Well, at least the kids weren’t singing – everybody now – “Mmm mmm mmm…Barack Hussein Obama.”  But the latest example of Big Education fawning over Barack Obama isn’t much better.

On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Cass Elementary School in Livonia, Michigan aired a video of still images of Obama, with a speech by King and – strangely – a Bob Marley song playing in the background.

The students looked about as interested as if they were watching paint dry.

It’s unclear how long the song actually was, as the citizen journalist video is 1:20 long and the song was clearly longer.

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Fresh on the heels of an exclusive report detailing a 7-day Caribbean cruise that National Education Association staffers are currently enjoying, Education Action Group has learned that dozens of teachers unions around the country are running out of money.

According to reports published by the National Staff Organization – a group made up of NEA and state affiliate union staffers:

“Fifteen states are considered to be financially distressed because of membership loss and their very survival is in jeopardy. And because of financial hardship, 41 state executives are on NEA’s payroll instead of being paid by their state. Two states—Indiana and South Carolina—remain under an NEA trusteeship.”

Teachers union accounts are buying red pens by the box these days.

NSO President Chuck Agerstrand called it a lesson in “trickle-down economics.”

Or maybe it’s just “trickle-down karma.”

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Imagine your organization is facing attacks from all sides.  Imagine it’s losing members and revenue.  Imagine governors and mayors – of both political parties – publicly denouncing your industry as “broken” and move swiftly to stifle your power and influence, while you flail away helplessly.

What to do?  What else to do but go down drinking?

That’s what members of the National Education Association’s National Staff Organization have apparently decided.  The NSO is an association of sorts for teachers’ union staff – political and communications types.

Following an “Advocacy Retreat” with the theme “Building Our Unionism,” members set sail on a 7-day cruise from Miami on February 5^th “with stops at Cozumel, Grand Cayman Island and Isla Roatan.”  Sounds fun!  [In case the Facebook link disappears, never fear: here’s a PDF of the NSO newsletter.]

Guess what union staff?  There are going to be cameras all over the ship documenting your every move – from every Fuzzy Navel to every game of shuffle board. Just think how your rank-and-file members might appreciate seeing all the “fun in the sun” you’re having, courtesy of their dues dollars.

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You just have to love it when government uses taxpayer resources to convince taxpayers to cough up more.  It takes an unusually large set of brass ones to do such a thing.

But that’s apparently how they roll in the Western School District, near Battle Creek, Michigan.

Apparently unaware for the past dozen years that technology can play a role in improving education, school officials want to raise taxes (about $180 annually for a $100,000 home) to pay for technology upgrades.

The school district has blurred ethical lines in order to accomplish its mission.

The “Vote Yes!” campaign posted a picture on Facebook of what appear to be elementary students standing in campaign t-shirts giving the thumbs up.  It had the caption, “These future WHS Panther wrestlers hope you support the bond proposal and vote ‘YES’ on February 28th.”

Source: Western Schools Bond Facebook page

[Here is a screen grab of the Facebook page, should it “conveniently” disappear.]

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When I watched the video of the Wisconsin teacher snubbing Congressman Paul Ryan, I knew instantly he was little more than an activist teacher seizing his moment.  Respect-be-damned, it was his moment to stick it to an ideological foe.  He became an instant folk hero for leftists.

But the silliness was nothing new for Racine teacher Al Levie.  He has a history of using students in his personal political agenda.

Case in point is an article Levie penned for the National Education Association magazine, NEA Today, titled, “Don’t Scold, Organize!”  He concluded it by writing:

“By engaging students in real-life issues and encouraging them to act on a political level, we will transform schools into places where authentic learning takes place.

“At the same time, we will help our students become engines of positive change in our society.”

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“A Tale of Two Missions” – a film by Juan Williams and Kyle Olson (and directed by Chicago-based Andrew Marcus) – tells the story of competing cultures in American education through examples from Chicago.

See the internet-only abridged version here:

While the fight for school choice rages across the nation, perhaps no better example exists than that of the Windy City.  Traditional alliances are breaking down.  Both political parties are pushing for education reform and expanded school choice.  The status quo is under attack, because most reasonable people understand that thousands of Chicago students are trapped in failing schools.

But the education establishment, led by the radical Chicago Teachers Union, is not willing to give an inch to allow better choices for underserved students. And the union still has enough money, influence and legal standing to make reform efforts difficult to implement.

The film features the Noble Street College Prep charter school and the amazing results its teachers and leaders are delivering for students and parents of Chicago.  It also exposes the entrenched educational establishment bent on stifling school choice options and preserving its monopoly on state education dollars.

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New York City government schools have had some pretty outrageous policies.  Rubber rooms were a great example.  They were special places created for teachers accused of crimes, incompetence and the like. Due to state tenure laws, it actually cost less to house the failed teachers in a location where they couldn’t inflict more damage on students, than to go through the lengthy and expensive legal process necessary to fire them.

Thanks Big Labor!

Now New York administrators are trying to deep-six a program created a few years ago in the collective bargaining agreement with the United Federation of Teachers: the Absent Teacher Reserve.

What’s this?  A creation of bureaucrats, politicians and labor bosses, the ATR is comprised of teachers who literally have no classroom for one reason or another. Due to a labor contract stipulation, they can’t be fired or laid off, and continue to draw the same salaries as full-time teachers. They’re put into the ATR pool, where they may be assigned to work as substitutes, clerks, or perhaps to do nothing at all.

They’re clearly not needed, and collectively they make a great deal of money. How’s that for management of taxpayer dollars?

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Jose Rico has been named the new director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, a key position that could help close the achievement gap between white and minority students.  But if his history is any indication, his influence may do more harm than good.

Perhaps most troubling is Rico’s connection to unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and communist radical Mike Klonsky through the Chicago-based “Small Schools Workshop.”

The “Small Schools Workshop” was founded by Ayers and Klonsky.  In Klonsky’s words, Rico “toiled in the vineyards at the Small Schools Workshop” prior to obtaining an administrative position within Chicago Public Schools.  According to a U.S. Department of Education biography, Rico worked for the Small Schools Workshop some 6 years.  Klonsky beamed like a doting father on his website when Rico was appointed to the White House position.

While Rico’s CPSalumni.org bio doesn’t mention Small Schools Workshop, it describes his time in Chicago working as a “community organizer.”

Even after leaving Small Schools Workshop, Rico continued to associate with Klonsky.  In early 2009, he appeared on a panel with Klonsky titled “Prospects for Change in the Obama Years.” And Klonsky’s track record would make any American wonder why he’s been allowed to teach in American public schools.

After leading the violent Students for a Democratic Society with Ayers in the late 1960s, Klonsky left to fully embrace his communist roots.  Believing that the Communist Party-USA was not radical enough, in 1971, Klonsky founded the Communist Party-Marxist Leninist.

While serving as its chairman, Klonsky advocated for the overthrow of the world’s two superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union.

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Earlier this week, a Virginia-based organization came under fire for leading 3^rd grade students at Woodbrook Elementary in Charlottesville to write a song titled “We Are Part of the 99.”

The song, with its reference to the 1 percent and 99 percent was obviously talking about the Occupy protests that occurred around the country.

According to the school district’s story, the students wrote:

I used to be part of the 1 percent

I worked all the time

Never saw my family

Couldn’t make life rhyme

Then the bubble burst

When I was in 3^rd grade, I knew about bubbles in the bath, not housing bubbles.

Now another video has emerged which was produced by Kid Pan Alley, the same organization that “helped” the students write the Occupy song.

Posted a couple weeks prior to Barack Obama’s inauguration, the organization posted a video of a song written by 2^nd graders in Fairfax County, Virginia.

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It’s so reassuring to have the intellectual elites in our nation’s teachers unions, like Sandy Hughes of Tennessee, looking out for us rubes.

Hughes, a local union president, is pitching the idea that school board membership be limited to people who “have worked in the education field,” because the issues at hand are “so complex” and too complicated for average citizens.

In other words, all will be well if taxpayers just get out of the way and let the wise and wonderful union folks run our schools, no questions asked. All we have to do is keep paying the taxes, then mind our own business.

This is a perfect example of the snobbery and arrogance that is so pervasive in the public education establishment.

A stay-at-home mom that wants to be on the board?  Sorry.  Business owners who know how to control labor costs and balance budgets? They don’t have the right skill set, according to Hughes. Public education is too “complex” for them.

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We have come to appreciate the Occupiers for their fundamental misunderstanding of economics.  We’ve also come to look forward to the latest arrest statistics or video of delusional protesters weeping for their Lost Tent City.

I shudder to think what America would look like if they truly had any decision-making power.

Consider the latest zany idea from one “MrMiller” of Sandy, Utah:

“Here is my proposal for opening up cheaper education to people in our country. It is my opinion that we don’t need to pay professors quite so much money if we go about providing for them in a different way. What if we were to IMMEDIATELY find ways to provide for teachers to live life for free and paid their housing, (or collectively built them new houses, free of charge), gave them free food and also healthcare? If we collectively found a way to eliminate THEIR overhead, then we wouldn’t all have to pay so much for them and this would thus drive down costs for all? I have been thinking about this for a LONG time and have decided that that would be the single greatest step towards reducing the costs of education period if we all worked together to do it. It’s not even a hard thing to imagine. Anyone disagree?”

Um…me?

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Imagine watching Fox News one night and your high school child walks into the room and proceeds to tell you that “Fox News lies!”

That happened to Nick Benson, a Californian who had two students enrolled at Barstow High School in San Bernardino County.

“How do you know that,” Benson said he asked the boy.  “My teacher told me,” was his grandson’s response.

An editorial cartoon Barstow high school students read in "World History" class

Sure enough.  His grandson’s “World History” teacher, Jim Duarte, fed a steady dose of radical left wing propaganda to his students, disguised as classroom assignments.  It was like students were receiving their news from a slightly more sophisticated source than The Daily Show.

Last week Benson provided Education Action Group with several assignments that Duarte handed out last school year, when Benson’s grandson was in his class.

The articles and editorial cartoons students were expected to review were ridiculously slanted to the Big Labor/socialist point of view, as were the leading questions on classroom worksheets.

On one such worksheet, students read an article on how Fox News supposedly “pushed” a “falsehood” that government workers make more than their private sector counterparts. Says who? Media Matters, far-left reactionary outfit that based its public/private comparison on a “study” published by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank largely funded by Big Labor.

Duarte’s efforts to sell his personal political beliefs to students are all-too-familiar. Throughout the nation, we’ve been hearing teachers union leaders openly calling for instructors to preach pro-union and anti-American philosophy to their students, some as young as preschool age.

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Bill Ayers recently appeared before a group of activist teachers to encourage them to keep up the fight.  He told them about the assistance he provided in getting the very radical Bob Peterson elected president of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association.

Hoping to wow his friendly audience, he also gushed about another leader he helped.

Ayers admitted he hosted a fundraiser at his home for Barack Obama in the 1990s.  “I thought he wanted to be mayor of Chicago – that’s the limit of my imagination,” he told the audience in a video released exclusively by Education Action Group.

This is likely the first time Ayers has been caught on tape discussing his connection to Obama.  Their relationship has been routinely been downplayed by Ayers, Obama and his associates, since the national media took a glancing look into their ties during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Ayers’ impact on America cannot be underestimated.  While many have exposed and condemned his leadership in the radical and violent Weather Underground – and the group’s efforts to terrorize the country in the 1960s and ’70s – he has done far more damage to our students’ minds.

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Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis called a press conference yesterday to go on the offensive and attempt to blame our organization, Education Action Group, for the ugly words she recently uttered at a conference for union activists.

On Monday, EAG released a video of three extended excerpts from her October speech, which included her ridicule of U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan over his speech impediment.  It created a media firestorm.

In an attempt to do damage control, Lewis said, “…I implore you to look at the entire 35-minute video and to listen to the entire speech so you can make a decision for yourself without the filter of right-wing pundits and anti-public education, media-savvy operatives.”

We did and it’s just as ugly as what has already been highlighted.

At the 12:31 mark of the original video, she attempts to smear Chicago school board members Henry Bienen and Penny Pritzker. She said Bienen, a former president of Northwestern University, was on the board of Bear Stearns “when it crashed.” She said Pritzker owns Hyatt hotels, a chain she claims “won’t pay her cleaning ladies a living wage.”

“These are the people we’re dealing with,” Lewis said about the board members.

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Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis recently appeared before the Northwest Teaching for Social Justice group and laid it on thick.

Lewis, who is also a vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, leveled a cheap personal attack at President Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan.  See it, courtesy of EAGtv.

Speaking with a manufactured speech impediment in order to mock Duncan, Lewis said:

“‘Education is the civil rights issue of our time.’  Now, you know he went to private school ‘cause if he had gone to public school he would have had that lisp fixed.  I know – that was ugly wasn’t it?  I’m sorry.”

I thought we taught children not to mock or make fun of others.  Apparently the teachers are exempt from such lessons.

It is interesting to witness the vitriol from union leaders aimed at Democratic leaders who have proposed tepid, incremental education reform and school choice.

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I guess NATSLA – that is, the “North American Teacher/Student Love Association”* – will have to look for members in places other than Michigan.  That’s because the Michigan legislature will likely pass a bill that would make it a crime for teachers and students to have sex.

It’s incredible that such a bill is necessary. Can’t we just expect the tiny fraction of overly-randy teachers to control themselves? Apparently not.

So the full-time Michigan legislature – which is often looking for new laws to pass to fill its time – is tackling the issue head-on.

MLive.com reports:

“The bill was sparked by concerns from prosecutors who said they were unable to charge teachers who had sex with students after the students turned 18, including one who waited until the day after the girl’s birthday before taking to her a hotel room.”

Who’s willing to bet this teacher splurged and rented a room at the Holiday Inn Express instead of the usual Super 8?  Anybody?

Why aren’t the unions cleaning out their own ranks, thereby making such a bill unnecessary?  It’s hard for union teachers to demand to be treated like professionals when issues like this must be addressed.

But never fear: Those deep-thinking legislators did raise some concerns.

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As radical progressives continue to strengthen their grip on the #OccupyWallStreet mob, they’ve looked to activists of yesteryear to glean some advice and guidance.  The #OccupyChicago crowd has unsurprisingly turned to domestic terrorist-turned-university professor-turned huggable grandpa Bill Ayers.

Ayers appeared at a recent “teach in” at #OccupyChicago and regaled his audience with stories of meeting with the Vietnamese to tut-tut about his “American revolution.”

He theorized whether or not the police – you know, the pigs that protesters are attacking from coast-to-coast – are indeed a part of the 99%.  They’re not if they attack us, he mused.

But then, in typical leftist fashion, he wondered why we have jails at all.  “Let’s abolish the prisons. That freaks people out,” he told his audience.

“But then somebody immediately says, ‘What about John Wayne Gacy…?’ Okay, one cell.  Who else…who else.  Alright, I’ll give you George Bush,” he said to his giggling admirers.

The more the #Occupy crowd embraces radicals and retired terrorists, the less chance they have of being respected for anything they say.  But I honestly don’t think they’re seeking validity in the sense of a political debate.

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It’s sad that teachers – who have such an influence over the future of America – where right in the mix when the riots and vandalism broke out Wednesday in Oakland, California.  Obviously that’s where their hearts are at.

Trouble was brewing when the Oakland Education Association – an affiliate of the National Education Association – endorsed the #Occupy mob’s call for a national strike on Nov. 2.  One declaration from the union stated, “We must shut down the schools to save the schools.”

Huh?  Perhaps a more accurate statement would be, “We must shut down the schools to protect our pensions and power.”

According to sources within the union, its leaders – including OEA President Betty Olson-Jones – were a part of the plotting to confront Bank of America, Whole Foods, and the sea port.

Do the taxpayers or the media even care?  Or is this just how they roll in Oakland?

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Patricia McAllister is the anti-Semitic gasbag who recently spouted racist remarks to Reason.tv.  She was summarily fired by the Los Angeles Unified School District where she was an at-will substitute teacher.  When a Fox 11 reporter gave her a chance to clarify her remarks, she continued with the same moronic diatribe: “Jews have been run out of 109 countries throughout history – we need to run them out of this one.”

The one and only Patricia McAllister. Thankfully.

An organizer for #OccupyLA was standing within earshot when McAllister spoke and refused to denounce her remarks. Is it now safe to assume that the Occupy protesters have adopted an anti-Jewish platform?

Of course McAllister isn’t satisfied with the outrage she provoked with her racist remarks.  Now she has targeted the Los Angeles school board:

LomaLindaPatch reports:

“Patricia McAllister, a teacher from the Los Angeles Unified School District, held a sign by the road as drivers honked in solidarity. She was concerned with some of the political issues she had seen on the school board. McAllister has noticed that many of the board members are elected, and as a result they receive campaign donations from charter schools and construction firms, who they steer business towards.

“’This is a conflict of interest,’ McAllister said. ‘They (board members) need to be appointed, not elected.’”

That’s a strange position for her to take, because typically unions prefer elections over appointments because elections are easier to manipulate.  The amount of teachers union campaign cash flowing to current school board members is astounding.

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