Free Republic

The National Education Association (NEA) appears to be playing clean-up after a tweet Saturday drew harsh criticism for claiming that educators "know better than anyone" what students need. The NEA, one of the largest teachers unions in the United States, later turned off replies to the tweet, but not before 5,000 people responded, including former education secretary Betsy DeVos, who simply stated "You misspelled parents." The National Education Association took issue with DeVos’ tweet, and noted the role of parents in shaping their children’s education. "Together, families and educators are an essential team for advocating for the resources and opportunities...

Nearly 270 public educators were arrested on child sex-related crimes in the US in the first nine months of this year, ranging from grooming to raping underage students. ... roughly one arrest a day. ... The analysis looked at local news stories week by week featuring arrests of K-12 principals, assistant principals, teachers, substitute teachers and teacher’s aides on child sex-related crimes in school districts across the country. Arrests that weren’t publicized were not counted in the analysis, meaning the true number may well be higher. ... Stephen Kenion, who taught self-defense classes to Baltimore City Public School students, was...

A Louisiana federal judge on Wednesday permanently blocked the federal government from enforcing its mask and vaccine mandates for children and teachers in public preschool. The Head Start program, which provides early education to infants, toddlers, and kids preparing for kindergarten, cannot require that any adults or students in the applicable centers or daycare be vaccinated against Covid-19 or wear masks, U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty ruled. The regulation applied to children as young as two years old, Doughty noted, both indoors and outdoors during activities that involve close contact with other people. The court rejected the argument...

In a surprise to nearly no one, children’s reading and math scores have plummeted. National Assessment of Educational Progress, nicknamed “the nation’s report card,” results show the first-ever drop in math and the largest drop in reading in more than 30 years. Black children had an even bigger collapse in scores. Decades of educational progress undone. Poof. Horrific. Stupid. Unnecessary. We know the school closures did this. It wasn’t the COVID virus. It was the hyper-political reaction, from the left, on reopening schools during the pandemic. The orders came from the top. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued...

An agreement between the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers union and the school district states that White teachers will be laid off before teachers of color, regardless of their seniority. The agreement, which was reached to end a two-week teacher strike last spring, says that starting this school year, "if excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the district shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population."

Potemkin villages” refer to the magnificent facades that Crimean governor Grigory Potemkin supposedly built in front of decrepit villages to impress Catherine the Great on her grand tour of the region. Today, there’s no better term than “Potemkin schools” to describe how educrats run public education in New York City. ... teachers at William Cullen Bryant High School in Queens complained that administrators forced them to pass failing students. Last year, a long-stalled investigation revealed that Maspeth High School in Queens repeatedly faked passing grades. In 2020, at Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill High School where more than 70% of the students...

Teachers’ unions are pushing a radical Marxist-inspired agenda that is destroying public education in America. Over the past several years, the left has aggressively infected the minds of the youngest children with the tenets of critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology, while academic excellence has been shoved to the back of the bus. As a result, public schools are hemorrhaging students. In my home state of Minnesota, 2022 “marks the second consecutive year the state’s public school system has lost thousands of students,” the Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota think tank, reported in February. Why should parents...

As a teacher, I attended the National Education Association convention last week, and my worst fears were confirmed. Public schools are no longer a safe place for families who hold traditional values or for families who believe gender (as in male/female binary) is biologically determined. It was also evident that the teachers union is a lobbying arm of the Democratic Party.

Jared Polis is running for president. He'll deny it. He has denied it. ... Polis has done little to nothing to ruffle the feathers of the teachers' unions... ... standing aside and letting municipalities do your dirty work for you. Polis let Denver Mayor Michael Hancock lead on coronavirus lockdowns and masks before imposing a statewide lockdown himself. Polis also signed a bill allowing cities and counties to enact stricter (but not looser) gun regulations than the state imposes. And there's nothing particularly libertarian about opening the door to public employees' unions in a traditionally non-union state like Colorado. ......

In New York City, the nation’s largest school district has lost some 50,000 students over the past two years. In Michigan, enrollment remains more than 50,000 below prepandemic levels from big cities to the rural Upper Peninsula. In the suburbs of Orange County, Calif., where families have moved for generations to be part of the public school system, enrollment slid for the second consecutive year; statewide, more than a quarter-million public school students have dropped from California’s rolls since 2019. And since school funding is tied to enrollment, cities that have lost many students — including Denver, Albuquerque and Oakland...

Schools are becoming indoctrination factories, trying to turn children against their country and their own parents' values. It's what the teachers unions intend. Amazingly, that's just fine with resident Joe Biden, who told a gathering of teachers and union bigwigs on April 27 that the kids are "yours when they're in the classroom." That wasn't just a Biden stumble. He repeated it for emphasis: "They are all our children ... They are not somebody else's children." Sorry, Joe. But parents have a right to know what their children are being taught, and to set limits. State legislators in at least...

Yes or no, do funds raised by public school levies give money to the teacher's unions?

NewsGuard, the establishment “news-rating” project that presents itself as a source of expert knowledge on which news sources can be trusted and which ones cannot, will be rolling out to millions of American schoolchildren due to a partnership with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Per Axios, the AFT will purchase NewsGuard licenses for all of its 1.7 million teachers, in a major deal for the news-rating project. NewsGuard has had a reputation as a project of the political establishment since its inception. NewsGuard maintains a list of news outlets it considers “trustworthy” and “untrustworthy,” data which it uses in...

In 2021, special interests groups and teachers unions worked their air-tight alliances with Democratic politicians to the bone, trying harder than ever to stop parents from having a say in the education of their children. But 2021 was also the year that parents fought back. Parents flocked to the polls in record numbers to elect Glenn Youngkin as Governor of Virginia in a massive upset. Youngkin kept his campaign promise and banned Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Virginia’s schools on his first day in office. In another victory, the Department of Education pulled the plug on a regulation that would...

You knew this fight was coming. Omicron is everywhere. It’s highly contagious. At this point, everyone is going to get it eventually. It’s not something that should cause embarrassment or shame. That feeling is only present because liberals decided to inject their moral superiority complex into this mess. The red states were the idiots. The rural folks were the morons who got COVID, not us. The elites took every word Fauci said as gospel. They wore 16 masks at a time. They wore moon suits. And the liberal Northeast is teeming with COVID. We’re breaking COVID records daily. Everyone is...

Parents in the Austin, Texas, area expressed outrage after a technology teacher read a Dr. Seuss-style poem mocking “evangelicals” and parents who have expressed concerns about books they call pornographic. Krista Tyler, instructional technology specialist at Grisham Middle School in the Round Rock Independent School District (ISD) read the poem at the Leander ISD school board meeting Dec. 16. “Everyone in Leander liked reading a lot/ but some evangelicals in Leader did not,” Tyler begins. “These kooks hated reading, the whole reading season./ Please don’t ask why, no one quite knows the reason./ It could be perhaps critical thinking causes...

Parents who never imagined running for office battled to win seats on local school boards last week; they won some, but lost many. Their fiercest opponents were the teachers unions. The media portrayed these school board races as culture wars, but more than anything they were struggles by parents to wrest control of the boards from self-serving unions. For decades, the unions have maintained a tight grip on who gets elected. No wonder school district decisions -- about budgets, masking, COVID closures, curriculum and teacher contracts -- protect teachers first. Never mind what's best for kids. That needs to change....

resident Joe Biden delivered a message and a warning to our country in a speech that I, along with many others, wholeheartedly agree with: "Any country that out-educates us will out-compete us." He is entirely correct. However, while his words are vital and motivating, they must be accompanied by actions. Biden delivered this speech in a city with the nation's worst school system: Baltimore City School District. The figures aren't simply stunning; they'll make your heart skip a beat and your stomach turn. In the Baltimore City School District, 41% of high school students have a GPA of less than...

HBO star said 'what's going on in the schools' was going to be 'the issue' in future elections... Bill Maher sounded the alarm Friday night about next week's Virginia gubernatorial election, which could go to Republicans for the first time since 2009. Maher began the show's panel discussion by pointing out that Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe "should walk away with it" since resident Biden won Virginia by 10 points and McAuliffe previously served as the commonwealth's governor, 2014-2018. Instead, Maher noted, the race is "neck and neck," with GOP challenger Glenn Youngkin over an issue that Maher reminded viewers he...

CRANSTON, R.I. (WJAR) — There is more fallout from the public records controversy in South Kingstown. The National Education Association Rhode Island (NEARI) and NEA South Kingstown (NEASK) filed a complaint in Rhode Island Superior Court on Monday to "protect teachers' privacy rights," NEARI Communication Director Stephanie DeSilva Mandeville shared Wednesday. "This action seeks to temporarily restrain the School Department from releasing any information related to these APRA requests," the union wrote in a statement. "NEARI believes many of these documents are not public records as defined under APRA and/or fall under APRA’s exclusions and therefore are not subject to...