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American Student Punished For Refusing To Recite Mexican Pledge Of Allegiance?

Photo Credit: Dario Lopez-Mills A Texas high school student has filed a federal lawsuit against her school after her Spanish teacher allegedly gave her a failing grade for refusing to recite the Mexican pledge of allegiance.

The lawsuit says the McAllen Independent School District violated 15-year-old girl Brenda Brinsdon’s constitutional rights, saying that the “Supreme Court forbids teachers from compelling schoolchildren to pledge their allegiance to a country.”

The complaint also states that the student was not allowed to recite the American Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish in front of the class as an alternative assignment. The teacher, Reyna Santos, gave her a different assignment on the Independence of Mexico to which she received 13 out of 100 points.

Read more from this story HERE.

School Choice: The Key to Saving the Nation?

The hopes and needs of children are clearly evident when charter, or pilot schools become available in school districts.

Lines, sometimes blocks long, of applicants eager to give their children a better shot at an education can be seen. Unfortunately, there are a limited amount of openings compared to the overwhelming demand by parents desperate to get their children a better education. These scenes, repeated around the country, are heartbreaking, but at the same time gives a sense of hope, that something is being attempted to shake up the government education system

This week is National School Choice Week. It is being celebrated throughout our country with over 3,500 events honoring the change that can transform our education system into one of the finest in the world…But it will take courage to change the status quo.

In honor of School Choice Week, I talked to Jeff Reed, communications director for the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. The Friedman Foundation has been spearheading school choice efforts throughout the country, working with new thinking Governors such as Louisiana’s Bobby Jindall and Wisconsins Scott Walker, in turning around a failing government education system.

Jeff shared many positive developments with me, as school choice starts to take hold around the country. See this map of where school choice is being implemented.

Parents love the freedom, when offered, to take a voucher to a private, or alternative school for the chance of a better education for their children.

Many Governors and Mayors love the idea of vouchers not only for the freedom of choice they offer, they love it because it can save them huge amounts of money. Sometimes the cost of a voucher for a student to enroll in a private school is ½ the cost of the public school. That can add up to substantial cost savings to states and cities struggling to keep their heads above water.

Additionally, when school choice is introduced into a state or district, through vouchers, tax credits, savings accounts, etc…It brings competition, which is lacking in the public school system.

But John Norquist, Democratic mayor of Milwaukee from 1988 to 2004, had a unique perspective on school choice and how it can restore our cities.

Norquist wrote: “If a young couple moves to, say, St. Louis and chooses a home in one of the city’s revitalizing neighborhoods, everything goes well until their first child approaches school age. They might decide to pay for private education at one of the few such schools in the city. Or they might take a chance on getting into one of the city’s elite magnet schools. But what looks like the surest way to enroll their child in a good school is to move to a suburb.”

He goes on with: “Although the couple enjoys urban life in St. Louis, they leave for better school opportunities. This process occurs all across the country; many parents with resources move away from cities and suburbs where poor people live.”

The lack of quality education choice leads to the further decay of our big cities and urban areas. Mr. Norquist believes “many more, including middle-class parents, would live in economically and racially diverse cities once school choice was universally available.”

When you hear a leader of the top public education union and fiercest foe of education choice say: “Union dues, not education, are our top priority,”…..it is plain to see we have lost our way as a country and have failed our children.

Lets give all of our parents and children a choice when it comes to education.

That’s Indoctrination!

Next week, fourth-grade students at Penn Valley Elementary School in the gilded Philadelphia suburb of Lower Merion will spend part of their school day watching and discussing a very clever piece of cinematic propaganda courtesy of organized homosexuality. The film is called That’s a Family!, and it is endorsed by the Human Rights Campaign along with other homosexual activist groups.

As a fellow practitioner of the occult arts of persuasion, I must confess my admiration for That’s a Family! The film clearly is a product of the institutional wing of the gay-rights movement, and the filmmaker’s earlier efforts include many examples of the Left’s garden-variety sex and sexuality obsessions: It’s Elementary — Talking about Gay Issues in School, One Wedding and a Revolution (“contains now-historic footage of the tearful exchange of vows between long-time lesbian activists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon who, celebrating their 51st anniversary, were the first couple to tie the knot”), Straightlaced: How Gender’s Got Us All Tied Up. The ingenious thing about That’s a Family! is that it does not present itself as a straightforward piece of gay agitprop. Though the same-sex couples are clearly at the center of filmmaker Debra Chasnoff’s agenda, she deftly mixes them in with other kinds of “different” families: children with divorced parents, children being raised by guardians other than their parents, adopted children, etc. Crucially, there is a racial-ethnic angle: Families that speak Spanish at home and mixed-race families, here amusingly enough represented by an adorable little girl who explains: “My dad’s Chinese-American and my mom’s German-American. My parents aren’t the same race, but they can still be married,” a statement that obviously is not directed at the imaginary cabal of bigots protesting Sino-Germanic romances.

Which is to say, That’s a Family! is an extended exercise in intentionally begging the question: Moral reservations about homosexuality extending to questions related to marriage and childrearing are indistinguishable from prejudices against mixed-race marriages or discounting the value of adopted families. Question the gay-rights program and you may as well be a member of the Klan — and not the kind of Klansman that Democrats send to the Senate, either. The identification of moral objections to homosexuality with racism is the holy grail of gay-rights rhetoric. As I used to tell my persuasive-writing students, begging the question may be a logical fallacy, but it often is an extraordinarily effective rhetorical tool: Most people are not intellectually sophisticated enough to understand how they have been manipulated. (Me, cynical? In an age of “hope and change” political rhetoric, it is impossible to set the bar too low.)

Most newspaper-reading adult voters do not understand the logical fallacy of begging the question, and I am entirely confident that Lower Merion’s fourth-graders do not, either, high-achieving kids though they may be.

I lived for many years in Lower Merion, where I was the editor of the local newspaper. The township has government schools that are both excellent and shockingly expensive. (I was endlessly entertained by the fact that the local schools’ million-dollar boss styled himself: “Dr. Jamie P. Savedoff, Ph.D.” — Dr. and Ph.D., the guy’s got you coming and going.) Though once a Republican stronghold, the place is not exactly a hotbed of social conservatism, unless by conservatism you mean “serve from the left and clear from the right.” Nonetheless, there are a fair number of Catholics and a few of the old Main Line WASPs who may not be entirely on board with the mandatory celebration of homosexual parenting, and they must of course be suffocated by the very government agency into whose care they are compelled by law to entrust their children for more than a decade.

Read more from this article HERE.

Video: Children Bullying, Assaulting Public School Teacher Caught on Camera

The video uploaded to YouTube is of an incident two weeks ago. It is obviously recorded on a phone by a student in a classroom; Baltimore City Schools confirms it is from Digital Harbor High School in Federal Hill.

You can watch as the female student flicks at and taunts the substitute teacher at the front of the room.

Then you can see the teacher dodging something that comes at her…all to the giggles and laughter of the rest of the class.

“My initial response was again, disgust.”

Marietta English is the head of the teachers union in Baltimore city.

She’s seen the video and says it happens more often than you think.

“Respect for adults. Somewhere there’s just, no civility. They don’t even respect the adults in the classroom who are trying to deliver a lesson and this is the battle we fight,” said English. Read more from this story HERE.

Federally-Funded Low-Calorie School Lunches Creating Schoolroom Black Markets Across America (+video)

By Kimberly Paxton. One thing is guaranteed…anytime the government moves to restrict something, be it alcohol during prohibition, marijuana in the drug war, gold after 1933 confiscation, black markets always emerge.

In the case of the tight school lunch restrictions being put into place in schools across the country, enterprising young bootleggers are smuggling in chocolate syrup and selling it by the squeeze.

Michelle Obama championed the federal Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act as part of her Let’s Move campaign. The act has been put into place to combat childhood obesity but it’s leaving a lot of kids…well…HUNGRY.

School lunches have undergone such a drastic transformation that students across the country are complaining of hunger pangs throughout the day. Portion sizes have been reduced, dessert and flavored milks have been banned, and, in the name of financial easing, the prices of these smaller lunches have been increased.

USDA Deputy Undersecretary Janey Thornton blames the kids for the reported hunger pangs. ”One thing I think we need to keep in mind as kids say they’re still hungry is that many children aren’t used to eating fruits and vegetables at home, much less at school. So it’s a change in what they are eating. If they are still hungry, it’s that they are not eating all the food that’s being offered.” Read more from this story HERE.

Here’s a video parody on the national school lunch policy (mandated by The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010) created by a talented group of Kansas students:

Nearly 40% of Striking Chicago Teachers Send Their Own Children to Private Schools

Photo credit: firedoglakedotcom

The Chicago teachers’ strike is an awkward dinner conversation between President Barack Obama and his former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Many of the policy prescriptions in the new Chicago teachers’ contract designed to create more accountability are supported by the Obama administration.

As the Chicago teachers’ strike continues, we’ve learned that they make $71-76,000 a year and they turned down a 16% pay increase, which amounts to $11,360. They work nine months out of the year, but say that this strike is benefits oriented. However, given that ABC World News didn’t even air this story last Sunday and most of the media, with the exception of CBS, failing to mention the compensation statistics in their broadcast – suffice to say that the media will probably ignore the fact that almost 40% of Chicago’s public school teachers send their kids to private schools.

I’m not against public education, but the fact that these teachers make enough to send their kids to private schools shows that Chicago’s public teachers are aware of the serial failure within the system. Second, it shows that these teachers have zero confidence in their own respective school district. Why are the teachers going on strike? Aren’t the contentious measures they’re squabbling about aimed at enhancing accountability that will make their institutions of learning better for the students? It appears this strike, like most union strikes, are defined by these three words: give. me. more.

However, given the state of public education and that of Chicago, it’s not alien for public school teachers to ship their kids to private institutions.

To see the actual statistics for Chicago and other areas, read more from this story HERE.

Thomas Sowell, W. Williams: Public schools bigger threat to blacks than KKK

Thursday on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program, fill-in host Walter E. Williams, a professor at George Mason University, and Hoover Institution scholar in residence Thomas Sowell, author of “Intellectuals and Society: Revised and Expanded Edition,” discussed public education and how it impacts the black community.

Sowell said Americans need to honestly answer some tough questions blacks and the public school system. “It’s very hard to take sometimes, but it has to be done,” he said.

“Wherever blacks or anybody else wants to go in life, they can’t only get there from where they are, which means they have to know where they are — not where they wish they were or for other people to think they are, but where they are in fact. The truth is absolutely the key to any hope of advancement.”

Williams likened that public education system to the Ku Klux Klan.

“I’ve said that, Tom, that if I were the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan and I wanted to sabotage any opportunity for black academic excellence, I could not think of a better means for doing so than the public education establishment in most of our cities,” Williams said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit: Cliff1066