New York University is no longer the only school offering OWS classes. The notion of competition seems so… capitalist… but there it is nonetheless:

Columbia University is offering a new course on Occupy Wall Street next semester — sending upperclassmen and grad students into the field for full course credit.

The class is taught by Dr. Hannah Appel, who boasts about her nights camped out in Zuccotti Park.

As many as 30 students will be expected to get involved in ongoing OWS projects outside the classroom, the syllabus says.

The class will be in the anthropology department and called “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement.” It will be divided between seminars at the Morningside Heights campus and fieldwork.

On her blog, Appel defends OWS, arguing that “it is important to push back against the rhetoric of ‘disorganization’ or ‘a movement without a message’ coming from left, right and center.”

The course syllabus is here (PDF). Graduate thesis topic: A Brief History of Up Twinkles and Down Twinkles.

Hopefully the course also includes extra credit for an optional essay on the irony of going further into debt borrowing money to pay for a class that teaches students how to most effectively protest student loan debt. Or should we assume the class will be dramatically discounted from Columbia’s usual rates to avoid any hypocritical clash between Occupy Wall Street’s student loan philosophy and what Columbia charges to attend?

Update: Just got this Tweet wondering aloud how one would go about protesting the class. I’d suggest occupying the classroom.

(h/t Gothamist and Big Government)

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

If you have kids (or remember from your own grade-school days), Scholastic puts out news bulletins that get sent home weekly or monthly.

One of those items is Scholastic News, which bills itself as “America’s Leading News Source for kids.”

Reader Edward has a daughter in fourth grade who brought home the December issue of Scholastic News — and he wasn’t too happy when he saw the publication’s coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Read for yourself (click for full-size):

The news bulletin also included some quiz questions about OWS:

Talk about a whitewash. The Scholastic writers have great futures ahead as MSM writers.

Reader Edward wrote to Scholastic:

I grew up in Soviet Union and seeing your propaganda about Occupy Wall Street brings back my memories.

I’m neither Republican or Democrat but I would rather see my kids hear about both sides.

Scholastic responded:

Thank you for contacting Scholastic Book Clubs. I am happy to forward on your concern about providing both Democrat and Republican views. I apologize for any inconvenience you may have encountered while trying to offer different views for your children.

We truly appreciate your support of Scholastic Book Clubs.

Perhaps the next edition can provide kids with a full accounting of the Occupy-related illnesses, vandalism, rapes, deaths, and other criminal violations — and a related pop quiz on John Nolte’s Occupy arrest rap sheet.

The kids deserve the whole truth. The teachers unions’ Alinsky brigade won’t give it to them.

***

Mermaz tips me to this rather unbalanced piece on the Tea Party published by Scholastic last fall. Compare and contrast:

The Tea Party movement was founded in 2009 to advocate smaller government, lower taxes, and a smaller national debt. According to a CBS News poll, 18 per cent of Americans identify themselves as Tea Party supporters.

“The Tea Parties are filled with people who are average citizens,” Ross told the Scholastic Kids Press Corps. “We are the heart and soul of what the American spirit is.”

U.S. Senator Dan Inouye of Hawaii disagrees.

“I think they’re good Americans, but they go to the extreme,” he said. “They’re not covering the soul of America.”

Inouye is a former veteran and spoke to the Scholastic Kids Press Corps at a rally where the VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) endorsed Senator Barbara Boxer for U.S. Senate in California.

…In Nevada, Sharron Angle, a Tea Party-backed Republican candidate, has become a real threat to U.S. Senator Harry Reid, who currently serves as the Senate Majority Leader. Reid called out the big guns to go up against his opponent. Former President Bill Clinton was recently in Nevada campaigning for him and warning voters against casting their ballots in anger.

“If any time in your life you make an important decision when you’re mad, there’s an 80 per cent chance you’re going to make a mistake,” Clinton said at a rally for Reid. “I don’t want people to abandon their anger. I want them to channel it so they can think clearly.”

***

A reader reminds me this isn’t the first time Scholastic has gone moonbatty:

Not the first time that Scholastic has whitewashed or succumbed to radical environmentalist (TreeHugger and Sierra Club) and liberal (Mother Jones, New York Times, Rethinking Schools, Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood) pressure. Earlier in the year they succeeded in shaking down Scholastic and won another liberal propaganda campaign that seeks to dictate average Americans’ lives down to the kindergarten level simply because a curriculum was not up to the standards of the environmental Left.

Of course now, Scholastic simply wants to focus on promoting environmental awareness child activism based on the book The Down-to-Earth-Guide to Global Warming, which was written by Al Gore’s co-producer of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, Laurie David.

Background here and here.

***

Related today: Occupying the Classroom: NYU to Offer Class in Occupy Wall Street

***
Previous:

“Educate, collaborate, AGITATE!”: Alinsky’s teacher corps
Flashback: Bill Ayers declares education “the motor-force of revolution”
Obama’s classroom campaign: No junior lobbyist left behind
Brainwashed in New Rochelle
Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools
A public school field trip…to the local illegal alien day labor center
First graders take school field trip…to teacher’s gay wedding
Roses are red. Bees are swarming. We’re all going to DIE from global warming!
Anti-war educators exploit The Children in the name of peace
The 3 R’s in the Age of Obama: Rappin’, revolution & radicalism
Get Schooled: Nickelodeon & friends want your kids to “change the system”
Nickelodeon goes moonbatty
Nickelodeon is at it again

A Suffolk University law professor will not collect items for United States troops overseas and thinks it is “shameful” to do so.

Law professor Michael Avery sent a five-paragraph e-mail to colleagues in response to a school-wide appeal for care packages for deployed soldiers.

“I think it is shameful that it is perceived as legitimate to solicit in an academic institution for support for men and women who have gone overseas to kill other human beings” wrote Avery.

Avery also wrote that he believes sympathy for troops in harms way is “not particularly rational in today’s world.”

The e-mail did not stop with Avery’s objection to the care packages. Avery went on to question the schools intent of the American flag hanging in the atrium:

“Since Sept. 11 we have had perhaps the largest flag in New England hanging in our atrium. This is not a politically neutral act. Excessive patriotic zeal is a hallmark of national security states. It permits, indeed encourages, excesses in the name of national security, as we saw during the Bush administration, and which continue during the Obama administration” wrote Avery.

More at My Fox Boston.

Background on Professor Avery:

Subjects:
Constitutional Law, Individual Rights, Evidence, Scientific Evidence

Professional Activities:
President, National Lawyers Guild (NLG) (2003 – 2006); Former President, Board of Directors, National Police Accountability Project; Frequently invited to lecture on the topic of constitutional law and/or police misconduct at law schools nationwide. Lectures at conferences sponsored by Georgetown University Law Center, Chicago Kent Law School, Suffolk University School of Law, A.L.I. – A.B.A., American Civil Liberties Union affiliates, National Lawyers Guild, Clark Boardman, Ltd., International Association of Chiefs of Police, various law enforcement agencies. President, Board of Directors, National Police Accountability Project, NLG,(1999 – 2003); Cooperating Attorney, Center for Constitutional Rights, New York, 1980-present; Co-chair, Massachusetts Chapter, National Lawyers Guild, 1996 to 1998; Board Member, Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, 1983-1986; General Counsel, Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, 1978-1981; Chairperson, Civil Liberties Committee, National Lawyers Guild, 1977-1980; National Council Member, Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, 1976-1979.

Via Discover the Networks:

Michael Avery was the President of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) from 2003 to 2006. In that role, he consistently condemned the Bush administration, its war on terror, and its 2003 invasion of Iraq. “I’m afraid that if we want President Bush to go,” said Avery in 2003, “we will have to make that happen ourselves. The President repeatedly lied about the justification for going to war in Iraq, to the Congress, to the United Nations and to the American people. Where are the weapons of mass destruction? They don’t exist. If they find any now, we should look for the ‘made in the USA’ label on the bottom.”

On February 10, 2005, NLG published a news release expressing its support for the self-proclaimed “radical activist attorney” Lynne Stewart, who had just been convicted of providing material aid to the Islamic Group, an Egypt-based terrorist organization whose leader, Omar Abdel Rahman, helped mastermind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In the NLG statement, Michael Avery is quoted as saying: “The National Lawyers Guild strongly urges its own members and other defense lawyers to continue to proudly represent clients who are openly critical of government policies. We will not be intimidated and this prosecution has only strengthened our resolve to oppose the repressive attacks this government has made on the civil liberties of everyone in this country. We will also continue to stand by Lynne Stewart.”

Refresher on convicted jihadist-enabler Lynne Stewart here.

Remember when school field trips were to zoos or historical landmarks?

From Fox6:

Every weekday at noon, the “Solidarity Singers” gather around the Capitol Rotunda to vocalize their displeasure with Governor Walker’s agenda.

On a Tuesday in late September, FOX6 watched as elementary school children were led into the middle of the protest, and encouraged to clap and sing along.
[...]
According to Reeder, it’s not the first time this has happened.

“When they are here, we do try to sing ‘This Land Is Your Land’ or ‘If I Had A Hammer,’ things they might be familiar with that are a little less political, so they would feel welcome to come into the circle,” Reeder said.

Suffice to say, I’d be unhappy to say the least if my kids were taken anywhere near “the circle.”

Click the pic for the video at The Right Scoop. The only thing missing from the “Solidarity Singers” footage is Nurse Ratched walking around dispensing meds:

Students who display an aptitude for anti-Scott Walker protest will be automatically enrolled in Wisonsin’s “Junior Fleebagger” training program.

But at least the lyrics of the protest songs offered the kids a good grammar lesson:

The Superintendent is clearly anxious to get to the bottom of this:

I’ll bet he’d have been concerned if the kids were taken to a Tea Party.

Privately though there’s a chance the Superintendent is berating the school’s educators for allowing 4th graders to participate in a left-wing protest… that’s 3rd grade curriculum, people!

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Proposition 103, the only statewide tax increase on the November ballot across the country, is going down tonight, according to number-crunchers in my home state of Colorado. If the results of this massive tax hike referendum had gone the big government/big labor lobby’s way, it would be front-page news tomorrow and Debbie Blabberman-Schultz would be crowing about it non-stop on MSNBC.

Instead, crickets will chirp. White House, pay attention:

Colorado voters have rejected an attempt to raise state income and sales taxes to fund education, The Denver Post has declared.

Colorado voters were saying no to a major tax increase proposal Tuesday night, as early returns appeared to show Proposition 103 failing across the state.

With 38 percent of precincts reporting, Proposition 103 looked to be headed to defeat, with 36.9 percent in favor to 63 percent against.

That was also true in Denver. With 68,471 ballots that had been counted through 7 p.m., the measure was failing 43.7 percent to 56.3 percent.

Even in liberal Boulder County — home to the measure’s chief supporter — the measure was failing, though by a narrow 93 votes.

Our Democrat governor here in Colorado, John Hickenlooper, refused to endorse the $3 billion measure. Voters were mercifully unswayed by the progressive human shield strategy of adorning the job-killing tax hikes with shiny apple images and elementary school kids. Analyst Ben DeGrow noted that contrary to hysterical ed lobby propaganda, total annual expenditures on K-12, adjusted for inflation, from 1999 to 2010 have actually “increased by $3.2 billion or 46 percent. Per pupil spending is up 24 percent.”

Fiscal sanity and the facts trumped teachers’ union demagoguery. Taxpayers in this battleground are not in the mood for more tax-and-spend sinkholes.

Hope for change? Yes, we can!

At Goode Elementary in York City, Pennsylvania yesterday, Joe Biden taught some 4th graders a valuable economic lesson: “If you need more money, just take it from rich people.”

From The Blaze by way of Ace of Spades:

Biden actually told the schoolchildren that, in order to rehire some 400,000 teachers nationwide, along with thousands of police officers and firefighters, all that needs to be done is tax wealthy individuals at a higher rate than they are currently taxed.

Then, in a move perhaps intended to woo, Biden told Lenid Keebaugh’s class of fourth-graders, “We’re going to give you some money to hire them back.”

Take about $500 in additional taxes from someone who makes a million dollars – “a million dollars,” Biden stressed – and those jobs will come right back.

Biden must have forgotten to blame Bush, which normally is part of his stock motivational speech to school children, but there’s such an urgency to pass the recently voted down jobs bill that I suppose the oversight is understandable:

A much more useful presentation would have been for Joe to show the kids where all that free money he keeps talking about is actually coming from:

Joe Biden update: You might have heard Joe Biden’s latest scare tactic of telling people that if the “jobs bill” isn’t passed, their chance of getting raped, robbed or murdered will increase.

Jason Mattera at Human Events confronted Biden about that claim. Check out the video here. The Sheriff got a little testy and a couple of aides whisked him away.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you are paying attention. Democrats in Washington are turning up the heat on the GOP as they push for quick passage of the “mini” $35 billion union jobs bailout. True to Alinsky form, Team Obama is spinning more emo-narratives centered on saving teachers from layoffs. At a Save the Teachers and Children! press conference yesterday, Senate Dems poured it on thick for their Big Labor pals. So did Joe Biden, who schmoozed it up with a class of fourth graders before turning on the fear-mongering spigot. Ignoring the billions in taxpayer dollars that he’s redistributed to the National Education Association’s pet causes over the last three years, the campaigner-in-chief took to the classroom to bemoan that “We have a tendency to say great things about how important education is in the abstract, but we don’t always put our money where our mouth is.”

As I spotlighted last week, President Obama’s marquee jobless teacher/poster boy for the union jobs bailout is a Boston educator who is NOT jobless. And all the little lies serve the larger Obama fraud of endless Keynesian intervention as a “cure” — which I’ve hit on again in my new column this week. Copy, clip, and save this companion chart (h/t Veronique de Rugy) for a ready reality check:

Update: Reid’s priorities laid bare. “It’s very clear that private sector jobs have been doing just fine, it’s the public sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation is all about,” Reid said on the Senate floor.”

Video:

Listen to what this responsible teacher has to say: When funds run out “you end up fiscally going off a cliff,” said Iowa Rep. Jeremy Taylor, R-Sioux City, vice chairman of the Iowa House Education Committee. “I don’t think it’s a wise idea for our state to be budgeting based on that one-time money, and I say that as both a legislator and a teacher.

***

The EduJobs III Bailout
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2011

One of my son’s Suzuki violin teachers had a wise twist on an old saying: “If at first you don’t succeed, try something else.” The corollary? “When you do succeed, don’t stop. Do it again.” The White House could use some remedial Suzuki lessons in economics. They’ve got everything completely bass-ackward.

In February 2009, President Obama signed the trillion-dollar American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Nearly $115 billion was earmarked for education. The stimulator-in-chief’s crack team of Ivy League economists predicted the law would hold the jobless rate under 8.5 percent.

The actual unemployment rate in October 2009 skyrocketed to a whopping 10.2 percent.

In August 2010, President Obama went back to the well. With deep-pocketed public employee unions by his side, he lobbied hard for the so-called “EduJobs” bill — $26 billion more to bail out bankrupt states, school districts and public hospitals. Nearly half went to teachers, whose unions raked in an estimated $50 million in rank-and-file dues as a result. Obama’s economists had promised the jobless rate would be down to 7.9 percent by then.

The actual unemployment rate in August 2010 was 9.6 percent.

Now, after the Senate rejected President Rerun’s latest half-trillion-dollar stimulus proposal, Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are pushing for a “mini” $30 billion union jobs package for teachers (with $5 billion to mollify police and firefighters unions). In addition to funding fantastical green school construction jobs (earmarked for unionized-only contractors in an industry that is 85 percent nonunion), the EduJobs III bill will purportedly “save” 400,000 education jobs at an average cost of nearly $80,000 per job. Those will be paid for with a 0.5 percent surtax on millionaires. The job-savings estimates come from the same economic wunderkinds who predicted the jobless rate today would be 7.1 percent.

The actual unemployment rate reported this month is 9.1 percent. While the White House decries layoffs, the inconvenient truth is that the EduJobs III union payoff is a drop in the bucket compared to the millions laid off in the private sector. According to official government statistics, the share of the eligible population now holding a job has sunk to 58.1 percent, the lowest since July 1983. (Moreover, as education investigative reporter Mike Antonucci and others have noted, the White House teacher layoff math is more statistical chicanery.)

So, where did all the original EduJobs money go? One survey by the Center on Education Policy found that much of the cash went to bolster fringe benefits and administrative staff. The Fordham Institute’s education analyst Chris Tessone noted: “There is no reason to expect anything but business as usual from another round of subsidies. … More subsidies just protect the status quo at great expense to taxpayers.”

While strapped, reckless-spending school districts bemoan the edge of the federal “funding cliff,” another chunk of the EduJobs money went to states that didn’t even need it — and had kept their teacher payrolls full through responsible fiscal stewardship. As education journalist Chris Moody reported last summer, states including North Dakota, Tennessee, Arkansas and Alaska whose budgets are in the black received tens of millions in superfluous school subsidies. “Arkansas,” Moody found, “has a fully funded teaching staff for the coming year, but the state will still receive up to $91 million for teaching jobs.”

In Alaska, school districts had already made hiring decisions for teachers and apportioned the children in each class based upon those numbers. Nevertheless, to fulfill their teachers union-pandering mission, Obama showered the state with $24 million under the bill — money that a state education bureaucrat acknowledged “probably would not go to adding new teachers.”

Other states, such as Illinois and West Virginia, raked in hundreds of millions more in EduJobs dough even though they hadn’t yet burned through 2009 education stimulus money. In fact, a total of 20 states and the District of Columbia have spent less than 5 percent of their allotments, according to Education Week magazine.

An Obama education official helpfully suggested that the unneeded money be spent on “on-campus therapists” instead.

Many other school districts failed to heed warnings against binging on full-time hiring sprees with temporary funding. Education Week reported this spring that the New Hanover County (N.C.) school district used $4.8 million in short-term EduJobs money to fund 88 teaching positions, in addition to more than 100 classroom slots funded with 2009 stimulus tax dollars. Obama and the Democrats blame meanie Republicans for the fiscal emergencies these districts now face.

But who devoured the Beltway candy instead of eating their peas? Washington rewards bloated school pensions, Taj Mahal construction outlays and chronic local education budget shortfalls by pouring more money down their sinkholes.

Instead of incentivizing fixes, politicians — dependent on teachers union campaign contributions and human shield photo-ops — incentivize more failure.

The solution to this vicious cycle of profligacy? It’s elementary: Try something else.

***

Related must-read from Neal McCluskey, who further deconstructs the White House teacher layoff math:

The administration’s report, after all, says that 300,000 elementary and secondary jobs were lost between 2008 and 2011, which seems like a big number. The report doesn’t say whether that was net or total, and it is probably a worst-case scenario, but still, that feels huge.

Huge, that is, until you see what it’s out of. In 2008 the total number of school and district employees was 6,318,395. That means a 300,000 loss was just a 4.7 percent trimming — far from humongous. To put that in students-per-employee perspective, using the latest total enrollment estimate such a cut would have taken us from a ratio of 7.9 students per employee in 2008 to about 8.2 to 1 today. In other words, it would have created a student-to-employee situation we haven’t seen since all the way back in…2003.

Oh.

But what if we lost another 280,000, which is the scenario the administration if trying to scare us with for the current school year? Add that to the 300,000 worst-case loss between 2008 and today, and it would be a total edu-jobs loss of 580,000. In percentage terms that would be a 9.2 percent drop since 2008, and in student-per-staffer perspective an uptick to 8.6 kids per employee, a proportion we last saw in just 1998.

That’s regretable, perhaps, but considering the gigantic staffing increases over the decades — a near doubling since 1969 — and stagnant achievement scores, we should probably be asking why we’ve let cuts be so small up to now. And lest we forget: The nation has an over $14 trillion-and-growing debt, which threatens all of us like a gigantic asteroid hurtling toward Earth. In light of that, using taxpayer dollars to keep public schooling a perpetual jobs factory not only flies in the face of educational logic, it is fiscal and economic lunacy.

The Obama Administration’s edu-jobs plan might work politically — it might be a great weapon for getting votes — but as public policy it is utterly irresponsible.

This story comes to us from Somerville, Massachusetts. All I know is that if I lived there I would definitely be home-schooling by now.

From the Boston Herald:

A Somerville principal has opened fire on cherished American holidays, blasting legendary explorer Christopher Columbus for “atrocities” and saying “we need to be careful” about celebrating Thanksgiving in a scathing email to teachers — who are already under orders not to let the kids dress up for Halloween.

“When we were young we might have been able to claim ignorance of the atrocities that Christopher Columbus committed against the indigenous peoples,” wrote Kennedy School Principal Anne Foley. “We can no longer do so. For many of us and our students celebrating this particular person is an insult and a slight to the people he annihilated. On the same lines, we need to be careful around the Thanksgiving Day time as well.”

Mayor Joseph Curtatone said, “She raises a fair point. History is messy.” School Superintendent Tony Pierantozzi said her “intention is to be very, very sensitive to all of the many, many cultures” of Somerville. Foley said she just wanted to “open up a conversation.”

She must be a blast at parties. This sounds like one of those schools where you’re sentenced to a week of re-education in the counselor’s office for violating the “no angry rhetoric” rule after being overheard referring to Hi-C as “punch.”

If the principal didn’t like Christopher Columbus before, wait until she finds out he was responsible for climate change. The school will probably end up making Al Gore’s birthday a paid holiday — if it isn’t already.

Video from Fox 25:

(h/t Ace of Spades)

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Vice President Joe Biden spent some time in Florida talking to a class of 5th graders about the economy and his favorite three-letter word, jobs. In his discussion about the troubled economy, do you think Biden was forced to admit to the kids that the stimulus was a waste of a huge amount of money, “we have to spend money to keep from going bankrupt” is a ridiculous theory, “green jobs” is a disaster, and that trillions have been charged to their generation and beyond on the Sheriff’s watch alone?

Nah, he just blamed Bush:

“Because things got really bad before we came into office and an awful lot of companies said ‘there’s no more jobs for you here.’”

Is that the same Biden who just last week took ownership of the economy on behalf of the administration? Maybe he got a talking to (and if so he might get another one for this):

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Well, there’s a different kind of aroma overtaking the city. It’s the stench of Big Labor intransigence as the public teachers’ union defies a court order to end its school strike. They’re on day six of job abandonment. For the children!

Striking teachers in Tacoma, Washington, walked picket lines for a sixth day on Tuesday, defying a judge’s back-to-work order and facing possible court sanctions as school officials canceled classes again for 28,700 students.

Contempt-of-court notices were mailed out this week to the roughly 1,900 teachers in the Tacoma School District who were found on Friday by Pierce County Superior Court Judge Bryan Chushcoff to be in violation of his no-strike order.

The letter tells teachers accused of failing to report to work to prepare for court appearances scheduled to begin next Tuesday, if the strike drags on that long.

Only about 90 teachers reported for work on Tuesday, and district officials said the 57 schools would remain closed again on Wednesday in anticipation of the strike continuing despite a new contract offer presented to the union.

Teachers from the state’s third-largest public school district walked off the job September 13 after contract talks hit a stalemate over staffing policies, class size and salaries.

Labor negotiations in Tacoma began May 31, and the teachers have been without a contract since September 1.

The latest 14-hour bargaining session ended at about 2:15 a.m. local time on Tuesday, shortly after the district offered new concessions. But by mid-afternoon, teachers were prepared to continue the strike on Wednesday, union spokesman Rich Wood said.

Despite huge concessions from the district, the union refuses to budge.

The judge overseeing the case may okay a replacement worker policy for the district.

Teachers are recruiting some of the idle students as human shields.

Democrat Gov. Christine Gregoire — long in the hip pocket of the public teachers’ union — is preparing to summon the parties to her office.

One family has had enough:

Tacoma teachers have been on the picket lines since last Tuesday, and for one family that’s already enough.

The Benthein sisters, Linnea, Skye, Autumn and Topanga, all miss the classroom. Their father, Michael, says it’s been tough for him and his wife to deal with.

But after watching the drama of the last week, including a picket line confrontation, and more than one courtroom showdown, he’s ready to move the kids to another school district.

“Transferring them over to Orting because it doesn’t look like there is an end in sight,” said Micheal. “How long is this going to go on?”

Related: What do teachers make in Tacoma?

Related: Why are there never any consequences for illegal teacher strikes?

All the wrong 9/11 lessons
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2011

Are your kids learning the right lessons about 9/11? Ten years after Osama bin Laden’s henchmen murdered thousands of innocents on American soil, too many children have been spoon-fed the thin gruel of progressive political correctness over the stiff antidote of truth.

“Know your enemy, name your enemy” is a 9/11 message that has gone unheeded. Our immigration and homeland security policies refuse to profile jihadi adherents at foreign consular offices and at our borders. Our military leaders refuse to expunge them from uniformed ranks until it’s too late (see: Fort Hood massacre). The j-word is discouraged in Obama intelligence circles, and the term “Islamic extremism” was removed from the U.S. national security strategy document last year.

Similarly, too many teachers refuse to show and tell who the perpetrators of 9/11 were and who their heirs are today. My own daughter was one year old when the Twin Towers collapsed, the Pentagon went up in flames and Shanksville, Pa., became hallowed ground for the brave passengers of United Flight 93. In second grade, her teachers read touchy-feely stories about peace and diversity to honor the 9/11 dead. They whitewashed Osama bin Laden, militant Islam and centuries-old jihad out of the curriculum. Apparently, the youngsters weren’t ready to learn even the most basic information about the evil masterminds of Islamic terrorism.

Mary Beth Hicks, author of the new book “Don’t Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid,” points to a recent review of 10 widely used textbooks in which the concepts of jihad and sharia were either watered down or absent. These childhood experts have determined that grade school is too early to delve into the specifics of the homicidal clash of Allah’s sharia-avenging soldiers with the freedom-loving Western world.

Yet, many of the same protectors of fragile elementary-school pupils can’t wait to teach them all the ins and outs of condoms, cross-dressers and crack addictions.

We pulled our daughter out of a cesspool of academic and moral relativism and found a reality-grounded, rigorous charter school where no-nonsense teachers refuse to sugarcoat inconvenient facts and history. Many of the students are children of soldiers and servicemen and women who — inspired by the heroes of 9/11 — have voluntarily deployed time and time again to kill the American Dream destroyers abroad before they kill us over here.

There’s no better way to hammer home the message that “freedom is not free” than to have your kids go to school with other kids whose dads and moms are gone for years at a time — missing births and birthday parties, recitals and soccer practice, Christmas pageants and Independence Day fireworks.

But instead of unfettered pride in our armed forces, social justice educators in high schools and colleges across the country indoctrinate American students into viewing our volunteer armed forces as victims, monsters and pawns in a leftist “social struggle.”

A decade after the 9/11 attacks, Blame America-ism still permeates classrooms and the culture. A special 9/11 curriculum distributed in New Jersey schools advises teachers to “avoid graphic details or dramatizing the destruction” wrought by the 9/11 hijackers, and instead focus elementary school students’ attention on broadly defined “intolerance” and “hurtful words.”

No surprise: Jihadist utterances such as “Kill the Jews,” “Allahu Akbar” and “Behead all those who insult Islam” are not among the “hurtful words” studied.

Middle-schoolers are directed to “analyze diversity and prejudice in U.S. history.” And high-school students are taught “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” – pop-psychology claptrap used to excuse jihadists’ behavior based on their purported low self-esteem and oppressed status caused by “European colonialism.”

It is no wonder that a new poll released this week showed that Americans today “are generally more willing to believe that U.S. policies in the Middle East might have motivated the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon,” according to Reuters.

To make matters worse, we have an appeaser-in-chief who wrote shortly after the jihadist attacks a decade ago that the “essence of this tragedy” derives “from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others.” A “climate of poverty and ignorance” caused the attacks, then-Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama preached. Never mind the Ivy League and Oxford educations, the oil wealth and the middle-class status of legions of al-Qaida plotters and operatives.

9/11 was a deliberate, carefully planned evil act of the long-waged war on the West by Koran-inspired soldiers of Allah around the world. They hated us before George W. Bush was in office. They hated us before Israel existed. And the avengers of the religion of perpetual outrage will keep hating us no matter how much we try to appease them.

The post-9/11 problem isn’t whether we’ll forget. The problem is: Will we ever learn?

Movie star Matt Damon has made a few notable appearances on this blog over the years — for his blind championing of the late radical Marxist academic Howard Zinn and his Sarah Palin Derangement Syndrome. He’s back today in my syndicated column for his ignorant diatribe against “drill and kill” education methods and lifetime teacher tenure critics.

Lights, camera, agitation!

***

Schooling Matt Damon
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2011

Actor Matt Damon is a walking, talking public service reminder to immunize your children early and often against La-La-Land disease.

In Damon’s world, all public school teachers are selfless angels. Government workers and Hollywood entertainers are impervious to economic incentives. And anyone who disagrees is a know-nothing, “corporate reformer” ingrate who hates education.

Last week, the liberal box-office star addressed a “Save Our Schools” march in Washington at the behest of his mother, a professor of early childhood education. He attacked standardized tests. He praised all the public school teachers who “empowered” him and unlocked his creative potential by rejecting “silly drill and kill nonsense.” Speaking on behalf of “an army of regular people,” Damon decried the demoralization of teachers by ruthless, results-oriented free marketeers whom he mocked as “simple-minded.”

What Damon’s superficial tirade lacked, however, was any real-world understanding of the deterioration of core curricular learning in America. Students can’t master simple division or fractions because today’s teachers — churned out through lowest common denominator grad schools and shielded from competition — have barely mastered those skills themselves. Un-educators have abandoned “drill and kill” computation for multicultural claptrap and fuzzy math, traded in grammar fundamentals for “creative spelling,” and dropped standard civics for save-the-earth propaganda and Alinskyite activism.

Consequence: bottom-basement U.S. student scores on global assessments over the past two decades. Blaming the tests is blaming the messenger. The liberal education establishment’s response to its abject academic failures? Run away. This is why the Save Our Schools agenda championed by Damon calls for less curricular emphasis on math and reading — and more focus on social justice, funding and “equity” issues.

Out: Reading is fundamental.

In: Feeling is fundamental.

After his drippy pep talk absolving teachers of any responsibility for America’s educational morass, Damon then lashed out at a young libertarian reporter who had the audacity to ask him about the negative impact of lifetime teacher tenure. “In acting there isn’t job security, right?” Reason.tv’s Michelle Fields asked Damon. “There is an incentive to work hard and be a better actor because you want to have a job. So why isn’t it like that for teachers?”

Watch here:

It’s elementary that people will work longer and harder if they know they will be rewarded. There’s nothing anti-teacher about the question. (And before teachers-unions goons go on the attack, I am the child of a public school teacher and the mother of two children in an excellent public charter school by choice.) But Damon’s hinges came undone when confronted with the mild question.

“You think job insecurity makes me work hard?” he retorted. “That’s like saying a teacher is going to get lazy when she has tenure.” Gathering all the creative potential he could muster, Damon unleashed crude profanities on Fields. “A teacher wants to teach,” Damon fumed with his mother next to him. “Why else would you take a sh**ty” salary and really long hours and do that job unless you really loved to do it?”

Never mind that most out-of-work Americans would find nothing “sh**ty” about earning an average $53,000 annual salary plus health and retirement benefits for a 180-day work year.

Damon went on to deride standard, mainstream behavioral economic principles as “intrinsically paternalistic” and “MBA-style thinking.” And when the young reporter’s cameraman pointed out that there are bad apples in the teaching profession as in any profession, Damon called him “sh**ty,” too.

Tinseltown stars can afford to put emotion over logic, progressive fantasy over practical reality. The rest of us are stuck with the bill. And those whom bleeding-heart celebrities purport to care most about — the children — suffer the consequences of bad ideas.

Interminable teacher tenure in America’s largest school districts, from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, has produced a rotten corps of incompetent (at best) and dangerous (at worst) educators coddled by Big Labor. As the D.C.-based Center for Union Facts reports, “In many major cities, only one out of 1,000 teachers is fired for performance-related reasons. … In 10 years, only about 47 out of 100,000 teachers were actually terminated from New Jersey’s schools.”

By contrast, as the educational documentary “Waiting for Superman” (produced by avowed liberal turned reformer Davis Guggenheim) pointed out, one out of every 57 doctors loses his or her license to practice medicine, and one out of every 97 lawyers loses their license to practice law.

In Los Angeles, it’s not just meanie tea party terrorists making the case for abolishing teacher tenure. When the Los Angeles Times exposed how the city’s tenure evaluation system rubber-stamped approvals and ignored actual performance, the district superintendent admitted: “Too many ineffective teachers are falling into tenured positions — the equivalent of jobs for life.” USC education professor Julie Slayton acknowledged: “It’s ridiculous and should be changed.”

Pop quiz: Would multimillionaire Matt Damon apply the same warped employment practices and dumbed-down curricular standards to his own accountants that he champions for America’s public school teachers? Film at 11.

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Related background reading:

Rank-and-file teachers speak truth to prog power

Fake sick teachers may cost Wisconsin taxpayers at least $6 million

Union pay chart of the day

Teachers’ Unions 101: “A” is for “agitation”

Obama’s Sputter-nik moment: Cash for Education Clunkers

Fuzzy math: A nationwide epidemic

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Must-read: How the American Federation for Teachers plotted to deceive parents and the public to subvert school reform

Harry Reid has decided to ratchet up the scare tactics a notch. We’ve already been told that if the debt ceiling isn’t raised and taxes increased, government checks might not go out, but now the schools will close:

To fall for these scare tactics you have to believe that refusal to raise the debt ceiling means that the government will suddenly stop taking in revenue, which obviously isn’t true (you’ll notice that at no point have Dems tried to frighten Americans by telling them that if the debt ceiling isn’t raised there won’t be enough money to fund the IRS — but on second thought maybe that should be the Republican talking point).

Human Events:

Once again, courtesy of the Examiner’s Mark Tapscott, here are the hard numbers, in monthly amounts, for anyone foolish enough to buy into Democrat scare tactics:

Federal revenue: $200 billion per month

Interest on the national debt: $29 billion

Social Security: $49.2 billion

Medicare and Medicaid: $50 billion

Active duty military pay: $2.9 billion

Veterans affairs programs: $2.9 billion

Education funding: $11 billion

All of that core spending adds up to $145 billion, which means that in the event of a debt limit, the government can pay it all and still have $55 billion a month left over.

Note also that this Tweet absolutely confirms Harry Reid is a liar, rather than simply an idiot, since he has previously insisted that Social Security “is in great shape for many decades… Today it is not a problem.”

Call the bluff, Republicans!

As August 2nd approaches, Democrats will be sweating like John Kerry during a luxury tax audit. Not because they fear default, but because they know a Y2K moment for the general population is approaching — that morning when everyone wakes up, looks around, realizes the world didn’t end and exclaims, “that’s what we were freaked out about?”

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

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Update from MM: This calls for my favorite kiddie human shield graphic…

(Makestickers.com)

LONDON – Big Labor looks the same wherever you go: Petulant, irrational, and wholly aggrieved beyond its means. I’m here on vacation with family as some 750,000 public-sector employees strike in protest over modest pension reform proposals. It’s a taste of Wisconsin on the Thames.

U.K. government teachers are just as shameless and entitlement-mongering as their American counterparts. More than half of England’s schools shut down on Thursday as union members took to the streets. Borrowing a trademark tactic employed by Democrats Against Fiscal Responsibility from Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Washington, D.C., British educators used their students and children as their kiddie human shields. “HANDS OFF ME MA’S PENSION” read a doe-eyed little girl’s sign in Liverpool. The militant National
Union of Teachers plastered their placards with infant-sized, pastel-colored handprints.

Simon Shaw, a teachers’ union rep in Woodford Green, complained to his local newspaper: “The Government is stealing our money and working till 65 or 68 is not realistic. How do teachers relate to children or have the energy for them at that age?” Asra Haque, a union protester and teacher in Kingsburgy, piled on: “What the government is doing makes us feel like we are part of a dictatorship.” On Twitter, a socialist activist proclaimed “solidarity” between strikers in London and democracy marchers in Egypt.

The supposedly fascist measures at issue involve an average hike in teachers’ pension contributions of about 3 percent and, in keeping with demographic reality, a gentle nudge in the retirement age to 68 by 2020. Striking teachers waved banners crying for “FAIR PENSIONS FOR ALL,” but as Treasury statistics released in England revealed this week, public-union workers rake in the most generous pensions of all. A “mid-ranking teacher on £32,000 a year will receive a final salary pension that is the equivalent of having built up a £500,000 pension pot. This is 20 times higher than the average private sector scheme, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics,” the U.K. Telegraph reported.

“Private sector workers would have to save more than 20 per cent of their salaries for 40 years – more than £500 a month for a similarly paid person — to amass the same amount in a defined contribution pension.” And each and every British family “faces a total bill of £13,500” for the striking teachers’ pensions.

Defined benefits plans are increasingly an anachronism in the modern workplace, but Big Labor obstinately refuses to get with the times.

More sobering for the children whom the teachers’ unions purport to speak, the U.K. faces a future that is “old and broke.” An analysis by the pro-free-market think tank Reform released here this week shows that Britain faces a demographic “timebomb” of an estimated 1.4 million seniors over 65 in the next five years – adding a tax burden
of £32billion for pensions and nearly £40billion for healthcare by 2041 (not adjusted for inflation.)

The report’s authors make conclusions that sound eerily familiar to entitlement-reformers across the pond: “The biggest challenge in encouraging action is that people think that dealing with the problem can be put off. Often population aging is seen as a problem for 2040 or 2050, which is well beyond the attention span of many policy makers
and media commentators. But the fiscal effects will be felt much earlier than that. The case for moving quickly is also not just a fiscal one. Any changes will create a group of people who lose out in the transition. Putting off reform will increase the costs of change and make the group of transitional losers larger.”

Left-wing teachers around the world spend many hours lecturing their students about the need for a “sustainable environment.” Too bad they don’t practice what they teach when it comes to their own unsustainable demands.

The Reverse Midas Touch has claimed another victim:

TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — An Ohio restaurant mentioned last week by President Barack Obama as an indirect beneficiary of the government’s Chrysler bailout will go out of business Sunday after a more than 70-year history.

Co-owner Richard Lawrence of New Chet’s Restaurant in Toledo says business has fallen victim to the economy and the workplace smoking ban approved by Ohio voters in 2006. He told The Blade newspaper of Toledo on Wednesday that auto industry cutbacks also hurt.

File that one alongside a teacher the White House used as a symbol for jobs saved by a $26 billion jobs bill who was subsequently laid off.

Moral of the story: If the administration approaches you and wants to use you or your business as an example of how massive government spending has saved the economy, politely decline the offer, go home for the day and come back when the coast is clear.

(h/t Gateway Pundit)

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe