Over 14,000 school boards, with about 100,000 members, set the course for instruction in classrooms across the country. To understand the views of parents and school board members in debates about K-12 content and policy, The Heritage Foundation commissioned a nationally representative survey.
On anything to do with K-12 education, the two big teachers unions own the Democratic Party, in Vermont and in Congress. They hate charter schools, which are almost all non-union.
A group of Vermont parents are suing the state and local school districts over unequal access to education under the state’s 150-year-old Town Tuitioning system.
With few exceptions, union officials have fought school reopenings tooth and nail. Their fierce resistance would be reasonable if COVID-19 posted a major risk to schoolchildren or to educators themselves. But the fact is that the risk to kids is very low.
Teachers unions largely won’t explain why they want to keep public education virtual, even though studies have suggested that schools aren’t coronavirus super-spreaders as originally expected and that students’ performance have suffered in remote environments.
More than half of red light-ranked schools are located in the District of Columbia and seven states: Alaska, Delaware, Illinois, Oregon, South Carolina, Vermont, and Wyoming.
Schools are adding the Pulitzer prize-winning but factually challenged “1619 Project,” to their curriculum. This is only the tip of the iceberg. Los Angeles’ elite Harvard-Westlake School recently announced that it will start teaching 11th grade history from a “critical race theory perspective.”
The HRC essentially is calling for faith-based education — from K-12 schools to colleges and universities — to adopt the campaign’s positions on gender identity, same-sex marriage, transgender transitioning, and more, or fail to be accredited.
It wasn’t long ago that Dartmouth College, an Ivy League institution nestled in Hanover, N.H., was praised for being one of the nation’s top colleges for free speech. Dartmouth no longer holds that distinction.
Education budgets also generally are approved routinely. This is the year that this habit absolutely must change. Vermont’s economy is in dire straits. The local education budgets must be scrutinized and challenged before they are approved.
A new study is out telling schools what they should do if they expect to stay open while more cases of the coronavirus are being reported. Among its conclusions is kids must substantially reduce the number of physical close encounters with their peers.