Tag: K-12

Pennsylvania Lawmaker Proposes Bill to Inform Parents of Sexual Content in Schools

Bradley Vasoli

A lawmaker is urging his colleagues to back a bill he is sponsoring to ensure Pennsylvania parents get notified when sexually explicit content is distributed in their children’s K-12 schools. 

State Representative Russ Diamond (R-Jonestown) announced he will introduce a companion bill to a Senate measure authored by Senator Ryan Aument (R-Lititz). The legislation would mandate that schools note sexually explicit texts and other media assigned or displayed as part of students’ coursework. The bill would further instruct schools to tell parents when a book their child accesses from their school library features sexually frank content. 

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Hundreds of Millions of COVID-19 Aid Never Reached K-12 School Districts: Report

Pennsylvania Daily Star Staff

More than $736 million of federal COVID-19 funds did not reach the K-12 schools and students it was meant for, with some states putting the money towards “slush funds” and “pet projects,” according to a March report by the National Opportunity Project.

In 2020, Congress gave $5.5 billion in COVID-19 aid to nonpublic schools with low-income students through its Emergency Assistance to Nonpublic Schools (EANS) program, according to a report by the National Opportunity Project. Of the aid, $736 million did not go to the schools with at least $157 million within 27 states going towards programs to teach video game coding and “I Got Vaxxed” competitions.

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Commentary: Tennessee’s Private Schools Have Authority to Establish ‘Firearms Friendly’ Policies

Pennsylvania Daily Star Staff

In 2016 Tennessee passed two new statutes with bi-partisan support that addressed the issue of whether Tennessee’s private schools, both K-12 and “higher education,” could establish their own policies with respect to whether and to what extent civilian possession of firearms would be prohibited on their campuses. These laws are codified at Tennessee Code Annotated Sections 49-50-803 and 49-7-161.

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Commentary: A Republic if You Can Teach It

RealClearWire

President Biden has a civics lesson that he is fond of and regularly repeats. It is about how the United States is unique in the world because of the founding ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

“Unlike every other nation on Earth, we were founded based on an idea,” he notes before adding that “while we’ve never fully lived up” to those principles, “we have never given up on them.”

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Mastriano Proposes Ban on Obscene Materials in Pennsylvania School Settings

Bradley Vasoli

State Senator Doug Mastriano (R-Gettysburg) this week announced he plans to introduce a bill banning the subjection of K-12 students to any “sexually explicit, obscene [or] racist principles.” 

In a memorandum describing his upcoming bill, the senator voiced alarm at parents, students, and school staff, alerting the public to certain materials and themes they feel do not serve educational purposes. He first mentioned “racist concepts,” a reference to Critical Race Theory (CRT), an idea suggesting that history should be taught from a perspective of ethnic politics. 

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‘Find Another Job’: Oklahoma Officials Respond to Teacher Quitting over CRT Ban

Admin

Oklahoma officials are calling for teachers pushing Critical Race Theory (CRT) to leave the classroom after an Oklahoma teacher spoke out against the states’ education law following her resignation.

Summer Boismier quit her high school teaching position at Norman Public Schools in Norman, Oklahoma, after she shared a QR code in her classroom linking students to “Books Unbanned,” a program through Brooklyn Public Library, that allowed students to access books prohibited from being taught by a state law. The law, HB 1775, prohibits teaching that one race or sex is superior to another, with the intent to prevent the teaching of CRT and certain elements of gender ideology.

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Columbus Teachers Start School Year on Picket Lines

Pennsylvania Daily Star Staff

Students in Ohio’s largest school district will begin classes Wednesday remotely after teachers rejected a final contract offer and voted to strike late Sunday night.

Columbus Education Association teachers were on the picket line at several school buildings Monday morning, the first day teachers were scheduled to report, after 94% of its members voted to strike for the first time since 1975.

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Commentary: College Enrollment Drops as Students Seek Alternatives

Admin

The past two years have been marked by major education disruption at the K-12 level, as more families questioned the schooling status quo during prolonged school closures and remote learning. They left district schools in droves, choosing instead to become independent homeschoolers, join learning pods and microschools, or find high-quality virtual learning platforms. 

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Commentary: Employer-Based Microschooling Could Be the Newest Workplace Perk

Pennsylvania Daily Star Staff

When Elon Musk created a small school for his children and some of his SpaceX employees on the company’s California campus, he created a spark that could just now be catching on in other workplaces across the country. 

In a 2015 interview about the school, the billionaire inventor said: “The regular schools weren’t doing the things that I thought should be done. So I thought, well, let’s see what we can do.” A year earlier he had pulled his boys out of an elite private school in Los Angeles and launched Ad Astra, a project-based school with no grade levels, no mandatory classes, and an emergent curriculum.

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Harvard to Shell Out $100 Million to ‘Redress’ Its ‘Legacies with Slavery’

Pennsylvania Daily Star Staff

Harvard University will allocate $100 million to study and address its history with slavery, according to a Tuesday announcement from the university’s president.

The university released a report from the Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery and announced a $100 million fund to implement the report’s recommendations, according to an announcement from President Larry Bacow. The report listed numerous recommendations including how Harvard “can redress” its “legacies with slavery” through teaching, research and service.

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Commentary: Civics Education Is More Important Than Ever

RealClearWire

At its founding, American K-12 public education was meant to prepare young people to be active participants in our democratic republic. That should still be its highest purpose, especially when it comes to teaching civics.

Historically, public schools held fast to the principle that effective education must be non-partisan. Knowing they had great power to influence young minds, teachers used to be careful to choose content and pedagogies that restricted their ability to impose their personal political views on schoolchildren.

Today, maintaining non-partisanship is more important than ever in classrooms. Sadly, it’s increasingly dishonored. Civics has become a hot-button issue of late, particularly after remote learning allowed more parents to see what their children were actually being taught. Many were not happy with what they saw, and the debate over civics education is symptomatic of the larger divide that has become such a looming threat to American society.

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Commentary: Revitalizing K-12 Education with 10,000 New Charter Schools

RealClearWire

The American K-12 education system has been failing too many students for too long. And the problem has only gotten worse amid pandemic-era school closures and remote learning.

Increasingly, parents are venting their frustration at local government bureaucracies and teachers’ unions that they believe have too often failed to put the interests of kids first — and some are voting with their feet.

Throughout Covid-19, traditional public school enrollment has dropped by 3.3% (1.45 million students) while charter school enrollment has increased by 7.1% year over year (237,000 students). Families are increasingly taking advantage of other non-traditional schooling options as well: according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the rate of homeschooling nationwide increased by 5.6 percentage points between April and October 2020.

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Commentary: The Path to ‘Racial Justice’ Runs Squarely Through Fixing Failed Schools

Pennsylvania Daily Star Staff

The Rittenhouse verdict has unleashed a torrent of stupidity and racist rhetoric from commentators across the country. The usual race peddlers seem to have kicked into high gear—even though everyone involved was a person of pallor.

But for me it only got my blood boiling. Let me explain.

In the course of my management consulting, I’ve been to some of the roughest neighborhoods in the country.

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Commentary: Parent and School Board Tensions Could Be Eased by School Choice

Pennsylvania Daily Star Staff
Young girl in pink long sleeve writing

Public education has been under the microscope lately, especially since many states shut down in-person learning last year during the COVID-19 pandemic. With children learning from home via technology, many parents had the chance to hear what their children’s teachers were saying—and they didn’t always like it. In fact, many were downright disturbed by what public schools were teaching their children.

Parents should not be forced to sit by and watch as their children get indoctrinated with progressive ideas they don’t agree with. Assuming it is legitimate for the government—that is, the taxpayers—to fund education, the government should distribute those funds directly to parents in the form of vouchers and allow them to choose where to educate their children. Not only would this allow for more choice in schools, but it would also reduce much of the conflict we are seeing today between parents and school boards across the country.

A common response to voucher proposals is that they would allow parents to use taxpayer dollars to send their children to private religious schools, thus violating separation of church and state. In other words, atheists and progressives argue that they should not have to financially support schools that teach students religious worldviews.

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