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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RACINE, Wis. – Left-wing Wisconsin teacher Al Levie believes his mission in the classroom is to help students “become engines of positive change in our society.”

Some of his former students, however, describe their experience in his class a little bit differently.

“This man is a socialist and proud of it. Not someone I wanted to learn from and I feel that I was not taught the truth,” a former student wrote on the popular website RateMyTeachers.com. “I was only taught the propagandized version of the truth. This man is a danger to American society.”

Another student described him as “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” and advises parents, “do not allow your kids to attend his class.

“He is the reason our high schools/colleges have become so progressive and this type of influence just solidifies our entitlement society.”

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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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WASHINGTON, Va. – If you want to mesmerize small children and make them believe everything you’re saying, just grab a guitar and deliver your philosophy in the form of music.

Soft sounds and attractive rhymes ring true with kids, regardless of the content or message. And with musicians being so glorified by popular culture, kids have a tendency to believe that if it comes in a song, the message must be profound and correct.

What a brilliant strategy for left-wing educators across the nation who have openly declared their intent to convert public school students into young liberals.

The indoctrination-through-music effort comes courtesy of a Washington, Virginia-based non-profit called “Kid Pan Alley.”

Musicians who belong to the group visit elementary schools for a reported $1,200 per day, supposedly helping children learn to write their own musical lyrics. The fee comes from school budgets, of course, and schools are encouraged to seek government grants to cover the cost.

When the “workshop” is finished, they help the kids perform “their” songs for classmates in school assemblies.

The lyrics these kids come up with are amazingly adult in their political content, and startlingly liberal for very small children who generally have little coherent understanding of politics at all.

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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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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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MUSKEGON, Mich. – We’ve always known that teachers unions are very political organizations, and many of their more radical members are active in left-wing causes.

That’s their right, as long as they pursue their activities after school.

But more and more American K-12 teachers are bringing their politics into the classroom, brazenly acknowledging their effort to indoctrinate and recruit a new generation of radical, anti-American students.

“The long period of self-censorship among educators regarding class and labor issues may no longer hold,” wrote radical educator Rob Linne in his book “Organizing the Curriculum.”

“We cannot claim to be teaching for social justice if we ignore the class warfare being waged all around us. Bringing labor into the arena of K-12 education will undoubtedly meet political resistance, but an increasing number of educators are motivated to take up the challenge.”

That frightening approach to teaching is what motivated Education Action Group to publish a new book titled “Indoctrination: How ‘Useful Idiots’ are Using Our Schools to Subvert American Exceptionalism.”

You can watch a short promotional video for the book by clicking here.

The book, authored by EAG Chief Executive Officer Kyle Olson, with assistance from staffers Ben Velderman and Steve Gunn, is available on Amazon.com.

It explores dozens of examples of radical public school teachers and their politically active unions taking liberty with our children by teaching left-wing philosophy as fact.

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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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Former Weather Underground terrorist leader, and long time colleague of president Barack Obama, Bill Ayers  is actively supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement, in his home town of Chicago – while his education activist brother Rick Ayers wants to see the movement extended to the nation’s schools.

In an October 16 interview with Chicago Sun-Times journalist Laura Washington, Bill Ayers described the” Occupy” movement as a “North American Spring,” akin to the “Arab Spring” still playing out in North Africa and the Middle East.

Said Ayers:

“These kinds of movements expand our consciousness of what’s possible…Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.”

Ayers’ support took a more practical form October 19, when the retired UIC professor led a “teach-in” with Occupy Chicago protesters on “ non-violent direct action” at the group’s  HQ (in front of the Federal Reseve Bank at Jackson and LaSalle).

Ayers  detailed the tactics and history of the Civil Rights movement, drawing analogies to the group before him. “You created power where there was none,” the famed agitator said.

Ayers spoke naturally to the crowd of 40, who sat in rapture, registering their approval by lifting silent fingers.

“It’s critical that you maintain your independence,” Ayers told the crowd – warning them not to be  co-opted by labor unions or the Democrats. History, Ayers told the assembled activists, shows his preferred approach to political power. “Martin Luther King didn’t go begging for a meeting with Lyndon Johnson,” Ayers said. “Lyndon Johnson begged for a meeting with Martin Luther King.”

The protesters seem to have already followed Ayers’ advice. The group turned down Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s proposition for a meeting, demanding the misdemeanor charges from last Saturday’s arrest of more than 170 activists be dropped first.

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Vladimir Lenin is popularly attributed with coining the term “useful idiots” – a description of Americans who were in effect doing the bidding of the communist Soviet Union – and subverting American exceptionalism – in the name of global humanity.

Lenin “has left the building,” but his leftist agenda lives on among progressives who are obsessed with trying to subvert our free market economy.  And it’s those progressives who control the nation’s teachers unions and the rest of the education blob which manipulates a naïve and sympathetic public to do their dirty work.

Many parents have come to believe that the red ink in public school budgets has been caused by politicians who have scaled back the increases in public education spending.  Parents have been duped into thinking that it’s the “evil” and miserly politicians who are to blame for government schools going broke.  Parents don’t want to confront the fact that it’s the pensions, benefits, and other perks for the adult school employees that have brought the system to the financial brink.  Worse, parents have fallen prey to the notion that spending must be increased or little Johnny’s art teacher will have taught his last finger painting lesson.

The teacher unions are fighting for their very survival, and have taken to creating a sense of panic among parents, in hopes the public will push the unions’ agenda.  As a result, some parents become desperate to do something – anything – to fix the problem.

That desperation seems to have motivated a group of California parents to create a music video that features a group of elementary children singing the following words:

“It’s my school, your school

Gotta get dough for our schools

This money won’t raise itself

But we can

“Unity! Community!

Funds, funds, funds, funds!

Looking forward to the next year

“No more music, PE, drama,

Spanish and art class goin’ bye bye

Funds, Funds, thinkin’ about funds

You know what I mean …”

The video – which appears to have been filmed at a taxpayer-funded school – is as pathetic as it is absurd. At one point, the children take turns putting money in a donation box, only to have an actor portraying Uncle Sam take the money out of the box and stuff it inside his coat.

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This is the final installment of the Indoctrination Fridays series.  They can all be read at PublicSchoolSpending.com.  A book featuring more leftist curricula, entitled, “Indoctrination! How Useful Idiots Are Using Our Schools to Subvert American Exceptionalism” will be released later this year.

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 earthquake mercilessly shook the country of Haiti, causing death and destruction of Biblical proportions. By the time the last aftershock was registered, approximately 85,000 Haitians were dead, and hundreds of thousands more were injured or left homeless.

Some observed that the 1989 San Francisco earthquake also reached 7.0 on the Richter scale, but that left 63 people dead and left about 12,000 homeless. The difference between the two was that California’s buildings are designed to withstand powerful earthquakes, and Haiti’s are not.

That realization brought renewed attention to the poverty of the Haitian people. Onlookers began to question why the tiny Caribbean country was so hopelessly poor and ill-prepared.

Garrett Glass of the Digital Freedom Network suggested a possible reason:

“In Haiti’s 200-year quest for freedom, one of the most crucial components of freedom, which leads to prosperity, has never been effectively implemented or even seriously tried (much less respected). The Haitian system of establishing property rights is so convoluted, complicated and corrupt that to the average citizen of Haiti owning any property will always remain just a dream. The connection between poverty and the lack of property rights is often overlooked.”

George Mason University economist Walter Williams noted that the rule of law is virtually nonexistent in Haiti:

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Last week, Andrew Breitbart sat down exclusively with EAGtv and shared the purpose of BigEducation.com, his next website to be launched.

This is one part of a running series entitled “Indoctrination Fridays,” a weekly review of leftist propaganda incorporated into public school curriculum, much of it geared towards elementary students.  For more of the series, please visit PublicSchoolSpending.com.

Leftist educators will take just about anything and turn it on its head to fit their agenda.  Even children’s fairytales don’t escape the slaughterhouse.

Ellen Wolpert, a longtime “early childhood educator” in Massachusetts, penned an article entitled, “Rethinking ‘The Three Little Pigs.’”

You’re probably familiar with the story: a big, bad wolf threatens to destroy the homes of three individual pigs. There’s a lot of huffing and puffing on the wolf’s part, but he can only blow over the two homes that were constructed with straw and sticks.

The house standing left standing is made of brick, leaving readers to conclude that careful planning and hard work (as represented by the brick house) leads to success. The pigs’ definition of success, of course, is to avoid being eaten by the wolf.

That’s how normal, well-adjusted people interpret the story. But Leftists, by and large, are dour, unhappy people who see oppression and bigotry around every corner. So it’s no surprise that Wolpert sees a dark and malicious subtext to the simple fairy tale.

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This is one part of a running series entitled “Indoctrination Fridays,” a weekly review of leftist propaganda incorporated into public school curriculum, much of it geared towards elementary students.  For more of the series, please visit PublicSchoolSpending.com.

Any good community organizer knows an effective protest requires two things: a bully to excoriate and a catchy slogan that resonates in the public mind.

Even though most protestors are “uncomplicated” people, don’t be deceived; staging an effective rally is not a simple task.

First, a bully must be identified. For progressives, a bully is anybody who disagrees with you politically, so there is no shortage of candidates. However, as Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” explains, it’s best to settle on one target to isolate and attack.

Next, protestors need to come up with a catchy slogan to shout at the designated bully. Most people don’t have the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s “gift” of reducing complex ideas into simplistic rhymes. This skill must be taught.

Which brings us to this week’s installment of the Indoctrination Fridays series:  Gender doesn’t limit you – A research-based anti-bullying program for the early grades.

This charming six-part lesson plan is designed to stamp out (mostly) gender-based bullying from Pre-K all the way through 6^th grade.

Most readers will agree that bullying is a problem and that teachers should talk to students about it in a thoughtful, reasonable manner.

But thought and reason are totally absent from the “Gender doesn’t limit you” lesson plans, which only provide children with a designated slogan to shout at suspected bullies.

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This is one part of a running series entitled “Indoctrination Fridays,” a weekly review of leftist propaganda incorporated into public school curriculum and geared towards elementary students.  For more of the series, please visit PublicSchoolSpending.com.

The real targets of the Green Movement are free markets and capitalism, not theoretical global warming.  There is always another agenda.

Back in 2008, Detroit News columnist and WJR talk radio personality Frack Beckmann brought to light a series of lessons produced by Creative Change Educational Solutions, a non-profit outfit producing plans for teachers that want to instruct their students on environmental issues.

Beckmann decried the fact that the curriculum developed by Creative Change focuses on criticizing capitalism by having students compare “wages and working conditions in factories in China and Vietnam (to) corporate profits…and compensation for chief executive officers.”  In other words, the distribution of wealth is unacceptable and must be changed.  That will save the whales!

This curriculum is much worse than Beckmann lets on, however.  The lessons have spread throughout southeast Michigan.  One school district, Bloomfield Hills – which ironically serves one of the wealthiest communities in the state – purchased the curriculum for $750. Ann Arbor Public Schools paid $4,900 for a day-long seminar.  Similarly, Eastern Michigan University paid Creative Change $19,133.67 between 2007 and 2008 to “identify community groups and schools, help to develop, plan for, and facilitate Stakeholders Meetings, and collaborate writing the implementation proposal.”

Eastern Michigan University and Ann Arbor Public Schools, spent our tax dollars to spread this poison around the region.

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Note: This is one part of a running series entitled “Indoctrination Fridays,” a weekly review of leftist propaganda incorporated into public school curriculum and oftentimes geared towards elementary students.  For more of the series, please visit PublicSchoolSpending.com.

The Black Panthers of the 1960s and 1970s and the New Black Panther Party today are known for employing violence, intimidation and radicalism to get their way.  The Black Panthers were founded in 1966 on Marxist principles, advocating socialism as a solution for the grievances of African-Americans.

Its “Honorary Prime Minister,” Stokley Carmichael, said in a speech that year:

“This country is a nation of thieves. It stole everything it has, beginning with black people. The U.S. cannot justify its existence as the policeman of the world any longer. I do not want to be a part of the American pie. The American pie means raping South Africa, beating Vietnam, beating South America, raping the Philippines, raping every country you’ve been in. I don’t want any of your blood money. I don’t want to be part of that system. We must question whether or not we want this country to continue being the wealthiest country in the world at the price of raping everybody else.”

The far-left Southern Poverty Law Center, which also has curricula that will be featured in this series, has labeled the New Black Panthers a “hate group.”  That’s saying something.

But that’s of little relevance to Wayne Au.

The Seattle high school teacher-turned-professor taught his students to apply the principles of the Black Panthers to their own problems.  Seriously.

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This is one part of a running series entitled “Indoctrination Fridays,” a weekly review of leftist propaganda incorporated into public school curriculum, much geared towards elementary students.  For more of the series, please visit PublicSchoolSpending.com.

In typical union and socialist propaganda, employers are depicted as cruel and uncaring business owners who never miss an opportunity to cheat and mistreat workers.

Big Labor’s “us versus them” worldview is so entrenched that they can’t recognize the fact that most successful companies value their employees, and do whatever they can to retain their best workers. That reality, of course, undercuts the relevance of unions.

So what’s a union to do?

Like their fellow travelers in the “man-made” global warming community, the unions know they have to indoctrinate the young with their propaganda. But when you’re dealing with kindergartners, you have to insert the concept of unionizing subtly into lessons.  You’ll get blank stares if you talk about the virtues of Jimmy Hoffa or the Service Employees International Union.

The California Federation of Teachers produced the perfect solution with “Trouble in the Hen House: A Puppet Show.” To spare you the unpleasantness of reading this bilge, here’s the basic plot:  a bunch of hens feel “oppressed” by the farmer, so they band together and create Hens United. The angry unionized chickens are too powerful a force for the farmer to handle, so he capitulates to the hens’ demands.  Here’s a key excerpt:

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I was seeing red this morning when I read this first-person account of 3^rd grade socialist indoctrination in Millwaukee Public Schools.

It came from Dale Weiss, an MPS teacher and devoted radical.

“The process of addressing budget cuts with my students taught me an incredible amount,” Weiss recently wrote. “I learned that laying a social justice foundation for young students is a complex process. I learned when issues are addressed, they need to be revisited many, many times.”

“Social justice foundation?”  Oh wait, dear readers, the giddy and proud Ms. Weiss explains how she set the 8- and 9-year olds up for a fall:

“Several weeks later, right as the bell was about to ring at the end of the school day, I casually mentioned to my students that I wanted to learn more about doing art with children since Ms. Sue [the art teacher] would not be with us next year. The students clearly were taken off guard:

“But I thought if we wrote letters to the school board there would be more money for MPS and we could keep Ms. Sue.

“Michael and Dakota read their letters at that meeting, and they asked for more money for our school. I really thought we would get more money. But now I don’t think it happened.

“Looking at the disappointment on their faces, I realized I had unintentionally led my students to conclude that if we believed something to be unfair and took action, the unfair situation would turn into a fair one. I remembered saying over and over: ‘There is always something you can do to try to turn the unfair situation into a fair one.’

Yet my students heard something quite different. In their hope and optimism as 8- and 9-year-old children, they knew that their actions would bring about a miracle. My heart sank; I felt I had let my students down.”

To Ms. Weiss and other unionists, the students are little more than political pawns in their game.  They’re setting them up to do their dirty lobbying work.

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Alright you evil, rotten, racist, white oppressors, it’s time once again for the “White Privilege Conference,” this year to be held in Minneapolis, Minnesota on April 13 – 16. Come on out you white teachers so we can get your rotten minds right about how racist you are and so that you can go back to your students and let them know how racist they are.

I’ll bet you think I am being sarcastic with the name of that conference, right? Nope. It really IS called the “White Privilege Conference,” and this year is its 12th year!

So, what is it? Why it’s a conference for America’s teachers to explore the full length and breadth of multifulcuralism. We are all the same, you see, Indians, Hispanics, Blacks, all at harmony and all equal… well, unless you are a whitey, of course. If you are a whitey, well you have some splanin’ to do! You are the one black mark on this wonderful multicultural world, doncha know? And it’s about time you admitted your malevolence, dang it!

Yes, it’s a “toxic cultural environment” we monstrous whites have created for our children… never mind that this is the greatest nation on earth, and all.

But the WPC has the cure.

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I don’t usually engage in snarky posts, but every once in a while, I need a little snark to put a ridiculous situation into perspective.  So please indulge me for the next three minutes…

It’s a good thing the government’s taken over the student loan industry.  Now our precious young college students will receive every opportunity to spend hours learning in the college classroom, enlightening their minds and enriching their lives.

Oh wait, no, that’s not how that “free money” is spent.  Why use our hard earned tax dollars for an education when you can waste our money and spend that time instead on becoming a pawn in someone else’s propaganda?  Why not abuse the money that’s been confiscated from our paychecks at a time when we so desperately need it and instead enjoy the benefits of union indoctrination on your college campus?

So let me get this straight.  Students all across the country have suddenly all taken a collective interest in the economic performance of their university’s cafeteria?  So, instead of attending classes like grateful students excited to learn, they’re sitting in the middle of a busy intersection at a red light, arm in arm, donning their SEIU-provided purple shirt, blocking traffic and taking cops away from important things – like responding to emergencies.  And last week, 20 were arrested for doing this at Ohio State University.

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