Saturday, January 26, 2013
Unqualified Teachers Cover Up Their Incompetence
Unqualified Teachers Cover Up Their Incompetence By Helping Students Cheat
Those familiar with this issue know there are numerous intertwined and overlapping reasons why American high school graduates are not prepared for college or the workplace. One reason is that leftwing indoctrination has supplanted teaching and learning as the overall thought unstated purpose of public education. Another reason is that liberals do not want young people to be able to read, write, compute, and think critically—it makes them harder to mislead. Yet another reason is that the development of academic discipline has been replaced by a focus on building self-esteem in students—a trend that has made hurting a student’s feelings by giving him honest feedback about sloppy, unacceptable work something akin to a capital crime.
There are many reasons for the poor state of public education in America, but in this column I will focus on one of the most disturbing of them: unqualified minority teachers who are given a “pass” in college by affirmative action advocates and, as a result, have to cheat in order to pass their teacher certification tests. Then, as teachers who lack both content mastery and fundamental teaching skills, they face the dilemma of being evaluated in part by how well their students perform on nationally-normed high school tests. This was one of the most contentious issues in the recent teacher strike in Chicago. Teachers’ unions did not want student performance to be part of teacher evaluations, for what should be obvious reasons.
What are teachers who can barely read, write, and compute themselves who were, in essence, given their college degrees by misguided liberal professors and who had to cheat to pass their teacher certification exams supposed to do when, predictably, their students perform poorly on high school tests? The answer is simple. They do what any cheater would do: cheat. More accurately, what they do is help their students cheat and the cycle of ignorance and incompetence continues. According to U.S. News & World Report, this is precisely what is happening in a surprising number of school systems across America—particularly big city school systems.
U.S. News & World Report carried a story titled “Educators Implicated in Atlanta Cheating Scandal.” The story revealed that for more than 10 years public school teachers and administrators had padded the scores of students on state-mandated assessments by reading the answers aloud during tests and even changing answers after students had submitted their tests. This was no isolated occurrence. Investigations revealed similar cheating scandals in Philadelphia, Houston, New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.
Recently a new scandal was uncovered. It seems that teacher education majors in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee hatched an ingenious plot for passing their teacher certification exams: they hired someone to take the exam for them. For just $1,500, a teacher wannabe could send a proxy to take his or her certification exam. The “agent” who arranged the proxies has since been caught and indicted.
What makes this scandalous situation even sadder is that a well-taught sixth grader could pass the teacher certification exam used in most states.
Any individual who cannot pass a teacher certification test should not have gotten out of high school much less college and certainly should not be a teacher. I asked a public school teacher to describe the hardest math question she had to complete on her teacher certification exam. She said the toughest question required her to add two fractions: ½ plus ¼. Then she said that more than half of the teacher candidates taking the test with her could not manage this simple computation. And we wonder why high school students are not prepared for college.
Friday, January 25, 2013
GUN BAN NONSENCE
President Obama has announced 23 executive actions relating to gun control, whether Congress acts or not. Included in those plans is a directive to the Centers for Disease Control to take your tax dollars and spend it on anti-gun propaganda, likening gun violence to a disease or a public health issue. It is the same thing he has done with Obamacare propaganda. Obama is treating our Bill of Rights like a plague.
Democrats in Congress are willing to help Obama destroy our Second Amendment rights. Senator Dianne Feinstein has unveiled her gun control legislation that I have mentioned before. Her actual proposal is much more severe than I expected, and it shows how far the Democrats are willing to go to wipe out our right to bear arms.
Feinstein wants to expand the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 and include rifles, handguns and shotguns. She would require grandfathered weapons to be entered into a national gun registry. Magazines would be limited to ten rounds.
And she would make it illegal to have just one cosmetic feature on a gun for it to be considered an assault weapon.
The Feinstein Gun Ban would:
*** Ban the sale, transfer,
importation, and manufacturing of 120 specifically named rifles,
shotguns and handguns!
*** Ban the sale, transfer,
importation and manufacturing of ALL
firearms with a detachable magazine and at least one "military
characteristic" -- which could mean just about anything that makes a
gun "look scary;"
*** Ban the sale, transfer,
importation, and manufacturing of magazines holding more than 10 rounds;
*** Force owners of ALL
"grandfathered" weapons to undergo an intrusive background check
and fingerprinting -- treating law-abiding citizens like criminals;
*** Force owners of ALL
"grandfathered" weapons to federally register their guns after
obtaining a permission slip from local law enforcement showing their
guns are not in violation of state or local law.
That’s right. If you own a $10 magazine that’s more than 10
rounds, you’ll have to register it with the BATFE in their National Firearms
Registry.
The ban on "transfers" means you and I can forget about ever handing down one of these guns to our kids and grandkids.
Worse, it could mean widows become instant felons if their husbands owned one of these banned magazines or firearms!
The ban on "transfers" means you and I can forget about ever handing down one of these guns to our kids and grandkids.
Worse, it could mean widows become instant felons if their husbands owned one of these banned magazines or firearms!
And make no mistake, the gun-grabbers’ TRUE
motives behind gun registration is always the same -- outright gun CONFISCATION,
and to do that they must first register every gun and gun owner.
Then Senator Feinstein will be able to achieve her publicly stated goal:
"Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in."
I have three points I want to make:
Then Senator Feinstein will be able to achieve her publicly stated goal:
"Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in."
I have three points I want to make:
FIRST POINT… Increasing gun sales in America
in recent years has led to lower crime rates.
The same is true all over the world. Studies show countries with low rates of civilian firearms ownership are the most violent. Countries with high rates of civilian firearms ownership are the safest. Just look to nearby Mexico if you want to see an example of the gun-grabbers’ idea of utopia. Effectively ruled by violent drug gangs in many areas, Mexico is a cesspool of rape, violence and murder.
SECOND POINT… The mainstream media has admitted no assault weapons were used in the attack at Sandy Hook. So, what’s the point of banning everything that is (in your mind) an assault weapon?
The same is true all over the world. Studies show countries with low rates of civilian firearms ownership are the most violent. Countries with high rates of civilian firearms ownership are the safest. Just look to nearby Mexico if you want to see an example of the gun-grabbers’ idea of utopia. Effectively ruled by violent drug gangs in many areas, Mexico is a cesspool of rape, violence and murder.
SECOND POINT… The mainstream media has admitted no assault weapons were used in the attack at Sandy Hook. So, what’s the point of banning everything that is (in your mind) an assault weapon?
THIRD POINT… Just what the hall is an assault weapon?
I believe by military the
definition, an assault rifle first and foremost must be fully automatic. Using that definition, they have been illegal
for civilians to own every since 1935 unless they have been disabled.
Anything that is used to assault
another person can be considered an assault weapon and anything that is used to
defend your self is without question, a DEFENSIVE weapon. If someone stabs another person with a
butter knife, that's an "assault weapon". Using that term is
laughable to describe any weapon. Any
object used in an assault, is an "assault weapon" by definition, even
if it's a rock.
FACT:
"Assault Hammers" were used 1.53 times more than rifles to murder 496
people in 2011; (which is why I'm putting trigger locks on all of my assault
hammers.)
Strangely
enough the weapon that killed more people than any other only carries 5 rounds.
The 98K Mauser is that weapon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karabiner_98k
WILL YOU FIRE ON US CITIZENS?
Obama
Asks Military Leaders If They Will “Fire On US Citizens”
This will come as a surprise
to many of you, and some of you will refuse to believe it.
IT COMES AS NO SURPRISE TO
ME, AND I DO BELIEVE EVERY WORD OF IT.
As a matter of fact, if you
read some of my previous emails and blog posts, you will see I have been predicting
this for some time.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
ANSWER MY QUESTION
Checks and Balances
Checks and balances is the primary difference between a
dictatorship and the complicated system of government our founding fathers came
up with for this country.
Just in case you have forgotten the most important thing you
learned in your high school civics class, here is a brief refresher: Our Founding Fathers created a system of
divided government, where the power at the federal government is separated
among three distinct branches: the legislative (Congress), the executive (the
president) and the judiciary (the Supreme Court).
That system served us well until a Marxist closet Muslim who
most likely isn’t even a citizen managed to get himself elected not once, but
twice. As a matter of fact, there is
already a movement under way to get him elected for a third term. I know what you’re thinking. “He can’t do that. He’s limited by law to just two terms.” Trust me, the movement to repeal that law is
already in the works and if something isn’t done, it will happen.
Some examples:
- Two days after he took office, President Obama rescinded by executive order the “Mexico City policy,” which prevents foreign aid going to organizations that perform or promote abortions. No legislation passed, no debate, just an executive order.
- In early 2011, the Obama administration stop enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, a law duly passed by Congress and signed into law. Here President Obama has directed his Department of Justice to ignore the Constitution and separation of powers and not enforce a law.
- In early 2012, Obama’s Health and Human Services department set forth the so-called “contraceptive mandate,” which requires all employers – including religious charities and institutions – to provide free contraception to all employees, a clear violation of the Constitution’s guarantees for freedom of conscience and freedom of religion.
- Last June, the president announced that the Department of Homeland Security will no longer deport young illegal immigrants who meet certain criteria. These criteria were proposed by the controversial DREAM Act, which has been working its way through Congress but has not been passed into law. Forget about whether this is a good law or a bad one; it’s about respecting the legislative process and letting these issues be debated and discussed. No, instead the president just picked aspects of the bill he liked and ordered his administration to follow them, even if they are illegal.
- Earlier this month, as the nation endured the “fiscal cliff” crises and negotiation, the administration floated the idea of minting the trillion-dollar coin. Why? Because the president needs Congress to raise the debt ceiling for the U.S. Treasury to borrow more to fund the government. Rather than have to negotiate with Congress, he could have had the U.S. Mint create a coin for $1 trillion and deposit it in the treasury. Though ultimately rejected as an idea, once again here was a plan to avoid confronting the “check” in the system – the Republican-controlled House.
The Bill of Rights clearly states that our government cannot stand in the way of law-abiding citizens using their legal firearms as a means of self-protection.
My question for you is quite simple: What do you, as a law abiding, tax paying
American citizen intend to do about it?
This blog has a comments section.
I’ll be waiting for your answer…
Petition to Congress:
Petition2Congress: Investigate Barack Obama’s Use of Forged SSN
On 01.16.2013, Attorney Orly Taitz filed a petition with the U.S. Congress entitled “Start immediate investigation of Barack Obama’s use of forged IDs and a CT SSN which was never assigned to him according to e-verify.”The petition states the following:
On April 15, 2010 Obama posted his 2009 tax returns on line. He forgot to flatten the PDF file and his full unredacted Social Security number xxx-xx-4425 became known to the public. This number immediately raised suspicions of Attorney Orly Taitz, as it started with 042, a digit combination which was assigned to the state of CT and Obama was never a resident of CT.
E-verify and SSNVS showed that this number used by Barack Obama was never assigned to him. We have an individual sitting in the WH as the US president and Commander-in-Chief, in control of our nuclear arsenal, while using a stolen/fraudulently obtained Social Security number from a state where he never resided. Additionally, former Chief Investigator of the special investigations unit of the U.S. Coast Guard Jeffrey Stephan Coffman prepared a sworn affidavit for Attorney Orly Taitz showing that Obama’s alleged application for the Selective Service is a forgery. According to 5 USC § 3328.one is forbidden from holding a position in the executive branch if he did not register for the Selective Service. Obama never legally registered for the selective service, as his application is a forgery, as such he is forbidden to work as a President in the White House…..
To View the Petition: http://www.petition2congress.com/9026/start-immediate-investigation-barack-obamas-use-forged-ids-ct-ssn/
Medications behind school massacres
This article from “world net daily” makes a lot of sense to me. I believe we are giving kids a whole lot of medications today that they would be better off without. When I was a kid, these drugs didn’t exist and we got along just fine without them. I’m not saying these drugs are the only reason for all the school shootings. I’m just saying they part of the problem.
Society conducting 'vast social experiment' without knowing its end.
From World Net DailyNEW YORK – If lawmakers and authorities are truly concerned about stopping gun violence in schools, they need to take a close look at the prescription of psychotropic drugs for children and young people, says a leading psychiatrist.
In an exclusive in-person interview in New York City with WND, London-based Dr. David Healy criticized pharmaceutical companies that have made billions of dollars marketing Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, known as SSRIs.
Psychotropic drugs “prescribed for school children cause violent behavior,” Healy stated.
The drugs are widely used in the U.S. as antidepressants by doctors working in the mental health field and increasingly by primary care doctors, he noted.
Healey insisted the problem today is that doctors working with schools to control the behavior of children are inclined to prescribe SSRI drugs without serious consideration of adverse consequences.
“The pharmaceutical companies made these drugs with the idea of making money,” he said. “There’s a wide range of problems when it comes to looking at these drugs for children. Very few children have serious problems that warrant treatment with pills that have the risks SSRI drugs have.”
The drugs can make children “aggressive and hostile,” he noted.
“Children taking SSRI drugs are more likely to harm or to injure other children at school,” said Healy. “The child may be made suicidal.
“We are giving drugs to children who are passing through critical development stages, and as a society we are really conducting a vast experiment and no one really knows what the outcome of that will be.”
Healey cautioned that there is a very high correlation between mass shootings and use of the drugs.
“When roughly nine out of every 10 cases in these school shootings and mass shootings involve these drugs being prescribed, then at least a significant proportion of these cases were either caused by the drugs or the drugs made a significant contribution to the problem,” he said.
President Obama, in a series of 23 presidential memoranda and proclamations signed last week, called for the Centers for Disease control to undertake research to examine gun violence and to explore medical means to control the problem.
WND contended that putting more mental illness screening into schools would actually increase the incidence of school shootings, not reduce the violence.
“You can draw a line between the number of child psychiatrists in the United States and the number of school shootings, and you will find that both have gone up in the same direction at the same time,” he said.
He sees a “propaganda campaign” being conducted in the U.S. in the wake of the Aurora, Colo., cinema shooting and the Newtown, Conn., school shooting asserting gun violence is being caused by mental illness and could be stopped by additional school programs that screen for it.
“If school children are screened for mental illness problems, this presumably will lead more medical doctors to put more students on more pills,” he said. “I would predict then the outcome of more school screenings for mental illness will be more mass killings, even if the guns are taken away and the mass killings are not done with guns.”
He cautioned shareholders of pharmaceutical companies to realize share prices can be adversely affected should judges and juries determine the companies bear legal liabilities. Law enforcement investigators could conclude one of the company’s medications was prescribed to a child who ended up perpetrating a school shooting.
Healy cautioned that medical doctors who prescribe pills do not necessarily cure mental illness problems.
Dr. David Healy
He argued that today medical doctors are inclined to solve a wide range of
health problems by prescribing drugs. In previous generations, however,
extended families were capable of providing a context of family history to
understand behavioral problems and to identify a wide range of problem-solving
treatments. The families understood the issue as a developmental problem better
treated by family intervention than by medicine.“Market research, for instance, has made pharmaceutical companies realize it is much harder to sell drugs for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, ADHD, in a home or a community where the child’s grandmother is likely to be present,” he explained. “Because, of course, the grandmother may say, ‘That kid doesn’t need pills. His father was just like him, and look, his father turned out alright.’ Medicine intervenes with pills when communities have lost their roots in families.”
Healy also expressed distress that information available to pharmaceutical companies exposing adverse side effects of SSRI medications is not made available to the public.
To solve this problem, Healy has created a website, RxISK.org, that allows the posting of personal experiences with SSRI drugs by people who have had personal experience or have had partners, parents, children or friends injured by them. These are people, the website says, “who have found themselves trapped in a Kafkaesque world when they have sought help from doctors, regulators, or others who seem to be there to help us” The goal of RxISK.org is to create a database open to the public that provides a report a patient can take to a doctor or pharmacist to support and inform a conversation about the adverse sides of a particular SSRI drug.
Independently, a sortable database of 4,800 cases in which SSRI drugs have been associated with violent behavior in the U.S. and worldwide has been posted on the Internet, compiled from incidents that have appeared in the media, scientific journals and Federal Drug Administration testimony.SSRI drugs covered in the sortable database include Prozac (fluoxetine), Zoloft (sertraline), Paxil (paroxetine), Celexa (citalopram), Lexapro (escitalopram) and Luvox (fluvoxamine).
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