Thursday, April 30, 2015

Barry Finally to Meet with the Largest School District.

When: May 4, 2015 @ 7:00 PM

Where:  City Hall
908 Elm Street
Manchester, NH 03101
USA

Cost:  Free

For more information visit Stop Common Core, New Hampshire.

Commissioner Barry has finally agreed to meet with the largest school district in the state to answer their questions. Since Barry didn’t want to come alone, the State Board of Education Chair Tom Raffio will join her.

Previous the Commissioner refused saying that “A public meeting rarely accomplishes the kind of meaningful conversation necessary to support students and families in these complex times.” This is a public servant who doesn’t understand that she works for us and not vice versa.

Please come and ask the Commissioner about any of your concerns. The public is allowed to bring their questions and speak for 3 minutes (max.) during the Public Comment period at the beginning of the meeting – before the Commissioner engages in Q&Ar with the School Committee.
You might want to ask the Commissioner why she promised the US Department of Education in her most recent Waiver application that she would transition all our public schools over to a Regionally controlled pilot program under her control.

Unless the Senate reverses the Senate Education Committee’s recommendation to pass HB 323 on May 7th, districts will be forced to Regionalize ….. lest NH should lose federal funding. The Senate wants to hand the Commissioner a blank check to re-design our statewide assessment program. Only these new assessments will be weekly and parents won’t be able to Refuse them like they can with Smarter Balanced.

Rich Girard will carry this meeting LIVE for the whole state to listen to this discussion. People can listen on 90.7 WLMW FM and also online at

Manchester City Hall, Aldermanic Chamber 3rd floor . Free parking in the public lot behind City Hall.


Hat tip Ann Marie Bandfield.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Earning $120,000 was not Enough

MANCHESTER — The former director of the Manchester School Driver Education program was indicted for allegedly stealing more than $12,000 in cash that students paid for driving lessons, according to a prosecutor.
Michael Dubisz, 55, of 14 Morse Drive, Hooksett, was indicted by a Hillsborough County Superior Court Northern District grand jury on a felony charge of theft by deception. Dubisz, a former Hooksett School Board member who resigned his board seat in April 2013, citing personal reasons, earned nearly $120,000 in 2010 running the driver education program — a salary topped in the district only by then-superintendent Thomas Brennan Jr.   To read the rest of the story visit the Union Leader.


Future thefts could helped to be avoided by having checkbooks on line for people to follow the money. 

Cathy

Monday, April 27, 2015

Elementary Indoctrination

"It's not a conspiracy if it is done in broad daylight. The reason the left demands everyone go to public schools is simple. That is where they intend to indoctrinate, not educate, your children.
Any lefty who doesn't simply admit this is being intellectually dishonest. This is also why I am being 100% intellectually honest when I say I want to dismantle the public education system.
Dismantlement is the only way you get your children out of the indoctrination system. Conservatives who think they can "save" schools are lying to themselves. There is no saving them. There is only saving "an educated populace," and you do this by dismantling the bureaucracy that is mis-educating them. We simply must start funding children, not systems, schools, bureaucracies or districts."  Bruno Behrend

The following piece appears in full at City Journal.org.

California

Larry Sand
Elementary Indoctrination
Teachers’ union propaganda is creeping into California’s public school curricula.
April 24, 2015
To say California’s teachers’ unions wield outsize influence over state education policy is hardly novel. From setting tenure rules to rewriting dismissal statutes and blocking pension reforms, the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers roam the halls of the legislature like varsity all-stars. But less well known are the unions’ efforts to remake curriculum—and thereby influence the next generation of citizens and voters.

According to labor expert Kevin Dayton, organized labor has been trying to get its collective hooks into classroom content since 1981, when the City University of New York developed the “American Social History Project.” The idea was to present the history of marginalized and oppressed groups—including labor unions—to a “broad popular audience.” In California, the project took a great leap forward in 2001, when Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg cooked up the Speaker’s Commission on Labor Education, which, as Dayton explains, was established “to address issues of labor education in California’s public school system.” At the commission’s behest, Governor Gray Davis signed a bill that encouraged school districts to set aside the first week in April as “Labor History Week” and “commemorate it with appropriate educational exercises to make pupils aware of the important role that the labor movement has played in shaping California and the United States.”

By 2012, labor’s “week” had morphed into “Labor History Month,” and California’s teachers’ unions began advancing their politicized agenda. The CFT’s elementary curriculum includes a story about a “mean farmer” and his ticked-off hens that organize against him. The CTA meantime offers up a passel of lessons with a heavy emphasis on issues such as “tax fairness.” The University of California’s Miguel Contreras Labor Program joined in, adding an anthology of stories promoting the IWW, a radical union noted for its ties to socialism and anarchism, as well as a biography of America’s singing Stalinist, Pete Seeger.

The unions were on the move again in 2014, as the California Department of Education began its periodic review of the state’s history framework. In November, the CFT sent a proposal to the Instructional Quality Commission, an advisory body to the state board of education on matters concerning curriculum, instructional materials, and content standards. The union’s suggestions included downplaying the Second Great Awakening—the eighteenth-century religious revival that had a profound effect on the temperance, abolition, and women’s rights movements—in favor of greater emphasis on anti-Muslim discrimination after the 9/11 attacks. The union also wants the United States described as an “empire” that regularly “dominate[s] other civilizations,” despite the nation’s record of rebuilding countries we have defeated in war, such as Germany and Japan after World War II.

Naturally, the CFT makes a case for a “Labor Studies” elective. California is considering a lesson that would let students “participate in a collective bargaining simulation to examine the struggles of workers to be paid for the value of their labor and to work under safe conditions. They can examine legislation that gave workers the right to organize into unions, to improve working conditions, and to prohibit discrimination.” The Speaker’s Commission on Labor Education co-chairs, Fred Glass and Kent Wong, weighed in with a letter of their own urging the Instructional Quality Commission to establish the labor studies elective.

Will the unions advocate a full and fair treatment of labor’s history, including routine episodes of union violence and intimidation? Can students expect thorough exploration of labor economics, including how collective bargaining lowers the pay of many workers due to wage compression? Probably not. It’s even less likely that students will hear anything about the teachers’ unions twenty-first century political ventures—such as how the CTA spent more than $26 million in 2000 to defeat a school-voucher initiative that would have let families escape failing schools, or how, in 2012, it successfully lobbied to defeat SB 1530, which would have simplified the process of firing pedophile teachers.

The teachers’ unions are clearly lobbying for changes to a curriculum they believe presents a sanitized version of U.S. history, but they would simply replace disfavored “myths” with their own versions. As an American history teacher for much of the last decade of my career, I was faithful to the state framework and taught extensively about slavery and other injustices in our collective past. Most other history instructors I knew did the same. We didn’t browbeat the kids, however, into believing that American history was riddled with treachery and malevolence. If parents and citizens don’t take action, a bundle of America-bashing lessons, distorted history, and indoctrination into the glories of collective bargaining may become a part of the Golden State’s curriculum.




Sunday, April 26, 2015

Civil Rights Racism: Democrats Controlled Everything But Would Not Pass Civil Rights! The History The Timeline of Democrat Racism

Civil Rights Racism: Democrats Controlled Everything But Would Not Pass Civil Rights! The History The Timeline of Democrat Racism

Nepotism at Newport Schools

Sunapee, Claremont, and Unity School Districts all have a school board policy about nepotism. NEWPORT DOES NOT... They all read the same. Newport's Chair said it was a small town.. so it is not unusal to have spouse of a school member employed.
Nepotism
The Board will not employ any teacher or other employee if such teacher or other employee is the father, mother, brother, sister, wife, husband, son, daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law, or brother-in-law of the Superintendent or any member of the Board. If a conflict exists,the Board member shall declare his/her interest and refrain from debating, discussing, or voting on a nomination or other issue.
This shall not apply to any person within such relationship or relationships who has been regularly employed by the Board prior to the inception of the relationship, the adoption of this policy, or a Board member's election.
Legal References:
Marsh v. Hanover, 113 NH 667 (1973) and
Atherton v. Concord, 109 NH 164 (1968)

The above was spotted on a facebook post by Gayle Hedrington.

Cathy