House lawmakers held a hearing to investigate the Chinese Communist Party’s alleged efforts to influence American classrooms.
The Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education Subcommittee held the hearing, led by Chair Rep. Aaron Bean, R-Fla. The lawmakers brought scrutiny against Confucius Classrooms, a program with ties to the CCP, which promote teaching things like the Chinese language and culture, among other things, in hundreds of classrooms around the country.
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More students are asking for better grades than earned — and a vast majority of educators questioned in a recent survey admit they’ve given in to those demands in a trend now dubbed “grade grubbing.”
Intelligent.com surveyed nearly 300 educators in late August, including high school teachers and professors who work with both undergrads and grad students.
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In an effort to promote “inclusivity,” a Canadian school district has removed all books published before the year 2008 from all of its libraries.
According to the Daily Caller, the actions taken by the Peel School District in Mississauga, Ontario were in response to a provincial directive from the minister of education ordering a greater focus on “equity.”
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It began a few weeks ago: the back-to-school memes.
One featured dejected kids dressed in new school clothes waiting for the bus while elated parents look forward to an empty house. My favorite meme so far is one with a mom in mid-kick, child flying through the air toward a waiting school bus. Freedom, at last.
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Studies have consistently shown a pronounced left-leaning political inclination among college professors. For example, a Harvard University survey last year revealed that of the 476 faculty members who responded, around 80 percent identified as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Meanwhile, 16.8 percent considered themselves “moderate,” a mere 1.46 percent identified as “conservative,” and none claimed to be “very conservative.”
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A federal judge best known for overturning California’s decades-old assault-weapons ban in 2021, a decision immediately stayed by the 9th U.S. Circuit of Appeals but returned to his court for reconsideration by the Supreme Court, is now making waves on schools, free speech and gender identity.
U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez issued a preliminary injunction that prevents California’s Escondido Union School District from enforcing its gender identity disclosure policy against teachers Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West or taking “adverse employment actions” against them.
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Art therapy is offered through a “Western ideology” lens and needs “decolonization,” according to a recently published academic paper.
Titled “Furthering the Field of Expressive Arts Therapies Through Acts of Decolonization,” the 35-page paper explores how colonialism, under the guise of “Western ideology,” not only killed “millions of Native American Indians,” but continues to negatively influence art therapy and other aspects of society.
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Fewer parents sent children to preschool in 2021 in a decline that corresponded with the COVID-19 pandemic.
The percentage of 3-to-6-year-olds enrolled in preschool in the United States dropped by 9.3 percentage points from 2019 to 2021, from 51.1% to 41.8%, according to a new U.S. Census Bureau report.
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Rhode Island’s biggest school district is refusing to name the adult advisors to its LGBTQ student clubs, claiming the parent activist seeking their identities posted “medical information” about the primary subject of the public records request.
That medical information is the gender identity of Aarav Sundaresh, Providence Public Schools director of equity and belonging, a biological woman who has spoken publicly about identifying as a man. The district even identifies Sundaresh as a “founding Core Collective member for the National Trans Educators Network.”
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The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) released a survey Wednesday that revealed a hostile free speech environment at colleges and universities.
Among students, 56% expressed concern about their reputation being damaged because of someone misunderstanding something they’ve said or done, according to the survey. The survey also revealed that attempts to de-platform speakers that students don’t like at the worst five campuses for speech had an 81% success rate and that de-platformings are on the rise on campuses, with 52 incidents in 2022, up from 36 in 2021.
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Schools and universities around the U.S. are bringing back mask mandates and shutdowns as COVID-19 numbers rise, according to public records reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Runge Independent School District (ISD) in Texas, Magoffin County (MC) Schools in Kentucky, Lee County School District in Kentucky and Rosemary Hills Elementary School in Maryland are all reimplementing some form of COVID-19 measures, according to public records reviewed by the DCNF. Some universities are reimplementing mask mandates, such as Dillard University in Louisiana and Morris Brown College (MBC) in Georgia, though MBC backtracked on its mandate.
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By now almost every American child starts a new school year. Many challenges confront families seeking solid formations for their children — from school violence, to radical secular humanist indoctrination, to the ongoing severe harm inflicted by the 2020-2021 lockdowns.
But Biden’s created border crisis now adds to that list of hurdles, as schools across the country – not just in border areas – grapple to deal with an illegal influx that prioritizes foreign migrants above our own American children.
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Georgia Piedmont Technical College broke ground on a 24,000-square-foot Regional Transportation Training Center in Stonecrest.
The facility should open to students in the fall of 2024. With this addition, officials said the school has room to double its commercial truck driving program enrollment.
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The student group that defeated affirmative action in the Supreme Court is turning their attention to American military academies exempted from the ban.
The group is currently collecting experiences of students who applied to the Air Force, Army and Navy military academies.
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A Colorado affiliate of the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, told its teachers to destroy any evidence of having given students a gender identity survey, according to a recent report.
CBS Colorado notes that while the JeffCo Public Schools district says it is “unclear” whether surveys about “preferred pronouns” are in violation of state law, it advised teachers against using them as lawsuits are ongoing.
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Despite the controversiality of the curriculum, business schools are still following the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiative.
The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance defines ESG as an effort that “grew out of investment philosophies clustered around sustainability and, thereafter, socially responsible investing,” though “there is no single list of ESG goals or examples, and ESG concepts often overlap.”
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The Alaska State Board of Education voted on Thursday to support a regulation banning boys from competing on girls’ high school athletic teams, according to The Associated Press.
The board delayed its initial vote on the issue in July after hearing hours of testimony and receiving 1,400 pages of written comments, according to the AP. The board voted 7-1 to support the measure in a special session, and the proposal now heads to Republican Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor for approval.
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Kids, go to school! It’s time to go back. Some will have already started. A ritual that we adults attend every year with a mixture of nostalgia and indifference: nostalgia because we remember the beautiful — or ugly — child we were, and indifference because at least this time the math teacher will not ask us to explain the lesson. However, both feelings can coexist naturally with something deeper and more important: We need the teachers, and we need the teachers to do their best work possible.
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A professor and NASA scientist recently shared her “climate grief” and how she copes with the stress in an article for Nature.
Kimberley Miner, a professor at Virginia Tech and the University of Maine, shared a story of breaking down in tears when she realized a California drought would mean some blue oaks would die.
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A tenured professor fired less than a month after seeking the scientific evidence behind her public university’s COVID-19 policies and challenging the legality of its vaccine mandate will get to continue her First Amendment retaliation lawsuit against the University of Maine System.
Patricia Griffin has sufficiently alleged “the subject matter of her speech pertained to a matter of great public concern and was outside the scope of her duties as a professor of marketing” at the University of Southern Maine, U.S. District Judge Jon Levy ruled last month, clearing the way for trial on that issue while dismissing Griffin’s other claims.
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Would you be interested in a book on reforming education by a man who created flourishing grade, middle, and high school charter schools, all with waiting lists today, found them too mired in government bureaucracy and so started 13 even more successful purely private campuses in 2007 — and who is willing to share his secrets of success with you?
In hiring young people for his large private business, Bob Luddy of Raleigh, North Carolina, ran head-long into the problem shared by other employers — namely, that many potential employees with a public-school education did not have the elemental skills required to hold jobs, some unable to understand basic logic or even to read.
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A couple of months ago, a friend of my wife and of mine, a young Italian priest, was visiting with us. Our conversation veered toward youth books and movies. Our friend lamented what he perceived as a lack of substance in contemporary books and movies for young people. He said that the books kids read and the movies they watch should reflect the truth and impel them toward right living and virtue, instead of simply mirroring the symptoms of a wounded culture. Perhaps my friend was onto something.
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What is slavery? Has it been abolished? Is the truth about American slavery taught in our public schools? There are historically documented answers to these questions. But the primary narrative continually promotes only one truth, and that truth is skewed because people don’t know history.
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It’s back to school for Florida students and many others across the country this week. The first days and weeks of a new school year are always filled with anticipation, adjustments, transitions and growth for parents and students. Yet, this school year’s “firsts” for an expanding pool of families also includes the first time that their children will have the resources and freedom to enroll in the school of their choice. The short and long-term consequences of these new opportunities aren’t just experienced within the four walls of a home or school building, or by the families now empowered to pursue them – the impact of education choice stretches across communities and economies, helping to unleash prosperity and growth that benefits everyone.
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It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too, e.g. about the changes of the moon and of the sun, about the stars and about the origin of the universe.
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A report published in the Washington Times last week, entitled “Young conservatives take climate activism to GOP presidential debate,” undoubtedly is of grave concern to conservatives and the Republican Party. A group of young Republicans called the American Conservation Coalition is warning GOP presidential candidates that they “need to engage on energy and climate or they’re going to lose young voters.”
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Atop international science journal funded by the federal government recently acknowledged that thousands of its published research papers may contain misleading language.
More than 2,600 of the papers from “Science,” the peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and one of the world’s top academic journals, were examined in depth by another research journal, “Scientometrics.” It found in a study that from 1997 to 2021, the use of “hedging” words have fallen by about 40%.
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In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education released a report titled, “A Nation at Risk,” which was an important point in the history of American education. The document used dire language, asserting that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
The report also stated: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
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Newly revealed teacher-training materials and sworn affidavits show Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools misled the federal court hearing a lawsuit by religious families against the district’s no-exemptions policy for gender and sexuality instruction in the English Language Arts curriculum, a national Muslim group claims.
School officials in the affluent suburb bordering Washington, D.C. told a judge last month it rescinded opt-outs and parental notification this spring because of the logistical challenges created by too many families choosing to remove their children from the “Pride storybooks,” which teach children as young as 3 about sex workers, kink, drag, gender transitions and prepubescent same-sex romance.
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Popular author and commentator Dr. James Lindsay joined Liz Collin on her podcast this week to discuss the deterioration of America’s education system over the last 30 years.
Lindsay’s new book, “The Marxification of Education,” examines the left’s “theft” of the education system. He has been touring the country and world speaking to audiences about this topic and will be in Minnesota Oct. 11 for an event hosted by the Child Protection League.
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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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The Arkansas Department of Education is investigating an Advanced Placement (AP) pilot course dedicated to African American studies for possible Critical Race Theory (CRT) content, according to The Associated Press.
Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva asked five school districts Monday to send in their course materials for the AP African American course, drafted by the College Board, an academic organization that administers and writes high school courses for college credit, so the state may evaluate whether the course complies with its CRT ban, according to the AP. Prior to the investigation, the five school districts announced that they would continue to teach the course despite the state saying that the course was not approved and would not count towards college credit.
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Boston University Professor Ibram Kendi has not published an academic paper in at least four years, according to his Google Scholar profile.
The professor, who popularized the term “anti-racism,” wrote at least two children’s books in the same period.
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LGBTQ activists are seeking to ensure Massachusetts public schools are celebrating their agenda’s events throughout the academic year, Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI) warns parents.
“Sex on the school calendar has become commonplace all over the nation,” a downloadable document from MFI states.
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The late founder of national pro-life organization Life Dynamics created his group’s new animated videos to serve as a tool for every pro-lifer, regardless of age, to help them engage with common pro-abortion talking points.
Pro-life leader Marcus “Mark” Crutcher, who died in March, wanted to address the issue of how to help pro-lifers engage in responding to common pro-abortion talking points, said a press statement Thursday announcing the release of Crutcher’s “Abortion Distortion” videos.
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A freshman seminar this fall at Cornell University is focused on how queer, trans, black, indigenous and people of color experience care through food, according to their website.
The seminar titled “Have You Eaten Yet? QTBIPOC Care” aims to use written texts and popular media such as “Lizzo’s music videos” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” to analyze how queer, trans, black, indigenous and people of color give, receive and experience care through food, according to the course listing. The seminar is offered through the Cornell Department of Performing and Media Arts by Ariel Dela Cruz, who is a Ph.D. student whose expertise is in “queer studies, trans studies, Filipinx diasporic studies, performance, and care work,” according to her bio.
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Memorization and recitation became part of my life through a club I was part of in middle and high school. With the club, I had the opportunity to recite patriotic speeches and poems along with chapters from the Bible in front of an audience of veterans, law enforcement officers, and first responders just about every month. I loved seeing how the words recited touched the people listening.
Almost without fail, after we spoke, adults would come over to thank us, amazed by the fact that we could remember so much and recite it with such confidence. Often, people said something along the lines of “I never thought kids could do that” or “That’s more than I would ever be able to do.”
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A Georgia school board voted Thursday to fire a teacher who read her fifth-grade students a book on gender identity, according to The Associated Press.
In March, Katie Rinderle, a fifth-grade teacher at Cobb County School District, says she got in trouble for reading her class “My Shadow is Purple,” a picture book about a child who discovers they are neither a girl or a boy, according to the AP. The Cobb County School Board voted 4-3 to fire Rinderle, finding that the teacher had violated the state’s divisive concepts law, which bars educators from giving lessons on race and “espousing personal political beliefs.”
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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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Conservative Christian education is being born again.
Arcadia Christian Academy, which opened in Arizona on Aug. 8, is one of dozens of Christian micro-schools popping up across the country, offering a hybrid in-class and at-home education to keep costs down and the odds of survival up in an increasingly competitive K-12 sector. What’s more, many long-established Christian schools are growing their enrollment after years of stagnation.
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A teachers union conference in July encouraged educators to lobby for gun control, according to a conference agenda revealed by the Defense of Freedom Institute.
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s second-largest teachers union, held a “Together Educating America’s Children” (TEACH) Conference July 21-23 featuring professional development workshops to teach educators tools and strategies to “help kids and communities succeed,” according to the teachers union’s website. One professional development session offered, “Speaking of Gun Violence: How Do We Ensure Educator Voices Matter?” was taught by “Teachers Unify To End Gun Violence,” an organization that works to help pass gun control legislation, and encouraged educators to “collectively raise [their] voices for change,” according to the conference agenda.
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The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Catholic school Monday, arguing that religious organizations have the right to require their staff to adhere to certain faith-based principles, according to court documents.
The case involved former teacher Victoria Crisitello whose contract was not renewed by St. Theresa School after she disclosed that she had become pregnant outside of wedlock, which was a violation of the school’s code of ethics, according to the ruling. After her contract was not renewed in 2014, Crisitello filed a lawsuit against the school claiming that she had been discriminated against, but the New Jersey justices did not agree, according to court documents.
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In the early 1990s, New York Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto, threw in the towel on teaching with his famous I Quit, I Think letter to the Wall Street Journal.
Gatto’s reason for quitting was simple. He could no longer justify teaching “a curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency.” Such a system, Gatto opined, was turning our children into mindless robots.
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Georgia’s news outlets from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to Atlanta News First have reported about a shortage of teachers plaguing the state’s education system. Data from the state’s Department of Education paints a different picture.
Georgia had a total of 123,210 teachers in 2022-23, according to their data. This is an increase of 1,711 teachers from the previous school year when Georgia had 121,499 teachers.
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The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) stated Thursday in a press release it opposes the decision by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to reaffirm transgender medical interventions for children and teens, but supports AAP’s claim it will be reviewing the latest evidence pertaining to the highly controversial treatments.
Last week, AAP reaffirmed its support for providing children and teens with transgender hormones and surgeries – called “gender-affirming care” by the transgender medical industry – while it simultaneously announced it would review medical research on the life-altering treatments.
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Public universities across the United States are spending money to increase their workforce and then passing the bill along to students, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal.
Since 2002, the average flagship university’s spending rose 38%, with a majority of the money being spent on salaries and benefits, which rose by 40% in the same time period, according to an analysis by the WSJ. However, the average tuition cost per student rose 64% to cover the costs of salaries and benefits in the same time period.
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Atlanta received a failing grade for its charter school funding gap.
A new report from the School Choice Demonstration Project, an educational research project within the University of Arkansas’ Department of Education Reform, examined funding disparities between traditional public schools and public charter schools in 18 cities nationwide.
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The Florida Department of Education (DOE) told schools Wednesday that an Advanced Placement (AP) Psychology course at the center of a controversy meets state law and can be taught, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
On Aug. 3, the College Board, an academic organization that administers and designs high school courses for college credit, claimed its AP Psychology course had been “effectively banned” because they refused to modify the course to comply with the state’s guidance prohibiting age-inappropriate lessons on gender identity and sexual orientation in Pre-K-12 classrooms. In a Wednesday letter to Florida school superintendents, the state DOE noted that the course can be taught under its Parental Rights in Education law and that the AP course will be offered during the 2023-2024 school year.
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Idaho professors and teachers unions are alleging that a state law violates their First Amendment rights by preventing them from teaching pro-abortion viewpoints, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by the ACLU.
Idaho passed the No Public Funds for Abortion Act in 2021, which prohibits state contracts with abortion providers and bans public employees from promoting abortion, according to Idaho’s legislative website. Public employees who violate the law can be charged with a felony and fired, and professors argue the law has forced them to alter their course modules by taking out entire sections related to abortion due to fear of repercussions, according to the lawsuit.
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The Georgia Lottery Corp. recently announced that it raised $1,516,383,000 for education in the Peach State during fiscal year 2023 (FY23), which spanned from July 1, 2022, through June 30, 2023.
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