Nearly two-thirds of voters think parents should be informed if a student wants to change their name or pronoun at school.
According to The Center Square Voter’s Voice Poll conducted by Noble Predictive Insights, the majority of likely voters say they disagree with allowing schools to affirm a student’s gender change without notifying parents.
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A couple of years ago, I was presenting at a small education conference in New York when someone asked what a success indicator might be for a dynamic, decentralized education marketplace.
“When we see some schools shutting down,” I responded.
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A large majority of voters say that public schools should focus on the basics – math, reading, writing, science and social studies – to improve the quality of public education in the country.
That’s according to the latest The Center Square’s Voters’ Voice poll conducted in late October in conjunction with Noble Predictive Insights. The poll of 2,605 likely voters includes 1,035 Republicans, 1,074 Democrats, and 496 true Independents, and is among the most comprehensive in the country.
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Democratic lawmakers privately negotiated with the nation’s largest teachers union to craft a bill intended to combat bans of sexually explicit books in schools, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Right To Read Act was reintroduced by Democratic Arizona Rep. Raúl Grijalva and Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed in April 2023, and is intended to rebuff efforts by parents and Republican lawmakers to remove sexually explicit content from school libraries, according to a press release from the lawmakers. The bill also authorized $500 million in funding for school libraries and provides liability protections to school librarians and educators providing sexually explicit books to students.
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Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill Monday that will ban school boards from removing books that teach racial or LGBTQ topics in the classroom.
School boards around the U.S. are removing books and materials from classrooms that parents have deemed inappropriate, causing books with overtly racial or sexual material to become a flashpoint in the culture wars. A.B. 1078, which Newsom signed, will prevent school boards from banning instructional materials or library books that include information teaching about racial or LGBTQ topics, and will allow the county superintendent to take unilateral action to include these materials, according to the bill.
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When Massachusetts passed the nation’s first compulsory school attendance law in 1852, parents were mandated to send their children to school under a legal threat of force. Today, that threat remains stronger than ever.
Prior to that law, and those that followed in all other US states over the subsequent decades, cities and towns were compelled to provide schooling for those who wanted it, but parents were under no obligation to use those schools. Many didn’t, choosing instead to send their children to private schools, church or charity schools, “dame schools” in their neighbor’s kitchen, apprenticeships for older children and teens, or to homeschool.
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Schools across the country are struggling to get kids to class while still recovering from the learning loss following the COVID-19 pandemic, according to The New York Times.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress released a report this month showing that students who missed three or more days of school had lower math scores than those who were not absent. Schools, however, are having trouble finding bus drivers to get children to class, with some districts delaying their start times each day and others forced to postpone school for a week, according to the NYT.
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As the first day of school nears across Pennsylvania, the undone budget will leave the poorest districts without the earmarked funds the state promised.
Teachers, administrators, and advocates recently told the House Education Committee that without the money, schools can’t address worker shortages, or provide mental health support, programs for pandemic-induced learning loss, technology upgrades, and building maintenance.
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The Biden Administration’s Department of Education (ED) confirmed that it is deliberately withholding federal funds from elementary and middle schools that have courses in hunting or archery.
As Fox News reports, the ED issued a statement claiming that the decision was due to an interpretation of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) passed last year in response to several shootings. The agency claims that its interpretation determined that funding for any shooting-related activities will be blocked across the country, under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965.
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Multiple cities are turning to school districts to house and support an influx of migrants through the summer months.
Following the expiration of Title 42, both New York City and Chicago have been overwhelmed by the number of migrants that have come to the cities, arguing that there is a lack of resources. In response, the city governments, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, have considered school districts to house migrants.
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Two Pennsylvania State House members are preparing to introduce a bill to facilitate parents’ and taxpayers’ access to K-12 school curricula.
In a memorandum asking colleagues to cosponsor their measure, Representatives Kristin Marcell (R-Richboro) and Jill Cooper (R-New Kensington) argue current school transparency requirements are inadequate. While state law mandates that school boards post policies governing curriculum review, district officials need not publish the actual syllabus or name the instructional texts. Districts must provide residents access to course outlines and texts, but that usually entails an interested party visiting the school.
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Several schools throughout the country are moving to axe homework and deadlines in an effort to increase equity, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Under the philosophy of “equitable grading,” students are given more chances to show they have mastered a subject, a practice that downplays the importance of homework and eschews deadlines in an attempt to give kids who struggle with hardships at home more opportunities to learn the material, according to the WSJ. Schools in California, Nevada and Connecticut are moving to implement “equitable grading,” though opponents of the system, many teachers and students say it disincentives students and leads to a lack of accountability.
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Pennsylvania state Senator Doug Mastriano (R-Gettysburg) this week announced he is introducing legislation requiring public K-12 schools to post their curricula online.
Should the policy become law, school districts and charter institutions must provide public web access to syllabi for all classes and thorough lists of the textbooks planned for use in those courses as well as commonwealth academic standards for all course offerings. Should a school make any curricular revisions, it would have 30 days to publish them.
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Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R-Crossville) has laid out the next step required for Tennessee to possibly reject federal education dollars in the future. On Monday, he filed legislation (add an attachment here) that would create an 11-member task force, helmed by Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn, to study the process required for the state to forego federal funding.
The proposed committee would begin meeting monthly in August and would be expected to deliver a strategic plan to Governor Lee and the General Assembly by December 1. The legislation further requires that Commissioner Schwinn, in her role as chair, notify the US Department of Education by August 31 and advise them on Tennessee’s intent to explore the possibility of Tennessee rejecting federal funding.
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A new report reveals students in the nation’s largest school districts are encouraged to change their names and pronouns without parental knowledge, even though those same schools require parental approval for over-the-counter medicine.
The report, released by The Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies (DFI), found that “eight of the nation’s 20 largest school districts allow students to use names and pronouns at school aligned with their gender identity without parental knowledge and consent,” said DFI.
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More than two-thirds of American voters believe the tenets and teachings of Critical Race Theory are only serving to further divide young people, according to a recent national poll. Conducted for Summit Ministries by nationally renowned polling firm McLaughlin & Associates, the poll shows 69 percent of respondents with an opinion on the issue believe CRT curriculum further divides ethnic groups and races among American youth. Less than one-third (31%) say CRT promotes racial healing and reconciliation among America’s kids.
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The same State Department office that partnered with a Department of Homeland Security-backed private consortium that reported purported election misinformation to tech platforms for removal in the 2020 and 2022 cycles is also using internet games to affect elections abroad.
In an Oct. 31 memo reviewed by Just the News, Secretary of State Antony Blinken encourages diplomatic and consular posts worldwide to promote “Cat Park,” funded by State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and U.S. Embassy The Hague and released to coincide with UNESCO’s Global Media and Information Literacy Week.
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Public school districts are adopting curricula on climate change from well-funded progressive groups casting the issue as a threat to life on the planet that students should respond to through activism.
As of fall 2020, 29 states and the District of Columbia have adopted standards that require science classes to teach human-caused climate change as a peril beyond dispute, according to K12 Climate Action, a group that is part of the progressive Aspen Institute.
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Punctuated by claps, cheers, jeers and a call to order, the Senate State Government Committee held a public hearing on a proposed parental bill of rights that raised questions of local control, race, and gender issues.
Senate Bill 996 is sponsored by Republican gubernatorial nominee Sen. Doug Mastriano, R-Chambersburg.
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Parents are understandably concerned with the divisive curricula now taught in America’s schools. Ideas like critical race theory and extreme gender ideology often replace the subjects traditionally taught in core classes like science and social studies. Students no longer learn the importance of our nation’s history. They learn a warped worldview that divides us into the oppressors and the oppressed.
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An FBI whistleblower who was recently suspended said in an interview this week that he became a whistleblower last November because of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s email ordering the FBI to use Patriot Act counterterrorism tools to target parents at school board meetings.
Special Agent Kyle Seraphin, who was indefinitely suspended on June 1 after nearly six years with the Bureau, said that he was so disturbed by the directive, he went to his congresswoman’s office in New Mexico, and made a “protected disclosure.”
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Twenty Republican members of Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives this week called on acting Pennsylvania Education Secretary Eric Hagarty to reverse controversial state guidelines concerning schools’ treatment of sex and gender.
On a webpage titled “Creating Gender-Inclusive Schools and Classrooms,” the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) calls “binary gender,” e.g., the idea that gender and biological sex are properly denoted as either “male” or “female,” a “faulty concept.” The document also suggests that teachers host a “gender-neutral day” for students above the second grade wherein kids would identify ways in which they will eschew gender stereotypes on that day. Elsewhere, the guidance counsels teachers to ask a student his or her gender identity before assuming the right pronouns by which to call the child.
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A majority of Americans oppose allowing children to choose their own pronouns and favor calling them by their biological sex to avoid confusing kids according to a recent Harvard-Harris survey.
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According to a new poll, Americans are divided along party lines on the question of whether or not to actively teach about race and sexuality in public schools.
The Associated Press reports that the poll by the University of Chicago, AP, and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research asked two questions of respondents: Do parents have too little, too much, or about the right amount of influence over what their children learn, and do teachers have too little, too much, or about the right amount of influence in the same area?
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Schools are becoming a political training ground, contrary to leftist media, who rather you not hear the initiatives taking place, or the indoctrination complaints parents are raising at board meetings.
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Five years ago, hardly anyone knew what Critical Race Theory (CRT) was, but now the phrase is a common one in American households. The Marxist-based theory advocating a race-essentialist approach to education, law, public policy, and even health care, seeks to deconstruct the foundations of society and rebuild it as “antiracist,” while discriminating against whites along the way. Many people are overwhelmed with both the pervasiveness of the doctrine and the large task of fighting it.
Parents in Loudon County, VA, have tackled the issue head on, making national news by loudly criticizing CRT and electing school board members opposed to it. Such efforts, however, have been piecemeal nationwide.
Momentum in fighting this hate-doctrine is growing, though, and many parents want to know how they can protect their children and eradicate such teaching from their local schools. Catrin Wigfall, a Policy Fellow with the Center of the American Experiment, offers some practical ways parents can fight CRT.
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Tracy Wilson is sitting in the cutest little ranch house in this Calvert County town. It is her dream house—literally her dream house, she explains, as she has had the image of this very home in her mind, down to the color scheme of the exterior.
It is 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and the single mother of two just got home from another dream—her job. She spends her days working as an instrumentation technician in the flight test program at Boeing.
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Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is lifting the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate and will not extend its mask requirement into March.
The Democratic mayor also says that as of Tuesday many businesses in the nation’s capital will no longer be required to check that customers have at least one dose of the vaccine before allowing them to enter. However, they will still be allowed to make such a request on their own, according to dcist.com.
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Over half of Americans don’t think schools have a responsibility to teach students about the ongoing impact of slavery and racism, according to according to a poll released Monday by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University in partnership with APM Research Lab.
Two-thirds of Republican respondents and almost half of Independents said educators should only teach the history of slavery, according to the “Mood of the Nation” poll. Only one-fifth of Democratic respondents said exclusively the history of slavery should be taught.
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No, this is not another Qanon or Pizzagate conspiracy theory. It’s a sober recitation of the facts and incidents that can support no other conclusion.
Let’s start with one important stage-setting fact: According to OpenSecrets.org two organizations account for practically all of the contributions made by teachers unions: The National Education Association (about $20 million in 2016) and the American Federation of Teachers (almost $12 million). Both groups — which compete for members, but also collaborate with each other through the NEA-AFT Partnership — are consistently among the organizations that contribute the most money to candidates and political groups. From 2004 to 2016, their donations grew from $4.3 million to more than $32 million — an all-time high.
Even more than most labor unions, they have little use for Republicans, giving Democrats at least 94 percent of the funds they contributed to candidates and parties since as far back as 1990, where the Open Secrets’ data begins. Go here for a detailed breakdown of teachers union political giving.
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Students across the U.S. are planning school walkouts in protest of in-person learning as COVID-19 cases spike amid the rise of the Omicron coronavirus variant.
There are nearly 3,500 schools actively disrupted as of Friday, according to Burbio’s K-12 School Opening Tracker, which tracks school closures for 1,200 districts, including the 200 largest school districts in the nation.
On Tuesday, New York City students staged a walkout in protest of in-person learning over what they said were concerns about testing and safety mitigation measures. NYC Mayor Eric Adams said school was the “safest place” for children during a Friday news conference.
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A high school in Oregon gave a presentation featuring a “Pyramid of White Supremacy” that discussed concepts like “white fragility” and “white saviorism,” according to documents obtained by Parents Defending Education.
Grant High School in Portland, Oregon, taught students about equity and racial justice as part of its “Race Forward” project from December of 2021, according to documents obtained by Parents Defending Education (PDE).
The presentation defined “whiteness” in connection with “the belief that white people are the standard in society” and said “white fragility” is demonstrated by white people showing discomfort and defensiveness “when confronted by information about racism,” such as “bringing up having family members or friends who are Black.”
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Former Obama White House adviser Seth Andrew this week pleaded guilty to participating in a wire fraud scheme in which he attempted to steal over $200,000 from a network of schools he helped found.
Andrew “admitted today to devising a scheme to steal from the very same schools he helped create,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement on the Justice Department’s website.
“Andrew now faces time in federal prison for abusing his position and robbing those he promised to help,” Williams noted.
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Last week, a friend phoned to tell me that her child would be unable to make a playdate with my 8-year-old scheduled for the following day. Her son had tested negative for COVID that evening, yet she planned to take him for another PCR test the next morning “out of an abundance of caution.” Days earlier, a neighborhood mom was so distraught that her daughter had shared the same bus with a classmate who was later discovered to have had COVID that she insisted on stocking up on at-home testing kits for use every day that week. Despite displaying no symptoms and being fully vaccinated, the child and her siblings were subjected to daily nasal swabs.
While television programs like HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm poke fun at liberals who stockpile COVID essentials, progressive professionals who retain the luxury and time to devote to their hypochondria are inevitably contributing to the nationwide shortfall of available tests while undermining the efforts of Americans whose testing needs revolve around a real exposure to the virus. Yet, as has been the case since the beginning of the pandemic, American children continue to pay the heftiest price for the Left’s misguided and irresponsible conduct.
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Homeless encampments have begun cropping up near schools throughout the city of Los Angeles, even despite a citywide ban on any such encampments near public areas, as reported by the Epoch Times.
The Los Angeles City Council had previously passed a new resolution, Ordinance 41.18, which was signed into law by Mayor Eric Garcetti (D-Calif.), forbidding any such homeless camps from being set up within 500 feet of “sensitive-use” areas, including schools, daycares, libraries, and parks. The ordinance also banned such camps from forming near freeway overpasses and underpasses, ramps, tunnels, and bridges.
But in order for the ordinance to be enforced, each individual district’s councilmember must introduce a motion to do so, which then must be approved by the council. As such, homeless encampments have begun sprouting up near schools in the Venice Beach neighborhood, which falls under District 11; that district is represented by Councilman Mike Bonin (D-Calif.), who has a history of refusing to enforce anti-homeless measures for other districts, and has not yet introduced any such measures to protect his own district.
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Just as it did last year, the most dangerous pandemic in a century spawned all sorts of junk science in 2021, running the gamut from pure quackery to ideology-fueled misinformation. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to spot junk science, especially when it’s disguised in techno-babble or parroted by governments, doctors, or other traditionally trusted sources. This sneakiness, combined with the unprecedented stress of a novel, highly-infectious disease, makes almost anyone prone to falling for BS.
To help identify junk science in the future, it’s useful to showcase junk science from the present and past. Here are six of the worst examples from this year:
6. Star NFL Quarterback Aaron Rodgers Was ‘Immunized’ Against COVID-19 With Homeopathy. Through much of the NFL season, Green Bay Packers starting quarterback Aaron Rodgers led reporters and fans to believe that he had been vaccinated against COVID-19. But when Rodgers was diagnosed with the illness in early November, it was revealed that he had not in fact been vaccinated, but rather had been ‘immunized’ with a homeopathic remedy. Homeopathy is a ridiculous, utterly disproven pseudoscience based on the magical notions that “like cures like” and that water can ‘remember’ the essence of a substance. Furthermore, according to practitioners, diluting a substance down to infinitesimal, often nonexistent amounts actually makes the homeopathic remedy stronger. In keeping with this fairytale logic, Rodgers likely imbibed a homeopathic potion (essentially just water) that before dilution may have had some sort of virus in it, and claimed that it raised his antibody levels, rendering him ‘immunized’. It’s utter nonsense.
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Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) this week vetoed legislation that would have directed school districts to publish their curricula online.
State Rep. Andrew Lewis (R-Harrisburg) sponsored the bill to provide a “standardized, simple and user-friendly” means for residents to review the general lesson plans and the titles of textbooks to which children in their districts are subject. New or revised plans would have had to appear online within 30 days of their approval. The representative has observed that many parents have publicly voiced frustration about their inability to ascertain their kids’ curricula ahead of time, with some speaking to him directly about the issue.
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Parents across Wisconsin will not get to see everything their kids are learning in school.
Gov. Tony Evers on Friday vetoed the so-called classroom transparency act.
The idea of the plan was to have schools share their curriculum, lesson plans, and assignments with parents so they knew just what their kids are being taught.
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Five years ago, the U.S. Department of Education approved a grant application for a summer research program whose “core feature” was introducing student fellows to “critical race theory.”
The feds approved a five-year extension of the original grant for the Research Institute for Scholars of Equity (RISE) this year, with one notable and unexplained omission: the term “critical race theory.”
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Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice debunked critical race theory during a recent appearance on ABC’s The View.
Rice, who is now director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, spoke bout the role of public schools in the United States during a discussion on broader education issues including homeschooling and sex education.
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