Thoughts From A Conservative Mom

Posts Tagged ‘Public Schools’

Earlier this week, an irate mom tweeted a photo her child had taken in class, in which the teacher openly mocked Fox News as an example of “media bias”:

The teacher was trying to explain what media bias looks like. Fox News was the only media example she used (because no other media outlets are biased, dontcha know?). FYI, snarky Wonka memes are an example of TEACHER bias, not media bias.

This is so typical. I remember from my “Critical Thinking” class in college, I could tell you exactly how the textbook authors and teachers voted by the end of the class. Their bias was that obvious.    Of course, you expect that now in universities, but it’s already seeped down to grades K-12.

In Wisconsin, a crossword puzzle assigned to 8th graders told students that “conservative” meant “restricting personal freedoms“:

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.

Read more at The Blaze

In New York, students were asked to write an essay from the Nazi perspective of “Why Jews Are Evil”:

An unnamed English teacher at Albany High School who wanted to “challenge” his/her students to “formulate a persuasive argument” tasked them with writing an essay about why “Jews are evil,” as if they were trying to convince a Nazi official of their loyalty. One third of the class refused, and the principal has apologized while insisting that there wasn’t any “malice or intent to cause any insensitivities to our families of Jewish faith.”

Read more at New York Magazine

Only one-third of the class refused.  That means, even with the example of principled resistance before them, two-thirds of the class went along with it!

In Florida, a father was stunned to discover this note written in crayon in his son’s handwriting:

The words are written in crayon, in the haphazard bumpiness of a child’s scrawl.

“I am willing to give up some of my constitutional rights in order to be safer or more secure.”

They’re the words that Florida father Aaron Harvey was stunned to find his fourth-grade son had written, after a lesson in school about the Constitution.

Harvey’s son attends Cedar Hills Elementary in Jacksonville, Fla. Back in January, a local attorney came in to teach the students about the Bill of Rights. But after the attorney left, fourth-grade teacher Cheryl Sabb dictated the sentence to part of the class and had them copy it down, he said.

Read more at The Blaze

If you think these are isolated incidents that would never happen at your child’s school, think again.  These are just the more blatantly obvious ones that happened to get caught.   The real indoctrination happens far more subtly, through half-truths and omissions, false assumptions, stories that manipulate the emotions and pressure to agree with the teacher and follow the crowd.  Day after day, year after year, they slowly break down the child’s resistance to their view of the world.

School Tells Students, Americans Don’t Have Right to Bear Arms

CSCOPE: Exposing The New Marxist Public School Curriculum

America’s School Children Being Indoctrinated With Marxism

Progressive-Communist Teachers Indoctrinate Children To Become Marxist

Public Education: Progressive Indoctrination Camps

Stalin-style U.S. public education

New Book Exposes the Effort to Introduce Radical Political Philosophy into K-12 Classrooms

Third Graders Want to Tax “Greedy” Rich, Marybeth Hicks Says Don’t Let Your Kids Drink The Marxist Koolaid

Progressive-Communist Teachers Indoctrinate Children To Become Marxist

Common Core is a federal attempt to nationalize curriculum.  We MUST oppose this, from every school board!

Americans For Prosperity is sounding the alarm:

Critics of the Common Core State Standards had our fears confirmed on Monday when Education Week reported that the Department of Education will oversee the assessment test design for the new national standards. This is no April Fool’s joke: Washington will soon be directly regulating what America’s schoolchildren learn and on what they are tested. This massive expansion of federal power is concerning considering the federal government’s failed history of intervening in public education.

As I recently explained in AFP Foundation’s school choice policy report, the federal government has had its meddling hands in America’s public schools for decades. From the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to No Child Left Behind today, Congress has provided Title I federal funding to schools with low-income student bodies for the past half-century. But, this money is by no means free. As is often the case with federal funds, Title I comes with strings attached – which explains how Washington has been such a major player in American education despite the fact that public schools are function of the states.

[...]  After decades of failed federal intervention in America’s public schools, Common Core’s similar approach of centrally planning public schools has worried education reformers since the initiative was launched in 2009. For years, proponents of the standards have tried to soothe these fears by emphasizing that they are not administered by the federal government. Common Core’s official website, for example, downplays the protests by claiming “[t]he federal government had no role in the development of the Common Core State Standards and will not have a role in their implementation.”

Perhaps this claim could hold water four years ago, but today it’s evident that Common Core is nothing more than a federal ruse to exert even greater control over America’s classrooms.  [...]

[I]t looks like Common Core is poised to repeat and amplify the federal government’s failed educational interventions by giving the central government even greater control of what American schoolchildren are learning. If the success of school choice has taught  us anything, it’s that education is most effective when controlled by actors on the local level, like teachers with freedom in how to teacher their students at charter schools, or parents with options of where to send their child to school through opportunity scholarships. Choice from the bottom, not force from the top, leads to effective learning.

Read more at AFP

Attention, parents: Common Core opt-out form now available

Six Reasons Why Conservatives Should Object to the Common Core

‘Common Core’ Threatens Homeschooling Freedom

Feds Launch Intrusive New ‘Common Core’ Student Tracking Database – Time To Opt Out!

‘Common Core’ Banishes Literature, Replaces With Government Propaganda

CSCOPE: Exposing The New Marxist Public School Curriculum

Obama Takes Over Public Schools With ‘ObamaCore’ Curriculum

Rotten to the Core: Reader feedback from the frontlines

Rotten to the Core, Part 1: Obama’s War on Academic Standards

Rotten to the Core, Part 2: Readin’, writin’ and deconstructionism

Rotten to the Core, Part 3: Lessons from Texas and the Growing Grassroots Revolt

Rotten to the Core, Part 4: The Feds’ Invasive Student Tracking Database

Support School Choice!

Plain meaning: if government militias get to carry arms, so do the citizens!

This is one of the reasons why it is an incredibly dangerous conflict of interest for the government to be shaping the hearts and minds of future voters.  Clearly, the Left wants the next generation of Americans to believe that they have no unalienable right to self-defense, from the government or anyone else.   They start by indoctrinating the young.

The Left knows it’s better to apologize after the fact than ask for permission. The seeds of deception have already been planted in these kids’ minds. They’ll let the outrage settle down, and then try again. This is why parents should have the choice to send their children to a school that isn’t out to indoctrinate their kids!

Todd Starnes reports at Fox News:

The father of a Connecticut child is furious after discovering that his son’s school is teaching students that Americans don’t have a Second Amendment right to bear arms.

“I am appalled,” said Steven Boibeaux, of Bristol. “It sounds to me like they are trying to indoctrinate our kids.”

Boibeaux’s son is an eighth grader at Northeast Middle School. On Monday his social studies teacher gave students a worksheet titled, ‘The Second Amendment Today.’

“The courts have consistently determined that the Second Amendment does not ensure each individual the right to bear arms,” the worksheet states. “The courts have never found a law regulating the private ownership of weapons unconstitutional.

The worksheet, published by Instructional Fair, goes on to say that the Second Amendment is not incorporated against the states.

“This means that the rights of this amendment are not extended to the individual citizens of the states,” the worksheet reads. “So a person has no right to complain about a Second Amendment violation by state laws.”

According to the document, the Second Amendment “only provides the right of a state to keep an armed National Guard.”

Boibeaux said he discovered the worksheet as he was going over his son’s homework assignments.

“I’m more than a little upset about this,” he told Fox News. “It’s not up to the teacher to determine what the Constitution means.”

Mat Staver, the founder and chairman of the Liberty Counsel, called the lesson propaganda – that is “absolutely false.”

“In fact, the US Supreme Court has affirmed that the Second Amendment ensures the individual the right to bear arms,” Staver told Fox News. “The progressive interpretation of the Second Amendment is that it doesn’t give you the right to bear arms – that it’s a corporate right of the government – but that has been rejected by the Courts.”

Read more at Fox News

Gun Hysteria Leads To Harrassment Of Innocent Children In Public Schools

Schools’ ‘Zero Tolerance’ Weapons Policies Used To Bully Innocent Children

Brainwashing Kids About Guns

Brainwashing Kids About Guns: the Sequel

The Second Amendment: Much Ado about Firearms

What We Believe, Part 5: Gun Rights

As the Democrats prepare to try to take back the House in 2014, they are beginning to realize that Obama’s permanent campaign arm, “Organizing For Action,” isn’t necessarily in their camp.   They are competing with the Democrat party for fundraising dollars, and using the money to prop up the Cult of Obama, not the Democrat party.

Anyone who has been paying attention to the Obamessiah’s narcissistic behavior for the past four years could have seen this coming a mile away.   Sadly, it appears the suckers at the DNC are only just realizing that their idol’s just not that into them.

Anita Kumar reports at McClatchy:

President Barack Obama’s decision to launch his own political organization has some Democrats wondering: Is he just in it for himself?

Obama’s new group, Organizing for Action, will focus on his policy agenda – not on electing Democratic candidates – by raising unlimited amounts of cash and accessing the president’s secret list of 20 million supporters, volunteers and donors.

The operation won’t share money, resources or the priceless Obama email list with the Democratic National Committee or campaign committees that help elect members of Congress, governors and legislators. And it has no plans to coordinate efforts, leading some Democrats to worry that it will take money and manpower away from the party as it heads into the 2014 elections for control of Congress.

“There’s only so much money to go around in Democratic circles. There’s a limited pool of resources,” said Gilda Cobb Hunter, a South Carolina legislator and a member of the Democratic National Committee. “Why can’t we strengthen one entity?”

[...]  Days before his second term began, Obama announced that his campaign would morph into a nonprofit, tax-exempt group to rally support across the country for his agenda. “Organizing for Action will be an unparalleled force in American politics,” he told supporters.

Other presidents have created or championed organizations outside the major national parties. Bill Clinton, for example, embraced the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization that pushed a moderate agenda.

But that functioned more as a think tank. And Obama is the first to form a group that will raise millions of dollars as it seeks to perpetuate a year-round campaign for him.

The decision to create Organizing for Action separate from the DNC, where a similar group was housed after the 2008 election, has prompted some Democrats to accuse Obama of focusing more on his legacy and less on his party.

Read more at McClatchy News

What does Obama have to gain from withholding the e-mail list, siphoning away donations, and otherwise threatening to weaken the DNC’s 2014 campaign efforts?   Is he trying to force them to come crawling to him to stay in power?

Democrats Begin to Fear Super Obama

Community-Organizer-In-Chief Reboots 2012 Campaign Machine As Political Activist Group Devoted To…Himself

Permanent Campaign: Obama SOTU Launches ‘Organizing for Action’ Nationwide

Obama’s New ‘Organizing For Action’ Brownshirt Brigade Teaming Up With George Soros

Community-Organizer-In-Chief’s ‘Organizing For Action’ Caught Selling Access To White House

Non-Stop Activism: How The Left Is Beating Us In Between Elections

Obama’s Alinsky Tactics Go into Overdrive

Short answer: because if they acknowledge parents’ fundamental right to educate their children, they will have to recognize it for all parents here, as well.

Dell Tackett warns at Truth Observed:

Uwe and Hanna are home-school parents from Germany. But Germany doesn’t tolerate home schooling. Those who do are harassed, fined, imprisoned, and can lose custody of their children. Uwe and Hanna had such a religious and moral problem with what German government schools were teaching that they chose to school their children themselves, just as millions in this country do every day. But Germany’s laws, based upon a 1938 law signed by Adolph Hitler, believe that Germany’s children belong to the State from an educational standpoint. The law prohibits parents from educating their own children so that Germany can prevent a different worldview, or “society” as the law states, from arising.

After increased persecution from the German state, Uwe and Hanna fled to the United States. A Federal judge heard the arguments and granted them asylum, stating that Germany’s law and policy was “Nazi-esque”.

Immediately, the Obama Administration filed suit against the ruling and will bring the case before the United States Court of Appeal for the Sixth Court on April 23. They are seeking to deport the Romeike family, which would send Uwe and Hanna back to Germany to face jail and possibly the loss of their children.

Why does the administration seek to do this?

Because it agrees with the German law. It doesn’t believe that parents have a right to educate their children. It is more in line with the National Education Association that homeschooling shouldn’t be allowed. It believes that the government can best educate “America’s children”. It doesn’t want another worldview taught in this country. It wants America’s children to have one worldview and one worldview only.

That is why they don’t want to grant asylum to the Romeike family. That would affirm parental rights—rights that have been fought for by so many courageous parents over the last 40 years in this country. Rights that I believe will take a serious hit if this case is won by the Administration.

Think of it this way: if the Administration wins this case, the legal statement and precedence will be set that parents do not have a fundamental right to educate their children and if the State were to ban home schooling, it would not be a violation of parental rights at all.

Read more at Truth Observed

A plea from abused homeschoolers

Attorney General Holder: Parents Have No Right to Educate their Children

German Homeschooling Family Flees to US

Flashback: US grants home schooling German family political asylum

Crackdown on Homeschooling in the Near Future?

Threat to Parents’ Rights a Bigger Issue than Rights of a Child

NO ONE is exempt from the new federal power-grab over education, which is designed to force all states and schools to teach a government-approved (Marxist?) curriculum.

William Estrada warns at HSLDA:

The CCSS removes education standards from the purview of state and local control to being controlled by unaccountable education policy experts sitting in a board room far removed from the parents, students, and teachers who are most critical to a child’s educational success.

Will the CCSS Affect Homeschools?

The CCSS specifically do not apply to private or homeschools, unless they receive government dollars (online charter school programs have no such protection). However, HSLDA has serious concerns with the rush to adopt the CCSS. HSLDA has fought national education standards for the past two decades. Why? National standards lead to national curriculum and national tests, and subsequent pressure on homeschool students to be taught from the same curricula.

The College Board—the entity that created the PSAT and SAT—has already indicated that its signature college entrance exam will be aligned with the CCSS. And many homeschoolers worry that colleges and universities may look askance at homeschool graduates who apply for admission if their highschool transcripts are not aligned with the CCSS.

Read more at HSLDA

Cheeky Bums answers homeschoolers’ FAQ’s:

The more that I read and study, the more convinced I am of the extreme detriment that the Common Core (CC) poses, not just to our children and our educational system – but to our country.

There are a few questions and comments that I have received this past week, some ranging from fear, and some from outright astonishment that I would even propose that CC presents a risk.  I want to, as succintly as possible, answer some of these…

The Common Core is being introduced into the PUBLIC school, so if I’m homeschooling, I don’t need to worry, right?

WRONG.  The CC is being adopted by 45 of the 50 states, including the District of Columbia, and it’s goal is NOT educational excellence.  One look at the standards and examples that we detailed in our previous post will undeniably confirm that.  The goal of Common Core is CONTROL.  The government is seeking to Nationalize educational standards, which goes COMPLETELY against that 10th Amendment of the Constitution, which outlines education as being within the scope of the State government, not the Federal government. If the States decide not to adopt CC, they will not be granted federal dollars, so although it’s not a mandate, it’s a mob version of law via monetary coercion.

Furthermore, homeschoolers will eventually need to meet the same educational standard and use CC approved/aligned curricula because the SATs, State tests and GEDs will all be modified to fit the new CC standards.

But homeschoolers traditionally test higher in academics, so I’m not worried.  My child will do fine on the tests. 

Although it’s true that homeschoolers traditionally, on average, test significantly higher than their publicly educated peers, this is not a safeguard given what is coming down the pipeline in terms of change.   Standardized testing is slated to be reformatted and rewritten, so we’re talking about a totally different measure of scope and sequence.  For example, math problem, as formed by the CC, are based on mental and verbal math; the emphasis is now on the process, not the answer.  Eventually, CC-educated students will be asked to verbally explain their method for solving the problem, regardless of whether or not the answer was correct.  If your homeschooled Senior can successfully complete complex mathematical algorithms but he is unable to explain how he got his answer, he will not pass.

Additionally, the literature requirements are changing significantly.  Non-fiction manuals are now required to compose 70% of your child’s “literature” by the time they graduate.   Here is a sample of the suggested reading within the CC:

• Petroski, Henry. “The Evolution of the Grocery Bag.”
• California Invasive Plant Council. Invasive Plant Inventory
• Kurlansky, Mark. Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World.
• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency/U.S. Department of Energy. Recommended Levels of Insulation
• FedViews by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
• Calishain, Tara, and Rael Dornfest. Google Hacks: Tips & Tools for Smarter Searching, 2nd Edition
• Fischetti, Mark. “Working Knowledge: Electronic Stability Control.”
• U.S. General Services Administration. Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management
• Gawande, Atul. “The Cost Conundrum: Health Care Costs in McAllen, Texas.”

As enlightening as they may be, we’ll be tossing out “To Kill A Mockingbird”, “The Scarlet Letter” , Shakespeare and many other classics in lieu of “The Evolution Of The Grocery Bag”.  Therefore, as homeschoolers, if we haven’t been reading the above list with our Seniors, they have no hope of passing the SATs or GEDs, because we’re talking about two completely different lists of topics and material.

But as a homeschooler, I get to choose my own curriculum, so it’s my decision what my children will read and study. 

True, for now.  However, I was disheartened to see that many large homeschool publishers have already, or are planning to, rewrite their curriculum in order to meet CC standards.   For a very thorough and growing list, check out the curriculum updates on The Educational Freedom Coalition.

Read more FAQ at Cheeky Bums

And then they came for the Homeschoolers

Education Policy Expert on Threat of Common Core Standards to Homeschoolers

‘Common Core’ Banishes Literature, Replaces With Government Propaganda

Obama Takes Over Public Schools With ‘ObamaCore’ Curriculum

CSCOPE: Exposing The New Marxist Public School Curriculum

Feds Launch Intrusive New ‘Common Core’ Student Tracking Database – Time To Opt Out!

Creepy doesn’t begin to describe this.

Liz Klimas reports a The Blaze:

As part of the government’s initiative to institute Common Core standards for education, so comes a system that would mine information about students to establish best practices for effective teaching. But some think the technology that would conduct the mining crosses a line.

[...]  In the draft “Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century” report released in February by the Department of Education is a section detailing how to measure such qualities in a student through Behavioral Task Performance.

“Behavioral task performance measures are the broad set of methods used to capture behaviors consistent with perseverance or lack thereof—and in many cases, associated emotional experiences, physical movements or facial expressions, physiological responses, and thoughts— that students do in response to a particular challenge,” the report states.

[...]  Understanding the emotions or physiological state of a student while they’re presented with a challenge, the report said, can be measured through “analysis of facial expressions, EEG brain wave patterns, skin conductance, heart rate variability, posture and eye- tracking.”

The report presents this figure showing a variety of sensors that could be used to determine the emotional state of a student while performing a certain task:

“Sensors provide constant, parallel streams of data and are used with data mining techniques and self-report measures to examine frustration, motivation/flow, confidence, boredom and fatigue,” the report states.

It presents MIT’s Mood Meter — a device that captures facial expression through a camera on a laptop while software analyses the mood — as an example of technology that can conduct these measurements.  [...]

A study in 1999 published by MIT researchers delved into the use of a posture-sensing chair to evaluate a student. The experiment using a chair with pressure sensors on the seat and back evaluated student interest in order to better learn how to improve the experience for students in a computer-learning situation.

But a camera, chair, mouse and wristband equipped with sensors to track different metrics isn’t not all. The report also highlights the value of FMRI (functional magnetic resonance imagery), which would reveal different areas of activity in the brain through scans.

Read more at The Blaze

Apparently they see classrooms full of children as guinea pigs who can be used for their Frankenexperiments – a captive audience that can’t leave once they find out that they have become the show.

Feds Launch Intrusive New ‘Common Core’ Student Tracking Database – Time To Opt Out!

Attention, parents: Common Core opt-out form now available

Common Core is Not Just About Standards, it’s also about Data Mining

‘Common Core’ Banishes Literature, Replaces With Government Propaganda

Obama Takes Over Public Schools With ‘ObamaCore’ Curriculum

Data-Crazy Department of Education Throws Privacy Out the Window

From our nation’s founding until the Supreme Court ruling on Engel vs. Vitale in 1962, school children across the country began their day with a prayer like this:

“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.”

How shockingly “offensive” to ask God to bless us, huh?

Until 1963, students could voluntarily choose an elective such as “New Testament Survey,” which studied the most influential book in history (especially Western Civilization).   Teachers could read from the Bible in a historical context, and teach children to recite “The Lord’s Prayer” (seeing as it’s the most well-known poem in the world).

But now, no more.  American school children have no idea of where common cultural references such as “David vs. Goliath,” “The Golden Rule” or “going the extra mile” come from.   The have no frame of reference for understanding why the Reformation was such a pivotal point in European history, how Henry VIII’s break away from Rome was so significant, and the reason why the Puritans and Separatists were so intent on escaping to the New World.   Children today aren’t taught where Thomas Jefferson got the phrase “Nature’s God” for the Declaration of Independence, or why our founders built our nation on the idea that unalienable rights come from our Creator.

They have no idea of an absolute moral standard – a Natural Law – which no man, woman, king or president is above.

And that’s exactly how tyrants want it.  If there is no recognized authority above the state, the state reigns supreme in people’s lives, and can do as it pleases with no accountability.

Pope Francis witnessed this first-hand in Argentina, and he offered this warning:

In a 2011 book,  Cardinal Jorge Maria Bergoglio, the new Pope Francis, stated that parents have a right to raise their children in accordance with their religious beliefs and that sometimes when the government intervenes to deprive young people of that religious element, it can produce terrible consequences, including “cases like Nazism” whereby many students were indoctrinated with views alien to those espoused their parents.

The book, in Spanish, is entitled Sobre El Cielo Y La Tierra (On Heaven and Earth), by Jorge Bergoglio and Abraham Skorka, the latter an Argentinan rabbi. The book is in interview-style and Skorka asks the cardinal a variety of questions throughout 29 chapters.

In Chapter 18, “Sobre la educacion” (On Education), the future Pope Francis says, “In the Bible, God presents himself as a teacher. ‘Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, who took them in my arms,’ it says.  A believer is obliged to raise his children. Every man and every woman has a right to educate their children in their religious values.”

“When a government deprives children of this formation, it can lead to cases like Nazism, whereby children were indoctrinated with values opposite to those of their parents. Totalitarianism tends to take over education so it can use the water for its own mill,” said then-Cardinal Bergogolio.

Read more at CNS News

Why Christians Should Care About School Choice

IndoctriNation: A Powerful Film for Christian Parents

Why is the Church Silent on Education?

School Forces Child to Remove ‘God’ From Veteran’s Day Poem: ‘Separation of Church & State’

Calif. Teacher Punishes Students for Saying ‘God Bless You’

Second-grader suspended over drawing of Jesus

Judge rules against student’s religious expression

ACLU suit forces NJ students to cover, avoid religious symbols by using side door to auditorium

God & Country Banned in Public Schools?

Canada Violates Religious Liberty, Forces Private Catholic Schools To Teach Moral Relativism

Here we go…more bullying of innocent children by the paranoid, overly-sensitive “politically correct” crowd.

ABC 15 reports:

BALTIMORE – A 7-year-old Maryland boy has been suspended from school after biting his breakfast pastry into a shape that his teacher thought looked like a gun.

Josh Welch, a second-grader at Park Elementary School in Baltimore, said he was trying to nibble his strawberry Pop Tart into a mountain.

“It was already a rectangle and I just kept on biting it and biting it and tore off the top and it kinda looked like a gun but it wasn’t,” Josh said. “All I was trying to do was turn it into a mountain but it didn’t look like a mountain really and it turned out to be a gun kinda.”

But when his teacher saw what he had done, the boy says she got “pretty mad” and he knew he was “in big trouble.”

Josh’s dad was called by the school and informed that his son had been suspended for two days.

Read more at ABC 15

The sight of a pastry in the shape of a gun has been deemed so traumatic, the school is offering counseling to any students whose irrational fear of pop tarts might have been triggered.

Doug Powers writes at Michelle Malkin:

A Baltimore area elementary school recently suspended a seven year old boy for chewing a breakfast pastry into a shape resembling a gun. There also seems to be some dispute over whether the boy said “bang bang” after doing so (some also claim there might have been a second Pop-Tarter on the grassy knoll).

For any students who were traumatized by the frightening toaster strudel ordeal, counseling is available:

The school sent home a letter to parents saying, “During breakfast this morning, one of our students used food to make inappropriate gestures that disrupted the class. While no physical threats were made and no one was harmed, the student had to be removed from the classroom.”

Parents should talk to their children if they’re troubled by the incident, the school said, and the school counselor will be available for any student who needs to talk.

It’s been pointed out that because the Pop Tart had a filling, the pastry weapon was likely considered to be loaded — a much more egregious zero-tolerance violation indeed — hence the suspension.

The letter sent to the parents of students is here. The educators will now undoubtedly insist that any Pop Tarts consumed on school property undergo a mandatory 24-hour cooling off period after coming out of the toaster.

Read more at Michelle Malkin

Pundit and Pundette wonders why more conservatives aren’t pulling their kids out of government schools that are inflicting this kind of abuse and indoctrination on their children:

Creating irrational fears in children is abusive. Also damaging to young souls and minds is the institutionalized squelching of the imagination and the subverting of rationality (kids know that gun-shaped Pop Tarts can’t hurt them), both evident in the Pop Tart incident. One wonders if the cogs in this machine ever speculate on the real purpose behind bureaucratic promotion of absurd, arbitrary rules, baseless fears, and mental paralysis. Hint: In what kind of society is a cowering populace a necessity?

[...]  But what about conservative parents? I wondered yesterday, via Twitter, why more of them don’t homeschool, and I got some interesting responses, including a couple of Tweets to the effect of, “Because we’re working!” Surely no one imagines that only affluent families homeschool their children. It’s just not the case.

I’m guessing that, though conservatives deplore this story and others like it, they’re still pretty satisfied with their own public schools, the defects of which aren’t great enough, in their view, to warrant pulling the kids out and taking personal charge of their education. Homeschooling can mean a huge lifestyle change, and it’s a lot of work. If the easy,* “free,” default way of doing things ain’t broke, why fix it?

But I think the reelection of President Obama proved beyond a doubt that our education system is very badly broken. From a November 2012 post:

David Gelernter has a partial explanation for the degradation of the electorate. It’s the schools, stupid:

. . . you can’t graduate class after class after class of left-indoctrinated ignoramuses without paying the price. Last night was a downpayment.

The switch to homeschooling can be a daunting prospect, especially for two-income households. But the benefits it bestows on the family make it an educational option worth serious consideration, even if you “can’t afford it” or find it unacceptably uncool. I for one am grateful that Big Brother still allows it.

Read more at Pundit and Pundette

In the light of the spate of school shootings over the past decade, school staff have justified cause to raise alarm over REAL guns brought onto school grounds without permission.   Instead of dealing with the threat of crazed gunmen, however, they seem content to merely punish those who heroically take them down:

A 16-year-old student from Fort Myers, Fla., was suspended for three days after he wrestled a loaded gun away from another student on the school bus.

The Cypress Lake High School student grappled a loaded .22-caliber RG-14 revolver away from the 15-year-old suspect on the ride home Tuesday.

Witnesses say the suspect, a football player, aimed the weapon point-blank at a teammate and threatened to shoot him.

“I think he was really going to shoot him right then and there,” said the student who wrestled the gun away and who requested to be unidentified.

“No doubt he was going to shoot him point-blank,” he added.

According to Fox4Now.com, the student was suspended for his role in an “incident” in which a weapon was present and given an “emergency suspension.”

“It’s dumb,” he said. “How they going to suspend me for doing the right thing?”

Read more at the Washington Times

But don’t worry.  The security team that can’t discern between a gunman and hero will be sure to protect you from cupcakes featuring plastic army men.  Wouldn’t want you to suffer PTSD, or anything.

High School Student Disarms Gunman, Gets Suspended 

Tutorial: How to tell the difference between a Glock and a half-eaten Pop Tart

Schools’ ‘Zero Tolerance’ Weapons Policies Used To Bully Innocent Children

Brainwashing Kids About Guns

Brainwashing Kids About Guns: the Sequel

Michigan Schools Shut Down b/c Former Student, Now Working For Air Force, Entered School Wearing His Work Camo

Canadian Man Arrested, Strip Searched After 4-Year-Old Daughter Draws Picture Of Gun At School

This is What Guns Were Made For

The Second Amendment: Much Ado about Firearms

What We Believe, Part 5: Gun Rights

As a parent, it is chilling to see how much government bureaucrats presumptiously claim the right to intrude into our children’s lives.   Since the moment the federal government took control of education (thanks, Jimmy Carter!), it has been progressively demanding more and more control over the system, the content, and even the most personal matters of the students themselves.

Children are the future.  If the state gains absolute control over the hearts, minds and choices of future voters and citizens, they will learn look to the state to be their provider, caregiver, and master.    It’s already happening.    If we don’t stop them, we will wake up one day to discover that our children have become wards of the state, with parents having little – if any – input.

Michelle Malkin explains the latest threat:

While many Americans worry about government drones in the sky spying on our private lives, Washington meddlers are already on the ground and in our schools gathering intimate data on children and families.

Say goodbye to your children’s privacy. Say hello to an unprecedented nationwide student tracking system, whose data will apparently be sold by government officials to the highest bidders. It’s yet another encroachment of centralized education bureaucrats on local control and parental rights under the banner of “Common Core.”

As the American Principles Project, a conservative education think tank, reported last year, Common Core’s technological project is “merely one part of a much broader plan by the federal government to track individuals from birth through their participation in the workforce.” The 2009 porkulus package included a “State Fiscal Stabilization Fund” to bribe states into constructing “longitudinal data systems (LDS) to collect data on public-school students.”

These systems will aggregate massive amounts of personal data — health-care histories, income information, religious affiliations, voting status and even blood types and homework completion. The data will be available to a wide variety of public agencies. And despite federal student-privacy protections guaranteed by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the Obama administration is paving the way for private entities to buy their way into the data boondoggle. Even more alarming, the U.S. Department of Education is encouraging a radical push from aggregate-level data-gathering to invasive individual student-level data collection.

[...]  Home-schoolers and religious families that reject traditional government education would be tracked. Original NEDM data points included hair color, eye color, weight, blood types and even dental status.

How exactly does amassing and selling such personal data improve educational outcomes? It doesn’t. This, at its core, is the central fraud of Washington’s top-down nationalized curricular scheme. The Bill Gates-endorsed Common Core “standards” are a phony pretext for big-government expansion. The dazzling allure of “21st-century technology” masks the privacy-undermining agenda of nosy bureaucratic drones allergic to transparency, accountability and parental autonomy. Individual student privacy is sacrificed at the collective “For the Children” altar.

Fed Ed is not about excellence or academic achievement. It’s about control, control and more control.

Read more at Michelle Malkin

However, there is currently a way for parents to opt out:

The good news: An independent grassroots revolt outside the Beltway bubble is swelling. Families are taking their children’s academic and privacy matters out of the snoopercrats’ grip and into their own hands. You can now download a Common Core opt-out/disclosure form to submit to your school district, courtesy of the Truth In American Education group: CLICK HERE.

Parents caught off guard by the stealthy tracking racket are now mobilizing across the country. Echoing families across the city, Big Apple public advocate Bill de Blasio blasted the tracking database in a letter to government officials: “I don’t want my kids’ privacy bought and sold like this.” On Wednesday, prompted by parental objections, Oklahoma state representatives unanimously passed House Bill 1989 — the Student Data Accessibility, Transparency and Accountability Act— to prohibit the release of confidential student data without the written consent of a student’s parent or guardian.

[...]   Research fellow Joy Pullmann at The Heartland Institute points to a February Department of Education report on its data-mining plans that contemplates the use of creepy student monitoring techniques such as “functional magnetic resonance imaging” and “using cameras to judge facial expressions, an electronic seat that judges posture, a pressure-sensitive computer mouse and a biometric wrap on kids’ wrists.”

The DOE report exposes the big lie that Common Core is about raising academic standards by revealing its progressive designs to measure and track children’s “competencies” in “recognizing bias in sources,” “flexibility,” “cultural awareness and competence,” “appreciation for diversity,” “empathy,” “perspective taking, trust (and) service orientation.”

That’s right. School districts and state governments are pimping out highly personal data on children’s feelings, beliefs, “biases” and “flexibility” instead of doing their own jobs imparting knowledge – or minding their own business. And yes, Republicans such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bushcontinue to falsely defend the centralized Common Core regime as locally driven and non-coercive, while ignoring the database system’s circumvention of federal student privacy laws.

Why? Edu-tech nosy-bodies are using the Common Core assessment boondoggle as a Trojan horse to collect and crunch massive amounts of personal student data for their own social justice or moneymaking ends.

Read more at Michelle Malkin

Don’t waste any time.  OPT OUT NOW!

Attention, parents: Common Core opt-out form now available

Common Core is Not Just About Standards, it’s also about Data Mining

‘Common Core’ Banishes Literature, Replaces With Government Propaganda

Obama Takes Over Public Schools With ‘ObamaCore’ Curriculum

Ravitch: Why I oppose Common Core standards

Rotten to the Core: Reader feedback from the frontlines

Rotten to the Core, Part 1: Obama’s War on Academic Standards

Rotten to the Core, Part 2: Readin’, writin’ and deconstructionism

Rotten to the Core, Part 3: Lessons from Texas and the Growing Grassroots Revolt

Rotten to the Core, Part 4: The Feds’ Invasive Student Tracking Database

Data-Crazy Department of Education Throws Privacy Out the Window

The Glenn Beck Program: Exposing CSCOPE

View on YouTube

The liberal strategy for indoctrinating children is rather simple: it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.   They teach revisionist history and Marxist ideology, make up excuses and promise “we’ll look into it” when the initial outrage arises, and then move right along as the protests die down.  Even if they’re stopped temporarily, they never give up.

Under the Obama administration’s “Common Core” education takeover, Marxist curriculums like CSCOPE are being implemented across the country.  Here are some of the lessons being taught to your children:

1. Islam is awesome

In a unit of high school world history, the online material students are given is essentially a paean to the greatness of Islam and its founder, Mohammed.

One portion involves open-ended discussion of the merits of the hijab — the face and body covering worn by many Muslim women (and under threat of arrest in Saudi Arabia and Iran). Perhaps high school students think the hijab is “freeing because it prevents others from making them into sexual objects.” Or perhaps they think the hijab suggests that “women need to be obscured so as not to arouse male desire.” Either way, it’s fine.

The widespread and ordinary mistreatment of women in Islamic countries — particularly Arab ones — is ignored. Texas high schoolers don’t learn, for example, that Jordan and other Islamic kingdoms have laws that pardon rapists if an arrangement can be reached for rapists and their victims to get married.

2. Christianity is a cult

Another portion of the materials on Islam lists several specific lessons that Muslims take from the example of Islam’s founder, such as “Be respectful of other religions.” Strangely, there does not appear to be any such lesson focused on, say, Moses or Jesus Christ.

Instead, the materials in another world history lesson inform students that Christianity is a cult that parallels the death and resurrection in the story of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead. The same material takes pains to point out that early Christians were accused of incest, cannibalism and other atrocities.

3. Communism is awesome

An illustration in a CSCOPE high school world history handout shows a figure with a trekking pole climbing steps made out of money. A chart immediately to the right concerns “big ideas” in 18th- and 19th-century economic thinking. At the bottom of the chart is free-market capitalism, where “all people strive to fulfill their own needs and wants,” and where government control and planning are low.

In the middle is socialism, where “the big things” in society (e.g., “telephones, roads, airports”) are “owned by the people.” “Can you think of other big stuff that should be covered?” the chart asks. (Note the loaded verb, “should.”)

At the top of the chart is communism, which the CSCOPE creators innocuously describe as “the idea of living together in a ‘commune’ where all people work together for everyone.” The chart manages to insult the Marxist vision of communism as well, by suggesting that government control and planning is highest under the system.

There is no mention of the nearly 100 million people who died in the 20th century under various self-described communist regimes around the world.

4. Hey kids! Let’s make communist flags

“Imagine a new socialist nation is creating a flag and you have been put in charge of creating a flag,” read the instructions from an activity that directs sixth graders to design a socialist or communist flag. “Use symbolism to represent aspects of socialism/communism on your flag.”

In the same lesson, students are also instructed that socialist utopian Robert Owen wanted to “give every child born into the world an equal chance to live and grow and to lead a happy life.”

No mention is made of the two socialist utopias Owen attempted to create, or how they ended up disastrously failed and disease-ridden.

5. The Boston Tea Party was a terrorist attack

A CSCOPE high school world history lesson plan Texas-schools-teach-boston-tea-party-as-act-of-terrorism/”>depicts the Boston Tea Party, the famous protest against taxation without representation, as an act of terrorism.

“A local militia, believed to be a terrorist organization, attacked the property of private citizens today at our nation’s busiest port,” the part of the curriculum pertaining to the Boston Tea Party reads. “Although no one was injured in the attack, a large quantity of merchandise, considered to be valuable to its owners and loathsome to the perpetrators, was destroyed. The terrorists, dressed in disguise and apparently intoxicated, were able to escape into the night with the help of local citizens who harbor these fugitives and conceal their identities from the authorities.”

Read more at the Daily Caller

The seeds have already been in a child’s mind, whether or not a parent objects with the material and tries to explain the truth to their child later.  The child cannot unsee or unhear what he has been taught.  He’s now trying to decide who to believe: mom and dad, or the teacher.  Unfortunately, most students eventually begin to agree with the material being taught.  Why?  Because they are told that the older, “unenlightened” generation (i.e., parent) is probably too “close-minded” or doesn’t have all the facts of “new discoveries,” but they’re the young ones who know better.   Nothing like stroking an ignorant kid’s ego to get him to swallow the bait.

Historian David Barton Breaks Down CSCOPE on the Glenn Beck show:

View on YouTube

Tiffany Gabbay reports at The Blaze:

To glean greater insight, Glenn Beck invited special guests David Barton and Pat Gray, along with teachers Mary Bowen, Stan Hartzler and Texas State Sen. Dan Patrick to discuss what is truly going on within their state’s education system.

Barton explained that CSCOPE is referred to as “instructional material” and not “curriculum,” therefore is not subject to regulation by the State Board of Education. The historian also brought in artifacts of Texas public school curriculum to showcase just how different it is today and to mark, year-by-year, the increasing application of political correctness in lesson plans.

Using a chart, Barton documented and mapped out core CSCOPE material, which eliminates national values, Americanism or rather, American exceptionalism, the study of federalism and majority rule (the core of our constitution) along with patriotic symbols like the Liberty Bell. Christopher Columbus, Rosh Hashanah and Christmas are all relegated to the dustbin along with American military history. Equality and a belief in justice is replaced by “fairness” and instruction on American propaganda and imperialism.

Disturbingly, Beck and Barton noted that the worst is yet to come. Showcasing a lesson plan for grades 1-3, Barton revealed CSCOPE’s list of “heroes,” which comprises a dozen secular progressives and only three conservatives or political moderates.

 According to a previous report from TheBlaze, teachers complained that they were expected to deliver the curriculum verbatim and only on days allotted by the CSCOPE lesson plan. Even if students were unable to absorb the lesson, teachers were allegedly directed to progress to the next lesson regardless. TheBlaze also reported that teachers were “asked to sign a contract that would prevent them from revealing what was in the CSCOPE lessons or face civil and criminal penalties.”

Read more at The Blaze

What Teachers and Parents Can Do To Fight CSCOPE:

View on YouTube

Texas Curriculum Teaches Boston Tea Party Was Terrorism, Has Students Design New Socialist Flag

Don’t Believe The Lies About CSCOPE

Senators question creators of curriculum system

Find out about Agenda 21 and you will understand more about why CSCOPE is so dangerous

America’s School Children Being Indoctrinated With Marxism

Progressive-Communist Teachers Indoctrinate Children To Become Marxist

Public Education: Progressive Indoctrination Camps

Stalin-style U.S. public education

New Book Exposes the Effort to Introduce Radical Political Philosophy into K-12 Classrooms

Third Graders Want to Tax “Greedy” Rich, Marybeth Hicks Says Don’t Let Your Kids Drink The Marxist Koolaid

Progressive-Communist Teachers Indoctrinate Children To Become Marxist

Marxist Professor: Education ‘Forms Cadre of Revolutionaries’

Children suffering from gender confusion are crying out for help.   They need loving people who can come along side them and help them deal with the deep hurts, dysfunctional relationships and other root issues which have caused them to hate the gender they were born with and wish to become the opposite (usually an unconscious process which began before they can even remember).

They need people who can lovingly affirm them and help them make peace with God made them to be.   They need support to learn to love themselves just as they are.

But instead of dealing with the root pain, the LGBT movement advises parents and educators to encourage the child’s confusion, reinforcing the child’s idea that they’re not who they’re supposed to be, and allowing them to subject themselves to powerful drugs and painful, irreversible surgeries to become something else (the opposite gender) in order to “find themselves.”   This is nothing short of child abuse in the name of political correctness.

Now the madness has found it’s way into schools, as staff and students are being forced to play along with the harmful charade:

Parents across Massachusetts are upset over new rules that would not only allow transgender students to use their restrooms of their choice – but would also punish students who refuse to affirm or support their transgender classmates.

Last week the Massachusetts Department of Education issued directives for handling transgender students – including allowing them to use the bathrooms of their choice or to play on sports teams that correspond to the gender with which they identify.

The 11-page directive also urged schools to eliminate gender-based clothing and gender-based activities – like having boys and girls line up separately to leave the classroom.

Schools will now be required to accept a student’s gender identity on face value.

“A student who says she is a girl and wishes to be regarded that way throughout the school day and throughout every, or almost every, other area of her life, should be respected and treated like a girl,” the guidelines stipulate.

According to the Dept. of Education, transgender students are those whose assigned birth sex does not match their “internalized sense of their gender.”

[...]  The Massachusetts Family Institute denounced the new rules calling them a violation of privacy.

“Fundamentally, boys need to be using the boys’ room and girls need to be using the girls’ rooms, and we base that on their anatomical sex, not some sort of internalized gender identity,” said Andrew Beckwith, the institute’s general counsel.

Beckwith told Fox News the new policy has a “very broad standard that is ripe for abuse.”

“The policy allows students to have one gender identity at home and another at school,” he said. “And it refuses to let teachers and administrators tell parents what gender their child is at school.”

Another part of the directive that troubles parents deals with students who might feel comfortable having someone of the opposite sex in their locker room or bathroom.

The state takes those students to task – noting their discomfort “is not a reason to deny access to the transgender student.”

And any student who refuses to refer to a transgendered student by the name or sex they identify with could face punishment.

For example – a fifth grade girl might feel uncomfortable using the restroom if there is an eighth grade transgendered boy in the next stall.

Under the state guidelines, the girl would have no recourse, Beckwith said.

“And if the girl continued to complain she could be subjected to discipline for not affirming that student’s gender identity choice,” he told Fox News.

“It should not be tolerated and can be grounds for student discipline,” the directive states.

Read more at Fox News

The directive applies not only to bathrooms, but also to sports teams, which means a girl could lose a spot on a team if a transgendered boy decided to try out for the girls’ team.

Massachusetts isn’t the only state embracing this madness:

Recently the City Council of Phoenix, AZ, passed the “Bathroom Bill,” which, among other things, will allow men to enter and use women’s restrooms and locker rooms. The Mayor and five Council members who voted in favor of this change said it was necessary to protect the miniscule segment of men who are confused about their sexuality and think that they are women. But in passing the Bathroom Bill, the Mayor and City Council abdicated its duty to protect Phoenix’s children and women. Instead, it provided voyeurs and other sexual predators easy access to the places where children and women are most vulnerable. The City Council thus violated its public trust and placed children, adolescents, and women who use a public restroom in Phoenix at risk.

Supporters of the Bathroom Bill are saying that no man who believes he is a woman will bother girls or women while using the restroom. Their claim misses the point. Most girls and women will be unnerved by seeing any man in their restroom, whether he intends them harm or not. The Bathroom Bill allows any man – including voyeurs and other sexual predators –  to enter women’s restrooms, locker rooms, and changing areas. It is not limited to the small percentage of men who think they are women. Sadly, there is nothing anyone can do to stop them. In fact, merely asking someone if they are aware it is the “wrong” bathroom can potentially invoke punishment and leave the person asking the question with a criminal record. That’s right, now it’s a criminal violation to discriminate against men who think they should use the women’s restroom.

While the City Council exempted churches and religious organizations from having to open their women’s restrooms to men, churches need to be concerned.  We all need to be concerned.  Letting men into public bathrooms used by young girls and women is an invasion of privacy and a threat to the safety of all citizens. Instead of protecting women and children, the city’s elected officials adopted a bill that will compromise their safety. It is appalling that these elected officials have decided to put women and young girls in danger.

Read more at Speak Up Movement

Mary Rice Hasson writes at Mercator Net:

Twelve-year-old children in the United Kingdomwho feel confused about their gender now can opt to receive puberty-blocking drugs while they make up their minds whether to be male or female.

The hormone blockers inhibit development of sex characteristics, such as facial hair in boys and full breasts in girls. A child who later opts for a sex-change operation, the thinking goes, will have fewer “parts” in need of changing.

[...]  Why would any straight-thinking parent purposely “stunt” their child’s normal, healthy, sexual development so they can switch genders more easily later on?

Well, they wouldn’t.

From the first sonogram or moment of birth, parents everywhere delight in knowing whether they have a girl or a boy—a son or a daughter. The baby’s body reveals an unequivocal truth about who that child is–male or female. And a young child’s confused protests to the contrary can’t change that.

The reality of male-female sexuality becomes an inconvenient truth, however, to agenda-driven LGBT-types. They reject the “gender-binary” mindset, positing instead a sliding scale, a gender spectrum, with each of us eventually choosing our own comfortable spot.

And if that comfortable, self-identified place happens to contradict bodily reality? According to the gender-bending folks, it’s the person’s body that’s out of whack, not the person’s self-perception. And this is the fiction they sell to teens, parents,teachers, doctors and counselors.

That is why a 12 year-old boy who decides that he doesn’t quite feel like a male can instruct willing docs in the U.K. to halt his body’s developing masculinity.

Instead of trying to clear up the poor lad’s confusion–teaching his parents to affirm his biological sex while counseling him towards self-acceptance–the “gender identity” evangelists prefer to validate his confusion.

In the process, they thwart his body’s normal sexual development in anticipation of pumping him with female hormones a few years later. (And once he takes cross-sex hormones, he will become irreversibly sterile—the same fate suffered by girls who “become” male.)

Just think–all this before he is even legally old enough to swig a beer.

[...]   Childhood and adolescence can be confusing for any kid. But that is where adults come in.  When life is confusing, kids need to rely on parents and other adults for love, stability, common sense, and affirmation. Adults bring clarity out of a child’s muddled feelings and expand child-sized perspectives with adult knowledge and wisdom. Parents who project unflappable sureness about a child’s identity and inherent lovableness provide the emotional anchor for a child who may be bobbing about in a sea of fears, needs, and insecurities.

Children confused by identity issues are vulnerable. But it’s worth considering whether their problems are caused by the parents’ own issues–or by clueless parenting made worse by flawed advice from gender experts.

[...]  Gender identity docs are churning out theories and medical protocols that affect real children in life-changing ways — suppressing normal sexual development in healthy bodies–in order to advance their ideologically-driven agenda.

The website for Dr Spack’s Gender Management Services Clinic contains this postscript on patient follow-up: “We conduct follow-up research on the patients we treat throughout their adolescence and adult years. Keeping track of their progress helps us determine our treatment efficacy.”

Translation: We really don’t know how these experimental “solutions” will affect your child’s life—but so what? Full speed ahead.

And that’s unconscionable.

Read more at Mercator Net

Lawmakers Act to Protect Children From Transgender Bathrooms

Sky fall: gender ideology comes to the schoolhouse

Answering Parents’ Questions on Gender Confusion in Children

Gender matters

Gender Identity Issues in children – is tolerance the answer?

Pediatricians Warn Educators: ‘Pro-Gay’ Attitude toward Gender Confusion Damages Children

Schools Promoting Homosexuality to Students Under Cloak of “Anti-Bullying” Campaign

The real agenda behind gay anti-bullying clubs in your school

Judge Rules School May Not Block Sexually Explicit LGBT Websites

Gay Editor: ‘We Will Teach Your Kids The New Norms’

The Gay Playbook, And How It’s ‘Overhauling’ America

The Marketing of Evil: How corruption is packaged, perfumed, gift-wrapped and sold to us

Justice Department: Home Schooling not a ‘Right’

View at CBN News

Illegal aliens – including drug dealers and other criminals – are welcome to come across the border in droves, according to this administration.

But a Christian family fleeing persecution in the form of fines, jail time and the confiscation of their children?   Not worthy of asylum, according to our Justice Department.  And why?  Because parents don’t have a fundamental right to direct the upbringing and education of their own children, our own government argues.

THIS is why the Parental Rights Amendment is so desperately needed!

CBN News reports:

The U.S. Justice Department says home-schooling is not a fundamental right.

That was the argument the Obama administration made in federal court against an evangelical Christian family from Germany seeking asylum in the United States.

Germany broadly forbids home-schooling. So the Romeike family was forced to flee the country or risk losing their five children to the German government, which was trying to force them to put their children in public schools.

The Homeschool Legal Defense Association is working on the Romeike family’s behalf.

Michael Farris, founder and chairman of HSLDA, wrote about Germany’s home-school ban in his blog saying, “It is thought control. It is belief control. It is totalitarianism dressed up in politically correct lingo.”

Read more at CBN News

Mary Jackson explains at the Baptist Press:

The Romeikes fled Germany in 2008 after authorities fined them thousands in euros and forcibly took their children because they homeschool. In 2010, a U.S. immigration judge granted the Romeikes political asylum — the first time this status was granted based on compulsory schooling laws. The judge found the family has legitimate fear of persecution in Germany, where a small group of Christian homeschooling families have already been jailed, fined and stripped of their children.

[...]  At a German public school, the children were bullied for their Christian beliefs. The Romeikes found school textbooks filled with inappropriate content. Still, Uwe says, “We knew that homeschooling would not be an easy journey.” The Romeikes came to the U.S. when “all other doors seemed to close.”

In Tennessee, Uwe teaches piano while the children play basketball and take science classes at a local co-op. Uwe says the uncertainty they face now hardly compares to the fear of “waking up with the police at your front door, there to take your children … not knowing if you will ever get them back.”

Read more at the Baptist Press

Deportation of German homeschool family affects US homeschool freedom

Petition: Grant permanent asylum to the Romeike family, who face prosecution in F.R. Germany for homeschooling their children

USA Trying to Deport Christian Homeschooling Family Knowing They Face Persecution

German Homeschooling Family Flees to US

Flashback: US grants home schooling German family political asylum

German Christian fathers put in jail for shunning explicit sex ed

Want To Tell The State To Stick It? Homeschool Your Kids

Crackdown on Homeschooling in the Near Future?

Threat to Parents’ Rights a Bigger Issue than Rights of a Child

This is probably one the best reasons for opposing government preschool.

Kyle Olson writes at EAGnews:

Is your three-year-old preschooler chanting ‘union power’ these days? She might, if author Innosanto Nagara has his way.

Nagara wrote “A is for Activist,” a book supposedly geared for the  children of the “99 percent.” In other words, a new vehicle has been developed for leftists to begin indoctrinating children.

“It’s pretty awesome to hear a three-year-old saying ‘union power,’” Nagara said in a YES! magazine interview.

But union power and student activism aren’t the only goals. Consider these other letters and how they are applied in the book:

• B is for banner, as in a protest banner hanging off a construction crane
• L is for LGBTQ, as in Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgendered and Queer
• T is for Trans, as in transgendered
• Z is for Zapatistas, as in Mexican revolutionary leftists

Heady stuff for preschoolers, but the indoctrinators believe the tykes are old enough to learn the basics of revolutionary thought.

Nagara’s “A is for Activist” has been heralded by the likes of Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin, who said, “May a thousand young activists bloom!”

Read more at EAGnews

Will they be learning to salute and shout “heil!” next?

Occupy’s 99 percent get children’s book: ‘A is for Activist’

Preschools Are Using a Marxist’s Theories to Manufacture Collectivists

Occupy Propaganda in Elementary Schools: Children Sing Praises of ‘The 99%’

New Book Exposes the Effort to Introduce Radical Political Philosophy into K-12 Classrooms

Third Graders Want to Tax “Greedy” Rich, Marybeth Hicks Says Don’t Let Your Kids Drink The Marxist Koolaid

America’s School Children Being Indoctrinated With Marxism

Progressive-Communist Teachers Indoctrinate Children To Become Marxist

Public Education: Progressive Indoctrination Camps

Only in the deranged minds of Leftists does patriotism = racism.

Todd Starnes reports at Fox News:

A group of students at a California high school basketball game were told to remove patriotic bandanas and stop chanting “USA, USA” because school administrators wanted to be sensitive to other spectators.

The incident occurred during a basketball last week between Camarillo High School and Rio Mesa High School in Ventura County.

A school administrator pulled aside four boys and told them to either remove their American flag bandanas or leave the game. The boys complied but returned to lead the crowd in a chant of “USA, USA.”

Camarillo High School principal Glenn Lipman told the Ventura County Star that the students were told to remove the bandanas as a “precaution” – because the two schools have “diverse student bodies.”

Both schools have a large Hispanic student population.

Student Austin Medeiros and the other boys were suspended for their actions – but the punishment was later lifted by school officials.

Still, students are upset over what happened and staged a protest at the school’s flagpole by wearing red, white and blue.

“We’ve done it always,” Medeiros told the Ventura County Star. “It’s something we do. It’s the same group of friends. We’re all very patriotic.”

Read more at Fox News

In Obama’s America, chanting ‘USA! USA!’ is racist 

Principal Bans ‘God Bless the USA,’ Claims It ‘Offends Other Cultures’

Elementary Children Harrassed By Angry Leftist Hecklers For Singing ‘God Bless The USA’

Teacher refuses to allow child to hang up American flag drawing, calls it “offensive”

Federal Judge: School Can Censor Student Display of American Flag

The War Against ‘Old Glory’

Students Kicked Off Campus for Wearing American Flag Tees

School Officials Won’t Let Students Recite Pledge of Allegiance

Racist Teacher Tries To Throw Student Out Of Class For Wearing A Romney T-shirt

Texas Curriculum Teaches Boston Tea Party Was Terrorism, Has Students Design New Socialist Flag