Free Republic

The New York City teachers’ union filed a federal lawsuit on Friday claiming that a policy banning political pins and signs in schools violates teachers’ First Amendment rights by blocking them from political expression. The lawsuit comes nearly two weeks after the Department of Education sent a memo to principals directing them to enforce the longstanding regulation, which requires that all school staff members show “complete neutrality” while on duty. The policy also prohibits teachers from using school property to promote a candidate. Randi Weingarten, president of the union, the United Federation of Teachers, said that while the policy has...

From Crayons to Condoms by: Deborah Lambert, October 09, 2008 The verdict is in. The new book, From Crayons to Condoms by Steve Baldwin and Karen Holgate is a must-read for parents everywhere. Those who know Steve Baldwin may recall that he has been shaking up the education community ever since he chaired the California Assembly Education Committee and reported the ugly truth about what was going on inside public schools—to the detriment of our children. The book describes nightmare scenarios that many parents will recognize—from the way that administrators routinely ignore parents to the fact that schools have become...

MHS student suspended for having hunting bow in his SUV A Milaca [Minnesota] High School senior has been suspended for 10 days for having a hunting bow in his vehicle. But is the school administration following its own policies? Keith Larson realized he had forgotten the cased bow in the back of his Ford Explorer when discussion of a recent incident in Blaine took place during his first hour economics class on Tuesday, Sept. 23. Keith had said he didn’t think the Blaine student should have been suspended because the box cutter was for his job. “I didn’t see what...

What about those "real issues" that Barack Obama's supporters in the media say we should get back to, whenever some new unsavory fact about his past comes out? Surely education is a real issue, with American school children consistently scoring below those in other countries, and children in minority communities faring worst of all. What about Senator Obama's position on this real issue? As with other issues, he has talked one way and acted the opposite way. The education situation in Obama's home base of Chicago is one of the worst in the nation for the children— and one of...

Unfortunately Gov. Sarah Palin wasn’t exaggerating when she said on Saturday that Presidential hopeful Barack Obama was friendly “with terrorists” referring to William Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist and former Weather Underground Operative. The question to ask today, however, is whether or not Ayer’s radical ideologies play a role in Obama’s revolutionary 2007 education legislation.

A British teachers’ union representative has come under fire after claiming that teachers who engage in consensual sex with students over the age of 16 should not be prosecuted, the U.K.’s Daily Mail reported Sunday. Chris Keates, the general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, said in an interview to be broadcast in the U.K. on Monday that teachers who have sex with pupils over the age of consent are guilty of a mere “error in professional judgment,” and should not be placed on the sex offenders register, the Mail reported. “There is a real...

Some teachers are used to confiscating toys or other disruptive items kids bring from home. But marijuana? A teacher at Harrington Avery D School, at 53rd Street and Baltimore Avenue, did just that yesterday when one of her second-grade students brought a bag of marijuana to school and showed it off to his friends, police said. One alert classmate notified the teacher and the authorities were called, said Lt. John Walker of Southwest Detectives. Police searched the home of the child's father, Lamar Anderson, 28, of 54th Street near Warrington Avenue, Southwest Philadelphia, and confiscated more marijuana and crack cocaine,...

A new study reveals that if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wanted to criticize the nation of Israel before the United Nations, he could use American public school textbooks to do so. "It is shocking to find the kind of misinformation we discovered in American textbooks and supplemental materials being used by schools in every state in the country," said Dr. Gary Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish & Community Research and a co-author of the study. "Elected officials at every level should investigate how these offensive passages are creeping into our textbooks. Presenting false information in the classroom undermines...

Teachers union e-mail touting Obama scorned Mike Drost Thursday, October 2, 2008 An e-mail distributed by a Virginia teachers union encouraged members to bring politics into the classroom by wearing blue in support of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama and simultaneously suggested that the union's voter registration efforts include those "you teach." The Virginia Education Association (VEA) e-mail drew strong criticism Wednesday from elected Republican officials and some residents after the state Republican Party obtained a copy. The author of the e-mail conceded Wednesday that the e-mail should have been worded differently. The VEA is an affiliate of the...

ANN ARBOR, MI – For the past twenty-five years, Brad Johnson, a high school math teacher at the Poway Unified School District in San Diego, CA, has been displaying large red, white and blue banners in his classroom that mention God. The banners contain patriotic phrases such as: “In God We Trust,” “One Nation Under God,” and “God Bless America.” However, last year school officials ordered the banners removed because they promoted a “Judeo-Christian” viewpoint. The School District allowed classroom displays by other teachers that included posters of Buddhist and Islamic messages and Tibetan prayer flags, among other displays. As...

Extremely slick propaganda directed at the youngest of children! The videos below are from It's Elementary, a 78-minute feature film produced by homosexual activists. These are actual scenes from elementary schools in Massachusetts and New York. It's Elementary is meant to be a training video for homosexual activist teachers across the country. In addition, the film itself has been shown to schoolchildren in public schools in Massachusetts and elsewhere. This is what is actually going on in more and more elementary schools across America. Watching this will really affect you! You will not believe what you are seeing. Part 1:...

An 11-year-old boy in Colorado was suspended from school after he refused to take off a shirt that read, “Obama is a terrorist’s best friend.” His father says that the school is violating his son’s First Amendment rights. Daxx Dalton, a fifth grader at Aurora Frontier K-8 School in Aurora, Colo., wore the homemade shirt on a day when students were asked to show their patriotism by wearing red, white and blue, according to MyFOXColorado.com. When he was given the choice of turning the shirt inside out or being suspended, Dalton chose suspension. “They’re taking away my right of freedom...

A student gave me a McCain/Palin sticker this morning. I put it up on my bulletin board. Since I teach at a public school is there any reason why I can't have a political sticker there?

Today, in a piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools,” I offer a report on my research into the archives of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), an education foundation once headed by Barack Obama. As I explained in “Chicago Annenberg Challenge Shutdown?” the Richard J. Daley Library of the University of Illinois at Chicago first agreed to grant, then abruptly denied me, access to the files of this foundation. Subsequently, the Daley Library again reversed their decision and made the CAC files available. As I note in today’s Journal piece, I’ve conveyed the...

The scenes could have been from any privileged school. Instead, they took place last week at the Palisade Preparatory School here, in a school district with a history of financial woes and uneven academic achievement, but one whose standing administrators are hoping to boost by providing a private school approach in a public school setting. “We expect everyone here to go to college,” said Michael Angresano, the principal of the school, which opened on Sept. 4 with about 160 students, split between sixth and ninth grades. It will expand to include additional middle and high school grades over the next...

A Texas teen claims she is forbidden from wearing a rosary around her neck in school because the prayer beads are a gang symbol, MyFOXDFW.com reported.Tabitha Ruiz was stopped by security guards at Seagoville High School in Dallas last week and told to take off the silver and ruby beaded rosary, a gift from her mother. On Monday, the same thing happened when she again came to the school wearing the beads. "I went to school, walked through the metal detectors and they told me to take it off," the teen told MyFOXDFW.com. "I asked them why and they said...

... While a member of the Illinois state legislature, Barack Obama voted YES on SB99, the so-called "comprehensive sex education" act sponsored by palnned Parenthood and the ACLU. The act includes a provision for sex education for kindergarten children. It passed March 6th, 2003. ... The Obama campaign and some commentators are trying to spin the sex education bill as a device to prevent sexual predators. Sorry folks, that is only one part of the bill, SB99 section 4. The full text is here. It is a comprehensive sex education bill for public schools in Illinois which covers the following:...

Interestingly, several unions have this convention season tried to cross the aisle from their usual Democrat side over to Republicans looking to garner support from the Red States. The National Journal has an interesting little account of the Service Employee International Union (SEIU) and the National Education Association (NEA) and a few others trying to warm up to Republicans soft on worker freedom. Under Stern, the SEIU is making a concerted effort to build bridges with the GOP, and for the first time ever it helped to finance a Republican convention by giving $50,000 to the host committee. Furthermore, the...

In 1816, Thomas Jefferson proclaimed in a letter to a friend an adage that we should be heeding today: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Never was this advice more desperately needed — or more consciously avoided — than it is today. American’s educational system has seemed unwilling to enlighten our children to the nature, history, and implications of the war that has been declared on us and on free people in general by Islamist theocratic totalitarians. At best, the subject is entirely...

there are new details the sex education bill that are worth getting out there.I continue to get furious e-mails from allegedly longtime readers (who I’ve never heard from before) now say they’ll never read me again because of my assessment of McCain’s ad hitting Obama on education. (Their rhetoric is suspiciously similar to those “longtime Republicans� who call into C-SPAN, who have never voted for a Democrat before, but who are now outraged that Republicans oppose universal health care/windfall profits taxes/the Fairness Doctrine and now are going to vote for Obama/Kerry/Gore.)Anyway, having now looked at the text of the sex...

Larry Schweikart, previously co-author of A Patriot’s History of the United States, is author of the new (released today) 49 Liberal Lies About American History (That You Probably Learned in School). A professor of history at the University of Dayton, he takes some opening-day questions from NRO editor Kathryn Lopez, in the hopes of undoing some of the lies early in the school year. Kathryn Jean Lopez: So only 49? Larry Schweikart: You know, publishers do have cost restraints. The original version was the size of The Historical Statistics of the United States. So we allowed for volume 2, 3,...

Michelle Rhee, Take 1Michelle Rhee, Take 2

New Jersey taxpayers will have to shell out more than $36 million in coming years to cover school administrator retirement payments as more than 30 school administrators are due six-figure retirement packages, according to a new state analysis. The state initiated the study, and new rules on retirement packages, after it was reported that retired Keansburg Superintendent Barbara Trzeszkowski was due $740,876 in unused sick time and other buybacks. That led to lawmakers to place caps on new contracts. The state Attorney General's Office is trying to get a judge to nullify the payment to Trzeszkowski. Meanwhile, the new numbers...

The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) released their annual school report cards this week, and the results show that two taxpayer-financed Islamic charter schools operated by officials of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) have failed miserably yet again. But protected by powerful political connections, including Ohio Governor Ted Strickland and Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman, and apparently indifferent to their exploitation of the Somali children that comprise the vast majority of their students, the Islamic extremists running the operation appear to have no fear of losing their cash cows. In fact, Ohio educrats have renewed one school’s contract after five...

I just found out late last night that my local public high school is not saying the Pledge of Allegiance at any point during the school day. Is this the norm?? This information came to me via a foreign exchange student we are hosting who is in her senior year of high school at our local public institution. We were talking about her first week of school which commenced 8/27 and she said they have not done the pledge even once yet! She knew what it was, she knows the words - she learned them before coming here. But her...

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit on behalf of two high school students who say they are offended by the school's policy of allowing prayer at voluntary events and holding Christmas concerts at churches. The students, from Pace High School in Pace, Fla., are identified only as Minor I Doe and Minor II Doe in the lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court because they are both under 18. The complaint alleges disclosure of their names would put the students at risk of "social ostracism, economic injury, governmental retaliation … and potential physical harm." Benjamin Stevenson, staff...

Continuing to follow up on what can be learned of Barack Obama's tenure as the Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), evaluations of the program during his tenure available on line demonstrate that in his only real executive test, Barack Obama was a dismal failure squandering millions of dollars on education programs which had basically no real effect. They also strongly suggest Obama's claim that un-repentant terrorist Bill Ayers is just a teacher who lived down the block is an outright lie. The structure and tone of the CAC, addressed in the documents, leave a strong...

When I listen to the AFT and NEA union thug bosses at the DNC two things POP out at me. 1) The teacher's Unions are firmly in the pocket of the Democrats, or vice versa. We will never have education reform until people understand the unions are political big government liberals, not interested in education, only interested in more pay for less work (smaller classes and thus the need for more dues paying teachers). 2) Their message alwasy goes unchallenged by the media. Thre is no connection with higher per pupil spending and educational outcomes - it's time to freeze...

Put On Your Happy Face by: Bethany Stotts, August 26, 2008 Less than one quarter of high school graduates who took the ACT have a 50% probability of getting a B in all four college-level subject areas of math, English, reading, and science, test results from the American College Testing Program (ACT) show. “This year’s results, released Wednesday, reveal that more than three in four test-takers will likely need remedial help in at least one subject to succeed in college,” wrote the Associated Press on August 13. Previous statistics, released this July, indicated that about 60% of America’s community college...

Isn’t this British Olympic boasting all rather East German? Huge state-directed resources have been devoted to gathering supposed glory at a world sports festival. But these medals do not tell the truth about what sort of nation we are at all. In fact, they are designed to cover up the truth – that we are an international failure, that our people are increasingly fat, unfit and unhealthy, that our schools continue to lose their sports grounds to development, and that we are, for the most part, one of the least competitive and sporty countries on Earth. What’s more, the national...

Kids With History of Skipping School To Wear Ankle Bracelets Equipped With Satellite Technology (AP) Court authorities here will be able to track students with a history of skipping school under a new program requiring them to wear ankle bracelets using satellite technology. But at least one group is worried the ankle bracelets, with Global Positioning System monitoring, will infringe on students' privacy. Linda Penn, a Bexar County justice of the peace, said she anticipates that about 50 students from four San Antonio-area school districts - likely to be mostly high schoolers - will wear the anklets during the six-month...

On June 30, the board of education and the town council in Enfield, Conn., convened to hear the results of a citizen cost-cutting committee. Among its other recommendations, the 17 residents recommended replacing some public school teachers with low-cost college interns, restricting the use of school vehicles, and increasing employee contributions to benefit plans. These may seem modest steps toward fiscal responsibility -- but they are emblematic of a significant change in this very blue state: growing disenchantment with the price of government, especially of public education. [Cross Country] Corbis Over the past two and a half decades, the student...

Barack Obama says he believes in universal preschool and if he's elected president he'll pump "billions of dollars into early childhood education." Universal preschool is now second only to universal health care on the liberal policy wish list.... ..."Advocates and supporters of universal preschool often use existing research for purely political purposes," says James Heckman, a University of Chicago Noble laureate in economics whose work Mr. Obama and preschool activists routinely cite. "But the solid evidence for the effectiveness of early interventions is limited to those conducted on disadvantaged populations."... ...If anything, preschool may do lasting damage to many children....

In the contentious world of education politics, the need to spend more on public schools stands out as a rare point of agreement. Our recent national survey of American adults ... found that those who support increased spending on public schools in their district outnumber those who want spending to decrease by a five-to-one margin. [A] solid majority (59 percent) of Americans express confidence that spending more on the public schools in their district will increase student learning. ... Do Americans have an accurate grasp of how much is currently being spent on public education? ... [A]mericans dramatically underestimate the...

Imagine you got a lousy haircut and complained about it, and you got this response: “Well, of course your haircut looks bad. What do you expect? You only paid us for a haircut. You didn’t also give us enough money to provide you with all the other services you need to look your best. Next time, pay us triple the price, and we won’t just give you a haircut, we’ll also give you a manicure and a new set of clothes. Then your haircut will look great!” Would you go back to that shop? Believe it or not, that more...

The citizens of the world who hate America are going to love the latest agitprop released this week by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union. In a document titled "A Violent Education: Corporal Punishment of Children in U.S. Public Schools," the left-wing groups seek to paint a horrifying portrait of the nation's classrooms as Abu Ghraib-like torture chambers. The report compiles sob stories of students humiliated after being disciplined by school officials for unruliness, and claims that minority students are "disproportionately targeted" for punishment. Citing international law and threatening lawsuits, Human Rights Watch and the ACLU are...

The Seattle Public school system may be finding itself in more hot water, following dustups over last fall’s “Myth Of Thanksgiving” incident, and last summer’s “Exploring White Privilege” conference. A reliable source has informed ORBUSMAX that at least one Obama supporter was caught openly selling Obama for President t-shirts, “on Seattle Public School premises during an official School District Training” for teachers, yesterday and today, at the Aki Kurose Middle school. The source says they overheard the Obama supporter being told by an attendee of the training on Monday that the table display was inappropriate and may be in violation...

It is estimated that between ten and twenty percent of children in the United States are exposed to domestic violence annually. While much is known about the impact of domestic violence and other family problems on children within the home, little is known regarding the extent to which these problems spill over to children outside the family. The widespread perception among parents and school officials is that these externalities are significant, though measuring them is difficult due to data and methodological limitations. We estimate the negative spillovers caused by children from troubled families by exploiting a unique data set in...

Offered up to $1,000 for scoring well on Advanced Placement exams, students at 31 New York City high schools took 345 more of the tests this year than last. But the number who passed declined slightly, raising questions about the effectiveness of increasingly popular pay-for-performance programs in schools here and across the country. Test Dollars Students involved in the program, financed with $2 million in private donations and aimed at closing a racial gap in Advanced Placement results, posted more 5’s, the highest possible score. That rise, however, was overshadowed by a decline in the number of 4’s and 3’s....

Islam is using the ideological approach to acculturate its belief system into main stream America. Of course, like most ideologies, Islam is using America’s public schools as its springboard for indoctrinating America’s children. By introducing Islam to students in their mandated curriculums, the next generation of Americans could possibly be pro-Islam in their belief system. However, since Islam is a religion and a political ideology, why is the United States government permitting this indoctrination to occur in America’s public schools? Even though some people promote the idea of the separation of church and state in America, the concept is not...

WASHINGTON - Hard times and higher fuel prices will follow kids back to school this fall. Children will walk farther to the bus stop, pay more for lunch, study from old textbooks and wear last year's clothes. Field trips? Forget about it. This year, it could cost nearly twice as much to fuel the yellow buses that rumble to school each morning. If you think it's expensive to fill up a sport utility vehicle, try topping off a tank that is two or even three times as big. At the same time, costs for air conditioning and heating, cafeteria food...

DENVER -- The Denver Public Schools' pay-for-performance plan to motivate teachers was hailed as a model for the rest of the country when it took effect three years ago. It now stands on the verge of collapse after months of contract negotiations have stalemated. Some teachers have staged sick-outs; others plan to welcome families back to school this week by handing out fliers denouncing the district's contract offer. There is even talk of a strike. National education experts are dismayed. If merit pay can't work in Denver, "future initiatives are destined to fail," said Matthew Springer, director of the National...

This paper describes basic facts regarding the black-white test score gap over the first four years of school. Black children enter school substantially behind their white counterparts in reading and math, but including a small number of covariates erases the gap. Over the first four years of school, however, blacks lose substantial ground relative to other races; averaging .10 standard deviations per school year. By the end of third grade there is a large Black-White test score gap that cannot be explained by observable characteristics. Blacks are falling behind in virtually all categories of skills tested, except the most basic....

A 37-year-old high school teacher from Lamberton has been charged with possession of child pornography after a search of his home computer. Jason Kedl is a teacher a Red Rock Central High School. He appeared on court on Monday. He was released on the promise that he reappear on court, that he have no unsupervised contact with minors and that he stay off the Web. The criminal complaint says the investigation started when the state Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force tipped local authorities that suspicious files were being posted from a Red Rock Internet address. The address was tracked...

Later this month the book "Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope" will be published by Simon & Schuster. Nikki Grimes, a children's author and poet, wrote enthusiastically on her website that a book usually takes her 3-6 months to write, but in this case she "miraculously" finished it in just two weeks. It is full of rhyming verses, descriptions of the exotic countries that little Obama visited, and conversation "Barry" the kid holds with hope. Even God himself talks to Barry while he's in church on Sunday, telling him: "Look around you. Now look to me. There is...

Schools: While Obama's children enjoy the best education money can buy, he wants to deny inner-city children the education change we can believe in — school choice. He prefers cradle-to-diploma collectivist education. When Barack Obama collected the endorsement of the American Federation of Teachers, he told the teachers that support for alternatives to the education monopoly amounted to "tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice." He recently told an interviewer that he opposes school choice because "although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you're going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom." Not...

Teen Screen Lawsuit Advances: Federal Court Affirms Family’s Right to Sue School for Subjecting Teen to Mental Health Test Without Parental Consent SOUTH BEND, Ind.—A federal court has given the green light to a civil rights lawsuit filed by Rutherford Institute attorneys in defense of a 15-year-old Indiana student who was subjected by school officials to a controversial mental health examination without the knowledge or consent of her parents. In ruling that the lawsuit filed on behalf of Chelsea Rhoades and her parents, Teresa and Michael, may proceed to trial, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana...

For many young'uns around the country this is a momentous day. Sadly, for many of them, it is also a tragic one. Today millions of parents who should know better are going to take the most precious things in their lives, their children, and turn them over to the government to be educated. These parents all know that our government education system in this country is beyond horrible --- but for some reason they operate under the impression that the very school that, by chance, their child is going to attend is the one and only exception. Their child's school...

In 1937, Hitler ordered all German children into the government schools. He said: "The Youth of today is ever the people of tomorrow. For this reason we have set before ourselves the task of innoculating our youth with the spirit of this community of the people at a very early age, at an age when human beings are still unperverted and therefore unspoiled. This Reich stands, and it is building itself up for the future, upon its youth. And this new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own...

For the first time, video cameras will monitor Fairfax County high school cafeterias this fall to keep students from pilfering chicken wraps or veggie burgers in the lunch line. The region's largest school system is turning to video surveillance, already widely used on school buses and outside school buildings, to combat what officials say has become a pervasive problem: food theft. The school system's food and nutrition services department estimated that $1.2 million worth of prepared food was lifted from cafeterias in the past school year. Board members decided last month that they could no longer swallow such losses, given...