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Photoshop: Leo Alberti
Tunku Varadarajan is a professor at NYU’s Stern Business School, fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and executive editor for opinions at Forbes.
He thinks I am a “kook” and “crazy” for criticizing President Obama’s education event tomorrow.
Tellingly, he does not address the actual substance of my arguments. But he packs in [...]

Reader Ernest emails a link to the notice on the Broward County FL school district site, which informs parents that they cannot opt their kids out of the president’s speech on Tuesday because the administrators are committed to “encouraging civics education in the broadest sense.”
Who controls your kids?
On Tuesday, September 8, 2009, Broward County Public [...]

My column takes another swing at all the president’s radical education men. For more background on Commie Michael Klonsky, see Andrew McCarthy’s report from last October here. I mentioned some of the activists in the White House Teaching Fellowship program here. Don’t forget your Hall Pass on That. The guys at The Nose on Your [...]

From the National Tea Party Coalition, there’s a counter-program to President Obama’s Sept. 8 pretextual education speech.
“Hall Pass on That:”
The Nationwide Tea Party Coalition announces “Hall Pass on That,” the alternative to President Barack Obama’s September 8th address to school children across the nation. The group asks that schools who choose to participate in the [...]

Well, well, well.
The White House has re-written its activist talking points for teachers/administrators disseminated by the US Department of Education and removed the language about “helping the president.”
Whitewashing: It’s the Obama way.
What they can’t whitewash is the radicalism of many of the White House Teaching Fellows responsible for drafting the material — or the radicalism [...]

One nation, under O…

Reader Katie e-mails about how the US Department of Education circumvented elected school officials to send notice of President Obama’s junior lobbyist recruitment speech on September 8:
Michelle,
I am a conservative school board member in the Atlanta area…
It is very important to note that the DOE sent letters directly to the Principals of every public [...]

I thought this would be a useful refresher as President Obama’s September 8 junior lobbyist recruitment speech approaches. It’s his Chicago pal Bill Ayers’ 2006 speech at the World Economic Forum in Caracas, Venezuela.
You can separate Obama from radical Ayers’ neighborhood. But you can’t separate Ayers’ radicalism from Obama.
President Hugo Chavez, Vice-President Vicente Rangel, Ministers [...]

Photoshop: Leo Alberti
My syndicated column today digs a little deeper into President Obama’s September 8 speech to schoolchildren. The school guides now featured front and center on the www.ed.gov website were developed by the White House Teaching Fellows — a group which includes several activist educators as you’ll see below.
Downplaying academic achievement in favor of [...]

President Obama told a student reporter last month that he would be making an address to schoolchildren on September 8:

ServiceWire has the announcement and broadcast schedule for the speech.
The Daily Paul picked up the story last week and linked to teachers’ manuals pegged to Obama’s address, which have now been linked on Drudge.
The documents have [...]

If Team Obama could send their ACORN foot soldiers into taxpayer-funded schools to collect Census data, they would.
Instead, they’re turning your own children into proxy Census collectors. Specifically targeted: Bilingual children whom the government is relying on to reach non-English-speaking parents. (See my April 3, 2009 column: Obama Census – No Illegal Alien Left Behind.)
The [...]

Two items to raise the blood pressure of law-abiding, hard-working Americans:
1) From the L.A. Times: “San Francisco D.A.’s program trained illegal immigrants for jobs they couldn’t legally hold.”
As she runs for state attorney general, prosecutor Kamala Harris faces questions over a program that trained illegal immigrant drug felons for jobs, kept them out of jail [...]

I noted over the weekend that charity-stingy First Lady told the grads at UC Merced to “give back.”
Via Vanessa Richardson at WalletPop , the Merced Sun-Star reported on the price tag for Michelle O’s lecture:
The Merced Sun-Star reports the school’s commencement budget has ballooned from $100,000 to $700,000 to accommodate Obama on campus. It’s not [...]

An estimated 20,000 protesters are expected this weekend to oppose Catholic Notre Dame’s embrace of abortion militant Barack Obama.
Eighteen were arrested today at the gates of the university.
More than 360,000 have signed a protest petition.
The White House is pooh-poohing the controversy:
The White House has responded to opposition to President Obama’s appearance at the University [...]

Sharing a bit of good news about the JROTC program in San Francisco, which I’ve blogged about for the past several years.
The school board has voted to restore the program after an extraordinary public backlash and campaign by past and present cadets — many of them minority students — to bring it back:
A three-year battle [...]

Fun government schools fact of the day:
The Los Angeles Unified School District pays 160 shady teachers and staff an estimated $10 million a year not to teach.
Nice non-work if you can get it.

D.C. parents aren’t letting the anti-choice Obama administration off the hook for strangling the city’s school choice program. They’re holding a rally at Freedom Plaza today. Watch ReasonTV’s terrific video and if you’re in the Washington area, please join the parents and children raising their voices for educational excellence and opportunity for all:

Save Our D.C. [...]

No, they haven’t learned.
And yes, it is time for UNC-Chapel Hill administrators to turn the mirror on themselves and ask how they fostered this pathetic climate of intolerance. After driving Tom Tancredo off campus, student mobsters again attempted to shut down a pro-immigration enforcement advocate, Rep. Virgil Goode. He was to speak on the suppression [...]

Several parents with kids at UN-Chapel Hill have e-mailed me their outrage over the appalling treatment of Tom Tancredo. Yesterday, the chancellor sent the following note to parents:
Dear Carolina Parents,
To keep you informed, we are forwarding a message from Chancellor Holden Thorp that was disbursed to the University community today.
Your Office on Campus,
New Student & [...]

The free-speech squelchers at UNC-Chapel Hill threw a temper tantrum during Tom Tancredo’s speech.
I can hardly stomach watching the videos. And I am very grateful that Tancredo was not harmed.
We’ve seen it so many times before: Administration officials and faculty who refuse to act like adults on campus. They are worse than AWOL. They have [...]

It would have been helpful to know about a Department of Education study on D.C.’s school choice initiative before the Democrats — beholden to teachers unions allergic to competition — voted to starve the innovative program benefiting poor, minority children in the worst school district in the nation.
Somehow, the results of the study conducted last [...]

Reason number 99,997,678 to homeschool your kids, via the SFChronicle:
There was a time when teachers would freak at the sound of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” or “Stone Free.” Now the San Francisco school district wants them to get in the spirit.
“Remember the first time you heard Jimi Hendrix?” reads the cover of the district’s new [...]

It’s official:
The Oakland school board has voted to change the name of a small school to Barack Obama Academy, reportedly the first middle school in the country to adopt the name of the nation’s 44th president.
While Obama has been in office fewer than 100 days, the 35 students at the former Alternative Learning Community public [...]

If you want your kids to go to a university that teaches tolerance for dissent, respect for free speech, and the ability to debate ideological opponents without screaming at them and waving ferrets in their faces, do not — I repeat, do not — send them to the University of Massachussetts .
For crying out loud.
It [...]

Militants.

Scroll for updates…7:09pm Eastern…motion to invoke cloture passes 62-35…and…omni-pork sails through the Senate on voice vote…$410 billion soon to siphoned away from taxpayers to bolster congressional re-election prospects…they should have said “Oink” instead of “aye…”
Just watched Jeff Session’s E-Verify amendment to ensure that omni-pork spending only goes to legal citizens get tabled.
Vote was 50-47. Here’s [...]

Not very.

I’ve posted several times over the past week on the Democrats’ campaign to kill a federal voucher program for poor children in Washington, D.C. (see here, here, and here).
Well, lookee here. President Obama’s education secretary is feeling the heat — and now says the program should be preserved (some of the beneficiaries, as noted previously, [...]

…when asked why the president opposes the D.C. school choice program that allows a black family to send their two kids to the same private school to which the Obamas send their daughters.
Squirm, Bobby, squirm.

First, watch this powerful video open letter to President Obama from students who have benefited from D.C. public school choice through the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. Kids who support government monopolies get all the MSM attention. These kids get…ignored:

Rob Bluey blasts the Dems’ efforts to block the D.C. schoolhouse door led by Rep. David [...]