Tag Archives: NEA

News

Teacher union memo reveals agenda to undermine parents

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From the Washington Examiner.

Excerpt:

American Federation of Teachers officials have disavowed an internal report after it was posted on the union’s website following its annual conference, embedded on each of its 19 pages with the union’s logo and signed by a union official.

The report, titled “How Connecticut Defused the Parent Trigger,” was replaced on AFT’s website with a note saying “we have received complaints about these materials and have removed them because they do not represent AFT’s position.”

Education activist RiShawn Biddle copied the report before it was removed from the AFT website. The report describes in detail AFT’s strategy for subverting school reform legislation in Connecticut, a strategy that relied greatly on deceiving legislators and interested parents.

The Parent Trigger proposal originated in California and was adopted by education reformers in Connecticut last year. The proposal empowers a majority of parents with children attending a persistently failing school to force education officials to either close it, convert it to a charter school or replace its staff.

The union was blindsided when thousands of minority parents thronged in the Connecticut capitol to support the measure. Many of them expressed concern that their state’s public schools posted the biggest gap in the country on standardized test scores between minority and Caucasian students.

But where California teachers unions lobbied to block the bill in their state legislature and state education department, AFT’s Connecticut affiliate began an offensive that ultimately neutered the bill.

And, according to the now-disavowed report, they succeeded because the proposal’s “name is a misnomer,” since school governance councils “are advisory and do not have true governing authority.”

The bill approved by Connecticut legislators allows the councils of elected community members only to advise school officials rather than empowering them to force needed reforms.

[…]The report also makes clear AFT officials must be hoping Biddle’s discovery does not become more widely known because it destroys the union’s carefully erected image as reform-minded partners who love to “collaborate” with parents and communities.Though the union’s biggest concern is not serving children or parents, it cannot have the public aware of this, or that its strategy includes the “absence of charter school and parent groups from the table” during political shenanigans that simultaneously target lawmakers with lobbying pressure while appearing to “[discuss] shared concerns” with parent and reform groups.

The union says it learned from past “mistakes” to avoid “inflammatory rhetoric” and the appearance of “saying ‘no.'” So, instead, it preaches “collaboration” and “allowing teachers to have a voice,” while working behind the scenes to make sure no one but the union does.

Read the whole thing, and consider homeschooling.

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News

Atlanta public schools caught helping students to cheat on standardized tests

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Beverly Hall and Atlanta public schools
Beverly Hall and Atlanta public schools

From the liberal Atlanta Journal-Constitution, news of a cover-up of “systemic” cheating in the Atlanta public schools. (H/T Reason to Stand)

Excerpt:

State investigators have uncovered a decade of systemic cheating in the Atlanta Public Schools and conclude that Superintendent Beverly Hall knew or should have known about it, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned.

In a report that Gov. Nathan Deal planned to release today, the investigators name nearly 180 educators, including more than three dozen principals, as participants in cheating on state curriculum tests, officials said over the weekend. The investigators obtained scores of confessions.

The findings suggest the national accolades that Hall and the school system have collected — and the much-vaunted academic progress for which she claimed credit — were based on falsehoods. Raising test scores apparently became a higher priority than conducting the district’s business in an ethical manner.

[…]The report’s release culminates more than two years of inquiries into Atlanta’s huge gains on the state-mandated Criterion-Referenced Competency Test in 2009. An AJC analysis first detected statistically improbable increases in test scores at two Atlanta schools in 2008. The following year, the AJC published another analysis that found suspicious score changes on the 2009 CRCT at a dozen Atlanta schools. The newspaper’s reporting ultimately led to the state investigation that is being released today.The investigators’ report, officials said, depicts a culture that rewarded cheaters, punished whistle-blowers and covered up improprieties. Strongly contradicting denials of cheating and other irregularities by Hall and other top district executives, the report describes organized wrongdoing that robbed tens of thousands of children — many of whom came from disadvantaged backgrounds and struggled in school — of an honest appraisal of their abilities.

At the same time, the document apparently provides a scathing assessment of the school system’s handling of the scandal, accusing district leaders of hampering the special investigators’ efforts to uncover the truth. The investigators reportedly accuse Hall and her top aides of refusing to take responsibility for the district’s problems.

The report also will detail potentially criminal acts by district officials, the AJC has learned.

In an effort to maintain Hall’s high profile in national education circles, the superintendent and her top aides reportedly tried to hide unflattering information as far back as 2006. District officials illegally altered documents related to the test and withheld material that should have been released under the state’s Open Records Act, the report is expected to say.

There is a possibility of criminal charges, and I do hope that this woman and all responsible spend at least a few years in jail.

We need to get taxpayer money out of the public school system, and back into the hands of parents, through a federal voucher system. Let the parents decide which school is best for their children. Let them buy education the same way that they buy things from other retailers. Choice and competition. Lower price and higher quality. If they don’t like the results that public schools provide, then let them take their money to a private school – or use the money to homeschool.

Notice that the largest teacher union, the National Education Association (NEA) has endorsed Obama. Democrats protect the failings of the education establishment, in exchange for votes and political activism. The faster we vote the Democrats out, the faster education in this country will improve.

News

Teacher union promotes sexualizing children at United Nations conference

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Robert Stacy McCain is covering a very strange story about how the United Nations is promoting sex to children. (H/T Hot Air)

Over the long-term, I think it is probably better for a child to learn about marriage than sex, because they shouldn’t be alone and childless for the last half of their lives. Instead of learning how to have sex outside of marriage, so that they can use people and be used by people for temporary fun, it might be a better idea to research what challenges are encountered in a long-term stable marriage, what character and skills a spouse should have, and what policies and laws promote marriage.

The only thing that I think sexualization of children will do is raise social costs, increase government, and break the bonds between children and parents. That will just open up children to being influenced more by government and less by their parents. Furthermore, I guess some people who are perverts and predators would also benefit from sexualizing children. They would be less likely to be exposed to moral judgments and shame if young people are indoctrinated to think that perversion is normal, and more likely to find lots of children to have sex with. So I guess that this is the agenda that teacher unions, the United Nations, and the Democrats who fund both of them are pushing.

Anyway, here is the first story from Robert Stacy McCain.

Excerpt:

“Experts” have determined that what’s wrong with our education system is that kids aren’t taught enough about sex:

“Oral sex, masturbation, and orgasms need to be taught in education,” Diane Schneider told the audience at a [United Nations conference] panel on combating homophobia and transphobia. Schneider, representing the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers union in the US, advocated for more “inclusive” sex education in US schools. . . . She claimed that the idea of sex education remains an oxymoron if it is abstinence-based, or if students are still able to opt-out.

Comprehensive sex education is “the only way to combat heterosexism and gender conformity,” Schneider proclaimed, “and we must make these issues a part of every middle and high-school student’s agenda.” . . .

A panel sponsored in part by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) advocated for “comprehensive sex education” not only as a tool to combat “gender oppression,” but also as the key to achieving all of the Millennium Development Goals.

Diane Schneider has done work for the National Education Association, and she is also employed by the gay rights group GLSEN, which promotes sex to children. The NEA is the largest teacher union in the country, and they basically own the Democrat party. The sexualization of children is part of the Democrat agenda. They don’t like marriage – they don’t like parents. They want children to be having sex. They want children to reject the morality of their parents, especially fathers. And they don’t like “heterosexism”. Traditional marriage is “heterosexist”. Only feminists use words like “gender oppression”. This is a feminist initiative.

Keep in mind that the teaching profession is dominated by women. Around 80% of classroom teachers are women. The unions are likewise dominated by women at all levels. So why are women pushing this agenda into classrooms? Why is there no revolt to teaching sex outside of marriage to children? Is it because women do not want children who engage in risky, immoral and dangerous activities to feel badly about it? Is it because children resent fathers setting moral boundaries on children? Is it because they think that if everyone sins, then no one will be able to make any judgments, and then no one will feel bad? Is it because they think that the problems that result from risky behavior should just be solved by taking someone else’s money, instead of making better choices?

Isn’t it weird that single, unmarried women who vote Democrat think that they will one day get married and stay married for their whole lives? I find that weird. I am not sure how encouraging men to have sex with women they have NO INTENTION of staying with for life will make men into husbands. I think that feminists think that some charming, loyal, faithful man is going to come along and protect and provide for them and love them into their old age and raise children with them. But then I look at stories like this and I wonder – are women who vote Democrat capable of linking the things they are voting for to their own plans for their lives? Or do they just expect to degrade themselves with others until they turn 30, knock out a couple of fatherless children at taxpayer expense (IVF) and then go on welfare for the rest of their lives with no man ever giving them a second look. That seems to be what will happen. Men don’t marry women who cannot be faithful, who cannot be unselfish, and who cannot stop voting more and more of their money out of their wallets.

McCain writes:

Of all the problems affecting the world, America’s leading organization of teachers is urging the United Nations “to combat heterosexism and gender conformity” by teaching “oral sex, masturbation, and orgasms”? Because that’s exactly what’s needed by impoverished villagers in Bolivia, Botswana, Belize and Burkina Faso.

Meanwhile, you will be pleased to learn, in her official statement to the U.N. conference, Melanne Verveer, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues (and “one of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ’s closest associates“), devoted separate sections to “Women and Green Jobs” and “Gender and Climate Change.”

So that’s the “women’s agenda” the United States is now promoting worldwide: Orgasms for kids, green jobs and fighting climate change.

You can find out more about Diane in McCain’s first post.

But there’s more in the second post, which talks about Girl Scouts and the United Nations.

Excerpt:

Pundette was writing about the latest United Nations outrage — teaching kids masturbation and oral sex to combat “heterosexism” — and in the process linked to this U.N.-related story you might have missed:

The World Association of Girl Scouts and Girl Guides hosted a no-adults-welcome panel at the United Nations [in March 2010] where Planned Parenthood was allowed to distribute a brochure entitled “Healthy, Happy and Hot.” . . .
The brochure claims, “Many people think sex is just about vaginal or anal intercourse… But, there are lots of different ways to have sex and lots of different types of sex. There is no right or wrong way to have sex. Just have fun, explore and be yourself!” . . .
The Girl Scouts, along with the YWCA have been co-moderating a young women’s caucus that included an “Intergenerational Conversation” side event on “universal access” and “reproductive health.” One recent Girl Scout project “aims at securing the right of women, men and adolescents aged between ten and twenty-five, to better reproductive and sexual health.”

If this is what women want, then they need to realize that this is mutually exclusive to marriage. You can spend the first 30 years of your like as a left-wing anti-family activist and then blame men for not marrying you and taking care of you in your old age. Women are doing this to themselves, and man-blaming is not going to fix the situation. Feminism and the sexual revolution isn’t something that men pushed on women. It’s something that women push on themselves. Just because they don’t like it doesn’t mean that they didn’t choose it.