Free Republic

May 16, 2013 Dear : The VEA Fund for Children and Public Education Executive Committee (VEA Fund) and The VEA Fund Directors, your elected representatives from across Virginia, have offered recommendations for the June 11 Democratic primaries. The Democratic Party is choosing Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General candidates in an open primary on that day. Republican Candidates are being chosen by a convention this Saturday in Richmond. Regrettably, none of the Republican candidates chose to complete the candidate questionnaire required to gain a recommendation. In Virginia voters do not register by party, so our primaries are open. Any voter can...

Labor is mounting an all-out push to fill the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as the agency faces the prospect of being sidelined for the rest of President Obama’s second term. Unions of all stripes have told Senate Democrats that they need to move on all five of Obama's nominees to the labor board, even if it takes a controversial change to filibuster rules to make it happen. “Without this, there's nothing [to protect workers],” said Larry Cohen, the president of the Communications Workers of America. (CWA) “It's a floor and now the floor is caving in as well.” The...

Ten California teachers are suing to break one of the strongest iron triangles in American politics, where the taxpayers pay the teachers; the teachers’ union supports candidates and referenda, and that leads eventually to the teachers getting better pay, benefits and working conditions. A civil rights law firm filed a federal law suit April 30 on behalf of 10 California teachers and the Christian Educators Association International challenging the state’s closed shop law that has them contributing to support political activity they opposed. "Individual teachers have a constitutional right to decide for themselves whether to join a union and financially...

Few Democratic Party constituencies were quicker and more vociferous than the union brass in commending President Barack Obama’s announcement on May 9, 2012, endorsing state court decisions and statutes that change the traditional definition of marriage by formally instituting same-sex unions. The top bosses of the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the United Auto Workers (UAW), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and a host of other unions all issued statements clearly implying that all right-thinking people should agree with Mr. Obama’s...

Like the brainwashing jihad running amok among government goons and most of America’s media, our social engineering indoctrination camps (formerly known as the public school system) clearly have it in for guns. This is not surprising since these camps are controlled by the National Education Association, which is the largest contributor to the bigger/more-control government-approved party (formerly known as the Democratic Party)

Students in some Albany High School English classes were asked to participate in the unthinkable this week as part of a persuasive writing assignment. The objective? Prove why Jews are evil and convince the teacher of their loyalty to the Third Reich in five paragraphs or less. “You must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!” read the description on the assignment, which the school superintendent said reflects the kind of sophisticated writing expected of students under the new Common Core standards and was meant...

Eighth-graders in Wisconsin’s Union Grove school district were assigned to fill out a “Liberalism vs. Conservatism” crossword puzzle, and they learned some new and very questionable “facts.” Students learned conservatism is “the political belief of preserving traditional moral values by restricting personal freedoms … ” Conversely, they learned liberalism is “the political belief of equality and personal freedom for everyone, often changing the current system to increase government protection of civil liberties.” See the photos here. The crossword puzzle was part of a civics assignment that was forwarded to EAGnews by Tamara Varebrook, a local conservative activist whose eighth-grade daughter...

A mother at a Wisconsin public school said her daughter’s eighth grade class was assigned a worksheet with some eyebrow-raising definitions for “conservatism” and “liberalism.” Conservatism, it stated in part, believes in “preserving traditional moral values by restricting personal freedoms” while liberalism is for “equality and personal freedom for everyone.” “This is indoctrination,” Tamra Varebrook, a Republican activist in Racine, Wis., told TheBlaze on Thursday after her 13-year-old daughter showed her the crossword-style vocabulary sheet from Union Grove Elementary School earlier this week. Varebrook first talked about the assignment with the news arm of the conservative Education Action Group. Varebrook...

In the Wayne-Westland Community Schools, high school math teachers are the lowest paid as a group and make on average almost $25,000 less a year than the physical education teachers. The high school science teachers make $11,000 less than the district’s gym teachers on average. The salaries are set by a six-year teacher’s contract Wayne-Westland agreed to in 2008 and runs through 2014. The salary schedule determines pay solely by years of experience and education background. On average, physical education teachers were the highest paid group and made $78,675 a year. Teacher gross salaries can also include pay for extracurricular...

Maryland lawmakers agreed this week to require public school teachers to pay union fees – a move that bolsters the state’s connection to organized labor as others move toward a right-to-work status. The bill passed Thursday in the General Assembly and is headed to the desk of Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley for signing after Monday, the final day of Maryland’s 2013 legislative session. The bill is also part of a larger progressive agenda put fourth this year by leaders of the Democrat-controlled Assembly that includes the approval of tax increases and one of the toughest gun-control proposals in the country.

A federal civil rights complaint has been filed against the Salt Lake City School Board after a principal booted a Cub Scout pack from an elementary school. About 30 eight to 11 year-olds were told they could no longer meet at Mountain View Elementary School because the Boy Scout’s ban on gay members in leaders conflicted with the school district’s anti-bias policy. The ban drew the ire of Michael Clara, a school board member and lifetime Boy Scout. Clara filed the federal complaint on behalf of two Latino parents. “I believe it is an assault on the founding principles of...

<p>ATLANTA (AP) — Juwanna Guffie was sitting in her fifth-grade classroom taking a standardized test when, authorities say, the teacher came around offering information and asking the students to rewrite their answers. Juwanna rejected the help.</p> <p>"I don't want your answers, I want to take my own test," Juwanna told her teacher, according to Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard.</p>

"...The “Kids' Zone” of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) website, part of the Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, quotes communist leader Mao Zedong. The NCES is the“primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education in the U.S. and other nations.”..."

Shortly after I did my first TV special on education, "Stupid in America," hundreds of union teachers showed up outside my office to yell at me. They were angry because I said union rules were a big reason American kids don't learn. The union is a big reason kids don't like school and learn less. Union contracts limit flexibility, limit promotion of good teachers, waste money and make it hard for principals to fire even terrible teachers. But I was wrong to imply that the union is the biggest problem. In states with weak unions, K-12 schools stagnate, too. Education...

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War In the preceding “Know Thy Enemy” series - Prologue, I Education, II Media and III Celebrity Culture  - I’ve identified three sources which have exposed America to a very dangerous disease. The systemic cause is a virus that manifests itself as a...

The Obama campaign reinvented itself as SuperPAC Organizing for Action to push Obama’s agenda while trading donations for access to the guy in the White House. ($500,000 gets you in.) Organizing for Action’s headquarters is located inside the National Education Association building and it is unclear whether the organizing arm of the Chief Executive of the United States government is paying rent to the NEA or whether it’s getting the space as a contribution. OFA has refused to answer the question. The National Education Association is the largest labor union in the United States. It donated 18 million dollars last...

School Reform Commission Votes To Save Four Schools, 23 To CloseBy Chelsea KarnashPHILADELPHIA (CBS) – The School Reform Commission has voted to save four public schools from closure in Philadelphia. The four schools are Roosevelt Middle School, Taylor Elementary, Pierce Elementary and Robeson High School. Twenty-three other schools on the chopping block will close. "This was a difficult vote, but it focused on our goal to provide safe, high-quality seats while being fiscally responsible," said Pedro Ramos, Chairman of the School Reform Commission, in a release from the district. "By not taking action now, we would continue the deterioration...

A press release from gun-rights group Rocky Mountain Gun Owners announces that last night it gave a firearms class to 300 teachers in Colorado. There was no cost for admission. "Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, Colorado's largest grassroots gun rights organization, provided a free firearms training course for 300 Colorado teachers," the group says. "The 300 men and women braved snow and inclement weather to attend the four hour course focusing on firearms safety and handling, and Colorado gun laws." In a statement, the executive director of the group, Dudley Brown, says, "Colorado teachers have been beating down our doors to...

LOS ANGELES – Los Angeles police say a fourth-grade teacher has been arrested and charged with sexual abuse of 19 students and one adult. Police said in a statement that Robert Pimental, a teacher at George De La Torre Jr. Elementary in the Wilmington area, was arrested Wednesday. The 57-year-old left his position with the Los Angeles Unified School District at the onset of the investigation in March, after working for the district since 1974. Police say the abuse occurred at school. Pimental's bail has been set at $12 million. His arraignment date hasn't been set.

Let’s pretend that in the spring of 2012 Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, John Engler of the Business Roundtable, Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity, and Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association began to organize an assembly of right-leaning groups. Let’s pretend that in the months since there had been not one but two meetings where these luminaries joined with representatives of Christians United For Israel, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Tea Party Express, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and the American Petroleum Institute to discuss strategy and promote a series of “structural...

I've used 'bwahahahaha' several times recently in response to Liberal hypocrisy, so can't use it this time. Mother Jones says this "invite-only and off-the record" meeting is the kind that "conspiratorial conservative bloggers dream about." Those in the meeting pledged BIG MONEY to supposedly remove BIG MONEY from the politics they are trying so hard to dominate. The whole affair is known as the "Democracy Initiative." At the end of the day, many of the attendees closed with a pledge of money and staff resources to build a national, coordinated campaign around three goals: getting big money out of politics, expanding...

It’s not always fun and easy being a young Republican, let alone an enthusiastic Mitt Romney supporter. Whoa: The parents of the Charles Carroll High School student ridiculed and ordered by her teacher to remove a t-shirt supporting Mitt Romney sued the teacher and school district on Friday, claiming the act violated the girl's civil rights. Filed in federal court in Philadelphia, the suit says the district ignored Samantha Pawlucy's right to free speech, let other students threaten and harass her and subjected her "to emotional distress, simply because she exercised her First Amendment rights." Fernando Gallard, a spokesman for...

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten issued the following statement in reaction to National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre’s press conference today: After remaining silent for an entire week following the Newtown massacre, the NRA’s first comments were to call for more guns in our schools and our society. This is both irresponsible and dangerous. No matter how much money the NRA spends or propaganda it tries to spread, one thing is clear—the NRA is not serious about confronting the epidemic of gun violence in our nation. Schools must be safe sanctuaries, not armed fortresses. Anyone who...

Teachers’ Pensions Are a Half-Trillion ShortBy Kevin D. Williamson December 14, 2012 11:15 A.M. The habitual overpromising and underfunding of government-employee pensions is a fiscal powder keg in an economy full of sparks — and a new report estimates that teachers’ pensions alone are underfunded by nearly a half-trillion dollars. **SNIP** Note that the savings per teacher derived from the reform of eligibility rules runs $450,000, or more than two and a half times the average net worth of a retirement-age U.S. household. The real value of the average teacher’s retirement benefits in low-cost Wyoming is pushing the $1 million...

Terrorist turned teacher Bill Ayers appeared at a recent Big Apple gathering of “Change the Stakes,” an anti-testing group comprised mostly of teachers and parents. At least two employees of the New York City Board of Education were there as well. EAGnews obtained exclusive video of the event and will be releasing more clips in the coming days. But first we would like to present Ayers’ statement on the power of radical socialist educators in today’s public schools. It should send chills down every parent’s spine. SEE THE VIDEO HERE. Ayers explained to his audience that leftists wrongly put...

The chickens have come home to roost. The first generation of students swaddled in the insanity of the self-esteem movement have emerged on the scene as arrogant, self-absorbed twits with an exaggerated sense of entitlement and self-importance. In short, they’ve been spoiled. Potentially, they’ve been ruined. The idiocy of social engineering in the classroom is again bearing catastrophic results. Here’s how we know. A group of five university professors has evaluated more than 16,000 personality profiles of college students gathered over the last 24 years. What they’ve discovered is that today’s young people have dramatically different self-concepts than the two...

<p>ON the first day Douglass High School students walked the halls of their new building, the Oklahoma City School Board chairman at the time stood before students with a message of hope.</p> <p>“The investment they made in you is one we expect to pay off for years to come,” Cliff Hudson said that day in January 2006. He was referencing voter support of MAPS for Kids, which paid for the new Douglass and hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of capital improvements throughout the district.</p>

"The unbridled growth of crony unionism and government corruption will destroy the United States as we know it." This statement may strike many as sheer hyperbole. But its author, Mallory Factor, a political scientist at The Citadel, knows whereof he writes. His new book, "Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind" (New York: Center Street), makes a credible case, and a well-sourced one, that our country may be in the early stages of a ruinous dystopia, courtesy of public-sector unions. In pursuing their interests, argues the author, these labor organizations hold taxpaying citizens hostage to unsustainable wage/salary, pension,...

This Saturday, the Midwest Marxist Conference was held at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. The event was teeming with teachers who spoke about the new found bond between the radical socialists and their Teachers Union. The all-day event, which collected money to support Chicago Socialists and featured a communist bookstore, provided students on-campus along with the radical left community to plan the next phase in their activism. After the opening plenary, breakout sessions addressed more specific topics like the history of the Democratic party, education, and case studies in Russia. In these sessions, speakers continued to celebrate the use...

The Oakland Education Association might want to consider changing its name. The teachers union was one of six unions in California that refused last week to support their school district application for millions of dollars worth of federal funding offered by the Race to the Top program. Without union support, the districts could not qualify for the grants, which - if won - would have paid for high-quality math programs for fourth-through-eighth-grade students. Clearly the union placed the welfare of its membership above that of the students, so it's somewhat misleading that it calls itself an "education association." The big...

Education turned into a key issue in Wednesday’s first presidential debate between President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney. Their visions could not have been more divergent and stark.Romney called for putting federal education dollars into the “backpack” of the student, empowering parents to pick the educational option that best meets the needs of their child.Obama called for hiring 100,000 new teachers, a familiar refrain during his first term in office. A champion of government school bailouts, Obama emphasizes more teachers, as opposed to insisting on more effective teachers, and refuses to endorse the idea of freeing students to choose...

Enrollment in online schools has increased twelvefold in Ohio since the first internet-based school was created in the state in 2000, The Gazette Medina reports.More than 30,000 students are currently enrolled, most of them concentrated in seven statewide cyber schools. Only Arizona had more students in online schools, according to the news report.Online schools, and other forms of digital learning, are an inevitable and promising form of education for the 21st Century, unless special interest forces are able to keep technology from becoming more integrated into everyday education.Professor Gary Miron of the National Education Policy Center is a leading voice...

More cheating scandals inevitable, as states can’t ensure test integrityNational education policy built on test scores is undermined By Michael Pell The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Updated: 7:56 a.m. Sunday, Sept. 30, 2012 The stain of cheating spread unchecked across 44 Atlanta schools before the state finally stepped in and cleaned it up. But across the country, oversight remains so haphazard that most states cannot guarantee the integrity of their standardized tests, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found. Poor oversight means that cheating scandals in other states are inevitable. It also undermines a national education policy built on test scores, which the states...

The controversial “Piss Christ” artwork Sen. Alfonse D’Amato once branded as a “deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity,” is coming to New York, and security is being heavily ramped- up at the gallery that will show the piece. Andres Serrano’s work — a “photograph of the crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine” — first ignited controversy in 1989 when D’Amato complained to the US Senate that it was an “outrage,” an “indignity” and a “piece of trash” that had been funded by taxpayers. Serrano had won a $15,000 prize for his work, backed in part by the National Endowment for the...

Jesse Jackson at Saturday's rally for striking Chicago school teachers

If Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has spent the last 18 months painting a portrait of public-employee unions as intransigent and selfish, the Chicago Teachers Union this week provided him with confirmation. On Monday, 25,000 Chicago teachers (average salary: $76,000 before benefits) walked out of their classrooms, leaving nearly 350,000 schoolchildren and their parents in the lurch. The teachers are fighting to protect their lavish pay and benefit packages and also trying to stave off a new accountability plan that would evaluate their effectiveness using studentsÂ’ test scores. The Chicago strike serves as a counterpoint to events in Wisconsin after WalkerÂ’s...

Public Employee Unions: In a city with double-digit unemployment, teachers who can't be fired and who make more than double what their students' parents make, have gone on strike. Anyone for school choice? Public sector unions reared their burdensome and inefficient head Monday when some 25,000 unionized Chicago Public School teachers went on strike, unhappy with a salary the parents of their students can only envy, leaving 350,000 students and their overtaxed parents struggling in the educational lurch. The Chicago Teachers Union walked away from a contract offer that amounted to a 16% raise over four years for the average...

The movie stars Oscar nominees Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis as two gritty women who try to take over a failing urban school. Oscar winner Holly Hunter plays a headstrong but compassionate union official fighting the women’s plans. The film played to an appreciative crowd last week at the Republican National Conventional in Tampa, with many movie goers driven to tears before the end credits rolled. Democrats also got a peek at the film yesterday, courtesy of a screening held by Democrats for Education Reform. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, acknowledged the film’s power and “sense...

Wisconsin public high-school teacher Kristi Lacroix has endured yells, curses, laughs, derision, and threats to her face. It isn't students who give her grief, though. It's the other adults. One woman spit on Lacroix while she shopped for groceries at Pick'n Save. At Capt. Mike's Beer & Burger Bar, a table of teachers moved when she sat nearby, while another patron suggested someone should assassinate her. Her sin? Being a teachers union member who opposed the recall of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. As a political conservative, Lacroix had become frustrated when she learned her union supported liberal candidates and agendas....

Via Daily Caller: A document the National Education Association filed with the U.S. Department of Labor in 2011 indicates that the teachers union donated $100,000 to Media Matters For America nearly two years ago, describing it as a payment for “public relations costs.” In the months that followed, Media Matters’ online coverage of teachers unions increased, focusing largely on attacking the Fox News Channel and other media outlets it considers “conservative” in nature.The $100,000 payment was first documented in “Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind,” a book by Citadel international politics professor Mallory Factor published on August...

<p>BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - The Louisiana Supreme Court has refused to stop the launch of Gov. Bobby Jindal's statewide voucher program, which began this month.</p> <p>The high court denied an injunction request by teacher unions and school boards to stall the voucher program as they challenge whether it is constitutional. A hearing in the court case is set for October.</p>

The Washington Times reports: “Nationwide, public school teachers are almost twice as likely as other parents to choose private schools for their own children, the study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found. More than 1 in 5 public school teachers said their children attend private schools.” “In Washington (28 percent), Baltimore (35 percent) and 16 other major cities, the figure is more than 1 in 4. In some cities, nearly half of the children of public school teachers have abandoned public schools.” “In Philadelphia, 44 percent of the teachers put their children in private schools; in Cincinnati, 41 percent;...

A Louisiana teachers union is threatening private schools with legal action if they accept money from a new voucher program – and the threat has already forced at least one school to put its participation in the program on hold. The demand was sent a few weeks ago by law firm representing the Louisiana Association of Educators and several other interests, and it argues the state-approved program is illegal because participating schools would be receiving an unconstitutional payment of public funds. The two-page letter further states if schools don’t agree, then the law firm has “no alternative” than to take...

What does it take to make our nation's "teachers," 'supposedly' some of the most intelligent among us - those entrusted with the minds of our children - to face-down the Unions that are bankrupting our country financially and morally? The leaders of two of the largest Unions, American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the National Education Association (NEA) are paid about $500,000 annually, each, while the average teacher's salary is $44,000. It's about Liberalism, Progressivism, Socialism, Buying Votes. That's the bottom line and it is ruining the American dream for our kids. Teachers, have you considered the Association of American...

Federal agents served a search warrant on Thursday at the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School in Midland, the largest cyber school in the state with more than 11,000 students. The Department of Justice would not say what agents with the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Education were seeking there or at least three other locations where warrants were served. In a statement, the Justice Department said the Beaver County school, founded in 2000, “is not a current target of this investigation.” Founder Nick Trombetta, 57, could not be reached for comment. On June 30, he stepped down...

The AFL-CIO today filed a “friend of the court" brief asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to uphold a lower court’s ruling that the so-called Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. The 1996 law denies federal benefits to same sex couples.In the brief, filed along with Change to Win (CTW) and the National Education Association (NEA), the three union groups say:The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), by intention and design, ensures that workers with same-sex spouses earn less money, are taxed more on their wages and benefits, and have available to them fewer valuable benefits and...

Things are looking grim for teachers unions. The National Education Association (NEA) membership has declined by more than 100,000 since 2010, and the union’s own projections indicate that within two more years it could have lost a total of 308,000 full-time teachers and other workers. This would represent a 16% drop in membership from 2010. It’s not simply member numbers at stake, but the dues each member provides. If projections are correct, then the NEA budget will decline 18% and they’ll have $65 million less to work with. Greg Toppo of USA Today reports that the NEA explains the unprecedented...

Vice President Joe Biden faulted Mitt Romney for believing that “so-called job creators” build the economy, as he suggested that government spending and increased taxes on the wealthy would provide long-term economic strength. “[Romney believes] somehow, that those so-called job creators will make everything okay for the rest of us,” Biden said at the National Education Association conference. “We believe that the way to build this country is the way we always have, from the middle out . . . [to] invest in the things that have always made our economy grow: innovation, research, development,

Left-wing activists gave a painting of Reagan the finger, but the hand that props them up comes from George Soros. One of the two activists involved is national director of public engagement at Solutions for Progress –funded in part by Soros’s Open Society Institute....Matthew Hart, the national director of public engagement at Solutions for Progress, posted his photo giving Reagan the finger on Facebook with the caption saying, “F*** Reagan,” (without the editing)

I have a great deal of sympathy for Michelle Apperson, the Sacramento "Teacher of the Year" who was laid off. Assuming she deserved the award, she should not have been laid off. Sixth-grade teacher Michelle Apperson passed down a simple message to her students. "My favorite teachers growing up were the ones who challenged me to go out of my comfort level a little bit, strive for the stars, and work hard," the veteran California educator wrote on her school's bio page. Despite just being named Sacramento's "Teacher of the Year," Apperson was laid off as part of a massive...