Free Republic

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Jefferson County Public Schools will close Tuesday due to teacher shortages as local educators continue protesting at the Capitol. JCPS made the call around 10 p.m. Monday, saying that about one-third of teachers had said they'd be absent. Tuesday will mark the fourth work stoppage at JCPS in less than two weeks. Teachers have voiced opposition to three bills before the General Assembly, notably one that would legalize tax credits for donors to groups that award private-school scholarships. ... JCPS will rescheduled the ACT test that was to be taken Tuesday to April 24.

Teacher collective bargaining is a highly debated feature of the education system in the US. This paper presents the first analysis of the effect of teacher collective bargaining laws on long-run labor market and educational attainment outcomes, exploiting the timing of passage of duty-tobargain laws across cohorts within states and across states over time. Using American Community Survey data linked to each respondent’s state of birth, we examine labor market outcomes and educational attainment for 35-49 year olds, separately by gender. We find robust evidence that exposure to teacher collective bargaining laws worsens the future labor market outcomes of men:...

A political action committee backing former state Sen. Michael Johnston of Denver for the Democratic nod for governor has received another $1 million dollars from Michael Bloomberg, bringing the wealthy former New York mayor’s total donations to the committee to $2 million. ... The $1 million contribution was the largest that any campaign committee received in the most recent reporting period from May 31 to June 13, according to the secretary of state’s office’s TRACER campaign finance system. Second on the list: another $750,000 from fellow Democrat U.S. Rep. Jared Polis of Boulder to his gubernatorial campaign, bringing his total...

With a U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Janus v. AFCSME case expected any day, Connecticut’s public sector unions are trying to convince members not to opt-out of membership if the Supreme Court decides in favor of Mark Janus. The Connecticut State Employees Association and the American Federation of Teachers informed their members of a Freedom of Information request for union members’ contact information that originated out of Illinois. Leaders say this information could be used for an opt-out campaign in the wake of a positive Janus decision. ... A decision in favor of Janus would essentially make Connecticut a...

Teachers' unions are changing their tactics to maintain 'political clout' and salvage potential losses...Their new message? Anyone can join the union. A new membership category called “Community Allies,” open to “any person who demonstrates support in advancing the cause of public education.” It is of dubious legality, as unions are created to represent employees in a certain field, not to wield political influence. Yet, if this plan succeeds, the National Educators Association will be able to solicit these new “members” for PAC donations, a fact that could extend their political reach even further beyond where it is now. The National...

The Union City teachers union chief is under fire after the release of an undercover video that shows her denigrating some of the city's public-school students, suggesting a teacher not report that he hurt a student and referring to a Union City teacher who had sex with a child but was not charged criminally. Conservative group Project Veritas, which has been slammed by the statewide teachers union for "using dishonest and illegal tactics to fabricate false stories," released the 15-minute video on Wednesday morning, one day following the release of a similar video that resulted in the suspension of a...

If you’ve ever taken a statistics class, you’ve probably read Darrell Huff’s “How to Lie with Statistics.” Teachers unions appear to have drawn some lessons from the 1954 book. They’re using misleading statistics to rally public support for teacher walkouts in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona and Colorado. Here are some of their distortions. • They conflate school funding and state education spending. In Oklahoma, unions proclaimed that per pupil school spending fell by 28.2% over the past decade. That refers to the inflation-adjusted state’s general funding formula. But total per pupil outlays increased by 16% in nominal terms between...

In Douglas County, Colorado, the front line of the fight for school choice and vouchers on the SCOTUS level, Republican voters outnumber Democrats about two to one. Yet until recently, Republican taxpayers .. paying about $1.25 million a year to fund Democrats’ political campaigns. How so? Most of the district’s 4,300 plus teachers belonged to the local American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union, to which they paid about $1.25 million in dues annually, according to the union’s IRS filings. Since teachers’ salaries are paid by the county’s property tax payers, their dues come out of those salaries. So the $1.25...

What do the three pictured flags have in common? The first is the flag of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Estimates are that 40,000,000 to 60,000,000 people lost their lives under the rule of Stalin's iron fist. The third is the Chinese flag. Everyday hard-working people did not fare well in Mao's China either. Anywhere from 49,000,000 to 78,000,000 died under Mao's communist society. In the middle is the flyer that teachers' unions distributed to Colorado teachers with their Walk-Ins tool-kit encouraging Englewood's teachers to protest and walk out of class recently. Additionally, the teachers' unions are organizing...

As about 100 of the 1,700-plus students at my high school walked out in protest on March 14 (for a moment, I thought it was merely an overzealous Pi Day party), I mentioned to a colleague that the whole episode was little more than a ploy to elect more Democrats. I found out a short while later that others thought exactly the same. As most of us watching well knew, several reports have revealed that the student walkouts across the U.S. last Wednesday were far from "organic." Sadly, liberal organizations across the U.S. have seized on the wicked act that...

Hundreds of New York City teachers who'd lost their full-time positions but stayed on the payroll will be headed back to classrooms within the next few weeks. About a third of those teachers, it turns out, have faced legal or disciplinary charges. The city's education department announced this summer that schools that hadn't filled all their teaching positions by Oct. 15 would be assigned educators from the "absent teacher reserve" pool. According to a spokesman at the New York City Department of Education, the "matches" between teachers and schools are being made now, and those teachers will go into schools...

Zero proficiency in math, English in probe of 6 inner-city schools. In an astonishing outcome, an investigation of six Baltimore schools found not a single student passed the state’s proficiency test in the subjects of math and English. ... In February, columnist Thomas Sowell, noting “most public schools in most low-income, inner-city neighborhoods produce educational outcomes that are far below the outcomes in other neighborhoods,” observed that many teachers who use unorthodox methods to reverse that trend encounter opposition from the education establishment. He said that in his 40 years of observing successful minority schools, he was struck “by how...

New York would be the first state to make tuition at public colleges and universities free for middle-class students under a state budget set for passage in Albany. The plan crafted by Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo would apply to any New York student whose family has an annual income of $125,000 or less. To qualify the student would have to meet certain class load and grade point average restrictions, and room and board would not be covered. Cuomo said Sunday that the tuition plan, which his office has estimated to cost $163 million, is a national first.

America's public education system is failing the citizens of Detroit, where the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund reports that 47% of people in Detroit are illiterate. In nearby suburbs, up to one-third are functionally illiterate. The report, titled "Addressing Detroit's Basic Skills Crisis" makes the problem seem as intractible as the Flint water crisis that is about to hit its third anniversary. Director Karen Tyler-Ruiz described that level of illiteracy to WWJ: "Not able to fill out basic forms, for getting a job — those types of basic everyday (things). Reading a prescription; what’s on the bottle, how many you should...

BANGOR, MICH. - A video showing a group of Bangor teachers and staff making inappropriate comments about students prompted a school secretary to resign. The commentary, heard in a six-minute video posted Monday, Feb. 13, to YouTube, shows a group of adults sitting around a table at the Bangor Tavern Bar and Grill. Such comments from seven involved Bangor Public Schools faculty include ratings of who they'd have sex with, marry, or kill.

The two Republicans who broke ranks with their party and announced they would vote against education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos have received thousands of dollars from the nation's largest teachers union.Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska) and Susan Collins (R., Maine) have each benefited from contributions from the National Education Association. Collins received $2,000 from the union in 2002 and 2008, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Murkowski, meanwhile, has received $23,500.The NEA represents 3 million members, making it the wealthiest and most influential union in the country. The NEA, along with other labor groups like the American Federation of Teachers, has waged a fierce campaign against...

WASHINGTON—In response to President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos to lead the Department of Education, AFT President Randi Weingarten issued the following statement:“The president-elect, in his selection of Betsy DeVos, has chosen the most ideological, anti-public education nominee put forward since President Carter created a Cabinet-level Department of Education. “In nominating DeVos, Trump makes it loud and clear that his education policy will focus on privatizing, defunding and destroying public education in America. “DeVos has no meaningful experience in the classroom or in our schools. The sum total of her involvement has been spending her family’s wealth in an effort to...

Ohio Senate candidate Ted Strickland joked about the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Monday, saying it came "at a good time" for union workers since he was unable to cast the deciding vote in a March case that ended up in a 4-4 deadlock. ... Strickland made the remarks in Cleveland, telling AFL-CIO members that Scalia's death "saved labor" from a terrible decision in the case, which could have dealt a blow to the ability of public-sector unions to collect fees from those who decide against joining the union and pay for collective bargaining activities. ... the...

Teachers' unions can now point to an academic study to defend themselves against the charge that they prevent the firing of bad teachers, but the study itself is more of a hypothetical defense against very real charges. Eunice S. Han of Wellesley College, Hillary Clinton's alma mater, finished a study on February 27, 2016 entitled "The Myth of Unions' Overprotection of Bad Teachers: Evidence from the District-Teacher Matched Panel Data on Teacher Turnover." Yet and still, she spends many pages using phrases such as "suppose," "assume," and "predict" and developing "models" in which she adds these suppositions, assumptions and predictions...

I-Team: French teacher at HISD school doesn't speak French HOUSTON - How do you teach a French class, if you don’t even speak French? The I-Team discovered that’s exactly what is happening at the Houston Independent School District’s Energy Institute High School in the 1800 block of Sampson Street. Sharonda White’s son Nathanial is a junior at the school. "I thought it was a joke, I couldn't believe this was happening,” White said. We asked her son about his classroom experience. I-Team: “Does your teacher speak French?” Nathanial White: “No sir.” I-Team: “Have you ever heard him speak a word...