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More and more children being arrested for trivial things…

• 1 At one public school down in Texas, a 12-year-old girl named Sarah Bustamantes was recently arrested for spraying herself with perfume.
• 2 A 13-year-old student at a school in Albuquerque, New Mexico was recently arrested by police for burping in class.
• 3 Another student down in Albuquerque was forced to strip down to his underwear while five adults watched because he had $200 in his pocket. The student was never formally charged with doing anything wrong.
• 4 A security guard at one school in California broke the arm of a 16-year-old girl because she left some crumbs on the floor after cleaning up some cake that she had spilled.
• 5 One teenage couple down in Houston poured milk on each other during a squabble while they were breaking up. Instead of being sent to see the principal, they were arrested and sent to court.
• 6 In early 2010, a 12-year-old girl at a school in Forest Hills, New York was arrested by police and marched out of her school in handcuffs just because she doodled on her desk. “I love my friends Abby and Faith” was what she reportedly scribbled on her desk.
• 7 A 6-year-old girl down in Florida was handcuffed and sent to a mental facility after throwing temper tantrums at her elementary school.
• 8 One student down in Texas was reportedly arrested by police for throwing paper airplanes in class.
• 9 A 17-year-old honor student in North Carolina named Ashley Smithwick accidentally took her father’s lunch with her to school. It contained a small paring knife which he would use to slice up apples. So what happened to this standout student when the school discovered this? The school suspended her for the rest of the year and the police charged her with a misdemeanor.
• 10 In Allentown, Pennsylvania a 14-year-old girl was tasered in the groin area by a school security officer even though she had put up her hands in the air to surrender.
• 11 Down in Florida, an 11-year-old student was arrested, thrown in jail and charged with a third-degree felony for bringing a plastic butter knife to school.
• 12 Back in 2009, an 8-year-old boy in Massachusetts was sent home from school and was forced to undergo a psychological evaluation because he drew a picture of Jesus on the cross.
• 13 A police officer in San Mateo, California blasted a 7-year-old special education student in the face with pepper spray because he would not quit climbing on the furniture.
• 14 In America today, even 5-year-old children are treated brutally by police. The following is from a recent article that described what happened to one very young student in Stockton, California a while back….“Earlier this year, a Stockton student was handcuffed with zip ties on his hands and feet, forced to go to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and was charged with battery on a police officer. That student was 5 years old”.
• 15 At one school in Connecticut, a 17-year-old boy was thrown to the floor and tasered five times because he was yelling at a cafeteria worker.
• 16 A teenager in suburban Dallas was forced to take on a part-time job after being ticketed for using foul language in one high school classroom. The original ticket was for $340, but additional fees have raised the total bill to $637.
• 17 A few months ago, police were called out when a little girl kissed a little boy during a physical education class at an elementary school down in Florida.
• 18 A 6-year-old boy was recently charged with sexual battery for some “inappropriate touching” during a game of tag at one elementary school in the San Francisco area.
• 19 In Massachusetts, police were recently sent out to collect an overdue library book from a 5-year-old girl.

HERE ARE THE LINKS FOR THOSE WHO FEEL THIS IS ALL MADE UP:

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David Karp, the 26-year-old founder of blogging site Tumblr, has just made to make a lot of money - almost in spite of himself.

Yahoo's board of directors agreed on Sunday to buy his wildly popular blogging platform, which boasts 100million users and 90million posts per day, for $1.1billion cash.

The deal could make the native New Yorker the latest 20-something tech billionaire, even though he was publicly opposed, even just last year, to selling the company he founded out of his mother's small Manhattan apartment in 2007.

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Dear Class of ’13: You’ve been scammed

No one else is going to tell you this, so I might as well.

You sit here today, $30,000 or $40,000 in debt, as the latest victims of what may well be the biggest conspiracy in U.S. history. It is a conspiracy so big and powerful that Dan Brown won’t even touch it. It’s a conspiracy so insidious that you will rarely hear its name.

Move over, Illuminati. Stand down, Wall Street. Area 51? Pah. It’s nothing.

The biggest conspiracy of all? The College-Industrial Complex.

Consider this: You have just paid about three times as much for your degree as did someone graduating 30 years ago. That’s in constant dollars — in other words, after accounting for inflation. There is no evidence that you have received a degree three times as good. Some would wonder if you have received a degree even one times as good.

According to the College Board, in 1983 a typical private American university managed to provide a bachelor’s-degree-level education to young people just like you for $11,000 a year in tuition and fees. That’s in 2012 dollars.

Instead, those of you at private colleges paid this year an average of $29,000.

And back then a public college charged in-state students just $2,200 a year in tuition and fees — in today’s dollars. You could get a full four-year degree for $8,800. Today that will get you one year’s tuition, or $8,700.

Notice, please, we are not even counting the cost of all the “extras,” like room and board. This is just the cost of the teaching.

It is, as a result, no surprise that total student loans are now approaching $1 trillion. They have easily overtaken credit-card debts and car loans. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, total student loans have basically tripled since 2004. Fed researcher Lee Donghoon says that in the last eight years the number of borrowers has gone up by about 70%, and the average amount owed has also gone up about 70%.

Donghoon calculates that about 17% of those with student loans are more than 90 days’ delinquent on their interest payments. Yet he also calculates that 44% haven’t even entered the repayment period at all.

If you turn to the pages of any newspaper, you will read a lot of hand-wringing about this. You will hear attacks on “predatory” student-loan companies and “predatory ... for-profit colleges.” You will hear about cutbacks in Pell Grants and federal aid and proposals to lower the interest rate on subsidized federal loans. But all of these comments ignore one basic problem.

It’s the cost, stupid.

U.S. colleges are a rip-off. Two decades ago I spent six years at Cambridge and Oxford universities, and it didn’t cost me a nickel. Admittedly, one reason was social policy: The taxpayers paid the bill (and a very good return they earned too, given the British taxes I paid once I graduated and started work). But the second reason was that these universities did not charge an arm, leg and other appendage for the act of teaching.

My undergraduate course at Cambridge largely consisted of one hour a week with a tutor, a weekly essay question and research list, and a library card. This teaching model hadn’t changed much, really, since the days of Aristotle. Student, teacher, discussion. See you same time next week.

How on earth do colleges today ramp up costs to $40,000 a year?

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The Romeike family has for years been battling for the right to educate their children as they see fit. Today, the United States government has denied their request.

Originally from Germany, Evangelical Christians Uwe and Hannelore Romeike wanted to homeschool their six children, but it is against the law in Germany. They faced threats of legal action from the government and crippling fines before choosing to immigrate to the United States in 2010, seeking political asylum.

U.S. Immigration Judge Lawrence Burman granted the Romeike’s request, but it was overturned in 2012 by the Board of Immigration Appeals, after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement challenged the decision.

Today, in the words of the Home School Defense League Association, which has represented the family, “the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Obama Administration’s denial of asylum granted to the Romeike family.”

The parents could face jail time if forced to return home.

The ruling essentially states that “the Romeikes [have] not shown that Germany’s enforcement of its general school-attendance law amounts to persecution against them, whether on grounds of religion or membership in a recognized social group.”

The compulsory attendance laws — and related punishments if violated — apply to everyone, and therefore this isn’t a case of persecution, they say.

“The United States has not opened its doors to every victim of unfair treatment, even treatment that our laws do not allow,” the ruling explains.

Michael Farris, the founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), which has been representing the family, commented in a press release: “We believe the Sixth Circuit is wrong and we will appeal their decision…America has room for this family and we will do everything we can to help them.”

Mike Donnelly, HSLDA’s Director of Internal Affairs, added in the release: “Germany continues to persecute homeschoolers. The court ignored mountains of evidence that homeschoolers are harshly fined and that custody of their children is gravely threatened—something most people would call persecution. This is what the Romeikes will suffer if they are sent back to Germany.”

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Home schooling tripping up education reform
Efforts to improve public education face a move to also alter parent-led instruction
May 12, 2013 |


Written by
Jason Noble


The success of education reform in the Iowa Legislature this year may hinge as much on the instruction Jason and Tamara Pool provide at their dining room table as what teachers offer in the classrooms of Iowa’s public schools.

Home schooling — and specifically three proposed changes to the state law regulating it — has emerged as a key division between Democrats and Republicans working to craft a compromise over K-12 reforms.

Both sides recognize it as one of the few remaining issues standing between them and passage of legislation that all sides say they support and that Republican Gov. Terry Branstad has made a personal crusade. House and Senate leaders have not yet negotiated language in earnest in an attempt to broker agreement.

What hangs in the balance: a push for sweeping reforms aimed at improving instruction and student achievement in Iowa’s public schools. A generation ago, Iowa was a top-performing state in national testing, but its average scores have stagnated, while the averages in other states have climbed.

The three changes would loosen existing restrictions on in-home, parent-led instruction and have long been sought by home-school parents, a small but influential bloc in Republican circles. The proposals sharply divide legislators, who either deride the changes as having little to do with either public education or reform, or champion them as ensuring a fundamental right and expanding the options available for teaching kids.

House Education Committee Chairman Ron Jorgensen, R-Sioux City, described the home-school measures last week as must-haves for Republican lawmakers.

One of the measures would allow home-school parents to teach their children driver education, while another would allow home-school educators to teach up to four unrelated students. The most controversial, though, would remove requirements currently in law for home-schoolers to file paperwork with their local school district and to undergo testing by an independent teacher. Results are reported back to the district.

Even with the requirements, some children slip through the cracks with too little education — raising questions about what could happen if they went away entirely, said Mary Gannon, attorney for the Iowa Association of School Boards.

<snip>

The Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators has lobbied for years on behalf of the changes now included in the bill. Its legislative liaison, Bill Gustoff, echoed the Pools’ point, suggesting that eliminating the requirements for bringing in a supervising teacher and reporting data to school districts could make home schooling more affordable.

“It levels the playing field and makes the option more available for more parents to teach their own kids,” he said.

Several other states do not have such stringent requirements, including neighbors Illinois and Missouri, Gustoff added.

Other supporters embrace more militant views on the subject. Rep. Matt Windschitl, R-Missouri Valley, who was home-schooled himself and home-schools his own children, sponsored the amendments adding the language to the reform package. He called the language an “independence amendment.”

“Quite frankly, as I’m home-schooling my children, it is my duty and my job to raise them to the best of my ability. It’s not the government’s job to do that,” he said. “So if I’m choosing to independently educate my children, I should not be accountable to the government for how I am choosing to raise my children.”
Lawyer: State needs info to protect kids

Public education organizations, however, see big problems with the language and question its inclusion alongside the public-school reforms.

Gannon, the attorney for the school boards association, said the current home-school reporting and assessment requirements are critical to ensure students are learning what they need to know. She said she’s heard “horror stories” from around the state of home-school students entering the public schools for their final years of high school grossly unprepared for grade-level course work.

“We have had first-hand evidence of these students not getting the appropriate education they need to be getting,” she said. “I don’t think that’s the majority of home-schoolers by any means, but I don’t know how you pick and choose who’s going to do a good job and who’s not.”

Gustoff dismissed such situations as aberrations, pointing to research showing that home-schoolers routinely outperform public school peers, he said.

Indeed, studies from 1999 and 2009 frequently highlighted by home-school advocacy organizations suggest that home-school students rank in the 80th percentile or higher on standardized tests of reading, math, science, language and social studies. But an author of one of those studies and other researchers have argued the results are not representative of all home-schoolers and may suffer from selection biases.

The nonpartisan International Center for Home Education Research, based at the University of Indiana, cautions that no reliable research has yet been performed to assess the effect of home schooling on academic achievement.

The state’s largest teachers union, the Iowa State Education Association, meanwhile, sees something of a double standard at work in the inclusion of the home-school language.

ISEA Executive Director Mary Jane Cobb noted that while other aspects of the reform package are aimed at improving accountability of public school teachers with new evaluation procedures, the home-school language does the opposite.

“It seems to me to be a really odd mix of strong accountability on our public school teachers but much, much less accountability on home-school parents,” she said.
Parent choice, or kids 'held hostage'?

How the home-school measures will play into the negotiations over the final form of the bill remains to be seen. Jorgensen, chairman of the House Education Committee, and his Senate counterpart, Herman Quirmbach, D-Ames, both said they’ve been focused on larger aspects of the package and haven’t even begun talking about that language.

But Jorgensen stressed that Republicans in both chambers would need to see the language in the final bill to vote for it. Including the provisions is what helped him persuade fellow Republicans to boost state aid to schools by 4 percent each of the next two years, meeting a Democratic demand, he said.

“We felt we have given from a funding standpoint to meet their need, and now it’s important for them in the spirit of compromise to meet our need from a parent choice standpoint,” Jorgensen said.

Quirmbach, however, said that adding home-school measures complicates the areas of agreement on a reform package that originated in the governor’s office, occupied by a Republican, and which contains several elements favored by Democrats and Republicans alike.

“I’d prefer to focus the efforts in the bill on the theme that is common in the governor’s version, the House version and the Senate version, which is recruiting more great teachers into the profession and making the great teachers we have even better,” Quirmbach said.

The GOP insistence, he added, amounts to holding public school students “hostage” to the desires of a far smaller but politically potent minority.

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The first evidence of agriculture appears in the archaeological record some 10,000 years ago. But the skills needed to cultivate and harvest crops weren’t learned overnight. Scientists have traced these roots back to 23,000-year-old tools used to grind seeds, found mostly in the Middle East.

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The high school band in Gold Beach, Oregon, isn't bad. The group is only 15 kids, but they did well in last year's District Festival and were hoping to return this year to take the crown.

Just one problem: The band's director is a volunteer and the local teachers union didn't like that at all.

Lenie Duffy taught in California for nine years with full credentials and continued to volunteer in local schools for 15 years after she formally left teaching, as pianist for a school choir and then as band director after the previous director had a heart attack.

Despite the fact that parents and students were pleased with Duffy's work—she was recently nominated as the town's "volunteer of the year"—the teachers union filed a complaint about Duffy with the state Teacher Standards and Practices Commission. The commission ruled against Duffy and she was forced out.

This story comes courtesy of Backwoods Home Magazine, where Duffy has worked a day job as a business manager for many years. The magazine stepped up to save the day:

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There are few victories sweeter in life than that of young teenagers triumphing over organized mean-spirited adults in positions of seemingly absolute power. This is a story that comes out of my own home town of Gold Beach, Oregon. It pits the high school band, consisting of 15 teenagers ranging in age from 15 to 18, against the powerful local teacher's union that tried to shut the band down because their unpaid volunteer band director, who everybody agreed was doing a good job, did not possess an Oregon teaching credential.

As far as the kids were concerned, it was simply a matter of wanting to play music. They had nearly won the District Festival competition last year under the same uncredentialed band director, and they figured they had a good chance of winning it all this year.

But for the teacher's union it was a matter of revenge, not against the band or its director, but against the school superintendent who had presided over teacher layoffs forced by the economic downturn in recent years. The band itself was nearly a casualty of the bad economy, but the school superintendent, Jeff Davis, made it possible for it to survive by allowing an unpaid volunteer to teach it.

That volunteer happened to be Lenie Duffy, who is also the business manager for Backwoods Home Magazine. She felt she had no choice. The previous band director, another volunteer, had died suddenly of a heart attack. The last "paid" band director had taken a job in another district two years previous, in part to escape looming teacher layoffs.

Lenie had significant credentials. Before becoming BHM's business manager 20 years ago, she had been a "credentialed" California teacher for 9 years. And for the past 15 years, she has been an unpaid volunteer in our local schools' classrooms, spending the last 5 years as the choir's piano accompanist, and the last year plus as band director. Everybody — students, parents, teachers, even the union activists — heaped praise on her for her work with the band, and she was even nominated a couple of months ago as the town's "volunteer of the year." But she did not have an Oregon teaching credential!

The union, frustrated by the superintendent and fearing more layoffs, secretly filed a complaint with the state's Teacher Standards and Practices Commission (TSPC). They simply could not allow an unpaid volunteer, no matter how good, to fill a position that their contract said was worth about $80,000 a year in compensation. It set a bad precedent, as far as they were concerned.

Especially because the school district a few towns north of Gold Beach, in the town of Reedsport, had recently allowed the opening of a charter school, in which half the teachers could be "volunteers" or lower paid people drawn from the community. The only requirements were knowing your subject and knowing how to teach it to kids. The union had spent heavily in a vain effort to stop the charter school in Reedsport. It had been a humiliating and bitter defeat, and they did not want the idea of unpaid volunteers gaining traction in Gold Beach.

The TSPC, after lengthy deliberation, informed Davis he should cancel the class, and he did. The news hit Gold Beach like the Grinch descending on the town. "How could they!" many in the town gasped. It was the talk of the coffee shops and everyone was on the band's side.

The kids took to their social media of choice, Facebook, condemning the teacher's union with harsh, sometimes obscene, language. On the afternoon they were supposed to report to the school library instead of the band room, they staged a mass sit-in on the concrete steps that led to the band room. The local newspaper went wild with letters of complaint from parents and community members.

The union reps went on damage control. Their goal, they insisted, was not to hurt the kids. They told the local volunteer choir director, whose class they had also forced into cancellation, that they did it "for the good of the kids," arguing that only credentialed teachers should be allowed to teach children.

But here's where this sad saga turns more sensible.

Backwoods Home Magazine decided to help the kids fight back against the teacher's union. I and BHM's Senior Editor John Silveira, Ad Manager Jeff Ferguson, and Technology Manager Al Boulley moved out of our offices and made room for a "band room." The band reformed itself into an off-campus club, just like the high school golf club BHM sponsors. In fact, the golf club subsequently held an emergency meeting and agreed to donate $1,000 (nearly half of its funds) to the band to show its support. The band relocated to the BHM building and now practices there as a club, free from any further threat from the teacher's union. They will lose the half credit they should have earned for the semester, but they will still get to put on their scheduled concerts and compete at the District Festival.

There are two important lessons that the band kids, or anyone else, can learn from this incident:

1) Don't let bullies and tyrants push you around. They can only control you if you let them.

2) There is always a solution to a problem. Pointing out the culprits is fine, but quickly find the solution and get on with what you want to do.

And there is, of course, a further lesson we as a society should understand from what has transpired in Gold Beach: Teacher's unions are meant to protect teachers, not students...

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