Justin's Political Corner
We are thrilled to announce that the Sexual Health Education bill (HB 2675) just passed in the Illinois Senate! The final vote resulted in 37 voting in favor and 21 voting against. This is wonderful news for Illinois youth!
HB 2675 creates a standard for existing sexual health education courses taught in grades 6-12. It provides medically accurate, age-appropriate, complete information on reducing STIs and unintended pregnancies including information on abstinence, contraception, healthy relationships and boundary setting.
h/t: PPIA.blogspot.com
Brianna Pena, a 5-year-old, was told she could not return to her kindergarten classroom at her Bronx, NY, charter school until she was “psychiatrically cleared” to return by a medical professional. It was her first day at a new school. She didn’t know anyone and repeatedly cried, “Nobody cares about me!” School officials insist that Brianna kept “yelling and throwing chairs” during the incident. Administrators placed her on a list of so-called “psychiatric suspensions.”
In Bartow, FL, Kiera Wilmot, a 16-year-old student was expelled from Bartow High School and arrested for conducting an unapproved chemistry experiment. She combined some household chemicals in an 8-ounce water bottle and the top popped off, giving off a small explosion. According to the school principal, Ron Pritchard, “she made a bad choice. … She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did.” She was charged with possession of and discharging a weapon on school property.
Brianna’s and Kiera are but two examples of the growing “discipline” crisis besetting schools throughout the country. School administrators are resorting to an increasing number of questionable tactics to address problems associated with the breakdown of the classroom as a learning environment. These include the use of local EMS workers to remove pre-teen children as well as such high-tech methods as RFID tracking and CCTV video surveillance. An increasing number of officials are resorting to aggressive in-school policing, with on-campus uniformed and armed officers ticketing and arresting more and more kids. All to contain “disruptive” students often engaged in what was once considered bad behavior but is now criminalized conduct.
Reports that American education is in crisis appear in the media almost every day. From Pres. Obama to mayors across the country, everyone complains about the country’s supposedly failing education system. Each promises to fix the problem – and it only seems to be getting worse. Yet, efforts to police schools reflect the further shifting of education spending from the classroom to the administrative apparatus of control.
A major contributing factor to this crisis is the failed “zero tolerance” discipline program promoted by the Bush administration and still in force in school systems throughout the country. Like its abstinence-only sex ed program, Bush policies made a serious issue worse. The effort to enforce classroom discipline through the expulsion and punishment of students is an example of the moral absolutism propagated during much of the last few decades. It further extends the “school-to-prison pipeline” by aggressively incarcerating ever-younger children, particularly African-American and Hispanic youth.
Some cities, like New York, are increasingly turning to costly emergency medical services to restrain students. Cashmiere Turner, a 7th grader at New York’s Intermediate School 151 in the Bronx, struggled both academically and socially in the classroom. Her mother, Sonya, repeatedly sought school administrators’ help with her daughter’s learning problems and the bullying she faced, but was ignored. In October 2011, school officials claimed that the troubled teen acted out, attempting to harm herself. They contacted Cashmiere’s mother, who rushed to the school only to find that the officials had also contacted the local EMS. Refusing to let Ms. Turner take her daughter home, EMS workers and police officers brought her to a local hospital that found her neither a threat to herself nor others. She was released, but not before the hospital billed her mother an estimated $1,300 for services rendered.
The city’s Board of Education (BOE) reports that during 2010-2011 school year, EMS was called 947 times to handle disruptive or dangerous kids; this is up 12 percent from the previous year. Nelson Mar, an attorney with Legal Services NYC-Bronx, represented both Brianna Pena and Cashmiere Turner, warns, “minor children are removed by EMS for childhood behavior or misbehavior which does not rise to the level of a medical emergency.” He points out that at one Bronx hospital, there were 58 EMS calls from schools during a 10-day period in February 2011. Most troubling, doctors and psychologists found that only 3 percent of the kids brought to an Emergency Room were admitted to the hospital.
A high school student from Hoover, AL, was recently beaten by a school official and then arrested for falling asleep in school, according to a recent lawsuit. Ashlynn Avery is not your typical teenager. She suffers from diabetes, asthma and sleep apnea. Sadly, while sitting in the in-school suspension room and reading “Huckleberry Finn,” she dozed off. She asserts that the classroom supervisor seized the book and hit her with it; he claims it was an accident. The police were called and the girl was “forcefully” arrested, causing her to have a seizure, vomit, pass out and endup in the hospital.
To enforce discipline, school systems across the country are employing harsher techniques and turning to the local police. In Maine, educators report an increase in school disruptions with students pulling fire alarms and scratching and bruising teachers. The state is considering allowing teachers to use restraints or seclusion on misbehaving students; the current bill limits such actions to those authorized in writing by a student’s parent, whether this will remain in the final bill is an open question. In Connecticut over the last few years, nearly 1,700 students were arrested, almost two-thirds of them for breach of peace, minor fights and disorderly conduct. In-school busts account for 20 percent of all youth arrests in the state.
In Georgia, school misbehavior incidents bring in the local police. In Milledgeville, GA, a small town about 90 miles from Atlanta, Salecia Johnson, a 6-year-old student at Creekside Elementary School, was handcuffed and taken away in a patrol car to the police station. According to the Baldwin County schools Superintendent, Geneva Braziel, the police were called due to Johnson’s “violent and disruptive” behavior that threatened other classmates and school staff. In Clayton County, police recently arrested seven students at the North Clayton High School for disorderly conduct; Precious Woods was busted for spiting on a fellow student who had thrown a trashcan at her and Trinell Kennedy was arrested for using profanity during the same incident.
In Albuquerque, NM, during the 2009-2010 school year, 900 of the district’s 90,000 students were referred to the criminal justice system. More than 500 of were handcuffed, arrested and brought to juvenile detention. More than 200 were arrested for minor offences, including disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, refusing to obey and interference with staff. (In response to a 2010 class-action lawsuit, student arrests fell by 53 percent.)
Things are far worse in Texas. In a 2010 report, Texas Appleseed, a public-interest group, found that each year more than 275,000 non-traffic tickets are issued to juveniles. It reports that the vast majority of offences are due to classroom disruptions and disorderly conduct. It noted that in 1989, only 9 school districts in Texas had separate police agencies while in 2010 more than 160 had police units. Ticketed students received fines of between $250 and $500 or do community service in lieu of fines.
Steven Teske, MA, JD, and a Judge, Juvenile Court of Clayton County, Jonesboro, GA, writing in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, defines zero tolerance as “policies operate under the assumption that removing disruptive students deters other students from similar conduct while simultaneously enhancing the classroom environment.” His detailed analysis makes clear not only that the policy doesn’t work, but contributes to the deepening crisis of American education and harms children.
The concept of zero tolerance originated during the Reagan-era’s so-called “war on drugs.” It entered the educational sector in 1994 when Pres. Bill Clinton signed the Gun-Free Schools Act that required a student’s 1-year suspension if s/he was found possessing a firearm. In the wake of the Columbine shootings of 1999, the law has been expanded to include any so-called weapon, including Kiera Wilmot’s chemistry experiment. Under Pres. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind program, zero tolerance was linked to teaching-to-the-test policies as a solution to the education crisis.
The increased policing of the classroom is part of the effort to transform schools from “educational” institutions that cultivate citizenship to “training” campuses inculcating workplace discipline. It is a battle that has shaped American education since mass public schooling was introduced more then a century ago.
h/t: Alternet
The Rude Pundit’s gotta admit: when he read Dennis Prager’s most recent “column” (if by “column,” you mean, “another degrading crawl through a mind of broken glass”), “No More Free Breakfasts,” he tried really hard to see it as satire. In words that render The Onion useless, Prager actually thinks he’s laying out some rational, culture-warrior reason to stop free school breakfasts. See, making sure that schoolkids learn without hunger pains is a liberal plot to make Americans dependent on the state. No, that’s not an exaggeration of what Prager says. Here’s his words: “the free breakfast profoundly weakens young people’s character. When you grow up learning to depend on the state, you will almost inevitably — even understandably — assume that the state will take care of you.”
Prager posits that it’s impossible that people are so poor that they can’t afford food for their kids for breakfast, an ignorance so deep, abiding, elitist, and disturbing that it’s impossible to take anything else he says seriously. He writes, “[A]ny home that cannot provide its child with breakfast demands a visit from child protective services.” Which leads the Rude Pundit to this question: What the fuck are you gonna do with all the kids you take out of the poor people’s homes? Who the fuck is gonna take care of them, you sanctimonious white-haired idiot with the face of ass (not the donkey)? The state is gonna pay for it. Who’s gonna pay for the hundreds of thousands of extra visits by child protective services? The state.
Seriously, conservatives, you gotta leave some things alone. You gotta be willing at some point to walk the fuck away from your most ludicrous, reductive attempts to justify your government-hating, hypocritical ideology. Do you understand how ridiculous you sound when you say shit like “the Left has damaged children and families through free school breakfasts”? Who are you talking to? Which cruel yahoos are you appealing to? Has Glenn Beck even gone here yet?
And what’s next? Crossing guards teach kids to be dependent on the state making decisions for their safety? School buses ignore the self-reliance of hitching a ride with strangers?
These right-wing shit-stains make me wanna puke!
(via silas216)
Right-wing rock musician and radio host Bradlee Dean, a Michele Bachmann ally, was part of a panel on the Millennial generation at Liberty Counsel’s recent Awakening conference. Dean’s You Can Run But You Can’t Hide ministry, designated an anti-gay hate group last year by the Southern Poverty Law Center, works to book Dean’s right-wing-values presentations into public schools.
Dean – who has suggested that the federal government was behind the shootings in Sandy Hook, Aurora Springs, and Columbine, along with the Oklahoma City bombing and 9-11 – not surprisingly pushed conspiracy theories about public education, including the notion that the rigorous International Baccalaureate program is part of a global scheme to disarm Americans and indoctrinate students into a homosexual agenda.
During the Awakening panel, Dean ranted that public school students know nothing about the Constitution and said that Christian parents have no excuse for having their children in public schools. He cited the Common Core, a curriculum standard developed by state education officials, as evidence that President Obama is acting like Mao Tse-Tung. He said Supreme Court rulings on church-state issues had opened the door to Satanism.
h/t: RWW
But is it true? Let’s take a look at several issues and how both mainstream liberals and mainstream conservatives respond. I will be adding links to the conservative side to forestall the usual “Straw man” complaint.
1. Abortion: Can a woman abort a fetus and if so, up to what stage of development?
Liberals – Currently, there is no way to know when a fetus/zygote becomes a person with the same moral weight as a “post-uterine” individual. In the absence of anything more solid than, “That’s how I feel about it,” liberals are willing to let the choice belong to the woman up to the point of viability. No one is comfortable with a 30 week abortion except under dire circumstances.
Conservatives – Not only have they declared that a single celled zygote is the same as a 10 year old child but have tried to pass laws to allow civilians to kill abortion providers and arrest women suspected of trying to induce a miscarriage.
Who is more extreme?
2. Religion in school – Should religion be promoted in school through teacher-led prayer and religious iconography or should schools be “religion neutral?”
Liberals – They would prefer to keep religion out of schools so no one religion is promoted over others in a country with literally hundreds of different faiths and sects (or none at all). This way, no one is ostracized or pressured.
Conservatives – They want Christianity, only Christianity and a particular brand of Christianity (No Catholics or Mormons!) taught in schools. At the same time, they do not want objective and verifiable science taught because it runs counter their very specific brand of fundamentalist Christianity. No evolution and no six billion year old Earth.
Who is more extreme?
3. Banning religion – Should the United States pass laws against unpopular religions in direct contradiction of the First Amendment?
Liberals - Militant atheists, not all of whom are liberals, talk about banning religion but they are a minority and no lawmaker has tried to seriously do this.
Conservatives – Conservatives talk about banning Islam all the time and have passed several “anti-Sharia” laws.
Who is more extreme?
4. Guns – Does society have the right to limit certain kinds of firearms and accessories like semi-automatic assault rifles, extended clips and fully-automatic machine guns while requiring all purchases of guns to be subjected to a background check to weed out criminals, the mentally ill, potential terrorists, etc.?
Liberals - Militant gun control proponents would like to ban all guns like many other industrialized countries have done with no ill effect. They are a minority and no lawmaker has tried to seriously do this. Liberals, in general, believe that background checks will reduce gun crime and banning certain kinds of guns and accessories will reduce, but not eliminate, the ability of killers to commit mass murder.
Conservatives – They have suppressed gun control laws so much that anyone can buy almost any gun at anytime with no oversight whatsoever and want to continue to do so. Conservative lawmakers have pushed laws to allow guns in churches, pre-schools and bars that serve alcohol. Some towns have mandated that every household MUST have a gun. They even want people just released from mental health facilities to immediately be able to buy a gun as well as convicted violent felons. They believe more guns make them safer in direct contradiction to evidence that show states flooded with guns have a high level of gun violence.
Who is more extreme?
5. Marriage – Can the definition of marriage be expanded to include homosexuals?
Liberals – Considering marriage used to be prohibited between blacks and whites and nothing bad happened when we changed it, liberals would like for people to be able to marry the person they love regardless of their sex.
Conservatives – They insist that marriage has remained unchanged for centuries despite all evidence to the contrary. They also insist that same sex marriage is no different than bestiality and pedophilia despite it being between two consenting adults.
Who is more extreme?
6. Voting – Should we require citizens to obtain special ID in order to vote?
“Big government” Liberals – Everybody should be able to vote with a minimal amount of interference.
“Small government” Conservatives – Everyone should be forced to have “Voter ID” that costs time and money to get in order to fight wide-spread (but strangely impossible to find) “voter fraud.” Curiously, if you ask these same people if guns should be subject to the same kinds of rules to combat the well established tens of thousands of gun deaths and hundreds of thousands of gun crimes a year, they get very upset at this “infringement” on their “freedom.”
Who is more extreme?
7. The President – Does the office of the President of the United States deserve unquestioning respect and obedience in a time of war?
“Totalitarian” Liberals – No. No president should have carte blanche to wage war in our names or be immune to criticism. The right to to petition the Government for a redress of grievances is in the very first amendment in the Bill of Rights. Yet, anyone that criticized President Bush in any way, including about about non-war related policies, was labeled “traitors” by conservatives for “not supporting the president in a time of war” as if he were the God-Emperor of Arrakis.
Conservatives – During the very same war in which Bush was not allowed to be criticized, President Obama has been accused of being a secret Muslim from Kenya, a Nazi, a Communist, a Socialist, a homosexual, a gangsta, a traitor, a terrorist and racial slurs have been tossed around like confetti at a KKK gathering. The calls for impeachment haven’t stopped since almost his first day in office.
Who is more extreme?
8. Taxes – How should the broken tax code be fixed?
Liberals – We want tax loopholes closed for the rich and corporations and for them to pay what they actually owe. Hiding money in tax havens should be aggressively discouraged with confiscation and jail time (just like the rest if us face when we dodge our taxes). A modest tax hike on billionaires wouldn’t be so bad, either but not terribly necessary if the previous steps are taken.
Conservatives – They want to pay no taxes at all (but not a penny to be taken from their Social Security and Medicare) because they’ve been taxed enough already despite having lower taxes than at any point in the last 30 years..
Who is more extreme?
9. Rhetoric – Whose rhetoric displays a disconnect from reality and/or violence?
Liberals – We yell about the banks stealing our money with bailouts and being “Too big to fail,” getting money out of politics, the rich not paying their taxes, no more warmongering, no more rape, no more discrimination, respecting women’s rights, feeding the poor and hungry, stopping Climate Change and freedom of, and from, religion.
Conservatives – While they happen to agree with liberals about the banks, getting money out of politics and no more warmongering, they also say that liberals are violent thugs that are planning on putting conservatives into concentration camps, regularly talk about secession, revolution, Second Amendment remedies, shooting liberals and pray for Obama’s death.
Who is more extreme?
10. Rape – Is rape…rape?*
Liberals – Yes. It doesn’t matter if violence, drugs or coercion were used. If the sex was not consensual, it’s rape.
Conservatives – Well, it depends. Was it legitimate? A Gift from God? Did she get pregnant? Was it forcible? Was her vagina shredded by the rape? If not then it wasn’t “real rape.”
*I’m leaving out all of the slut shaming and “she was asking for it” because that is a product of rape culture and is almost entirely independent of political affiliation. While it is more prevalent among conservatives it’s not remotely confined to them. I’m not even sure they represent a majority in this regard.
Who is more extreme?
Now, conservatives will complain that I’m “misrepresenting them” or “using straw man arguments.” This is why I included all of the links to actual quotes from actual mainstream Republicans or conservatives. These are not fringe beliefs for the right. This is what their elected officials and media representatives say. When a conservative uses the most extreme of left wing positions (They want to ban all guns!), they have to find a blog no one has heard of or random Facebook comments to support their accusation. It certainly isn’t a part of mainstream liberal ideology.
(via Fox Asks If Children Should Work For School Meals | Blog | Media Matters for America)
Fox News forwarded the notion that it might be appropriate for school children to be forced to work in exchange for free school meals, after a Republican lawmaker in West Virginia proposed such a requirement for a new law curbing child hunger.
As part of Bryan Fischer’s attempts to “reclaim the ‘D’ word” — discrimination — the American Family Association spokesman is praising a Catholic school in Ohio which fired a teacher after she named her partner in her mother’s obituary.
“The school discriminated against this teacher, yes they absolutely did and they should have,” Fischer said, “they were absolutely right to do it…. It is right to discriminate against people who engage in aberrant sexual behavior, we should discriminate against people like that.”
Fischer maintained that the school was right to discriminate against her “immoral sexual behavior” in the same way “we discriminate against shoplifters.”
Bill O’Reilly recently got into a little hot water with the religious right. The abrasive talk show host dared to suggest on his show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” that the anti-gay movement would be better off using secular arguments against same-sex marriage than resorting endlessly to biblical ones. “The compelling argument is on the side of homosexuals,” O’Reilly argued, adding, “And the other side hasn’t been able to do anything but thump the Bible.”
Since the beginning, the Christian right has been aware that the First Amendment makes it impossible for them to use “God said so” to justify legislation. They’ve spent decades grafting secular reasons onto what are fundamentally attempts to foist their views on the rest of the country, often going out of their way to conceal the religious origins of their policy ideas. In response, I created this list of what the religious right wants; what nonsense secular reason they give for wanting it; and the actual, true reason, usually down to chapter and verse.
1) What they want: A rollback on environmental protections. This is but one of many ways the religious right has merged its interests with that of corporate America.
The secular reasons they give: Many on the Christian right scoff at the science of global warming. Sadly, Americans in general are resistant to the science of global warming, but white evangelical Christians are even worse than the general public. Pew Forum found in 2009 that 47% of Americans accept the science of climate change, but only 34% of white evangelicals. The objections the religious right offers are fed to them by oil industry lobbyists, such as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council calling global warming theory “speculative.”
The unconstitutional, actual religious reasons: They justify this to themselves religiously coming and going. The fundamentalist Cornwall Alliance claims that belief in climate change is anti-Christian, because it “rests on and promotes a view of human beings as threats to Earth’s flourishing rather than the bearers of God’s image” and implies that God’s creation is “the fragile product of chance, not the robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting product of God’s wise design and powerful sustaining.” On the other side of it, as Ben Jervey of GOOD argued, 41% of Americans believe Jesus Christ will usher in Armageddon before 2050. If you believe the world is about to end, it seems pointless to make huge sacrifices to preserve its health into the future.
2) What they want: For the government to take money from the public school system and give it to private schools in the form of vouchers. They’ve had remarkable success at this by hijacking the larger, secular debate over education.
The secular reasons they give: The claim is that “school choice” creates competition among schools that improves educational outcomes. Public school charter systems are seen as an inadequate alternative, because they are supposedly not flexible enough.
The unconstitutional, actual religious reasons: They want the government to pay for the religious indoctrination of children. Even though the vouchers can, in theory, be spent on private secular schools, the way the program works in places like Louisiana makes it clear that this is about government-sponsored religious education.
3) What they want: No Equal Rights Amendment. While this battle to prevent the Constitution from being amended to give women equal rights, which the right won, was mostly fought in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Christian right-controlled legislatures occasionally take time to vote against it today.
The secular reasons they gave: In many ways, Phyllis Schlafly used the battle against the ERA to invent the modern conservative strategy of making bad faith secular arguments to advance a religious agenda. As Rachel Maddow recounts, Schlafly and her comrades claimed the ERA would mandate unisex bathrooms, make it illegal for women to be housewives, and destroy families.
The unconstitutional, actual religious reasons: The Bible is pretty clear that women are not equal to men, calling them “the weaker vessel” (1 Peter 3:7) who must live “in silence” to “not usurp authority over man” (1 Timothy 2:12), because women are to basically worship their husbands, “and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16).
4) What they want: A ban on gay marriage. Often cast as “protecting” traditional marriage.
The secular reasons they give: The argument presented in favor of Prop 8 before the Supreme Court is that marriage was established to make sure children are raised by the parents who created them through sexual intercourse, and that expanding it to include gay couples (it’s already expanded to include stepfamilies and infertile couples) would redefine it in a way that would cause vague damage the anti-gay lawyer refused to describe.
The unconstitutional, actual religious reasons: The Old Testament harshly condemns homosexuality, saying, “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death” (Leviticus 20:13). Christian fundamentalists have downgraded this simply to mean that their government shouldn’t endorse marriages that go against right-wing religious teachings.
5) What they want: To end the teaching of evolution in schools. This battle has been going on since at least the 1920s, and every time it comes around, the religious right gets a little better at hiding its religious motivations behind secularist claims.
The secular reasons they give: The current strategy is to claim that evolutionary theory is scientifically controversial, and therefore schools should “teach the controversy.” Clearly, they hope to give students reason to doubt the theory of evolution. In reality, there is no controversy. As the National Center for Science Education has stated, “There is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism of evolution.”
The unconstitutional, actual religious reasons: For Biblical literalists, evolution is an uncomfortable topic because the Bible says God created the world in the space of six days. While evolution correctly holds that human beings are primates who evolved from a common ancestor, the Bible teaches that God made them out of “the dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7). Why that is supposed to be less demeaning is hard to say.
6) What they want: To restrict access to abortion and contraception. Everyone knows the religious right has it out for abortion rights, but recently attacks on contraception access have also been increasing.
The secular reasons they give: Abortion is “baby-killing,” it’s unsafe for women, and it causes breast cancer and suicide. Emergency contraception is really “abortion” and birth control pills are unsafe. Telling kids just to abstain from sex is the only public health strategy we need. Condoms don’t work to prevent HIV.
All of these claims are lies, as is the secular pose that anti-choice activists take when promoting these lies.
The unconstitutional, actual religious reasons: Right from the beginning, the Bible is big on the idea that a woman’s role is to be frequently pregnant, whether she likes it or not. “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16). He commands it again to Noah: “And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein” (Genesis 9:7).
So, in a very real sense, even when Bill O’Reilly is right, he’s wrong. He’s not wrong to say that social conservatives would do well to come up with secular arguments for their positions, instead of tell a country with strict protections for religious freedom to obey their interpretation of the Bible. He’s just wrong to think they don’t already know that. After all, they wrote the instruction manual.
h/t: AlterNet
Limbaugh freaks: Melissa Harris-Perry a ‘foreign’ Marxist who wants to steal children (via Raw Story )
The conservative pundit class is outraged over MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry’s recent ad spot about public education, and Rush Limbaugh, not wanting to be left behind, took his best swing at the university professor on Monday, describing her with the words “foreign,” “Marxist” and “communist…
This is why we need Comprehensive Sex Ed in schools.
(via zalatix)
Steve Cookson (R-Poplar Bluff) , the state House elementary and secondary education committee chairman, filed legislation Wednesday that would mandate school-age children of welfare recipients attend public school 90 percent of the time, unless the children are physically disabled, “in order to receive benefits.” The one-sentence bill does not specify if medical absences would be counted or if students from private, parochial or charter schools would face a similar mandate.
The legislation is similar to a 2011 law passed in Michigan and to a bill pending in Tennessee.
“This thing is so crazy that it would have devastating effects on the families already in a precarious situation,” state Rep. Kevin McManus (D-Kansas City) told The Huffington Post. “If you had a child suffering from mono or leukemia, you would take away food stamps and assistance and possibly have them lose their home. It is misguided.”
Cookson did not return a message left at his Jefferson City office. The bill has not been referred to a House committee.
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) signed a similar welfare attendance law last year,saying it was needed to make sure children receive education and end generational poverty. Opponents said that truancy affects all socioeconomic groups, not just the poor.
Tennessee legislators are debating a bill that would tie welfare benefits to school attendance and performance. “We have such a problem with generational poverty here,” Tennessee state Sen. Stacey Campfield (R-Knoxville) told current.com in January. “I have always said the golden ticket out of poverty is education. And education, to me, is a three-part stool — schools, teachers and the family. We have already put a huge burden on our schools and our teachers. What we have not done is put a burden on the family to make sure they are stepping up to the plate.”
H/T: Huffington Post
Presenting the next great conservative conspiracy: Obama, ALEC, the UN, Rupert Murdoch, Bill & Melinda Gates, and Jeb Bush (!) are coming for your kids.
Last week, conservative talk show host and media mogul Glenn Beck decided to let his listeners in on what he dubbed “the biggest story in American history.” It’s called System X. “If you don’t stop it,” he warned, “American history is over as you know it.”
As Beck explained it, a little-known Department of Education program, supported by rich philanthropists, business interests, and the United Nations, was turning public schools into the world’s next great data-mining frontier. Using carrots offered up in the 2009 stimulus bill, the federal government and its contractors could compile hundreds of points of data on your kids and use it for who knows what. The result: “System X: a government run by a single party in control of labor, media, education, and banking; joined by big business to further their mutual collective goals.”
Beck’s not the only person fighting Common Core. Lawmakers in 18 states have considered legislation to block the implementation of the curriculum standards. Five—Alaska, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia—have successfully rejected or partially rejected Common Core. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell reiterated his opposition to Common Core in late March, just one week after Texas Gov. Rick Perry went on Beck’s program to denounce it.
On the most basic level, the fight over Common Core is same fight parents and policymakers have been waging over public education for the last century, centering on two basic questions: What is the appropriate level of federal involvement in local schooling? And if we did settle on an umbrella curriculum, what should it actually look like? Education reformer Diane Ravitch, for one, opposes Common Core on the grounds that, while there should be a set of national education tenets, she believes “such standards should be voluntary, not imposed by the federal government.”
But in the hands of activists like Beck, Common Core has taken on a more ominous tone. The long-standing fever swamp fears of enforced secularism and multiculturalism, like those promoted by now-Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) in the 1990s, have been given a digital makeover.
The core itself is what it sounds like—a broad curriculum standard. States that choose to accept Common Core gain access to a pot of billions of federal dollars. Social conservatives have never liked that kind of incentive game, especially when it’s connected to a Democratic president. (GOP Rep. Rob Bishop, whose Utah district is ground zero for the anti-Common Core movement, called the Common Core a “hook” from which the state could never extricate itself.)
According to its critics, the most nefarious consequence of Common Core is a data collection program that’s part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus). The idea is to better track student demographic and achievement data to figure out what’s working and what’s not, and respond accordingly. Some of the biggest names in American politics and business support the idea. In 2011, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation teamed up with the Carnegie Foundation and an educational subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. to develop a database of student data that states can access for free until 2015. (After that it will charge an annual fee.) At a speech at the White House last November, Shawn T. Bay, CEO of the education data company eScholar, called Common Core “the glue that actually ties everything together” in the Department of Education’s Big Data push.
For now, most GOP lawmakers’ concerns about the Common Core focus on the curriculum and the idea of federal control, not Big Data. But the Obama administration is wary of Common Core taking on a life of its own in the conservative fever swamps.
Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who is currently out on bail while appealing his three year prison sentence in his corruption case, took the time to join Rick Scarborough on a March 7th Tea Party Unity conference call where he criticized the Violence Against Women Act.
He attacked the law because it “includes homosexuality, transgender; setting up all kinds of different classes of sexual deviance,” and later called it “unconstitutional.”
While they were having a meeting with the Values Action Team, which is reaching out to those values organizations, in the same week they passed the Senate’s Violence Against Women Act that includes homosexuality, transgender; setting up all kinds of different classes of sexual deviance. It’s just absolutely amazing that they did that. They fashioned a rule so it would be easier to pass the Senate bill, which is a wacko leftist bill. We as groups need to understand that that’s happening and reach out to the members of the House and the Senate and tell them enough is enough.
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This is how we took over the House for the first time in forty years in 1994’s election is that for five years we spent five years providing alternatives to everything the Democrats were doing: alternative bills, alternative amendments, alternative press releases. We expressed ourselves by always having an alternative. The same here, if there is a Violence Against Women Act there should be a conservative alternative. First and foremost, they should point out the fact the whole act itself is unconstitutional.DeLay insisted that conservatives need to “rebuild our infrastructure” in order to win elections again, by establishing new groups to “hold the media accountable” and creating “an outside organization that is focused on taking over our schools.”
h/t: RWW
While only around 40 percent of children in Chicago are black are Latino, 90 percent of children whose schools will be shuttered are black or Latino.
