Tag: education

Reconciliation propaganda in high school exposed by BC teen

A 16-year-old B.C. high school student says he is being denied the opportunity to return to class unless he removes his YouTube video called “Lies and Reconciliation,” which exposed some of the propaganda that was pushed on students during his school’s Truth and Reconciliation Day programming.

Isaac Simpson, a Grade 11 student enrolled in a Lower Mainland school’s film and television program, decided to put his filmmaking skills to use after growing frustrated with what he was being taught about Canada’s history, often unbeknownst to parents.

From a masked Black Lives Matter advocate telling students about truth, to another virtual speaker telling the youth to embrace discussions of “land back,” to a disturbing exaggerated illustration depicting Catholic nuns and an RCMP officer forcibly tearing Indigenous children from their mothers, Simpson’s video gives parents a rare look inside the classroom.

“I got really sick of all the indoctrination being pushed down students’ throats,” Simpson told me. “They were just telling you what to think, not how to think.”

But his decision to expose the material came at a cost.

After initially being suspended for what the school described as a period of “pause and reflection,” Simpson and his parents attended a meeting with school officials that the teen likened to an interrogation.

Simpson documented that experience in a second video posted to his YouTube channel, Isaac Simpson’s Flying Circus. Both videos have since been gaining attention online.

Now, Simpson says he has been told he cannot return to school unless the videos come down. He refuses to comply.

“I’m not taking it down because, you know, I stand by what I said,” Simpson explained.

I caught up with the young filmmaker to find out why it was important for him to expose what’s happening in his public school despite the risk.

For Simpson, the issue is bigger than his suspension. Currently, “parents have no way of figuring out what is being taught in schools,” he said.

I also spoke with his mother, former Global News director and current B.C. political commentator Anita Krishna, about the school’s response and what comes next.

Keep reading

China used military-linked kindergarten to cultivate ties with Mitch McConnell’s wife and in-laws

A child soldier lies dead in a marsh from starvation.

The Red Army pauses to mourn the little martyr for a moment before the Long March moves on — and the kindergarten play ends.

It is graduation day in Shanghai and Elaine Chao is in attendance.

The date is June 14, 2026 and in several hours Chao’s husband, Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, will be rushed to a hospital on the other side of the globe.

Chao has been returning to this Shanghai kindergarten for decades, where she has repeatedly met with officials from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and an influence and intelligence arm called the United Front Work Department (UFWD), according to Daily Caller News Foundation translations of dozens of Chinese government and state-media reports.

Beijing uses the UFWD to steer foreign policy and “gain access to advanced foreign technology,” according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

Named in honor of Chao’s grandfather, the kindergarten is being used by a United Front arm as a stage to cultivate ties with Chao, documents show.

Chao — whose Chinese name is Zhao Xiaolan — has received at least four Chinese government positions since 2008, including a Wuhan municipal advisory post as well as roles within the China Overseas Friendship Association (COFA) and the All-China Federation Of Returned Overseas Chinese (ACFROC) — both of which are UFWD arms, the DCNF recently reported. Chao’s three UFWD arm positions partially overlapped with her tenure as President George W. Bush’s Department of Labor secretary and/or her service as Department of Transportation secretary during President Donald Trump’s first term.

Chao’s spokesperson, Patrick O’Connor, denied she “held a position with a foreign government” and told the DCNF “[w]e are not aware she has met with representatives of UFWD entities” after being sent photos showing Chao meeting with CCP and UFWD officials.

“Such a suggestion disregards her nearly five decades of faithful service to the United States and is both unfounded and deeply insulting, hurtful and racist,” O’Connor added.

“Education has always been a primary focus for the family and its philanthropy. The secretary regularly visits schools in the U.S. and abroad,” O’Connor said in response to questions about why Chao had participated in events at the Shanghai kindergarten that variously featured Chinese military propaganda, CCP and UFWD officials. “This kindergarten is named after Dr. Chao’s father, and he has supported it for nearly four decades. The secretary was there to honor her father’s connection to the school, which is recognized as one of the best kindergartens in the region.”

Chao’s relationship with CCP and UFWD-affiliated organizations underscores how China intends to use political influence operations and information warfare to defeat the U.S. “without ever firing a shot,” Brandon Weichert, a geopolitical analyst and author of The Weichert Brief, told the DCNF.

“After more than 40 years of such operations, which have even influenced educational institutions in the U.S., it is clear that the United States has been completely outmaneuvered and overrun by the Chinese narrative,” Weichert said. “That even people like the wife of former Republican Party Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a former cabinet member herself, has become the face of a quiet campaign to influence the hearts and minds shows you how prolific — and profligate — the Chinese campaign has been.”

“We are on the slow, but steady path of being absorbed in China’s new empire without so much as any understanding that this is underway,” Weichert warned.

Keep reading

Yes, The Public Education System Is Broken

I have been in education for a long time. My first teaching job came two weeks after my younger nephew was born. His birthday is next week, and he’ll be 29. Take out the five years when I was working in retail and going to graduate school, and I’ve been a teacher for 24 years. There is not enough money in the world to tempt me back into public education. I’d rather stay poor, thank you. I keep hearing about a teacher shortage. That’s incorrect. There’s not a teacher shortage; there’s a people willing to be treated like dirt shortage. Why? How did public education come to this sad state? Jonathan Turley’s opinion piece in The Hill speaks to the problem and nails it right to the wall.

His opinion piece titled “The Blue-State Model for Education has Failed, and the Public has Caught On” states early on that one of the reasons the public schools have gone down the drain is because of the teachers’ unions. Early in the article, Turley states, “New polling shows that K-12 education has now reached a record low in the number of people who are even “somewhat satisfied” with the state of education in the U.S.” He then talks about the “education cartel,” a self-sustaining, self-perpetuating alliance between unions and politicians. The cartel has rendered families and students irrelevant.

How is that possible? people ask. Without the students, there is no school system. It doesn’t matter to the cartel. As long as the money keeps coming, which it does through dues, the cartel continues to operate. Personally, I have very little experience with the teachers’ unions. I joined the American Federation of Teachers briefly so I could get some legal help regarding the principal at the high school where I taught. I was a second-year teacher, and he had determined that I needed to go. He was black, and I was white. The AFT pointed me to the union steward at my high school, a government teacher who was also one of the basketball coaches. He told me that there was nothing the principal could do to force me from the building. I had to leave on my own. I’m a stubborn soul, so I was determined that the principal was going to leave first. He did, two years later.

Was the advice I got worth the annual membership? Absolutely. But that was twenty years ago. I dropped my membership the next year. Today, I wouldn’t join any teachers’ union because at their very core, they are about representing the teachers, not the students. The unions protect every teacher, even the teachers who have no business being anywhere near a classroom. In the states where teachers are required to join a union, the power is tenfold over the states that give teachers a choice, the right-to-work states.

In states where union membership is required, even if the teacher is able to quit the union, the union will still take a deduction from the teacher’s paycheck unless the teacher stands up and says “No.” In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court in Janus vs. AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) said that taking dues from non-union members was a violation of the First Amendment. This had an effect on union membership, which dropped by 10% after the ruling. However, the unions are not letting the decision slow them down. One year after the Janus ruling, a full 52% of teachers surveyed did not know they could leave the union without paying a fee. We are now eight years after the Janus decision, and the deep blue Democrat states with powerful teachers’ unions are working to make it easy to join a union but very hard to leave.

Aren’t unions supposed to protect workers and allow them to negotiate on a level playing field with their bosses? During the time of the Robber Barons in the early 1900s, yes. Today, most unions serve no purpose other than to enrich their heads. Both the head of the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) make six figures. The head of the Chicago Teachers Union makes six figures. Their salaries come from dues. Fewer dues-paying members, lower salaries. If the unions actually promoted better teaching and better practices, I would have no problem with them, but they don’t. The problem? Money. As long as the money keeps flowing to the unions, they can do whatever they want.

Keep reading

Education Department Calls For Transparency And Tolerance… Teacher Unions Cry Foul

The decline of higher education into an ideological echo chamber has been widely discussed on this and other sites. Polls show record lows in the public trust in our universities and colleges as revenues decline and closures increase. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon responded to this meltdown with a common-sense call for greater transparency and tolerance.

The response from teacher unions has been nothing short of hysteria, led by Randi Weingarten at the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and Todd Wolfson at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) – two of the most polarizing and political figures in teaching.

Secretary McMahon released a policy statement titled “National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards.” I encourage you to read it. Few Americans would disagree with the call for universities to post policies on how they can achieve greater intellectual diversity and openness in both admissions and hiring.

Not surprisingly, the AFT and AAUP went into a full cardiac arrest at the notion that universities would adopt such policies, let alone work to restore integrity and balance to higher education.

In a public letter, they denounced the policy as “galling.” The letter was a telling moment from the two organizations most responsible for the politicization of education.

The AFT and AAUP merged not long ago, destroying the AAUP’s traditional role as a neutral advocate for academic freedom. Under Wolfson, the organization has become blatantly political, even abandoning its long apolitical stance and issuing its first political endorsement this year. It was for radical Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

I recently debated Todd Wolfson, President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), over the loss of institutional neutrality in higher education. In the debate, I raised AAUP’s own abandonment of neutrality principles, which Wolfson acknowledged. While the viewers overwhelmingly supported a return to neutrality principles, Wolfson was undeterred.

The alliance with AFT and Weingarten is crushingly predictable. Weingarten personifies what I have called the “education cartel,” where teacher unions receive massive contracts and pension agreements from Democratic allies and then turn around and send massive political contributions to those same allies. The losers in this symbiotic relationship are of course the students and their families.

Weingarten is “credited” with turning the teachers’ union into an extension of the Democratic Party, often appearing at political rallies with her signature high-volume screeds:

Keep reading

Obama Judge Tanya Chutkan Blocks Trump Education Department From Naming Foreign Donors Who Dumped Billions Into Harvard, Columbia, and Other Elite Campuses

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from publicly releasing the names of foreign donors and contract counterparties tied to some of America’s most prominent universities.

DC US District Judge Tanya Chutkan, the Obama appointee who presided over the federal election case against President Trump, issued a temporary restraining order barring the Department of Education from releasing a list of foreign donors tied to as much as $5.2 billion in gifts and contracts reported by the schools since 2020.

The Department of Education announced in February that universities disclosed more than $5.2 billion in reportable foreign gifts and contracts during 2025 alone, involving more than 8,300 transactions. The agency said universities have reported a cumulative $67.6 billion in foreign funding since Section 117 was added to federal law in 1986.

Section 117 of the Higher Education Act already requires schools that take federal money to report foreign gifts and contracts of $250,000 or more.

The department began collecting individual donor names in 2020, during President Trump’s first term, while telling the schools the names would stay confidential.

In June 2026, the department reversed course. It has already published 92 “counterparties of concern.” Friday was supposed to be the day the rest of the list went public.

According to the New York Post, Chutkan ruled that disclosure of the information could “constitute irreparable harm.”

Keep reading

Protests Explode As France Arrests 625 Schoolchildren

As high-school students all over France are protesting the lack of teachers, crowded classes, long school days and wretched conditions in their schools, the French authorities have detained 625 people. Most of them were minors and were detained the day before in 356 schools throughout France.

The protests, which began last week in Paris, have been characterized by “an escalation of violence” including “projectiles, attempted arson and other forms of urban violence” against police, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said on Wednesday. In total, 83 police officers and gendarmes were injured, said the minister. Education Minister Édouard Geffray said that 119 students and staff members were injured by protesters since the start of the unrest, reported Reuters.

According to the education minister,Édouard Geffray, most of the injured staff were principals or teachers who were attacked as they tried to put a stop to the disturbances at their schools. Geffray claimed that “agitators” were “moving from school to school”. The students’ union, Unity for High School Students, a union of high school students, said that the disturbances were caused by a lack of teachers and other staff at schools, as well as by the poor conditions at many of them, including dilapidated buildings and overcrowded classes. A 16-year-old student in Paris told AFP that the education system was “completely broken” and that he and his friends were fed up with being forced to attend classes of 34 or more and with the overworked teachers who tried to teach them, added BBC.

In Marseille this morning a headteacher was attacked with petrol at Victor Hugo high school and seriously injured, the regional authorities said. Seven others including the school’s deputy head, its head of administration and four other managers were also attacked inside the school with petrol. At Saint-Exupéry high school hundreds of young people surrounded a fire truck called to the scene of a blaze and drove the firefighters out. Later a school fire was reported in Nantes. Meanwhile school and public transport have been attacked in Marseille with bus, tram and metro services suspended throughout the city because of damage to vehicles and attacks on drivers. French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has called an interministerial crisis meeting at Matignon this evening to deal with the crisis. All ministers will be expected to cancel their travel plans for the night so that they can be with their regional prefects.

Keep reading

REVEALED: Inside the Plan to Build ‘Trans Schools’ and Spread Their Lessons Nationwide

ANew York education group is planning a trans middle school—and wants its approach to reach classrooms far beyond New York.

Trans Formative Schools spells out its ambition:

“Eventually, we aspire to support trans teachers to launch trans schools around the country and the world.”

Its plans extend to teachers already working in other schools. The organization proposes national educator training and free classroom materials combining conventional academic subjects with sex education and activism.

It already operates a free afterschool program welcoming students ages nine to fifteen. Its advertised activities include “Activism/Transing School.” And this September, a philanthropic fund backed by MacKenzie Scott named the organization among its latest grant recipients.

The full middle school remains a proposal. The existing afterschool, published curriculum plans and new funding reveal how the organization wants to build toward it.

A middle school built around activism

The group’s school vision calls for teaching “transformational resistance” and empowering students to challenge racism, ableism, transphobia and what it describes as “other white supremacist systems.”

Its 2026–27 afterschool program operates at NYC Heritage of Pride in Manhattan. Alongside engineering, coding, creative writing and arts activities, it advertises queer media, student activism and exploration of identity. The program is open to all students in its age range.

Keep reading

AOC Pushes ‘Free’ College as Only Way to Rein in Runaway Cost of College Tuition

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushed the idea of ‘free’ college during a recent event at Cornell University, saying that this is the only way to rein in the ridiculous cost of tuition these days.

It is worth mentioning that this event was called ‘Students vs. Billionaires Town Hall’ so even the name of the event sets up an adversarial relationship between students and wealthy people. The message is clear. Rich people are the bad guys.

It’s also important to point out that there is no such thing as ‘free’ college. Someone is going to pay for it, usually taxpayers.

Breitbart News reports:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) suggested “tuition-free public colleges and universities” as part of an effort to “rein in” the increased costs at private institutions.

While speaking at a “Students vs. Billionaires Town Hall” event on Sunday, hosted by the More Perfect Union, Ocasio-Cortez was asked what her team and the Democratic Party are “doing to ensure that middle and low-income families can continue to afford a quality, higher education.” The question came as Cornell University “recently broke $100,000 a year for tuition.”

Ocasio-Cortez responded by expressing shock at the tuition number, stating that it was “far more than what many households make in a year in this country.”

The congresswoman explained that what a lot of colleges and universities “do with their funds is more of a real estate investment strategy, than an educational strategy.” Ocasio-Cortez continued to state that colleges and universities put a lot of the funds toward “new buildings, and facilities that are often marketed as luxury,” while the adjunct faculty is “barely paid a living wage” and the quality of education is going downhill.

Keep reading

Trump Junks Biden’s Title IX Rules, Now Defines Sex by Biology

The Department of Education said Monday it will formally remove the Biden administration’s Title IX regulations and restore rules issued during President Donald Trump’s first term.

The change takes effect Tuesday. Under the final rule issued Monday, the Education Department’s anti-discrimination policy will recognize sex as male or female at birth. It formally removes Biden-era regulations that extended protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity to students and employees at federally funded schools.

The 2024 rules also forced schools to use transgender students’ pronouns and changed how schools handle harassment complaints. A federal court struck down the rules in January 2025.

The Education Department then told schools it would enforce the 2020 rules. Monday’s action puts that change into the published federal regulations; schools have already been operating under the earlier rules.

The department said the last lawsuits over the Biden rules were dismissed in August, clearing the way for it to formally remove them. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the move would make the written regulations match the court rulings and the rules her department has been enforcing since Trump returned to office:

Today’s rulemaking clears the Biden Administration’s illegal rewrite of Title IX from the Code of Federal Regulations and restores the commonsense language promulgated in the first Trump Administration, which we have been enforcing since the first days of the Administration. Thanks to today’s action, the published Title IX regulations faithfully reflects court orders and Congressional intent—reducing confusion for parents, students, and educational institutions. We will continue to relentlessly champion equal opportunity for all Americans and hold accountable any school or college that violates the rights, privacy, or athletic opportunities of our women and girls.

The rule follows a 2025 executive order from Trump directing federal agencies to recognize only male and female as sexes and apply that definition when enforcing laws against sex discrimination.

Keep reading

Woke Grad School Teacher Programs Help Explain Why The Kids Can’t Read

The New York Times featured an in-depth essay from writer Nikole Hannah-Jones last week about the lamentable state of elementary and secondary education in the United States. The essay’s contents deserve (and are receiving) much criticism, thanks in part to Hannah-Jones sacrificing her daughter’s educational outcomes on the altar of wokeness and racism. But moral failings aside, the “1619 Project” author shines a spotlight on the failures plaguing American students not just in inner cities but across the map.

The recent release of results from last year’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests confirms on a macro level what Hannah-Jones described at length from a micro perspective. The international test of 15-year-olds showed that American youths continue to lag behind those in many other peer nations — which might have something to do with the woke ideology pervading the schools that educate the next generation of teachers.

Plummeting Reading Scores 

The PISA results brought discouraging news regarding the global competitiveness of American students. The Wall Street Journal noted that since 2018, “math scores in China have improved by an impressive 21 points (equivalent to roughly one year of learning) while those in the U.S. have fallen by 15 (three quarters of a year of learning).” And whereas more than half (54 percent) of students in the four Chinese cities tested qualified as “top performers,” fewer than 1 in 10 (only 8 percent) American students did. This is not a positive development given the importance of engineering and computer science in the global economy.

If anything, the PISA reading test results proved even more worrisome. Americans’ reading scores plunged by 14 points since the last round of tests in 2022, and they now sit near their lowest point this century.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which organizes the PISA tests, noted that reading scores have declined generally since 2012. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the blame may point in the direction of smartphones and social media shortening attention spans. The OECD notes that “the share of ‘hasty readers’ — students who rush through texts and give quick but incorrect answers — almost doubled between 2018 and 2025.”

Education Schools’ Woke Obsession

But in the United States at least, another factor may help to explain students’ poor academic performance. A separate paper by researchers at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) illustrated the ideological obsessions within graduate schools of education, which train the next generation of teachers going into American classrooms.

The AEI study examined course reading materials and syllabi for master’s programs at 10 public graduate schools of education. As the paper notes, because many school districts pay higher wages to teachers with master’s degrees, these graduate schools have a ready-built pipeline of potential students.

Consider the titles of just some of the course readings in one school’s curriculum:

  • “Is an Antiracist and Decolonizing Applied Linguistics Possible?” 
  • “Theorizing Linguistic Racisms from a Language Ideological Perspective” 
  • “Writing, Rioting, and Righting Como Negra: A Testimonio of Black Latinx Erasure in Bilingual Education”
  • “Black Languaging [sic] as Anti-Racist Pedagogy in the World Language Classroom”
  • “World Languages for Black Linguistic Reparations”
  • “Toward an Anti-Racist Linguistic Anthropology: An Indigenous Response to White Supremacy.”

Note that these are all titles from syllabi at the University of Texas, a publicly funded institution in a purportedly conservative state.

Keep reading