Free Republic

America's socialists -- I mean, progressives, are enraged that President-elect Trump chose Betsy DeVos to be his secretary of education. "Not a good appointment," yelled Al Sharpton. A "proponent of a for-profit institution! She does not believe in the public school system!" complained CNN's Bakari Sellers. Wait. Is your for-profit local supermarket less "public" than your kid's school? No! For-profit institutions serve the public and usually do it better than governments do. Let's stop calling government schools "public." Call them what they are: "government-run" schools. Anyway, the charter schools DeVos supports are public. They're just not controlled by the usual...

WARRINGTON, England, October 2, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – A primary school in England makes children as young as six write “love letters” inserting themselves into a homosexual fairytale, according to a recent video from BBC Radio Manchester. The Blaze reports that the video profiles a class at Bewsey Lodge Primary School, in which teacher Sarah Hopson has her students place themselves in the role of Prince Henry and write a letter asking male servant Thomas to “marry” him. “This school teaches children about LGBT relationships from an early age,” text over the video explains. “This class of 6 year olds is...

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...

They are the schools Mayor de Blasio doesn’t mention. At 32 city elementary and middle schools, the average English-math proficiency rate on state exams has not exceeded 10 percent of students for four years in a row. Seventeen of these schools — which enroll nearly 10,000 kids — have been part of the mayor’s signature Renewal program, which has spent $582 million on teacher training, social services and an extra hour a day of instruction. Four did so poorly that the city Department of Education closed them in June. ... Families for Excellent Schools, a pro-charter-school group that analyzed the test...

'It's a system deliberately designed to handicap the individual' It’s no surprise to hear that America’s education system is in disarray, with Common Core dumbing down young students, faith absent from education and underpaid teachers increasingly unfit to serve as effective educators. But all of that is by design, contends Alex Newman, an international journalist and co-author of “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.” He recently appeared on the “Revealing the Truth with Rabbi Walker” Web TV show to discuss the issue. Newman believes the government education system is not built to...

The parents of a Maryland teenager are suing their daughter's high school over a world history lesson they claim was little more than Islamic indoctrination. The Thomas More Law Center filed a lawsuit against La Plata High School on behalf of John and Melissa Wood, claiming the lesson favored a "sugar-coated version of Islam" over other religions and forced their 16-year-old child "to disparage her Christian faith," according to the law firm. The parents said the class spent one day on Christianity, followed by two weeks on Islam. And the 11th grader was "forced to profess and to write out...

Can you name the most contentious issue in American politics? Here's a hint. It's being fought at the federal, state and local levels. And it doesn't go away. The struggle is persistent, ongoing, unending. Here is a second hint. The issue is not gay marriage, or gun control, or police brutality and or immigration. Those issues are either settled, largely settled, isolated or completely out of the control of local and state governments. Here is a third hint. The issue divides Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. But it is especially divisive among Democrats and among people who call themselves...

New data shows about half of Illinois high school graduates going on to the state's community colleges need remediation in at least one subject. That data was released this past week by the Illinois State Board of Education. It shows 48.7 percent of graduates who enrolled in the community college system needed remedial instruction to prepare them for entry-level college coursework. ... For the first time, that information is being reported with Illinois Report Card data.

Ann Marie Corgill, 2015 National Teacher of the Year finalist and 2014-2015 Alabama Teacher of the Year, has submitted a letter of resignation to Birmingham City Schools. Corgill, a fifth-grade teacher at Oliver Elementary School, moved to the Birmingham school district after teaching at Cherokee Bend Elementary School for three years - a move widely considered a step in the right direction for the Birmingham City Schools. But in the letter obtained by AL.com, she cited confusion about her certification after Birmingham and Alabama Department of Education officials recently informed her she was not qualified to teach fifth grade. "After...

How do you fix a failing high school? Change the grades. Under pressure to boost student achievement, the state-designated “out of time” Automotive HS in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, has resorted to rigging Regents exam scores. The failing scores of five students who took the Regents in January were switched to passing scores of 65 or higher on their transcripts, the city Department of Education has confirmed. One junior saw his scores upped to pass two exams required for graduation — Living Environment (biology) and algebra — even though he had failed both classes. The student insisted he deserved a break on...

HOUSTON – About 130 Houston student will attend a new Arabic immersion school next year, where they will learn to speak Arabic as they learn “to be truly global citizens.” “With kids who learn Arabic, as a parent you’re going to set them up for success, as a teacher you’re going to challenge them to do the best they can, but that skill of learning Arabic and being fluent in it really can be life-changing for a Houston kid,” Kate Adams, the principal of Houston Independent School District’s Arabic Immersion Magnet School, told Houston Public Media. “In addition to the...

The Chicago Public Schools — already facing a federal criminal investigation of its CEO and a projected $1.1 billion budget deficit next school year — now must pay a price for those problems through higher interest rates on a new $300 million bond deal. The rates lured investors to buy the bonds, which CPS says it will use to pay off recently completed construction projects. But they also mean Chicago taxpayers will pay more over the life of the borrowing deal, financial analysts said Wednesday. The main bond issue — for $280 million to be repaid over 25 years —...

Full title: That's pretty fishy!: School blames ‘poor lighting’ for paltry lunch that meets Michelle Obama's nutritional guidelines That's not a light lunch, it's just bad lighting, say administrators at a Virginia School standing up for their FLOTUS approved school meals. A concerned mother took a photo of her child's lunch consisting of a dull looking fish fillet, a whole wheat bun, and corn and then posted it to social media this week. Virginia’s Portsmouth Public Schools say that their lunches are in compliance with Michelle Obama's federal lunch rules. Scroll down for video

Moody’s Investors Service on Friday announced it had reduced its rating on Chicago Board of Education debt to one level above junk bond status. Moody’s downgraded the rating to Baa3 from Baa1 on the board’s general obligation debt. That rating applies to a total of $6.3 billion in outstanding debt held by Chicago Public Schools. That lowered rating, according to Moody’s, “reflects CPS’s continued reliance” on its reserves to cover ongoing operating expenditures, “particularly pension contributions, which will steadily increase in the coming years.” ... the lowered CPS rating also takes into account the city’s own credit rating, which also...

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...

Home-schoolers represent the only authentically radical social movement in the United States (Occupy Wall Street was a fashion statement) and so they must be suppressed, as a malevolent committee of leftist academics and union bosses under the direction of Governor Dannel Malloy is preparing to do in Connecticut, using the Sandy Hook massacre as a pretext. The ghouls invariably rush to the podium after every school massacre, issuing their insipid press releases before the bodies have even cooled, and normally they’re after your guns. But the Malloy gang is after your children. Malloy’s committee on the Newtown shootings is recommending...

Frequently, left-wing ideologues manage to harm the very people they claim they are aiding. “When your government and your school are constantly telling you that you’re a victim of a racist society who needs protection, you may start believing it at some point,” Mike Gonzalez writes in the recently released book, A Race for the Future: How Conservatives Can Break the Liberal Monopoly on Hispanic-Americans. mike gonzalez book Gonzalez shows, in part, how government schools are failing Hispanics. “In May 2010, the American Psychological Association (APA) published a handful of studies conducted on Latino students, and they had their share...

This year the movie God Is Not Dead preyed on every Christian parent’s fear of sending a child off to college only to have their family’s faith and values undermined by an atheist college professor espousing some form of moral relativism. The movie hinges on a certain cliché, but the cliché is a cliché because many of us took a class with “that professor.” He might not have been so over-the-top, but his prejudices were evident. The American university tends to be fairly hostile to the conservative movement. One of the core tenets of conservatism is the Judeo-Christian teaching that...

Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about this morning – the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it – where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic. We call it “Political Correctness.” The name originated as something of a joke,...

As conservatives, we seek to build on past successes wherever we can rather than start anew. Fortunately, when we look at the question of education, the next conservatism quickly finds a lot to build on. The existing conservative movement has done some things right in this area. The most important achievement is the home schooling movement. Today, over a million American children are getting real educations at home instead of being propagandized in the public schools. Unfortunately, a new problem has cropped up which the next conservatism needs to take on now, before it gets bigger. Political Correctness, which is...