Posted on 05/15/2006 7:19:15 AM PDT by Nextrush
Excerpts from the "NEA Today" monthly publication of the National Education Association for May 2006. Some of the articles are available online, others not:
1. Page 7 President's Viewpoint:
"Educators of the World, Unite!"
I see the face of a child. She has a beautiful, shy smile. She lives in a huge, sprawling shantytown in a developing country. She is dark-skinned. Her nationality doesn't matter. What matters is that she is a child with all the dazzling potential of a child.
She sleeps the sleep of a child, and when she awakens to a living nightmare of poverty, despair and ignorance. She has never spent a single day of her life in a school. Instead, every morning she accompanies her mother to a huge garbage dump, where they pick through mountains of debris, looking for something, anything, to sell..............The girl is illiterate, she's malnourished, and she knows nothing about HIV/AIDS, but soon she will become a young woman.
I think about this girl when I am doing Education International work,........
NEA'S membership in Education International (www.ei-ie.org) affords us, as educators, the opportunity to link arms with other caring educators around the world-more than 29 million of them, in fact-and to raise our voices on behalf of the children of the world and on behalf of our profession.
It is a fundamental human right for all to have a free, quality public education. Education International is dedicated to this ideal........
I was recently elected Vice-President of Education International, and it was a great honor. After all NEA is a founding member of Education International and NEA's Mary Hatwood Futrell is the founding president. Plus, the association is the largest affiliate among EI's membership of 348 national education unions in 166 countries.
Faced with the magnitude and the multitude of challenges around the world-war, famine, disease and oppression-there is an understandable tendency for people to feel overwhelmed and to withdraw into their private shells. But there is another option. It is for us to say to ourselves. I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can still do something........
Educators everwhere need to work together, because a great public school is a basic right for every child, whether that child lives in Idaho or Indonesia, Addis Ababa or Altoona.....
Your generosity of spirit and your committment to the cause of children and public education everywhere inspire me.
NEA President Reg Weaver
2. On Page 10: "Stay-At-Home-Kids":
" More than 1 million American students stayed home from school in 2003-that is, they were home-schooled, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That's a 29 percent increase since 1999, but still just 2.2 percent of all students. The top two reasons? Home-schooling parents believe school is dangerous, they told surveyors, or they want to provide children with a religious education."
3. Page 16: "States Support NEA Lawsuit"
"Six states and the District of Columbia, the governor of Pennsylvania, school administrators, and a coalition of California elected officials and community activists have filed legal briefs in support of NEA's legal challenge to unfunded federal mandates in the No Child Left Behind law. The amicus brief filing by Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin says the states "respectfully disagreed" with a U.S. District Court judge who dismissed NEA's lawsuit in November. The association and the other plantiff's have since filed an appeal. The suit argues that NCLB is an unlawfully underfunded by more than $40 billion-in spite of wording in the law that makes clear its mandates will be fully paid by the federal government. About 80 percent of districts say they have costs associated with the law not covered by federal funding, according to a report released in March by the Center on Education Policy. For more information, visit www.nea.org/lawsuit."
4. Page 16: "Moving Beyond NCLB"
"The so-called No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, which has introduced children all across America to the joys of bubble sheets, comes up for renewal in September 2007. That means Congress will begin considering changes to the law, possibly starting with hearings later this year. Final action may not occur until 2008 or even later, but NEA is mobilizing to play a major role.
'The problems with the law have become apparent in our classrooms and our communities across the country and to people across the political spectrum,' says NEA Executive Committee member Becky Pringle. "We're optimistic that Congress can be persuaded to make the major changes that are essential to keep this law from hurting the very children it was originally supposed to help.'
NEA President Reg Weaver appointed Pringle to head an advisory committee...The committee has held hearings around the country to gather information from members about how NCLB affects their schools and their students, and to enlist their professional expertise in crafting a positive agenda for changing the law.
Members have been telling them of the many ways in which NCLB is distorting the curriculum.....
'a custodian actually started crying while describing what's happening to some of his teacher-colleagues,' says Pringle. 'He said students are so upset that they're blaming their teachers for having to take all these tests, and deciding to punish the teachers by refusing to answer the questions.'.........
'One sixth-grade teacher said his school is spending so much time testing reading and math, they've been unable to focus on science and social studies as they used to do,' says Pringle......
Pringle adds that many teachers are saying their children are being set up to fail because NCLB ignores the problems caused by poverty and doesn't even require that students be tested in a language they can understand.......
Pringle says she believes of Congress are ready to listen, but only if they hear from their own constituents..........
'NEA's great strength is that we have members in every congressional district. But we can only harness that strength when our members collectively speak up and take action.'...............
NEA doesn't just monitor home education...they have been fighting it with moola and dirty tactics for decades. In fact the DNC incorporated word for word the NEA stance (anti-homeschool) into a plank at the 2000 convention. The Republican convention showed a pro home education position in several speeches. Those who are HS activists are repeatedly targeted. This is a frontline of the political war zone. The reason why?
http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v7n8/
"...the governor of Pennsylvania,..."
PA is where the NEA started. There are over sixty affiliated teaching related unions here.
"The County Board of Education must have turned over all the
emails AND the corresponding full names to the DNC."
The NEA is the financial arm of the DNC.
I didn't want to oversell but I look at NCLB as a one size fits all attack on local schools that are dominated by liberals in administration and local school boards.
It puts schools in the position of having to teach reading and writing so that children will actually be able to pass reading and writing tests.
My wife was a literacy tutor twenty years ago and yes adults graduated from high school in my area not being able to read.
NCLB is a start but school choice got left out for non-public schools. That would really put the liberals on their toes. As it is if schools fail liberal administration stands to lose their jobs and that makes the union (NEA members are administrators, too) mad.
Who's telling those parents you hear say nasty things about NCLB? Are they National Education Association members who happen to be parents or are they being fed this line from adminstrators, teachers, etc?
By the way, Rush Limbaugh, who's spoken to parents just like you do came back with the line about more Clinton in history class last week.
Oh yes, my local school district is blaming the need to hire more people on NCLB. Special reading teachers have to be hired to back up the regular teacher even though class sizes (liberals swear by them) are always under 20 students. I went to schools with class sizes of 25-30.
NCLB is no more a bureaucratic nightmare than the other ones big government imposes on us.
I wish we had conservatives leading in local communities, but liberals run the show and you buy the line they lead you with. NCLB, flawed as it is (federal control), is the only weapon we have to make sure Johnny can read and write when he gets out of school.
Its about time teachers, students and parents all care about education and take it seriously.
As for teachers, here's a real story I learned from a local school staff member. When teachers met with the school superintendent one of their concerns was whether or not the insects in the schools were being exterminated in a "humane" way. No Kidding.
I am a parent and I stay in touch with my local schools. I talk to people who work in schools and even my children's teachers on occasion. My older daughters have difficulty with reading but my younger son is catching on quickly. I think NCLB is having a positive impact in that area at his elementary school level.
I agree that the Department of Education should go, but I think that liberalism is a disease that has permeated the schools worse than the Communist undergound of the 1940's.
Last year I read the book "I Led Three Lives" by Herbert Philbrick. He infiltrated the Communist Party in the 1940's and spied on them for the FBI.
They were into everything even helping political campaigns of non-Communists. The Communist Party wanted Philbrick to remain a Republican and a member of a Baptist church.
When on assignment to infiltrate civic groups and take them over for the Communists, Philbrick would identify himself as a Baptist.
Some outfits (Communists) were so bad they needed the FBI (Feds) to take them on and spy on them to boot.
We've haven't gone that far with the National Education Association and schools, but for now NCLB will do and I hope it can be improved upon with school choice for non-public schools, too.
But my hope is that good leadership will emerge in local schools and the liberal dominance will be someday a thing of the past.
Yes, we need consevatives to rise up and take back the schools and run for our local school boards. And we need to stick by them when the Education Association pours money in to take them out in elections like has happened in my area.
I know Ted was brought in in the phony spirit of "bipartisanship".
But I think the scheme you talk of is doomed to failure because if students fail under NCLB principals will lose their jobs and eventually there will be calls for state takeover like is happening in Baltimore right now.
Corrupt superintendents like the ones you describe are a big city thing and only one of the sixteen school districts in my county is a "city" district, with that kind of superintendent turnover.
And why shouldn't students take tests that will make them proficient in reading and math. My son is doing well in reading and I believe NCLB is having a positive impact on his performance.
If they get out of school being able to read and do math they will be able to get jobs.
Students have graduated from schools being unable to read and spell. Its about time that stopped.
I'm all for improving education, but you don't do that by teaching the students just how to take a test which is what NCLB does.
To improve education, what's expected of the students has to be increased, real discipline needs to be introduced into the schools and an alternative track established for those who just don't want learn and disrupt the students who do.
"NCLB is a bureacratic, nightmarish money pit that no conservative should even consider supporting. From other comments, it appears you think it will somehow magically remove all liberal ideas and teaching from the schools. Believe me, it won't."
Clearly you haven't read all the particulars of NCLB. If you had, you'd realize just how fully we have the Marxists by the balls. Their demise is only a matter of time--and NCLB (big government hassle that it is) is merely the means to that end.
So you actually couldn't be more wrong...as long as Congress doesn't go wobbly.
"So you actually couldn't be more wrong...as long as Congress doesn't go wobbly."
I know what's in it and it's a piece of pure crap. As a result of NCLB, my son is learning less algebra, advanced science, and English than he should be. He's also less likely to be able to take things like band, and middle school sports have been cut. If this is your idea of how to get the Marxists, then screw you.
You just don't get it. NCLB is the beginning of the end for entire failing, corrupt, leftist, "publik skrool" system. The deck is stacked...
You just don't get it. NCLB is the beginning of the end for the entire failing, corrupt, leftist, "publik skrool" system. The deck is stacked...
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