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Last week, ABC 7′s I-Team produced a troubling report about a surge in extreme drinking so far this year at UC Berkeley. According to the investigation, UC Berkeley has seen an increase in the number of students who get so drunk, often at frat parties, that they need to be taken to the hospital for care. This has, at times, put a significant burden on the city’s ambulance services, leaving other city residents waiting for care, or requiring the Berkeley Fire Department to call for help from other paramedics in the region. It also puts pressure on the hospital closest...

Homeschoolers whose children were recently seized by the German government are now not allowed to emigrate to a country that allows homeschooling. In August, the children of Dirk and Petra Wunderlich were seized at gunpoint by German officials because the Wunderlich's refused to send their children to the public school. In mid-September, the Wunderlichs were reunited with their children, but only after they promised to send their kids to public school. The Wunderlichs then requested that they be allowed to leave the country so that they could go to a country that will allow them to homeschool. A judge told...

At a home-school community meeting deep in the woods of Baden-Württemberg, children kick around balls and parents grill sausages while chatting about their latest run-ins with the state. An American woman who just gives her name as “Teri” says she and her German husband started home-schooling their two daughters so they could learn both English and German. “We want them to be fluent in both languages, in both cultures and in both politics,” she says. But when local authorities discovered their daughters were not going to school, Teri and her husband received a letter demanding they enroll them. “The letter...

Some parents at Leeds Elementary Public School in Alabama were in for a shock when their kids brought home a permission slip for corporal punishment. It stated that failure to return the form would be considered authorization for school personnel to administer the punishment. Corporal punishment is legal in 19 states in America. …

Dirk and Petra Wunderlich were reunited with their children Thursday after they were taken by their German government because the Wunderlichs homeschooled. The Wunderlichs had to agree to send their kids to public school before their kids were returned to them. On Aug. 29, armed police officers raided the Wunderlich's home and forcibly took their four children, ages 7 to 14. There were no accusations of abuse nor neglect. The Wunderlich's were homeschooling their kids, in violation of German law. The case has gained attention in the United States through the efforts of the Home School Legal Defense Association, which...

Will and Jada's oldest child [took] to Twitter over the weekend and encourag[ed] followers to… drop out of school?!? "School Is The Tool To Brainwash The Youth," the actor wrote, following up this odd message with two more: 1. "If Newborn Babies Could Speak They’d Be The Most Intelligent Beings On The Planet." 2. "If Everybody In The World Dropped Out Of School We Would Have A Much More Intelligent Society.”

One of the largest Jewish schools in Belgium is at risk of losing its state recognition and subsidies because it is "too conservative." Meanwhile, the Belgians have opened their own Islamic school, subsidized by the authorities, who evidently do not see Islamic education as "too conservative." A German SWAT team stormed a house in Darmstadt on the morning of August 29. Had the German police discovered a group of dangerous jihadists? No, they were storming the house because the family living in the house were homeschooling their four children. The children, between 7 and 14 years old, were forcibly removed...

Four children, ages 7 to 14, have been forcibly taken from their home by police armed with a battering ram, and their parents have been told they won’t see them again soon, all over the issue of homeschooling, according to a stunning new report from the Home School Legal Defense Association. HSLDA, the world’s premiere advocate for homeschoolers, said the family of Dirk and Petra Wunderlich has battled for several years Germany’s World War II-era requirement that all children submit to the indoctrination programs in the nation’s public schools. The shocking raid was made solely because the parents were providing...

Outgoing Ohio Education Association (OEA) President Patricia Frost-Brooks was paid a total of $998,949 from 2008-2012, the first five years of her six-year tenure. Thanks to union contracts that existed long before many current teachers were hired, the vast majority of OEA’s revenue comes from more than $450 per year in dues deducted automatically from tens of thousands of Ohio teachers’ paychecks. Based on OEA’s annual report to the U.S. Department of Labor, the union collected over $58 million in dues and “fair share” fees in 2012. While Frost-Brooks has benefited the most from OEA’s generous officer and executive salaries...

Just when you think the progressive liberal power grab can't get more blatant, another ugly example rears its head. It appears that under the umbrella of Obamacare, the government will now send agents into your very home to inspect it and you. Yes, you now have someone else to worry about other than the IRS. David Catron reports in The American Spectator that the federal government will "authorize state agencies throughout the nation to send government inspectors to your house if a 'home visit' is deemed appropriate pursuant to HHS guidelines ostensibly meant to 'create social and physical environments that...

Larry Grathwohl, who had just come back to Cincinnati from Vietnam, was infiltrating the domestic terrorist group Weatherman, the only one to have done so. Larry saved potentially hundreds of lives when he alerted the FBI to a bomb placed near a Detroit police station and a restaurant. Bill Ayers, Education Secretary of Weatherman, told him that in the revolution, lives would have to be sacrificed. ... My interest in Bill Ayers began a few years ago when I learned about his career as a “Distinguished Professor of Education.” In reality he was working to destroy everything that was good...

A group of Woodland Park parents and educators want to get rid of the Common Core Academic Standards that are being implemented in Colorado Schools. Teller County Citizens Against Common Core Standards maintains the new academic guidelines aren't as good as the ones in place. It also argues that the system is unconstitutional because it takes local control away from school districts. It may lobby Woodland Park School District RE-2 and the state to drop out. "We want to get the word out. The standards were just a money carrot for the state to get federal money," ... Among other...

The best educated children in America don't go to school. Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute, compared home schoolers and public school students on the results of three standardized tests -- the California Achievement Test, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the Stanford Achievement Test -- for the 2007-2008 academic year. With public school students at the 50th percentile, home schoolers were at the 89th percentile in reading, the 86th percentile in science, the 84th percentile in language, math and social studies.

The U.S. Department of Justice has revealed in a court filing it agrees with the philosophy of the German government that bureaucrats can punish homeschooling parents. The agency contended parental rights to keep children free from instruction that violates faith essentially are negligible when the government’s goal is an “open society.” The arguments were made in a pleading before the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that urges the judges to send a German homeschooling family, the Romeikes, back to Germany where members likely would face persecution. “The goal in Germany is for an ‘open, pluralistic society,’” wrote the government’s...

The Romeikes, a German family granted legal asylum in the United States by a U.S. immigration judge in 2010, will petition the Supreme Court to hear its case to be granted permanent legal status in the country. Uwe and Hannelore Romeike fled Germany after their family was vigorously prosecuted with steep fines, threats of loss of custody of their children, and imprisonment—all for homeschooling. Homeschooling is largely illegal in Germany. Though the family was granted political asylum in the United States, the Obama administration appealed that decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals, and that Board decided in favor of...

The Department of Justice intervened in the case of a German family seeking asylum in order to home school their children. The Romeike family fled Germany when authorities threatened to remove their children from their parents' custody if they weren't sent to public school. Lawyers for the family called teaching one's own children a fundamental parental right. Not so, said a brief filed by the US Department of Justice: “Where the boundary lies between parental authority and state authority is a matter of law. The state's interest in promoting a child's socialization as a participant in the collective body of...

The Romeike family PURCELLVILLE, VA, July 2, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) - On June 26, the Department of Justice submitted a brief to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stating Germany's laws that suppress religious homeschooling aim at promoting "tolerance" and are not grounds for claiming persecution. Homeschooling is illegal in Germany under a law dating back to the Hitler era, and in recent years the country has become increasingly draconian in enforcing the law – removing children from their families, levying heavy fines, even sentencing homeschooling parents to jail. The German Supreme Court has stated that the purpose of the homeschool ban is to “counteract the development of religious...

The U.S. Department of Justice has revealed in a court filing it agrees with the philosophy of the German government that bureaucrats can punish homeschooling parents. The agency contended parental rights to keep children free from instruction that violates faith essentially are negligible when the government’s goal is an “open society.” The arguments were made in a pleading before the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that urges the judges to send a German homeschooling family, the Romeikes, back to Germany where members likely would face persecution. “The goal in Germany is for an ‘open, pluralistic society,’” wrote the government’s...

WASHINGTON – A German family who chose to homeschool their six children for religious reasons is currently still residing in the United States and their legal counsels say they're willing to go all the way to the Supreme Court to fight for their right to receive political asylum in the U.S. Jim Mason, senior counsel and litigation director of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), told The Christian Post that HSLDA received a response to their letter from the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Wednesay basically saying that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit made the...

As dissatisfaction with the U.S. public school system grows, apparently so has the appeal of homeschooling. Educational researchers, in fact, are expecting a surge in the number of students educated at home by their parents over the next ten years, as more parents reject public schools. A recent report in Education News states that, since 1999, the number of children who are homeschooled has increased by 75%. Though homeschooled children represent only 4% of all school-age children nationwide, the number of children whose parents choose to educate them at home rather than a traditional academic setting is growing seven times...