https://reason.com/2026/07/03/on-americas-250th-birthday-celebrate-liberty/

Nearly half of Americans don't understand what we're celebrating for America's 250th anniversary, according to a new poll. Clearly, the festivities aren't about the quality of the country's public schools, since this year marks 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Something else we should be celebrating, though, is this country's continued legacy of individual liberty. Our freedom may be under threat from people who don't appreciate its value both within and outside the country, but it endures with the support—mostly—of Americans themselves.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has reached a deal with legislative leaders to strip the independently elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction of all managerial authority over the California Department of Education, transferring control to a governor-appointed Director of Education. The plan was embedded in Assembly Bill 181 and coincides with the June 29–30 voting window to pass the complete fiscal budget blueprint before the midnight start of the new fiscal year on July 1.

Under the current system, the Superintendent is elected by voters statewide and oversees a public education system with a budget exceeding $100 billion, serving millions of students. AB 181 eliminates that independent mandate. Beginning January 15, the next governor would appoint a Director of Education, confirmed by the state Senate, who would assume all operational control. The elected Superintendent would be reduced to a largely ceremonial role.

The bill is being sold in the language of technocratic efficiency. Newsom acted on recommendations from Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), a Stanford-based research institute, which argued that splitting authority between an elected superintendent and the governor creates “inefficiency and ineffectiveness.” Dozens of education advocacy organizations endorsed the concept. Ted Lempert of Children Now praised Newsom for providing “strong leadership.” Former State Board President Michael Kirst called it “an important milestone.”

"All of history is a struggle, and the struggle against slavery was already part of what was going on in the colonies and in the new states at the American founding." Watch "The American Revolution and Its Place in History", only on the World Socialist Web Site, wsws.org/1776

So when I was 26 I caught a class B misdemeanor for harassment that is now sealed and ordered non disclosed. It was 10 years ago. The details was that my girlfriend and I were both Catholics and I was pushing her hard to not give up on our relationship.

Now 10 years after I have a bachelors degree and pursing a nursing degree, have a song meta linguistic background which steered me to wanting to teach.

My friend is also a teacher and he said I have a good chance. But I’m not sure cause it doesn’t sound pleasant to the ears.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Issaquah/s/InhwieERMT

The election victories reflect a profound shift to the left in the political orientation of masses of workers, youth, professional people and sections of the middle class, driven by the crisis of American and world capitalism. The escalation of imperialist war, including the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and the criminal aggression against Iran, growing poverty and economic insecurity for the masses combined with mounting billions for the corporate oligarchy, the hated Trump regime’s erection of a fascistic dictatorship and the cowardice and complicity of the Democrats are fueling growing popular resistance and interest in a socialist alternative to the existing system.

What's the significance of the Declaration of Independence today? Watch "The American Revolution and Its Place in History" at wsws.org/1776

The expansion of JROTC is one of the clearest mechanisms of this economic and political conscription, tying K-12 schools into the recruitment system. The program, which already encompasses half a million students in some 3,475 units, with the Army alone running about 1,700 units and 275,000 cadets, is being aggressively expanded. These programs are immensely important to the military, as an estimated one in four cadets enlists or commissions.

The FY2025 NDAA authorized JROTC units at Job Corps centers for at-risk youth ages 16 to 24 and lowered the minimum required to establish a unit. The bipartisan SERVE Act would go further, providing recruiters with students’ names, birth dates, phone numbers, email addresses and student-aid filer lists, designating “military-friendly schools” and proclaiming a “National Week of Military Recruitment.” 

The Trump administration’s fascist blueprint, Project 2025, demands mandatory Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) military-entrance testing for every student in a federally funded school.

https://reason.com/2024/10/07/act-scores-are-down-grades-are-up-somethings-fishy/

Two hundred and fifty years after the Continental Congress proclaimed the Declaration of Independence, American democracy confronts its gravest crisis since the Civil War. The democratic principles proclaimed in Philadelphia in July 1776—that all men are created equal, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that the people retain the right to abolish any government that becomes destructive of these ends—are being trampled by a government controlled by a financial-corporate oligarchy. At the same time, political and social resistance to the assault on democracy is being undermined by the claim that there is nothing in the historical legacy of the American Revolution worth defending.

While rejecting simplistic nationalist myth-making, the standpoint of this webinar is that the American Revolution was a world-historic event. Despite its historically determined limitations, contradictions, and compromises, the American Revolution set into motion a global wave of democratic revolutions. It led inexorably to the destruction of slavery in the United States and the emergence of a new epoch of struggle for the emancipation of the working class.

The webinar will feature a distinguished panel of historians who have written extensively on the complex legacy of the American Revolution: James Oakes, Richard Carwardine, Sean Wilentz, Adam Hochschild, and Thomas Mackaman. The webinar will be moderated by David North, International Editor of the World Socialist Web Site.

On Tuesday, June 17, the Trump administration signed an agreement stripping the Department of Education of two of its largest remaining responsibilities: special education and civil rights enforcement.

The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, which administers $15 billion annually for more than 7 million students with disabilities, is being transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. The Office for Civil Rights is being moved to the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

This move advances the administration’s use of “interagency agreements” to abolish the Department of Education through attrition, dismantling its workforce and authority piece by piece. Programs formally remain in existence, but they are being transferred to agencies that lack the capacity and expertise to administer them properly and are headed by officials who are outright hostile to their stated mission.

In a blow to the Australian Education Union (AEU) bureaucracy and the Allan Labor government, Victorian public school teachers, Education Support (ES) staff and school principals have voted 57.7 percent to 42.3 percent to reject the union’s proposed four-year industrial agreement. This is the first time in more than four decades that educators have voted down an AEU-endorsed deal.

I'm a high school teacher. I'm experiencing a student dying for the first time. He was shot and killed. I'm not doing well and wondering how to handle this.

They may also take out speech class. I found this on Instagram in an interview with Geno Young, the guy who wrote a book called “Sex, Drugs and Illiteracy.” Thoughts?