Articles tagged as

Public Schools

Public Educators Caught in Massive Cheating Conspiracy

cheating is wrong-Image property of fox television
Image Credit: Fox Television

Public Educators in Atlanta have been caught in a massive cheating conspiracy designed to hide poor reading and math skills.  “The four principle crimes that are charged in the indictment are the statements and writings, false swearings, theft by taking, and influencing witnesses,” Fulton County District Attorney Paul L. Howard, Jr. said.

Racketeering charges are also being filed.

Nearly 200 educators admitted to taking part in the massive scandal: they tampered with students’ standardized tests and corrected answers to inflate scores. Some teachers had pizza parties to erase wrong answers and circle in the right ones. One principal allegedly handled altered tests wearing gloves to avoid leaving her fingerprints.

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A Conservative Solution to The Public School Lunch Circular Firing Squad

Federal mandates made school lunches cost more and forced foods into them most kids don’t care for so the Derry School District Lunch program School lunches dont have to be expensive trach no one wantsis pondering why overall receipts are down.

“The food service numbers are significantly less on student sales,” Simard said. She said the food services department is still working to determine the cause and whether it is the result of new meal plans and food choices required under state and federal reimbursement guidelines.

She knows why she is just being diplomatic.  The Feds have made lunch cost more.  They have made the cost of providing lunch cost more.  They have simultaneously required foods that a majority of the target hot lunch customer base does not enjoy while making foods they do less accessible or unavailable.  The result is more cost for less benefit.

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Because Someone Asked For It – Public School Sex Abuse For The Record

Public school teachers, as a matter of record, have recorded more incidences of sexual misconduct than any other group we know of. But because these events are often unreported, under-reported, (not sensationalized by the press or any particular group), or just concealed from the public, there is a false perception that it can’t be all that bad.

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Who cares about a child’s education? Conservatives!

Liberals (typically Democrats) and Conservatives (typically Republicans) have very different viewpoints about education.  Liberals see the public school educational establishment (the unions, the government bureaucracies, the University Education Departments, etc.) as the way to educate children (except occasionally for their own children).   

Conservatives believe results are the important thing, “Is the child getting a good education?”  Government ads claim that every day 7000 children drop out of school and millions more graduate lacking basic knowledge.  The educational establishment isn’t meeting society’s need to prepare children for adulthood.     

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Developing…Merrimack High School Teachers Indoctrinating Students?

I have received a number of reports of teachers in the Merrimack High School actively promoting a specific presidential candidate.  This appears to take several forms.  I have reports of posters, temporary messages encouraging students to assist a single campaign–with contact info, and then the typical teacher injecting their own preferences into the class discussion on an almost daily basis, also known as biased propagandizing and political indoctrination on the taxpayer dime.

Let me be clear.  All these offenses, and there appear to be several and many, promote President Obama’s re-election with little or no effort to provide any kind of ongoing or daily balance for or toward his opponent.  As class leaders, role models, and public servants, this is unethical, and very likely illegal.

This has been going on for weeks and I just want it to stop.

So how do we go about making it stop?

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Our destructive government schools…

For the sake of our kids, the government schools monopoly must be ended.

…and why we desperately need competition and alternatives.

This from today’s Wall Street Journal (bless those WSJ editorial pages!) where the owner of an employment agency writes in to explain that there are “jobs going begging” because applicants lack extraordinarily basic skills that public schools have failed to inculcate.

Those “skills”? Well, it’s almost ridiculous to use that label, since they’re so fundamental to being a self-responsible, functioning adult…but here they are anyway:

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You Can Force A Public School Student to Pay for a ‘Healthy Lunch’ But You Can’t Make Them Eat It.

school lunch- that no one is eating?Would you be at all surprised to learn that public school students who buy lunch in Public School cafeterias are–after a fashion–getting around the USDA Federal requirement that they consume certain foods with their meal?

Would you be more or less surprised to learn that the federal mandated will cost you as parents and taxpayers more, for no measurable good?

Examples?

Most public school cafeterias used to provide regular mashed potatoes weekly, and by all accounts, most of the kids were eating them.  But the USDA forced a switch from regular mashed to mashed sweet Potato. (I wouldn’t touch a sweet potato before I was thirty.) Guess what? Most of those Sweet potatoes end up in the trash.

Subversives!  How dare they not eat what we have decided is best for them.

So how about all the mandatory fresh vegetables?  How did they fare?

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A Brief And Incomplete Veto Override Round Up [Correction]

The fate of Obama-Care and the Holder Contempt vote , and all the discussion and speculation that follows, will probably wash out everything veto override day - John Lynch Vetoes being overriddenelse today.  Before that happens I want to take a few minutes to comment briefly on yesterday’s veto overrides.

I have written at great length on all these subjects and you can search the Grok for more detail than I’ll provide here, but for now I will speak again briefly on the Veto overrides of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban, Education scholarships (school choice) and Voter Photo ID…

On the jump.

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Public schools are government schools, government schools are monopolies, and thus…

…government schools don’t work. Did you know that 2,000 high schools in America constitute “‘dropout factories,’ where more than 40% of the freshman class fails to graduate. Most are in poor or minority zip codes wehre kids and parents have no other options. These 2,000 schools produce—if that’s the word—51% of U.S. dropouts.” How can … Read more

Do Retired School Superintendents Ever Really Retire?

Starting in July of 2012, Mr. Irwin Sussman will begin his new job as the Superintendent of SAU#43 ( Croydon-Newport), a not so curious turn of events for a man who recently “retired” after 40 years working in public education in New York State.  (Last week, you may recall, we introduced you to Robert Sullivan.  He retired as the Super in Middleboro MA, and is collecting $70-80K from the State of Massachusetts, while currently running SAU#21 in New Hampshire.)

Mr. Sussman was a teacher, school principal, and finally a superintendent, working in Lake Luzerne NY, when he “felt it was time” to retire…

After two decades at the Hadley-Luzerne Central School District, and the last eight years as the superintendent, Irwin Sussman told the board last week he will retire at the end of the school year.

Sussman, who turns 64 next month, will work his last day on June 30. His career in education spans 40 years.
“I feel that it’s that time,” said Sussman, who was the high school principal for about 11 years before he became the superintendent in January 2003.
Wait.  Didn’t I just say he was starting a new job in Croydon-Newport this July?

HB 1607 – Public Schools Could See Buckets of Free Money

Skip just posted a nice letter from the Londonderry Superintendent of schools in which the Super appears to lobby the state Senate in opposition to HB1607.  This bill establishes an education tax credit for businesses or groups that set up scholarship programs to help offset the costs of non-public school tuition.  This could allow more parents to enroll their kids outside of the governments education monopoly and on paper at least take the paltry sum of $3,450.00 per student with them when the business is reimbursed for its donations with a tax credit of that amount.   The business is, of course, free to set it’s award at any sum above that at their discretion, but the credit is (I assume) maxed out at $3450.00 per student.

Needless to say, the Super (Nate Greenberg) doesn’t care for the bill.  By his calculation each school district will lose money it needs to teach students and would necessarily downshift those costs onto local property taxpayers to make up the difference.

That argument sounds like it might hold water–the entire lobbying question Skip raises aside–but only if taken in the vacuum of the space between the typical bureaucrats ears.  I wont revisit all the Super’s arguments here, just follow the link if you feel confused, but in my district, this bill would, on paper at least,  be like the school district finding a winning lottery ticket every single year.

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Never A Surprise

 “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.” —Mark Twain

Londonderry School District Superintendent Nate Greenberg lobbied against HB 1607, “AN ACT establishing an education tax credit.” Not surprising at all…In fact, this is expected.

Long ago, educrats stopped caring about the delivery of a qualitative, substantive education for the communities children over their now-obvious priority of self-serving, fat-cat wielding power fiefdoms to preserve and continue the never-ending focus on how much the taxpayers can be bled to feed the whims of the edaucracy.

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An Airsoft Gun-Free Zone?

“Don’t carry a gun. It’s nice to have them close by, but don’t carry them. You might get arrested.” —John Gotti

An Airsoft gun can be dangerous. Dangerous because if one gets hit in the eye with one of those plastic BB’s, an eye could be lost. Like the old saying goes, “It’s all fun and games until somebody puts an eye out.” So here is this kid…He brings an Airsoft Pistol to school. Clearly, a very poor choice. But, let’s face it. If the kid brought a large chunk of soap to school, fashioned in the shape of a gun the school response would be the same.  Perhaps the word, “GUN” milled from steel in a CNC machine and then hot-blued… If you can admire “publik edjukayshen” for anything, they are to be lauded for their sheer ability to be consistent in this one single area.

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Define Irony For Me

The government run schools are concerned about making sure students get some kind of an education in personal finance and economics.

The Real Reason For Raising The Drop Out Age To 18?

I can tell you from long discussions about the various pathways to “graduation” that the goal is more geared toward getting kids through school on paper to make the numbers look good. Any reasonable path to that end is considered a win, but by any traditional standard it is anything but a public school success story.

The Cost of Defining “Adequate” In Merrimack NH

AppleA funny thing happened on the way to the ‘off-hand comment’ on the Merrimack TEA facebook page.  I was accused of not using "real and accurate data" and that my "rhetoric was not doing anyone any good."

Nothing surprising there I suppose but to stay on point–what was it I said that earned me such a response?

I announced that if you took the total Merrimack School budget and divided it by the total student enrollment that it cost more than  sending your kid to UNH.  This appears to have riled some people up.  In fact someone sent me a nice itemized list of the "costs" of sending your kid to UNH for a year just to prove I was wrong, and to justify how Merrimack’s cost per child wasn’t as much.

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Separation Of State…from Church.

Let me be clear.  My towns middle school does not do all that bad a job covering the US constitution.  I can say this mostly because they actually cover it for a few weeks, during an exploration of American history and the founding of the nation.   But being either a victim of or party to the kinds of support materials embedded into the public education system, I still manage to find a few ringers that make me shake my head and smile.

Not too long ago I regaled you on these pages with the tale of just such a ringer on the Middle Schools ‘citizenship quiz,’ where it asked the question, where does free speech come from?  The correct answer is of course, ‘our creator,’ who provided us with a set of unalienable rights that exist even in the vacuum of the necessary evil of government.  But that’s not the answer they were looking for.  They expect you to write ‘The 1st amendment.’ This is of course incorrect.  It assumes people could not speak freely prior 1791 when the bill of rights was ratified which is why I  am forever reminding my children that the US Constitution does not give rights, it protects them.

Which brings me to this newly discovered Gem. Yesterday I came across a series of poorly worded essay questions—my second sons homework–the worst of which was this; What part of Article VI of the US constitution supports the idea of separation of church and state? Explain. (Go ahead and roll your eyes or make a grunting noise, or whatever it is you do when confronted with such nonsense.)

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Number Poems

I neglected to share this, but on the first day of school this year my 5th grader’s first homework assignment in math was a math poem. Using numbers in a poem. That was the Math homework that day. Use numbers….to make a poem.

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