Are you kidding me? If ever there was a case for homeschooling…:

Several sixth-graders from suburban St. Louis are being disciplined for creating “Hit a Jew Day” and then hitting Jewish classmates.

Four or five students at Parkway West Middle School in Chesterfield could be suspended and undergo counseling for last week’s incident, school officials told the Associated Press. Others who taunted Jewish students or encouraged others to participate face lesser punishment.

Officials said fewer than 10 of the school’s 35 Jewish students were hit. One was slapped in the face and the others were hit mostly on the back of their shoulders.

“There is a mix of sadness and outrage,” said district spokesman Paul Tandy. “The concern is a lot of kids knew about it and they didn’t take action or say anything.”

Kids these days.

This might be the next real big Supreme Court Case:

http://getliberty.org/blog/the…_is_at_stake/

A 5-4 decision as to whether we can defend ourselves in our homes, might indeed be followed (next yearm\, most likely, by a 5-4 decision as to whether we can raise and educate our children as we see fit. This is an extremely fundamental and decidedly important case. Truthfully, to me, the thought of the Government having an absolute right to be the one and only arbiter of the education of your children is as scary, or perhaps even more scary, than the thought that the Government can be the only ones to carry guns.

Hopefully, someone will convince a “Progressive” or two might be convinced that ACCESS to public education and REQUIREMENT of public education are two completely different things.

Here’s a story that should maybe shift the conversation about sex education, birth control.

“Nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together,” the magazine’s story said, after reporters talked with Joseph Sullivan, Gloucester High School principal.

Seventeen girls at the 1,200-student Gloucester High have gotten pregnant over the school year, more than four times the average number. The spike has shocked and baffled education and health officials there and reignited a fierce debate about contraception in schools. But many told the Globe last month that the most alarming facts were that a significant portion of the expecting girls were 16 and younger and that some seemed to be intentional.

So maybe handing out more condoms would be the best way to go.  Obviously, if teenagers are old enough to have sex, then they’re old enough to appropriately use birth control, as long as their evil prudish parents don’t keep it from them, and it’s made available for free at school.

Unless, of course, they don’t want to.

Speaking of parents, there is no mention in the article about the parents of these teenagers…

“When it comes to sex, a lot of communities struggle to be forthright,” she said. “People in Gloucester need to look at using what feels like a crisis as an opportunity to improve services and support.”

…But who needs parents when you have “services and support.”

A Minnesota school backed out from an agreement to host veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan in the classroom. What an opportunity to learn about history in the making. I remember when some Vietnam vets came to our school and talked about the war. I’ll never forget it and learned more about the war than from the news.

“The event was structured to be an academic classroom discussion around military service. We thought we’d provide an opportunity for kids to learn about service in the context of our history classes,” Massey said. “As the day progressed, it became clear that this was becoming a political event … which would be inappropriate in a public setting.

Whatever you think about the war this would have been an eye-opening experience for a lot of young people and teachers.  I support those families and kids that skip school to attend this.

Well, I finally had to make the call to the school today. My daughter came home and said that she watched the first 10 minutes of An Inconvenient Truth today in honors science class, and that she would be watching the rest of the movie tomorrow, and writing a paper on the movie. I called the school and spoke to her science teacher, who had a “f*** you” attitude and said that the movie was educational and taught kids how to save the wetlands…and then she admitted that she had never actually seen the movie.

I then told her that I didn’t want my daughter watching the movie and that she was not going to write the required (indoctrination) paper about the movie. Nella and I will be enrolling her in a good private school at the end of this year. Below is the letter that she is carrying to school tomorrow to give to her teacher (not into having her name all over the Internet, so the name has been changed in the letter):

February 20, 2008

Dear Ms. Nick

Please excuse “A” from watching Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and from writing a paper about this movie. This movie is overtly political, and it has been proven inaccurate and purposefully misleading by many climatologists and weather experts. In fact, this movie amounts to little more than liberal propaganda designed to scare people, and I expected more from a Meisler education. Outside of a political science class, this movie is entirely inappropriate for a twelve year old student. In the future, please contact me if you plan on requiring “A” to watch any film that is remotely political. Should you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me at (504) 555-5555.

Sincerely,

Michael W. Gahagan, Esq.

Here’s the story on the concept of maternity leave for teenagers in Denver.

My first blush is of course, “What is the world coming to?” and then I think, “Well, they do need an education and it’s better than dropping out,” and then I go back to, “But what is the world coming to?!”

Can anyone see if Denver is one of those “Abstinence only” school districts?

Let Freedom Reign has the story.

Full story at World Net Daily

The next time anyone wants to accuse our government of Orwellian tendencies (via the Patriot Act, for instance, or wiretaps, or whatever), please keep this in mind.

Selective education is WAY more scary than wiretaps, any day of the week. The moment history has to be rewritten, ignored, or “repurposed” is the moment that our freedoms are compromised. This has not happened in the U.S. but don’t think for a second it can’t happen. Just ask your average homeschooler how jealously public schools guard control of educating children.

I found this article very interesting. It comes from a blatantly Christian conservative site, but any Civil Libertarian should agree with a good chunk of the following:

Today, many would find it hard to believe that education was never addressed in the United States Constitution, nor was it discussed at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The government would like citizens to believe that it reserves the right to educate the nation’s youth, yet this right was never bestowed upon it, nor was it stripped away from parents.

The post-civil war industrial revolution started to mainstream public schooling to meet the economy’s needs, not the children’s. Factories forced parents out of their homes and pushed children into the schools, where they became conditioned for work in the industry and indoctrinated into a national mindset that forwarded the government’s agenda.

Socialism, moral relativism, evolution, pro-choice, multiculturalism, environmentalism, gay rights, self-esteem training and sex education are all politically correct/fundamentally wrong concepts promoted in the public schools that have taken their toll on the conservative and biblical values that have formed the backbone of American society.

Through the public schools, the government has played monopoly in the game of education since the turn of the 20th century, controlling the board and children’s lives ever since. The recent homeschooling movement, which now provides instruction for 4 million children in the United States, is seen by bureaucrats as usurping their unbridled authority over the education system. Dire attempts to stem this burgeoning exodus from the schools have been made by the state at virtually any cost.

It is amazing how little control we have over what our kids learn in schools. The challenge really is that your average “Progressive” looks at this list: “Socialism, moral relativism, evolution, pro-choice, multiculturalism, environmentalism, gay rights, self-esteem training and sex education,” and deems them important, while simultaneously deeming Religion off limits, citing the fact that it MIGHT make someone “uncomfortable” or somehow discriminated against. While I would agree that religion–any religion–should NEVER be taught in a public classroom, I would contend that many (not all, but many) of the above list is very ANTI-religious, which is just as bad and just as UnConstitutional. It never occurs to bureaucrats that the “comfort” level of the majority (heterosexual and Christian, namely) is even remotely relevant.

24dash.com

Utah Politics has a great post about State Rep. Urquhart’s recent legislation on School Vouchers in Utah. He stated that vouchers do not hurt the core finances of public schools, and actually posted a web forum urging citizens to post their opinions on the pros and cons of school vouchers. Noone was able to effectively rebut his assertions, and therefore not only did the voucher legislation move forward, but it did so with a level of transparency and philosophical soundness simply unheard of in modern politics.

When our good friend Scottie begins to talk about a National Referendum I always start to cringe, but I do agree that modern technology allows citizens to have much more of an input than they did years ago. Now I know absolutely nothing more about Rep. Urquhart than this story, but judging from this it would be a great idea for others in the political realm to follow his example. If you have more openness like this, then a representative republican democracy is much more effective.

An interesting perspective from a corporate executive on teacher’s unions and the quality of the public school system. on Friday “lambasting” teacher’s unions:

Jobs compared schools to businesses with principals serving as CEOs.

“What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn’t get rid of people that they thought weren’t any good?” he asked to loud applause during an education reform conference.

“Not really great ones because if you’re really smart you go, ‘I can’t win.’”

In a rare joint appearance, Jobs shared the stage with competitor Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Inc. Both spoke to the gathering about the potential for bringing technological advances to classrooms.

“I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way,” Jobs said.

“This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”

A great post by Brain Terminal makes some good points about school vouchers:

That’s why you hear teachers’ unions oppose school choice on the grounds that it would hurt failing schools. But the point of public education is not to ensure the survival of schools, it’s to ensure the education of students. So what if failing schools are closed? They should close. And the only way that’ll ever happen is if less-advantaged families have an opportunity to vote with their feet and abandon the schools that are failing their children.

Jobs’ comparison of schools with a business reminds me of the “three-legged stool” concept. It goes like this:

In business you have three entities that must benefit from a product in order for that product to be successful–the customer, the company, and the sales rep or distributor. If any one of the three parties aren’t satisfied then the product is not successful, because either the company will stop producing it, the distributors will refuse to sell it, or the customer just won’t buy it. If either of the legs falls, the whole stool falls.

In the case of the private market, the person with really the most control is the customer. The company can produce the product well, and the distributor can sell the product well, but if the customer doesn’t buy it, then it’s not going to last long.

With public schools, the only person with virtually NO control is the customer–the student. The school boards have meetings and philosophize on how they can improve their product; the teachers unions do what they can to get the best contract they can as the distributor of the product.

But in some school districts, the customers (the kids) simply aren’t buying. And the kids (and their parents) have little say so; whatever district they’re in, that’s the product they get, unless they fork out tons of extra money for a quality product (private schools), while they’re still paying (from their tax dollars) for the inferior product.

It’s just confusing for me when I hear the “the schools are overcrowded” and “the teachers are overworked” and “not enough individual attention”, etc…and then almost in the same breath, “vouchers take resources away from public schools.”

And as Brain Terminal pointed out, it seems like a slight to the poor when the teachers unions tell them, “You have to deal with a mediocre product, so we can keep our jobs, even though we’re selling you a mediocre product, and if you sacrifice to go find a better school, then you still have to pay for this one, so we can continue to inadequately serve everyone else in the district who can’t afford private schools.”

It would be as if the local grocery store sold undeniably inferior produce, but in order to get good quality produce families had to buy it from that local store, throw it away, and then go to the next county and pay double for the good stuff.

Essentially, I’ve always been of the opinion that a teaching job is a sales job, and I’ve never heard of a union for salespeople (or perhaps I simply can’t imagine joining one). Teacher’s unions put too much power in the hands of the distributor (unheard of in the “real world”) and vouchers are really the only way to give the customer a choice in the matter, and as a result put upward pressure on public schools, the teachers, and the quality of their product.

Apple CEO lambasts teacher unions