Tag: education

Teachers Unions Fund Leftist Causes While Students Fail Math, Reading

As union-controlled public schools in big cities continue failing to educate kids, a new report shows that the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions have contributed almost $50 million to far-left interest groups since 2022.

When kids headed back to school nationwide last week, the Defending Education website reported that the National Education Association (NEA) and American Teachers Federation (AFT) is more interested in promoting crazy causes than educating kids.

Meanwhile, during the same time, multiple reports showed that urban students are not proficient in basic subjects such as math and reading.

As urban kids languish in schools with barely literate teachers, AFT and NEA poured money into a who’s who of leftist kookery.

In the past three years, the two anti-Christian, anti-American unions “have given out a combined $43,524,123 in funding to leftwing and far-left groups,” Defending Education reported.

Some organizations receiving funds include MoveOn.org, PEN America, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Trevor Project, and a handful of state and federal leftwing Political Action Committees (PACs). For example, the two unions gave a combined $9,300,000 to For Our Future Action Fund, a leftwing political action committee. Additionally, the NEA gave the State Engagement Fund $9,500,000 over the same period.

AFT contributed $14,747,625 to organized leftism, while the NEA pumped in almost twice that much with $28,776,500.

AFT shoveled $100,000 each into the Color of Change PAC; National Action Network; the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation; and $200,000 into the Center for American Progress.

The Democratic Governors Association collected $600,000.

NEA delivered $106,146 to the Alliance for Justice; $500,000 to the Center for American Progress; and $75,000 to the Tides Center, a “progressive incubator” tightly linked to left-wing billionaire George Soros.

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Trump’s Department of Education CONFIRMS Biden Regime WEAPONIZED the Agency Against Christians

A new report confirms what millions of Americans had already known for years: Joe Biden’s Department of Education was weaponized against Christians, unleashing the full weight of the federal government to punish people of faith.

The findings come from the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, created under President Donald Trump and chaired by Attorney General Pam Bondi.

According to the report obtained by Fox News, the Biden administration engaged in “numerous instances” of anti-Christian bias that went far beyond policy disagreements and into outright persecution.

“The Task Force makes this commitment: the federal government will never again be permitted to turn its power against people of faith,” the report reads.

“Under President Trump and Attorney General Bondi’s leadership, in partnership with all members of this Task Force, the rule of law will be enforced with vigor, and every religion will be treated with equality in both policy and action.

“The days of anti-Christian bias in the federal government are over. Faith is not a liability in America—it is a liberty,” the report added.

The Department of Education (DOE) tried to impose record-breaking fines on some of America’s largest Christian universities:

The report also documents how Biden’s DOE created a “book ban coordinator,” a bureaucratic hatchet job designed to target school boards and parents who dared object to sexually explicit or age-inappropriate material being forced on their children.

In other words, Christian parents standing up for their kids were treated as criminals.

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Ken Paxton Calls For Putting Prayer And Bible Back In Texas Schools

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton urged schools to prepare for classroom prayer and Bible reading following the passage of a new state law.

“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” Paxton said in a statement.

He recommended that students start with the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6:9-13.

He warned that the far left is actively working to strip schools of America’s spiritual foundation.

“Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society,” he said. “Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”

The announcement follows Senate Bill 11, approved during the 89th Legislature. The law requires school boards to vote within six months of Sept. 1, 2025, on whether to adopt policies permitting voluntary prayer and Bible reading.

The measure also directs the Attorney General’s Office to defend districts or charter schools that adopt such policies.

Supporters quickly praised the move.

“God bless you, General Paxton, for having the courage to begin the legal process of putting prayer and reading of Scripture in Texas classrooms,” Melissa Katz wrote on X.

“Amen! Thank you, sir!” added Alexander Duncan, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate.

Critics online pushed back.

“His actions are unconstitutional. I attend mass every week. Public school should be for all, not just Christians. Note, I am a Christian/Catholic and still feel this way,” wrote Vincomputerman.

“So now students have to take time out from academics so that there can be a prayer hour? Since when can’t people pray on their own time?” asked X user Johnson@F1979J.

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She Couldn’t Read Her Own Diploma: Why Public Schools Pass Students but Fail Society

A nineteen-year-old college student is suing her former high school for negligence because she graduated despite being unable to read or write.

The student, Aleysha Ortiz, graduated from Hartford Public Schools in the spring of 2024 with honors.

She earned a scholarship to attend the University of Connecticut, where she’s studying public policy. But while she was in high school, she had to use speech-to-text apps to help her read and write essays, and despite years of advocating for support for her literacy struggles, her school never addressed them.

Her story is shocking, but unfortunately, it isn’t isolated. At 24 Illinois public schools, not a single student can read at grade level. Nationwide, 54 percent of the American adult population reads at or below a sixth grade level. Put a different way: only 46 percent of American adults gained even a middle-school level mastery of literacy—let alone high school or collegiate levels.

In a first-world country where we spend nearly $16,000 per student per year to educate our children, that’s a horrifying statistic.

Literacy is supposed to be the bedrock of a free and liberally educated society. As the Washington Post’s motto so aptly reminds us, “democracy dies in darkness.”

Illiteracy is a form of darkness, and an illiterate populace is not one equipped to handle the demands of a world filled with forms and papers and words, let alone be the voting citizens of a democratic society.

What Do Literacy Stats Actually Mean?

Officially, the United States reports a basic literacy rate of 99 percent (which should perhaps be called into question, if students like Aleysha Ortiz can graduate with honors and still be illiterate).

But “basic literacy” is a bit of a sales pitch. It sounds impressive, but in practice, “basic literacy skills” means a K-3 grade level of reading—things like Hop on Pop and Amelia Bedelia.

“Functional literacy” is what actually matters: the ability to read and understand things like forms, instructions, job applications, and other forms of text you’ll encounter in your day-to-day life. It measures both technical reading skill and comprehension—your ability to decipher the words, and your ability to discern their meaning.

An estimated 21 percent of American adults (~43 million Americans) are functionally illiterate, meaning they have difficulty reading and comprehending instructions and filling out forms. A functionally illiterate American adult is unable to complete tasks like reading job descriptions or filling out paperwork for Social Security and Medicaid.

Perhaps worse still is the statistic that 54 percent of the American adult population reads at or below a sixth-grade level. Most of us don’t think about reading in terms of grade level, so this statistic feels intuitively bad but practically meaningless. What is a sixth-grade level?

Books written at the sixth-grade level are intended (in both literacy and comprehension skills) for eleven- and twelve-year-olds. Think of books like A Wrinkle in Time, Percy Jackson and The Olympians, and The Giver.

They’re good stories, but they don’t require the same vocabulary and mental acuity as making sense of a tax form. This is an excerpt from The Giver:

Garbriel’s breathing was even and deep. Jonas liked having him there, though he felt guilty about the secret. Each night he gave memories to Gabriel: memories of boat rides and picnics in the sun; memories of soft rainfall against windowpanes; memories of dancing barefoot on a damp lawn.

More complex than Dick and Jane or Hop on Pop, obviously. But this isn’t an adult level of comprehension. If your reading abilities cap out here, you’re going to encounter a lot of text in your day-to-day life that’s difficult to decipher—often things that are important for you to be able to comprehend, like the terms of a lease agreement or the instructions on a medication.

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Basic Civics Test in Oklahoma Triggers Democrat Outrage

Democrats are furious with Oklahoma lawmakers for requiring out-of-state teachers, many of them from deep-blue states, to pass a basic civics test before teaching in Oklahoma classrooms.

The law is straightforward: anyone responsible for educating American students must demonstrate knowledge of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and basic principles of government. 

Yet the left is treating this as if it were some radical assault on public education.

The test itself is not complicated. It mirrors the civics portion of the U.S. naturalization exam—the same test immigrants must pass to become citizens. 

Sample questions include: Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? or What is the supreme law of the land?

If immigrants seeking citizenship can learn these answers, surely teachers entrusted with the education of young Americans should be held to the same standard.

The statistics speak for themselves. 

According to a 2022 survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, only 47% of Americans could name all three branches of government. Even more troubling, 23% could not name a single branch. 

The growing crisis of civic illiteracy reflects decades of neglect in schools where basic U.S. history and constitutional principles have been sidelined in favor of political activism. 

Teachers who do not know or respect America’s founding documents cannot be expected to instill civic responsibility in their students.

Oklahoma’s approach is both reasonable and popular. Polling consistently shows that Americans want more civics in schools. 

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Half Of American Schools Require ‘Equitable’ Grading And Most Teachers Are Opposed: Survey

Lackluster student performance has plagued the Schenectady, N.Y., city school district for years.

The school district, like many others, implemented a “grading for equity” policy in response to dismal test scores.

However, as Aaron Gifford reports below for The Epoch Times, a recent national survey indicates that most teachers feel grade equity actually hurts students long term, although more than half of the schools and districts across the nation engage in the practice.

Schenectady’s 2022-2023 academic report said 95 percent of its high school freshmen were behind in math by three or more grade levels.

A year later, the district reported that in the first quarter of the 2022-2023 school year, more than half of its middle school students (grades 6-8) were three or more grade levels behind in both reading and math, while the daily attendance rate for high schoolers had dipped below 79 percent.

In response to these disappointing results, district leaders implemented a “grading for equity” policy whereby students are not penalized for handing in assignments late, and are allowed to retake tests with continuous guidance from teachers until their scores reflect proficiency levels. Incomplete grades for the semester require authorization from school principals. The policy took effect last fall.

“It’s almost academic fraud,” Christopher Ognibene, Schenectady High School social studies teacher, told The Epoch Times. He recalled a student who was given B’s all year but failed the end-of-the-year New York State Regents assessment with a score of 43.

“Watered-down report cards and transcripts mean nothing if you are left unprepared academically for college. And there are due dates in the real world—it doesn’t matter where you go after high school,” he said.

Most teachers agree with Ognibene’s assessment of the widely used approach, according to the recent survey by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Rand Corporation education team members.

The Aug. 20 report, “Equitable Grading Through the Eyes of Teachers,” summarized responses from 967 teachers from K-12 districts across the country in late 2024.

“Turns out, teachers don’t like it when the powers that be take a sledgehammer to their few sources of leverage over student motivation and effort. Nor do they like giving students grades they don’t deserve,” the report says.

The report identifies five equitable grading practices—unlimited retakes, no late penalties, no zeroes, no homework, and no required participation.

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Baltimore Schools Collapse Into “Failure Factory” Under Democratic Mismanagement

President Donald Trump said during a Cabinet meeting earlier on Tuesday, “I think one of the most important things we’re doing at this table is bringing education back to the states, where parents and local school boards run it.”

This leads us to President Trump’s executive order earlier this year to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. At the time, the president pointed to an uncomfortable truth for Democrats running Baltimore City Schools and City Hall: 40% of public high schools have zero students proficient in math. That damning statistic came from Fox 45 investigative reporter Chris Papst’s coverage of Baltimore’s education crisis. 

For nearly eight years, ZeroHedge has followed Papst’s investigative work through the trenches of school to school across crime-ridden Baltimore City. Papst has conducted all the investigative work through Project Baltimore, in collaboration with Fox45 News. He has spent years reporting on optically displeasing headlines that merely expose how progressive elites in City Hall and in the local school system seemingly rob generations of children of a future for short-term gain to line their pockets and funnel taxpayer funds into the Democratic Party machine, which is nothing more than corrupt unions. 

Many of Papst’s reports have gone viral, including the 2023 report cited by President Trump, which revealed that 40% of Baltimore City high schools had zero students proficient in math. 

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Ontario teachers union hands out awards for activism, not math or science

The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (EFTO) has handed out more than a dozen awards but not one recognized classroom excellence in teaching math, literacy, science or pedagogy without emphasizing a progressive activist lens.

This month, the union announced its 2024–25 award recipients, honouring “outstanding contributions.” Every academic category from curriculum development to children’s literature was tied to activism, equity, or social justice.

A closer look shows that the “academic” or “creative” awards were overwhelmingly for work that embedded activism into academics. Literature awards went to projects advancing social justice themes, curriculum awards highlighted equity-focused resources, and even environmental education was framed through climate justice, elevating union-aligned activism as the highest professional achievement.

Roughly two-thirds of all awards celebrated work in anti-racism, anti-oppression, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), or other progressive initiatives, while the rest were awarded for service to the union. No recognition was given for improving literacy, numeracy, or classroom learning outcomes.

Teachers’ unions exist to protect the labour rights of members. As such, their core responsibilities to collective bargaining, safeguarding against unfair discipline, and lobbying for manageable class sizes and working conditions. In Ontario, the ETFO has broadened that role into one that functions as a political and cultural actor inside the education system. Its public campaigns, professional development programs, and awards now consistently emphasize anti-racism, anti-oppression, 2SLGBTQ+ issues, climate change, and decolonization.

Recognizing traditional teaching skills was not on the agenda. True North asked the ETFO why none of this year’s awards recognized classroom excellence in math, literacy, science, or pedagogy unless explicitly tied to progressive political causes. The union did not respond.

The union has received negative public feedback in recent months over its focus on activism. At its Annual General Meeting in August, the ETFO delegates passed a motion to develop teaching resources addressing anti-Palestinian racism. Seventy-one per cent supported the measure, which was intended to affirm Palestinian identity in schools and equip educators to confront bias.

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Billionaires Backing Woke Math Doesn’t Add Up Amid DEI Rollback

Jim Simons’ mathematical skills helped transform him from a prize-winning academic at Harvard and MIT into a legendary financier whose algorithmic models made Renaissance Technologies one of the most successful hedge funds in history. After his death last year, one of his consequential bequests went to his daughter, Liz, who oversees the Heising-Simons Foundation and its nearly billion-dollar endowment.

What Liz Simons has chosen to do with that inheritance might have surprised her father. Jim Simons devoted much of his charitable giving to basic research in mathematics and science, but his daughter’s foundation is moving in a very different direction. The Heising-Simons Foundation and similar organizations are supercharging a movement to remake K-12 mathematics education according to social justice principles.

The revamp the advocates seek is profound. They reject well-established practices of math instruction while infusing lessons with racial and gender themes. The goal is to motivate disadvantaged students while dispensing with the traditional features of math, like numerical computation, that they struggle with on standardized tests – considered an oppressive feature of white supremacist culture.

In many quarters, including corporations and universities, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are in retreat due to pressure from the Trump administration and the courts. Not so in public education, with curricula that are locally controlled and largely insulated from the dictates of Washington. That allows progressive foundations and like-minded charitable trusts to continue to pour millions of dollars into reshaping math education for black and Latino kids, including a $800,000 grant this year from the Heising-Simons Foundation, even though there exists no credible research showing that the social justice approach improves their performance.

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California invested millions in STEM for women. The results are disappointing

Ten years ago, it seemed everyone was talking about women in science.

As the economy improved in the years after the Great Recession, women were slower to return to the workforce, causing alarm, especially in vital fields like computing. State and federal leaders turned their attention to women in science, technology, engineering and math, known by the acronym STEM.

Over the next few years, they poured millions of dollars into increasing the number of women pursuing STEM degrees. But the rate of women who attain those degrees has hardly improved, according to an analysis of colleges’ data by the Public Policy Institute of California on behalf of CalMatters.

“The unfortunate news is that the numbers haven’t changed much at all,” said Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the institute who conducted the analysis of California’s four-year colleges using data from the 2009-10 school year and comparing it to the most recent numbers, from 2022-23. The share of women who received a bachelor’s degree increased from roughly 19% to about 25% in engineering and from nearly 16% to about 23% in computer science. In math and statistics, the percentage of women who graduate with a degree has gone down in the last five years.

“It’s not nothing, but at this pace it would take a very long time to reach parity,” Johnson said.

Girls are also underrepresented in certain high school classes, such as AP computer science, and while women make up about 42% of California’s workforce, they comprise just a quarter of those working in STEM careers, according to a study by Mount Saint Mary’s University. Fewer women were working in math careers in 2023 than in the five or 10 years before that, the study found.

“It’s a cultural phenomenon, not a biological phenomenon,” said Mayya Tokman, a professor of applied mathematics at UC Merced. She said underrepresentation is a result of perceptions about women, the quality of their education, and a lack of role models in a given field.

Science and technology spurs innovation and economic growth while promoting national security, and these jobs are often lucrative and stable. Gender parity is critical, especially as U.S. science and technology industries struggle to find qualified workers, said Sue Rosser, provost emerita at San Francisco State and a longtime advocate for women in science. “We need more people in STEM. More people means immigrants, women, people of color as well as white men. There’s no point in excluding anyone.”

She said that recent cuts by the Trump administration to California’s research and education programs will stymie progress in science, technology and engineering — and hurt countless careers, including the women who aspire to join these fields.

Over the last eight months, the federal government has made extensive cuts to scientific research at California’s universities, affecting work on dementia, vaccines, women’s issues and on health problems affecting the LGBTQ+ community. The administration also ended programs that support undergraduate students in science. In June a federal judge ruled that the administration needs to restore some of those grants, but a Supreme Court decision could reverse that ruling.

More recently, the administration halted hundreds of grants to UCLA — representing hundreds of millions in research funding — in response to a U.S. Justice Department investigation into allegations of antisemitism. Now the Trump administration is asking for a $1 billion settlement in return for the grants. A California district judge ruled on Tuesday that at least some of those grants need to be restored.

‘The cultural conversation has changed’

In the past five years, attention has shifted away from women in science. Nonprofit leaders and researchers across the state say that many lawmakers and philanthropists turned away from women in STEM during the COVID-19 pandemic and focused more on racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd.

Since 1995, women have been outpacing men in college, and women are now much more likely to attain a bachelor’s degree. The unemployment rate for men is higher, too, and men without college degrees are opting out of the labor force at unprecedented rates.

On July 30 Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order saying the state needs to do more to address the “growing crisis of connection and opportunity for men and boys.” It’s not a “zero-sum” game, he wrote: the state can, and should, support everyone.

But some state investments for women’s education are lagging.

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