Free Republic

Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will require teachers next school year to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students.

K-12 schools must allow boys into girls’ private areas to obtain federal funds for lunches, breakfasts, and snacks, the Biden administration announced this month. A U.S. Department of Education spokesman told The Federalist the Biden administration’s press releases from several agencies announcing this policy will be followed by formal rulemaking in June. “It seems to be playing politics with feeding poor kids, which is really unfortunate,” John Elcesser, executive director of the Indiana Non-Public Education Association, said via phone amid weeks of attempting to sort out these new demands with government officials on behalf of private schools in his state....

This is exactly the kind of routine hostility we can expect for students all over the country if Biden successfully writes ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ into the meaning of ‘sex’ in education. Braden Rabidoux had no idea how his life was about to change when his mother got a call from his school principal. Braden, an eighth-grader in Wisconsin’s Kiel Area School District, was the subject of a sexual harassment complaint and investigation, the principal told her. “I was like, ‘What? Sexual harassment? What are you talking about?'” Braden’s mom, Rose Rabidoux, recalled to The Federalist. “Because when I...

Teachers and staffers at the public schools in the Eau Claire Area School District in central Wisconsin have been busy receiving all manner of training in how they should perform their duties. At least some of that training, however, has parents seeing red and driving some of them to run to replace members of the school board. The specific training program in question was provided by the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire’s Gender & Sexuality Research Center. It dealt with how to deal with children who are supposedly going through “gender identity transition.” A more accurate way to describe it...

Over at Reason, Robby Soave has a really interesting story about a high school English teacher from Salinas, California, a district with a large Hispanic population. After the start of the pandemic, teacher Kali Fontanilla noticed that a bunch of students seemed to be failing a new ethnic studies class. Fontanilla herself wasn’t teaching the class but she taught English to many of the students who were inexplicably failing. She became curious about why, so she went into the online portal where teachers kept their lesson plans to see what the class was about. She was shocked by what she...

My students were taught to think of themselves as vectors of disease. This has fundamentally altered their understanding of themselves. I am proud to be a teacher. I’ve worked in the Canadian public school system for the past 15 years, mostly at the high school level, teaching morals and ethics. I don’t claim to be a doctor or an expert in virology. There is a lot I don’t know. But I spend my days with our youth and they tell me a lot about their lives. And I want to tell you what I’m hearing and what I’m seeing. Since...

Luke Rosiak is a reporter for the Daily Wire and he’s about to have a book published about K-12 schools. It’s titled “Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education.” Today the Daily Wire published an excerpt from the book about the director of ethnic studies for Seattle public schools, a woman named Tracy Castro-Gill. Originally Tracy Hammond, her husband asked her for a divorce and Hammond decided to leave him and her young daughter behind in California so she could marry a convicted child molester in Seattle, a man she’d met playing the video game...

California’s long-running descent into madness continues as its bizarre Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) now encourages public school students to pray to bloodthirsty Aztec deities. The California State Board of Education approved the almost 900-page ESMC in March 2021, saying teaching children about the systemic racism that supposedly plagues America has never been more urgent, as Fox News reported at the time. “The curriculum’s unequivocal promotion of five Aztec gods or deities through repetitive chanting and affirmation of their symbolic principles constitutes an unlawful government preference toward a particular religious practice,” Frank Xu, president of Californians for Equal Rights...

Readers likely are familiar with the bleak state of American higher education. The U.S. spends more per student than most of its peers, yet comparative-academic-proficiency studies from the Pew Foundation and others consistently rank us in the middle or bottom rungs. Literacy rates are lower today than in 1840, well before the imposition of compulsory public education. University campuses have become pedagogic citadels of woke-ism. What is less understood is the degree to which these same forces have invaded the nation’s primary and secondary public schools. From Loudoun County to Cupertino, the K-12 public-education system is subverting our shared welfare....

The Mankato School Board in Minnesota voted unanimously for a new policy that allows non-white teachers exclusively to be eligible for “additional stipends,” and for teachers to be segregated by race. State Rep. Jeremy Munson (R), however, condemned the new policy, which mirrors a new Minnesota statute. “Our largest local school district just voted to pay people differently, not on merit, or by the content of their character, but based solely on the color of their skin,” he said.

NYT's 1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones talked about the appropriate role race should play in the public school curriculum in an interview with Chuck Todd on Sunday's 'Meet the Press' on NBC. Hannah-Jones told Todd that Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe was right when he said parents should not decide what is taught in school. She said the entire reason that parents send their children to school is because they want kids "to be taught by people who have an expertise."

Administrators at a Chicago Public Schools high school have shot down an attempt by a right-wing group to form a chapter on the Northwest Side campus of “an organization promoting racial intolerance.” Meanwhile, Chicago police said they are investigating a social media post by a longtime CPD sergeant that praised supposed efforts by students to start the group, Turning Point USA. Taft High School Principal Mark Grishaber said in a letter to the school community earlier this month that he was “disturbed” by efforts to launch a Turning Point chapter at Taft. The right-wing organization has a presence at more...

An LGBT club for kindergarteners, 'two-spirit' sexuality, and a radical leftwing understanding of sex were all promoted in the nation's second largest school district.The Los Angeles Unified School District’s Office of Human Relations, Equity and Diversity hosted a 10-week online club for LGBT elementary schoolers, down to four-year-olds. It also prepared a series of presentations that promoted leftwing gender theory and deviant sexualities including the “Two Spirit” sexuality. The club was called “Rainbow Club,” and met once a week for 10 weeks. It was advertised to students from preschool to fifth grade as a “virtual club for LGBTQ+ elementary school...

Parents outraged over school staff who allegedly disguised the names of Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) clubs at a California middle school are planning to voice their concerns at a school board meeting this week in Salinas. Jessica Konen has alleged that school staff indoctrinated her then 12-year-old daughter in an LGBTQ club disguised as an “Equality Club.” She told The Epoch Times she plans to speak at the Dec. 15 meeting at Spreckels Union School District (SUSD) during public comments. Two teachers at Buena Vista Middle School in Salinas were recorded coaching other teachers to conceal the nature of LGTBQ clubs...

CRT ForeverRacial tribalism doesn’t have to be part of the curriculum to dominate education.“Please keep your cameras on: we’re watching to make sure you’re paying attention.”Our racial equity training is a 16-hour-long affair. It starts with denunciations of capitalism, the United States, and various aspects of “white culture.” You are encouraged to ask questions, but if anyone is brave or foolish enough to complicate the approved narratives, he will practically be laughed to scorn. How could you be so obtuse as not to see the centuries of racism you’re responsible for?On day two, before bringing things to a close, participants...

Vermont's Essex-Westford School District, which includes the town of Essex that last year fired a high school lifeguard for merely questioning Critical Race Theory, has done it again. In the midst of a national furor over a sexually explicit graphic novel, the school has proclaimed it has the duty to expose children to pornographic imagery — to support free speech.It is axiomatic that free speech rights do not extend fully into schools — they never have. For example, the First Amendment protects quite a shocking variety of pornographic materials, including bondage and rape videos. Are those acceptable, protected school teaching...

The state of New York used federal American Rescue Plan (ARP) coronavirus relief funds to advance critical race theory indoctrination in elementary and secondary public schooling. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona approved of the plan, saying it “lay[s] the groundwork for the ways in which an unprecedented infusion of federal resources will be used to address the urgent needs of America’s children and build back better.” The Empire State’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) plan is federally funded to the tune of $8,995,282,324, and “highlights” its commitment to “provide social emotional support within a Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Framework.”...

Hundreds of prominent professors — including top names from CUNY, NYU, and Columbia — have signed a letter blasting the erosion of math rigor in grades K to 12. Arguing that curtailing advanced math programs puts American kids at a global disadvantage, the coalition called the movement “the height of irresponsibility.” A total of 746 math teachers and professors across the country signed the new missive, warning that enfeebled math curriculums would have dire consequences down the line. The teachers — including two CUNY professors, nine from Columbia University, and 13 from NYU — argued that kids need exposure to...

While documenting my former high school’s attempt to indoctrinate me with critical race theory six years ago, I remarked that now, several years later, “the situation has undoubtedly worsened.” Worsened it has. Now, Campbell Union High School District has promoted more than 100 “equity resources” to students and staff, including a document that taught students how to put a curse on those who say “all lives matter.”Colorblindness, Cops, and CursesThe page serves as a vast library for CRT resources and features 60 different links, including a Google Drive folder with 45 different documents. The list made sure to include the...

State legislators know nothing about Critical Race Theory (CRT). Descended from Critical Theory (CT) created by the Marxist German Frankfurt School, CRT is the latest effort to divide Americans by race and create a hierarchy of victimhood to use in the war against America’s history and our free-market economy, with the goal of turning the United States into a Marxist state. Do our state legislators fear CRT as the existential national threat it is? Are they or are they not willing to expunge its divisive concepts from our educational system, and are they willing to stay the course to achieve...