Tag: K-12 public schools

Democrats Want ‘Climate Literacy’ in Schools as Actual Literacy Slips

Daily Caller News Foundation
Classroom students

The Democratic Party is pushing to increase “literacy” on climate change-related material in America’s schools while students are performing poorly with respect to actual literacy.

The party’s education platform mentions the importance of “climate literacy” for American K-12 students several times, emphasizing the purported need for students to be able to understand and interpret information relating to climate change. Meanwhile, the average reading score for both fourth and eighth grade students in 2022 had fallen by three points relative to 2019, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

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Commentary: Cell Phone Bans in Schools Is a Growing Trend

Virginia Star Staff
Student with Cell Phone

Navigating the complexities of smartphone use in K-12 education is a collective effort that requires ongoing adaptation as technology evolves. We expect the Tennessee General Assembly to draft legislation on this issue in the next session. There is an increasing push to safeguard young individuals from spending too much time in front of screens.

States and public school districts are advocating cellphone bans in schools, driven by concerns about distractions and their adverse effects on student well-being. This growing trend should not just be about restrictions but about creating a more focused and conducive learning environment. Teacher buy-in is critical to this process.

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Commentary: This National School Choice Week, Let’s Celebrate Return to Founding Principles

Virginia Star Staff

The school choice policies sweeping the nation may be among the most innovative—and promising—enacted in recent memory. Yet they also embody a return to principles first enshrined in American law nearly 400 years ago.

In 1642, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony crafted the nation’s first education law, its objective was clear: Parents must educate their children.

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Commentary: The Educational Establishment’s Radical New Ploys

Virginia Star Staff

Increased spending, common good bargaining, community schools and transitional kindergarten will not improve student learning.

A Gallup poll released earlier this month shows that just 28% of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in K-12 public schools. The number for Republicans is particularly damning: Just 14% of GOPers view education in a positive light.

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‘It’s Just Unacceptable’: The Border Crisis Is Overwhelming Schools in Some of America’s Most Populated Cities

Admin

The crisis at the southern border is overwhelming school systems in several metropolitan areas of the country, according to multiple reports.

New York City, Miami-Dade County, Denver and Chicago school systems have all had to adapt to the influx of migrants, according to reports. Border Patrol recorded more than 632,000 encounters of migrant families and unaccompanied children in fiscal year 2022 at the southern border and more than 365,000 in the first seven months of fiscal year 2023, according to federal data.

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Analysis: The State School Choice in the U.S.

Virginia Star Staff

As the school year ends and legislative sessions adjourn, Chalkboard updated its review of which legislatures nationwide are implementing school choice measures that provide education options for students and their families and which states have removed them.

Several states across the country have recently adopted legislation that would allow students to attend any school of their choice using taxpayer dollars, something that advocates call universal school choice. Critics of the legislation say such measures will divert money away from public school systems that need the funds.

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Commentary: Let’s Try Teacher Choice

RealClearWire

The House Education and Workforce Committee convened a hearing last week entitled “American Education in Crisis.” The perennial left–right debate between promoting parents’ rights and protecting public schools was on full display. 

Committee Chair Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina, used her opening statement to argue for extending “education freedom” and to defend parents’ prerogative to take their children and the public funding that goes with them to private, charter, or home schools. Representative Suzanne Bonamici, a Democrat from Oregon, countered by expressing her “strong opposition” to plans that would “funnel taxpayer dollars to unaccountable private schools and for-profit charter schools,” saying that such an approach would “undermine the effectiveness of public education.”

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Cross-Dressing Book for Pre-K Students Crossed the Line in Kansas

RealClearWire

A school district that gave preschoolers a book on cross-dressing has changed its procedures for giving out books after news of the incident surfaced last week.

As first reported exclusively by The Lion and The Heartlander news sites, a 4-year-old preschooler in the Turner School District in Kansas City, Kansas, took home the book Jacob’s New Dress. It’s a picture book in which a little boy wears girls’ clothes and even competes with his friend Emily to be a princess.

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Two Studies Raise Concerns About Public School ‘Serious Violence Incidents’

The Center Square

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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GOP Lawmaker Claims School Officials in His State Found a Loophole in the Ban on CRT

Virginia Star Staff

A Republican lawmaker in Oklahoma is sounding the alarm on what he says is just the “wicked woke stepsister of” Critical Race Theory.

Oklahoma state Senator Shane Jett has proposed legislation to prohibit the teaching of so-called Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in K-12 public schools. The Oklahoma State Department of Education (DOE) is using the seemingly nice sounding name “Social and Emotional Learning” to implement the curriculum as a loophole in a state law that restricts teaching concepts like CRT, according to Jett.

Jett believes his bill, if passed, would shut that loophole and keep SEL out of public schools.

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