What Happens When YouTake School Choice Away

 

 

 

My, my... Leave it to Sodom on the Bay to not only close schools for weeks, but to come up with a forced, mandatory requirement to 'expand diversity' which gave most parents zero choices of where their children could go to school. This so-called 'Zone system' the school board voted in back in  December was designed to 'increase diversity' in the public schools no matter what. And, as a cherry on top, students living in public housing and their parents were given a priority in the selection process. 

 What that meant is that if you had a child in a decent elementary school near where you live, they could be sent  anywhere. And parents were prevented from any appeal about it, even if it meant their children would be going to school in a dangerous neighborhood far away, with substandard teachers and curriculum and problems with gangs. 

 

On the other hand, if your child already was in such a school, instead of improving it with better teachers and disciplining the trouble makers, You would get  the priority of sending him or her to the good schools in your 'zone'. Not only that, but the curriculum of all public schools will also be 'diversified...and I'm sure you know what that means...the teaching of critical Race theory in all public schools.

  While on the face of it this seems like it might have some good points, the obvious reasons for doing it was highly suspect. Among other things, it was scheduled to cost $2.5 million over the next 18 months. 

Hmm, no interest in how how the existing schools could have been improved with that money instead! The real reason of course has nothing to do with diversity. So the real reason it was done is obvious. It's about power and control. These children will be subjected to the far Left's views on morality, America, and of course critical race theory. 

Not only that, but families were not to be allowed  to appeal any decision of the Bureaucrats. And since students living in public House projects will get priority in picking whatever school they want, teachers who are actually trying to educate a class of students can no longer teach to the general learning level of a classroom, which of course means that the smarter kids with the higher learning capacities suffer.

It also means that people who struggled to save and  buy a home at San Francisco's high prices in a nice neighborhood because of the good schools were getting ripped off big time.Especially since they pay the highest taxes.

So how well did this expensive program work out? Simple. Much of San Francisco white and Asian parents took one of two ways out. They either found private and/or Parochial schools to send their kids to, which meant that they were still getting ripped off and  stuck paying those high taxes as well as private school fees.

The other choice of course, being to relocate outside the district or maybe even move away from SF period.

When I first read about this , I sympathized, since I got my kids out of the public schools where I lived  myself as soon as possible, respectfully in the 5th and 3rd grades and found an excellent parochial school for them. I still think that it was one of the best moves we ever made as parents, expensive though it was.

Surprise! That's exactly what happened in San Francisco, and their racist woke tactics cost them a bundle. This s what happens when the people supposedly running the public school district spend their time debating on how to rename public  schools after Lefty 'heroes' instead of historic American heroes. And the kids are already behind, because there was almost a year's lock down mandated by the teacher's union.

According to the SF Chronicle, more than 1,700 public school students have simply left the public schools. And they're expecting a lot more to  leave at the start of the next academic year in the fall. And guess what?  Any teacher will tell you that one of their important duties is that morning head count, which determines how much Federal money the school gets.

According to the Chronicle, this is going to cost the district $20 Million in Fed money...not that the public schools are doing very well otherwise academically, like a lot of California public schools. You see, with the better students leaving, the remaining children in SFUSD were at 12% proficiency in Math & 19% in English, with 80% of those kids who are left  not meeting reading literacy requirements.

The Sf school district already has a lawsuit to deal with because of its decision to rename schools named after Washington,Lincoln, etc for their 'racism.' 

Meanwhile, the School District Vice President, Alison Collins

 👇

 was under fire because of a number of tweets criticizing Asians of being racist and not woke. After she refused to resign or remove the tweets (see, if you use Twitter and are from the right demographic you can get away with racism). She sued the School District for $87 million after she was removed from her position. I haven't bothered to check whether she won, since all this shows is the quality of who's running the school district....

Again, in big letters.....THIS IS NOT ABOUT BETTER EDUCATION.IT IS DEFINITELY NOT ABOUT THE WELFARE OF THE KIDS, IF ANYTHING, IT'S THE REVERSE.  SO WHAT IS IT REALLY ABOUT???

SIMPLE, IT'S ABOUT CONTROL, WASTING OTHER PEOPLE'S HARD EARNED MONEY, INFERIOR TEACHERS PROTECTED BY A POLITICALY PROMINENT UNION AND MOST OF ALL, MIND RAPING YOUR CHILDREN.

 TO FIX IT WILL TAKE PARENTS THEMSELVES GETTING IN THESE PEOPLE'S FACES AND VOTING THEM OUT OF POWER. Or SIMPLY LEAVING THE DISTRICT AND STARVING THE BEAST. HOME SCHOOLING IS ALSO AN OPTION.

THINK ABOUT IT. YOUR KIDS ARE WORTH IT.

Rob Miller writes for Joshuapundit. His articles have appeared in The Jerusalem Post, The Washington Examiner, American Thinker, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The San Francisco Chronicle, Real Clear Politics, The Times Of Israel, Breitbart.Com, Yediot and many other publications.

Saving The K-12 Schools? Here's How

 

I read a recent article decrying the dysfunction of our public schools (no link, simply because I have no interest in appearing to criticize the author, who I'm sure means well).

After talking about the obvious attempt to indoctrinate children with a certain point of view and posting some of the usual dismal statistics - for instance, that only a third of our eighth-graders are proficient in reading, math, or much of anything else - his solution is for more parents to get involved with the public schools to try and change this sorry situation.

I'm afraid the author of this piece has misplaced expectations. The average public school could care less what parents think, although surprising exceptions sometimes occur on a case by case basis. Not only is there a great deal of money at stake in the process itself, but let's not forget that the Democrat Party gets a significant amount of its funding from the teacher's unions and this have, to put it mildly, a vested interest in keeping things exactly as they are.

That is, except in one area, discipline and providing a safe learning environment. They're more than willing to change there with a 'prompt' from President Obama's Department of Education, particularly in regards to one demographic that now has special rules designed to make suspending them for even the most egregious misbehavior 'racist' and simply not to be tolerated no matter what it does to the quality of the other kids' education.

Also to be considered is the current policy of allowing thousands of illegal aliens into public schools that aren't even literate in their own language let alone English and the effect this on the learning curve and the progress of the other children, especially when it comes to minority area schools.

Nothing's going to move on these areas no matter what, barring radical reform in Washington.

So while parents getting more involved at this point isn't likely to change things much if at all at this point, there is a fairly simple solution...

Get your children out of the public schools immediately before the mind rape is complete. That's exactly what we did.Not only did our kids receive a superb secular education (at more than one third less than the cost per pupil of our local big city school district), but what I call 'faith armor' which serves them very well in today's society.Yes, it cost, but the parochial schools frequently give tuition aid based on your income and in any event, this is your children's future you're talking about. So go to the parochial schools or other private schools. Get them out of the public schools.

Or home school them. Buy a curriculum (there are some excellent ones to choose from) and teach them at home. And that need not be very expensive, considering the cost of the alternatives.

I know parents who have banded together in small groups to share the cost of buying one of the fine the home school curriculums out there and even organized 'teaching shifts' to lessen the time factor if you're dealing with working parents. I even know one group of a dozen parents with kids the same basic age who actually split the cost of hiring a teacher and basic supplies. Which of course, is how it used to be done in America.

Aside from saving your kids, doing it this way saves others. Any honest teacher will admit that it's drilled into them that the most crucial part of the day is the morning head count, because it determines how much money the school gets from the feds. When your kids leave the system, that lessens the school's take and essentially starves the beast, along with voting against every local school bond.

That's what will save the schools as long as school choice is not an option and kids are used as pawns to feed and perpetuate a corrupt dysfunctional system. The Public schools will only take notice when their money/traffic decreases and they're forced to provide a better product.

That's  going to take time. But until real school choice becomes a reality, we're going to have to do what we can do to  destroy the system in order to remake it and  save it.

AG Holder's New School Discipline Diktats: "Stop Targeting Blacks And Hispanics":

Attorney General Eric Holder has a new crusade.He says that schools discriminate against blacks and Latinos when it comes to meting out discipline in public schools, and he wants it stopped.

The Justice Department and the Department of Education have issued new guidelines for disciplining students in public schools, and claim that their internal investigations show racial bias.

The wide-ranging series of guidelines issued today in essence threatens schools with strong action if they are seen as 'not adhering to standards of fairness and equity in student discipline.'

"In our investigations, we have found cases where African-American students were disciplined more harshly and more frequently because of their race than similarly situated white students," the Justice Department and Education Department said in the letter to school districts. "In short, racial discrimination in school discipline is a real problem."

Could it maybe have something to do with a higher percentage of black students constituting major discipline problems perhaps? Nah, couldn't be. Must be racism.

According to government civil rights data collection from 2011-2012, black students make up 15% of the population of America's public schools. Yet they were more than three times as likely as white students students to get expelled or suspended.They made up more than a third of students suspended once, 44 percent of those suspended more than once and more than a third of students expelled. According to one study I saw, blacks were ten times more likely to get suspended or expelled than Asian students.

More than half of students involved in school-related arrests or referred to law enforcement were Hispanic or black, according to the data.Racism obviously. Although not in California or some other jurisdictions, where the huge Los Angeles Unified School District has a policy now of not suspending students for what's called 'willful defiance'..in other words, repeatedly disrupting class, creating a climate where learning is impossible and refusing to pay any attention to a teacher's efforts to stop it. This has now gone statewide with pending legislation, AB40, that's going to make it fairly difficult for a public school to suspend or expel any student. This too was largely sparked by complaints that black and Hispanic students are being 'suspended too often'.

There's teeth in the new policies too. For instance, in Brevard County Florida, where the public schools suspend black students about two-and-a-half times as often as its white students, the NAACP has filed a complaint against the school district and the Justice Department and The U.S. Department of Education are helping them proceed.

Holder said in a statement that he blames the high rates of black suspension and expulsion on "zero-tolerance" policies that too often inject the criminal justice system into school discipline. The zero tolerance policies he's talking about are mandated set penalties for things like truancy, drugs on campus, or carrying a weapon, and our attorney general thinks it's time that stopped.

It used to be that trouble makers guilty of multiple offenses were sent to a specific school set up for exactly that purpose and placed under stricter discipline to both benefit themselves and the other children who actually wanted to learn. That sort of common sense arrangement is a thing of the distant past.

While the new Obama guidelines are said to be exactly that, they're clearly a warning and will be taken as such by the schools. So if your child is assaulted, bullied or cheated out of the education you paid for by someone's else's activities in the classroom and the perpetrator just happens to be black or Hispanic, don't even bother complaining, even if you yourself are black or Hispanic, let alone white or Asian. Ditto if you're a teacher,especially in one of the large urban politically correct school districts.

Or to put it another way, is there a reason you haven't started homeschooling or put your kids in private school yet?

Obama's DOJ Sues To Block School Choice Vouchers

Yes, the Left definitely wants kids stuck in dysfunctional, union controlled under performing schools. Especially if they happen to be black or Latino and belong to working families.

Louisiana's governor Bobby Jindal put something in place that is needed nationwide - a voucher program known as The Louisiana Scholarship Program that allows working families to avoid poor quality public schools graded C D or F in terms of their test scores and drop out rate and attend the private schools of their choice at taxpayer expense.

Needless to say, lots of families took advantage of the program.Note that these are poorly performing mostly minority schools.

As to be expected, the teacher's union sued as the program got more popular, claiming it was 'illegally ' depriving public schools of public funds,and the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled in a party line ruling back in May that the state could not use the money it allots for each student in public schools to fund the Louisiana Scholarship Program. So pending appeal, Governor Jindal managed to find about $40 million in public money elsewhere to cover the almost 8,000 2013-14 students enrolled in the program.

But if course, we can't have that.

Attorney General Eric Holder and the Obama Department of Justice are suing in federal court to block the program on the basis that- wait for it- giving vouchers to children in poorly performing increases segregation!

The Justice Department's primary argument is that letting students leave for vouchered private schools can disrupt the racial balance in public school systems that desegregation orders are meant to protect. Those orders almost always set rules for student transfers with the school system. {...}

In Tangipahoa Parish, for instance, Independence Elementary School lost five white students to voucher schools, the petition states. The consequent change in the percent of enrolled white students "reinforc(ed) the racial identity of the school as a black school."

As State Education Superintendent John White pointed out in response, almost all the students using vouchers are black. Given that framework, "it's a little ridiculous" to argue that students' departure to voucher schools makes their home school systems less whit. He also pointed out that it's ironic that rules set up to combat racism were being used on to keep black students in failing schools.

Not only that, but the schools in the voucher program must comply with the terms of 1975 court case Brumfield v. Dodd that prohibits the state from using public money to fund private schools that uphold segregation or engage in discrimination.

The feds will likely win the case since it has been assigned to Federal District Court Judge Ivan Lemelle, a Democrat and Clinton appointee who has already ruled against the voucher program in the past. The State of Louisiana will undoubtedly appeal.

"After generations of being denied a choice, parents finally can choose a school for their child, but now the federal government is stepping in to prevent parents from exercising this right. Shame on them," Jindal said. "Parents should have the ability to decide where to send their child to school."

And working families should be able to opt of of failing, union controlled public schools just like the elites do.

But right or wrong, the Ruling Class will fight it tooth and nail. They don't want the kids of working families educated.

It's all about control.

Report: 40,000 Public Schools Teachers Are Registered Online As Seeking 'Sugar Daddies'

Now, this is interesting...according to SeekingArrangement.com, which calls itself “the #1 online dating website for sugar babies and generous men,” some 40,000 entrepreneurial public school teachers have joined the website in an attempt to sell their bodies um...find wealthy, generous older men for “mutually beneficial relationships.”

According to SeekingArrangement, the top five school districts in the country for sugar-baby teachers are (in order): the School District of Philadelphia, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Los Angeles Unified School District, the Clark County School District (Las Vegas area) and the New York City public schools.

“Based on the occupation field ‘teacher,’ we polled members to see which school districts they worked in,” explained Jennifer Gwynn, SeekingArrangement’s public relations manager.

According to SeekingArrangement, the average public school teacher who uses the site is between the ages of 28 and 33. The average tab is around $3,000 in 'financial assistance' each month from the generous benefactor on the other side of the deal.

If the name of this site sounds familiar to you, perhaps it's because it's where Anthony Weiner's sexting buddy Sydney Leathers trolled for older johns online.

Education indeed! I wonder if the union would insist on a cut if they found out about it?

'We Don't Need No Education' - Americans And History

These videos pretty much speaks for themselves.

Since public school education became just another union gig and our universities became an industry prizing 'diversity' and 'the college experience' over a true Liberal arts education,this is what we've come to.

Two Big Victories For School Choice

There have been two recent major  victories at the state level for school choice that deserve to be shared.

Both involved Choice Scholarship Programs ( CSP) which provide vouchers to low-income and middle-income families to help pay the cost of private schools and get children out of the public school systems.

In Indiana, the state supreme court ruled unanimously in Meredith v. Pence that the CSP vouchers were constitutional, defeating a huge lawsuit and lobbying campaign by the teacher's union and the ACLU.

The decision affects 600,000 children, who will now be free to flee dysfunctional public schools for quality private education:

The union's lawsuit hinged on two legal points. First, constitutional provisions requiring that states provide a “general and uniform” system of public education and second, provisions forbidding state support of religion.

Or to put it more plainly, 'we'll be in charge of the mindrape and indoctrination, thanks. Not you Jesus freaks or racist Tea Party types.'

The court did not agree:

With regard to requiring a uniform system of public education, Gall goes on to write that the court “showed that the duty to provide a ‘general and uniform’ system of public schools is not violated when a state provides educational options above and beyond the system.”

As for the provision prohibiting state support of religion, the court noted that:

any benefit to program-eligible schools, religious or non-religious, derives from the private, independent choice of the parents of program-eligible students, not the decree of the state, and is thus ancillary and incidental to the benefit conferred on these families.

The Indiana legislature is now talking about expanding the program to serve even more students.

In Colorado, there was a victory that may even be more far reaching.

The Appeals Court overturned an injunction on the Douglas County CSP program issued by a Left wing judge in response to a suit by the teacher's unions, ACLU, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and similar actors.

They claimed that the CSP program violated, among other things, the establishment clause in the Colorado constitution. Their argument was that by subsidizing student to attend religious schools, the state was promoting and subsidizing particular faiths. And since Secular Leftism was already covered by the public schools it wasn't among them.

The appellate court decided to reason this out in an interesting way:

In rejecting the plaintiffs’ establishment clause claims, the appellate court applied the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Colorado Christian University v. Weaver, 534 F.3d 1245 (10th Cir. 2008). In this decision, penned by then-Judge Michael McConnell, the Tenth Circuit held that it violated the First Amendment to provide financial aid to students attending sectarian institutions but not to students attending “pervasively sectarian” institutions. As the Tenth Circuit noted, “inquiring into the pervasiveness or intensity of… belief” of religious institutions receiving funding is a form of anti-religious discrimination.

In the case challenging the CSP, the Colorado appeals court applied the same logic, holding that:

the inquiry in which the district court engaged—into the degree to which religious tenets and beliefs are included in participating private schools’ educational programs—is no longer constitutionally permissible. In the thirty years since Americans United was decided, the United States Supreme Court has made clear that, in assessing facially neutral student aid laws, a court may not inquire into the extent to which religious teaching pervades a particular institution’s curriculum. Doing so violates the First Amendment.

This means that a First Amendment violation does not occur when a facially neutral law happens to fund religious school. Rather, the true First Amendment violation occurs when an activist court seeks to scrutinize the curriculum of schools funded by vouchers to sniff out religion it doesn’t like.

Heh!

Needless to say, no one has ever gone to Harvard, UW at Madison, Yale, or any other bastion of Leftist thought to challenge their right to public funds based on the depth of their beliefs.

These two decisions add to a growing file of case law supporting the right to school choice. And that's a very important issue..if not one of the most important.

A Marvelous Speech By Dr. Benjamin Carson

Dr. Benjamin Carson, the chief pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore gave this speech at the national prayer breakfast last week with President Obama in attendance. It's created quite a bit of reaction. Needless to say, President Obama stopped looking pleased after about 12 minutes. You'll see why when you listen to what Dr. Carson had to say, particularly about self-reliance, education and healthcare.

By the way, I can vouch for what he had to say about getting rid of TV when it comes to young children. My wife and I did exactly the same thing when our kids were very small, and it was one of the best things we ever did for them.

(Must See) Chicago Teachers Party And Show Off Their Radical Roots

As you watch this, remember what I said yesterday about many public school teachers providing, in many cases, a healthy dose of lefty indoctrination. And remember what a prominant part of the Democrat party these public employee unions are.

Granted, I'm sure the interviewer cherry picked a bit. But it doesn't look like he had to work very hard to do it, does it?

The Chicago Teacher's Strike - Starving The Kids, Literally

As the Chicago teacher's union strike moves into high gear, one thing that gone almost unnoticed is an important effect on the city's school children. Aside from the effect of missing school on their academic progress, the hellish inconvenience for working parents and the fact that many of these children are running around with no real safe place to go in a fairly dangerous city, there's one more thing, as Charles Lane points out in today's Washington Post; a lot of them are running around hungry.

Keep the following numbers in mind for the next time a public-sector union official starts lecturing you about social justice.

In Chicago, 85 percent of the roughly 400,000 public school students are either African American or Latino. A similar percentage receives free or reduced-price meals, which means these students live at or near the poverty line: $27,214 for a family of three, in a typical case. Keep the following numbers in mind for the next time a public-sector union official starts lecturing you about social justice.

The average public-school teacher in Chicago earned almost triple that amount — $76,000 per year, according to the school district. In contract negotiations this year, Chicago Public Schools offered an average total pay increase of 16 percent over four years.

Since the schools are closed, so are the meal programs. As I have reason to know, for a lot of these children, the meals they get at school constitute a major portion of their diet. In a number of cases, the free breakfast and lunch the school hands out might be the only food they get during the day.

They are literally being starved and held as hostages by a greedy, incompetent and uncaring public employee union that is supposed to be in the profession of caring about what happens to children.

I use the term incompetant advisedly.While there are probably a number of good teachers working in Chicago's public school system, it graduates only 60 percent of its students and fewer than 8 percent of 11th-graders met all four college readiness benchmarks on 2011 state tests, according to the school system's own, almost certainly exaggerated numbers .

Of course, caring about what happens to the school children entrusted to their care has never been what the teacher's unions were about, in spite of some heroic efforts by individual teachers.

It was always about milking the public treasury and getting the right Democrat politicians elected to continue the process...along with a healthy dose of lefty indoctrination on the side in a lot of cases.

The children were always just a side issue, the 'product' the factory turned out, as if they were widgets being manufactured.

It is an indictment on us as a society that we have allowed this to continue as long as it has.

The Real Reason The Chicago Teacher's Strike Is Bad News For Obama

Chris Cillizza in his WaPo politics column the Fix looks at the Chicago teachers strike and writers that the primary reason it's bad for President Obama's campaign is the associations with the president's adopted hometown and his ex-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, and Emanuel being distracted from fundraising for the chief pro-Obama PAC, Priorities USA.

He misses the main reason entirely.

What's going on with the Chicago teacher's union is a story that's occurred nation-wide for years. What people see is a greedy and unprincipled public employee union holding up the tax payers once again with the help of the Democrat they elected to office. And this is happening right after they saw a convention that featured a number of public employee functionaries speaking loudly and in some cases arrogantly about their 'rights' , with those sentiments being echoed by a number of Democrat politicians, including the president.

They see an entitled class of whom teacher's union president Karen Lewis is almost a caricature of, a far left harridan holding children and their education hostage. Note color of those tee shirts. It's not accidental.





In Los Angeles, for instance, the teacher's unions have the same kind of hold over th ecity's Democrat politicians they do in Chicago. In spite of the fact that the LA Unified School District's drop out rate is almost 40% and test scores are in the cellar while California is number 3 in the country in the amount spent per pupil, the union has successfully fought any attempts to institute teacher evaluation based on test scores while continuing to rack up raises and increased benefits. In fact, the teacher's unions have contributed millions and are the main financial backers of Governor Jerry Brown's Proposition 30, which would raise the already high state taxes on incomes over $250,000 while increasing the state sales tax to 7.75%, which in Los Angeles because of local city sales taxes translates to an increase from 9.75% to 10%. The increase on Los Angeles' already highly taxed gas prices, currently averaging about $4.15 per gallon on food and manufactured goods for people at all economic levels can only be imagined.

And one of the primary reason for the hikes is to allow the teachers and the other public employee unions to preserve the raises and benefits they've already been granted by the Democrats they paid to put into office.

The fact that this time it's Chicago and Rahm Emanuel is entirely secondary.

By this time, anyone who's paying attention identifies this president and his party with the greed of the public employee unions, and this strike, which even Rahm Emanuel called unnecessary and a strike of choice may make a lot of them start putting 2 and 2 together and thinking about whether they want to reward the enablers of this kind of behavior come November.

Chicago's Teachers Go On Strike: 'Screw The Kids'

Chicago's teachers are going out on strike, putting an estimated 400,000 children out on the streets at the beginning of the school year.

They are striking in spite of the school board caving in and meeting almost all their demands, including a 16% increase in pay over 4 years (about 3.5 times the rate of inflation), rehiring 500 teachers, and an improved package of benefit proposals. Currently, Chicago teachers average $76,000 per year before benefits.

The major sticking point - wait for it- was that the union refuses to consider any kind of teacher evaluations based on standardized test scores:

[Teacher's Union president Karen] Lewis said she was concerned about the possibility of a large termination of teachers under a new evaluation system.

"We are also concerned that too much of the evaluations will be based on students' standardized test scores. This is no way to measure teacher effectiveness at all," she said.

Heaven forbid that unionized teachers should undergo the same kind of performance evaluations the people that pay their salaries are subjected to.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel angrily called this “a strike of choice” and urged the union to return to the table, saying, “My team is available now.”

But the reality is that the public employee unions own Rahm Emanuel just as they do any Chicago Democrat. They came across with huge dollars wrested willing or no from their dues paying members for campaign contributions to get him elected, they supplied the manpower on the streets to walk the polls and man phone banks, and they expect and demand that investment pays off. And they could care less that the city's budget is seriously in the red.

Rahm Emanuel knows this quite well, and he understands that after some face saving 'negotiations', he's going to have to bend over and do what the teacher's union wants.And the taxpayers and the children can pound sand.

That's the devil's bargain public employee unions and democrat politicians have been making for years. It's a corrupt scheme Charles Ponzi would have wept with greed over...the unions elect Democrats, and then 'negotiate' with these same politicians for increased wages and benefits, a portion of which gets kicked back to keep the same politicians in power next election cycle.

It has bankrupted our state, city and municipal treasuries. It has destroyed public education in the case of the teachers unions, as even many individual teachers will admit when you talk to them privately. And if any one really cared about educating our children, it would have stopped a long time ago.

Iran Has A Plan To Deal With Uppity Women - Ban Them From Universities

The latest news from the Islamic Republic concerns their way of dealing with the problem of uppity, educated women.

Apparently Iranian clerics feel that too many women are getting an education, and one that makes them far less agreeable to their religiously sanctioned role of becoming property.So they have banned women outright from 77 BA and Bachelor of Science courses of study, thus making them male only domains.

The courses affected include English literature, English translation, hotel management, archaeology, nuclear physics, computer science, electrical engineering, industrial engineering and business management.

Iran's Oil Industry University, which has several campuses across the country, says it will no longer accept female students at all and Isfahan University will no longer allow women to study in its mining engineering degree program.

What they're doing, essentially is excluding women from many of Iran's higher paying occupations. That's going to make them a lot more dependent on men and give women more of an incentive to be content with their sharia defined role.

Islam - the religion where women know their place - or else.

Teacher Who Screamed At Student : 'It's Criminal To Criticize Obama' Will Keep Her Job

Remember this one?



The video shows the interaction between a teacher, one Tanya Dixon-Neely at North Rowan High School in North Carolina telling her class all about the story of Mitt Romney allegedly bullying someone in high school.

When one of her students asks her, “Didn’t Obama bully someone though?” The teacher says: “Not to my knowledge.” When the student then cites the fact that Obama, in Dreams from My Father, admitted to shoving a little girl around, she gets hysterical“Stop, no, because there is no comparison,” screams the teacher. Romney is “running for president. Obama is the president.” She proceeds to go absolutely berserk and starts screaming that no one is going to disrespect President Obama in her classroom, says that the student can be arrested for 'slandering the president', that people were arrested for 'saying bad things about President Bush' and that 'you think when you get arrested they read you your rights? They don't.'

When the student refused to back down, she physically threatens him, saying, “OK, do I have to get my cane?”

I predicted when this originally broke that this sorry excuse for an 'educator' would keep her job, and it turns out I was right:


The North Rowan High School teacher who told students it’s criminal to speak ill of the president will keep her job with the Rowan-Salisbury School System.

Although Tanya Dixon-Neely has been suspended without pay, she will return next school year, when she will be required to start a monitored growth plan, Superintendent Dr. Judy Grissom said in a press release.

The district received national attention when a nearly 10-minute video of Dixon-Neely and senior Hunter Rogers engaging in a heated political debate went viral. In the video, the Dixon-Neely can be heard telling Rogers that he could be criminally charged for speaking ill of President Obama and that people had been charged for insulting former President George W. Bush.

“As I have stated to our entire school system staff, I expect all teachers to be professional during class discussion and not to force their personal or political views on students, demean students, or instruct students on what to believe,” Grissom said in the release. “Teachers must create a positive instructional environment conducive to learning within the guidelines of our state curriculum.

“Ms. Dixon-Neely’s failure to meet these standards during the recorded portion of class is the basis for my disciplinary action against her.”

The fact that the teacher in question gave her students totally false information, tried to indoctrinate them, and demonstrated her superb classroom management skills by getting hysterical in front of them and actually threatening a student physically is apparently outweighed by her union protection and racial background.

And yes, that's a factor. The superintendent understandably doesn't want this woman running to Eric Holder and the Department of Justice to file a taxpayer funded law suit that the district will have to fight at its own expense....so the students at this North Carolina high school can just put up with it and like it, and that goes double for their parents who are paying the bills.

I notice that the superintendent makes a point of mentioning that the teacher 'has received messages that include racist language and sentiments'. Wrongheaded as that language and those sentiments may be, that has no bearing on the fact she's not fit to teach. But it is a cute way of using the race card to imply that all of the criticism of Ms. Dixon-Neely is just the ignorant ramblings of some semi-educated white trash, and therefore of no account.

Teacher Screams At Student : 'It's Criminal To Criticize Obama'

Just a look at your standard classroom indoctrination at work and what happens if you question it.

The video shows the interaction between a teacher ( now identified as one Tanya Dixon-Neely) at North Rowan High School in North Carolina telling her class all about the story of Mitt Romney allegedly bullying someone in high school.

When one of her students asks her, “Didn’t Obama bully someone though?” The teacher says: “Not to my knowledge.” The student then cites the fact that Obama, in Dreams from My Father, admits to shoving a little girl around. “Stop, no, because there is no comparison,” screams the teacher. Romney is “running for president. Obama is the president.” she goes absolutely berserk and starts screaming that no one is going to disrespect President Obama in her classroom.

She then goes on to say that you can be arrested for 'slandering the president', that people were arrested for 'saying bad things about President Bush' and that 'you think when you get arrested they read you your rights? They don't.'

When the student refuses to be intimidated into agreeing with the teacher, Dixon-Neely states, “OK, do I have to get my cane?”

Yes, this woman is actually an accredited teacher paid for instructing children in social studies.. And what's more, she's going to remain one. They're not going to suspend her, not even for giving her students blatantly false information or for her abysmal classroom management skills.

The most the The Rowan-Salisbury School System released a statement saying that the incident should be used a 'learning experience'.

Extra credit - the teacher isn't shown, but listen to the vocal inflections, particularly when she loses it and starts hysterically defending Obama and see if you can guess her race.

President Obama's Latest Horror - A Trillion Dollar Timebomb For America's Economy

President Obama has just enacted his latest raid on the American treasury. It's designed to benefit the president by pandering to the student vote at the expense of the American taxpayer.

President Obama has announced that he intends to issue an executive order for the federal government to reduce student loan payments to 10 % of a borrower's income above the poverty line, and for total debt forgiveness after 20 years, regardless of the outstanding balance.

"We're just going to do this by ourselves. We can't wait for Congress, we're just going to act," said Education Secretary Arne Duncan on CNN.

And of course, the president is putting this out there at universities all over the country.

To see how insidious this really is, let's take a look at how this works in the real world. Let's say Jane Jones borrows $150,000 to obtain a liberal arts undergraduate degree at your typical university. Her repayment is based on what she earns, if anything. Let's say Jane gets a job as a community organizer at $30,000 per year. Factor out the $10,800 for a single person under the federal poverty guidelines and her total annual repayment is $1,600 per year, or only $133.33 per month.

Twenty years later, she's only repaid $32,000 on her loan. And the balance? it doesn't 'dissolve' as the Obama Administration's rhetoric suggests. It gets picked up by the rest of us and gets added to the national debt.

Yes, fellow citizens. If some of the people the president and his minions feel are more deserving than you are want to go to academia for a 4-year funfest and pick up an overpriced diploma in ethnic or womyn's studies, you and your children are footing the bill.

The tenured radicals installed in the university system working to destroy America one mind at a time always had their six-figure lifestyles subsidized by the rest of us, but the bill just increased a hundred fold.

This is by no means small change. Americans currently owe over $1 trillion in college debt, and some 1.6 million have subsidized student loans, which Obama had the federal government take over in 2009.

Now that it's essentially going to be a free ride, that $1 trillion is going to look like pocket money.

College costs have increased nearly 600 percent since 1980, far ahead of inflation and price increases on cars, homes, and medical care. But for some strange reason, no one is suggesting cutting tuition, limiting tenure, creating alternative programs like apprenticeships, eliminating programs of dubious value or other steps that could make college more affordable. Instead, this president is inflating yet another bubble, since more money directed at the same commodity means schools can increase their prices, based on the 'bigger fool' theory that worked so well when it came to real estate. Remember how people bought homes at inflated prices they couldn't afford because they were always going to appreciate and they could always flip them for a profit in a few months? Remember how realtors always told people that now was the time to buy, before prices went up again?

President Obama is doing exactly the same thing here. He's deliberately setting another time bomb for the economy and creating another megabucks unfunded entitlement for the sole purpose of trying to slither back into office for another four years.When it explodes, he'll be long gone and away from the scene of the crime.

At least with real estate, the private sector was involved, or at least it was until the Obama Administration essentially took over the mortgage industry. Here, the debt bomb is already going to be absorbed via executive order without benefit of any congressional oversight, and it will increase to toxic levels as universities hyper-inflate their already obscene costs.

Ironically, the entire thing is a Ponzi scheme in reverse. The same students crying 'whoo hoo!' as they listen to President Hope n' Change haven't figured out that the small amount their loan payments are going to be lowered is going to be eclipsed by the increasing amount of taxes they'll have to pay to cover what the federal government eats in debt forgiveness, the increased cost of a college degree for their children, and the diminished employment opportunities as more and more economic activity is swallowed up by yet another unfunded federal mandate.

The idea of a sitting president deliberately doing something like this via executive order simply to benefit his own election prospects at the expense of the nation is something new here. But that's what we have.

Along with all the other episodes of this abysmally failed presidency, this latest horror makes it clear that not only does this president not deserve re-election, but that he was unworthy of his office to begin with.

As the ancient Greeks said, character is destiny.

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Obama DOJ Forces School District To Pay Muslim Teacher $75K Over Special Leave For Mecca Trip During School Year

You may remember a story I reported on last December about the Obama Justice Department filing suit against the Berkeley School District in Illinois on behalf of Safoora Kahn, a Muslim teacher because the district denied her three weeks special leave during the school term in order to attend the Haj in Mecca.

The Haj, for those of you who don't know is a religious pilgrimage to the Saudi city of Mecca. It's a religious duty all Muslims are supposed to perform once in their lifetime if they are able, where they prostrate themselves before the Ka'aba and a meteorite known as the Sacred Black Stone and perform rites virtually unchanged since it was a pagan idol dedicated to Lah, the Arabian Moon God.

And it lasts all of five days, not the three weeks Khan requested.

Nevertheless, after her request was denied twice, Khan resigned, went to Mecca and filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) which referred it to the Department of Justice. They sued on her behalf, and believe it or not, they won.

Safoorah Khan’s religious discrimination lawsuit against the Berkeley School District ended with a settlement that forced the district to pay $75,000 in lost back pay, compensatory damages and attorneys’ fees, not to mention the costs the district incurred in defending itself.

The settlement also requires the district to develop a policy for accommodating religions - and let's be honest, we're only talking about Islam here - including mandatory training on religious accommodations to all board of education members and school supervisors.

“I’m glad that we settled and I hope this does set a precedent,” Khan said. “I hope they realize that hajj means a lot to Muslims and there will be more and more people taking the trip. I hope this helps people and their employers to accommodate Muslims and their requests.”

That statement is a clue as to how this went down. I can almost guarantee that Ms. Kahn talked to her friends at CAIR first before quitting her job and filing the EEOC complaint, which cost her nothing and cost the school district she worked for $75,000, the cost of defending itself against her lawsuit and the cost of hiring a replacement when she resigned in the middle of a school year.

I guarantee you, the Obama DOJ would not have taken a similar case for a Catholic teacher seeking three weeks off for Holy Week, or a Jewish teacher seeking three weeks off for the ten day period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

The first commandment of the Obama Administration - Thou shalt appease Islam at all times.

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Andrew Breitbart On Education "The Status Quo Is Deplorable"

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The Teacher's Unions Strike Again - Major Cheating Scandal Unfolds In Atlanta

At least 178 teachers and principals in the Atlanta Public Schools conspired in cheating to raise student scores on high-stakes standardized tests, according to a report from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

The report on the Atlanta Public Schools, released Tuesday, states there was a "widespread" conspiracy by teachers, principals and administrators to fix answers on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT), punish anyone who objected, and hide the conspiracy from outsiders.

The investigation did not indirectly implicated recently retired Superintendent Beverly Hall, who was named US Superintendent of the Year in 2009 largely because of the school system's reported gains on test scores – especially in inner-city schools. The investigators said she likely knew, or should have known, what was going on.

“Dr. Hall pledged ‘full cooperation’ with this investigation, but did not deliver,” the report said. “APS withheld documents and information from us. Many district officials we interviewed were not truthful.”

The scandal spreads over three counties — Fulton, DeKalb and Douglas - and the respective DA's will make the decision on whether to prosecute and whom to charge.

Of course, since federal money was received by the school system and what we have here is also a conspiracy to defraud the taxpayers, the US Department of Justice could certainly investigate and indict on federal charges where appropriate. However, given the union membership and racial makeup of many of the teachers and administrators involved, it's doubtful the feds will get involved.

Many teachers claim they cooperated out of fear.

“APS is run like the mob,” one teacher told investigators, saying she cheated because she feared retaliation if she didn’t.

The investigation showed widespread corrections and erasures on test scores, and it's alleged that some of the teachers and administrators even held 'cheating parties'.There was also a widespread pattern of deliberate coverups and failure to cooperate with the investigations.

One thing the article fails to mention is another possible motive for the conspiracy, since we know these teachers and administrators likely could care less about the kids or doing their jobs well.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that a number of them received merit or incentive pay because the kids were 'doing so well.' It also probably helped shield incompetent teachers and administrators from performance reviews.

I would almost guarantee that it's not just these teachers and not just Atlanta. There are at least eight pending investigations in major urban school districts because of similarly abnormal patterns in erasures and suspiciously high test scores.

The Obama Administration's response, via Education Secretary Arne Duncan is to call for reform of No Child Left Behind to de-emphasize test scores while still paying bonuses to teachers who improve test scores in their classes.

Perhaps Zombie is right after all...we may need to destroy public education in order to save it. Certainly we need to get the unions out of it.



Yes...it's for the children.

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Why There's Nothing Wrong With Feeding Schoolkids Dinner

This story created a mild ripple in the blogosphere, and led to an interesting online discussion with some of my favorite conservatives.

It concerns a program instituted by the DC public schools to serve dinner at school.

The District of Columbia has joined 13 states which serve three meals a day at school, as part of a $5.7 million Federally Funded program.
“We're reaching 10,000 kids a day at 99 of our 120 schools," said Anthony Tata, Chief Operating Officer of D.C. Public Schools.

Public school officials claim, quite correctly, that healthy, well-fed kids learn better, and are less prone to be discipline problems. And the after school dinners also have more kids enrolling in the after school programs - where they have the opportunity to spend more time on schoolwork.

A lot of my conservative friends were outraged at the dependency and what they saw as Big Government doing something these children's parents should be doing...at the taxpayer's expense. One of them came up with the entirely correct insight that as the school system takes over more and more of the functions of family, more and more families stop functioning.

I understand that viewpoint, but I differ in this particular instance.

Assuming the kids' families qualify financially ( and I'm sure a lot of these programs need much more oversight to weed out the grifters from the truly needy) I see nothing wrong with feeding them. The article correctly states that otherwise, a lot of these kids in the after school program probably wouldn't get any food until breakfast at school the next day.

Kids with a meal under their belts do learn better, are easier to discipline and approach school with a much better attitude. The problem with the DC schools (which are near the bottom results wise and near the top in dollars spent per pupil) is the top heavy and largely incompetent administration, a lack of fiscal discipline and the teacher's union protection of incompetent teachers. I don't agree that the kids should suffer because of that just to make a point.

Vouchers are the answer,but Obama helped kill DC's voucher program - while sending his own kids to an exclusive private school.

Given the racial composition of DC's public schools,it's a pretty safe bet that the majority of these kids are coming from one parent households, with the luckier ones being raised by grandpa and grandma. There's also a culture problem when it comes to school if we're willing to be honest about it, and it is NOT a racial problem by the way - Barbados, for example is a black country that spends a fraction of what DC does per pupil with much better educational results.

One of my friends made the observation that the real cultural problem is the development of a culture of dependency. He's right, it definitely is, and it's the fruits of decades of Big Government.

But this is a cultural problem that definitely isn't going to be addressed at the home level, because of political correctness. Gut the program? Stop feeding the kids and tell their parents to do it? Fine..a lot of them will end up going hungry, get involved in crime, drugs or prostitution and just perpetuate the cycle.

Take the kids away from their dysfunctional 'families'? Then they're either in orphanages or foster homes, which costs even more and creates other problems with oversight.

Bottom line, it would be nice if more people would refrain from bringing kids into the world with the expectation that someone else is going to pay to support them. But they aren't. They'll still breed.

So we can ignore the problem as not ours, or try and fix it.

My point is that the public schools, properly managed could be a tool to instill some different values and break the cultural cycle.The fact that they by and large aren't being used like that now and are just functioning as madrassahs for the Left and sources to siphon off public monies for political contributions to the Democrats via the unions is another matter.

Back in previous generations,a large part of the entire rationale for public schools was to teach values, patriotism and citizenship as well as things like math and English. I think that unfortunately pretty much ended in the days after WWII,when teaching became just another union gig.

But if schools started instilling those values again and started creating citizens rather than statistics,if tax paying public saw that the school budgets were being used wisely and were more convinced that they were actually receiving value,there would be less of a call for vouchers and they'd likely be a lot more amenable to spending the money.

Your thoughts?

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