The Broward County School Board on Tuesday unanimously voted to restrict students’ use of cellphones in an effort to keep them focused and off social media during school hours.
Although the school district said restrictions on cell phone use were already part of the Student Code of Conduct, there will now be some changes that will go into effect when classes start on August 12.
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Former President Donald Trump on Thursday outlined a plan to overhaul the American education system and restore parental rights.
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A California high school refers students to an LGBTQ+ nonprofit that helps minors get transgender surgery referrals, documents obtained by The Daily Signal reveal.
The high school in the Newport Mesa Unified School District in Southern California has scannable QR codes in its hallways that take students to a number of “LGBTQ+ Resources,” including the LGBTQ Center of Orange County’s website, according to photos shared with The Daily Signal.
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Student test scores are continuing to fall four years after schools moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a study released Tuesday by testing company Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA).
The paper found gaps in academic performance between today’s students and their pre-pandemic counterparts are widening, despite the record $190 billion in federal aid distributed to schools since the pandemic began. The findings — which were divulged from an analysis of test results from the 2023-24 school year for approximately 7.7 million students between the third and eighth grades — also come two years after experts had claimed a recovery in education was underway.
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Diversity, equity and inclusion and critical race theory topics now pervade U.S. Armed Forces educational trainings and programs, according to newly published research.
The recent report out of Arizona State University’s Center for American Institutions detailed the extensiveness of DEI training throughout the branches of the military and military academies, as well as highlighted an increasing budget for DEI training.
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In an ideal world, wrongdoers face swift and exact justice for their misdeeds. In reality, the legal system is costly. Justice comes at a steep price, one that I, and others whose works were allegedly plagiarized by Harvard’s Claudine Gay and others cannot afford.
After months of turmoil and legal back and forth, it is with a heavy heart that I announce that my intended copyright infringement case against former Harvard President Claudine Gay and the Harvard Corporation — a legal complaint that would have requested a jury trial — cannot be filed as planned in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. The inability to raise sufficient funds for a trial (a steep minimum of $100,000 to $250,000) and the knowledge that the losing party could be ordered to cover the legal expenses of the victors, to which no limits exist under federal copyright law, gave me pause.
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by David Huber In a perfect world, people like Alison Scott, a teacher in the Oklahoma-based Ardmore City Schools district would have the self-control not to post stupid stuff on social media after a U.S. presidential candidate is almost assassinated. The high school music teacher responded to a Facebook user’s…
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A federal appeals court issued a temporary halt on Thursday on President Joe Biden’s income-driven repayment program for student loans due to challenges to its legality.
The Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, which was introduced in 2023, seeks to provide new repayment methods for student loan borrowers, including lowering monthly payments based on income and minimizing interest payments. The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals halted the plan in its entirety in order to give the court time to issue a final ruling after also issuing a partial injunction in June.
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A medical internship program is under fire for allegedly racially discriminating against otherwise qualified applicants, requiring that applicants must “identify” as black or African American.
Do No Harm filed a complaint on behalf of a member on Thursday requesting the federal government investigate an internship offered by the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine (ARM). The anonymous member was qualified academically and met all other requirements but was rejected because of his race.
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Next month, the Huntsville School District in Arkansas will join the wave of public schools switching to a four-day week.
The shorter school week, which first emerged in a few rural areas decades ago, is now expanding into suburbs and smaller cities. At least 2,100 schools in half the states have embraced the three-day weekend mostly as an incentive to hire and keep teachers, prompting cheers of support from instructors, unions, and many families.
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On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) signed a controversial bill into law that would forbid schools from notifying parents if their children have decided to “transition” their gender.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, polling has suggested that the law is widely unpopular with voters nationwide as well as within California. A poll from Rasmussen in June of 2023 shows that over 60 percent of likely voters in California support schools informing the parents about a child’s desire to “transition.” A national poll by the Center Square in November saw two-thirds of respondents say that schools should let parents know.
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A college in Louisville has placed an instructor on unpaid leave after posting on social media he wished the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump succeeded.
“If you’re gonna shoot, man, don’t miss,” John James wrote in all caps on a post discovered Sunday by Libsoftiktok. The statement was made above a screenshot of a news story on the Saturday shooting during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania that left the former president and current Republican nominee injured after a bullet grazed his ear.
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The Florida Auditor General’s office has released two reports that detail significant issues and financial trends in the Sunshine State’s charter schools, charter technical career centers and district school boards.
There are 720 charter schools and charter technical career centers operating in Florida, with the majority in Miami-Dade and Broward counties. State law requires these schools to be annually audited by an independent certified public accountant.
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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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Every day millions of parents put their children under the care of public school teachers, administrators, and support staff. Their trust, however, is frequently broken by predators in authority in what appears to be the largest ongoing sexual abuse scandal in our nation’s history.
Given the roughly 50 million students in U.S. K-12 schools each year, the number of students who have been victims of sexual misconduct by school employees is probably in the millions each decade, according to multiple studies. Such numbers would far exceed the high-profile abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America.
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What does an institution of higher learning do when it has a “problematic” collection of paintings and sculptures?
Answer: It “decolonizes” them. In other words, it replaces “white settler” works with those by Indigenous/Native/First Americans.
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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology added more than 1,200 new administrative/support staff positions in less than a decade – including six “diversity, equity, and inclusion” assistant deans in one year, a College Fix analysis found.
Meanwhile, between 2013 and 2022, undergraduate student enrollment remained basically flat.
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Two years ago this month, the University of Pennsylvania law school stopped accusing a tenured professor of making up statistics about black student performance, which she called defamatory, after ignoring requests for the supposedly correct statistics going back four years.
Dean Ted Ruger still sought “major sanctions” against Amy Wax for “intentional and incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic actions and statements,” and disgraced ex-President Liz Magill approved a hearing board’s recommended one-year suspension, slashed pay and mandatory scarlet letter in her public appearances.
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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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Federal judge John Broomes ruled on the side of attorneys general in Kansas, Alaska, Utah, and Wyoming, claiming that Title IX was meant to protect biological women from discrimination in education.
A federal court in Kansas on Tuesday blocked the Biden administration’s Title IX regulations from taking effect in four states, becoming the latest court to stop the new controversial rules from taking effect in August.
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The Founding Fathers recognized that an educated citizenry was vital to the survival of our republic. Thomas Jefferson, for example, saw education as essential to giving every citizen the opportunity to participate meaningfully in a free society.
Writing in 1818, our third president described public education as “the means to give every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business … to express and preserve his own ideas … to improve his morals and faculties … to understand his duties, and to exercise his rights.”
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As we celebrate our independence on the Fourth of July, Americans would do well to reflect upon what’s necessary for a nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, to long endure.
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Wichita State University is closing its women’s studies department, one of the oldest in the country, due to continuously low student interest.
The Department of Women, Ethnicity, and Intersectional Studies will be dissolved and its degree program will be merged with the English Department, according to an action plan approved earlier this month by the Kansas Board of Regents.
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Faculty at public universities in nine states may have fewer speech protections than they assume following federal appeals court rulings against professors on the political right and left who were punished for perceived lack of collegiality – strong words short of harassment.
But a private university has egg on its face after taking seven months to allegedly clear a professor of wrongdoing for telling anti-Israel campus protesters they are “ignorant” and “Hamas are murderers,” despite having immediate access to both viral video and its own surveillance.
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The last time I was a member of an officially male group, I was 12 and in the Little League. After that, I shied away from them. There was a nearly all-male Catholic high school I earned a scholarship to, but I chose another school and another scholarship. There were still several prestigious all-male colleges to choose from, but I had no desire to go to those places. Princeton got me instead.
But as I look back and as I’ve grown more aware of what colleges used to be like, I wonder why we take for granted the superiority of having boys and girls, or young men and women, together everywhere and all the time. Shouldn’t there be at least some places that are otherwise? Here, one of the tenets of the progressive creed, that people’s sexual proclivities ought to be championed no matter what they are, is in flat contradiction with another one of the tenets, that all-male institutions are to be eliminated.
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It’s true. Sometimes homeschoolers do school in their pajamas.
But that wasn’t the norm in my home when I was growing up. Generally, my mother kept us to a set schedule. Piano practice was at 8:15 sharp. Math class started at 9:00. The other subjects fell into place around that. Often, we finished our work by lunchtime, after which my sister and I would go outside and play in the woods behind our house, read, draw, or work on some other personal hobby.
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Oklahoma is now requiring that all schools include teachings centered around the Bible in curriculums for grades five through 12.
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Obama-appointed federal judges blocked parts of the Biden administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan on Monday in response to Republican states’ lawsuits.
Judge John A. Ross of Missouri and Judge Daniel Crabtree of Kansas blocked parts of the administration’s SAVE plan, which was an income-driven repayment program intended to lower monthly costs for borrowers. The court rulings prohibit the Department of Education from further lowering payments or eliminating more debt through the program, Politico reported.
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The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that the approval of what would have been the nation’s first publicly-funded religious school was unconstitutional, according to court records.
Oklahoma’s Virtual Charter School Board voted to approve an application for a virtual religious charter school in June 2023, prompting state Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond to file a lawsuit in October to block the funding, calling it “an irreparable violation of our individual religious liberty” and “an unthinkable waste of our tax dollars.” The Oklahoma Supreme Court ultimately sided with Drummond on Tuesday, finding that “under Oklahoma law, a charter school is a public school” and that “as such, a charter school must be nonsectarian,” per court filings.
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A recent survey found that 3 in 10 college students or recent graduates had job offers rescinded as a result of their “pro-Palestine” activism.
Intelligent surveyed 672 students or recent college graduates who have engaged in anti-Israel activism and found that 29% of them had a job offer rescinded in the past six months and 55% believe there was bias against them in the hiring process because of their activism.
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Some of you may remember that four years ago this week I debated Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Bartholet who called for a “presumptive ban” on homeschooling. The online event was hosted by the Cato Institute and drew thousands of participants, including many homeschooling families who were incensed by Bartholet’s proposal.
Now, Scientific American is joining the crowd of busybodies eager to constrain a family’s right to raise and educate their children how they choose. “The federal government must develop basic standards for safety and quality of education in homeschooling across the country,” read a recent editorial in the magazine.
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A Catholic school’s ability to operate in accord with its faith is in jeopardy.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit heard oral arguments June 11 in St. Joseph Parish v. Nessel. The case involves St. Joseph Catholic School in Saint Johns, Michigan, which is asking the court to protect its ability to hire staff who share the same faith.
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Louisiana is set to become the first state to mandate the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms under a bill signed into law by Republican Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry on Wednesday, The Associated Press reported.
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America’s debt is growing faster than previously expected, largely due to actions taken by the Biden administration and recent legislation, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
The United States’ projected deficit is $1.9 trillion for the 2024 fiscal year, $400 billion higher than it was projected to be in February, the CBO announced Tuesday. CBO analysts increased their estimate due in large part to the foreign aid package signed by President Joe Biden in April and his administration’s efforts to reduce student loan balances.
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A new book confronts the longstanding problem of “anti-white racism.”
Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Jeremy Carl discussed his new book, “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart,” during a virtual event hosted by the think tank.
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A federal judge in Louisiana has temporarily blocked four more states from expanding the Biden administration’s new Title IX policy to protect LGBTQ+ students.
The Biden administration’s new Title IX policy outlined federal protections for LGBTQ+ students and victims of sexual assault while expanding the definition of sexual harassment for schools and universities. The new Title IX provisions collide with Louisiana’s “Women’s Safety and Protection Act” which requires individuals to use the bathroom based on their sex, prohibiting transgender people from using bathrooms and other close-quartered facilities corresponding with their gender identity, according to the court documents.
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Millions of Americans have woken up to the fact that their education system is rotten to the core. As elite universities are engulfed by antisemitic riots, their veil of prestige has been torn to shreds. It is by now clear to many that, in the words of Christopher Rufo, the radical left has conquered everything.
What, then, is to be done? Many, Rufo included, are doing their best to stem the tide of revolutionary ideology through direct political engagement. Their hard work is paying off. In recent months, universities are beginning to move away from mandatory diversity statements. This is just the beginning.
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The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is making climate-related demands in contract negotiations as the city’s students continue to struggle mightily in the classroom, according to E&E News.
The CTU will push the city to include initiatives like electric school buses, green jobs training programs for students and reducing emissions from buildings with solar panels and other retrofits, among other initiatives, according to E&E News. Those demands are being made while 2023 testing data shows that about 75% of Chicago’s public school students were unable to read at grade level and 83% of students were behind grade level proficiency in math, according to the Illinois Policy Institute.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a news conference in Hialeah on Monday to announce $1.25 billion for teacher salary increases.
DeSantis said the funds for teacher salary hikes are earmarked in the budget over the next five years and pointed out that Florida has ranked tops overall in education by U.S. News and World Report for the past two years.
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Florida International University’s civics center has made an international impact in its first four years of existence by bringing together politicians and private sector leaders to promote individual and economic freedom.
The Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom at the Miami university came about through efforts by Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state legislature to bolster Western democratic thought in higher education. In 2023, DeSantis signed additional legislation to boost civic education centers in the state’s public universities.
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A federal court ruled Wednesday that Colorado discriminated against Catholic preschools by refusing to allow them to participate in the state’s school voucher program over their faith.
St. Mary’s Catholic Parish and St. Bernadette’s Catholic Parish filed a lawsuit against the state in August 2023 after Colorado denied its application to the state’s universal preschool (UPK) program because the schools consider religious beliefs when deciding whether or not a student can attend the school. Judge John Kane Jr., a Jimmy Carter appointee, of the District Court of Colorado determined that the state had erred in allowing “faith-based providers” to receive exemptions in similar cases but not the preschool, according to the 101-page opinion.
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Ibram Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research is racist – according to the founder’s own definition.
The College Fix analyzed the remaining team at his Boston University center, which has shrunk since last year due to budgetary problems.
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It’s no secret that the government’s monopoly on education is in trouble. Across the country, public schools are emptying while parental choice is flourishing. Florida, perhaps the national leader in this movement, has four different private school choice programs: one education savings account (ESA), one voucher program, and two tax-credit scholarships.
One of the results of Florida’s success is that many of the state’s public schools are shutting down. Florida’s Broward County, the sixth largest school district in the country, housing some 320 K-12 schools, could see 42 of them shut down, including 32 elementary schools, eight middle schools, and two high schools.
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The Biden administration’s changes to Title IX will reverse 50 years of progress for female athletes by allowing biological men to keep competing in women’s sports, pro-women’s sports leaders said Friday at an Our Bodies, Our Sports coalition rally.
The event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania was one of the first stops on the coalition’s Take Back Title IX bus tour, which calls on America’s leaders to ensure equal protections for female athletes under the federal regulation.
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Indiana University is violating students’ First and 14th Amendment rights through its “far-reaching” bias reporting policy, a civil rights organization alleges.
Speech First filed a federal lawsuit against Indiana University on Wednesday arguing that the school is violating the rights of students by enacting a speech policy that “is designed solely to deter, discourage, and otherwise ‘prevent’ students from expressing disfavored views about the political and social issues of the day.” Under the policy, students can report others for “any conduct, speech, or expression, motivated in whole or in part by bias or prejudice meant to intimidate, demean, mock, degrade, marginalize, or threaten individuals or groups” on some aspect of their identity, like race or gender identity, according to Indiana University’s website.
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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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Paul Tice, senior fellow for the National Center for Energy Analytics, took the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal to criticize the climate change curriculum in New Jersey public schools.
The educational materials, Tice explained, are not just found in sections of science courses, but in all school subjects. Districts are encouraged to insert lessons on climate change into English language arts and mathematics. In foreign language classes, students discuss the impacts of climate change “on the target language of the world.”
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Another university diversity, equity, and inclusion administrator is facing allegations of plagiarism – but neither she nor her employer, the University of California at Los Angeles, has responded publicly to the report.
Natalie Perry, the leader of the Cultural North Star program at the UCLA School of Medicine, and UCLA did not answer multiple requests for comment from The College Fix since a recent investigation alleged she plagiarized large portions of her doctoral dissertation.
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The stories of pedophile teachers not being held accountable for their abominable crimes are endless. In an in-depth piece, reporter Matt Drange investigates the issue and what he finds is positively revolting.
A case in North Carolina is typical. In Durham County, a student at Neal Middle School said her chorus teacher, Troy Pickens, had groped her, only disclosing a few years later that he’d raped her. James Key, the school’s principal, didn’t open an investigation until the child’s mother got involved, and even then, according to a subsequent civil suit that settled out of court, the principal “failed to report the groping allegation to law enforcement or child protective services, as required by state law.” Instead, Key allowed Pickens to resign, paving the way for him to remain in the field.
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American tax dollars are funding an array of book projects covering topics like “trans reproduction” and the “neglected queer history” of homosexuality in post-colonial Ireland, federal records show.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) spends hundreds of thousands of tax dollars a year funding academics to write full-length books on a variety of subjects, according to grant records. While many of the books center on innocuous topics, like the history of criminal procedure in China or philosopher Immanuel Kant, others the NEH funded in 2023 and 2024 veer into left-wing topics.
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