Free Republic

Parents are planning on pulling their daughters off a Wisconsin high school sports team after a male has been allowed to compete.. About 50 parents and athletes within Green Bay Area Public School District met with officials Thursday who told them that a male would be allowed to compete on a high school sports team and potentially use locker rooms on the basis of gender identity rather than biological sex ... With tryouts starting Monday, some girls do not plan to attend over concerns for their physical safety. ... “The girls are just kind of fed up hearing that your...

A Colorado momma bear is suing Wellington Middle School in Fort Collins, Colo., after learning they pulled her sixth-grade daughter into a secret transgender recruiting meeting disguised as an “art club.” “When she got there, she very quickly learned it was actually a gender and sexuality awareness club,” Erin Lee ... “What you hear in here, stays in here,” the mystery groomer allegedly told the kids, suggesting that telling their parents wasn’t “safe.” Lee further disclosed that the guest presenter informed the kids they were transgender if they didn’t feel totally comfy with their gender. “She explained to my daughter...

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...

Julianne Benzel, a teacher at Rocklin High School, asked students if school administrators would permit an anti-abortion protest, gets placed on administrative leave as a consequence A California high school teacher has been placed on leave after she wondered if her school would permit an organized walkout to protest abortion. According to CBS Sacramento, Rocklin High School’s Julianne Benzel said all she did was have a conversation with her class last Thursday and Friday about the “politics of protest” — a lesson ahead of yesterday’s school walkouts. However, this seems to have angered some students and their parents. Benzel said...

A former Connecticut high school teacher awaiting sentencing over a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old student has been arrested again after allegedly threatening to kill one of her accusers. Police say 32-year-old Danielle Watkins of Norwalk was arrested Friday. She was first arrested in July, accused of having sex with one student at Stamford High and giving marijuana to another. Police say she threatened one of the victims at a doughnut shop Friday. Watkins pleaded guilty to second-degree sexual assault and risk of injury to a minor last month under a deal with prosecutors. The agreement calls for her to...

This past election season, I tried an experiment with the twelve 6th-graders in my history class: I challenged them to develop a fictional candidate and persuade the rest of us to vote for him by creating a commercial. My hidden agenda was to find out which of the kids' political positions were influenced by their parents and whether, if given the opportunity to evaluate their positions from scratch, they might choose differently. The students were ready -- dare I say waiting -- for it. See, our school happens to be in Hyde Park, that ivy-covered, venerated neighborhood otherwise known as...

BOSTON (CBS) – A 7-year-old boy is being investigated by his South Boston elementary school for possible sexual harassment after kicking another boy in the crotch. The first grader’s mother, Tasha Lynch, says she was shocked by the school’s decision. “He’s 7 years old. He doesn’t know anything about sexual harassment,” she said. Lynch’s son, Mark Curran, said the boy that he kicked had been bullying him on the school bus ride home from Tynan Elementary last week. “He just all of a sudden came up to him, choked him. He wanted to take his gloves, and my son said,...

(CNSNews.com) – A Fairfax County high school last month told teachers to let cheating students retake tests so they wouldn’t receive zeros, the Washington Post reported. In a Nov. 5 e-mail to teachers, West Potomac High School Principal Cliff Hardison said cheating should "result in a disciplinary consequence separate from an academic consequence." This is the same Fairfax County high school that asked teachers to mostly banish F's from report cards, the newspaper said. According to the Washington Post, Hardison – responding to complaints from parents and teachers – later reverted to the old policy of giving zeroes to cheaters,...

While a California school district is seeing a boom in interest in a controversial educational philosophy that goes back more than 100 years, at the same time it's fighting a lawsuit over whether the system is legal in public schools. California's capital city offers two Waldorf-inspired public schools -- John Morse Waldorf Methods School (K-8), and the high school George Washington Carver School of Arts and Sciences. The Sacramento City Unified School District now is facing a trial in federal court on allegations that those schools are religious, making them ineligible to receive taxpayer dollars. The lawsuit, filed in 1998...

Colorado lawmakers this week unveiled a major overhaul of the state's college tuition program that seeks to raise an additional $300 million by requiring parents and students to pay more. Lawmakers announced the move as a way to help the state cover a projected $1.7 billion budget shortfall next fall. If approved, the measure would go into effect this November. In exchange, colleges would have to meet strict goals for graduation and employment of students or they would have to roll back tuition increases. it's not unreasonable to ask students to work 10 hours a week during the semester and...

There is a popular belief that the best way for children to learn is for them to be sent away to a “brick and mortar” school, where highly trained educators will teach them the subjects they need to succeed in the world. This belief rejects homeschooling, because dedicated mothers and fathers are simply not as good as government school teachers. For the sake of argument, let’s say they are right. Let’s say that, as a homeschool dad, I’m not as good. Still, when I teach my children about our nation’s history, I will be teaching from three different texts. The...

Heather Lawrence didn't know the name of the girl with the Muslim head covering, or where she was from. But as Lawrence walked by a classroom at Springstead High School on Wednesday, the 16-year-old junior did know one thing: The girl wasn't standing for the Pledge of Allegiance. Lawrence, an JROTC member who plans to enlist in the Army next summer, says she was aghast. "That's one of the most disrespectful things you can do," Lawrence recalled Friday. "Even the kids who are anarchists, who hate our government, still have respect to stand." A few bells later, Lawrence was on...

Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee told the D.C. Council yesterday that the District needs to completely rethink its approach to preventing school violence, with a better trained security force but also by teaching students to manage conflicts before they spiral out of control. Rhee spoke to the council a day after fights among rival groups at Anacostia High School left five students injured, including three with stab wounds. Flooding school corridors with more police or private security guards is not the answer, she said. Students feel less safe in schools filled with guards, she said, and dollars are better invested in...

The University of Delaware has suspended a program that had recently come under fire for being nothing more than an indoctrination program. The program required residence hall students to acknowledge "all whites were racist." According to Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the program has been in place four years, but since University President Patrick Harker joined the university, the program has really increased the intensity.

First it was his world history class. Then he saw it in his economics class. And his world issues class. And his environment class. In total, 18-year-old McKenzie, a Northern Ontario high schooler, says he has had the film An Inconvenient Truth shown to him by four different teachers this year. "I really don't understand why they keep showing it," says McKenzie (his parents asked that his last name not be used). "I've spoken to the principal about it, and he said that teachers are instructed to present it as a debate. But every time we've seen it, well, one...

Some parents cried, some screamed, and one man had to be wrestled out of the room by security guards. It sounds like a school hostage crisis, but that's actually a description of a Seattle School Board meeting last month. The Board was considering whether or not to close nine city schools, and the parents and students who would have been affected weren't especially keen on the idea. In the end, the closure plan was suspended, but it is almost certain to resurface given the district's ongoing budget woes. When it does, the tensions will resurface along with it. These sorts...

Of every 100 freshmen entering a Chicago public high school, only about six will earn a bachelor's degree by the time they're in their mid-20s... The prospects are even worse for African-American and Latino male freshmen, who only have about a 3 percent chance of obtaining a bachelor's degree by the time they're 25. The study, which tracked Chicago high school students who graduated in 1998 and 1999, also found that making it to college doesn't ensure success: Of the city public school students who went to a four-year college, only about 35 percent earned a bachelor's degree within six...

Teachers unions are mad at me. The New York State United Teachers demands I apologize for my "gutter level" journalism, "an irresponsible assault on public school students and teachers." This is because I hosted an ABC News TV special titled "Stupid in America," which pointed out: -- American fourth graders do well on international tests, but by high school, Americans have fallen behind kids in most other countries. -- The constant refrain that "public schools need more money" is nonsense. Many countries that spend significantly less on education do better than we do. School spending in America (adjusted for inflation)...

Two weeks ago, a six-year-old boy was suspended from first grade for three days for "sexual harassment" because he allegedly put "two fingers inside [a] girl's waistband while she sat on the floor in front of him," according to an AP story. Sexual harassment at age six. Growing up kind of fast these days, aren't they? "He doesn't know those things," the boy's mother told the local press. "He's only six years old." The woman said she "screamed" about the suspension. Yeah, well, I'd scream too. The whole thing is stupid--children poking at one another and then being punished for...

At some point Mouna Raad realized she didn't want her daughter to be treated as ``special'' anymore. She just wanted Elissa, who has cerebral palsy, to be treated like any other kid. So she overcame some resistance at Elissa's special-education preschool and enrolled her in a Santa Clara preschool with -- as Raad calls them -- ``regular kids.'' The result, she says, was ``amazing.'' And not just for Elissa. ``I think the kids learned a lot,'' Raad said. ``I think it makes them richer people.'' That kind of enrichment is the goal of several Santa Clara County agencies and individuals,...