Education Archives - Page 79 of 134

School Choice Helped This Girl Escape a Broken School, Then Become Valedictorian

January 24, 2018/in Culture War, Education, Policy, Politics/by The Daily Signal

The right to choose where your kids attend school should be common sense. But for too long, it’s something too many parents have been denied for their children.

Thankfully, we live in a day when access to education choice is gaining ground. More kids across our country are now being freed from broken schools and have the chance to select schools that meet their needs, setting them on a course to achieve their own dreams.

That is progress worth celebrating, and it’s why I am celebrating National School Choice Week. To have played a part in fighting for school choice has been a true privilege.

As an advocate for school choice, I’ve followed many families whose children found success. One of the students I’ve stayed close to is Tiffany Dunston.

I first met Tiffany and her grandmother when they attended an information session about a scholarship that would allow Tiffany to attend a better school that would nurture her. I remember chatting with a mature 13-year-old girl whose eyes sparkled as she talked about doing well in school and making her family proud.

Immediately, I knew that the future would be bright for this young girl.

That hope of a scholarship turned into a reality for Tiffany in 2004. Congress had approved the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, providing scholarships to children from low-income families (like Tiffany), which enabled them to attend a private school of choice.

I saw Tiffany again that year and learned that she had received a scholarship through the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and was enrolled at Archbishop Carroll High School.

Tiffany had grown into a lovely young woman who was thriving as a freshman at Carroll. I was delighted to see her and so many other students excelling who had benefited from the same scholarship option.

Tiffany went on to graduate as valedictorian from Carroll in 2008, and received a scholarship to Syracuse University. I prayed that this young woman would do well and accomplish her dreams there. And she did.

Not only did she thrive at Syracuse, but after receiving her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry, she was accepted into a doctoral program. Tiffany received her doctorate in chemistry one year ago and is now working at Johns Hopkins University as a post-doctoral research fellow in oncology.

Tiffany Dunston, left, stands with Virginia Walden Ford, right. (Photo: Virginia Walden Ford)

Tiffany’s journey has not only brought joy to my heart—it has made the hard work of fighting for school choice worth every second. And there are countless other children like Tiffany who stand to benefit from expanding school choice across our nation.

National School Choice Week is a time for us to rejoice over stories like Tiffany’s, and also look forward to a day when every child in America will have the doors of education opened wide to them. Our movement is winning. Let’s keep winning more.

COMMENTARY BY

Virginia Walden Ford

Virginia Walden Ford Virginia is a national board member and a founding member of The Black Alliance for Educational Options, Inc. She also serves on the D.C. Advisory Committee of the US Civil Rights Commission, and serves as executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice, Inc. which she founded in 1998.

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Ever since Donald Trump was elected president, it is painfully clear that the mainstream media covers liberals glowingly and conservatives critically.

Now journalists spread false, negative rumors about President Trump before any evidence is even produced.

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The Humanitarian Hoax of Common Core: Killing America With Kindness

January 14, 2018/in Culture War, Education, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Linda Goudsmit

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Obama, the humanitarian huckster-in-chief, weakened the United States for eight years presenting his crippling Common Core advocacy as altruistic when in fact it was designed for destruction. His legacy, the Leftist Democrat Party with its “Resistance” movement, is the party of the Humanitarian Hoax attempting to destroy the capitalist infrastructure of American democracy and replace it with socialism.

Common Core is a deliberate information war targeting American children. It is a deceitful campaign to undermine established American Judeo-Christian cultural norms celebrating patriotism, the meritocracy, and American sovereignty. The Leftist/Islamist axis is promoting collectivism in preparation for one-world government. This is how it works.

Serious educational reform enacted by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 was designed to provide high standards and measurable goals to improve individual outcomes in education. Federal funding was correlated to test performance. Rather than improving education the net effect of NCLB was education reformatted to teach to the tests. Education critic Alfie Kohn argued that the “NCLB law is ‘unredeemable’ and should be scrapped – its main effect has been to sentence poor children to an endless regimen of test-preparation drills.” There were loud calls for reform.

Enter Common Core State Standards (CCSS) launched under Obama in 2009 deceptively marketed by a propaganda campaign emphasizing the positive benefits of national standards and uniformity in curriculum guidelines with measurable effectiveness for American public education K-12. Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are mistakenly understood to be a derivative of the No Child Left Behind Act – they aren’t.

Obama’s 2009 Race To The Top program was introduced as a competitive grant program that awarded points to states for satisfying performance-based evaluations of teachers and principals based on measures of educator effectiveness. Sound familiar? It should because measurable effectiveness = student test scores. Even though Race to the Top did not mandate adoption of Common Core, to receive federal stimulus money states had to “commit” to adopting Common Core standards. Forty-two states now operate public and private education under the Common Core program.

So, what makes Common Core a humanitarian hoax? Let’s review.

Common Core Standards Mission Statement:

“The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy. . . These Standards do not dictate curriculum or teach methods.”

Sounds great. The problem is the deceptive language referring to the “real world” the “global economy” and the misleading statement that the Standards do not dictate curriculum or teaching methods. This is how it works.

Common Core State Standards are not a derivative of America’s No Child Left Behind. Common Core State Standards are a derivative of the United Nation’s Global Education First initiative (GEFI). The 3 Priorities of GEFI are:

Priority 1: Put Every Child in School
Priority 2: Improve the Quality of Learning
Priority 3: Foster Global Citizenship

It is Priority #3 that is most problematic and the basis for the humanitarian hoax of Common Core.

Obama’s Common Core is not teaching American children about the world and how to be effective and competitive in a global marketplace. Obama’s deceitful Common Core initiative is propagandizing American children toward collectivism, globalism, and one-world government with its anti-American, anti-Judeo-Christian, pro-Islamic bias. American public/private education no longer advocates American patriotism, the meritocracy, American exceptionalism, or American sovereignty. America is no longer in control of American education. This is how it happened.

Obama’s infamous Cairo speech launched an eight-year initiative Connect All Schools that was fraudulently presented as a program to help different people who believe different things be able to communicate and understand one another.

Bethany Blankley’s stunning 4/2015 article exposes Obama’s Common Core as “originating from the One World Education concept, a global goal orchestrated by the Connect All Schools program to globalize instruction. Its origin is funded by the Qatar Foundation International (QFI). The director of QFI’s Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics is Tariq Ramadan, grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder, Hassan al-Banna.”

World Net Daily WND reported that in 2011 Qatar Foundation International “partnered with the Department of State and the U.S. Department of Education to facilitate matchmaking between classrooms in the U.S. and international schools through. . . the ‘Connect All Schools’ project.” QFI proudly states on its website that the initiative was founded in response to Mr. Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech with the Muslim Brotherhood prominently seated in the front row.

The conspiracy of the Leftist/Islamist axis to re-educate American children away from America-first patriotism toward global governance and Islam is well underway and well funded.

Qatari Foundation International unapologetically states its mission of advancing global citizenship through educational curricula on its Q&A page:

Why is your global presence limited to a select few countries?

While QFI’s mission is dedicated to connecting cultures and advancing global citizenship through education, our current focus is K-12 public and charter schools in the United States, Canada, and Brazil. To find out if a school near you is a QFI partner, see our map to find other resources that may help your child learn Arabic, visit Al Masdar.

Most parents have no idea what their children are learning in school unless their child asks for help with homework or relates an experience at school. Parents in any of the 42 states that have adopted Common Core State Standards need to start reading their children’s textbooks immediately. It is up to parents to decide if they support American sovereignty and fair trade in the global marketplace or if they support global citizenship and a globalized curriculum promoting one-world government. It is a matter of informed consent.

This brings us to the United Nations Agenda 21 initiated in 1992 and described in a lengthy report titled United Nations Sustainable Development. The entire document can be summarized in one sentence:

The United Nations Agenda 21 is a plan for a New World Order that internationalizes the entire world into a global society under its own UN global governance for our own good of course. Its lofty Preamble reads like the lyrics of John Lennon’s song “Imagine.” In the old days power grabbers for world domination were not so soft spoken. Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini did not sing lullabies of peace – but this is the 21st century and requires a different approach. We have “Imagine” and the updated 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The Culture War is an insidious information war being waged on America through the political correctness, moral relativism, and historical revisionism embodied in the informational materials supplied by the pro-globalism enemies of national sovereignty at the UN. Stealth jihad is quietly being fought in classrooms with the educational propaganda of the World Core Curriculum – not with bullets or airplanes.

In 1989 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) awarded its prize for peace education to the father of global education and creator of the World Core Curriculum (WCC) Robert Muller. He accepted his award saying, “I dream that UNESCO will study and recommend by the year 2000 a world core curriculum for adoption by all nations.”

Why is a world core curriculum desirable? Most people understand the mission of the United Nations to be promotion of mutual respect and understanding between sovereign nations with differing cultures. Were we mistaken or mislead? Was the goal of the UN always universal citizenship? Muller says, “In the final analysis… the main function of education is to make children happy, fulfilled, and universal human beings.” Universal human beings?? Really?

In November, 2010 Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan addressed UNESCO praising universal education without ever mentioning educational content. Educating the world’s children is a laudable goal. Putting every child in school and improving the quality of learning is an altruistic undertaking. The problem is that most people naively assume universal education advances literacy and do not realize it is a propaganda tool designed to advance global governance. It is a humanitarian hoax.

In a world of technology where hard copy books are increasingly being replaced with software and lessons taught on computers it is incredibly simple to alter, censor, and manipulate original texts. Having the world’s children literate and able to read about the world to better understand other cultures and live together in peace is not the same thing as having the children of the world literate to be propagandized by manipulated curriculum content.

There are 193 member states in the United Nations and only 86 are full-fledged democracies. The G77 has 134 members (69% of member states) and functions to advance the economic well-being of the Third World. It should surprise no one that UN educational objectives are in conflict with traditional American educational objectives.

Curriculum content for American educational materials must be developed by Americans for Americans with an unapologetic America-first foundation. Parents endorsing the Common Core State Standards are unwittingly endorsing the pro-Muslim anti-American globalized educational products designed by British publishing giant Pearson Education. Pearson Education supplies educational materials to Connect All Schools.

When the UK froze Muammar Gaddafi’s assets in 2011 The Sovereign Fund of Libya had a 3.27% stake in Pearson. Libya was the second largest shareholder in Pearson Education. CAIR, designated a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates, was also an investor. The anti-American, anti-Semitic, pro-Muslim Pearson educational products must not be allowed to propagandize American students.

Words matter. It is essential that Americans understand what one-world government global citizenship means in the Arab world. To Qatar and the Islamic world it means the re-establishment of the Islamic caliphate that rules the world under religious Islamic sharia law. It is equally important for Americans to understand what one-world government means to the secular globalist elite.

Secular one-world government was described in chilling detail 65 years ago by English aristocrat Lord Bertrand Russell in his alarming book, The Impact of Science on Society. Neither the secular nor the religious version of one-world government is the fulfillment of John Lennon’s iconic song “Imagine.” Both are regressive returns to feudal infrastructures consisting of the few ruling masters, the mass of ruled slaves, and an army of soldiers to enforce the pyramid. Both see the United Nations as the instrument for imposition and management of their own version of global governance.

If American parents do not become actively involved in discovering what their children are learning in school they will be unable to oppose the radical education initiative currently transforming the children of the world into “green” or “global citizens” prepared for the New World Order. The humanitarian hoax of Common Core will successfully propagandize American children to reject American citizenship and become citizens of a world dictated and governed by the United Nations. Ignorance is not bliss and willful blindness is not a position of strength – it is submission.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in Goudsmit Pundicity.

Public School Kids Get Assembly on Sex Changes

January 12, 2018/in Culture War, Education, Science, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Family Research Council

By Cathy Ruse, FRC’s Senior Fellow for Legal Studies

Amy Ellis Nutt

A Northern Virginia public school held a school-wide assembly before Christmas break featuring transgender crusader Amy Ellis Nutt. George Mason High School in the City of Falls Church brought in Nutt, a Washington Post reporter, to lecture students on her book Becoming Nicole, about a boy who “identified” as a girl as a toddler, had his puberty suppressed as a child, and was castrated as a teenager.

Nutt’s lecture hit all the usual notes. Your gender is “assigned at birth” by people who might get it wrong. Toddlers can be transgender. Moray eels change sex and female reef fish produce sperm when there are no males. “Gender is a spectrum,” everyone must get “comfortable” with new gender language that is “changing every day.” Asking a biological boy to use the teachers’ rather than the girls’ restroom is “bullying.”

The full assembly can be viewed on YouTube:

The sponsor of the event was the Falls Church Education Foundation.

Did the school make plain to the students that they could decline to attend? That’s not clear. In her presentation, Nutt quipped: “Thank you for coming, although I know you’re probably required to be here.”

Nor is it clear whether parents were fully informed about the assembly in advance. At least one shocked George Mason teacher, who remains anonymous, says parents were not.

What does seem clear is that this public school will not hold another school-wide assembly featuring other views on the issue: such as first-person accounts of the negative consequences of “transitioning,” health warnings from pediatricians and other medical experts, or condemnation from the feminist community, from which the term “female erasure” has sprung to describe the transgender program.

Transgender ideology in children is extremely controversial, not least because so many children who experience gender dysphoria later desist and accept their natal biology. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-5) as many as 98% of boys and 88% of girls will “grow out of” their gender dysphoria and accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.

There is no medical or psychological test to show which 2% of those boys will persist in their gender dysphoria as young adults. Protocols that encourage school-wide affirmation of every case of gender dysphoria could impede the overwhelming majority of children from accepting their natal biology, as well as sow confusion in other vulnerable children.

There has been a spate of articles in recent weeks on the phenomenon of “rapid onset” gender dysphoria in teen girls, thought to be a “social contagion” like anorexia 30 years ago. Details of these cases reported by therapists are heartbreaking.

At the end of the talk, Nutt was asked two student questions, written on index cards.

“What is gender dysphoria and how does the transgender community respond to the idea that they are glorifying the mental health condition known as gender dysphoria?”

That was a good question, and evidence that at least one student at George Mason has held on to his critical thinking skills.

Nutt’s answer was not good: “Gender dysphoria is not a mental health condition,” she said, continuing:

It is included in the DSM, which is the bible of mental illnesses, of psychiatrists, but only because gender dysphoria isn’t the inability or confusion of a transgender child to understand why they are the way they are, it’s the failure for [sic] other people to understand that. It’s the confusion that comes because of the cultural misconceptions and not being able to fit into that.

So a person is diagnosed because other people are confused? It’s in “the bible of mental illnesses” because it’s a healthy condition that the culture doesn’t understand? Now I am confused.

The DSM defines gender dysphoria in children as “clinically significant distress” from “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender” manifested by, among other things, “a strong dislike of one’s sexual anatomy.”

The ICD – the International Classification of Diseases – calls it a “childhood disorder” characterized by “persistent and intense distress.” Diagnosis requires “a profound disturbance of the normal gender identity.”

If Nutt is trying to dismiss their distress as a cultural condition, she’s freelancing.

The final question was also a good one: “Did Nicole undergo reassignment surgery and if so was there any risk to it?”

Nutt’s answer was bad, and sort of creepy. “Yes. She was 17 at the time…I was there.”

“It was not the most important thing…but it was the last thing that she needed to do,” said Nutt.

“What was important for her early on was to have her puberty suppressed as a child, so that she knew what she really wanted.”

Puberty-blockers are serious business. Puberty suppression and cross-sex hormones can stunt a person’s growth and render him completely infertile, never able to have genetically-related children, even by artificial means. You cannot walk back up this road.

What’s more, there are no scientific studies on their use by growing children. None.

Nutt’s cavalier treatment of puberty blockers was awfully reckless.

And isn’t her logic backwards? How does blocking your natural development tell you what you really want? Isn’t it, rather, tipping the scales toward an ideologically pre-determined outcome?

Did Nicole even have the capacity to consent to this untested, irreversible medical treatment in the first place? “There is a serious ethical problem with allowing irreversible, life-changing procedures to be performed on minors who are too young to give valid consent themselves,” cautions the American College of Pediatricians.

Nutt went on: “When the time for puberty came, she took estrogen, and she made the puberty that all girls do at the right time.”

Making the puberty that all girls do is strange phraseology. But of course this teen could not make the puberty that all girls do without ovaries and a uterus. Were the teen girls in the audience misled? Were the boys?

As to risk, Nutt brushed it aside: “You know, there’s always a risk to surgery, it’s actually not that complicated.”

“She will be, for all purposes, physically and biologically a girl. A woman.”

Wrong. Biologically, Nicole will never be a girl. Every cell in Nicole’s body contains male sex chromosomes. A lifetime of male-suppressing hormones will never change that fact.

At one point in her lecture, Nutt said: “I’m not trying to be funny, I’m trying to be factual.”

She should have tried harder.

Children suffering from gender dysphoria deserve our compassion. Surely their suffering is genuine, and profound. But they also deserve an adult response: first and foremost, our recognition that the distress and confusion they are experiencing will give way to acceptance of their natal biology in the vast majority of cases.

The person with persistent dysphoria who ultimately chooses radical surgery and a lifetime of hormones deserves compassion, too. As well as great sympathy, in my opinion, for treating a healthy body as sick and a troubled mind as healthy.

Nutt obviously disagrees. There is great disagreement on this issue, especially among medical experts.

When a public school takes sides, nobody wins. But students, and taxpayers, lose.

Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

RELATED ARTICLE: What You Can Do to Fight Sex Trafficking

Here’s How Bad Left-Wing Antics on Campus Were in 2017

January 10, 2018/in Education, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Daily Signal

A frequent point I have made in past columns has been about the educational travesty happening on many college campuses.

Some people have labeled my observations and concerns as trivial, unimportant, and cherry-picking. While the spring semester awaits us, let’s ask ourselves whether we’d like to see repeats of last year’s antics.

An excellent source for college news is Campus Reform, a conservative website operated by the Leadership Institute. Its reporters are college students. Here is a tiny sample of last year’s bizarre stories.

Donna Riley, a professor at Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education, published an article in the most recent issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Engineering Education, positing that academic rigor is a “dirty deed” that upholds “white male heterosexual privilege.”

Riley added that “scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing.”

Would you hire an engineering education graduate who has little mastery of the rigor of engineering? What does Riley’s vision, if actually practiced by her colleagues, do to the worth of degrees in engineering education from Purdue held by female and black students?

Sympathizing with Riley’s vision is Rochelle Gutierrez, a math education professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In her recent book, she says the ability to solve algebra and geometry problems perpetuates “unearned privilege” among whites. Educators must be aware of the “politics that mathematics brings” in society.

She thinks that “on many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness.” After all, she adds, “who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White.”

What’s worse is that the university’s interim provost, John Wilkin, sanctioned her vision, telling Fox News that Gutierrez is an established and admired scholar who has been published in many peer-reviewed publications.

I hope that the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s black students don’t have the same admiration and stay away from her classes.

Last February, a California State University, Fullerton professor assaulted a CSUF Republicans member during a demonstration against President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration. The students identified the assailant as Eric Canin, an anthropology professor.

Fortunately, the school had the good sense to later suspend Canin after confirming the allegations through an internal investigation.

Last month, the presidents of 13 San Antonio colleges declared in an op-ed written by Ric Baser, president of the Higher Education Council of San Antonio, and signed by San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg and 12 other members of the council that “hate speech” and “inappropriate messages” should not be treated as free speech on college campuses.

Their vision should be seen as tyranny.

The true test of one’s commitment to free speech doesn’t come when he permits people to be free to make statements that he does not find offensive. The true test of one’s commitment to free speech comes when he permits people to make statements he does deem offensive.

Last year, University of Georgia professor Rick Watson adopted a policy allowing students to select their own grade if they “feel unduly stressed” by their actual grade in the class.

Benjamin Ayers, dean of the school’s Terry College of Business, released a statement condemning Watson’s pick-your-own-grade policy, calling it “inappropriate.” He added:

Rest assured that this ill-advised proposal will not be implemented in any Terry classroom. The University of Georgia upholds strict guidelines and academic policies to promote a culture of academic rigor, integrity, and honesty.

Ayers’ response gives us hope that not all is lost in terms of academic honesty.

Other campus good news is a report on the resignation of George Ciccariello-Maher, a white Drexel University professor who tweeted last winter, “All I Want for Christmas Is White Genocide.” He said that he resigned from his tenured position because threats against him and his family had become “unsustainable.”

If conservative students made such threats, they, too, could benefit from learning the principles of free speech.

COMMENTARY BY

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University

A Note for our Readers:

Trust in the mainstream media is at a historic low—and rightfully so given the behavior of many journalists in Washington, D.C.

Ever since Donald Trump was elected president, it is painfully clear that the mainstream media covers liberals glowingly and conservatives critically.

Now journalists spread false, negative rumors about President Trump before any evidence is even produced.

Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. That’s why The Daily Signal exists.

The Daily Signal’s mission is to give Americans the real, unvarnished truth about what is happening in Washington and what must be done to save our country.

Our dedicated team of more than 100 journalists and policy experts rely on the financial support of patriots like you.

Your donation helps us fight for access to our nation’s leaders and report the facts.

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The Lib/Con Utah School Porn War Rages On

January 8, 2018/in Culture War, Education, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Selwyn Duke

Recently I reported on the firing of Mateo Rueda, now an ex-art teacher after showing 10 and 11-year-olds nude “artwork” at Lincoln Elementary School in Hyrum, Utah on Dec. 4. Normally I would have let this story go by now, but Rueda continues playing the victim, aided and abetted by complicit reporters; libertines the world over; and, unfortunately, some good people who don’t realize that the media have mischaracterized his trespass.

Rueda, a native of Colombia, demands an apology, even as he condemns his fellow Cache Valley residents as “cultural dead-ends” and members of a “narrow-minded community.” He also said, “I was overqualified[;] I took the [teaching] position with an open heart to make a difference in a predominantly[] Mormon community where there isn’t much culture.” My, charitable as well as charming! Yet his defenders — who’ve called people such as me puritans, prudes and even Nazi-like book burners — should know that Rueda himself confessed that the nudes were out of bounds.

Claiming the images were among a set of art postcards with which Rueda was unacquainted, the Herald Journal reported Dec. 28, “Asked if he thought the nudes were appropriate for the sixth-graders in his class, Rueda said he did not. ‘This is not material at all that I would use. I had no idea,’ he said.” So honest mistake, right?

Well, that was before I conducted interviews with local parents and reported that after Rueda showed the nudes to the sixth-graders and got complaints, he must have found them appropriate for fifth-graders — because that’s exactly whom he later showed them to. What’s more, the parents told me Rueda belittled the children who objected, said they might find some images inappropriate but he didn’t (which was all that apparently mattered), forced them to continue viewing the images over their protestations and said he didn’t care if they reported him. He also told them to “grow up.”

Yet after I tipped off the Herald Journal that a second class had seen the images and that Rueda was “lying,” as one of the parents put it, it ran a Jan.2 piece mentioning the fifth-graders but also printing this: “Rueda said he told the class that they should not feel the images are inappropriate or wrong.”

So do we believe the late December “not material at all that I would use. I had no idea” Rueda or the early January “don’t ‘feel the images are inappropriate or wrong’” Rueda? Hey, it is a different year — I guess his story evolved.

Speaking of which, smut can evolve, too — into art. One of the paintings Late December Rueda said was inappropriate and Early January Rueda fancied culture is the full-frontal nude “Iris Tree,” a portrait of a sexually libertine, drug-using, bohemian woman by that name. It’s a work the media consistently label “classical” (“Ooh, the rubes object to classical art!”), apparently unaware that the term references Greek and Roman antiquity. In contrast, “Iris Tree” is an early 20^th-century creation by Italian Amedeo Modigliani, a violent, woman-abusing, philandering, drug-addicted, alcoholic known for dancing naked in Paris streets and who could be called a pornographer of his day (other than that, he was a peach).

For those who say I’m confusing art with artist, I have already examined the difference between legitimate art portraying the naked human form (e.g., Sistine Chapel) and porn masquerading as art. Suffice it to say here, something designed to symbolically relate theological concepts — e.g., the Garden of Eden — “Iris Tree” is not. It’s more the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It’s one of those Modigliani paintings that, as the Daily Mail put it, exudes “raw sensuality” and is “an homage to the sex he so loved.”

So why are such things deemed fine art and shown to kids? Because sometimes, the older they get, the better they were. People have this curious notion that if smut is put to canvas with paint and some skill and allowed to age a century, the x-rated becomes the extraordinary. It doesn’t help that a Chinese collector with more yuan than brains shelled out $153 million for a Modigliani nude in 2015 or that the painter’s works now enjoy art-world approval.

(Think this is meaningful? Read the story of Estelle Lovatt, who in 2007 fooled the art world into thinking her two-year-old’s tomato-ketchup daubs were great works by a renowned, mature artist.)

Speaking of the fooled, and foolish, the mainstream media continue writing inaccurate articles sympathetic toward Rueda. A good example is this People piece, which portrays the teacher as a martyr, quoting him positively as saying that the “works” were “icons of art history and human patrimony.” Interestingly, however, People shows an image of “Iris Tree” with her nipples and nether region curiously obscured. So the painting is appropriate for 10-year-olds but not for an article meant for adults?

Apparently, People agrees that its picture refutes its thousand words. You see, shortly before readying this article for publication, I learned that People had removed the “Iris Tree” image from its piece completely, no doubt as a response to my (and others’) having called them out on hypocrisy via Twitter. Ah, but you know the Internet — archiving and the computer “Print Screen” function saved the day. Here’s how the People article looked before the people at People became apprised of their sheer stupidity.

Of course, maybe it’s predictable that a media outlet would blur an image when it has already blurred the line between good and bad journalism. But I’d still like to know why People is unwilling to show, in its entirety, a painting that it states “[m]illions of people worldwide have marveled at.” What are you afraid of, dear editors? That kids may see it?

Oh, wait….

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com.

War in the Classroom

January 2, 2018/in Education, Policy, Politics/by Tabitha Korol

The year was 2011, and a freshman in Newton South High School, in Newton, Massachusetts, asked her father if it was true that the “Israeli occupation forces” had “imprisoned, tortured and killed” hundreds of Arabic women who had been “active in the Palestinian resistant movement.” Her father, Tony Pagliuso, asked for the source of this misinformation. It was her 540-page Arab World Studies Notebook, a highly explosive textbook filled with fabrications, shown to contribute, at least in part, to the marked decrease, from 84 to 57 percent, in student sympathy for Israel. In another textbook, The Cultural Landscape: An Introduction to Human Geography, a question reads, “If a Palestinian suicide bomber kills several dozen Israeli teenagers in a Jerusalem restaurant, is that an act of terrorism or wartime retaliation against Israeli government policies and army actions?” These are not unique.

The editor, Audrey Park Shabbas, employed by Arab World and Islamic Resources and School Services, authored the volume to improve the Arab image because the truth is unpalatable in Western society, and the Israeli image is scapegoated in the process, consistent with the 1400-year Islamic war against Jews and Western civilization. Schools also distribute Scholastic’s maps that omit Israel from the modern Middle East.

Other education sources used across America are the Internet’s Flashpoints: Guide to World Conflicts, which identifies Jerusalem as the capital of (the non-existent) Palestine; handouts that omit the numerous and deadly Arab terrorist attacks on Israel; and A Muslim Primer that presents a deceptive, sugar-coated version of the subjugated Muslim woman’s life. Biased textbooks in use throughout America are World History: The Human Odyssey; World History: Human Legacy; World Civilizations: The Global Experience; A Muslim Primer: Beginner’s Guide to Islam, and more. I have personally reviewed four textbooks and written exposés accordingly, and many concerned professionals and members of the public are working hard to combat the manipulation of our youth, but the disinformation continues to proliferate.

More than 10,000 teachers attended Shabbas’s hundreds of three-day teacher-training sessions from 2000 to 2006, and were thus persuaded and made skillful at reaching and indoctrinating more than 25 million students over ten years. Additional corroboration comes from visiting biased speakers, such as the notorious anti-Israel Noam Chomsky, an aficionado of the Iran-supported, world’s most powerful terrorist group/army, Hezbollah, responsible for large-scale bombings and suicide attacks on Americans and Israelis; Linda Sarsour, anti-Semite, jihadi and proponent of FGM (Female Genital Mutiliation); and academia’s Paul Beran, then-director of Harvard University’s Outreach Center, now leader of SHARIAsource, recognized for promoting BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) against Israel to the Presbyterian Church.

It took alert parents and involved citizens and intense investigation and reports by The Massachusetts Board of Education, Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT), the American Jewish Committee and Verité Educate to expose Newton High’s ethical violations and unacceptable practices and to finally have the school admit the Outreach Center’s strong influence. Key criticism was leveled at Harvard International Review’s Hatem Bazian’s fallacious portrayal of Palestinians as the indigenous victims and Jews as the colonialists; at the textbooks for their academic dishonesty through inaccuracies, false information, plagiarism, deceptive editing, and hate-filled, religious-proselytizing websites; assignments designed to prejudice students toward a suicidal one-state solution for Israel/the West Bank/Gaza, revealed in Miriam F. Elman’s “Palestinian Propaganda is Infiltrating US Public Schools”; and biases against Israel and the US while sanitizing Islamic ideology and terrorism, explained by Rafael Medoff in Breaking Christian News.

Examples of other schools across the country that inculcate Islamism and unfairness in the classroom include Bellaire High, in Houston, Texas, cited for extreme claims about Israel’s history; Carlmont High in Belmont, California, which invited Linda Sarsour and other anti-Semites to advocate BDS and tutor radical positions against Israel; and La Plata High, a Maryland public school that forces the children to learn about Islam, memorize the Five Pillars of Islam, and recite the Shahada, the Islamic oath of conversion. By contrast, there is a considerable lack of parallel information being taught about Christianity and Judaism because Islamists precedently announced their aversion and umbrage. This generation of children is being fed an egregiously biased version of an ideology that is incompatible with democracy and corrosive to our beliefs, morals, and ideals. Let us be clear: their ultimate purpose is the conversion of our children.

The Intense focus on Islamic subjects is carefully selected. For example, the status of women is profoundly misrepresented, the origin and purpose of their sharia-compliant clothing falsified and unsupported by scholarship. One author asserts that “Islam and the Quran created major improvements in the status of women,” when the truth is otherwise. The worst conditions for women are concealed, including the practices of genital mutilation and honor killings; accusations of adultery and stoning; their treatment as property and legal inferiority; endorsed beatings by their husbands; the fact that a woman may have no rights to show her face, walk alone, drive a vehicle or attend schools. International speakers and experts who offer genuine facts, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Anni Cyrus, Brigitte Gabriel, and Noni Darwish, are not among the invitees.

John Esposito

The textbooks elevate Islam over Judaism and Christianity, one being John Esposito’s Islam, the Straight Path, in which he declares that revelations given to the Jews and Christians were false. By contrast, he cites as truth, rather than belief, that God sent Muhammad as his final messenger and that God’s sacred language is Arabic. Students write about Moslem pilgrimages, including to Jerusalem as “your homeland,” when Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Koran. Many textbooks explain the rise and spread of Islam as being a successful acceptance of ideas, rather than the result of persecution and wantonly destructive conquerors who beheaded the non-believers, kidnapped the women for forced conversion and sexual slavery, and enriched themselves with appropriated bounty.

The textbooks’ definition of jihad varies from the benign, the spiritual struggle within oneself against sin, to the traditional, the struggle against the enemies of Islam, but the goal is always the same – that of bringing the whole world under Islamic law, as explained by Bernard Lewis. Omitted is the account of hundreds of members of the Jewish Meccan tribe, the Quarayza, beheaded in 627 AD for rejecting Muhammad as Prophet, and the more than 109 verses in the Quran that decree violence and death to Jews and Christians, and the destruction of Israel.

Not found in textbooks is Israel’s history – not 1948, when five surrounding Arab states declared war on the new state of Israel and lost, or 1967, when the Arabs again attacked Israel and lost, leaving behind Arabs who stayed and accepted Israel citizenship and Arabs who fled and remained as stateless pawns, neglected by their brethren. Mislaid is the number of Jews – between 800,000 and one million – who fled for their lives from Islamic countries, and were absorbed by Israel. Missing are a timeline that would verify Israel’s attacks as retaliatory to the Arab leaders’ calls to annihilate Israel, and a correct definition of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as “religious,” as declared in the Quran, confirming that anti-Semitism is integral to the Moslem culture. The textbooks do not explain Islamic terrorism and radicalism as religious precepts of jihad, or the incitement to hate that permeates Palestinian and Islamic society. Palestinians extol terrorism, praise terrorists as heroes and deceased murderers as martyrs after whom streets, cultural events, and public squares are named, and for which parents are handsomely rewarded – with “humanitarian aid” funded by UN countries. Anti-Semitism is endemic to the Koran, and none of this is mentioned.

The correct definition of Islam, with its religious, legal, political, economic, social and military components is a 100% system of life, and the greatest threat to the world. There are organizations that work to free our schools of Islamic propaganda, but the programs of study have been bought and paid for by the Saudis, and theirs is the agenda. Hence, the lessons are plagued with poor scholarship, revisionism, and blatant anti-Israel bias, and supported by a corrupt media that fuels the skewed perspective.

It is now evident that we are at war, a war that is being waged in the classroom, with its weaponry aimed at our children’s minds. The diligent work, “Indoctrinating our Youth,” by CAMERA, Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, has resulted in the removal of some curriculum materials, but not all. Despite parental rights to know what their children are learning, teaching staff does not provide full disclosure. And, for every school that removes falsehoods, there are a hundred more that are continuing its use, now beginning at 3rd grade level. It is up to us to pursue what must be stopped for the sake of our survival as a republic.

Go to www.schoolbias.org or call CAMERA, at 617-377-6911. To quote a popular phrase, “If you see something, say something.”

RELATED VIDEO: What are Newton students really learning.

Cutting Through the Media’s Falsehoods About ‘Dreamers’

December 30, 2017/in Courts & Law, Education, Policy, Politics/by The Daily Signal

When members of Congress battled over the budget, some threatened to block funding unless Congress provided amnesty to illegal alien Dreamers who benefited from President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which President Donald Trump announced he is ending.

Conscientious members of Congress should not give in to this threat. Amnesty will encourage even more illegal immigration—just as the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act did.

That bill provided citizenship to 2.7 million illegal aliens. Yet by 1995, another 5.7 million illegal aliens were residing in the U.S. Many of them crossed the border to join their newly legalized friends and family. Others, no doubt, believed that since the U.S. provided amnesty once, it would do so again.

However Congress decides to deal with Dreamers, it should be based on the real demographics of the DACA populace, not the glamorized image typically presented by the media.

Watching television reports concerning Dreamers, one would think that the DACA program applied only to college-educated immigrants who were just a few years old when their parents brought them into the country illegally.

We are led to believe that most are so fully Americanized that they would now have trouble speaking their native language and are all but ignorant of their birth countries’ cultural norms. Thus, we are supposed to believe returning them to their native lands would be a cruel hardship.

In fact, many DACA beneficiaries came here as teenagers. All were eligible for the program as long as they entered the U.S. before their 16th birthday. By that time, there is no doubt that they spoke the language of their native countries fluently and knew their culture intimately.

DACA had no requirement of English fluency, as evidenced by the application form that had a space to list the translator used to complete the form.

The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that “perhaps 24 percent of the DACA-eligible population fall into the functionally illiterate category and another 46 percent have only ‘basic’ English ability.”

Unfortunately, many Dreamers are poorly educated. Only 49 percent of DACA beneficiaries have a high school education, even though a majority are now adults. And while military service could also qualify an illegal alien for DACA, out of the current 690,000 DACA beneficiaries, only 900 are serving in the military.

The Obama administration did not check the background of each DACA beneficiary, despite a requirement that they have no felony convictions and pose no threat to national security. Only a few randomly selected DACA applicants were ever actually vetted.

This may explain why, by August this year, more than 2,100 DACA beneficiaries had had their eligibility pulled because of criminal convictions and gang affiliation.

Even if a random background investigation produced substantial evidence that an illegal alien might have committed multiple crimes, the alien would still be eligible for DACA if he wasn’t convicted.

Thus, it seems that a significant percentage of DACA beneficiaries have serious limitations in their education, work experience, and English fluency. What’s the likelihood that they’ll be able to function in American society without being substantial burdens to U.S. taxpayers?

Without changing the sponsorship rules, any congressional amnesty bill providing citizenship could significantly increase the number of illegal aliens who will benefit beyond the immediate DACA beneficiaries. Giving lawful status to Dreamers will allow them and their families to profit from illegal conduct.

History shows that providing amnesty will attract even more illegal immigration and won’t solve our enforcement problems. Congress shouldn’t even consider such relief unless and until we have a sustained period of concentrated enforcement that stems illegal entry and reduces the illegal alien population in the U.S.

Congress should instead concentrate on providing the resources needed to enforce our immigration laws and secure our border.

COMMENTARY BY

Hans von Spakovsky

Hans von Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration, the rule of law and government reform—as a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative. Read his research. Twitter: @HvonSpakovsky.

EDITORS NOTE: This column was originally published by The Washington Times. The featured image of a protester partaking in a demonstration in support of DACA outside the U.S Capitol. (Photo: Alex Edelman/Zuma Press/Newscom)

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VIDEO EXPOSE: Support for Hitler at Canadian University

December 16, 2017/in Culture War, Education, Policy, Politics/by Canary Mission

Anti-Israel students at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada have published multiple social media posts praising Adolf Hitler, demonizing Jews and glorifying terrorist organizations.

Jew Hate at McMaster from Canary Mission on Vimeo.

“Everytime I read about Hitler, I fall in love all over again” and “Hitler should have took you all” are among scores of offensive comments flooding the social media pages of current and former students at McMaster U, Canada.

The Canary Mission December 2017 McMaster Report identifies 39 current and former students who posted over 280 bigoted comments on social media.

All have or had affiliations with the campus chapter of SPHR or Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights, a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).

The list of outrageous comments include:

“Death to America and white people” — Nadera Masad
“How long does it take a zionist woman to take out the trash?…………Nine months.” — Nadera Masad
“I honestly wish I was born at the time of the second world war just to see the genius, Hitler, at work.” — Rawan Qaddoura
“falastine ibladna wel ya7ood eklabna [palestine is our land and the jews are our dogs].” — Walid Abdulaziz
>“Where is hitler when u need one?’ I literally ask this every day.” — Esra Bengizi
“I’m actually going to the rule the world and get rid of anyone who doesn’t have basic common sense or if you’re yahoodi [Jewish]” — Esra Bengizi

On Tuesday the Algemeiner ran an article on the report. The response from the McMaster community was rapid.

It became a heated discussion point on Spotted at Mac, a McMaster community chat forum on Facebook with over 29,000 members,

The anti-Zionist Mac SPHR released a statement on their Facebook page that condemned the anti-Semitic comments posted by the numerous members and officers within their organization.

On Wednesday the McMaster university administration released a statement condemning the anti-Semitic posts and asserting that they are “actively reviewing” them.

The Algemeiner published a follow-up article that included a statement from the McMaster chapter of Hillel and one from B’nai Brith Canada, decrying the hateful posts and calling on the university to take action.

However, the response was not all positive.

“The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist. Add that to my profile.”

This was the shockingly unrepentant tweet sent out by Nadera Masad within a day of being exposed for promoting violence against Jews and praising Hitler. Since over 6.4 million Jews currently reside in Israel, her statement is nothing short of a call for a genocide — in greater number than even her hero Hitler.

A few hours later she tweeted, “I keep saying, we need to cleanse the world of creatures such as these dirty white Americans,” with the note, “Add this to my canary profile.” A day later, after having her fill of bigotry, she deleted her Twitter account.

The Canary Mission McMaster exposé is the latest in a series of scandals to have hit SJP and its leader Hatem Bazian. They have been exposed so oftenfor bigotry and racism that SJP is no longer seen as a serious player by university administrations or even former members.

To view the full campaign, go to CanaryMission.org/McMaster

People of Florida 2, Lobbyists 0. School Board Term Limits Advance Again!

December 14, 2017/in Culture War, Education, Elections, Politics, Regulation/by Philip Blumel

Today we learned once again that the power of the grassroots here in Florida can overcome any special interest, no matter how entrenched.

The Local Government Committee of the Constitutional Revision Commission just passed School Board Term Limits by a 5-1 vote, meaning we are one step closer to letting Florida voters decide in 2018 whether eight years is enough for all school board politicians.

The School Board remains one of few areas in Florida government where there are no term limits yet, except for a single county (Duval).

I have to tell you, the way we passed the committee today was great. First, our sponsor — Collier School Board member Erika Donalds — gave an awesome pitch for term limits. Then, like clockwork, the biggest and most powerful lobbyists in Tallahassee got up one by one to bash term limits. These guys were angry. They know they stand to lose a lot of influence over incumbents if we succeed.

Erika handled their flimsy objections with no problems. Then, one commissioner, Bob Solari of Indian River, announced he would oppose term limits. At this moment, the gallery full of lobbyists and special interests gave Solari an ovation! They were so proud that someone stood up for their swamp.

However, one minute later, the committee voted and term limits WON, 5-1. Solari and his influence-peddling friends were crushed.

So how did the lobbyists lose? It’s simple. For the last few weeks, you and people like you have been making calls and sending emails nonstop to this Commission to let them know the people want term limits. Lobbyists have no such army behind them. They have deep pockets, sure, but they lack real citizens taking action to get things done.

Citizen energy is term limits’ secret weapon.

We’ve come a long way, but School Board term limits still aren’t on the 2018 ballot yet. This measure has to pass a drafting committee and then be elevated to the full Commission level for a final vote. But today’s action brings us one big step closer.

The Commission will even be touring Florida before taking a final vote, so you’ll have an opportunity to appear in person and make the case. I’ll email you when it comes to your town.

Thanks for your continued support,

Nick Tomboulides
Executive Director
U.S. Term Limits

Pro-Life Students Sue Miami University Because It Won’t Let Them Erect a Cross

December 5, 2017/in Culture War, Education, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Daily Caller

Students at the Miami University in Ohio are suing the school after it wouldn’t let them erect a cross on its campus to express their pro-life message.

Filed by the Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of Miami University’s Students for Life, the lawsuit alleges that the university violated their rights to free speech and expression because it wouldn’t let them erect a cross on it’s Hamilton campus, which recently hosted an event on the “Perspectives of Free Speech,” according to WLWT5. The suit also asks the university to change its policies regarding campus postage and seeks monetary damages.

Miami University’s Students for Life has displayed its cross every year in an appeal to Christians and pro-lifers to protect the life of the unborn for both religious and moral reasons, but campus officials said the students couldn’t erect their symbol this year, according to WLWT5. They added that the cross would only be permitted if the students included “warning” signs around campus explaining why they had erected the cross.

The university plans to “address any potential mistake,” said school spokeswoman Claire Wagner, who indicated the lawsuit may have resulted from a miscommunication or misunderstanding between the students and campus officials.

Other universities have also faced run-ins with events regarding free speech, including Ryerson University, which canceled a panel dedicated to discussing the silencing of free speech on college campuses, citing “campus safety.”

Not long ago, the Berkeley mayor also advised the University of California, Berkeley to cancel conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos’ planned September Free Speech Week, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Grace Carr

Grace Carr is a reporter for The Daily Caller News Foundation. Twitter: @gbcarr24.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image of a cross is by Wagner Santos/Photoshot/Newscom. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities for this original content, email licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Islamist Gülen Schools in America: Interactive Map, Video and More

December 4, 2017/in Education, Policy, Politics/by Mercedes Schneider

In October 2015, the Republic of Turkey retained the London-based, international law firm, Amsterdam and Partners, “to conduct a global investigation into the activities of the organization led by the Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen.”

Another component of Amsterdam and Partners’ work related to Gülen concerns public awareness:

“We have been retained by the Republic to expose allegedly unlawful conduct by the Gülen network worldwide,” said Robert Amsterdam, founding partner of Amsterdam & Partners LLP, during a press conference held today at the National Press Club in Washington DC. “The activities of the Gülen network, including its penetration of the Turkish judiciary and police, as well as its political lobbying abroad, should concern everyone who cares about the future of democracy in Turkey.”

In my book, School Choice: The End of Public Education, I have a chapter examining Fethullah Gülen, the powerful Turkish imam who commands leadership of scores of charter schools on American soil. Indeed, Gülen himself has been residing in the Poconos (Pennsylvania) since 1999.

One can get a sense of concerns related to Gülen from this November 10, 2017, California NAACP resolution for Gülen school investigation:

RESOLUTION #16 CONCERNING THE IMPACT OF GÜLEN CHARTER SCHOOLS

WHEREAS, there exists over 200 schools in the United States operated by the Gülen Organization, teaching over 80,000 American students. This organization operates under the names Magnolia Science Academy (CA), Horizon Science Academy (OH , IL), Harmony Science Academy (TX), Sonoran Science Academy (AR), Coral Academy of Science (NV), Dove Science Academy (OK), as well as others.

WHEREAS, audits having been conducted in LAUSD, the State of Oklahoma, the State of Georgia (resulting in their closure), the State of New York, have resulted in a pattern of massive accounting irregularities involving without limitation the use of Gülen related landlords such as Terra (NY, NJ), the Sky Foundation (OK), Harmony Public Schools (TX), Concept Schools (IL, OH), the use of Gülen Related Management Companies such as Accord (CA), Concept Education Services (OH), Apple Education (NJ), Terra Science and Education (NY), as well as others.

WHEREAS, Gülen schools; such as Magnolia (CA) have targeted the African American and Hispanic communities as shown in the documentary film Killing Ed.

WHEREAS, all 200 Gülen schools recruit teachers from Turkey under the H – 1B Visa program thereby replacing fully qualified American teachers.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, the California NAACP urges federal, state and local authorities to conduct forensic audits of both the schools, and the management organizations operating them.

BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED, that the California NAACP further urges that these investigations be conducted by state and federal auditors as opposed to state boards of education, as well as other relevant investigations necessary to evaluate fully the apparent, suspect financial dealings, visa misuse, and highly suspicious conduct.

Regarding the California NAACP resolution, PR Newswire adds this statement from Amsterdam:

The organizations running these schools have not only been found to be pillaging taxpayers through real estate schemes and self-dealing to their own contractors, but they are also abusing the H-1B visa program to bring over foreign teachers often lacking in basic English skills and training. This has a devastating impact on the communities in which they operate.

In September 2017, Amsterdam published a 650-page book, Empire of Deceit: An Investigation of the Gülen Charter School Network, that “details how the nationwide charter school network controlled by the Gülen Organization enriches itself at the expense of American school children.”

Regarding Empire of Deceit, PR Newswire notes:

Amsterdam’s book reveals surprising facts regarding the Gülen Organization’s vast US network:

Misuse of taxpayer funds totaling at least $243 million.

More than 6,504 H-1B visas to import unqualified Turkish teachers at a public cost of as much as $26 million and lost jobs for American teachers.

Nearly 81,000 students enrolled at Gülen schools across 27 states and District of Columbia.

Widespread manipulation of state mandated testing, grades and attendance figures.

Lobbying and publicly funded trips to Turkey to influence politicians and local officials.

Amsterdam and Partners also sponsors an Empire of Deceit website, which promotes Killing Ed, “an independently produced documentary feature film that exposes a vast range of questionable academic, labor, and H1-B visa violations by schools tied to Gülen movement.” The site includes the following 11-minute director’s cut “to accompany the launch of Empire of Deceit“:

(Former national security adviser Michael Flynn is connected to a documentary on Gülen through his lobbying form, Flynn Intel Group; I’m not sure if it is Killing Ed.)

The Empire of Deceit website also includes an interactive US map, with the heading, “Gülen’s Footprint Inside of the United States.” One can search by state– or “by issue”:

States with Active Networks
HB-1 Hiring by State
States with Suspect Property Deals
Charter Bonds Procured by the Gülen Organization
Regional Hub and Member States Identified

Time for those state- and federal-level forensic audits of Gülen-run charter schools.

EDITORS NOTE: According to Discover the Networks the under the section titled “Center for American Progress’ Relationship with Turkey’s Islamist, Jihad-Supporting Regime” states:

On May 14, 2013, CAP issued a report titled “Freedom of the Press and Expression in Turkey,” which downplayed the increasingly authoritarian crackdown on the media by Turkey’s jihad-supporting prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, whose Islamist party was already moving inexorably to transform the secular Turkish republic into an Islamic state. At that time, Turkish prisons held 49 of the 232 journalists who were incarcerated worldwide—more than any other country on Earth. In addition, as former Middle East Pentagon advisor Michael Rubin noted, Erdogan was in the habit of personally suing “even political cartoonists who lampoon him and his government.” Notwithstanding the foregoing facts, the CAP report whitewashed Erdogan’s crackdown as a “necessary, if sometimes unpleasant, correction” that would ultimately result in democratic reforms. Asserting that “the blame [for the crackdown] must not be placed solely on the government,” but also on anti-government ethnic groups such as the Kurds who had fomented unrest and provoked government suppression. “Turkey today is more democratic than in the past, if perhaps less socially liberal,” said the report.

The CAP report was partially funded by the Turkish branch of George Soros’s Open Society Institute. Even more significantly, the report failed to disclose that a Turkish business group named TUSKON, which had close ties to the Erdogan government, had donated large sums of money to CAP in order to gain entrance into the latter’s exclusive Business Alliance. Known for lobbying government officials and forming business relationships with Western organizations (such as CAP), TUSKON serves as the business arm of the so-called Gulen movement—named after Fethullah Gulen, a charismatic spiritual leader devoted to spreading Islamist theology across the globe. Moreover, TUSKON and CAP had jointly hosted annual “fact finding” trips to Turkey, where participants enjoyed access to senior Turkish government officials. Reporter Ken Silverstein wrote, “A former CAP staffer told me that TUSKON … ‘could call anyone in the government and get us a meeting or interview.’ As a result of the Turkish group’s support, CAP was ‘totally in the tank for them.’”

It should also be noted that the CAP report obscured not only Ergodan’s press crackdown but also the nature of the Armenian genocide, in which Turkey had systematically slaughtered more than a million Armenians beginning in 1915. The report only refers to the genocide in non-judgmental terms, as “the death of more than 1 million Armenians during and after the First World War.” [Emphasis added]

Take Action: Floridians can Term Limit School Board Members

December 1, 2017/in Education, Policy, Politics/by Philip Blumel

THE LOBBYISTS ARE COMING! Term limits a crucial defense against degenerating school board politics

Last year, the Orlando Sentinel revealed that candidates the Orange County school board were raking in campaign contributions from the building industry. At the same time, a school building boom is under way in Orange County, with plans to open 13 new campuses by 2020.

A representative of the Florida School Boards Association admitted such contributions were “quite typical,” and indeed they are. There has always been a battle between parents and local special interests to hold the attention and favor of school board members. Due to the phenomenon of “concentrated benefits and dispersed costs,” local special interests too often win out.

In response to entrenched incumbency and special interest relationships, there are two efforts to put 8-year school board term limits on the statewide ballot in November 2018. One is via legislation introduced to the legislature and another via the state’s Constitution Revision Commission process.

But there is a new wave of soft and not-so-soft corruption emerging in our nation’s school board politics that make this reform even more urgent. A new crew of lobbyists are coming, with hands full of cash to establish relationships with incumbent school board members who statistically are unlikely to lose their low-turnout elections.

TAKE ACTION:

To voice your support for a school board term limits referendum, you can contact the Constitutional Revision Commission (CRC) here.

As the Economist put it in their Nov. 11 issue, elections to choose school boards “have historically been sleepy, low-turnout affairs. But in recent years they have become contentious, serving as proxies for the rancorous debate between advocates of education reform and teachers’ unions.” The Economist pointed to recent big money campaigns earlier this month near Denver and Las Vegas that have drew in $1.65 million and $15 million, respectively. In Florida, we saw a 2016 Collier County race swamped with special interest money to the tune of more than $350,000.

This is dangerous as once a candidate is on the board and has demonstrated they are reliable to special interests, the financial contributions come pretty much automatically. Such contributions are a good investment for lobbyists, as well over 80% of incumbents are regularly re-elected. Many run unopposed and elections are not even held.

Eight-year term limits will improve our school boards in several ways:

Term limits will encourage regular, open-seat elections.
Term limits encourages independence by the board, as term limits will regularly sever the relationships that grow between special interests and incumbent school board members.
Term limits improve citizen access to the process, both in running for office or working on meaningful campaigns.
Term limits encourage new faces and fresh ideas. Incumbent members often have their heels dug in over past political battles or are wedded to the special interests they have relied on for reelection.
Term limits mandate rotation in office which expands the circle of citizens with intimate knowledge of how the school board works.
Term limits encourage transparency and discourage corruption, both soft and hard.

Florida has term limits on its governor, lt. governor, state cabinet members, legislature, its largest counties and too many mayors and council members to count. It is time to bring this simple, effective and popular reform to our school boards.

School Board Term Limits to be placed on Florida’s 2018 ballot

November 29, 2017/in Education, Policy, Politics/by Philip Blumel

I have some excellent news!

Yesterday, the Education Committee of Florida’s Constitutional Revision Commission unanimously passed our measure asking for School Board Term Limits to be placed on Florida’s 2018 ballot.

Before the vote, the commissioners cited the high volume of positive citizen emails and phone calls as a major reason they voted “YES”. That means your activism made the difference!

With this vote, we are one big step closer to allowing all Florida voters to choose whether to term limit School Board members.

If the measure gets on the ballot and passes next year, all 356 elected School Board members in Florida will face a term limit of eight years. Right now, just one county out of 67 has term limits.

I testified at the Committee meeting yesterday (watch the video below) and I can tell you we were not without opposition.

Some of the most powerful lobbyists and cronies in Tallahassee came out to try to sink term limits. Of course, they’re all nervous that term limits will disrupt the profitable relationships they’ve purchased with incumbent politicians. What a shame, huh?

Thankfully, the Committee listened to the people rather than the insiders. Commissioner Erika Donalds, a Collier County School Board member and the lead sponsor of the proposal, made a great case for term limits in her remarks. Donalds flattened the lobbyists’ weak arguments by noting that the entrenchment of incumbents makes it impossible to have a level playing field without term limits.

I’ve already thanked Commissioner Donalds for her pro-term limits effort. If you’d also like to thank her, she may be contacted here: donale@collierschools.com

The next step in this process is getting 22 of the Commission’s 37 members to vote to officially place this on the ballot. That’s a challenge, but it’s not one that Florida’s grassroots term limits supporters cannot handle. Our movement is committed to adding term limits wherever they don’t exist and protecting them where they do.

We’ve term-limited the Governor, the state legislature, the cabinet and tons of county and city politicians. We got the Florida Legislature to apply for the Term Limits Convention, and held plenty of rogue elected officials accountable when they tried to overstay their limits.

Now it’s time to bring that winning energy and focus to Florida School Boards. With your help, we will make School Board term limits a reality.

Please click this link to send a pre-written email or call the Florida Constitution Review Commission members.

Thank you,

Nick Tomboulides
Executive Director
U.S. Term Limits
termlimits.org

Good Morning, Little Comrades

November 25, 2017/in Culture War, Education, Policy, Politics/by Tabitha Korol

Nikita S. Krushchev said, “Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all.”

Vladmir Ilyich Lenin said, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”

The teachings of the Left include discrediting the Bible and replacing religion with social justice, dishonoring America and family, controlling the schools and curricula, and normalizing promiscuity. The Left has set about “deconstructing” (breaking down) the child’s psychology, removing every facet of life that provides the sense of security needed to create a mature, stable, responsible, independent, confident, and productive adult who will contribute to a free society. And it is through today’s schools that they are deconstructing our children in order to destroy the free society.

Education reformers are damaging the children’s psyche with gender redefinition, creating dysfunctional adults with confused purpose.
California lawmakers are proposing SB48; radicals, elitists and pseudo-experts are selling corruption disguised as freedom, promoting homosexual lifestyles while reducing morality and responsibility.
Under Common Core, fine literature that hones our comprehension and creative skills, teaching initiative and courage, are replaced with dystopian literature that adds to their sadness, immorality, and overall impairment. Mis-education is becoming un-education.
Cursive writing, known to enhance creativity, is removed from curricula, and restricts the student’s ability to read our founding documents, understand their rights, and be prone to subservience to a master regime.
Common core began with higher standards, intentionally designed to frustrate and make for unhappy students. Standards were then lowered across the board, to falsely lift self-esteem, reduce achievement and raise grades, but not in keeping with maturity and ability levels.
Fatherless households lead to irresponsibility, rebellion, and crime; welfare policies encourage unmarried motherhood and incomplete families.
Schools discredit our Judeo-Christian roots and allegiance to our country, but dwell on Islam and socialism.
There is growing disrespect for police and government.
Limiting free speech has prevented students from hearing opposing views, and the schools from providing a genuine education. They are fed ideas of Socialism/Marxism, globalism, and Islamism, and cannot reason, understand, or face ideas not within their realm of indoctrination.
Schools are creating young fascists who are taught to march, rage and destroy, yet cannot articulate their purpose.
The future workforce is reduced through dysfunctional children and entitlement programs, and open to replacement by migrants who bring their tyrannical way of life with them.

And now, another assault against the children has appeared in the offing, perhaps the most egregious. A mandate that first became evident in some English schools several years ago, now seen in some Canadian and American schools, is that children should be discouraged from having “best friends.” England’s Thomas’s Battersea school has determined, with the agreement of some (but by no means all) parents and psychologists, that group bonding would encourage inclusion of all children and prevent rejection of the few.

The strength one gets from a best-friend relationship, if removed, may be sufficient to create enough despair where the individual will seek comfort in an ever-expanding government (the Marxist purpose). As with any detrimental Leftist concept, this technique is couched as an appeal for sympathy and compassion for those who are slow to bond with a best friend, but its stealth purpose is a means of assuring equalization by removing the securities of friendship.

Of course, not all children will immediately develop warm friendships, but should that be the norm to impose on others? Our schools have already lowered standards to meet the levels of lower achievers. Should we also remove music and the arts with deference to the less gifted, or impose a veritable “eye for an eye” on behalf of those with poorer vision? Would not our population be better served by a sensitive teacher to help all the children overcome their timidity and fears, learn the art of conversation, and develop the social graces needed to negotiate their future? For school personnel to reduce every student to his or her lowest common denominator is a Marxist technique. Already implemented in grading, it guarantees equality to the masses with obedience to the authorities, and where equality is imposed, freedoms are sacrificed.

There are many quotes about the value of friends, four of which I thought prudent to include here:

“When it hurts to look back, and you’re scared to look ahead, you can look beside you and your best friend will be there” – Anonymous.

“My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me” – Henry Ford.

“Things are never quite as scary when you’ve got a best friend” – Bill Watterson.

“A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend, one human soul whom we can trust utterly, who knows the best and worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all our faults” – Charles Kingsley.

The benefits of friendship are many and unique. We are social beings and friends fill a psychological need for survival, to cope with life’s trials and to remain inspired. A friend is an eager companion, one who provides praise and kindly given criticism, and a way for us to learn trust and support. Friends are there for comfort and to teach us about respect, sharing, thought, discussion and debate, analysis and problem-solving; simply put, they bring us happiness. Vital for our emotional wellbeing, best friends provide what parents and teachers cannot, particularly because the adults are less than perfect or may have, themselves, been deprived of best friends.

The lack of close friends results in emotional distress – loneliness, sadness, emptiness, withdrawal – which can also take its toll on physical health. It is known to be the leading reason for delinquency, school dropouts, antisocial personality disorder and suicide. In adults, loneliness precipitates depression and alcoholism, and stress with sleep disorders and multiple medical problems. Psychologist John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago concluded that social skills are crucial for mental and physical wellbeing.

In geographic situations that contribute to isolation, but where children may turn to books of imagination, challenge and rewards, achievement and travel, one might anticipate emotional success. But today’s educational system has removed such books and replaced them with dystopian novels, where the characters are immersed in loneliness, sadness, defeat, and an environment bereft of reason. The stories provide situations of crises from which the characters may not always extricate themselves. Therefore, with no escape and nowhere to vent, the child can lose his individuality, creativity and the chance to form valuable coping skills, and be drawn to any available group mentality, as well as drug abuse and alcoholism.

Robbing the children of the necessary human encounter and intimacy conforms to Leftist ideologies, which intend to destroy all social, economic, and political artifacts of classical liberalism. We see disintegration of the old society and family in the history of the Soviet Union, but, significantly, there are parallels in Islam’s jihadi warriors who emerge from emotional solitude and emptiness. The Arabic term, Asabiyah, defined in Kobrin’s The Jihadi Dictionary, is comparable to group consciousness, group-think, and the loss of individuality. By destroying intimacy, empathy and compassion, the group creates the shame-honor culture, using passive-aggressive behavior of intimidation and scapegoating. Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the aim and end of human existence.

The child who is friendless and isolated, bereft of independence and initiative, responds with obedience, guilt, and lying to protect himself from being ostracized. He may then be vulnerable to joining violent Leftist movements or submitting to Islamic radicalization.

A civilization becoming a shadow of its former greatness – this is the gift of the Left.

Take Action Now – Term Limit School Board Members in Florida!

November 23, 2017/in Culture War, Education, Policy, Politics/by Philip Blumel

Who’s ready to term limit every School Board member in Florida?

Florida is, without question, THE term limits state. Our voters have limited the terms of our governor, attorney general, state legislators, county commissioners, city councilors and many other offices. But elected School Board members, who manage billions of your tax dollars, have always been able to evade term limits. With the exception of a single county, all 356 School Board members in Florida are allowed to serve for life.

That must be changed. Our School Boards should be run by citizen leaders, not career politicians.

Florida’s Constitutional Revision Commission is deciding whether to put a measure on the November 2018 ballot limiting all School Board members to two four-year terms in office (eight years total). This is the same term limit that applies to the president and countless other offices. We have to tell the Commission to put School Board term limits on the ballot.