Free Republic

If the Biden administration is trying to restore American parents’ confidence in the public school system, they sure have a funny way of showing it. Nowadays, one of the most significant causes of concern — and perhaps the deciding factor for most parents pulling their children out of public schools — has been the increasing woke indoctrination from the public school system, especially in regard to the ever-prominent LGBT agenda. And how is Biden’s Department of Education handling the increasing wariness of parents toward the public school system? By releasing on social media a video celebrating another made-up LGBT holiday,...

On a spring night in 2022, Ross Hill was trying to get several of his children—he has eight—tucked into bed for the night. *** “They were in tears because they didn’t want to go to school the next day,” said Mr. Hill, a 38-year-old teacher from Florence, South Carolina (pop: 39,958). Whether he knew it at the time or not, Mr. Hill’s family was part of a trend in the United States. A surprising number of children are miserable at school, research shows, and it’s a trend that began before the pandemic. For example, a 2020 Yale study that surveyed...

Benjamin Franklin once famously quipped, “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” Today, however, we can alter that to “death, taxes, and a slew of myths about teacher pay.”Leading the half-truth brigade, on March 4, a headline in My eLearning World read, “New Teachers Are Earning 20% Less Than They Were 20 Years Ago.” The piece informs us that if starting salaries for new teachers had kept pace with inflation over the last 20 years, a teacher just starting out would currently be making $53,303 per year. Instead, using data from the National...

It's no secret that the US military has repeatedly missed some or all of its recruitment goals over the past several years. Various reasons have been offered, ranging from low pay to low unemployment rates and better opportunities in the civilian world. Others have suggested that our endless wars in foreign lands act as disincentives to enlistment because of the higher risk that recruits will end up coming home in a body bag rather than reaching retirement. But during a recent hearing before the House Armed Services Committee, one Army veteran and former Senate candidate, Jake Bequette, offered a potentially...

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued a local school district, alleging it engaged in illegal electioneering by using official email accounts to encourage employees to vote for specific legislative candidates who opposed school choice vouchers. The lawsuit filed this week against the Denton Independent School District alleges a director of special programs and as many as two principals sent emails on official school district account encouraging employees to vote for legislative candidates who oppose school choice candidates. One of the email “encourages the staff of Borman Elementary School to vote in the Republican primary, even if the staff member...

There’s little that better highlights the moral bankruptcy of Chicago’s ‘equity’ agenda than a look at how CPS is treating two of its schools: Northside College Prep and Douglass High.CPS and union officials want to end selective enrollment at Northside, a diverse, top-performing school where blacks and Hispanics excel at the highest level. At the same time, those officials want to keep open Douglass High School, a nearly-empty, all-black neighborhood school that spends over $68,000 per student…and yet not a single one of its students could read or do math at grade level last year.That’s the official policy of CPS...

A pitfall of the fallen human mind is how narratives shape our perception of the world, even outweighing facts and common sense. For example, nuclear power is one of the safest ways to generate electricity. According to the Our World in Data report, nuclear is 99.8% safer than coal in terms of deaths per unit of power. Yet because of three dramatic accidents and the press surrounding them — Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima in 2011 — nuclear power is widely perceived as extraordinarily dangerous and in need of claustrophobic regulation. Similarly, a narrative pushed...

Diagnoses of “gender dysphoria” rose in every state except one over the last several years. South Dakota was the only state that did not see a rise in gender dysphoria diagnoses between 2018 and 2022, according to new data from Definitive Healthcare. In fact, South Dakota saw a 23% decrease in gender dysphoria diagnoses, while every other state saw their diagnoses rise by at least 6%. Last year, South Dakota restricted transgender medical interventions for minors. At least 23 states have similar bans, but they are only currently in effect in 14 states. South Dakota lawmakers also pushed for such...

An annual report from the Inspector General of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) revealed that millions of dollars worth of tech devices were reported lost or stolen “without appropriate search and recovery efforts.” The fiscal year 2023 annual report released Tuesday states CPS schools reported 77,505 tech devices as lost or stolen during the 2021-22 school year, totaling well over $23 million in original purchase price. The discovery, as a result of the district’s first post-COVID-19 inventory, calls the numbers “unacceptably high” and says the oversight process is in need of a “serious overhaul.” The report said the missing items included...

A public New York City elementary school is being accused of “Jewish erasure” because a map in one of its classrooms showed all of the countries in the Middle East except for Israel — which it labeled as Palestine. The map, labeled the “Arab World,” appears in a classroom at PS 261 in Brooklyn, where Rita Lahoud gives students lessons in the Arab Culture Arts program — which is funded by Qatar Foundation International, the American wing of the Qatar Foundation, a nonprofit owned by the country’s wealthy ruling family. It was manufactured by Arab education company Ruman and features...

Utah ranked fourth in the nation for states with the largest political shift leftward between 2000 and 2020, according to research by a Brigham Young University sociologist.Comparing presidential election vote shares from 2000 to 2020, Utah had one of the largest swings leftward in the United States — behind only Vermont, Colorado and Alaska, according to Jacob Rugh, associate professor of sociology at Brigham Young University.Utah went from giving President George W. Bush 66.8% of the vote, compared to 26.5% for Vice President Al Gore in 2000; (R+40) to President Donald Trump receiving 58.1% of the vote and President Joe...

Memphis — An After School Satan Club plans to begin offering activities to children at a Tennessee elementary school following Christmas break, officials said, and the move immediately proved controversial. The Satanic Temple plans to host the club at Chimneyrock Elementary School in Cordova, news outlets reported. It will begin meeting on Jan. 10 in the school's library and run through the spring semester, according to an announcement Tuesday posted on social media.

Other Chicago political leaders have chosen to send their children to private schools in the past. Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates, who has been vocal in the past about her opposition to private schools, enrolled her teenager at a Catholic school, NBC Chicago confirmed. After days of questions directly to Davis Gates and the CTU that were left unanswered, NBC Chicago confirmed via Davis Gates' own social media posts and multiple sources that her child was enrolled this year at a Chicago Catholic high school. NBC Chicago is not naming the school nor the name of Gates' child....

Earlier this month, Moody’s Investors Service slashed its outlook for the United States’ credit rating from “stable” to “negative” pointing to economic risks including high interest rates, the government’s steadily growing debt, and political polarization in Washington. According to the Congressional Budget Office, updated projections show a federal budget deficit of $1.5 trillion for 2023. By eliminating the federal government’s intrusion in education, annual government spending could be reduced by $725.8 billion. Not only could Congress dramatically cut the deficit, reducing debt in the long run, they could demonstrate political will and cooperation by collaborating to remove the unconstitutional federal...

Nearly nine out of 10 parents believe their child is performing at grade level despite standardized tests showing far fewer students are on track, according to a poll released Wednesday by Gallup and the nonprofit Learning Heroes. Report cards, which many parents rely on for a sense of their children's progress, might be missing the whole picture, researchers say. Without that knowledge, parents may not seek opportunities for extra support for their children. “Grades are the holy grail,” said Bibb Hubbard, founder and president of Learning Heroes. “They’re the number one indicator that parents turn to to understand that their...

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on September 12, 2023, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. The transgender movement is pressing its agenda everywhere. Most publicly, activist teachers are using classrooms to propagandize on its behalf and activist health professionals are promoting the mutilation of children under the euphemistic banner of “gender-affirming care.” The sudden and pervasive rise of this movement provokes two questions: where did it come from, and how has it proved so successful? The story...

The Colorado School district that wanted to ban a student from wearing a Gadsden Flag patch on his bookbag is now the target of a federal lawsuit for its handling of the situation. In August, Jaiden Rodriguez came under fire at the Vanguard School, part of Harrison School District 2 in Colorado Springs, when the school banned the flag patch before relenting as it became the focus of national attention... a video made the rounds of social media showing Jaiden’s mother explaining the history of the Revolutionary War flag to a school official who had believed the yellow flag with...

A Solution to the Problem of Failed Public SchoolsIt may be true, as the late, great Andrew Breitbart famously said, that “politics is downstream of culture.” But both are downstream of education. Nothing is more important to our families or to the future of our country than the moral, social, psychological, and intellectual development of our children. In that regard, the pandemic lockdowns created quite a conundrum for traditionally conservative and “red-pilled” parents. They were on the front lines of the school reopening movement, demanding that children—who were at virtually no risk from covid—be allowed to attend school in person...

Portland Public Schools is considering adopting new ‘equitable grading practices’, which would change how teachers grade students. A handout from the school district said historical data shows racial disparities in students’ pass/fail rate. The handout also instructs teachers to not assign zeros to assignments that are handed in late, or are missing. It also states that for students caught cheating, they are to face disciplinary action instead of having their grade be penalized. District administrators said these changes and others would make classrooms more fair and reduce bias. "What it's doing is, it's assessing mastery and accuracy,” PPS’ Chief Academic...

A transgender high school tennis coach has been rehired following a controversy that occurred in the girls' locker room. The board of the Gettysburg Area School District in Pennsylvania voted 6 to 2 on September 5 to renew tennis coach Sasha Yates' contract. Yates' employment came under scrutiny after an incident in the fall of 2022 when the coach changed clothes in the girls' locker room, reports PennLive. The principal for Gettysburg Area High School, Jeremy Lusk, sent a letter to Yates about concerns raised with the administration about professional boundaries. Sources familiar with the matter say Yates did change...