Tennessee ultimately retained 898 statewide due to its new third-grade reading retention law.
Less than 40% of third-graders statewide scored high enough on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program test to be promoted to fourth grade while many of the others used the various pathways to advance allowed by the state.
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A Tennessee committee is scheduled to begin its review on the state’s use of federal funding for K-12 education at 2 p.m. on Monday with presentations from Tennessee’s Office of Research and Educational Accountability and the state’s Fiscal Review office.
The Joint Working Group on Federal Education Funding is scheduled to hear from education and financial experts during two weeks of committee meetings as state leaders evaluate the possibility of rejecting federal education funding coming to Tennessee.
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This year’s Jack Daniel’s New Year’s Eve Live: Nashville’s Big Bash at Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park will go towards supporting students and their families who are experiencing homelessness through the Homeless Education Resource Office (HERO) Program of Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS).
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There has been, for some time now, optimism about a post-Covid recovery for American public school students, but sadly, there is no good news to be had.
Looking through a long lens, government-run education has been an enterprise rife with failure. The National Commission on Excellence in Education released a report in 1983 titled “A Nation at Risk,” which 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.”
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Conservatives in the Indianola Independent School District need to vote in the school board election on Tuesday, November 7th. Both Rob Keller and Patty Alexander are school board candidates who realize that sexually explicit materials are not appropriate for school libraries. Please vote for them.
Please do not vote for Aaron Labertew and Eric Christensen, who are opposed to SF496, the new legislation that bars books from school libraries, such as “Gender Queer,” “Push,” and “A Court of Silver Flames,” which have explicit descriptions or visual depictions of sex acts. Labertew is also opposed to school vouchers.
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Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union and one of the most powerful political players in Minnesota, has spent over $80,000 on supporting its endorsed candidates in local school board races in the final days of the election season.
The union announced the digital advertising campaign in a press release Wednesday, saying its get-out-the-vote push was a response to “unprecedented outside spending on fall school board races.”
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The University of Tennessee (UT) admitted in a statement on Wednesday night that one of its professors made antisemitic comments during a classroom lecture, but said it could not go into details out of respect for the students’ privacy.
In a statement, UT Director of News and Information Tyra Hagg distributed to the media late Wednesday, the university claimed it “has addressed concerns about a class lecture that included several comments” which fall under the “working definition of antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance” in 2016.
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Former President Trump is making a reelection pledge that if he elected he would create a federally funded online university that awards free degrees, in response to those now in the U.S. that are “turning our students into communists and terrorists.”
Trump makes the pledge in a campaign video obtained by Politico.
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A coalition of 19 attorneys general filed an amicus brief in support of a local Maryland board of education’s policy that does not allow parents to opt their children out of LGBTQ+ inclusive texts. The lawsuit was filed by three families against the Montgomery County Board of Education, with two of the three families suing on behalf of policies for their second grade children, while the third did not list the grade level of its elementary school children. The parents, who are Muslim, Roman Catholic, and Ukrainian Orthodox, filed their lawsuit on religious freedom grounds.
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The University of Pennsylvania, which hosts the Penn Biden Center, took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 2022, roughly five years after AUB paid a settlement to the United States government in connection with its alleged ties to Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terror organization.
UPenn received $474,947 from AUB in 2022, with the donations earmarked as “Education/Tuition/Scholarship,” according to a 2021-2022 foreign gift disclosure obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request. AUB settled a lawsuit with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, paying $700,000 and promising to revise its policies, following a suit alleging the university assisted organizations linked to Hezbollah, Reuters reported.
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High school students in a northern Virginia County on Wednesday protested a school policy that allows biological males in girl’s locker rooms and restrooms.
The protest occurred in Loudoun County, which in recent years has become a focal point over school policies regarding transgender students and the transparency of those policies.
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The Arizona branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has prepared form letters to help Arab- and Muslim-Americans shut down expressions of support for Israel from their colleagues at workplaces and schools.
“Your team, here at CAIR-AZ, has prepared templatized documents to advocate for you and your loved ones at work and school. Your voice is powerful. Use these letters to keep that power in your hands. Please reach out to CAIR-AZ if you feel you have been discriminated against,” said Azza Abuseif, executive director of the Mesa-based chapter.
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The state House agreed Tuesday to boost support of Pennsylvania’s four state-related universities in exchange for a tuition freeze in the 2024-25 academic year.
Penn State University, the University of Pittsburgh, Temple University, and Lincoln University will receive $640 million more from the state after months of legislative wrangling.
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University of Tennessee student group hosted an “Abortion Pill Training ‘’ event on Oct. 19, educating students on how to discreetly maintain access to abortions in defiance of statewide laws that prohibit this practice.
The University of Tennessee’s Women’s Coordinating Council, which runs as a registered student organization at the university, invited Maxine Carwile to lead a training course through “Self-Managed Abortion; Safe and Supported” (SASS), a pro-abortion non-profit organization.
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Republicans at the Wisconsin Capitol say students need free speech protections on University of Wisconsin campuses.
The Assembly Committee on Colleges and University held a public hearing on a pair of plans Republicans say will not only make sure the Universities of Wisconsin are respecting the First Amendment but will also open the campus to more students.
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U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) took to the floor last week to detail the myriad instances of United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) teachers who indoctrinate students with hatred and incite violence, terrorism, and antisemitism.
Blackburn, who also has introduced a bill to halt funding for the suspect UNRWA, read from a report from UN Watch, the non-profit organization whose mission is to hold the United Nations accountable to its founding principles.
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Undergraduate enrollment numbers increased during the fall semester for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic while the number of freshmen enrolling in colleges and universities declined, according to the National Student Research Clearinghouse Center (NSRCC).
Undergraduate enrollment at colleges and universities increased 2.1% compared to 2022 and 1.2% compared to 2021, with community colleges accounting for nearly 59% of the increase, according to the NSRCC. Freshmen enrollment declined by 3.6%, with bachelor programs seeing a 6.9% and 4.7% decline, respectively, at public and private four-year nonprofit institutions.
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Options for school teachers to be armed, and school systems to allow it, will be considered by Georgia lawmakers.
Republicans proposed a state-funded certified firearms training program for teachers as part of a proposed School Safety Initiative. Lawmakers plan to introduce the proposal during next year’s legislative session, saying it builds on previous reforms educators have passed.
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Lead paint, coal furnaces, hallway instruction, classrooms partitioned with teetering stacks of books and supplies, students and teachers struggling to work in unabated heat during sweltering weather — these are all images invoked by testifiers before the Basic Education Funding Commission over the last few months.
Experts say this barely scratches the surface of a massive infrastructural crisis across the state.
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A West Central Area (WCA) School District board member resigned effective Thursday after it was discovered he posted a video of himself engaging in a lewd sexual act to his social media account.
Jared Olson, a WCA school board member, posted a video to his SnapChat “stories” Wednesday of himself masturbating.
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Ohio falls short in creating competition between public schools and allowing students to find the best schools that work for them, according to a recent report.
The Reason Foundation examined each state’s open enrollment policies, evaluating them based on best practices. The report said 73% of parents support open enrollment for public schools.
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Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) released statements defending students’ pro-Hamas speech after campus protests, but in the past have muzzled conservatives for speech and online statements.
Harvard University President Claudine Gay and UPenn President Elizabeth Magill both said their respective universities support “free expression” in statements made after pro-Palestinian rallies at the colleges following Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attacks in Israel. In the past, however, conservative speakers and professors at the universities have frequently been shouted down, and some have been canceled for online statements.
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Democratic lawmakers privately negotiated with the nation’s largest teachers union to craft a bill intended to combat bans of sexually explicit books in schools, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Right To Read Act was reintroduced by Democratic Arizona Rep. Raúl Grijalva and Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed in April 2023, and is intended to rebuff efforts by parents and Republican lawmakers to remove sexually explicit content from school libraries, according to a press release from the lawmakers. The bill also authorized $500 million in funding for school libraries and provides liability protections to school librarians and educators providing sexually explicit books to students.
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Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds is pushing back against claims from some in the media that an education bill she signed into law back in late May involved banning books.
Senate File 496 prohibited books with written and visual depictions of sex acts from school libraries.
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Schools across Wisconsin have not yet rebounded from enrollment losses during the coronavirus outbreak.
A recent report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum found more than 4,500 students are still “missing.”
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Edina High School students walked out of class Wednesday afternoon to protest their district’s “support for Israel,” which is at war with Hamas after the terrorist organization slaughtered Israeli civilians in an Oct. 7 attack.
“We all [saw] the email Edina Public Schools sent out showing their ‘support’ for Israel. History is repeating itself, an ethnic cleansing is happening to Palestine right now yet we close our eyes,” says a post on an Instagram page created for the walkout.
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Educators at a Pennsylvania middle school acknowledged that the school was withholding information about a student’s “gender identity” and preferred name after the child was bullied and told to commit suicide, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Southern Lehigh School District (SLSD) instructed teachers and staff in October 2021 to use students’ preferred names or pronouns but told them to keep the information from parents if students request it, according to a DCNF investigation. Tara Cooke, a counselor for SLSD’s Joseph P. Liberati Intermediate School, and Deanna Webb, formerly the school’s vice principal, discussed an incident in which several male students allegedly told a “female” student to kill herself. The administrators noted that they had yet to inform the child’s parents about the victim’s “gender identity,” according to a May 18, 2022 email in a public records request by several concerned parents, who asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons.
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Ticket sales giant Eventbrite won’t allow Riley Gaines to promote her upcoming speech, but it was all in on a pro-Hamas event hosted by an LGBTQ community center.
That is until public pressure caught up with the big tech platform.
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Teaching children to self-entertain is key to traditional parenting. While I totally understand the desire to occasionally use technology and screens as “babysitters,” shouldn’t parents aim to instill more sustainable and healthier alternatives? In comes teaching children to self-entertain!
Essentially, self-entertainment means kids keeping themselves appropriately occupied while a parent’s attention is elsewhere. As much as this benefits children when they are small, it also plants the seed for healthy, independent adulthood. Children who know how to self-entertain won’t need to depend on television, video games, social media, or other technology to keep busy in their free time. They will already know how to pursue worthier and healthier activities.
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Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration ordered two major universities in Florida to remove Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters from campus Wednesday, citing the organizations’ support for “terrorism.”
Multiple student organizations at elite colleges and universities signed open letters or held rallies in support of Palestinians following the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, including the University of Florida and the University of South Florida. The chancellor of Florida’s university system, Ray Rodrigues, called on the colleges to disband SJP chapters Tuesday following their declaration of support for Palestinians, alleging they violated Florida’s antisemitism laws.
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The Pennsylvania Senate remains divided over a proposal that asks for parental permission before students can view sexually explicit content at school.
In the end, a majority of lawmakers – including all 21 Republicans and one Democrat – approved the legislation, sending it to the House for consideration.
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Like the cassette music format among hipsters, COVID-19 vaccine mandates live on in select educational settings.
Students may not be told until they’re already well into a program, however.
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In the state of Oregon, high school students will no longer need to display basic comprehension of reading, math, or writing in order to graduate, with state officials claiming that such a change is necessary to guarantee higher graduation rates for minority students.
As reported by Fox News, the pause on such basic graduation requirements had first been implemented during the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic. But last week, the Oregon State Board of Education voted unanimously to extend the requirement suspension at least until the end of the 2027-2028 school year.
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Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine planned to move ahead Monday afternoon with moving control of the state’s education system from the school board to his office.
In July, DeWine signed the state’s two-year budget, which included legislation to transfer the duties of the majority-elected state board to the new cabinet-level Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.
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A Michigan State University (MSU) employee was suspended Sunday after allowing an image of Adolf Hitler to be shown on the university’s scoreboard, according to The Associated Press.
The video was shown prior to Saturday’s rivalry football game between MSU and the University of Michigan, according to the AP. Alan Haller, MSU’s vice president and director of Athletics, released a statement Monday confirming that the employee had been suspended without pay and was under investigation, noting that the MSU athletics department failed to check the entire video before it was approved.
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One of the best things parents can do for their children is read with them. Even reading a few minutes a day makes a world of difference.
Literacy is not only the key skill required by almost all education formats but also one of the most influential factors in any learning endeavor. Even children too young to read independently garner an incredible amount from listening to books read aloud. They significantly increase their language skills, attention span, memory, visual awareness, and emotional response and regulation. And, of course, reading together offers children time to cuddle up with parents for quality bonding time.
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After the horrific atrocities committed by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7, we witnessed a wave of antisemitism on college campuses by anti-Israel groups praising Hamas’ mass murder of Jews.
Remember: Hamas invaded Israel, murdered at least 1,400 people, and took at least 212 hostages. Still, student groups at colleges across the country came out in support of the killings. The national chapter of the notoriously pro-terror Students for Justice in Palestine called the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust a “historic win.” Thirty-one Harvard organizations blamed Israel for the Hamas attacks. Students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison chanted “Glory to the Martyrs” while the La Fuerza Student Association at California State University advertised their pro-Palestine protest with a picture of a paraglider – a blatant endorsement of the massacre at the Supernova music festival.
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There’s an ongoing debate on university campuses about whether and how to respond to students who support, defend or even praise what Hamas terrorists deliberately did to innocent Israeli children, the elderly and other civilians.
On the one hand, there are free-speech and academic-freedom considerations.
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Ohio State Representative Adam Mathews (R-Lebanon) renewed calls for the Ohio Senate to pass his Higher Education Return on Investment Act this week.
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Online learning has revolutionized higher education, but a recent move by the federal Department of Education is threatening to tear down systems that are helping millions of students learn.
An extremely wide diversity of students choose to take online courses or to get entire online degrees. Colleges that offer them need to be nimble as the economy changes, yet traditional colleges are slow to change, and they often lack the expertise and funding to develop and manage online courses independently.
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A mile and a half from the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, a free speech battle is raging over the worst terrorist attack on Israeli soil.
New York University is under fire from critics of Israel and civil libertarians for its response to pro-Palestine student activism in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas slaughter and kidnapping of Israeli civilians and Israel’s resulting Gaza offensive.
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Leading a group of 23 attorneys general, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares filed an amicus brief on Wednesday on behalf of the plaintiffs in Mahmoud v. McKnight, a lawsuit involving Maryland parents and the Montgomery County School Board.
Along with over 30 other states, Maryland law includes an opt-out provision that allows parents to excuse their children from sex education courses or lectures. About half the states require parents to be notified when their children will receive sex education, including Maryland.
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Three leaders of the University of Pennsylvania faculty senate released a statement Thursday condemning those who “use their pocketbooks to shape our mission” after donors began withdrawing support over the school’s response to the Israel-Hamas war.
UPenn donors began pulling their funding from the university after President Liz Magill failed to initially label Hamas as a terrorist organization in an Oct. 10 statement about the Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians. The university’s faculty senate tri-chairs, Tulia G. Falleti, Eric A. Feldman and Vivian L. Gadsden, accused individuals of trying to censor free speech by “surveilling both faculty and students” and criticized those who would try to use their “pocketbooks” to buy the speech of university students and faculty, according to the statement.
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Metro Nashville Public School’s (MNPS) teachers and students face widespread internet outages after returning from fall break.
Sean Braisted, MNPS’s chief communications officer, told The Tennessee Star, “We’ve experienced network traffic issues over the past few days, primarily linked to changes during a recent upgrade that has led to increased network saturation.”
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State Superintendent of Public Schools Tom Horne announced on Wednesday that he contracted with a private company to fill law enforcement vacancies at schools in 11 Arizona counties. Horne said the new contract would ensure safety of students, teachers, and staff despite a “pervasive officer shortage” throughout the state.
The Arizona Department of Education (ADE) revealed a new contract with Off Duty Management (ODM), a private company, to schedule off-duty law enforcement to serve as School Safety Officers (SSOs).
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Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature withheld pay raises for employees of the University of Wisconsin System (UW) over its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) funding, according to the Associated Press.
Wisconsin Republicans voted in June to cut the UW System’s budget by $32 million, which is the estimated amount it spends on DEI over a 2-year period. Wisconsin Republicans denied the raises Tuesday in a bid to pressure the system to cut the spending, according to the AP.
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Elite universities that rushed to condemn the killing of George Floyd and Jan. 6 Capitol riot saw no need to denounce Hamas for terrorism against Israeli women, children and partiers – until wealthy donors called them out and even demanded the firing of top brass.
Another oft-marginalized group on campus doesn’t have titans of hedge funds, private equity firms and the “Law & Order” franchise to plead their case, however.
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In the aftermath of Hamas’ barbaric attack on Israel, Arizona State University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) declared “Palestinian freedom fighters are not terrorists!”
The message was a theme in the group’s anti-Israel “Day of Resistance” in solidarity with Palestine — and, by extension, Hamas.
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Sexually explicit books in school libraries make many parents uncomfortable, but some educators say policies that limit access for students are ineffective, at best.
Still, local officials want guidance from the state about how to allay concerns over books available to children, some as young as sixth grade, that depict or describe graphic sexual acts, incest and pedophilia.
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Few at the Wisconsin capital is happy about the University of Wisconsin’s decision to end in-person classes at two regional campuses, though they are not shocked.
University president Jay Rothman announced the university will end face-to-face classes at UW-Milwaukee Washington County and UW Oshkosh Fond du Lac.
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