLEANS — The American Federation for Children, which wants a dramatic expansion of charter schools and voucher programs, picked a boxing theme for its annual policy summit this week. Red boxing gloves became table centerpieces at the opening lunch Monday. Panel titles included "Knocking out yesterday's education models" and "Training parents to win the fight." And the first keynote speaker was Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a likely Republican presidential contender who is best known for aggressively fighting and weakening his state's education labor unions..... ....Wisconsin is home to the nation's first modern voucher system. The state adopted legislation in...

A Duke University professor has reportedly been placed on leave after posting racist comments online that included talk of “the blacks” and “the Asians.” Jerry Hough commented on a New York Times editorial titled “How Racism Doomed Baltimore”...The key question,though,according to Hough, “is whether my comments were largely accurate. In writing me, no one has said I was wrong, just racist.”....full comments in the New York Times:This editorial is what is wrong. The Democrats are an alliance of Westchester and Harlem,of Montgomery County and intercity Baltimore. Westchester and Montgomery get a Citigroup asset stimulus policy that triples the market. The...

Ronald Nelson from Memphis, Tennessee, is a senior at Houston High School. He was accepted to all eight Ivy League schools--that's Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, and UPenn--along with Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Vanderbilt, among a few other schools. While any of these schools are fantastic options, Nelson made headlines for another reason: he turned them all down. Nelson will be attending the University of Alabama this fall, as a member of the school's honors program.While it may seem shocking that a student would turn down a prestigious university for a state school, Nelson actually showed impressive maturity...

For years, Sharon High School parents had help finding their sons and daughters among the sea of gowns on graduation day: boys all sported deep maroon, while girls wore pristine white. But last year, students approached principal Jose Libano with a proposal: end the tradition, which alienated some students. Now, all graduates wear maroon. Around the region, longstanding customs of assigning graduation colors by sex are giving way to new realities, driven by transgender student activists and supportive educators and classmates of all stripes. The change reflects a growing awareness that simple categories of male and female do not fit...

Caleb Stewart Rossiter, a college professor and policy analyst, decided to try teaching math in the D.C. schools. He was given a pre-calculus class with 38 seniors at H.D. Woodson High School. When he discovered that half of them could not handle even second-grade problems, he sought out the teachers who had awarded the passing grades of D in Algebra II, a course that they needed to take his high-level class. There are many bewildering stories like this in Rossiter’s new book, “Ain’t Nobody Be Learnin’ Nothin’: The Fraud and the Fix for High-Poverty Schools,” the best account of public...

FULL TITLE: Shocking video shows American schoolkids running in terror as teacher whips 'unruly' children with his belt A group of four boys fighting in their classroom were brutally halted when their teacher took off his belt and started hitting them with it. In shocking cell phone video posted to Live leak on Friday, likely recorded in an American classroom, children can be heard shrieking as the unidentified teacher whips them about three times with his belt. Chairs and tables are overturned, what appear to be middle-school aged boys and girls scream in fear and let out nervous laughter as...

Board members of California's Oakland Unified School District unanimously voted on Wednesday to cease suspending students for what they call "willful defiance." Those behaviors can include swearing/yelling at teachers, refusing direct orders, texting, and storming out of class, to name a few. The reason? Concern that too many black students are being suspended for willful defiance. One sophomore student, Dan'enicole Williams, told the San Francisco Gate, "They never take time out, if someone is sleeping in class, to ask what’s wrong. They may be acting that way because they didn’t eat the night before.” "We’re getting pushed out of schools,”...

One of the nation’s largest public school systems is preparing to include gender identity to its classroom curriculum, including lessons on sexual fluidity and spectrum – the idea that there’s no such thing as 100 percent boys or 100 percent girls. Fairfax County Public Schools released a report recommending changes to their family life curriculum for grades 7 through 12. The changes, which critics call radical gender ideology, will be formally introduced next week. “The larger picture is this is really an attack on nature itself – the created order,” said Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council. “Human beings...

Comedian Ed Helms delivered the commencement address at the University of Virginia yesterday, and took a moment to really tear into Rolling Stone for how much its discredited UVA rape report hurt the community. Helms, whom you’ll recognize as Andy from The Office or Stu from the Hangover movies, mostly kept things light and joke-y, and even gave a shoutout to the UVA a capella group that made an appearance with him one time on The Office. Helms talked about his own experience being “defined by outsiders,” and acknowledge that’s happened to the UVA community as well, before squaring in...

More has been done to further progress by America than anywhere else because we are a people who believe we can do things better. Since Columbus touched these shores, the Pilgrims knelt down and kissed the ground, and our Founding Patriots risked everything for independence, the commitment to pursuing human betterment for all has been understood as our God-given responsibility. This is because Americans believe in the value and potential of every individual, which also is the engine that powers capitalism. Distilled to the bare essence, markets operate based on the principle that the decisions made every day by millions...

[VIDEO AT THE LINK Provided below] What do you do when your child comes home with bad grades? Do you cuddle him (or her)? Or do you get angry and tell them they should do better? Or do you go further than that? Do you punish him by, say, not giving him pocket money or by grounding him for a few days? One father decided to take it a bit further than that. When his son told him he failed his class, he gave his son a sledgehammer, threw his most prized possession (Xbox) in the garden and forced him...

NEW BRAUNFELS, Texas – New Braunfels ISD responded Friday to a complaint from parents of a student at Carl Schurz Elementary School being in a "FOCUS room." A website, called "The 'Focus Room' Horror" and dated May 13, shows photos of a visibly upset boy sitting on the floor of a room. The website writes that the boy is a 9-year-old student named Alex and states that he was confined to the room for more than an hour. According to the website, Alex was told to sit in a circle drawn on the floor for 90 minutes "to earn 90...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is pushing back against a campaign criticizing First Lady Michelle Obama’s school lunch rules by showing one picture of a somewhat appetizing child’s lunch. “They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and in the digital age we have ample opportunity to document and broadcast every moment, meeting and meal,” wrote Deborah Kane, the national director of the USDA Farm to School Program, in a blog post Thursday. “We have all seen those unappetizing photos of food served at school that quickly go viral,” she said. “A lonesome whole wheat bun atop a sad...

It was just a small item in a round-up of the day's news, but like so many such nuggets, it set off a whole train of thoughts: "Mindy McCarty-Stewart, the principal of Mason High School in Ohio, canceled a student-led event that invited girls to spend a day wearing a Muslim headscarf and issued an apology, adding that the school received numerous messages that forced her to reconsider the event's ability to meet its goal of combating stereotypes." In that one sentence, Gentle Reader is offered a panoramic view of the trouble with American education, society and politics. What's wrong...

Conventional public school districts may covet the taxpayer dollars that follow a student when parents choose to enroll their child in a Michigan "public school academy" — also known as a charter school. But that isn’t the only motive behind the intense political campaign aimed at limiting the number of public charter schools, or even shutting them down altogether (see the Abed amendment). Union efforts to maintain the flow of school employee dues might be an even stronger motive. For teacher unions and those politically and financially dependent on them, charter schools represent a significant threat. In academically failing school...

“Community schools” is not a widely-known term, but today representatives in the Texas State House will vote on House Bill 1891, entitled “Relating to Texas Community Schools” – legislation that would, if passed, fundamentally change the role of public education in students’ lives, in ways that conflict with Texas values. HB 1891, written by Rep. Eddie Rodriguez (D-Austin), defines a “community school” as any K-12 public school that “partners with one or more community-based organizations to coordinate academic, social, and health services.” Community schools are not the usual workforce-ready education reform. “The vision of a community school must be at...