Tag: education

State University of New York System Implements Mandatory Tutoring Program Because ‘Record Number’ of First Year Students Are Failing Math and Writing

The State University of New York (SUNY) is implementing a mandatory tutoring system because a record number of first year students are failing reading and math. This problem is widespread and not isolated to New York.

Part of this problem is due to what happened during Covid-19, when school systems across the country shut down for months and conducted classes via Zoom. Students everywhere fell behind and never caught up.

It is also due to the fact that so many schools have abandoned basic elements of education in favor of pushing woke garbage about social justice, race, and gender.

The College Fix reports:

SUNY institutes mandatory tutoring, extra class time due to ‘record’ number of first-years failing math, writing

Due to a “record” number of first-year failures in freshman writing and math courses, the State University of New York system now will require students to have weekly meetings with a one-on-one tutor, and will add additional time to classes in the latter category.

According to the Times Union, SUNY reported that a quarter of its freshmen failed the introductory math course, and 22 percent flunked English.

This fall at SUNY Albany, selected first-years will have to get tutored in writing for an hour each week, and for 90 minutes in math/science. “Hundreds” of high-performing students have been tapped to help with the effort.

Dean for Undergraduate Education JoAnne Malatesta said that the assisting students, who “did well” in the writing class, will “direct freshmen to the tutoring center and encourage them to go to the professor’s office hours.”

Some 375 student tutors also will hold “90-minute ‘supplemental instruction’ sessions” each week in math and science that freshmen are “expected” to attend.

Malatesta said similar sessions in the past have led to “significant gains” in academic performance.

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This Sex Robot Is Going To ‘Teach’ Your Kids IN SCHOOLS

A rural New York school district on the Seneca Nation reservation is set to become one of the first in the United States to place a lifelike humanoid robot in front of high school students.

Starting this fall, Salamanca High School will introduce “Sally,” an M-Series robot built by Realbotix, to assist in coding, robotics, and AI classes for 11th and 12th graders.

Sally comes with brown hair, silicone skin, a Western New York accent, upper-body movement, and facial expressions. She remains seated and cannot walk the room. Students will log in with unique identification codes so the machine can recognize them and pick up previous interactions.

The full package—robot plus the accompanying Optio AI tutor platform—cost the district $57,590, a discounted figure below the average New York teacher salary and well under the company’s listed starting price near $95,000.

“The Realbotix educational robot will never replace teachers, staff members, or meaningful human interaction,” the Salamanca City Central School District stated. Instead, they describe it as an instructional tool loaded only with district-approved curriculum, historical information about Salamanca, and content designed to encourage critical thinking rather than simply spit out answers.

The system reportedly operates offline with no internet connection, collects no personally identifiable information, records neither video nor audio, and transmits nothing back to the company. If asked something outside its knowledge base, it is programmed to reply “I don’t know.”

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Anti-ICE walkout exposes how school district ‘failed’ parents, risked student safety: ‘Broken my trust’

Internal emails, messages and memos from Arizona’s Flagstaff Unified School District (FUSD) reveal that staff allegedly breached security protocol and violated several school policies by facilitating a student walkout to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) earlier this year, according to America First Legal.

Hundreds of Flagstaff high school and middle school students walked out of class to protest ICE on Jan. 28. The protest came amid national controversy over the deaths of anti-ICE activists Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota. Immediately after the walkout, many parents, citing safety concerns, expressed outrage that they were not notified that their children had been allowed to leave school premises without their consent. One parent who said they had children under the age of 12 said the “district failed us as parents.”

Documents obtained by America First Legal, a conservative watchdog group, reveal that FUSD officials knew about the walkout days in advance and also coordinated with students. The documents, which were reviewed by Fox News Digital, were obtained by America First Legal through a lawsuit forcing FUSD to comply with its public records request for records related to the walkout.

Screenshots from a district staff text group show faculty coordinating during the walkout. One staff member texted, “We have 75 plus students staged outside of fhs [Flagstaff High School] getting ready to walk.” In the same message, the staff member wrote, “Looks like we have some members of the public joining.”

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Teachers’ Union Doubles Down On Crazy Leftist Policies Of Division

New NEA President Princess Moss is just what you would expect from the newly elected National Education Association President, a leftist idealogue who will continue the union’s slide to the left in support of indoctrination of our nation’s students into Marxism/Communism, gender ideology, and anti-family politics.

How do we know? We know because she, like former President Becky Pringle, tells us. Here is a quote from her acceptance speech at the recent NEA Convention. Moss is the current NEA Vice President and will take over as President September 1st, allowing Pringle to continue to prance around as if she is some kind of deity for just a bit longer. From the beginning of Moss’s speech:

“Together, we will build the power to defend public education, advance racial and social justice, and ensure every educator has the respect, resources, and voice they deserve,” new President Princess Moss said in announcing her win at the union’s Annual Meeting and Representative Assembly last week.

As you can see, there is no reference to academic achievement for children, parental rights, or American values in that announcement. It’s more of the same divisive rhetoric that has carried Pringle through her term, especially if you dig past the initial phrases.

The National EDUCATION Association has NOTHING to do with education, or kids, or even the rank-and-file teachers. In fact, less than 10 cents per dollar of member dues goes to educator advocacy and representation. The rest is salaries for six figure administrative salaries, payoffs to politicians, and millions into political action committees that don’t mirror the beliefs of many of their members. These facts have caused U.S. Representatives to introduce legislation to decertify the union.

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Education Secretary Spent £500,000 of Taxpayers’ Money Trying to Scrap University Free Speech Laws

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has run up a bill of more than £500,000 in taxpayers’ money attempting to block free speech protections for university academics. The High Court has ordered the Government to pay the Free Speech Union’s legal costs of £353,748 after it successfully resisted her bid to scrap the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. The Mail has the story:

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has spent more than £500,000 of taxpayers’ money trying to water down laws which protect free speech in universities, it was revealed last night.

Ms Phillipson embarked on the legal battle after trying to dilute Tory legislation which put a duty on universities and student unions to actively promote, as well as protect, free speech on campuses, describing it as a “Tory hate speech charter”.

A free speech watchdog allows universities to be fined up to 2% of their income for censoring academics.

The laws came after university staff were hounded out of their jobs for expressing their opinions.

They included Professor Kathleen Stock, who resigned from Sussex University in 2021 after harassment and protests by trans activists, saying she felt pressure to “self-censor” her work.

The philosophy lecturer, who believes single-sex spaces are necessary in places such as prisons and public toilets, was accused by students of making trans people feel “unsafe”.

Ms Phillipson’s move to block the laws was successfully opposed by the Free Speech Union (FSU), run by Tory peer Toby Young.

Now the High Court has ruled that the Government should pay the FSU’s costs of £353,748, which takes the total bill to more than £500,000 when its own legal costs are included.

Within weeks of Labour entering office in July 2024, Ms Phillipson declared that she would revoke the planned introduction of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which had been passed in 2023.

Internal documents, disclosed during the litigation, revealed that officials had been instructed before the election to have a statutory instrument ready to pause the Act “on ‘day one’”, and that the Secretary of State did “not wish to implement the Act, at least in full”.

But in January 2025, nine days before the case was due to be heard, Ms Phillipson capitulated and told Parliament that the majority of the Act’s provisions would be enacted after all.

At that point, the FSU offered to withdraw its claim in return for a fixed costs payment of £84,000.

The Government refused, offering instead a “drop hands” settlement under which the FSU, having won in substance, would recover nothing. Since then, the costs have spiralled as expensive KCs wrangled over the details.

Lord Young of Acton, general secretary of the FSU, said: “The significance of this judicial decision is that it confirms our view and the view of our lawyers that we won this case and the Education Secretary lost – costs are awarded to the winners, with the losers having to pay.”

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Racist ‘Hispanics Only’ Program At USC and Loyola Marymount University Draws Civil Rights Complaint

“A Hispanics-only program hosted at the University of Southern California and Loyola Marymount University has drawn a federal civil rights complaint.”

According to a report from The College Fix, a complaint has been filed with the Education Department for Civil Rights after Los Angeles universities promoted a scholarship program exclusively for Hispanics.

The complaint against this program was naturally due to the fact that “it is expressly limited to students who identify as being of Hispanic heritage.”

It should go without saying that this violates civil rights laws. If there must be special civil rights laws, how would this not be a violation of them?

This program, by definition, would amount to segregation based on race, something which would never be tolerated if done for White students.

“USC and LMU participation in the YLI program violates Title VI by discriminating on the basis of national origin. Moreover, this participation violates California’s own discrimination statutes and the nondiscrimination policies,” states the complaint, lodged June 29.”

“William Jacobson, president of the Equal Protection Project, told the New York Post that it’s “open discrimination, they don’t try to hide it.”

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The Israeli Spy Behind Prageru’s Plan To Rewrite American Education To Indoctrinate Children

PragerU is trying to take over American schools. The right-wing, pseudo-educational group is now an official educational partner in at least ten states, and blitzes children with highly questionable messaging on race, history, and politics. Even more concerning, PragerU is led by former Israeli spy, Marissa Streit, who has stated she uses the tactics and techniques honed by IDF military intelligence on the American people.

Streit’s company is involved in a big-money operation targeting children with neoconservative, pro-war, pro-business, pro-Israel messaging, attempting to indoctrinate them at their youngest and most impressionable age.

MintPress explores this increasingly powerful group, with ambitions to completely overhaul the American educational system.

Leave Our Kids Alone

You have probably seen a PragerU video. An estimated one-in-three Americans have. The billionaire-funded media machine is a powerful force on the American right, providing highly-produced conservative content attempting to push U.S. politics and society rightwards.

Recently, however, PragerU has set its sights on children, and is seeking to hijack the American education system. Since 2023, it has signed deals with ten states – Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah – to become an official education provider, supplying books, videos, and other content to schools across the United States. Students in New Hampshire, meanwhile, can earn credits by completing online PragerU courses. And with PragerU Español, it has plans to expand into Latin America as well.

Florida was the trailblazer in this phenomenon. As part of his Stop WOKE Act – a bill that sought to eradicate liberal ideology from public life – Governor Ron DeSantis partnered with the organization, identifying it as one that “aligned with the state’s revised civics and government standards.” PragerU now provides ultra-conservative “American values” messaging for use in grades K-12.

Florida’s post Stop WOKE Act curriculum now requires middle school teachers to instruct students on the benefits of slavery for black Americans, including that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

It has also rewritten the 1920 Ocoee Massacre – a pogrom that saw a white mob kill dozens of black residents and permanently ethnically cleanse the Florida town of its black population – as an “act of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

College students at Southeastern University in Lakeland, Florida, meanwhile, can earn extra credit by taking a PragerU history course. This, despite the fact that, despite its branding, PragerU is not an accredited educational institution, let alone a university.

Oklahoma, however, has gone even further. Last year, the state’s superintendent of education, Ryan Walters, launched a controversial teacher evaluation test developed by PragerU to vet teachers for their ideology and filter out applicants considered insufficiently conservative. The plan even withheld teaching certificates from educators from what Walters described as “woke states.” Walters left his position to head the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a conservative pressure group opposed to teachers unions.

Free Healthcare is Slavery, But Actual Slavery is A-OK

The PragerU content being shown to American schoolchildren contains a number of highly controversial viewpoints presented as common sense. Most “lessons” are presented in cartoon format, with one about the founding of America including an animated Christopher Columbus stating that slavery was “no big deal.” “Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world,” he said; “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don’t see the problem.” Further justifying the enslavement and genocide of two continents, Columbus tells those watching that, “The place I discovered was beautiful, but it wasn’t exactly a paradise of civilization, and the native people were far from peaceful.”

Another video lesson grossly distorts the views of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, with an animated Douglas justifying slavery in America, stating that “the founding fathers made a compromise [supporting slavery] to achieve something great: the making of the United States.”

PragerU Kids videos also cover more contemporary issues. One video, titled “Los Angeles: Mateo Backs the Blue,” deals with the murder of George Floyd, whom the narrator describes as a “black man who resisted arrest.” The video claims that “violent protests” and “looting” were sparked by “false claims” of racist policing spread by unnamed “activists.” Mateo, a Los Angeles child, is aghast by protestors “threatening police,” or, as the video calls them, “protectors,” and decides to stand firmly in solidarity with the Blue Lives Matter movement.

Another educational resource approved for use in schools is a lecture called “Is Fascism Right or Left?” by controversial conspiracist Dinesh D’Souza, in which he insists that, “Fascism bears a deep kinship to the ideology of today’s left.” In 2014, D’Souza pled guilty for violating federal campaign financing laws.

Unsurprisingly for a conservative movement funded by fracking billionaires, PragerU also instructs children to reject the overwhelming consensus on climate change. However, it takes it to absurd levels, comparing the supposed oppression of climate skeptics to the living in Warsaw Ghetto, where upwards of 300,000 Jewish people were killed by the Nazis.

In “Poland: Ania’s Energy Crisis,” the titular character is fed propaganda at school about the disastrous impact of human-made climate change, only to have her eyes opened by her conservative parents. Ania is ostracized by the other children for merely expressing her concerns. Luckily, her grandfather Jakub gives her the strength to continue, by telling her about the Warsaw Uprising. “Through her family’s stories, Ania is realizing that fighting oppression is risky, and that it always takes courage,” viewers are told.

On India, American children are told that the country benefitted greatly from British imperialism, who “spread the influence of Christianity and Western values through India” and “discouraged or even outlawed harmful traditions,” and “gave” India its independence in 1947. “Western influence helped transform the country in many positive ways, but some ancient customs are harder to change than others,” the video concludes, framing India’s problems as entirely down to their own backward culture, rather than centuries of direct rule and oppression.

Another video lambasts Canada’s free healthcare system and highlights the supposed dangers of socialized medicine, while extolling the for-profit privatized American system, despite it being by far the most expensive, comparatively, and having the worst outcomes of any developed country, according to international studies.

PragerU also sets its targets on Cuba, China, Venezuela, and North Korea as well, publishing videos demonizing those countries as authoritarian nightmare regimes in need of U.S. intervention.

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The Death of Reading

Picture it. You’re lucky enough to live in the late 19th century. Van Gogh is wandering around the Netherlands painting haystacks and stars. Spiritualism is everywhere: séances, mediums, table-turning, and seers who communicate with the dead. Some dude named PT Barnum is criss-crossing America with this crazy melange of traveling circus and sly hoaxes. There are side shows and peep shows, theatrical extravaganzas in every town. Ragtime is just taking hold.

And for the first time in the history of man, books are available to the everyone with a few ha’penneys to rub together. The print industry has exploded, becoming more systematized, and better at shipping. Suddenly, even ordinary people can read – in their parlors, at saloons and libraries, and after dinner, once the harpsichord recital is done. Novels are everywhere: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot. In France, Victor Hugo. The Russians? They’re producing metric tons of pages. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. People are inhaling these stories, 900 pages at a time.

Academics refer to this period as the “reading revolution.” Reading was as much an indulgence as carnivals and music halls. People didn’t HAVE to read, they GOT to read. They did it ostentatiously and with zeal. And this habit lasted, in one form or another, until recently when reading for enjoyment started to tank. Blame the Internet and social media and our fractured attention span. Blame Oprah, who in her quest to ‘get people reading’ promoted one title and focused every English-speaking woman’s attention on it, to the exclusion of every other book on the planet. 

But the real culprit, if you ask me, is politics. When identity and partisanship become your defining feature, when you adhere to rigid ideas and philosophies – and fear anything that challenges your beliefs – reading becomes dangerous. All those random ideas floating around? Problems that have no easy answers? Bah! Who needs that?

So here’s where we are: reading for enjoyment has fallen by 40% in the past 20 years. And despite bullshit feel-good essays about how we’re not really reading less, it just seems that way – and online influencers who hawk the classics without a single specific detail about plot, theme, or character – literacy in every single cohort is falling off a cliff. Publishing is becoming narrower, more ideological, and preachy. The books that face out in shop windows reinforce pat answers instead of asking hard questions. And the world seems smaller, because it is.

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Stop Praising All Our ‘Wonderful’ Teachers

As a teacher for over two decades, I’m allowed to criticize people who regularly extol all the wonderful teachers in our country. In any cohort numbering over five million, there are obviously many excellent teachers, but as a whole, educators are one of the nation’s least admirable professional cohorts and contain numerous individuals who shouldn’t be near children at all.

Thomas Sowell has long noted that education majors represent the dregs of college and post-graduate applicants. One study found that only 7% of high school seniors with SAT scores in the top quintile chose education as a major, whereas more than half of those in the lowest quintile went into education. What’s true of students is also true about their instructors and the quality of classes taught by these “doctors” who rank at the bottom of the academic totem pole in terms of collegial respect. Little wonder that Jill Biden’s “doctorate” degree (Ed.D.) was in education. Her so-called dissertation was accurately described in a 2020 Wall Street Journal opinion column as emitting “so much noxious methane the EPA should regulate it.”

Given the paucity of significant content compared to disciplines like history or science, there is always the temptation, as Sowell again notes, to promote educational fads. Some years ago, for example, the look-say method of reading replaced a long-proven technique, phonics, doubtless to create some new-and-improved product. As if depriving generations of children the ability to read effectively weren’t bad enough, schools of education (along with their 10 to 1 leftist scholastic mentors) also employ curricula designed to indoctrinate kids in perverse ideologies that have proliferated for decades at universities where former terrorists like Distinguished Professor of Education Bill Ayers and Northwestern Law’s Bernadine Dohrn found cushy employment.

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Woke activists push for ‘Black English’ to be taught in Democrat state’s preschools to combat ‘harmful language hierarchies’

California activists are calling for the state’s preschools to legitimize the use of Black English in the classroom.

Supporters say teaching the dialect, also known as African American English (AAE) or African American Vernacular English (AAVE), will help ‘combat harmful language hierarchies.’

The Black Californians United for Early Care & Education group is part of a movement advocating for Black English to be recognized as a legitimate, rule-based language in preschool classrooms on par with other languages.

Co-founder Dr Ashley Williams told PBS the movement is personal because she grew up being told by her family that the way she spoke at home wasn’t acceptable at school.

Williams says she felt ashamed and embarrassed by this and is spearheading the movement because she doesn’t want her two-year-old son to grow up with the same experience. 

‘I don’t want my son to walk into any room and feel like his voice is not valued or his perspective can’t be heard because he’s not saying it in one way or the other,’ she told the outlet. 

The advocacy group – known as BlackECE – has trained educators to support Black English speakers in the same way they support dual language learners. 

The group uses resources like the Black English Knowledge Brief and webinar series, which helps educators, caregivers, and school leaders better understand Black English, its roots.

It also offers ways to create classrooms that affirm children’s language and identity.  

It comes after the Golden State introduced a plan in 2020 to expand early dual-language learning and support bilingual children.

BlackECE argues that Black English should also be included as part of the scheme.

‘We talk about multilinguals, but we don’t include Black children who may be African-American English speakers,’ Xigrid Soto-Boykin, director of the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University, said.

‘We completely miss this subgroup of children that could also benefit from their language backgrounds to be sustained, but also to be leveraged for their own learning.’

According to 2020 research published by the National Library of Medicine, about 20 percent of US children and 44 percent of California children ages five to 17 are bilingual. 

As of 2023, 96 percent of Black Americans speak English fluently.

Around 88 percent speak only English, with the remaining respondents using another language at home and speaking English very well, according to Pew Research.

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