Inside the "Progressive" Mind of NYC's Mayor DeBlasio

Inside the "Progressive" Mind of NYC's Mayor DeBlasio

 

I was a one-time liberal, before I grew up and learned something.  I was certainly not in the same class as today’s liberal-leftists in the Democrat Party and I always (ok, usually) get a good laugh at the extremes to which the lib-left goes nowadays.

Take, for example, the new Communist-Democrat mayor of New York City, “progressive” Bill DeBlasio.

Even prior to his November election, he courageously announced he would rescue hansom carriage horses from their involuntary servitude hauling tourists around Central Park.  If implemented, DeBlasio’s rescue plan would send dozens of carriage drivers to unemployment lines and probably consign their well-tended horses to glue factories or cans of Alpo.

As with all “progressives,” the mayor regards misplaced charities as more important than the well-being of human beings.

Both pre- and post-election, De Blasio made it vividly clear that he considered the highly-effective NYPD policy of stopping, questioning, and frisking suspected criminals constituted racial profiling and was racially discriminatory.  On assuming the mayoralty, he banned the practice, ignoring the reality that stop-question-frisk mainly benefitted blacks in black neighborhoods by getting dangerous miscreants off their streets.

Liberal-leftist politicians proudly and invariably favor criminals' rights over the rights of their law-abiding constituents.

Ever-faithful to his campaign promises, last week the new resident of Gracie Mansion launched his threatened war against what are by far the best alternatives to the miserably-failing New York City’s public school system, charter schools. 

Those alternatives also happen to be the bane of De Blasio’s most avid supporters, the National Education Association and the New York State United Teachers.

DeBlasio, the NEA and the NYSUT oppose and despise charters because, by virtue of their educational achievements; those schools accent the failures of public school systems and the mayor is counting on the products of those schools to (God forbid!) reelect him in four years.

Last Thursday, De Blasio scrapped former Mayor Bloomberg’s green-lighting of two new Success Academy . . . (Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=36085.)

The Rotten Core of the Common Core--Part Eight

The Rotten Core of the Common Core--Part Eight

 

There are so many things wrong with the Common Core State Standards Inititiative, which has been promoted as a state idea when it is actually the product of President Barack Hussein Obama’s Department of Education in conjunction with state education lapdogs in the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, that it’s been a challenge to pinpoint precisely what perverse philosophy inspired it.

Until now.

And it’s all thanks to Paul Reville, former secretary of education in one of the most liberal states in the nation, Massachusetts, former professor at one of the most liberal universities in America, Harvard, and currently one of the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for the most liberal proposal ever to infect American education, the Common Core State Standards Initiative. 

The core of the Common Core is based on a fundamental error: Contrary to the beliefs of millions of American parents, your kids aren’t really yours.  Their bodies and souls belong to the federal government!

Serving as a panelist last month at an event sponsored by the Center for American Progress, Reville referred to Common Core critics as a “tiny minority” who opposed any educational standards, which he characterized as unfair since “the children belong to all of us.”
That observation bears repeating: Prof. Reville believes America’s “children belong to all of us,” echoing the theme of then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us.

Hillary’s ghost-written 1996 classic of collectivist thinking has been derided by everyone from that year’s GOP presidential nominee, Bob Dole, who said: “I am here to tell you, it does not take a village to raise a child.  It takes a family to raise a child,” to Tim Wilson’s in his song, “It Takes a Village to Raise a Nut,” to Senator Rick Santorum in his book, It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good.

You’re known by the company you keep: Prof. Reville’s forum, the Center for American Progress, is a leftist think tank founded by John Podesta . . . (Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=35649.)

Public Schools: Lechers, Diversity, Nudists

Public Schools: Lechers, Diversity, Nudists

 

Recent stories leaking out of public schools, which go out of their way to avoid such leakage since the leaks often reflect badly on school administrations and administrators, demonstrate once again that something is rotten in the formerly great state of education in America. 
With the Third World rapidly catching up and surpassing us in the art of educating children and with our educational establishment–led by left wing extremists in the National Education Association–far more concerned with diversity and propagandizing than learning, it’s no surprise our nation is on a slippery slope toward the scrapheap of history. 

The following only touch on some of the problems facing our kids, our schools, and our country, simply a few illustrations of the gross and systemic failures in our public schools.

For example, in Houston, Pasadena Memorial High School history teacher, 36 year old Paul Edward Tate, is obviously an incurable romantic.  His romanticism, though, wasn’t focused on women his own age but rather on a 16 year old female student on whom he lavished gifts and with whom he was so enamored that he stupidly and repeatedly took her on public dates to his version of fancy restaurants, including a local Olive Garden. 

Someone noticed the two lovebirds at the Olive Garden walking arm in arm and a Pasadena Memorial High assistant principal watched as the teacher bought the student a purse and  a $200 Pandora bracelet, which the girl was wearing when police interviewed her and which Tate told police was a gift for his mother.

Tate is facing felony charges for indecency with a child, having an improper relationship with a student, and carrying on a sexual relationship with a minor.  Depending on the outcome of the investigation, he may soon be joining the ranks of the hundreds of teachers, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, who are arrested and convicted of similar crimes every year in the United States, almost all of whom were smarter than Tate. (http://tinyurl.com/k9tprvv)

Most of them conducted their private sex-ed classes a tad more discreetly, like at their homes or in the back seats of their cars.

Continuing the dumbing-down of public education in America, a gifted-and-talented program at New York City’s PS 139 elementary school is going the way of most programs designed to raise the ed-bar by challenging brighter kids so they can reach their highest potential instead of burying them in classrooms filled with current and future miscreants.

Last month, PS 139 Principal Mary McDonald sent a letter telling parents that Students of Academic Rigor, or SOAR, would no longer accept applications for incoming kindergartners because SOAR is being phased out–in the interests of educators’ favorite buzzword, diversity.  As Ms. McDonald wrote, “Our Kindergarten classes will be heterogeneously grouped to reflect the diversity of our student body and the community we live in.”

Suspicions are rife in that Flatbush, Brooklyn community that SOAR is being grounded due to the fact white kids comprise the majority in the program.

Principal McDonald subsequently advised parents in another letter dripping with hypocrisy, “At PS 193, we believe that all children can learn and achieve high standards. We also know  that we want all children at PS 193 to have equal access to high quality, challenging curriculum, . . . We also want our classes to reflect the diversity of our community.”
Ironically, P.S. 139′s Mission Statement says . . . (Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=35549.)

The Rotten Core of the Common Core: Part Seven

The Rotten Core of the Common Core: Part Seven

 

John Dewey, the undisputed “Father of Progressive Education” who began publishing his theories on politically-oriented  educational reform in various  works such as The School and Society and Democracy and Education over a century ago, may have finally achieved the ultimate consequence of his philosophy: supposedly student-centered schools in which education takes a back seat to social reform with government dictating what must be taught, how it will be taught, and determining if it’s worthwhile teaching.
The disaster that is the test-fixated Common Core State Standards Initiative is rapidly evolving into the vehicle through which Dewey’s “progressive” principles are being implemented in America’s troubled schools.

The many flaws and misrepresentations in the mislabeled, pernicious Common Core State Standards Initiative, actually a federal initiative disguised as a state idea, have already been detailed in this space in six parts but news on those flaws and misrepresentations keeps pouring in:

–Ethan Young, a well-dressed, articulate senior at Farragut High School in Knox County, TN., is one student fighting back.  Young pleaded at a school board meeting that the national Common Core education guidelines, which he called “a mistrust of teachers,” be dropped because, “If everything I learned in high school was a measurable objective: I haven’t learned anything.”  (American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten might just agree with the Tennessee teen.  An avid supporter of Common  Core, Weingarten has nevertheless characterized its rollout as even more disastrous than Obamacare.)

–North Dakota’s Superintendent of Public Schools claimed that, “after meticulous review” and “local leaders always have and always will determine the textbooks being used to teach your child.”  However, the fact the sex-filled, Common Core-recommended novel Dreaming in Cuban is being taught to North Dakota 10th graders calls into question who is really making the education decisions in the Roughrider State.  (One of the novel’s less-explicit excerpts: “Hugo and Felicia stripped in their room, dissolving easily into one another, and made love against the whitewashed walls. Hugo bit Felicia’s breast and left purplish bands of bruises on her upper thighs.”) 

–TownHall.com reports that ”New Common Core teaching materials instruct second graders that land owners are intrinsically evil, that business owners are inherently greedy, and Saul Alinsky radicals are the saviors of the everyman.”  The article explains, “In addition to reading a glowing biography of the Marxist labor leader [Cesar Chavez], students will be asked to evaluate the “scales of fairness” between wealthy landowners, and lowly [non-union] workers.”  The teachers’ guide directs teachers to say, “Fairness and equality exist when the scales are balanced” and ask students whether both sides, as presented in the plan, are equal.  (The correct answer is “no” according to the guide.)

–A mother of a New York kindergarten student found offensive materials on the Student Services Page of the Engage NY Common Core materials site and reported it to NYSED. . . . (Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=35213.)

The Rotten Core of the Common Core--Part Five

The Rotten Core of the Common Core--Part Five

When America’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, sarcastically told a group of school superintendents last month that it was “fascinating” to see opposition to the Common Core initiative coming from “white suburban moms who—all of a sudden, their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were,” he ignited an educational firestorm not only among “white suburban moms” but among many non-white, non-suburban mothers.

Duncan, one of Barack Hussein Obama’s old Chicago cronies who helped run Chicago’s public school system into the ground and who had been educated in elite private schools and who had never taught a day in any school, soon apologized for his arrogantly racist slander. 

Apparently in full apologetic mode, he also apologized for lying about teachers getting fired as a result of congressional sequester cuts and admitted to his fellow Cabinet officers that pink slips to teachers were handed in Kanawha County, West Virginia only because of that school district’s prior union agreement.

Conceding he misspoke on the latter, Duncan went on to emphatically declare, “Language is really, really important, and I want to apologize for not being as clear as I should’ve been last week. Because I wasn’t as clear, the spotlight was put on me and that’s never ever my goal.”

His unstated but obvious goal is really, really to commit and enforce the massive educational malpractice that is really, really at the rotten core of Common Core.

Rejecting Duncan’s empty, redundant apology, one non-white mom cited by Michelle Malkin indignantly and articulately responded to the Secretary’s put-down: “As a brown-skinned suburban mom opposed to Common Core, I can tell you I’ve personally met moms and dads of all races, ethnicities, backgrounds and parts of the country over the past year who have sacrificed to get their kids into the best schools possible. They are outraged that dumbed-down, untested federal ‘standards’ pose an existential threat to their excellent educational arrangements–be they public, private, religious or homeschooling.” 

If nothing else, the misbegotten Common Core farce which will soon rival in unpopularity that other misbegotten brainchild of the Obama administration, Obamacare, has succeeded in mobilizing suburban and metropolitan public school, private school and homeschooling moms and dads to actively campaign against its rottenness.

MAD, an acronym for Moms Against Duncan, . . . (Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=34396.)