Tag: public schools

Ohio School Offical Appears to Coach Parents on Circumventing State Laws to Put Male Trans Student on Girls Team

Accuracy in Media has released a disturbing video that appears to show an Ohio school official coaching parents on how to circumvent laws keeping girls safe by keeping boys out of girls’ sports and spaces.

In 2023, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine vetoed House Bill 68, which sought to prohibit gender-affirming care for minors and to restrict transgender athletes’ participation in girls’ and women’s sports.

Last year, the State Senate voted to override DeWine’s veto.

But that didn’t stop an Ohio school official from brainstorming ways to bypass the law.

The video, shared by Accuracy in Media, shows undercover investigators, posing as prospective parents of a trans student, meeting with Princeton City Schools Assistant Athletic Director Tamette Duckworth.

The video shows Duckworth strategizing with investigators to help the alleged transgender student join the girls’ teams and access female facilities.

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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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‘Teacher of the Year’ Brandyn Hargrove gets off with probation after admitting to abusing ex-student starting at age 15

A married former “Teacher of the Year” has pleaded guilty to having an “ongoing relationship” with one of her female students, starting when the girl was just 15.

Brandyn Martin Hargrove was convicted on Wednesday of 12 criminal counts connected to her sexual assault of the ex-student while she was a teacher at Brazoswood High School in Clute, Texas.

The formerly-decorated educator was sentenced to 10 years of probation and a 10-year probated sentence, meaning she won’t face any time in prison, despite grooming her student and having a sexual relationship with the minor, which continued until the girl turned 17, according to court records.

In September 2023, Hargrove’s victim, who is now in her 30s, walked into the police station to report she had been sexually assaulted by her teacher nearly two decades earlier, Clute Chief of Police James Fitch told ABC 13.

“From the get-go, we really felt there was a good chance this would go to trial, so we were a little surprised with the plea agreement. There was a lot of legwork by the detectives tracking down some of those people that went to school 17 years ago with our victim and people she made initial outcries to,” Fitch said.

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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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Denver School Accused Of Violating Title IX Over All-Gender Restrooms

The Education Department said on Thursday that Denver Public Schools violated Title IX, the law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, by converting sex-separated restrooms into “all-gender” facilities.

The department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) also found that the school district violated the law by allowing students to use intimate facilities matching their gender identity rather than their biological sex.

The finding followed an OCR investigation into Denver’s East High School earlier this year after it converted a girls’ restroom into a multi-stall all-gender facility. The agency said the school had an exclusive restroom for males on its second floor but none for females.

The school district has said that the all-gender lavatory, which has 12-foot partitions between stalls, was created as the result of a student-led process.

The school district later created a second all-gender restroom on the same floor as the first.

However, OCR said the district’s actions did not resolve its Title IX violation “because males are still allowed to invade sensitive female-only facilities.” The agency cited a complaint from a female student who said that “boys kept staring at her, looking her up and down, kind of taunting her” when using the bathroom, which left her “very uncomfortable.”

Another complainant alleged that a male teacher frequently entered the restroom “to check on things,” which made female students uncomfortable and raised privacy concerns, according to the agency.

“Denver is free to endorse a self-defeating gender ideology, but it is not free to accept federal taxpayer funds and harm its students in violation of Title IX,” acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor stated, noting that the district had created “a hostile environment” for its students by endangering their safety and privacy.

OCR offered the school district a 10-day window to voluntarily make changes or risk enforcement action, though it did not specify what actions could be taken in the event of noncompliance.

The school district is required within that timeframe to convert all gender-neutral restrooms back to sex-designated restrooms and rescind any policies that allowed access to facilities based on gender identity.

OCR also directed the school district to adopt biology-based definitions for the words “male” and “female” in all Title IX-related policies and practices, according to its statement.

Denver Public Schools officials said they had received the results of the OCR investigation and were determining their next steps.

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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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Thomas Massie Introduces Repeal of Gun-Free School Zones Act

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) is pushing a repeal of the Gun-Free School Zones Act (1990) in order to make it easier for law-abiding teachers, faculty, and others, to be armed to fend off would-be attackers on school campuses.

The Gun-Free School Zones Act was put in place by President George H.W. Bush (R), barring the possession of a firearm in a “school zone” and thereby creating myriad gun-free soft targets in places filled with defenseless children, teachers, and school staff.

Massie wants to see the Gun-Free School Zones Act repealed as a way of removing the soft target moniker from schools around the country.

Gun Owners of America praised Massie’s push, saying, “Congress needs to abandon the failed federal gun-free schools policy & arm willing teachers instead!”

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New York City Projected to Spend $42,000 Per Student This School Year – And Their Reading and Math Scores Are Terrible

New York City is poised to spend an eye-popping $42,000 per student this school year, the highest figure in the country.

Some people might think this is a reasonable figure if New York City schools were also the top performing schools in the country, but they are not, not even close in fact. The city’s schools get terrible grades for reading and math.

How many parents in the NYC area do you suppose could do better by taking that $42,000 and spending it on a private school for their children, or even a full time home tutor? Don’t you think many parents would choose one of those options if they were available?

The New York Post reports:

NYC DOE projected to spend $42k per student this school year — the most in the country

The city Department of Education will spend a staggering $42,168 per student this school year, budget experts project, even as enrollment declines and student achievement stalls.

The record sum is nearly $2,000 per student more than the DOE spent last year, according to the nonprofit think tank Citizens Budget Commission. Students report to class Sept. 4.

The stunning figure is 36% more than the $31,119 the city spent per pupil just five years ago…

Despite the vast sums poured into the nation’s largest school system, student proficiency in English language arts and math continues to lag behind the rest of the state and country.

The “Nation’s Report Card” released by the National Center for Education Statistics in January revealed that just 33% of Big Apple fourth graders scored proficiency in math and 28% in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress last year.

Older students’ results were worse – 23% of city eighth graders met the national standards in math and 29% in reading.

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Potential DC school shooter arrested with guns after social media threat: ATF, MTPD report

Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the Metro Transit Police Department (MTPD) say that they stopped a school shooting in D.C. just one day after a mass shooter opened fire on a mass at a Minneapolis Catholic school.

The investigation began with an “alarming” social media post referencing a potential threat to a DC public school, according to MTPD’s Criminal Investigation Division. They have not yet revealed which school was targeted.

On August 27, MTPD and ATF conducted a search warrant at a District residence where multiple firearms were recovered, and a teen was placed under arrest.

“As part of our participation in a longstanding ATF task force, we’re proud of our officers who disrupted this significant public safety threat,” a MTPD spokesperson said. “We are focused on keeping our Metro system and community safe across the region.”

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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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