Philadelphia's school district plans to close a quarter of its school buildings in coming years to eliminate a huge budget hole.

After conceding that poor communication with teachers could have contributed to the unprecedented plunge in Florida students’ writing scores this year, the state Board of Education voted Tuesday to lower the passing mark for the test.

Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson defended the decision against critics who said it was a quick fix for bad results on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, or FCAT. He said changing the test’s passing score to a 3 from a 4 (out of 6) “corrected the process.”

“The results still stand,” he said.

Just 27 percent of fourth-graders statewide earned a 4 or better on the writing FCAT, a steep decline from last year’s 81 percent. Eighth- and 10th-graders showed similar drops.

In Glynn County, Georgia, a school bus driver and an assistant have been suspended after leaving a 5-year-old special needs student strapped to a seat in an unattended bus for two hours. The student was supposed to have been taken to a pre-kindergarten program. But the bus returned to the depot without dropping the student off. The student wasn't discovered until another driver went to use the bus. School officials are refusing to release the names of the suspended employees.

To imply that our government would stoop so low, that our leaders are so driven by greed that 2,996 deaths are simply collateral damage can only be described as offensive.

About 22 percent of California’s eighth-graders tested on a national science test passed, ranking the Golden State among the worst in the nation, according to figures released Thursday.

Scores from the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, show that too few students have the skills that could lead to careers in the field, educators said.

The state ranked 47th, only above Mississippi, Alabama and the District of Columbia, in a tie with Hawaii.

"I am not a welfare queen," says Melissa Bruninga-Matteau.

That's how she feels compelled to start a conversation about how she, a white woman with a Ph.D. in medieval history and an adjunct professor, came to rely on food stamps and Medicaid. Ms. Bruninga-Matteau, a 43-year-old single mother who teaches two humanities courses at Yavapai College, in Prescott, Ariz., says the stereotype of the people receiving such aid does not reflect reality. Recipients include growing numbers of people like her, the highly educated, whose advanced degrees have not insulated them from financial hardship.

Residents at the school carry small rucksacks, trailing wires that lead under their clothes and end in electrodes attached to their skin. Each rucksack contains a box, operated by staff members via remote control. When a button on the controller is pressed, a signal is sent generating a charge that delivers an electric shock to the skin. The teachers regularly inflict electric shocks on students, some as young as eight, zapping them for up to two seconds on their legs, arms or stomach.

The father angrily replied: "That's a bunch of horsecrap! I've always been fair-minded and tolerant of people from all backgrounds and races. When have you ever heard a racial epithet come out of my mouth? I haven't "oppressed' anybody, and furthermore there's nothing wrong with being proud of your own people, including the European race of people. Your race is in your blood. It's like an extension of your biological family and you ought to be mindful of your European heritage and identity, just like every other racial group in America is proud of its identity. Why is it OK for them to have a strong sense of racial identity but it's evil for us Europeans to feel that way?"

The young "intellectual" rolled his eyes disrespectfully.

"Come on dad, that's the same kind of White supremacy that Hitler tried to peddle. Those racist attitudes were discredited years ago."

"Discredited by whom?" retorted the father.

"By eminent scholars like Professor Silverstein." replied George.

AN OUTRAGED mum has vowed to take her daughter out of ‘lessons in suicide’ at Poole High School.

Jennene Garnett says teaching teens about such sensitive issues is inappropriate and that daughter Jasmine Bird, 15, came home distressed when she found out about their next religious studies topic.

The 38-year-old mum-of-two’s fears grew when other parents said their youngsters were shown different ways to commit suicide.

Students traditionally have a soft spot for their alma maters. But as growing numbers of students run up debt in the high five and even six figures to pay for college, that may change. Especially when they discover their old school is actively blocking them from getting a job or going on to a higher degree.

That's what increasing numbers of students are finding when they try to obtain an official transcript to send to potential employers or graduate admissions offices.

It turns out many colleges and universities refuse to issue these critical documents if students are in default on student loans, or in many cases, even if they just fall one or two months behind.

This is happening at a time when recent grads are finding it particularly hard to find work, not just in their chosen fields, but anywhere.

Posted below is a response to the advert which appeared on the Pages of The New York Times (See THIS post) …. also see this hateful video to know what we are dealing with. Presented is a letter sent to the Editor at the Times. Let’s see if it is fit for them to print, or would they prefer to get it in the form of an ad with a check enclosed …
Just how much Freedom of the Press is there?

Webmaster's Commentary: 

Bumped back to the top at readers' requests.
Dear New York Times Presstitutes.

Kindly look at all these Palestinian children.

And just so they don't feel left out, here are some Jewish kids.

So, tell us all again, New York Times, just who is inciting the murder of whose children?

We used to revere scientists. Now we worship Kim Kardashian. Why?

A small supremacist Jewish group is launching a smear campaign against a number of professors and academics on North American campuses for daring to criticize racist Israeli policies against native Palestinians.

The group, called Campus Watch and headed by David Horowitz, an extremist Zionist stalwart, has published advertisements inciting to hatred against a number of prominent professors on American campuses.

The academics are accused of vilifying Israel and of indulging in hate speech that would endanger the very existence of the apartheid Israeli state.

The San Diego school board voted to eliminate nearly 1,000 nonteaching positions Tuesday night over the familiar protests of parents, teachers and others who have grown frustrated with budget cuts they say will give students a substandard education in an unsafe environment.

Under the San Diego Unified School District’s preliminary budget, more than 1,600 teachers and well over 1,000 full and part-time nonteaching employees — including classroom assistants, cafeteria workers, and office clerks — will be laid off next year.

David Shorter, an associate professor of world arts and cultures, was the subject of a late March complaint from an organization of University of California faculty that fights anti-Semitic sentiments on college campuses. The organization, AMCHA Initiative, decried that Shorter had linked his course website to a campaign calling for a boycott of Israel.

Tomorrow the State of Israel will celebrate its 64th birthday. As in the past, tis the season to spread hatred and lies about Palestine, Palestinians and their struggle for nationhood and a just peace in the Middle East.
*
The zionists will spend Million$ to get their message across to you, using the platforms of every major campus in the country…. here is one of the vilest pieces of ziocrap in action…

If you are in college right now, you will most likely either be unemployed or working a job that only requires a high school degree when you graduate. The truth is that the U.S. economy is not coming anywhere close to producing enough jobs for the hordes of new college graduates that are entering the workforce every year.

During the 1990s it became common in Australia to refer to the phenomenon “Political Correctness” as an opinion-making movement by those who were intolerant of another person’s point of view, the self-labeled politically correct being the so-called left-wing, which thus pitted itself against the right-wing in any political debate. That this dialectic divide itself is deceptive is another issue.

Milledgeville's acting police chief, Dray Swicord, said Tuesday that he stands by an officer's decision to handcuff an elementary school student for safety Friday after she allegedly threw a tantrum.

Swicord said the arresting officer is not under investigation for his actions.

According to the police report, kindergartner Salecia Johnson is accused of tearing items off the walls and throwing furniture.

She was crying in the principal's office at Creekside Elementary before police arrived Friday. The report says the girl knocked over a shelf that injured the principal. It also says she was seen biting the door knob of the office and jumping on the paper shredder. And, it says, she attempted to break a glass frame above the shredder.

A law to allow public school teachers to challenge the scientific consensus on issues like climate change and evolution will soon take effect in Tennessee.

The measure allows teachers to “help students understand, analyze, critique and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.”

The ACLU of Maryland on Friday said it was “appalling” that Baltimore police officers arrested and handcuffed three 9-year-old girls and an 8-year-old boy at an elementary school.

The officers arrested the children Thursday afternoon inside Morrell Park Elementary School on aggravated-assault charges. The charges were based on a schoolyard fight that occurred nine days earlier.

Unable to find a job as a music teacher in the current economic crisis, he eventually went into default on his loans, which included Stafford, Perkins and private bank loans. Then this year, he decided to go on to earn a PhD, which would make it possible for him to get hired in his field. He applied to a top-rated university in the Northeast, but when it was time to send his school transcripts, Temple froze him out. “They said as long as I was in default on my loans, they would not issue a transcript!” says Rodriguez.

In a bold comparative analysis of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Jada Williams, a 13-year old eighth grader at School #3 in Rochester, New York, asserted that in her experience, today's education system is a modern-day version of slavery. According to the Fredrick Douglass Foundation of New York, the schools' teachers and administrators were so offended by Williams' essay that they began a campaign of harassment—kicking her out of class and trying to suspend her—that ultimately forced her parents to withdraw her from the school.

The amount Americans owe on student loans is far higher than earlier estimates and could lead some consumers to postpone buying homes, potentially slowing the housing recovery, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

Cedric Calero, 18, of Manalapan and his family are dumbfounded as to why the manager of the school cafeteria would call the police after his taking a cup of ice without permission on Jan. 31.

Twin-brother honor students claim in Federal Court that their public school "callously" suspended them for 180 days for setting up and running a nonviolent website on their own time and on their own computers.

Four people were injured during student protests over tuition-fee hikes as clouds of tear gas wafted Wednesday over downtown Montreal.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Monday told a high school senior not to expect any help from the government for college tuition unless he joined the military.

I feel that if you are willing to serve your country in the military for instance, that’s a place where we’re going to say, ‘Yeah, we’ll give you help,’” the candidate added.

“Don’t take on too much debt, and don’t expect the government to forgive the debt that you take on. Recognize that you’re going to have to pay it back. I want to make sure that every kid in this country that wants to go to college gets a chance to go to college.”

It should be painfully obvious to everyone by now that it is time to get all of our kids out of the government schools. The public school system in the United States has been dramatically declining for a long time, and in most areas of the country the public schools are open sewers at this point. Yes, there are some U.S. public schools that are still very good and that do a decent job of preparing our young people for their adult lives. But those good schools are the exception to the rule.

Sadly, “destructive” is not too hard a word to use for the environment in these public schools. I went to public schools all my life, and they were absolutely horrible. Unfortunately, they have gotten even worse since the time that I left them.

A white public school teacher in Chicago has filed suit against the city’s board of education after he was suspended for using a racial epithet during an in-class discussion about offensive language.

Western schoolchildren are up to three years behind those in China’s Shanghai and success in Asian education is not just the product of pushy “tiger” parents, an Australian report released Friday said.

The study by independent think-tank The Grattan Institute said East Asia was the centre of high performance in schools with four of the world’s top systems in the region — Hong Kong, South Korea, Shanghai and Singapore.

“In Shanghai, the average 15-year-old mathematics student is performing at a level two to three years above his or her counterpart in Australia, the USA and Europe,” Grattan’s school education programme director Ben Jensen said.

“That has profound consequences. As economic power is shifting from West to East, high performance in education is too.”

In December, six children testified at a congressional hearing on H.R. 32, a bill aimed at expanding HUD's homeless definition and introduced by Republican Judy Biggert (R-Ill.) The children talked about the hardships of sleeping four or five to a room in cheap motels and bouncing from one relative's living room to the next. They said that the resulting stress had caused them to struggle in school. Yet because they fail to meet HUD's criteria for homelessness, they and thousands of others like them aren't eligible for housing help.

The University of Hawaii is demanding the operator of a pornographic web site stop using the school's name or face legal action.

The web site, called universityofhawaii.xxx, claims to feature what it describes as "hot nude Hawaiian college girls." It is full of graphic pictures of men and women having sex on beaches and at other tropical locations.

Students at a top girl's school in London are being taught to accept failure as an option.

Failure Week is set to begin in Wimbledon High School on Monday, as teachers encourage students to demystify failure, put it into context, and even embrace it as an important part of their education.

"I want to suggest to girls that it is acceptable and completely normal not to succeed at times in life," said Heather Hanbury, the Headmistress of Wimbledon High.

Hawaii was among the states receiving a “D” grade. The Hawaii DoE was awarded 3/7 for “Content and Rigor”, and 1/3 for “Clarity and Specificity.” Hawaii is by now used to receiving low grades by honest education analysts. But in four pages of analysis, Fordham’s researchers dug into the reality of the Hawaii DoE with the kind of alacrity and specificity which many previous reports have avoided.

We think of homeschoolers as evangelicals or off-the-gridders who spend a lot of time at kitchen tables in the countryside. And it’s true that most homeschooling parents do so for moral or religious reasons. But education observers believe that is changing. You only have to go to a downtown Starbucks or art museum in the middle of a weekday to see that a once-unconventional choice “has become newly fashionable,” says Mitchell Stevens, a Stanford professor who wrote Kingdom of Children, a history of homeschooling. There are an estimated 300,000 homeschooled children in America’s cities, many of them children of secular, highly educated professionals who always figured they’d send their kids to school—until they came to think, Hey, maybe we could do better.

Times HAVE changed!
When I was a youngster, every time we heard the siren from a fire truck we hoped it was our school that was ablaze.
Now that New York’s Mayor Bloomberg plans to close down High Schools in the area, the students are out there protesting in Union Square Park, joined by Occupiers from the Wall Street Encampment … I wonder what my generation would have done.

According to Alabama state Sen. Shadrack McGill (R), the Bible says that increasing teacher salaries would only lead to less-qualified teachers. McGill said at a prayer breakfast that doubling teachers’ salaries — starting pay for Alabama teachers begins at $36,144 — would not help education. In fact, he said that keeping teacher pay low is a “Biblical principle“:

Now, factory animals are fed grains so they’ll rapidly gain weight, increasing their value as a food product. Factory animals are also selectively bred to this end. Chickens, for example, are usually bred to produce larger breasts. Schools do not actually “breed” children, but they do control the environment to encourage or discourage certain traits. Controlling mealtimes — and feeding them a carbohydrate-rich diet — ensures children are lethargic in the middle of the day, a time when they would naturally be at the peak of their physical activity. This is reminiscent of denying veal cattle iron or natural milk to ensure they remain weak and unable to exercise their muscles.

In its initial review of No Child Left Behind waiver requests, the U.S. Education Department highlighted a similar weakness in nearly every application: States did not do enough to ensure schools would be held accountable for the performance of all students.

The Obama administration praised the states for their high academic standards. But nearly every application was criticized for being loose about setting high goals and, when necessary, interventions for all student groups – including minorities, the disabled and low-income – or for failing to create sufficient incentives to close the achievement gap.

there's something wrong, something terribly wrong, with this picture. A society in which people exist for the sake of some non-human entity is a society enslaved. And this picture gets even more horrid with the realization that workers are expected to pay to acquire the required skills. Students are being asked to pay for the privilege of becoming serfs.

A network of schools run by the military should be introduced in Britain's most deprived areas to prevent youngsters turning into a new generation of rioters, according to a think-tank.

More and more US schools have police patrolling the corridors. Pupils are being arrested for throwing paper planes and failing to pick up crumbs from the canteen floor. Why is the state criminalising normal childhood behaviour?

“There are families becoming homeless for the first time because they lost their housing,” she said. “There are people who have been just getting by for a long time on some part-time job and then that part-time job went away, and so they’re now falling into the shelter system, or they’re staying with grandma or an aunt. I think it really signifies that we are in dire economic times.”

Nationally, 1.6 million U.S. children lived in homeless shelters, motels, with relatives or other families or living on the street in 2010 — a 38 percent increase since 2007, according to the center.

It has been said that children are our future, and right now the vast majority of our children are being “educated” in public schools that are rapidly being turned into indoctrination centers and prison camps. Our children desperately need to focus on the basics such as reading, writing and math, but instead a whole host of politicians, “education officials” and teachers are constantly injecting as much propaganda as they possibly can into classroom instruction. Instead of learning how to think, our children are continually being told what to think. Not only that, our children are also being trained how to live as subservient slaves in a Big Brother police state.

Despite an apparent calm, the American Jewish community is at war. It had declared war on everybody and every organization daring to criticize Israel, no matter how justified this criticism is. Cite the Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which was written by a Jew and defines Israel as a terror organization in article 1690 and others, and you are automatically defined as an anti-Semite, despite the report having been overwhelmingly approved by the UN General Assembly on October 16, 2009. That despite the report being backed by a more terrifying document issued with the cooperation of the IDF itself, the Beit Oranim Transcript (Hebrew).

A new student in elementary school who was bullied by classmates hanged himself in class and his teacher "grabbed her phone and began taking pictures" and didn't help him down until she said, "'Now that's the picture I want,'" the boy's grandmother claims in City Court.

Nearly half of America's public schools didn't meet federal achievement standards this year, marking the largest failure rate since the much-criticized No Child Left Behind Law took effect a decade ago, according to a national report released Thursday.

The Center on Education Policy report shows more than 43,000 schools – or 48 percent – did not make "adequate yearly progress" this year. The failure rates range from a low of 11 percent in Wisconsin to a high of 89 percent in Florida.

South Gate High School music teacher Ruben Gonzalez Jr. told the Los Angeles Times that thieves broke into his band room and took only tubas. Losses included an upright concert tuba and a silver sousaphone — or marching-band tuba — worth a combined $13,000.

Several weeks earlier, thieves stole eight sousaphones from Compton’s Centennial High School.

"The whole idea of equal justice under law means that you've got to play by the rules. It has nothing to do with the underlying subject matter. You just tell the truth." --Kenneth Starr

In one North Carolina school, a student got more than just detention for having a schoolboy crush.

Nine year old Emanyea Lockett was suspended from school for two days when he told a friend that he thought his teacher was 'cute'.

The mother of a Boston elementary school first-grader being investigated for possible sexual harassment for punching another boy in the groin says her son acted in self-defense.

Tasha Lynch said Thursday the other boy had choked her son on a school bus and stolen his gloves late last month.

CSU Board Chair Herbert Carter says the board based its decision on the experience of its Nov. 16 meeting when protesters clashed with police, shattering a glass door. He says the building entrance at CSU headquarters is still being repaired.

A teenage girl in a high school group called Youth in Government uses her fancy new tweeting phone to exercise her constitutionally-protected right to call a governor a butthead. (Or, to be more specific, to say that he “sucked” and to create the hashtag #heblowsalot.) Her perceptive abilities proved accurate, when said Gov. Sam Brownback reveals that he uses taxpayer dollars to gather evidence that teenagers are making fun of him on Twitter, and to use that evidence to get them in trouble at school.

Consider the resemblences between the Climategate and Penn State scandals.

Climategate emails -- leaked, not "stolen" -- reveal the key players as egocentric, ruthless game players. As per this report. And this comment.

Note how often they admit they are cooking the data. "As one e-mail states: 'The figure you sent is very deceptive . . . there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change].'”

So they're aware, but they plug on. It reminds me of the Penn State scandals. A grad student, later a coach, sees a coach molesting a boy in the shower. There are plenty of other complaints, even investigations. But nothing happens. They do not act; many seem oblivious to the problem.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan is joining forces with two unlikely allies, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, to push cities to fix failing schools.

University of California officials said Tuesday they will pay the medical expenses of students who were pepper sprayed during an Occupy Davis protest last week.

Authorities have also decided to drop charges against 10 people who were arrested during the Friday protest on the campus of UC Davis. The university system has also created an advisory panel to look into the incident, University of California President Mark Yudof said.

The chancellor of the University of California at Davis apologised to a crowd of more than 1,000 demonstrators for the use of pepper spray by campus police on protesters last week.

The California State University Board voted Wednesday to approve a 9-percent, system-wide tuition hike for all 23 CSU campuses, sparking a violent confrontation in Long Beach that injured three officers, according to a CSU spokesman.

An elementary school counselor has been arrested for sending nude pictures of herself to a 15-year-old boy, investigators said.

Her mother Jane West is now considering taking her daughter, who was born in Virginia, out of the school and suing the district over the affair.

Raymond G. and Ruth C. Perelman U. of Pennsylvania, Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine (Philadelphia) $225-million

Lawrence J. and Barbara Brizdle Schoenberg $20-million

P. Roy and Diana T. Vagelos $13.6-million

Bruce Jacobs and Ken Levy $12-million

Doug and Julie Rock $10-million

Barry R. Lipman $6.5-million

James Joo-Kin Kim $6-million

Frank J. and Janet Glasgow Dudek $2.5-million

Keith L. and Katherine Sachs $2.5-million

Joseph and Isabel Prischak $2-million

John Gilmartin $1-million

Paul and Nancy Silvis $1-million

Joe Paterno transferred full ownership of his house to his wife, Sue, for $1 in July, less than four months before a sexual abuse scandal engulfed his Penn State football program and the university.

Documents filed in Centre County, Pa., show that on July 21, Paterno’s house near campus was turned over to “Suzanne P. Paterno, trustee” for a dollar plus “love and affection.” The couple had previously held joint ownership of the house, which they bought in 1969 for $58,000.

The United States has over 4,000 college institutions many which have been raising tuition and fees far faster than the overall rate of inflation. Combine this with a younger and poorer population and you have a recipe for massive debt serfdom. As the recession drags painfully on, being the deepest and longest economic contraction since the Great Depression many people are questioning once deeply held mantras of economic prophesy. A home never goes down in value. You can’t go wrong with a college education. Of course these hollow statements mean little without further examination of the details. Buying a home isn’t necessarily a bad decision but it can be a bad decision if you over leverage yourself like a Wall Street investment bank.

Readers here have come across one two university cover-ups in the last few years, so the news reported at Climate Audit that the President of Penn State university has been fired for failing to investigate allegations of paedophilia against one of football coaches is perhaps less of a surprise than it might be to others. For these latest allegations to be centred on Penn State - Michael Mann's place of work, and the university responsible for one of the Climategate non-inquiries adds a certain piquancy to the story.

Demonstrators at the University of California Berkeley were assaulted by police on Wednesday night for failing to leave a peaceful encampment they attempted to establish in solidarity with the nationwide Occupy Wall Street movement.

In conjunction with the Occupy protests, demonstrators in Berkeley rallied yesterday against corporate greed and corrupt financial institutions on the historic campus, which was instrumental in the free speech movement of the 1960s. Amanda Armstrong, an organizer of yesterday’s protests, told the school’s Daily Cal paper that the occupation of the campus was also to oppose the increased privatization of the school.

Since 2001, the U.S. has lost a total of more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities.

Vince Taylor doesn't fit the stereotype of unkempt twentysomething protesters at the Occupy Wall Street site in Manhattan, which was clear from the homemade canvas sign he held there.

It read: "75 AND DISGUSTED."

By the end of this year, Seung Lee, a science teacher at lower Manhattan's P.S. 1, expects to have spent $500 from his own pocket on school supplies.

"And that's a conservative estimate," said Lee, who has taught at P.S. 1 for nine years. "I'm afraid to tell my wife."

Lee's nine classes are exploding, some with 32 students. "Every desk is full. There's no space for anything," he said.

All this complicates the lab work he hoped to pursue. While his recent lesson on earthworms proceeded, he lost the ability to delve into the material. "With 32 kids, you spend a lot more time making sure everyone is doing it right, but not necessarily learning."

This year's math scores are the highest to date since 1990, when the test was first administered. But the scores remain dismal: Only 40 percent of fourth graders and 35 percent of eighth-grade students are performing at or above a level defined as "proficient." In reading, despite average scores reaching a similar peak, only 34 percent of students in both grades were rated "proficient."

"The modest increases in NAEP scores are reason for concern as much as optimism," U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement. "While student achievement is up since 2009 in both grades in mathematics and in 8th grade reading, it's clear that achievement is not accelerating fast enough to compete in the knowledge economy of the 21st century."

Greece is to hold a referendum on whether to accept the rescue package from the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund troika.