Govt. Schools = FAIL
#1
Quote:Exodus Out of Tax-Funded Schools in Major Cities
Written by Gary North on July 25, 2012


Parents are pulling their children out of the government schools. This is happening across the USA.

In city after city, enrollment is declining. This is not a recent development. It has been going on for a half a decade. It has taken place in half of the nation’s largest districts.

The trend looks irreversible.

As the Web offers better programs free of charge, the public schools cannot compete. The inner city schools are catastrophic. They are getting worse. As whites and Asians flee the cities, the inner-city schools get worse.

The tax base shrinks. The teachers union demands more pay and smaller classes. The city governments are trapped. Solution: cut programs, fire teachers, and enlarge classes back to (horror!) 1959′s 33 students.

Nobody is supposed to talk about this. It is time to talk about it. Public education will not recover. The longer the decline takes place, the more parents will conclude that there is only one solution: pull their kids out.

At some point, voters will not pass any more bond issues. They will not consent to higher property taxes. They will let the public schools sink.

The only established church in the USA will find fewer members. The only kids will be those whose parents do not have the money to pull them out.

The New York Times reports: “Urban districts like Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio, are facing an exodus even as the school-age population has increased.”

The exodus has begun. “Let my people go!”

School financing is on a per-pupil basis. This dooms districts whose student enrollment is falling.

Teachers will be fired. Courses like art, music, dance, and other classes that will not get an inner-city kid a job will be cut.

Quote:The rise of charter schools has accelerated some enrollment declines. The number of students fell about 5 percent in traditional public school districts between 2005 and 2010; by comparison, the number of students in all-charter districts soared by close to 60 percent, according to the Department of Education data. Thousands of students have moved into charter schools in districts with both traditional public and charter schools.

Although the total number of students in charter schools is just 5 percent of all public school children, it has had a striking effect in some cities. In Columbus, Ohio, for example, enrollment in city schools declined by more than 10 percent — or about 6,150 students — between 2005 and 2010, even as charter schools gained close to 9,000 students.

Charter schools are not under the thumb of school boards, politicians, and the teachers union.

The old model for schools is dying.

Quote:In Los Angeles, the district has dismissed more than 8,500 teachers and other education workers in the last four years as enrollment fell by about 56,000 students. The Mesa Unified District, which lost 7,155 students between 2005 and 2010, has closed four middle schools in the last three years, delayed new textbook purchases, and laid off librarians.

The students left behind in some of these large districts are increasingly children with disabilities, in poverty or learning English as a second language.

Their parents have little political clout. They do not pay taxes. They rent. They are on welfare.

Parents with money will no longer pay for these schools. The districts will have to find ways to get into wallets in the suburbs. That will not be easy. Judges will be the tools of this wealth redistribution.

Quote:Such trends alarm those who worry about the increasing inequity in schools. “I see greater stratification and greater segregation,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

You’ve got it, Randy. And your union is doomed. Your members will not get pay raises, smaller classes, and retirement benefits. Cities will declare bankruptcy and thereby escape these huge obligations.

Quote:Educators are concerned that a vicious cycle will set in. Some of the largest public school systems in the country are in danger of becoming “the schools that nobody wants,” said Jeffrey Mirel, an education historian at the University of Michigan.

You’ve got it, Jeff. Nobody wants these schools. They have failed. The era of public education is going the way of all flesh.

Who needs public schools when there is the Khan Academy?

Quote:A. Duane Arbogast, acting deputy superintendent for academics in Prince George’s County, said he recognized the challenge of persuading families to send their children to public schools.

“We simply have to get better and provide an education that people of all social classes would be proud of,” said Mr. Arbogast, who cited a new health sciences academy and a planned performing arts high school in his district.

But you can’t provide decent education, Duane. Education is not about new buildings. It’s about vision, self-discipline, future-orientation, and a curriculum that is held together by a deeply religious view. The public schools used to have such a view: the messianic transformation of mankind through public education. No one believes it any more. The money is running out.

Quote:Before the Mesa district closed Brimhall Junior High School this year, the school lost teachers in art, music and technology in part because of a declining student head count. That made it harder for the school, which faces competition from many charter schools, to attract students.

“Education has gotten to be almost a sales job,” said Susan Chard, who taught seventh grade math at Brimhall for 18 years. “You want to provide reasons for parents to bring their children to your school.”

You do, indeed. Brimhall Junior High could not come up with enough of them.

Many more Brimhalls will follow.


Quote:Enrollment Off in Big Districts, Forcing Layoffs
By MOTOKO RICH
Published: July 23, 2012

Enrollment in nearly half of the nation’s largest school districts has dropped steadily over the last five years, triggering school closings that have destabilized neighborhoods, caused layoffs of essential staff and concerns in many cities that the students who remain are some of the neediest and most difficult to educate.

While the losses have been especially steep in long-battered cities like Cleveland and Detroit, enrollment has also fallen significantly in places suffering through the recent economic downturn, like Broward County, Fla., San Bernardino, Calif., and Tucson, according to the latest available data from the Department of Education, analyzed for The New York Times. Urban districts like Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio, are facing an exodus even as the school-age population has increased.

Enrollment in the New York City schools, the largest district in the country, was flat from 2005 to 2010, but both Chicago and Los Angeles lost students, with declining birthrates and competition from charter schools cited as among the reasons.

Because school financing is often allocated on a per-pupil basis, plummeting enrollment can mean fewer teachers will be needed. But it can also affect the depth of a district’s curriculum, jeopardizing programs in foreign languages, music or art.

While large districts lost students in the 1970s as middle class families left big cities for the suburbs, districts are losing students now for a variety of reasons. The economy and home foreclosure crisis drove some families from one school system into another. Hundreds of children from immigrant families have left districts in Arizona and California as their parents have lost jobs. Legal crackdowns have also prompted many families to return to their home countries.

In some cases, the collapse of housing prices has led homeowners to stay put, making it difficult for new families — and new prospective students — to move in and take their place.

But some say the schools are partly to blame. “We have record-low confidence in our public schools,” said Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento and head of education policy for the United States Conference of Mayors. (He is married to Michelle Rhee, the lightning rod former chancellor of the Washington public schools and now an advocate for data-driven reform). “If we have high-quality choices in all neighborhoods, you don’t have that exodus taking place,” he said.

The rise of charter schools has accelerated some enrollment declines. The number of students fell about 5 percent in traditional public school districts between 2005 and 2010; by comparison, the number of students in all-charter districts soared by close to 60 percent, according to the Department of Education data. Thousands of students have moved into charter schools in districts with both traditional public and charter schools.

Although the total number of students in charter schools is just 5 percent of all public school children, it has had a striking effect in some cities. In Columbus, Ohio, for example, enrollment in city schools declined by more than 10 percent — or about 6,150 students — between 2005 and 2010, even as charter schools gained close to 9,000 students.

A year ago, Tanya Moton withdrew her daughter, Dy’Mon Starks, 12, from a public school and signed her up for Graham Expeditionary Middle School, a nearby charter school.

“The classes were too big, the kids were unruly and didn’t pay attention to the teachers,” Ms. Moton said of the former school.

She said she sought help for her daughter’s dyslexia at her former school, but officials “claimed that she didn’t need it.” After transferring to Graham, Ms. Moton said, “one of the teachers stayed after school every Friday to help her.”

During the recession and weak recovery, pinched state financing and dwindling property taxes forced many public schools to shed teachers and cut programs.

“The fewer students we have, the fewer dollars we’re getting” from the state and federal government, said Matthew E. Stanski, chief financial officer of Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland, where enrollment has fallen by almost 5 percent in five years, despite sharp gains in nearby counties.

Officials have laid off about 100 teachers and district employees, cut prekindergarten to half days and canceled some athletic programs, Mr. Stanski said.

In Los Angeles, the district has dismissed more than 8,500 teachers and other education workers in the last four years as enrollment fell by about 56,000 students. The Mesa Unified District, which lost 7,155 students between 2005 and 2010, has closed four middle schools in the last three years, delayed new textbook purchases, and laid off librarians.

The students left behind in some of these large districts are increasingly children with disabilities, in poverty or learning English as a second language.

Jeff Warner, a spokesman for the Columbus City Schools, said that enrollment appears to be stabilizing, but it can be difficult to compete against suburban and charter schools because of the district’s higher proportion of students requiring special education services.

In Cleveland, where enrollment fell by nearly a fifth between 2005 and 2010, the number of students requiring special education services has risen from 17 percent of the student body to 23 percent, up from just under 14 percent a decade ago, according to the Cleveland Metropolitan School District.

Such trends alarm those who worry about the increasing inequity in schools. “I see greater stratification and greater segregation,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Educators are concerned that a vicious cycle will set in. Some of the largest public school systems in the country are in danger of becoming “the schools that nobody wants,” said Jeffrey Mirel, an education historian at the University of Michigan.

Jeanmarie Hedges, a mother of two teenage sons, moved her family out of Prince George’s County two years ago because the proportion of students passing standardized tests was much lower than in neighboring Charles County, Md.

Ms. Hedges said she was also driven by fear of violence in the school. “Some of our friends went there and they were beaten up a lot,” she said.

A. Duane Arbogast, acting deputy superintendent for academics in Prince George’s County, said he recognized the challenge of persuading families to send their children to public schools.

“We simply have to get better and provide an education that people of all social classes would be proud of,” said Mr. Arbogast, who cited a new health sciences academy and a planned performing arts high school in his district.

But declining enrollment can force tough trade-offs. “If you want to offer Spanish but you only have 80 kids taking Spanish, then your cost per pupil” is larger than if you have 500 in Spanish classes, said Jonathan Travers, director at Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit consulting group that helps school systems adjust to changes in enrollment.

Before the Mesa district closed Brimhall Junior High School this year, the school lost teachers in art, music and technology in part because of a declining student head count. That made it harder for the school, which faces competition from many charter schools, to attract students.

“Education has gotten to be almost a sales job,” said Susan Chard, who taught seventh grade math at Brimhall for 18 years. “You want to provide reasons for parents to bring their children to your school.”
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#2
I hope more people turn to the tried and true method of correspondence school, that the BPPE provides. These outstanding distance education universities are accessible, for much cheaper than most of the lousy RA colleges, that "gouge" the student and provide a "less than wonderful education", to say the least. I have a graduate degree from a state approved university and it has served me well, and allowed me to function as an employee for the state of California for many moons... all state approved colleges and universities are legal and valid...in fact, they are every bit as legal and valid as any RA school in the great state of California...Sacramento says so as does the Constitution of these United states.
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#3
Quote:Educational Lunacy
Walter E. Williams
August 21, 2012

If I were a Klansman, wanting to sabotage black education, I couldn't find better allies than education establishment liberals and officials in the Obama administration, especially Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who in March 2010 announced that his department was "going to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement."

For Duncan, the civil rights issue was that black elementary and high school students are disciplined at a higher rate than whites. His evidence for discrimination is that blacks are three and a half times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers.

Duncan and his Obama administration supporters conveniently ignored school "racial discrimination" against whites, who are more than two times as likely to be suspended as Asians and Pacific Islanders.

Heather MacDonald reports on all of this in "Undisciplined," appearing in City Journal (Summer 2012). She writes that between September 2011 and February 2012, 25 times more black Chicago students than white students were arrested at school, mostly for battery. In Chicago schools, black students outnumber whites by four to one.

MacDonald adds, "Nationally, the picture is no better. The homicide rate among males between the ages of 14 and 17 is nearly ten times higher for blacks than for whites and Hispanics combined. Such data make no impact on the Obama administration and its orbiting advocates, who apparently believe that the lack of self-control and socialization that results in this disproportionate criminal violence does not manifest itself in classroom comportment as well."

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nationally during 2007-2008, more than 145,000 teachers were physically attacked. Six percent of big-city schools report verbal abuse of teachers, and 18 percent report non-verbal disrespect for teachers. An earlier NCES study found that 18 percent of the nation's schools accounted for 75 percent of the reported incidents of violence, and 6.6 percent accounted for 50 percent.

So far as serious violence, murder and rapes, 1.9 percent of schools reported 50 percent of the incidents. The preponderance of school violence occurs in big-city schools attended by black students.

Educators might not see classroom comportment as a priority. According to a recent hire, a Baltimore high school now asks prospective teachers: "How do you respond to being mistreated? What do you do if someone cusses you out?" The proper answer is: "Nothing." That vision might explain why a 34-year veteran of the school had to be taken from the premises in an ambulance after a student shattered the glass in a classroom display case.

MacDonald reports that a fifth-grade teacher in St. Paul, Minn., scoffs at the notion that minority students are being unfairly targeted for discipline, saying "Anyone in his right mind knows that these (disciplined) students are extremely disruptive."

In response to the higher disciplinary rates for minority students, the St. Paul school district has spent $350,000 for teacher "cultural-proficiency" training sessions where they learn about "whiteness." At one of these sessions, an Asian teacher asked: "How do I help the student who blurts out answers and disrupts the class?" The black facilitator said: "That's what black culture is." If a white person made such a remark, I'm sure it would be deemed racist.

Some of today's black political leaders are around my age, 76, such as Reps. Maxine Waters, Charles Rangel, John Conyers, former Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder, Jesse Jackson and many others. Ask them what their parents would have done had they cursed, assaulted a teacher or engaged in disruptive behavior that's become routine in far too many schools. Would their parents have accepted the grossly disrespectful public behavior that includes foul language and racial epithets?

Their silence and support of the status quo represent a betrayal of epic proportions to the blood, sweat and tears of our ancestors in their struggle to make today's education opportunities available.
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#4
Quote:Liberals Indoctrinate Children To Control Society
August 27, 2012 By John Careccia

After the debacle of the Vietnam War era, the liberal establishment decided that the only way to accomplish the goal of “converting” American opinion was to infiltrate our schools at the level of teacher and administrator to control the student’s degree of learning in institutions of higher education. So the numbers of students majoring in political science and education exploded exponentially over the next couple of decades. One of the principal strategies of the left for the past 40 years has been to control the learning process in America’s public schools. Controlling the content of public education at all levels is how the left is actively transforming Americans into a flock of naive ill-informed, easily-led sheep or as I call them Sheoples. A major component of the dumbing down process is to revise history to suit their goals. Historical revisionism is how liberals revise America’s past to suit their agenda.

One of the most prolific practitioners of historical revisionism is President Obama. When it suits his purposes to do so, the president will simply make up history that never happened or distort what did happen until it appears to support his agenda. When he speaks to his audience he refers to historical circumstances as if they are indisputable facts, and they are if no one questions them. President Obama’s most infamous act of historical revisionism came when he claimed that not only is America not a Christian nation, it is one of the world’s largest Muslim nations. To make such an absurd statement, Barack Obama had to ignore more than 200 years of historical evidence, evidence that is readily available and clearly contradicts him.

The question that should be in our minds is Why did Obama do that? What was the purpose behind his remarks? Even though we are a decidedly Christian nation with more than 80% of Americans identifying themselves as Christians, and there are more than 56 Million Catholics in the United States not to mention the number of Evangelical and other types of Christians. So even though the facts were staring him straight in the face, Obama insisted on stressing how important the Muslim people were in shaping our country. Why? What he said could be characterized as a lie, but to be generous we say that he misspoke. There were no Muslims of note in this country before 1900. So where did all these Muslims come from? Actually, best guess estimates is that there are fewer than 3 million Muslim citizens in the United States. What else is our government trying to say didn’t happen or happened in a way contrary to the facts. Women should take note of what this government is proposing in many areas of our country. Municipal Progressive Liberal administrations are promoting and allowing Shariah Law in local neighborhoods throughout the country. How does Shariah law affect the average woman? You can ask one if they would dare answer you. History shows that women do not fare well in Muslim societies. Women are treated as property and dealt with in that fashion. If a woman is raped, she must have 3 witnesses to prove it, or she is arrested and prosecuted as a “loose woman” and faces possible stoning.

Why would a government want to change the history taught in the schools? If children grow up knowing what the government wants them to know and not the actual facts or circumstances as they happened, then the children will believe whatever they have been taught. If the government tells them it is proper to practice homosexuality then the child believes it is. By doing this the government molds the thoughts and opinions of the next generation the same way Hitler did in the 1930′s with his Youth Corps. Once the government has the children’s faith in action they can deal with the existing generation’s belief system in a way that the children will not question. The children will grow up depending on the government and believing everything the government tells them. They will have become Sheoples instead of individuals with character and determination. Sheoples are easily managed and molded to the will of the government that controls them.

Thinking people who respect and admire the truth no matter where it leads need to understand that Liberals will use many different methods to revise or change historical occurrences. Good people need to recognize when they are being employed, and challenge the liberals who use them to distort the truth. Check what is being taught in your local school. Know who your child’s teacher is and what their teaching philosophy is. If you sense that there is something amiss, confront them and voice a public challenge so that you draw the community’s attention to it. It is true that there is strength in numbers. The more people you can enlist in your efforts to make things right the more chance you have of getting it done. Liberals will tell you they have the right to do this and that with your children. Make them prove it and don’t allow them to say anything is fact without proving it. Until you are told by a Judge, you have the last word in how and what your child is taught. I would rather home school my child than expose them to indoctrination in a broken school system. One of the most insidious form of revisionism is Academic cronyism.

Academic cronyism is the practice of academic historians quoting each other instead of relying on original source material. This is perhaps the most hideous of all the methods the revisionists use. So-called professors set themselves up as experts and quote each other ignoring the facts of the original source material. It works like this: One so-called expert makes a claim about an individual or historic event that by design or carelessness is wrong. Then other professors quote the erroneous material of this so-called expert and the process repeats itself until fiction becomes enshrined as fact. If a lie is repeated often enough, it becomes fact to the less informed general populace. Perception becomes reality. I encourage readers to look for these five revisionist methods of liberals in the speeches of politicians (especially President Obama when he uses a teleprompter). Parents need to closely examine the textbooks of their children, and question the facts stated by political commentators.

There is an agenda behind these methods that is not good for America. The Liberal Progressive Socialist agenda is a disease that if left unchecked can infect the entire host and bring about the demise of the American Experiment.
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