A teacher at Minnesota Connections Academy, an online public school, sent an email to eighth grade Language Arts students saying he wondered how he “could possibly come to school” following last week’s election of President Donald Trump.
“It’s the fact that it’s pushing an agenda. The Democrats are saying that it’s not happening, but it very clearly is,” Antonio Pici, a law enforcement officer and veteran, shared with Alpha News.
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A squabble between Vanderbilt University graduate students and the school has students caught in the middle as they try to protect their privacy.
United Auto Workers filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board on Oct. 2 to form the union, which includes about 2,200 employees, according to the National Labor Relations Board online record.
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The rate of freshman enrollment at colleges across the country, from private to public, has dropped to the lowest levels since before the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic.
According to the Daily Caller, freshman enrollment at public universities decreased by 8.5% in 2024 compared to 2023, while private enrollment dropped by 6.5% in the same span of time. This comes despite the fact that freshman enrollment rose slightly in 2023 compared to 2022, with a mere 0.8% increase.
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Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, welcomed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials into his Nebraska classroom while working as a teacher in the 1990s, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found.
In February 1996, a delegation of three “educators” from southeast China visited Walz’s Alliance High School social studies class “to study the education system,” according to an unearthed Alliance Times-Herald article. However, the delegation included CCP officials who at the time worked for an institute serving a Chinese influence and intelligence agency, according to a DCNF review of Chinese government records.
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The overwhelming majority of Americans do not believe schools should hide a student’s gender change at school from parents, according to a recent poll of over 2,200 likely voters.
The issue of parental notification regarding a student’s gender transition has been hotly contested in recent years, especially in California, where the state has sided against school districts that have passed policies to let parents know students are using different names or pronouns.
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A recent report from the Fiscal Research and Education Center shows that school choice programs may save taxpayers money despite some Arizona politicians’ concerns about oversight of the statewide ESA program.
The report looked at 25 states plus the District of Columbia, including Arizona. The report looked at school choice programs through 2022, but since Arizona’s universal ESA program was not enacted until 2023, the report includes a separate fiscal analysis looking at the impacts of Arizona’s universal ESA program from 2023 through 2024.
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A group of parents, teachers and religious leaders filed a lawsuit Thursday with the Oklahoma Supreme Court challenging a new state requirement to teach the Bible in public schools.
Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters announced the mandate for children in grades five through 12 be taught lessons on the Bible “as an instructional support into the curriculum” in June, and was quickly met with pushback from schools refusing to implement the rule. The suit alleges the mandate, which allocates $3 million to the Bibles, violates the state Constitution’s prohibition on spending public funds on religious items and is contrary to religious freedom.
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A new national poll shows a majority of Americans support school choice measures that would allow families to use taxpayer funds to attend a private school.
The Center Square Voters’ Voice Poll conducted by Noble Predictive Insights found that over two-thirds of the more than 2,200 likely voters polled support giving families choices using public funds.
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The Florida school district that birthed Moms for Liberty as a repudiation of its COVID-19 mandates on their children is parenting the conservative group all wrong, so to speak, according to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Its Tuesday ruling smacked down Brevard Public Schools and four current and former school board members for unconstitutional restrictions on public comments at their meetings in a lawsuit by Moms for Liberty’s founding Brevard County chapter and its members, putting public schools on notice across the court’s jurisdiction of the Sunshine State, Alabama and Georgia.
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Cities with robust charter school programs have drastically lowered the performance gap between low-income students and their peers, a study published in October found.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) found that student performance rose in every city with a majority of low-income students when 33% or more are enrolled in charter schools, according to the report. Non-white students make up a large percentage of those benefiting from school choice policies.
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A massive influx in non-English speaking students in Pennsylvania is overwhelming school districts across the state, and the logistical strain on administrators could be leaving other students behind.
The number of English Language Learners (ELL) in school districts in Pennsylvania has surged nearly 40% since 2021, forcing public schools to shell out more cash to try and meet the needs of these students, according to documents obtained via records requests and open-source information reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The surge for many schools began in the 2021-2022 academic school year, coinciding with the onset of the Biden-Harris administration and the subsequent border crisis.
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State Senator Jake Hoffman (R-Queen Creek) announced Sunday evening that he was launching an investigation into how students from Arizona State University, the University of Arizona, and Northern Arizona University received text messages from the Kamala Harris presidential campaign on the last day before voter registration ends in the state. Hoffman, who chairs the Senate Committee on Government, expressed concern that it might violate FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy act that protects students. Hoffman told The Arizona Sun Times on Sunday, “I was made aware of this breach of security by dozens of students today, and intend to throw the full weight of the Arizona Senate into ascertaining how the Harris campaign acquired these students’ legally protected personally identifiable information.” The College Republicans at ASU broke the story on X on Sunday. They posted, “150,000 students from ALL Arizona universities including ASU and UofA have received a text from Kamala Harris’ campaign telling the students to vote for her. If Kamala Harris has access to all of Arizona college students’ phone numbers, what ELSE do they have?” 🚨MAJOR BREAKING: 150,000 students from ALL Arizona universities including ASU and UofA have received a text from Kamala Harris' campaign telling…
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Ohio’s largest school district will resume busing more than 100 charter and private school students next week as a lawsuit continues over its transportation changes.
Columbus City Schools sent a letter to those parents who rejected payment instead of busing and requested mediation, saying new routes will be added and transportation will resume while the mediation process is ongoing.
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The epidemic of school shootings in America could be drastically curtailed by a few simple policy changes.
First, school shooters should automatically receive the death penalty with only limited opportunities to appeal. The problem of frivolous appeals and court cases dragging on for decades afflicts our entire judicial system, but it is especially egregious in the case of school shootings.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday revealed that the 2023-2024 academic school year held the record for the most kindergartners declining at least one vaccination.
The CDC said a total of 3.3% of kindergartners nationwide, equaling 127,000 kindergartners, were granted exemptions on at least one vaccine, which beats the previous record of 3% in the 2022-2023 school year.
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Following a Michigan Department of Education report showing drops in reading and math proficiency in some grades, Michigan House Republicans have unveiled a multi-step plan to boost student achievement and teacher support.
The plan would provide extra funding for school safety and mental health resources, waive state fees for teachers and modernize the standard curriculum, State Reps. Jaime Greene, R-Richmond, and Nancy DeBoer, R-Holland, announced Monday.
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Fourteen states have joined an effort to cut chronic student absenteeism by 50% over the next five years.
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The University of Virginia tops the 2025 free speech ranking on college campuses, a first for the school founded by Thomas Jefferson.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression surveyed over 250 colleges and universities in its rankings. The foundation survey, administered by College Pulse, surveyed nearly 60,000 undergraduates enrolled full-time in four-year degree programs.
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Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost made good on a threat to sue the Columbus City Schools if it did not resume busing for school choice students.
Yost promised to sue earlier this week after the state’s largest school district eliminated busing for charter- and private-school students, notifying parents about two weeks before school began in August.
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A month after Matthew Garrett secured a $2.4 million settlement from the Kern Community College District over termination proceedings for the “dishonesty” of disagreeing with colleagues on diversity issues and “unprofessional conduct” of questioning the data used to create a “racial climate task force,” the former Bakersfield College tenured history professor isn’t done yet.
He has started a campaign to pressure the KCCD Board of Trustees to rescind a contract extension and pay boost for the human resources official who oversaw his proceedings, citing newly obtained sworn testimony of the colleague who he says sicced students on Garrett with racially charged complaints that were “ultimately found to be baseless” – and used class time to do it.
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Two weeks ago, three unlikely bedfellows joined forces to announce their intention to cut K-12 chronic absenteeism in half by 2029.
The right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Education Trust, and the nonprofit organization Attendance Works revealed their plan in Washington, DC. The coalition hopes to combat chronic absenteeism, defined as students missing 10 percent or more of school days in a given academic year, by implementing a variety of initiatives, including home visits and similar interventions. Chronic absenteeism rates more than doubled during and after the Covid response. The goal is to reduce these rates to pre-pandemic levels, or around 13 percent.
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Social-emotional learning (SEL) has been in vogue in education circles for decades. Following its precepts, teachers, counselors, and administrators encourage students to look inward and focus on their feelings. The result?
A generation of young people who can’t stop thinking about their emotions, leaving them incredibly fragile. But that’s not what many of the experts will tell you.
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Ideological litmus tests have no place in higher education. They weaponize loyalty and contradict the university’s purpose of fostering academic inquiry and informed debates. Scholars cannot pursue truth or progress if they are denied academic jobs based on their devotion to a specific political ideology or philosophy.
I applaud states like Florida, Alabama, Wyoming, Tennessee, and Texas that have banned varied Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) requirements that mandate loyalty to its agenda. But we need to go further. Congress can deny federal funding to universities that impose DEI on faculty, administrators, and staff. Conservative lawmakers are already trying to “dismantle” DEI in the federal government and others are currently weighing defunding universities over Title VI violations. They should extend defunding to universities that require DEI.
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Students at a Detroit combined virtual school took their online credit recovery courses 20 times faster than the courseware provider suggests in the 2023-24 school year.
According to a public records request filed with Detroit Public Community School District, students took their 11th and 12th-grade English language arts classes in about four hours, while the courseware provider Edgenuity recommends students spend 80 hours on such courses.
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A federal appeals court has ruled that the Biden administration can’t implement its Title IX rules in an additional four states, bringing the total number of statewide injunctions to 26.
With a recent block awarded in Oklahoma on Wednesday and then an emergency appeal granted by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, over half of the United States will be exempt from the Thursday deadline.
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As the Democrat-controlled Senate prepares to debate and consider amendments to the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, which already passed the GOP-led House with several amendments supported by Anti-Woke Caucus members, a transparency group is shining a light on the curriculum and vendors in the Pentagon’s 70,000-student school system.
The K-12 Department of Defense Education Activity, probed in a January hearing on “progressive ideologies in the U.S. military,” simply reshuffled its “radical” diversity, equity and inclusion programs and staff after reassigning DEI chief Kelisa Wing and deleting its DEI Division page, according to a report by OpenTheBooks.com published Thursday.
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Over half of U.S. states now require high school students to receive a financial literacy course before they graduate after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill passed by the California Legislature.
With the passage of California’s law requiring schools to offer a course in personal finance by the 2027-28 school year and requiring the class of 2031 to receive at least one class, a total of 26 states now require students to take a course on how to manage money, according to a nonprofit spearheading efforts to pass such laws.
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Ten bills passed during the most recent legislative session of the Tennessee General Assembly and signed by Governor Bill Lee concerning school safety will take effect on Monday, July 1.
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Public school districts in Ohio could soon have access limited to school-issued computers used by students and monitoring students’ web-browsing activity during non-school hours.
A bill that recently unanimously passed the Senate and began hearings in the House would also prohibit technology providers from using educational data to market or advertise to students.
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Eighty-two percent of teachers say that the general state of public K-12 education has gotten worse over the past five years. This is according to a new Pew Research Center survey conducted in October and November of 2023. That’s not the only shocking statistic from the survey, either, which overall offers a grim statistical map of the fault lines fracturing our education system. However, these trends may offer some insight into how to fix our schools.
First, the teachers. Most teachers (77 percent) find their job frequently stressful, and a large majority (70 percent) say their school is understaffed, which may contribute to the fact that over 80 percent of teachers say they do not have enough time in the work day to complete all necessary tasks.
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More school districts in Virginia are starting to implement school cell phone bans, prohibiting students from using their phones during the school day and, in some cases, even on the bus.
Many districts ban student cell phone usage at elementary schools, and some ban them at their middle schools, but until recently, high school policies have often been more permissive.
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Parents, children, and supporters of school choice have cause to celebrate this National Charter Schools Week.
Charter schools earned the top two spots on a list of the best high schools in America, according to a recent report by U.S. News & World Report. And, of the top 100 public high schools, charter schools claimed 19 spots—10 in Arizona alone—despite accounting for only 8% of all public schools in the country.
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Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed House Bill 250 on Wednesday, requiring schools to implement official policy governing students’ use of cellphones during school hours.
The bill aims to “minimize student use of cellphones in K-12 schools” by requiring school districts to create a policy that reduces cellphone-related distractions in classroom settings.
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For 19 years, I was a master of time. Down to the minute, I controlled time for others and used it to meet my and others’ ends, irrespective of the desires of those in front of me. In short, I was a public-school teacher, and controlling time was my talent. Although I and other adults often talked about helping students reach their potential and grow as learners, what we really did each day was control their time and force upon them ideas and subjects in which most of them had little to no interest.
What if there were a better way? A way to help each student learn the way he or she learns best, develop autonomy, explore passions, and take control of his or her own time? Thankfully, that way does exist in the form of alternative schools and learning programs that continue to increase in number each day.
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Ten years ago, I had never heard the word “fentanyl.” Now, every sorority and fraternity on my college campus is equipped with Naloxone, also known by the brand name Narcan, a lifesaving medication used to treat opioid overdoses.
The fentanyl crisis is acutely felt on college campuses. Oftentimes, college students will take a pill that they thought was Xanax or Ritalin and end up dead.
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For years, liberals have scoffed at the idea that standardized testing is the best predictor of academic success. The National Education Association, for instance, claims standardized tests are “both inequitable and ineffective at gauging what students know.” Activists’ campaign against standardized testing — and their assertions that such tests discriminate against “underrepresented minority students” — culminated in the decisions by more than 1,000 colleges to drop their standardized testing requirements.
This week, cold, hard data showed just how foolish those decisions were. The University of Texas at Austin released the academic performance data for students who submitted standardized scores versus those who did not submit such scores. The result is unambiguous: Students who did not submit standardized tests performed drastically worse than students who did submit their scores. The students who did not submit ACT or SAT scores finished the fall 2023 semester with a grade point average 0.86 grade points lower than students who did. This demonstrates an average difference of almost an entire letter grade. Had the University of Texas utilized all applicants’ standardized scores, it very well might have decided against admitting many of those who did not provide their scores. Students who did not provide scores had a median SAT of 1160, markedly lower than that of the students who did provide their scores: 1420. The University of Texas would have been correct in deciding against admitting those students with lower scores given how much better students with a higher average SAT performed academically.
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Learning to read is trending. The most fundamental of K-12 subjects is fueling YouTube videos and feature stories in People magazine and is now the subject of a report from Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Let’s hope the renewed interest spreads, because a shocking proportion of American children cannot read, and the data have profound implications for these children’s futures—and the entire criminal justice system.
Oliver James is the former convict who announced on social media that he taught himself to read as an adult, which sparked media coverage on how learning to read changed his life. As a student, James had been passed along from grade to grade without learning this basic skill.
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The National Association of Scholars’ Civics Alliance coalition released a comprehensive report critiquing Connecticut’s social studies standards, which is the state’s guide for teachers detailing what students should be learning from Pre-K through 12th grade.
The 34-page report, titled “Disowned Yankees: How Connecticut’s Social Studies Standards Shortchange Students,” details how the Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE) produced the curriculum, the result of implementing the curriculum, as well as “recommendations for how to fix the adoption process and the substance of Connecticut’s social studies instruction, by substantive revision of the Standards.”
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It’s no secret that chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed since the pandemic. As The 74s Linda Jacobson writes, a new analysis of federal data released in late 2023 shows the problem may be even worse than previously understood.
The report from Johns Hopkins University shows that two out of three students were enrolled in schools with high or extreme chronic absenteeism rates during the 2021-22 school year—more than double the rate in 2017-18. (Students who miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days, are considered chronically absent.)
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School choice activist Corey A. DeAngelis joined Wednesday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy to discuss the future of school choice in the U.S., specifically in Democrat-run states.
Leahy kicked off the segment by noting how Vermont has the oldest operating school voucher program in the country’s history with its Town Tuitioning Program.
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Virginia’s House of Delegates Education Committee voted on several influential bills Monday morning, including one on student bullying, the implications of which may be unclear.
The legislation was created with the belief that naming groups of students often targeted most by bullying would force schools to proactively develop a plan for responding to specific bullying situations quickly and appropriately.
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A self-declared “abortion doula” spoke this week to Catholic University of America students about her experiences coaching women through delivering or aborting babies, as well as coaching “pregnant men” to deliver in what she called a “seahorse birth,” according to audio of the class lecture obtained by The Daily Signal.
A Catholic University nursing student described Tuesday’s lecture to The Daily Signal, saying the guest speaker said she also practices Reiki, a controversial Japanese method of spiritual healing and self-improvement.
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A proposal that recently cleared the House Education Committee would consider mental health days as excused absences for students.
The bill was one of three approved Thursday after lawmakers fielded testimony about the public education system’s struggle to offer comprehensive mental health support to students.
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Kelly Walker, a journalist and father of five in Tucson, is expanding his efforts to protect children from bad policies in schools despite being arrested and prosecuted after one school pushed back. Since the bad experience, he’s built a platform of advocacy for parents and children harmed by school policies at Real Freedom Talk. He now produces videos about abuses in schools and appears on major talk shows to discuss his experiences and expose what is happening in Tucson schools.
Walker said what prompted his activism was observing the increase in mental health problems among children due to the COVID-19 lockdowns. A student committed suicide near his home, and the suicide rate among children in Pima County increased 30 percent. A nearby school admitted they had locked students in closets and forgotten about them. He said parents from the community came to his former coffee shop, Viva Coffee House, and asked him if he could do something about it.
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It’s no secret that America’s students are struggling. The latest Nation’s Report Cards have not been flattering, with average scores in both math and reading declining over recent years.
It’s also no secret that pandemic restrictions have only exacerbated the learning decline in the U.S. However, scores have been falling since before the pandemic, signaling that there are more systemic problems holding back young people. In fact, this educational decline comes from a deeper philosophical brokenness about the notion of truth itself.
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The Biden administration’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is taking aim at the largest Christian university in the U.S. in a new lawsuit.
Grand Canyon University (GCU) is the largest Christian university in the U.S. with over 100,000 students enrolled and over 85,000 online students as of fall 2022, according to their website. The FTC alleges that GCU engaged in deceptive business practices with its doctoral programs and that it also engaged in illegal telemarketing practices, according to the federal complaint filed in the District of Arizona.
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Georgia’s public charter school enrollment has grown over the last four years while enrollment at traditional schools has declined.
That’s according to state-level data the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools studied for a new report, “Believing in Public Education: A Demographic and State-level Analysis of Public Charter School and District Public School Enrollment Trends.”
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According to the latest ABCs of School Choice – EdChoice’s comprehensive report about all matters pertaining to education freedom – policymakers in 40 states have debated 111 educational choice bills in 2023, 79 percent of which related to education savings accounts. (ESAs allow parents to receive a deposit of public funds into a government-authorized savings account with restricted, but multiple uses. Those funds can cover private school tuition and fees, online learning programs, private tutoring, community college costs, higher education expenses, and other approved customized learning services and materials).
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“I hated going to school when I was a kid,” said Elon Musk in a 2015 interview. “It was torture.”
When deciding how his own children would be educated, Musk rejected traditional schooling and created his own project-based microschool, Ad Astra, in 2014, on his SpaceX campus. “The kids really love going to school,” said Musk about Ad Astra in that same interview, adding that “they actually think vacations are too long as they want to go back to school.” In 2020, Ad Astra evolved into the fully online school, Astra Nova, and its popular math enrichment spin-off, Synthesis.
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Due to pandemic-related issues, declining birthrates, inferior education, radical curricula, etc., government-run schools are bleeding students. Whereas traditional public schools (TPS) had 50.8 million students enrolled in 2019, the number had shrunk to 49.4 million one year later. The federal government now projects that public school enrollment will fall even further – to 47.3 million – by 2030, an almost 7% drop in 11 years.
Where are the kids going? The U.S. Census Bureau reports that families are moving to private schools and setting up home schools at a great rate. But what can parents do if they can’t home-school or afford a private school and there are no educational freedom laws on the books? Their option then would be charter schools, which are independently operated public schools of choice that aren’t shackled by the litany of rules and regs that TPS are encumbered with and, importantly, are rarely unionized.
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