The epidemic of school shootings in America could be drastically curtailed by a few simple policy changes.
First, school shooters should automatically receive the death penalty with only limited opportunities to appeal. The problem of frivolous appeals and court cases dragging on for decades afflicts our entire judicial system, but it is especially egregious in the case of school shootings.
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In California, a county judge has issued a ruling forbidding a school district from enacting its policy of requiring teachers and staff to inform parents whenever their child plans on “transitioning” their gender or using different pronouns besides their correct ones.
As reported by Fox News, San Bernardino County Judge Michael Sachs had previously issued his preliminary injunction against the Chino Valley Unified (CVU) school district last year; now, following the passing of a state law that forbids schools statewide from informing parents of such drastic decisions by their students, Judge Sachs has permanently struck down CVU’s policy.
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Understandably, we want to blame someone besides the 14-year-old who murdered four people last week at Apalachee High School in Georgia. People are shocked and upset that the father taught the boy to shoot and hunt and bought the boy a rifle for Christmas. But that doesn’t mean it made any sense for police to arrest the father the day after the school shooting on two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter, and eight counts of cruelty to children.
This isn’t the first time that parents are being held liable for their children’s actions. Jennifer and James Crumbley were sentenced to prison for 10 to 15 years after their son perpetrated the 2021 Oxford High School shootings in Michigan. Their crime? Letting their son have access to the father’s pistol, which was used in the murders.
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For several weeks, social media has been flooded by teachers’ posts with Amazon wish lists, soliciting others to stock their classrooms with basic supplies. Creating these lists has been commonplace in recent years as teachers look outside their schools and districts to fill their supply needs.
Some of the most popular requested items are dry erase markers, Kleenex, Lysol wipes, erasers, tape, pens, colored copy paper, file folders, and pencil sharpeners. Others request educational items such as a microscope, map, or globe, which seem essential for student learning.
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Social-emotional learning (SEL) has been in vogue in education circles for decades. Following its precepts, teachers, counselors, and administrators encourage students to look inward and focus on their feelings. The result?
A generation of young people who can’t stop thinking about their emotions, leaving them incredibly fragile. But that’s not what many of the experts will tell you.
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Eighty-two percent of teachers say that the general state of public K-12 education has gotten worse over the past five years. This is according to a new Pew Research Center survey conducted in October and November of 2023. That’s not the only shocking statistic from the survey, either, which overall offers a grim statistical map of the fault lines fracturing our education system. However, these trends may offer some insight into how to fix our schools.
First, the teachers. Most teachers (77 percent) find their job frequently stressful, and a large majority (70 percent) say their school is understaffed, which may contribute to the fact that over 80 percent of teachers say they do not have enough time in the work day to complete all necessary tasks.
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Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed legislation doubling annual paid parental leave for state employees and school personnel, including teachers.
Previously, state employees could take three weeks or 120 hours of paid parental leave during a 12-month “rolling” period following a child’s birth, adoption or foster care placement. However, House Bill 1010 increases the paid leave to six weeks — or 240 hours.
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A federally-funded training program set to take place in July will teach middle school teachers about LGBTQ+ history and provide them with strategies to further integrate “queer” content into their classrooms.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is funding a two-week summer program titled “LGBTQ+ histories in the U.S.” that will instruct 30 middle and high school teachers on “expanding historical narratives” and “identifying pedagogical strategies” in their classrooms to better incorporate LGBTQ+ content. The July session is the second iteration of the NEH-funded program, the first having occurred in 2022, with the two activities collectively costing taxpayers nearly $400,000, according to federal grant listings.
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From Boston to Los Angeles, teachers’ unions and their progressive counterparts have quietly devised an unprecedented method to bypass the legislative process by embedding unrelated policy issues deep within the intricate terms of teacher contracts.
This new, covert strategy, hidden in plain sight, allows state and municipal officials to create sweeping policy changes that evade the scrutiny typically associated with customary legislative procedures, which include publicly available draft legislation, committee hearings, amendments and comprehensive floor debates.
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Jack Fredericks is investing in new teachers because he wants to help them stay in the classroom for the long haul.
He serves as the program coordinator for the new teacher mentorship program in the West Tallahatchie School District, something he worked with his superintendent to create after researching mentorship as a Teach Plus Mississippi policy fellow.
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All across the country, school teachers are beginning to resign due to a rising fear of violence from students, with many acts largely going unpunished by authorities.
As reported by the New York Post, student behavior has gotten progressively worse after the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic, with fights breaking out more frequently, and some altercations leading to teachers sustaining injuries in the process of trying to break up the fighting.
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When my husband and I decided we were going to homeschool, we puzzled over what might be his contribution. Our division of labor as a married couple included me as a stay-at-home mom and him as the primary breadwinner. Nevertheless, we wanted to find a way for him to be involved in the educational aspects of raising our children, despite his being gone all day at work. After giving it some thought, my husband decided on reading to our children at night as part of their bedtime ritual.
As soon as our first born could sit still enough to listen to a story, he began reading to her. As we added more children to the household, the bedtime ritual, already well established with our first, continued with each subsequent child. My husband sat and read his way through all of the books that had captured us as children, while our own children snuggled into their beds, listening attentively.
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School choice is going to be a hot-button issue next year as several states are set to propose legislation expanding education options, while others are gearing up to defend against lawsuits claiming voucher programs are unconstitutional and an “existential threat” to public schools.
School choice advocates passed legislation in Nebraska, Florida, Ohio and other states in 2023, with a major victory in Oklahoma as well after the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved an application for a Catholic online school in June, the first religious charter school in the country. Several states are looking to follow their lead in 2024 and expand education options for parents, while others have become the target of lawsuits by public education advocates, who argue that voucher programs are unconstitutional.
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Several left-wing librarians, teachers, and other school employees are trying to claim that the removal of inappropriate books from school libraries is a violation of their civil rights.
As reported by ABC News, three librarians who were recently fired have filed workplace discrimination claims with U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). They all claim that they were discriminated against when they were fired for promoting controversial, far-left material to students, including Critical Race Theory and the LGBTQ agenda.
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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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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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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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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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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 vast majority of parents in a new State Policy Network poll say public school teachers regularly deviated from set school curriculum to interject their own personal views and feelings over the past year.
In all, two out of every three parents polled in the survey of 2,014 respondents said teachings strayed from what was supposed to be taught, and 25% said they actually had a problem with a public-school teacher on the issue over the last 12 months.
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The recent Supreme Court ruling regarding college admissions has once again thrust America’s educational system into the spotlight. A major question that has come from this ruling is whether America’s children are being intellectually and academically prepared to even enter or succeed in these colleges and universities. The tragic answer is that America’s public education system is failing to equip our youth with the tools necessary to succeed in higher education and in their future professional lives. We are failing America’s most valuable asset—our children.
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A bipartisan group will try again to pass a bill to help teachers and first-responders buy homes in the communities they serve.
U.S. Sens. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga.; Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio; and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., reintroduced the Homes for Every Local Protector Educator and Responder (HELPER) Act. The bill would create a first-time homebuyer loan program under the Federal Housing Administration for teachers and first responders who have served at least four years.
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A week before the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could force employers to more freely grant religious accommodations, a federal appeals court determined that calling all students by their last names for the sake of religious conscience was a fireable offense.
A three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this month that Indiana’s Brownsburg Community Schools Corp. had a “legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason” for firing music teacher John Kluge: He caused “emotional harm” and disrupted the learning environment by not addressing transgender students by preferred names and pronouns.
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Teachers of a Massachusetts school district are striking for a second day over higher pay, according to Boston 25 News.
Woburn Public School District canceled classes for a second day on Tuesday as teachers continue to strike for a 14.75% raise, an increase in salary for paraprofessionals and smaller class sizes, according to Boston 25 News. Massachusetts‘ teachers are among the highest paid teachers in the country, averaging more than $88,000 for a full time salary, according to World Population Review.
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As millions of children settle into an uninterrupted academic term, widespread classroom disorder is undermining efforts to reintroduce students to in-person learning. This increased disorder corresponds with an increase in district-approved “restorative justice” programs, which address classroom dysfunction through nonpunitive measures. Though these programs have existed for decades, they are gaining momentum nationwide.
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Do parents have the right to know what their children are being taught in public school?
Parents say yes; teachers say no.
Of course, it’s not quite that simple. The description of the latter party can be tweaked to “teachers unions” — although you don’t hear many individual teachers bucking the union line — but the dichotomy remains: parents want to know what’s going on in their kids’ classrooms, and teachers, administrators, and their union bosses would rather not tell them.
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The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has been forcing teachers across the country to follow certain guidelines demonstrating their commitment to “LGBTQ inclusivity” in their classroom instructions.
As reported by Breitbart, the CDC-issued “assessment tool” asks teachers numerous questions about school employees and their loyalty to the concept of “queer theory,” and forcing sexual education teachers to use gender-neutral language, forbidding them from using terms such as “boy” and “girl.”
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American’s respect for teachers is high coming out of the pandemic, according to a new EdChoice poll — placing them among doctors and members of the military as some of the most respected professionals in the country.
A whopping 70 percent of Americans respect the men and women who teach our children — yet across the nation, teachers are prevented from making their own decisions when it comes to key aspects of their job: their membership in a teachers’ union.
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Georgia plans to spend about $20 million on a program to give teachers and school employees a $125 bonus, a state official confirmed on Friday.
Georgia announced the “Back-to-School Supply Supplement” program in July. Under the plan, the state will give a $125 supplement to teachers and school staff members “who work to provide instructional and supportive services directly to students on a daily basis.”
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At a time when school shootings are a concern for many Americans, serious violence incidents are also up in schools across the nation, reports two recent studies.
One study, from the National Center for Education Statistics, shows a 35% increase in serious violence incidents in K-12 public schools from the 2015-16 school year to 2019-20. Serious violence incidents include rape, attempted rape, sexual assault other than rape, threatened rape, physical attacks, fights with a weapon, threat of physical attack with a weapon, and robbery with or without a weapon.
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The number of teachers in the U.S. has increased from 2013 to 2020 while the number of students has decreased, according to data from the National Education Association, the nation’s largest public-school union.
While total enrollment has dropped 1.4% over those seven years, there has been a 2.3% increase in the number of public-school teachers.
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Teachers across the country revealed the strategies they use to teach young children about gender ideology in a Friday article published by The Washington Post.
Teachers discussed the various ways they are injecting gender-related discussions into their lessons, including comments about using hormones to stop menstrual periods and declining to state that sexual anatomy is gender-specific, according to The Washington Post. One transgender teacher makes a point of telling students about the process of gender transitions, including with personal testimony.
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My Dearest Randi,
What is going on! It has been a year since my last missive, and I have not heard a peep from you. This is not the first time you have snubbed me, however. When I tried to say hi to you outside the Supreme Court after the Janus oral arguments in 2018, you refused to even look at me, and then turned to a newsman and launched into a kooky rant, insisting that unions “actually make communities safer and…the right-wing is threatened by that.”
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President Joe Biden’s administration is pushing new policies that make it harder for charter schools to survive while strengthening the power of teachers unions, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The newly proposed rules, which apply to the Department of Education’s (DOE) 2023 budget, will make it more difficult for charter start-ups to qualify and receive funding from a $440 million federal charter school program by requiring charter schools to prove there is a demand for education not being met by other institutions like public schools. The guidelines will consequently give teachers unions more control over education, experts told the DCNF.
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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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The Georgia Department of Education is dishing out more than $11 million in federal COVID-19 relief to help more than 14,600 Georgia teachers.
The State Board of Education approved $6.8 million in Expanding Opportunities for Teachers Grants for 19 school districts, higher education institutions and Regional Educational Service Agencies (RESAs). Recipients can use the money to pay for tuition, fees and exam costs for Georgia public school teachers enrolled in approved Teacher and Teacher Leader Endorsement programs.
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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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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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Newly uncovered federal grant documents show that the U.S. Department of Education awarded roughly $2.5 million in taxpayer dollars to a Florida-based education program that trains future teachers and other professionals in, among other things, critical race theory.
The funding came through two grants, one in 2017 and another in 2021. Both grants went to faculty at Florida State University, which has partnered with Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University.
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As school districts start dropping the mask mandates, removing pornographic books from their libraries, and explicitly prohibiting critical race theory, it’s clear that the parent protests are working. School boards, even in progressive bastions like San Francisco, are currently being cleaned out and replaced by more pro-parent members. Moreover, politicians like the governor of Oklahoma are openly instituting a school choice model that would allow for different schooling models and have education dollars follow the student, not automatically go to the school.
Naturally, these developments invite more pushback (sometimes literally so) from those who believe they’re supporting public education. It was fine in the past to let various kooky parents carry on about the evils of teaching Harry Potter or sex ed; school boards and district leaders could simply yawn and carry on as before. However, now that it actually threatens their authority and influence, they can no longer ignore parents’ concerns..
In general, opponents of protesting parents make the same points over and over. They deny that public schools have problems, play semantic games with critical race theory (“it’s just an abstract legal theory taught in law school,” etc.), and accuse angry parents of being misguided racists. In their view, parents who demand a more wholesome and academic experience for their children are actually demanding an exclusively white and privileged experience. And for good measure, they will add an anecdote about a heroic public school teacher changing lives, proving beyond any doubt that public schools are still doing noble work and are essential for a healthy, diverse society.
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A petition by teachers nationwide pledging to teach Critical Race Theory (CRT) to students regardless of whether states pass laws against the practice has reached more than 8,000 signatures.
“From police violence, to the prison system, to the wealth gap, to maternal mortality rates, to housing, to education and beyond, the major institutions and systems of our country are deeply infected with anti-Blackness and its intersection with other forms of oppression,” the Zinn Education Project’s petition page says. “To not acknowledge this and help students understand the roots of U.S. racism is to deceive them — not educate them.”
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A National School Boards Association (NSBA) executive reportedly knew about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s memorandum targeting concerned parents before it was published, according to new information obtained by Parents Defending Education.
Chip Slaven, then-interim executive director of the National School Boards Association (NSBA) knew about Garland’s memorandum that called on the FBI to “use its authority” against parents who threaten or use violence against public school officials, according to an email obtained by Parents Defending Education (PDE) through a public records request.
“I understand Chip knew about the U.S. AG Directives before they were published,” Alabama NSBA member Pam Doyle told Florida NSBA member Beverly Slough in an Oct. 5, 2021 internal email exchange. “So much for communicating with the BOD,” she added.
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Chaos. Disruption. Uncertainty.
The Chicago Teachers Union provides a real-world example of what happens when a government union has too much power.
CTU has gone on strike three times in three school years. In the latest work stoppage, over 330,000 schoolchildren missed five days of school. Parents were notified of the walkout after 11 p.m. on a school night, leaving them just hours to develop a back-up plan after the union decided not to show up.
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An Iowa representative introduced Tuesday a bill that would allow parents to watch live footage of their children in public school classrooms.
“I think we need to showcase the great work our teachers do,” Rep. Norlin Mommsen, R-DeWitt, a farmer, told The Center Square in a phone interview Tuesday.
He said that through the COVID-19 pandemic, parents learned they wanted to be more involved, and this is a mechanism of facilitating parental involvement.
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Legislators are considering changes to Missouri’s teacher and non-certified school employee pension plans to alleviate pandemic-related teacher and staff shortages.
HB2114, sponsored by Rep. Rusty Black, R-Chillicothe, will reduce restrictions on pensions if a retired public school teacher returns to the classroom or to a non-teaching position in a public school. The legislation also increases from two to four years the length of time a retired teacher or retired non-certified public school employee can work while still receiving their pension.
During testimony before the House pensions committee, Rep. Black, the committee vice chairman, said similar legislation was passed by the House and died in the Senate last year as the legislative session ended in May. He said the legislation simplifies and improves the amount retirees can earn before their pensions are restricted.
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Of late, Fox News has been hosting a series called “The MisEducation of America” featuring gatherings of critical race theory’s critics—such as Carol Swain of Vanderbilt University—focusing on the danger of teaching racially divisive versions of American history. According to Swain, a black professor of political science at Vanderbilt, forcing kids to do things like play games called “privilege bingo” are “a prime example of how CRT, has seeped down to K-12 education, and it disturbs students.” Further: “All of these critical theories with Marxist roots are destroying American education, and parents have to save their children. But they also have to work to save other people’s children.”
Although the media and our universities may choose to ignore Swain’s complaint, she is actually understating the problem she and “MisEducation” host Pete Hegseth are featuring. I’m not sure I see “the Marxist roots” of the crusade against white people and their history in quite the same way Swain and Hegseth see it. We are indeed witnessing class warfare but not of the kind that Marx foresaw. It is a war being waged by white elites against the “basket of deplorables,” the predominantly white, working-class, and small-town Americans whom these elites hate and want to divest of human dignity. Similar conflicts are going on simultaneously in other Western countries, featuring equivalent social conflict.
In none of these cases do we find Marx’s appeals to the proletariat to rise up against those who control the means of production. In fact, we are witnessing exactly the opposite. An alliance of corporate capitalists, feminists, the LGBT lobby, and black race hustlers are directing their fire on the working class, which seems to be the least affected by the hegemonic ideology of wokeness. If anything, we are now looking at what Pedro Gonzalez has characterized as “the counterrevolution of the ruling class.” If Marxist theory, which supposedly is “seeping in” has any application, it would be as an analysis of how our elites are suppressing those they are stepping on and trying through increasingly vicious hate speech to isolate.
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The school district that oversees public education in Las Vegas said it will offer teachers and other employees up to $2,000 in bonuses if they stay on amid the current COVID-19 surge and concurrent employment crisis.
Clark County School District said in a statement this week that the CCSD Board of School Trustees had “approved an agreement with all five employee bargaining units to provide eligible regular and full-time employees employed as of January 1, 2022 with a $1,000 COVID retention bonus.”
“CCSD will also pay an additional $1,000 bonus to eligible regular and full-time employees who are employed on May 25, 2022, for a total of $2,000,” the statement added.
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A new survey suggests that at least half of Americans fall for a number of sleep myths, some of them quite damaging for sleep health.
Assistant Teaching Professor Elizabeth Pantesco and Associate Professor Irene Kan, both in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Villanova University, spearheaded the research, which was recently published to the journal Sleep Health.
The duo surveyed 1,120 adults residing in the United States via CloudResearch’s Prime Panels. Participants were queried about their demographics, then asked whether they agreed or disagreed with twenty statements about sleep, for example, “Watching television in bed is a good way to relax before sleep” and “For sleeping, it is better to have a warmer bedroom than a cooler bedroom.” Unbeknownst to them, the statements were all widely recognized as myths by sleep experts.
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This week’s Golden Horseshoe once again goes to the U.S. Department of Education for allowing school districts to use pandemic relief funds for pay raises and bonuses for teachers despite the funds being appropriated to reopen schools safely.
Schools nationwide received $190 billion through three relief packages passed. Of that total, the largest sum, $122 billion, was from President Biden’s American Rescue Plan.
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Over the last year, school board meetings have become ground zero for the country’s culture wars as irate parents have showed up in droves to decry school COVID closures, mask mandates, and critical race theory, as well as transgender policies.
After political analysts credited a parental uprising with helping Republican political newcomer Glenn Youngkin capture the Virginia governorship this month, these fights show no sign of easing. Both major political parties are already gearing up for next year’s midterm elections with Republicans sensing an advantage and Democrats digging in to defend beleaguered school boards, teacher unions, and the progressive policies they hold dear.
This week, conservative parents and their supporters are expressing new outrage over news that the FBI is placing “threat tags” on individuals accused of harassing or trying to intimidate school board members and teachers. For months, disgruntled parents have angrily targeted school board trustees for recalls across the nation, regularly denouncing union control of the schools as the crux of the problem. Recall attempts against school board trustees have tripled in 2021, targeting at least 216 officials, according to Ballotpedia.
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