School teaching is important because teachers are supposed to help children learn skills that will help them become productive adults.
This is an area where you as parents should be demanding competence and excellence from your school officials.
As an older guy, I have not been a formal student since I was 40. I studied forensic science and toxicology to up my game. I assisted at autopsies and did blood work and trace evidence work as a 40-year-old intern with the good folks of the Cuyahoga County Coromer’s Office. Since I was older than most of the technicians, I ended up refereeing some of their squabbles even as they taught me the skills of their trade.
More recently, I have worked on defense projects with 20-something engineers who can run rings around me in the classroom but lack practical application skills for now. There is something about roofing a barn or putting a rebuilt motor and a wiring harness in a car or repairing the plumbing and wiring of a house that teaches a guy things that books don’t. One young woman I worked with, who looks and talks like a bespactacled escapee from a Mennonite community, had the guts to take on the manufacture of sophisticated aviation guidance shelters. She learned by doing in so many ways, and she will be an industrial leader in the years to come.
On the other hand, I’ve worked with 20-something and 30-something and 40-something people with little in the way of analytical skills or even curiosity. They didn’t learn a lot in schools, and they weren’t penalized for not achieving much.
So I’m turning to you parents out there with children in school or soon to be in school, and to you parents whose children are out of school but you are still paying taxes for your local schools and state colleges.
All too often the school hierarchy and teachers union oppose you. They belittle your understanding of school issues. Of course, if the government didn’t have armed officers to take your money and your property if you didn’t pay taxes, the teachers and adminstrators wouldn’t have jobs. Your job depends upon your performance – you have to profit if you are in business, or you have to help your company’s owners profit if you are an employee.
But admittedly it takes a lot of people being angry to overthrow a school board and run out bad teachers.
Chriss Street reported a relatively new tactic to hold teachers and administrators accountable – the lawsuit. He wrote in the 12/7/2017 edition of Breitbart:
“A group of parents and students has filed what it hopes will be a landmark lawsuit against the State of California for its public schools failing to teach literacy.
The parents’ group sued the State of California, the State Board of Education, the State Department of Education, and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson for reportedly failing to provide every child in the state access to literacy as required under state law.
They charged California has 11 of the 26 worst-performing large public school districts in the nation for the ability of students to read and write.
This is not the first lawsuit brought against California school officials for failure to educate.
Vergara v. California was a lawsuit in the California state courts which dealt with a child’s right to education and to instruction by effective teachers. Lawyers filed this lawsuit in 2012 on behalf of nine California public school student plaintiffs. They claimed California laws on teacher tenure, layoffs, and dismissal violate the Constitution of California by retaining some “grossly ineffective” teachers and thus denying equal protection to students assigned to the teachers. They also charged these rules made it more likely children in poorer areas would get horrible teachers, because the better ones with tenure would want to teach in safer schools.
The trail judge ruled in favor of the parents. California appellate judges in 2016 overturned the trial judge. Since the state supreme court and U.S. Supreme Court judges refused to hear the parents’ appeal, the parents lost the case.
Nor is this the first lawsuit Public Counsel as a law firm has pursued for parents or others who invoke the right of a child to education. Public Counsel is the self styled “nation’s largest pro-bono law firm.” This of course doesn’t count the public defenders offices in many large counties. Or the JAGs who provide military people counsel when accused or aggrieved.
Public Counsel has sued the State of Michigan and Governor Rick Snyder in federal court for allegedly denying Detroit public school students for “violating their constitutional the right to literacy.” The case is “Gary B. v. Snyder.”
They didn’t sue Detroit public school officials who preside over the problem school district. Since most of Michigan’s students are white, Snyder is a Republican, most of the Detroit public school attenders are black, and Detroit school officials and other public officials are Democrats, it was easier to find a sympathetic federal judge and imply racism instead of local school system personnel incompetence was responsible for the conditions of the schools in Detroit.
Since California is under hard left control, and since the schools have more Latin, Asian, and black students combined than white students, Public Counsel lawyers couldn’t convincingly sue in federal court and imply racism had anything to do with the abysmal state of California’s public schools. So they simply went with a “right to literacy” argument. They of course said California needed to spend more on public schools per pupil.
What public records did the Public Counsel lawyers quote? They used publicly-available info from state education agency records in Michigan and in California to make their cases. For the California case, they also used a study from Stanford University claiming of the 200 largest school districts in the country, 11 of the 26 worst were in California. This is a rare negative achievement of public school systems in California.
What I found interesting in the statistics were those that California Department of Public Education officials released showing in the three most recent school years, fewer than half of all students are proficient in English and only about a third of the students are proficient in math.
These poor results look better than they are. According to Mr. Street, he said the Public Counsel lawyers accused California public school officials of the following:
“But that concerted effort to improve student literacy was torpedoed in late 2015 by President Barack Obama’s signing of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), requiring school evaluations to include at least one “non-academic factor.” ESSA replaced the No Child Left Behind Act, which relied almost exclusively on regular student testing for gradelevel reading and math skills.
Unable or unwilling to improve literacy test scores, the California Board of Education in September of last year voted unanimously to undermine the testing by incorporating other non-academic factors in rating schools that include graduation rates, college preparedness, and rates at which non-native speakers are learning English. Under the new educational evaluation system adopted by the Board of Education, each California school will not receive an overall literacy rating, but rather receive year-to-year comparative results for how it performs across categories of different student groups.”
This is a common tactic of school officials. They can’t show objective progress so they change the scoring rules. This is not too different from teachers and school administrators cheating to get their students to do better on mandated state testing. The latter has been a nationwide plague touching most states’ school districts (many repeatedly) over the last 30 or so years.
In other words: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, cheat.
The Public Counsel lawyers want a number of public school conditions met. And of course they want lawyer fees and litigation costs, which will further fund them as a nonprofit public issues law firm.
I pulled Public Counsel’s latest IRS Form 990, their nonprofit tax return for FY 2015, because nonprofits’ tax returns are public records. It showed the lawyers and other top officials in the group are generously compensated. It also showed most of the group’s expenses ($10 million out of $11.8 million) went to salaries and benefits. It showed the group pulled in $3 million for legal fees and other services, $5.3 million from contributions, $2.7 million from fundraising, and $3.1 million from government grants. Not stated was the monetary value of donated lawyer time that lawyers can write off on their own tax returns.
So the Public Counsel lawyers aren’t quite the selfless public-spirited lawyers they would like you to believe they are. But compared to the ACLU, Public Counsel is quiet and ungreedy.
Per Public Counsel’s annual report, which displays on the Web, a lot of high-powered trust funds shovel them money. So they can afford to take on cases against school officials.
Public Counsel may lose their latest case for California students because of potential institutional hypocrisy. Schools across the country, and especially those in California, pay billions of dollars to educate the children of illegals. Public Counsel’s annual report details the group’s work to keep illegals in America.
How many illegals put children into public schools in this country?
According to a Pew Research Center study quoted by the Washington Post in a 11/21/2014 article, 7% of all children in public schools in the United States in 2012 had parents who were illegal immigrants. The study can be obtained on the Net.
The worst offenders? Nevada, whose taxpayers had to pay expenses for the 82% of school kids whose parents were citizens or at least legal foreigners, and the 18% of the school kids whose parents were illegal aliens. The other high offenders? Kids whose parents are illegals comprise 13% of all kids in California public schools, 13% of all kids in Texas public schools, and 11% of all kids in Arizona public schools. The number of kids in California public schools whose parents are illegals is more than the number of kids in public schools whose parents are natives of America in roughly 30 states.
Note I said “kids whose parents are illegals” The DACA “dreamer” youths are illegals themselves. But many children, since their mothers played Baby Blanket Bingo and popped them out on American soil, wrongfully get US citizenship status, and have done so since the LBJ administration. LBJ benefited in Texas from the illegal Mexican vote in counties on or near the Rio Grande.
The 14th Amendment, quoted by leftists who want votes and cheap labor and GOPers who want cheap labor, was designed to make citizens out of blacks born in the United States. It, along with the 13th Amendment which outlawed slavery and the 15th Amendment which allowed black male American citizens to vote, was aimed at making full citizens of American blacks who were abused under slavery or were free but were not given equal rights with whites. Proof? There were 500 babies born on Ellis Island to alien mothers. All but one of them got the status of alien, the same as the parents. One got American citizenship because her father was an American citizen.
Where did I get this? From the work of Ellis Island historian and National Park Services Ranger Barry Moreno. He noted this in his wonderful book “Encyclopedia of Ellis Island.”
Let that sink in. The number of kids in Californis public schools whose parents are illegals is more than the number of kids in public schools whose parents are natives of America in roughly 30 states.
If you think the Washington Post smells for using Pew data, then consider this:
The right-of-center Federation for American Immigration Reform released a report in September 2016 titled “The Elephant in the Classroom: Mass Immigration’s Impact on Education.” The report’s authors, citing the U.S. Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics, noted the states spend at least $30 billion on teaching children of aliens with “limited English Proficiency” each year. The authors also noted close to 80% such children are rated “below basic” – the lowest rating for children’s math and English skills.
So it’s possible a judge or judges tells the Public Counsel lawyers to pull the logs out of their own eyes before they notice the logs in the eyes of public school officials.
What is the “how to be your own detective” angle on these issues?
Public records in the custody of public school officials, once examined by plaintiff lawyers, enabled the lawyers to determine a pattern of school underachievement that in a world with accountability for poor government employee performance would cost many school teachers and administrators their jobs.
The lawsuit itself, BC685730, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, is a public record which I viewed courtesy of the Internet.
Public records in the custody of the U.S. Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics, once examined by the researchers of FAIR, enabled them to determine how much money working Americans are on the hook for paying for the substandard education of children of illegals.
Public records enabled me to check Public Counsel’s income, spending, and case work. These came from the IRS and from Public Counsel.
Here’s another aspect of public disclosure that will improve the safety of children in schools.
On New Year’s Day, President Trump proclaimed war upon sex traffickers. A couple of weeks ago, he signed an executive order (Executive Order Blocking the Property of Persons Involved in Serious Human Rights Abuse or Corruption, 12/20/2017) directing the freezing of U.S. assets of anyone aiding or being directly involved in “serious human rights abuse” like sex trafficking, forced labor, body parts trafficking and the like) or corruption. This will hurt the Clintons and people around them who have collected all kinds of money from such criminals.
Destruction of evidence of wrongdoing is a crime in most jurisdicitons.
President Trump would do well to ensure the enforcement of laws preventing destruction of records pertaining to sexual abuse of victims in this country. Lawyers for the Los Angeles Unified School District recently destroyed 20 years worth of records for the nation’s second largest school district to protect LAUSD from paying out awards to victims who their teachers and administrators sexually abused. Other school district personnel and agents and teacher union agents have done likewise in many parts of the country. These people by and large support President Trump’s sworn enemies. By having school system officials and teacher union officials prosecuted under such charges, he would protect hundreds of thousands of children from sexual abuse, and would get a little revenge for these people’s opposition.
He would also do well to have the US Department of Education start a national database of all persons accused of sexual abuse or other forms of abuse while teachers or other school employees or officials. The database would include charges, outcomes, and disciplines. It would note if the accused was innocent, guilty of the accusations, or culpable of lesser offenses.
In Ohio, state lawmakers in 2007 put a law on the books requiring school districts to check educators for criminal arrests on a national crime data base every five years. They also require school district officials to contact the state education department when one of their staff and faculty members is arrested. As a result, officials of the Ohio Department of Education’s Office of Professional Conduct reported a dramatic rise in reported criminal and ethical violations educators reportedly committed, from 4770 in 2005 to more than 8000 in 2012. These state school officials only investigated 1000 or so of the FY 2012 cases, according to a reporter who covered the issue.
This law should be a national law as teachers cross state lines like gators crawl from water body to water body over land. The school personnel should undergo checks yearly (and a drug test as well), and the results should be on a database that is a public record. Millions of parents would be grateful to President Trump and the members of the House and Senate who make such a bill the law of the land.
SHERLOCK JUSTICE
WE CAN SHOW YOU HOW TO BE YOUR OWN DETECTIVE.
END NOTES
Info on Ohio’s screening comes from a 10/10/2013 article by Hannah Poturalski in the Hamilton, Ohio Journal-News.
Further info on Public Counsel’s lawsuits comes from their press releases 12/5/2017 and 9/13/2016.
Public Counsel’s 2016 Annual Report
Education Week, 12/5/2017
