Free Republic

Across the country, people found alternatives in home schooling, private schools and charter schools.

A group of four high-class private schools in New York City is owned by a company that is run by a man identified as a senior member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). According to the New York Post, the Basis Independent Schools (BIS) district has two campuses in Manhattan and another two in Brooklyn. The district charges as much as $44,500 a year in tuition, and promotes itself as a district that produces graduates who “gain entry into some of the world’s most prestigious colleges.” The district consists of a Pre-Kindergarten to Second Grade school in downtown Brooklyn, a...

<p>But after the murder of George Floyd, the $50,000-a-year school said it was reimagining its purpose “with an eye toward anti-racism” and diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI. In Eisenberg’s view, Brentwood was pulling a “bait and switch” on parents. He sued the school last year for breach of contract, civil rights violations and emotional distress.</p>

Through teacher training lectures with titles like “Cultivating Anti-Racists and Activists in Kindergarten,” “Decolonizing the Minds of Second Graders,” and “The White People Way,” the nation’s leading accreditation association for private schools is instructing educators to adopt a race-essentialist and cultural Marxist curriculum for children as young as five years old. The National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) hosts professional development conferences for teachers at schools in their network, which promote a race-based curriculum and grading system — including tips on how to avoid transparency with parents — according to a trove of footage reviewed by Breitbart News. The principal...

The Dalton School hosts an annual conference for New York City private schools on diversity, equity, and inclusion. This May, it was Rodney Glasgow’s turn to deliver the keynote address. Glasgow, a longtime school administrator who has founded multiple DEI consultancies, used his speech to address the elephant in the room: the parental pushback to "antiracism" at Dalton and other elite private schools, which made national headlines after Dalton headmaster Jim Best resigned amid the uproar. The disgruntled parents, Glasgow said, were like the "white supremacists" who stormed the Capitol. And the schools that had admitted their children were like...

Officials will have to show which they value: the growing demand by families for education choice, or teachers' unions' persistent political clout.Teachers’ unions took it on the nose during the lockdowns. After they pushed to keep schools closed for months (and then folks like national teachers’ union president Randi Weingarten inexplicably blamed it on the “privilege” of Jewish Americans), unions are justly taking blame for school closures. Angry parents have taken to school board meetings and national news to openly criticize their school boards’ servility to the unions.But even after this public beating, unions still wield brazen political power in...

The pandemic lockdowns have created quite a conundrum for conservative parents. On the one hand, we’ve been on the front lines of the (maskless) school reopening movement. On the other hand, as schools do reopen, our children are encountering a level of sexual and political indoctrination never before seen. Or maybe we just hadn’t noticed. Ironically, it was the closures themselves, championed by the left, that helped bring the abuses to light. Parents peeking in on their children’s Zoom lessons found themselves appalled at what was being taught: critical race theory, BLM-inspired anti-police rhetoric, “LGBTQ” propaganda. The backlash has been...

Since public schools are spectacularly successful leftist recruitment centers, weakening public attachment to them through lockdowns was a dangerous move for Democrats.Between May and October 2020, homeschooling more than doubled among U.S. households with school-age children, from 5.4 percent that spring to 11.1 percent that fall, according to new Census Bureau data. Black and Hispanic Americans were the most likely to switch to homeschooling, while white and Asian Americans were the least likely. This could be due to the fact that African-American children are the most likely to be financially locked into poor-quality school districts, or that black Americans have...

A private school in Miami is warning its staff against getting a COVID-19 vaccine. Centner Academy said its school policy, to the extent possible, not to employ anyone who has gotten a coronavirus vaccine until further information is known. “Here we have one of the most powerful tools in our arsenal to protect ourselves and prevent this problem and they are discouraging the use of it. It’s tragic,” said Dr. Aileen Marty, a FIU infectious disease expert. A letter was sent to parents of students at Centner Academy, saying the school discourages teachers and staff from getting the COVID-19 vaccines...

At a time countless students face obstacles that could permanently stunt their learning growth, school choice provides one obvious solution to help mitigate a ‘lost generation.’At a time countless students face obstacles that could permanently stunt their learning growth, school choice provides one obvious solution to help mitigate a ‘lost generation.’ Impact on Suicide RatesThe study, released in December and conducted by a Cato Institute scholar and Western Carolina University economist, used two different methods to examine the impact of school choice on mental health. First, the researchers used examined variations in teenage (i.e., 15-19) suicide rates based on states’...

Because Democrats don't hesitate to use power even if they lack legitimacy, they will go farther than Obama did in pushing transgender ideology on American children over the next four years.The next several years are likely to reopen the floodgates to leftists’ long repurposing of public schools to indoctrinate children with lies about sex. According to leftist reporting, once in office Joe Biden plans to quickly use executive power to push transgenderism in schools, farther than President Obama did. In Congress, Democrats plan to prioritize legislation to do the same, potentially with Republican support, with the so-called Equality Act and...

EMPOWERING PARENTS AND STUDENTS: President Donald J. Trump is taking action to expand K-12 educational options for disadvantaged children impacted by the pandemic.Today, President Trump signed an Executive Order offering flexibility to provide certain disadvantaged children with emergency K-12 scholarships to access in-person learning opportunities.The Order allows States and eligible entities to use available Federal Community Service Block Grants (CSBG) funds to provide life-changing scholarships to families whose children cannot access in-person learning. CSBG funds totaled nearly $1.7 billion in FY 2020.Scholarships provided with CSBG funds can help families pay for private school tuition, home schooling, micro schooling, learning-pod expenses,...

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos just got to the official end of the line with her efforts to divert $16 million in public school COVID-relief funding to private schools. U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of California James Donato signed a permanent injunction–made public Monday–that will formally end litigation begun last summer against the Department of Education (DOE). In July, Judge Donato, a Barack Obama appointee, quoted the late Justice Antonin Scalia when he called DeVos’s justification of the DOE’s pro-private school policy “interpretive jiggery-pokery in the extreme.” The Congressional CARES Act earmarked approximately $16 billion to help elementary...

SANTA FE – The U.S. Justice Department sided Monday with the father of a seventh grade prep school student in a lawsuit that challenges pandemic-related limits on classroom capacity at private schools in New Mexico as more restrictive than public school guidelines. Albuquerque-based U.S. Attorney John Anderson filed a statement of interest that argues the state is violating the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution by limiting attendance at private schools to 25% of building capacity under a public health order. The limit is set at 50% for public schools under guidance from the Public Education Department, though only...

A federal judge on Friday ruled that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ effort to boost the amount of emergency pandemic relief that flows to private school students is illegal and struck down the policy. U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, an appointee of President Donald Trump, ruled that DeVos ran afoul of the CARES Act when she required public schools to send a greater share of pandemic assistance to private school students than is typically required under federal law.... But in her 13-page decision on Friday, Friedrich ruled that DeVos had it wrong, writing that “Congress expressed a clear and unambiguous preference...

Prominent Democrat politicians have started making huge concessions on reopening schools. Back in May, Democrats pounced after President Trump supported reopening. Despite the data finding precisely the opposite, it quickly became the Democrat-media complex line that opening schools this fall would be preposterously dangerous to children and teachers.In July, when New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled a plan to put the city’s 1.1 million school kids back in schools half the week and “online learning” the rest of the week, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo picked a public fight with him, saying, “If anybody sat here today...

Using claims of discrimination as a wedge in the door for government bureaucrats would end religious education and the religious rights of parents to educate their children according to the dictates of their faith. While the Supreme Court was hearing oral argument May 13 about whether Catholic schools should have the right to decide whom they employ as teachers, my daughter was on a Zoom call with her Catholic schoolteacher. Like the schools that appeared before the court, Our Lady of Guadalupe School and St. James School, her Catholic elementary school has one class per grade, and as a result,...

Last week, Wells Fargo and Fifth Third Bank announced they no longer would donate to the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which enables more than 108,000 low-income children and children in foster care to receive scholarships to attend a safe and effective school of choice. The move comes after the Orlando Sentinel published a piece suggesting that $105 million in tax credit scholarships had been used by families to pay tuition at faith-based schools that, as The Federalist’s Joy Pullmann put it, “uphold their faiths’ historic sexual ethics.” Businesses that contribute to nonprofit scholarship-granting organizations in the state can receive...

In recent years, certain advocacy groups have criticized private Jewish schools, generally known as yeshivoth, claiming that the schools provide a substandard education. At issue is the interpretation of a New York state law passed in the late 19th century that requires private schools to provide an education “substantially equivalent” to that offered in the public schools. Through the decades, the various private school networks, whether religious or non-sectarian, have managed to meet this vague requirement to the satisfaction of local authorities and the New York State Education Department (NYSED). Until now. Under substantial pressure from an organization called Young...

Mayor Bill de Blasio on Friday took the extraordinary step of firing his embattled investigations commissioner, Mark G. Peters, the culmination of a fierce rivalry between the two powerful men. It was a rare and consequential action by a mayor to remove an investigations commissioner: The position is understood to come with a large degree of independence that allows impartial scrutiny of all areas of government, including the executive branch.