Tag Archives: Public School

Commentary

10% of US students are subject to sexual misconduct by school staff

1 Comment

Story from Big Journalism. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

In 2004, Hofstra University professor Dr. Carol Shakeshaft published a report for the United States Department of Education titled “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature.” It was presented to Congress as part of the No Child Left Behind Act. In it, Shakeshaft stated:

As a group, these studies present a wide range of estimates of the percentage of U.S. students subject to sexual misconduct by school staff and vary from 3.7 to 50.3 percent. Because of its carefully drawn sample and survey methodology, the AAUW report that nearly 9.6 percent of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career presents the most accurate data available at this time.

According to a study she did of abuse complaints against Catholic priests over a five decade period she concluded that “…the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”

[…]But this story, involving mainly public schools, silently went away. The government, not wanting the legal nightmare that would follow, let the whole matter drop.

A story like this should have been huge, but the press had a vested interest in protecting academia. Public schools might get complained about in terms that would motivate politicians to pour more tax dollars into them. But any story that would inspire parents to pull their kids out en masse is spiked. The public institutions that statists love so much, despite their many failings, are protected. The progressive agenda trumped what should have been the story of the year.

One more reason why I oppose public schools and teacher unions. I hope you all watched the recent video I posted on school choice!

Videos

MUST-SEE: Cato Institute lady explains why competition is better than monopoly

3 Comments

Look at this fun video of a young lady from the libertarian Cato Institute explaining why choice and competition are better for consumers than monopolies! (H/T Hot Air)

She is especially interested in education and has lots of wonderful statistics.

It’s only 5 minutes long! This woman (Izzy Santa) is way better than Dan Mitchell! His videos were horrible compared to this one. I can actually understand what this lady is saying, and she makes fun gestures when she talks. She says “rotten”! The charts are really helpful, too. This is probably the best thing you could ever watch to learn a little bit about why I find economics so interesting. This is really something that all women should know a lot about to help them to be excellent wives and mothers.

You might want to send this post to your friends and family who may think that the best thing for education is to give public schools more money. It may be that the best way to get better public schools for less money is to make them compete with private, parochial and charter schools.

Moral hazard and the recession

Here’s another video on moral hazards, which explains how we got the recession:

This one is only 4 minutes long. I don’t think it’s quite as good as the first one. The lady who is presenting is from the Independent Women’s Forum. I love that think tank! They have Carrie Lukas on staff. She is the author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism”.

News

Federal judge awards German homeschooling family political asylum

2 Comments
The Romeike Family, formerly of Germany

Story here from the UK Telegraph. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The case of the homeschooling couple from Germany who were granted political asylum in the United States, about which Ed West blogged recently, becomes even more interesting if one reads the remarks of the man who granted the Romeikes asylum, Immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman, of Memphis, Tennessee.

[…]Judge Burman added that the scariest thing about this case was the motivation of the German government. He said that, rather than being concerned with the welfare of the children, it was trying to stamp out parallel societies. Making his court order, the judge voiced concern that, although Germany was a democratic country and an ally, the policy of persecuting homeschoolers was “repellent to everything we believe as Americans”.

[…]The mentality is that the state – not parents – is the natural controller and shaper of children’s lives and beliefs. When a schoolgirl can be given an abortion without her parents’ knowledge, we know that, while public utilities may have been privatised, children have been nationalised. The Romeikes who fled from Germany objected to their children being forced to follow a curriculum that they believed was anti-Christian. The same would apply in British state schools, where pornographic sex education is increasingly being made compulsory.

Next to unilateral “no-fault” divorce, this opposition to parental rights is what prevents me from considering marriage and parenting, no matter how good of a match I find. And make no mistake, the idea that children are the property of the state is totally at home among today’s Democrat party. The system of ineffective government-run public schools, which are partially funded by homeschooling and private-schooling families who don’t even use them, is anti-family and anti-liberty.

Consider this radical feminist Democrat:

“We really don’t know how to raise children. If we want to talk about equality of opportunity for children, then the fact that children are raised in families means there’s no equality. […]In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them.”
(Mary Jo Bane:  Former Assistant Secretary of Administration for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services of the Clinton administration)

I wrote about the problem of state intrusion into the family here: Are marriage and family compatible with single-payer health care?

But sometimes Christians cause their own problems by being ignorant about economics. I have talked to fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers who actually favored single-payer health care, yet simultaneously opposed things like taxpayer-funded abortions. The problem is that many Christians are not informed about economics. They think that they can empower a secular-leftist state to achieve “social justice” through wealth redistribution, without having their own religious liberty impacted.

But the same government that can confiscate wealth from “the rich” to nationalize health care can also force pro-life nurses at government-run hospitals to perform abortions. The best defense of religious liberty is a free market. If a government-run school discriminates against you in the free market, you can always homeschool or use private schools. That is, if you can afford to homeschool or pay for private schools after the government is done using your taxes to indoctrinate the other children.