Pennsylvania schools looking to switch to renewable energy can now receive assistance from the state through its $25 million Solar for Schools grant program.
For eligible schools, the program will cover up to half the cost of installing solar arrays on their campuses.
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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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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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The Georgia Senate passed a bill protecting women’s sports by 33 to 21 on Tuesday that would prevent biological males from unfairly competing in women’s and K-12 girls’ sports. The bill awaits transfer to the House for continued discussion.
HB 1104 seeks to safeguard “students from harm” and maintain “competitive fairness” in school sports by requiring athletes to compete in activities based on the gender listed on their birth certificate. The bill states that local schools may have “separate teams for members of each sex where selection for such teams is based upon competitive skill, competitive fairness, student safety or the activity involved is a contact sport.”
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A Phoenix-area parent filed a lawsuit against Creighton Elementary School District on March 19, 2024, for using a dual language program, accusing the district of violating a law that requires students learning English to be taught in English-only classrooms throughout the school day. The lawsuit was part of a broader effort to uphold English as the primary language used in Arizona classrooms.
According to the lawsuit, parent Patricia Pellett, whose “son is a student currently studying at Scottsdale High School,” is suing Creighton Elementary School District for allegedly violating Proposition 203, which Arizona voters approved “by margin of over 60 [percent]” in 2000. The lawsuit states that the “purpose of Proposition 203 was that children should no longer be taught in bilingual or dual language classes, where they are taught part of the day in Spanish. Instead, the purpose of Proposition 203 was that children should be taught the entire school day in English, so that they would quickly become proficient in English.”
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Better schools, brighter future.
This is not a pithy slogan. For me, it’s personal.
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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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Education expert Corey DeAngelis joined The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Monday to discuss a little-known detail about the Tennessee Education Freedom Act that makes the proposal a win-win for teachers, parents, students, and even teacher unions.
DeAngelis goes on to highlight the success of school choice programs in Arizona and Florida, where thousands of families have opted for alternatives to traditional public schools.
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American Federation for Children Senior Fellow Shaka Mitchell joined The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Wednesday to dive into the details of Gov. Bill Lee’s newly unveiled Education Freedom Scholarship Act, set to revolutionize school choice in Tennessee.
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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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by Reagan Reese and Megan Brock The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a nationally known LGBTQ activist organization, uses its “Rainbow Library” program to teach kids about “they/them” pronouns and push books on gender identity and sexual orientation in the classroom, according to a video unearthed by the Daily Caller News Foundation. Launched in 2019 by a third-grade teacher, GLSEN’s “Rainbow Library” program, which provides “LGBTQ+ affirming K-12 text sets,” is in 5,800 schools and libraries across 31 states, according to a 2022-2023 school year request form. The initiative makes books and resources on transgenderism and sexual orientation available to children as young as 5, according to a GLSEN 2021 recorded online workshop on the initiative. “The Rainbow Library, we send LGBTQ+ affirming books to schools and libraries for free along with additional GLSEN resources,” Michael Rady, the Rainbow Library Program manager, said in the 2021 workshop. “We have four different grade ranges for the books that we send out: K-2, 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12. We put a major emphasis on books that center the voices of trans and nonbinary people as well as books that attend to the voices of BIPOC [black, indigenous, people of color] LGBTQ+ people.” The initiative…
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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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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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So far in 2023, six states signed school choice legislation into law, giving millions of families and their children education options, including access to taxpayer-funded vouchers.
Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Utah, South Carolina and Oklahoma all signed legislation into law that makes at least some, if not all students within the states, eligible for taxpayer funded vouchers or a tax credit that can be used on education expenses such as private school tuition, textbooks and transportation. Under the legislation enacted in 2023, millions of students across the country are now able to attend schools outside their designated zip code or apply to receive funding in order to seek a private or a homeschool education.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed The Ohio Star’s managing editor Jack Windsor to the show to discuss Governor Mike DeWine’s mask mandate for kids K-12.
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By a vote of 32-0, Tennessee’s State Senate unanimously approved legislation that bolsters the Volunteer Public Education Trust Fund designed to assist the state’s K-12 public schools. A notice released after the Senate floor vote said the bill, SB 0625, sponsored by Senator Bo Watson (R-Hixson), Chairman of the Senate Finance, Ways and Means Committee, “makes improvements to the fund’s structure to expand the pool of donors and create an endowment where the interest could be used to assist with improvements or projects outside a school’s normal funding stream.” The release offered an explanation about the Fund by the bill’s sponsor, Senator Watson, “This fund was created in 1985 to be similar to the Tennessee Chairs of Excellence endowment which has been very successful for our colleges and universities.” Senator Watson went further to describe the difference in performance between the higher education endowment and that of the K-12 fund, “While the Chairs of Excellence Fund has raised $395.5 million since its creation, the Volunteer Public Education Trust Fund for K-12 schools has only received $171,147.” To address the many reasons the K-12 fund has not performed as well, including lack of information, marketing and management of the K-12 fund,…
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Tennessee K-12 public schools ranked among the worst in the nation in a study published Monday by WalletHub.com. Tennessee schools ranked 42 overall out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. WalletHub analysts evaluated schools using 21 metrics across two key areas, quality and safety. Tennessee ranked 35 in quality and 49 in safety. For quality, analysts reviewed math and reading test scores, SAT and ACT scores, pupil-teacher ratios, high school graduation rates among low-income students, dropout rates, and other factors. The safety category included a look at disciplinary and bullying rates, as well as the number of high school students reporting they had access to illegal drugs on campus or were threatened or injured with a weapon on campus. Other factors considered in the safety category included the number of high school students reporting they had been involved in a physical fight on campus, or did not attend school because they felt unsafe on campus or going to and from school. The states with the best schools, starting at the top, were Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Vermont. Those at the very bottom, starting with the lowest, were Louisiana, New Mexico, West Virginia, District of…
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