Free Republic

A student brought cotton balls to Diablo View Middle School allegedly to mock the celebrations of Black History Month, school officials said.

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,...

We should stop teaching history in our schools. The way history is now being taught leads to a racist society, perpetuates white privilege, and overlooks the contributions of women and minorities. I ask school districts to immediately remove history curricula, books, and materials that unfairly communicate history until suitable alternatives are developed. Enslaved people built our young nation and made possible an economy that would throw off the control of the most powerful country then on earth, Great Britain. But, oh, at what a price. According to Bennett Minton in The Washington Post, some schools across the country intend to...

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich insulted a Capitol Hill reporter after the journalist asked him to comment on the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. “What do you think about the January 6 committee,” Scott Wong, a reporter for NBC News who previously worked at The Hill, asked Gingrich during a press scrum at the Capitol on Thursday.

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 District of Columbia does not appear to have a contingency plan for unvaccinated students, who are banned from attending schools in person this fall after the first twenty days, according to comments made by Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser Thursday. During a press conference, Bowser, a Democrat, admitted there are no alternative options, including virtual learning, for students who cannot attend school due to the District’s vaccine mandate, meaning unvaccinated children will effectively be left without an education. Over 40% of blacks ages 12-17 are not vaccinated, according to city data. The Daily Signal asked Bowser what the plan...

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...

Aguest at a private reception last week with Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee secretly recorded the event and then sent the recording to a local media outlet. News Channel 5 then ran a hit story about Arnn’s accurate remark that “teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.” Selected 30-second clips from the two-hour recording that betrayed event-goers’ confidence were next quickly amplified in state media, including the state’s biggest leftist outlet, The Tennesseean. This pressure campaign on Thursday caused a Tennessee public school to drop its use of...

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."...

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is suggesting that her city’s dramatic rise in carjackings since the start of the coronavirus pandemic is linked to students being kept away from classrooms with remote learning.

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) – Pittsburgh Public Schools has informed families that several schools will be moving to remote learning today following a bridge collapse in the East End. “Due to the impact of a bridge collapse in the East End and high call-offs among bus drivers, all K-5, K-8 and 6-8 and Special Schools will transition to remote learning,” Pittsburgh Public Schools Director of Public Relations Ebony Pugh told KDKA in an email. High schools and 6-12 schools will continue in-person learning. The district will still operate on a two-hour delay schedule. However, Pittsburgh Public Schools transportation is canceled for those...

A parent in Arlington, Virginia, slammed the teachers’ union in the state by editing an error-ridden letter that demanded officials delay reopening schools and posted the corrected version on social media. “Hey @VEA4Kids, are you going to send out more of these grammar worksheets over break?” the parent wrote on Twitter. “My kids and I had a great time spotting errors! Did we find them all?” The parent rewrote the lead sentence, which includes strange descriptions and the incorrect style for the planned return to school date: “On behalf of the members of the Arlington Education Association, this dire expression...

frustrated because what you signed up for was for students to learn. And it just ended up being a conversation about points all the time.” These days, the Alhambra High School English teacher has done away with points entirely. He no longer gives students homework and gives them multiple opportunities to improve essays and classwork. The goal is to base grades on what students are learning, and remove behavior, deadlines and how much work they do from the equation. The changes Moreno embraced are part of a growing trend in which educators are moving away from traditional point-driven grading systems,...

In practice, media literacy is actually critical media literacy, indoctrinating students to adopt only leftist principles offered by leftist media outlets.K-12 instruction warped by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and related social-justice radicalism has become such a flashpoint that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland threatens federal retaliation against parent dissidents. Educrats are trying to quell the rebellion by changing definitions, such as the claim, “We’re not teaching CRT, we’re using culturally responsive teaching,” which is the same thing under a different label. Another tactic is to install anodyne-sounding curricular programs that accomplish subversive social-justice goals without alerting parents to the scam.One...

SAN FRANCISCO — Schools have welcomed students back to classrooms but face a new challenge: A shortage of teachers and staff the likes of which some district officials say they’ve never seen. Public schools have struggled for years with teacher shortages, but the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the problem. One school official in California calls it “the most acute shortage of labor” he’s ever seen. Similar scenarios are playing out across the country as schools cope with a spike in retirements and a need to hire more teachers, counselors, tutors and aides to help children make up for learning losses....

Dumbing down is something our public schools are good at. Cluttering up everyone's mind is a vital part of the process. Traditionally, education was focused on facts, information, details, content, learning, and knowledge, all of these hopefully leading to wisdom. Now we've gone to the other extreme. The students learn little, and they cannot connect one fragment of information to another. Classrooms are filled with chatter. The brains of students are overflowing with nothing much. This shift is bizarre. Wasn't it always assumed we were searching for the truth, for higher understanding, for the inner workings of reality, for the...

The inability of U.S. students to perform on par with the majority of other developed nations should cause alarm, given its implications for America’s global leadership. Instead, while other countries take their K-12 education seriously, American leaders are satisfied with pumping more money into an outdated system that continues to fail students and produced mediocre results. Here’s the sad truth. Twenty-five countries outperform U.S. K-12 students. Those leading the way are China, Hong Kong, Finland, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Canada. China’s students not only place first overall, but they dominate each individual subject as well. U.S. students straggle in...

Mr. Gatto (along with Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt), blew the whistle on deliberate dumbing down (on the Prussian model, crushing the imagination of children because it caused them to lose to Napoleon). Mr. Gatto said that the children of the elites have no advantage over ghetto kids "who have never eaten off a tablecloth". The opposite: elite prep schools, the Groton, Brook, St. Albans, Episcopal High & Andover, produce the idiots who presume to rule us. (Thomas Sowell waxed eloquent about how stupid top experts are.) Point in fact (from Samuel Blumenfeld, "Crimes of the Educators"): John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded...

Perhaps worse than trite politicization of classic tunes is failing to pass on the wealth of a child's musical heritage. Here are some ways to start offering that audible feast to your child.Just as what you feed your baby (and eat while pregnant) trains her palate toward good food or junk food for life, what your baby sees and hears does the same for her artistic tastes. Kids raised on mental junk food have a harder time developing an understanding of and affinity for more complex, subtle, and nourishing brain foods later in life.Many parents nowadays pay immense attention to...