Public school enrollment in Minnesota has declined for a third consecutive year, according to data released this week by the Department of Education.
MDE said enrollment dropped by about 2,427 students during the 2022-23 academic year, a roughly 0.3% decrease.
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The portion of students taking advantage of Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program after previously attending a public school has dramatically shifted.
According to the latest information from the Arizona Department of Education, the ESA program now has 47,200 students participating. The data, released Monday, is a marked increase from the roughly 30,000 students participating in January.
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Some of the largest public school districts in the nation are planning to close K-12 schools as they face plummeting student enrollment rates.
“Nationwide, public school enrollment fell by more than 1.4 million students to 49.4 million between fall 2019 and fall 2020—a decline of roughly 3%, according to data from the U.S. Education Department,” reported the Wall Street Journal in January. “The following school year, enrollment failed to return to prepandemic levels and remained roughly flat.”
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The Wilson County Board of Education (WCBOE) Ethics Committee in Tennessee dismissed most of the complaints from nine parents and community members against retired Marine Joe Padilla, who won his Zone 4 seat in August along with three other conservative Republicans.
One speaker at the ethics committee meeting held Thursday evening, accused Padilla of posting to his Facebook account that he disagrees with transgender hormone drugs and surgeries for minors, claiming such a post constitutes “propping up right-wing talking points.”
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Are America’s public schools falling apart?
The evidence certainly points in that direction.
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On this National School Choice Week, a new study by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty shows parental choice programs continuing to outperform public schools, particularly in the state’s largest city.
“Apples to Apples: Accessing Wisconsin State of Education”, accesses Badger State educational performance across public, charter, and private voucher schools.
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Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed education reporter Lawrence Wilson for The Epoch Times to the newsmaker line to talk about the national decline of public-school enrollment and its financial repercussions in big cities.
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Reports of student misbehavior have risen sharply in public schools, as districts also report widespread “stunted” social development among students.
Yet special education resources may not be able to cope with the subsequent rise in students with special needs.
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Student enrollment in Christian colleges and universities has increased at the same time many are leaving public sector schools of higher education.
Public sector schools lost 1.1 percent of undergraduates last fall, resulting in a total two-year drop of 4.2 percent since 2020, reported the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
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Former LGBTQ activist K. Yang says she is now actively working to “de-program” children who have been indoctrinated in woke gender ideology in public schools with funding from the New York State Department of Public Health.
In an interview Sunday on Fox & Friends Weekend, Yang explained her conversion from an LGBTQ activist who helped indoctrinate young children in government schools in the tenets of gender ideology.
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Alex Shilkrut has deep roots in Manhattan, where he has lived for 16 years, works as a physician, and sends his daughter to a public elementary school for gifted students in coveted District 2.
It’s a good life. But Shilkrut regretfully says he may leave the city, as well as a job he likes in a Manhattan hospital, because of sweeping changes in October that ended selective admissions in most New York City middle schools.
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed education journalist for The Tennessee Star, TC Weber in studio to talk about why parents want charter schools and the problems associated with traditional public schools.
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A Phoenix mother whose attendance at her local school board meeting in a cat costume went viral says she used that opportunity to protest the confusing message a transgender board member was sending to elementary school children.
“This was a local school in my neighborhood where there was a member of the school board whose name is Paul Bixler,” said Lindsey Graham during an appearance Tuesday on Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime.
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Vermont families that want to send their children to religious schools will no longer be excluded from the state’s tuition benefit program, as a result of legal settlements in two cases brought by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).
The plaintiffs who were denied funding under the Town Tuition Program, which provides tuition for students who live in areas without local public schools, will get reimbursement for money spent out of pocket on tuition. Other families denied funding can apply as well.
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Fifty-four Michigan school districts and 112 schools will receive required state partnership intervention, according to an announcement Tuesday from the Michigan Department of Education.
The department partners with districts with schools scoring in the bottom 5% on the state’s index accountability system, or that possess a four-year graduation rate below 67%, or that meet both criteria.
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Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could reverse the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, in which SCOTUS asserted that the use of an applicant’s race as a factor in an admissions policy of a public educational institution does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The current case specifically cites the use of race in the admissions process at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, maintain that Harvard violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, “which bars entities that receive federal funding from discriminating based on race, because Asian American applicants are less likely to be admitted than similarly qualified white, Black, or Hispanic applicants.”
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Afton Partners, a national organization specializing in school funding and education policy, has announced via social media a new partnership with the Tennessee State Collaborative for Reforming Education(SCORE) and The Tennessee Charter School Center(TCSC). The stated purpose of the budding collaboration is to help Tennessee’s charter school leaders better understand the operational and financial implications of Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement(TISA) – the state’s new funding formula for public schools.
TISA was passed by legislators during the last General Assembly and is slated to replace the current funding formula for the 2023-2024 school year. Touted as a formula that funds students over systems, the bill establishes a base funding rate of $6,860 per pupil, then distributes additional funding for students considered as being economically disadvantaged, having unique learning needs, or living in rural or impoverished communities. Tennessee charter schools are considered public schools and therefore receive funding through their charter authorizer at the same rate as traditional schools.
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Results of national education assessments released last week showed unprecedented drops in academic achievement in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading scores, but black, Hispanic, and low-income Catholic school students outperformed their counterparts in national, charter, and public school averages.
Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” revealed a dramatic decline in test scores from 2019, when students were last tested.
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During his tenure on the MNPS School Board, former Bredesen advisor Will Pinkston worked with a laser-like focus to prevent the growth of charter schools in Tennessee. Though he is no longer a board member, he is leading a new effort to continue that fight by drawing attention to the financial cost charter schools impose on local school districts. Pinkston, a Democrat, has joined forces with former Wilson County Schools Director Donna Wright, a Republican, to create a new nonprofit, nonpartisan group advocating for traditional public schools.
The stated focus of the new group is to shed a light on the fiscal cost of charter schools on local districts’ budgets. Visitors to the fledging group’s website will find a series of research studies including one by Derek W. Black. Black is considered one of the nation’s leading experts in public education funding and is the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law and director of the Constitutional Law Center at the University of South Carolina. He argues that charter schools have a negative impact on the budgets of local school districts due to fixed costs.
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Seven years ago, the former New York City Schools Chancellor said the city’s decision to lift a ban on cell phones in schools was “common sense.”
Last week, the Philadelphia Board of Education approved a contract of up to $5 million with a company that makes locking phone pouches that allow educators to make classrooms phone-free.
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Data journalist and pollster Rich Baris posted to social media he predicts a “homeschool boom” following the news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory committee unanimously voted to add the COVID shot to the children and adolescent immunization schedule, a move that will likely lead many states to require COVID shots for school attendance.
Baris, also known as “The People’s Pundit,” tweeted Wednesday, “Parents will flip the F–k out, with good reason. Homeschool boom.”
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Wisconsin’s latest public school headcount shows fewer kids in traditional public schools and more kids moving into schools of choice.
And school choice supporters say that shouldn’t be a surprise.
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The executive director of Tennessee’s Public Charter Schools Commission has recommended against two new charter schools, after last month battling to stop a charter school from opening in Rutherford County and another from opening in Williamson County.
Tess Stovall reportedly agreed with the Memphis-Shelby County School Boards unanimous votes – one in April and another in July – and recommended against the opening of Binghampton Community School and Tennessee Volunteer Military Academy.
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Republican candidate for Michigan Secretary of State Kristina Karamo joined her fellow parents at a Dearborn school board meeting to condemn sexually explicit materials and lessons in school libraries when academic achievement should be the focus of education.
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A mother from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina rebuked the school board and superintendent for allowing 7th graders access to a graphic book that promotes “the ins and outs of gay sex.”
Education investigative journalist Christopher Rufo posted the video to Twitter of the parent reading a section of This Book Is Gay by LGBTQ activist Juno Dawson.
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Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Carol Swain on the lack of Republican leadership, meeting AZ GOP Governor nominee Kari Lake, and the importance of public school and school choice.
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New York City is changing its admission policies implemented by former Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio, now basing admissions to selective high schools and middle schools on test scores amidst the city’s enrollment drop, according to a press release by New York City Schools Chancellor David C. Banks.
In an effort to admit “top-performing applicants,” the top 15% of students with a grade point average (GPA) of 90 or above, will be vetted first for the selective schools, according to a press release by Banks. The previous admissions policy was a random lottery that allowed underperforming students to receive admission to the screened schools, introduced during the pandemic.
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American Classical Education (ACE) announced Thursday that it had withdrawn its appeals to the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission that would open charter schools in Madison, Montgomery, and Rutherford counties.
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New Jersey is set to become the first state in the country that will mandate its public school students to learn about so-called “global warming,” with curriculum focusing on the subject being introduced in the 2022-2023 academic year.
According to ABC News, the effort was led by Tammy Murphy, the wife of Governor Phil Murphy (D-N.J.). In an interview on Thursday, the First Lady of New Jersey falsely claimed that “climate change is becoming a real reality.”
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Parents Defending Education’s (PDE) new resource for parents seeks to inform them of their state education agencies’ policies about gender identity and reveals multiple states instruct teachers to keep their students’ gender identities a secret from parents.
As it continues to add information from more states, the national grassroots organization’s resource for parents currently provides links to the websites of 29 state education departments across the country along with their policies regarding transgender students and gender identity.
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A New York City middle school English teacher told a Project Veritas (PV) undercover journalist she encourages her students to engage in political violence by teaching them “to throw bricks,” not to “black and brown communities,” but at “the people that are actually doing the things that [need to] change.”
In the fourth video of its education series titled “The Secret Curriculum,” New York City Department of Education middle school teacher Ariane Franco is heard telling the PV journalist she teaches her students “there’s strategic ways” to engage in violent protests against the people who oppose her political agenda.
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A Southington High School English teacher’s student worksheet that defined terms often associated with the concepts of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and radical gender theory drew anger from parents, students, board of education officials, and members of the community.
School board members said they were unaware of the three-page worksheet packet until they read about it on social media.
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Chicago’s largest children’s hospital is working with local government school districts to provide training materials that promote radical gender theory and LGBTQ activism.
Education researcher and author Christopher Rufo reported at the New York Post Monday he obtained documents from a whistleblower that show Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago has provided school administrators throughout the Chicago area with gender theory and LGBTQ activist materials to be distributed to teachers, administrators, and staff for ongoing employee training programs.
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The Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) plans to spend $1.2 billion of federal COVID-19 relief to recover from learning loss and revamp its buildings.
The spending plans aim to repair learning loss detailed by test data the state and federal government released this week showing a drop in test scores, and for some students, decades of learning loss.
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The grassroots website Awake-Illinois is reporting that only 23 of 860 school districts in the state have decided to adopt radical sex education standards, based on a national model, while 536 districts have thus far opted out.
Governor J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) signed SB 818 into law in August 2021, with his office claiming the standards are “voluntary” and will “emphasize health, safety, and inclusivity with age-appropriate resources.”
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The Pennsylvania Department of Education is encouraging teachers to host a “Gender-Neutral Day” for children with resources from the disgraced Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) Learning for Justice social justice education program.
The education department’s webpage titled “Gender/Gender Identity: Creating Gender-Inclusive Schools and Classrooms” contains a list of “Words You Should Know,” from “The Gender Spectrum,” which was published in 2013 by SPLC’s former Teaching Tolerance program.
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“School choice is good for everybody but unions, socialist bureaucrats and the tired education establishment,” libertarian John Stossel wrote Wednesday at the New York Post.
The author and journalist observed the “silver lining” of the COVID pandemic is that parents discovered alternatives to public schools and, as the statistics are telling us, they continue to act on that discovery by removing their children from them – in droves.
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LGBTQ activist organization the It Gets Better Project has awarded $10,000 in grant funds to 50 school districts across the country to promote gender ideology.
The project was founded by LGBTQ activist Dan Savage as an organization that provides anti-bullying support for LGBTQ teens, but Savage has a history of bullying teens himself – particularly, those who identify as Christian.
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A Fox News Digital analysis of child sex crime data in school districts around the nation has found a minimum of 181 K-12 educators have been arrested on child-related sex crimes in the first half of 2022.
Among those educators arrested were four principals, 153 teachers, 12 substitute teachers, and 12 teachers’ aides. The crimes ranged from child pornography to rape of students.
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New York City public schools are expected to lose nearly 30,000 students by this coming academic year says the city’s Department of Education Office of Student Enrollment, reports the New York Post.
Data from the department show 28,100 fewer students are expected to enroll in city public schools this fall, with another 2,300 fewer students by the end of the academic year, the Post noted, adding, “By the end of next school year, the largest school district in the nation expects to serve a student population of just 760,439 children, the data show.”
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A new Gallup poll shows how declining trust in America’s public schools differs along party lines.
Overall American trust in public schools remains low, with only 28% reporting that they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in public schools, which is down from 32% last year. Both numbers are short of the 41% reported in 2020, a level of trust not seen since 2004, with only 29% of Americans reporting having a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in public schools in 2018 and 2019.
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The president of the nation’s largest teachers’ union told union delegates at the start of the Representative Assembly (RA) Sunday that 2016 was the year of a “fateful election,” one that made clear the U.S. Supreme Court would become “radicalized.”
In her keynote address Sunday in Chicago, National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle targeted former President Donald Trump for his choices in appointing Supreme Court justices.
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The Tennessee Department of Education is seeking public comment by August 2 on rules that govern the funding for kindergarten through grade twelve (K-12) public schools.
In a tweet amplifying a previous request for public input, TNDOE said, “Informed by input from a variety of stakeholders, all Tennesseans are encouraged to submit public comment on the proposed rules on the TISA public school funding formula by 8/2.”
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The DC Court of Appeals has unanimously ruled in favor of pro-life advocates in the nation’s capital in a lawsuit brought by a public charter school that objected to the group’s efforts to stop a Planned Parenthood “abortion mega-facility” from opening next door to the school.
Two Rivers Public Charter School and its board of trustees brought a lawsuit in December 2015 that alleged longtime pro-life activist Ruby Nicdao engaged in harassment and intimidation of students in her campaign to educate parents and the greater community about the consequences of Planned Parenthood’s plans to erect an “abortion mega-facility” next door to the children’s school, a press release from Thomas More Society explained.
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed Southeastern Legal Foundation’s Director of Litigation Braden Boucek to the newsmaker line to explain how the educational savings account works and updates on pending litigation that proves the state is not interested in letting parents control their children’s education.
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Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed the Tennessee state director for Citizens for Renewing America, Aundrea Gomez in studio to talk about her personal experiences in public schools that led to her new position.
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A North Carolina state representative responded to an email from a constituent alerting her to the use of LGBTQ-themed flash cards, including a card with the depiction of a pregnant man, to teach colors to preschool children in an elementary school in the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS).
Upon receiving an email containing the flash card, apparently from “Progress Pride Flag Rainbow Families Flash Cards,” that depicted a pregnant man,” state Rep. Erin Paré (R-Wake) contacted the principal at Ballantine Elementary School in Wake County, noted a press release from North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore (R-Cleveland).
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Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt signed a bill into law Wednesday that requires students to use school restrooms that correspond to their sex as indicated on their birth certificates.
Stitt signed the bill after the state Senate and House approved it, 38-7 and 69-14, respectively.
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According to a recent survey, over 1.2 million students have abandoned public schools in favor of other alternatives in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, where many public schools shut down in-person learning in favor of “remote” learning.
The Daily Caller reports that the survey, conducted by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), discovered that over 1,268,000 students have fled public schooling since March of 2020. Enrollment initially fell by 2.5 percent in the Fall 2020 semester when lockdowns first began in the spring of that year. The following year, schools that returned to in-person learning restored some of those numbers, while the schools that remained on virtual learning continued to see steep declines.
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An opinion author at MSNBC has condemned homeschooling as a racist tool of evangelical Christians seeking to undermine public schools and policies that promote integration.
“It should come as no surprise that evangelicals, fundamentalists and other religious conservatives have fought against public education since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education,” Anthea Butler wrote at MSNBC in a column published Thursday.
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