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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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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The following is a video shot at a Tucson, Arizona school board meeting. The lady within the video is reading excerpts from a book in the Ethnic Studies curriculum. Yes, the following is actually being taught to children.

As Moonbat Tracker writes:

A law, authored by AZ Attorney General Tom Horne, would ban separatist and racist “Raza studies” (particularly in the out of control Tucson schools), and has been met with virulent protests from the far-left reconquistador crowd.

Last week, a woman read  excerpts from a book in the Tucson Ethnic Studies program at a school board meeting.

These outrageous and toxic books teach kids that the United States is an institutionally racist  system filled with “bloodsucking capitalists” and Anglos who “rape Hispanic culture”.

Here are a couple of quotes from the book in which the lady recites:

“Hard drugs and drug culture is an invention of the gringo because he has no culture.”

“We have to destroy capitalism and we have to help 5/6 of the world to destroy capitalism in order to equal all peoples’ lives.

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One thing I love about tea party activists is their commitment to government transparency and accountability.  When they see the media speaking no evil, hearing no evil and seeing no evil, they do the media’s job for them.  Citizen journalists are quickly showing the media to be biased and growing irrelevant.

The tea party activist to receive the gold star this week is Lennie Jarratt of Grayslake, Illinois.

In the Grayslake, Illinois School District 46, three tea party members decided to take action by running for three available seats on the school board this spring.  I wish more would do the same thing.

Their opponents were two incumbents with strong teachers’ union ties. One of the incumbents, Mary Garcia, also serves as the teachers’ union president in neighboring District 30. The other, Susan Fecklam, reportedly ran a coordinated campaign with Garcia.

The incumbents were obviously concerned about the presence of the tea party candidates on the ballot, and what they might do to the union agenda if they were elected.

So what did the incumbents do? They allegedly broke the law, or violated school policies, by using school email accounts to promote their campaigns, and by bribing 18-year-old students to register to vote, on the presumption the kids would vote for them.

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Activists in the Lake County Tea Party have received over 300 pages of email correspondence between school officials via FOIA. The emails uncover appalling actions by these officials. The following from  Paul Mitchell at the Lake County Tea Party exposes information about this past school board election, and the consequences that the President of the teacher’s union, Maria Garcia, feared would harm the union’s ability to collectively bargain, if any of the Lake County Tea Party affiliated candidates won the election. The emails how the tactics the officials would use to prevent that occurrence.

The following was sent to District 46 Superintendent Ellen Correll, Assistant Superintendent Lynn Barkley, union leaders Christine Wilson, Diane Elfering, and fellow incumbent candidate Sue Facklam,  from Garcia’s email account in District 30 (Wed., Feb. 23rd, 11:34 AM), where Garcia works as a teacher.

“I think that all members of both Unions should be apprised of this information… There will be no collective bargaining with those 3 on the board. I am very afraid that Sue and I will not have the funds necessary to fight a ‘party’.”

In the following email, Facklam, a voter registrar writes the following, referring to registering high school students to vote.

“Don’t let them turn us in; gifts to register to vote is probably illegal! I did offer Erika [Garcia’s 18-year-old daughter] more gift cards if she can gather up more friends!”(Wed., March 2nd, 10:14 AM to Mary Garcia at her D30 account.) It is a felony to offer remuneration to anyone for voting or registering to vote.

Mitchell explains, “The emails reveal evidence of extensive contributions, expenditures, and in-kind contributions that, by law, ought to have triggered formation of a campaign committee, and been reported to the State Board of Elections.”

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As if bailing out banks and the auto industry wasn’t enough, now Washington, D.C. wants more control over schools.

In order for a state to apply for its share of President Obama’s Race to the Top stimulus funds, it will have to explain how it will use those federal dollars on a list of suggested education reforms.  This week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry said “thanks but no thanks.”

This was the proper decision for Texas, and here’s why:

• Education has historically been a state issue, with power in Texas delegated to the Texas Legislature and the State Board of Education. Texas lawmakers control funding and school requirements, and the State Board makes decisions about curriculum.  All of these are elected positions directly accountable to the voters at least once every four years.

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