When she was a young girl, Sandra Day O’Connor began her education at home. Her early years of schooling on an Arizona ranch were sitting at the kitchen table with her mother, learning to read, and taking long nature walks.
I read this, and this scene of serenity, this future Supreme Court Justice, beginning her education at home, formed an image in my mind of what might be possible.
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In a frantic attempt to preserve its monopoly over the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, attorneys for the union currently representing the district’s 24,000-plus teachers and support staff are relying on a strategy that has the potential to backfire and leave its members without workplace representation altogether.
On March 18, United Teachers of Dade (UTD), using an argument that would invalidate its own petition, asked a hearing officer with Florida’s Public Employee Relations Commission (PERC) to reject a competing union’s bid to participate in a forthcoming election to determine the bargaining representative for the South Florida educators.
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Two policies backed by Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom could place serious strain on California’s already fiscally unhealthy public schools.
California’s new minimum wage law, which took effect Monday, guarantees a wage of at least $20 an hour for workers at fast food chains with 60 or more locations across the country, The Associated Press reported. The new law, however, does not apply to food service workers in the state’s public schools, forcing them to compete in a more expensive labor market just as schools are preparing for an increase in demand for food workers due to the state’s new universal free lunch program.
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Governor Glenn Youngkin on Tuesday announced a veto of legislation that would have mandated “environmental literacy” education across the commonwealth’s schools.
The governor vetoed HB 1088, which would have mandated the Virginia Board of Education to create or purchase “instructional materials on climate change and environmental literacy that are based on and include peer-reviewed scientific sources.”
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The National Council of Teachers of English, a professional development organization, hosted remote training to instruct K-12 teachers on how to teach the controversial book “Gender Queer” in their “classrooms, libraries, and communities.”
The NCTE, which boasts 25,000 members around the United States, hosted a panel including “Gender Queer” author Maia Kobabe and an “LGBTQIA+ Advisory Committee” to discuss how to incorporate the pornographic book into school curriculum.
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Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas announced Monday that the state Department of Education was expanding its education savings program to include veteran and first responder families.
The Arkansas Education Freedom Account program, which was launched in 2023, helps fund families who wish to send their children to private schools or homeschool them and previously included “Homeless students, current or former foster care students, students with disabilities” and “first-time kindergarteners.” For the 2024-2025 school year, “veterans, military reserve members, first responders, law enforcement officers and students from D-rated schools will now be eligible, according to a press release.
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Colleagues are coming to the defense of a Harvard University sociologist who was recently accused of plagiarism, arguing the claims are bogus and part of a larger attack on black female scholars in higher education.
Award-winning Harvard University Professor Christina Cross is under fire over allegations of plagiarism in a complaint first reported in mid-March by conservative education activist Christopher Rufo in City Journal.
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Stupidity is what our schools are about. They do not teach young people about the glory of Melville, if they teach Melville at all, but about how Melville does or does not fit into some gridwork of identity politics, so that the work of art and intelligence itself, Moby-Dick, is left on the shore like a beached whale, dead and stinking, while onlookers in their stupidity hold their noses and pass by.
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Upcoming Princeton University lecturer Dr. Kim Tallbear lists running a “sexy performance laboratory” among her credentials.
Tallbear (pictured above), a professor at the University of Alberta in Canada, is scheduled to give the talk “Why is sex a ‘thing’? Making relations against a Colonial world” on April 1 for Princeton’s annual Meredith Miller Memorial Lecture.
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As a veteran homeschooler, I am well aware of what a marathon this lifestyle can be. There’s no break when you live and work in the same place.
It’s time to take a deep breath and assess the situation. Burnout is a normal part of homeschooling. Everyone experiences it at one time or another, and it’s often associated with feelings of being distracted, overworked, and overwhelmed.
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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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The year, now a quarter old, reveals that the country’s rapid slide into educational purgatory is moving apace. Leading off the grossness parade is a school in Oklahoma where students lick and suck the armpits and toes of their fellow students in the name of charity. (This may garner a shrug in San Francisco, but Oklahoma?!)
While no district personnel were directly involved, video footage from Deer Creek High School in Edmond, OK, showed mid-teens participating in and watching the disgusting events unfold.
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The vast majority of people think schools should focus on traditional subjects like math, reading and science, and a majority also say critical race theory should not be taught, a new poll shows.
According to The Center Square Voters’ Voice Poll conducted by Noble Predictive, most surveyed said they want schools to focus on core subjects instead of hot-button topics like critical race theory.
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A speech by former William “Lia” Thomas teammate Paula Scanlan promotes “dehumanizing and cruel,” views according to a letter signed by Franklin & Marshall College affiliates.
The letter, signed by more than 125 professors, administrators, and staff, criticizes the speech planned for Wednesday and hosted by the campus Young Americans for Freedom and the national Young America’s Foundation.
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Republican leaders are responding with skepticism to the Biden administration’s plans to hire students to register voters and work in polling places.
New Department of Education guidance states Federal Work-Study funds “may be used for employment by a Federal, State, local, or Tribal public agency for civic engagement work that is not associated with a particular interest or group.”
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Educating from the podium and advocating for the inclusion of all, congressmen led by North Carolina’s Dr. Greg Murphy and Ohio’s Dr. Brad Wenstrup on Tuesday introduced legislation that would halt taxpayer money from going to medical schools promoting racial bias.
Multiple speakers, both Black and white and at least one saying she’s neither Republican nor Democrat, drove home the message directly and indirectly that health care is about the patients and their outcomes. Collectively, they explained how the best care comes from the best in education, that all can access it, and the promotion of “critical race theory-based woke philosophy based on DEI” will put Americans’ lives at risk.
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The Texas Permanent School Fund (PSF) is pulling $8.5 billion from the investment firm BlackRock over its use of environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies.
The board informed the investment firm that it was being terminated as the manager of the Navarro 1 Fund in a Tuesday letter, which it provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation. The divestment represents the largest from the private firm, according to Fox Business Network.
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School districts around the country are facing issues with how they handle their social media accounts, and the debate has reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
Denver Public Schools recently reviewed its social media policy that doesn’t allow employees to restrict comments on social media or limit who can see them.
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If you’re feeling unqualified to homeschool, you’re not alone. The question of what and how to teach stressed me out early on in my homeschooling journey.
I found that having a good curriculum did a great deal to reduce my fears of not being qualified to teach. I wanted to strike a balance between bookwork, memorization, and fun interactive activities. I wanted to make sure to impart to my kids the basic body of knowledge necessary for a good education, yet I didn’t want to burn them out with endless worksheets.
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World-renowned infectious-disease epidemiologist and biostatistician Martin Kulldorff is no longer a professor at Harvard Medical School after refusing the COVID vaccine because he had infection-acquired immunity.
Refusing the vaccine is a decision that lost him his appointment at a Harvard-affiliated hospital at the time several years ago — and this month led to his termination from the Ivy League school.
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Davidson College alumni are calling for change after student athletes recently were required to watch the video “I’m Not Racist … Am I?” which labels all white people as racists.
The Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse, an alumni-run free speech organization, exposed and denounced the video after learning the North Carolina institution forced student athletes to watch it this semester.
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For years, liberals have scoffed at the idea that standardized testing is the best predictor of academic success. The National Education Association, for instance, claims standardized tests are “both inequitable and ineffective at gauging what students know.” Activists’ campaign against standardized testing — and their assertions that such tests discriminate against “underrepresented minority students” — culminated in the decisions by more than 1,000 colleges to drop their standardized testing requirements.
This week, cold, hard data showed just how foolish those decisions were. The University of Texas at Austin released the academic performance data for students who submitted standardized scores versus those who did not submit such scores. The result is unambiguous: Students who did not submit standardized tests performed drastically worse than students who did submit their scores. The students who did not submit ACT or SAT scores finished the fall 2023 semester with a grade point average 0.86 grade points lower than students who did. This demonstrates an average difference of almost an entire letter grade. Had the University of Texas utilized all applicants’ standardized scores, it very well might have decided against admitting many of those who did not provide their scores. Students who did not provide scores had a median SAT of 1160, markedly lower than that of the students who did provide their scores: 1420. The University of Texas would have been correct in deciding against admitting those students with lower scores given how much better students with a higher average SAT performed academically.
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The United States Military Academy has removed the words “Duty, Honor, Country” from its mission statement, a move approved by Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth and Army Chief of Staff Randy George.
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It is an open secret among college professors and university administrators that college students aren’t what they used to be.
They struggle with lengthy reading assignments and basic vocabulary. They don’t know rudimentary algebra. They can’t add or subtract fractions. They complain that deadlines, hard exams, and required attendance are impediments to their success.
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Students at Roanoke College will soon be able to major in “cannabis studies.”
The private Virginia college will begin offering a major and minor this upcoming semester.
Program Director DorothyBelle Poli told The College Fix via email that majors can “go directly into the industry as growing/analysis scientists” or “as business owners with more knowledge (most likely double majoring in business at this time).”
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Brown University will reinstate a policy requiring standardized testing as part of the admissions process, according to a Tuesday news release.
First year applicants for next year’s admissions cycle will be required to submit standardized test scores, like the SAT or ACT, in their applications, according to the university news release. Brown suspended its testing policy in the summer of 2020 citing “unprecedented obstacles to testing” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Your kids are (finally!) reading on their own . . . Now what?
Well, now is when we parents face the often-herculean task of trying to verify which books are safe and fit for our kids to read—not to mention supportive of traditional values!
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Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed a bill Friday banning legacy admissions at public colleges in the state.
Several states have moved to eliminate legacy admissions, which are admissions based on prior familial attendance to a school, after the fall of race-based admissions at the Supreme Court in June 2023. The bill passed the Virginia Senate with bipartisan support, 39-0, and passed the state’s House of Delegates 99-0, and has now been signed by Youngkin.
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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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The future of the controversial classical education movement will be showcased later this month when Columbia University senior lecturer Roosevelt Montás is scheduled to deliver a keynote address at a national symposium hosted by Great Hearts, the biggest classical charter network.
The views of Montás, author of the widely praised memoir “Rescuing Socrates,” are well to the left of many in the classical charter movement, which is rooted in Christian conservatism. What makes Montás’ upcoming speech so notable, then, is the signal it sends about the movement’s effort to diversify its brand and project a welcoming attitude as it seeks to expand beyond conservative strongholds and suburbs where it began.
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The college horror stories are endless. A mandatory Title IX training session at Harvard instructs students that “fatphobia” and “cis-heterosexism” perpetuate violence and that using the wrong pronouns constitutes abuse. Yet, hatred against Jews is tolerated at the school.
In California, community colleges teach that if someone claims they are not a racist, they are in denial and that colorblindness “perpetuates existing racial inequities and denies systematic racism.” A Michigan college held a “queer” abortion stories event earlier this year. The once-venerable University of Chicago is planning to host a “kink and consent” workshop for students, in which the practice of sex play with ropes will be taught.
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Candidates who support school choice won big in Republican primaries Tuesday night in Texas. The majority of Republican primary voters also passed a nonbinding proposition supporting school choice.
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More public-school districts are being sued for allegedly using taxpayer resources to instruct staff to vote against school choice candidates in the Republican primary election regardless if they are Republicans.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Huffman and Aledo independent school districts on Friday alleging they used state resources to influence political races through illegal electioneering.
This is after Paxton first sued Denton, Frisco, Denison and Castleberry ISDs within one week “for illegal electioneering by using taxpayer-funded resources” to “stump for specific candidates during an election” and/or “promote certain political candidates and policies” related to school choice.
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Yale University employs more than three administrators and support staff for every four undergraduate students – roughly one administrator per undergrad, according to a College Fix analysis.
Over the last decade, Yale added 631 administrators and support staff to its payroll, according to data provided by administrators to the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.
As the university embraced new DEI efforts, the number of administrators and support staff increased by 13 percent, from 4,942 to 5,573, between 2013-14 and 2021-22, the analysis found.
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A University of Virginia professor on Monday canceled her class to support a walkout on campus timed to coincide with voting on a student referendum calling on the school to divest from companies with ties to Israel.
“I’m writing to let you know that I am canceling class today in solidarity with the ‘Yes on Divest Walkout’ that the UVA Apartheid Divest Coalition organized. I realize this issue is polarizing right now, so I want to take a moment to let you know why I made this choice,” Christa Robbins, an associate professor of art history at UVA, wrote in a Monday email to students, reported the Daily Caller, which obtained a copy of the memo.
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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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Democrats are split over whether students should be forced to learn about gender ideology at school, according to polling from the University of Southern California (USC) and Pew Research Center (PRC).
A PRC poll published Thursday found that only 53% of Democratic teachers supported a student learning that “gender can be different from their sex at birth” in K-12 schools. Additionally, while over 80% of Democrats approve of high schoolers learning about LGBTQ topics, only 44% felt that schools should discuss “gender identity vs. biological sex” with elementary students, according to a survey from USC published Wednesday.
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Maine’s Department of Education is reportedly urging school districts to stop using taxpayer-subsidized electric school buses that were purchased within the last year.
The districts reported problems with the new buses, which were supplied by Canada-based Lion Electric Co., last fall, according to CentralMaine.com. The windshields on the buses would leak whenever it rained, as the glass didn’t appear to be securely in place.
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Shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, a Harvard CAPS-Harris X poll found that 48 percent of Americans ages 18-24 supported Hamas over Israel. This is in direct contrast to 95 percent of Americans 65 years of age and older who sided with Israel. This stark difference begs the question: why do half of young Americans support a group that has been designated by the State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization since October 1997? Our ongoing fight for transparency suggests at least some of the answers lie in Qatar’s pocketbooks.
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Learning to read is trending. The most fundamental of K-12 subjects is fueling YouTube videos and feature stories in People magazine and is now the subject of a report from Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Let’s hope the renewed interest spreads, because a shocking proportion of American children cannot read, and the data have profound implications for these children’s futures—and the entire criminal justice system.
Oliver James is the former convict who announced on social media that he taught himself to read as an adult, which sparked media coverage on how learning to read changed his life. As a student, James had been passed along from grade to grade without learning this basic skill.
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In yet another move circumventing the Supreme Court on the question of student loan debt, Joe Biden announced the cancellation of approximately $1.2 billion in student loan debt for about 153,000 borrowers.
As reported by ABC News, the Biden Administration made the cancellation official on Wednesday, including a draft email that will be sent to all of the borrowers in question. The email will read, in part: “Congratulations — all or a portion of your federal student loans will be forgiven because you qualify for early loan forgiveness under my Administration’s SAVE Plan.”
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Multiple legislatures are considering bills that would require students to watch a video of an infant’s development in the womb as part of their sex education.
Live Action, a pro-life activist organization, created a three-minute video, which shows an animated infant named Olivia go through the developmental process from conception to full term at nine months. Bills have been proposed in Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri and West Virginia to include an animation “comparable” to the Live Action video for students from high school to as young as third grade.
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Denver’s public school system has been taking in as many as 250 new students a week since the new year, which it attributes to the increase in the number of migrants arriving in the city.
Denver Public Schools Superintendent Alex Marrero called the situation an “unprecedented challenge” in a message to the community posted on the district’s website. The district said the influx of new students will cost an additional $837,000 “to support additional needs across the system.”
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It’s no secret that chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed since the pandemic. As The 74s Linda Jacobson writes, a new analysis of federal data released in late 2023 shows the problem may be even worse than previously understood.
The report from Johns Hopkins University shows that two out of three students were enrolled in schools with high or extreme chronic absenteeism rates during the 2021-22 school year—more than double the rate in 2017-18. (Students who miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days, are considered chronically absent.)
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Christian, Jewish and Muslim families in suburban D.C. are waiting for a federal appeals court to determine whether their school district can continue requiring their children to read LGBTQ “storybooks” without parental knowledge or consent.
Eleven hundred miles away in a similarly blue jurisdiction led by the United States’ first known Somali-American mayor, Muslim immigrant families who escaped a war-torn country didn’t have to go to court to have their parental rights honored.
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Several elite universities are considering reversing recent decisions to reduce or even eliminate requirements for application that include standardized test scores such as the SAT exams.
According to Axios, multiple colleges used the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to weaken the importance of SAT and ACT test scores in most student applications. But in recent weeks, several schools have reversed course; Yale is considering repealing its prior policy of making SAT/ACT requirements optional, with Dartmouth already reinstating the requirements earlier this month. MIT reversed a similar policy back in 2022.
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A private school in Los Angeles was forced to close due to rising safety concerns as a result of the homeless and drug-abusing population in the vicinity.
As Fox News reports, the circumstances of the closure are detailed in a lawsuit filed by Dana Hammond, the founder of the Academy of Media Arts. Hammond claims that the city’s failure to adequately protect the school from vagrants constituted a breach of contract with the building that hosted the school.
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I’ve heard it said, “I was a great parent before I had kids.” The same can be said of being a homeschooling parent.
Homeschooling circles are full of idealistic moms and dads who often have very high standards for themselves and their children. Certainly, having strong ideals can work as a guide and benchmark for navigating what can be a very challenging endeavor. However, these high standards can also backfire and leave even the best of us feeling like failures.
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An administrator of the Harvard Extension School (HES) was accused of plagiarism in an anonymous complaint sent to the school Friday, according to The Harvard Crimson.
Shirley Greene, an HES administrator who handles Title IX compliance, was accused of 42 instances of plagiarism in her 2008 dissertation, according to a copy of the complaint obtained by the Crimson. The allegations mark the latest plagiarism scandal to hit the university after a string of allegations against high-ranking university faculty members, including former Harvard President Claudine Gay.
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The San Francisco-area elementary school whose test scores dropped following implementation of the so-called “Woke Kindergarten” program suspended the teacher who exposed the controversial program.
On Thursday, the teacher who blew the whistle on the program was “summoned […] to a video conference” during which he was told to “turn in his keys and laptop and not return to his classroom […] until further notice,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
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