Parents and students beware. Under the guise of improving the learning environment, local schools might be offering more of the same social experimentation that already leads to less literacy and more juvenile delinquency in public school classrooms year after year.
For openers, be skeptical about the test scores and glowing reports from school boards. They might be offering them up so that they don’t lose government funding under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.
“Left with a free hand, the District of Columbia and 47 of the 50 states officially denied that they have any unsafe schools at all,” Lawrence A. Uzzell writes in The American Spectator. “The state and local education bureaucrats in charge of the most crime-ridden parts of places such as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York and Washington claimed in their NCLB reports that they did not have even one unsafe school.”
Uzzell worked as a staff member of both the U. S. Department of Education as well as on the U. S. House and Senate Committees on Education. Currently, he is a fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D. C.
Speaking of our nation’s capital, The Examiner, a Washington, D. C. tabloid newspaper, had a pair of headlines on September 1st that spoke volumes about the state of education in that locality. On page one: “D. C. test scores worst in nation.” On page three: “Two teachers’ union officials convicted.”
“Two former Washington Teachers’ Union officials were convicted Wednesday for their roles in an embezzlement scheme that robbed the union of $4.6 million over seven years,” Examiner staff writer Sarah Kelley wrote. “Gwendolyn Hemphill, 64, the union’s former office manager, and James O. Baxter II, 50, its former treasurer, were found guilty of a long list of charges including embezzlement, conspiracy, money laundering and fraud.”
Oh well, that might explain the math scores…
For its part, at least one school district in Virginia is trying to crack down on gangs, but its means of doing so may lead to the harassment of the innocent and a free hand for the guilty. “In one 45-minute lesson for seventh-graders, for example, educators plan to give students a list of tips [in order] to steer clear of gang recruiters: don’t date a gang member, stay away from areas where gang members hang out and avoid making eye contact with those in gangs,” Brian Westley of the Associated Press writes of a program in Fairfax County.
So far so good but check this out:
“Students will also be urged not to use gang-related signs or copy tattoos or other insignia,” according to Westley. “Even a seemingly harmless symbol such as [a] rosary could be misconstrued by observers.” So, gang members can continue to roam classrooms unmolested if they just remove their tattoos, but Catholic school girls must keep their First Communions and Confirmations a big secret?
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
