Commentary: The Educational Establishment’s Radical New Ploys

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.

Read More

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

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.

Read More

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

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.

Read More

Analysis: Michigan Students’ Estimated Lifetime Earnings Losses Exceed $19 Billion

Learning losses for Michigan students during the COVID-19 pandemic could result in a combined lifetime income loss exceeding $19 billion, according to research from Harvard and Stanford universities.

The Education Recovery Scorecard was released this week by Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research and the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford. The scorecard measures learning loss in 40 states between 2019 and 2022, and estimates how much earnings will be subtracted from students’ lifetime earnings.

Read More

Commentary: A Modicum of Justice in Michigan for a COVID-Exploiting Teachers’ Union

Group of young students at table, reading and wearing masks

America’s teachers’ unions exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to maximum effect, leveraging school lockdowns for which they lobbied to pursue political demands stretching far beyond their salaries and benefits – and helping drive a $190 billion windfall in taxpayer dollars to K-12 schools.

The public bore that cost, in children’s learning loss and mental health struggles; in the burdens the closures placed on parents already struggling to make ends meet in an economy crippled by government decree; and on the literal costs that the teachers’ unions passed on to taxpayers.

Read More

Commentary: Let’s Try Teacher Choice

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.”

Read More

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

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.

Read More

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

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.

Read More

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

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.

Read More