Over 40% of California Public School Suspensions Are For ‘Willful Defiance’ Or Disruption

April 10, 2012

End The Lie

By Madison Ruppert

“Kids aren’t even allowed to kids in school anymore. Quick – get them on Ritalin.” –KTRN

One might think that school suspensions are reserved for serious student offenses like bringing drugs or weapons to school or perhaps fighting.

Unfortunately, that is far from the case nowadays in our society which increasingly criminalizes students for engaging in childish behavior, which obviously should be expected, to a certain degree, from children.

Students are now just as likely to get suspended from school for so-called “willful defiance” or any other activity which could be considered disruptive, like rolling eyes, coming to class late, or talking back to a teacher.

According to some critics, these tactics are disproportionately used against black and Latino males, thus alienating the people who most need to stay in school. They also charge that it is actually a catch-all term which can be applied to even the most trivial of offenses.

“It’s so broad it’s not useful” Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the president and chief executive of the non-profit South Los Angeles Community Coalition, said to CBS.

“You can’t quite define what it means, [and] what it doesn’t mean,” Harris-Dawson added. Indeed this is quite accurate and unfortunately has become a hallmark of how our government operates in the modern day.

Click here for the full report.

Shocking Report Says Water Bills to Triple Across USA

March 5th, 2012

Natural News

By: J.D. Heyes

With wages stagnant or declining, gasoline and electricity prices on the rise and food prices steadily increasing, the last thing American families need is another increase in a basic necessity. Yet, a new report says that’s exactly what you’re going to get: Water bills that will likely double or triple over the next few years, thanks to the nation’s crumbling water system infrastructure.

A new study and report by the American Water Works Association (AWWA) entitled, Buried No Longer: Confronting America’s Water Infrastructure Challenge, improving and expanding the nation’s underground water systems will cost upwards of $1 trillion over the next 25 years. And, as is always the case, water system users are going to get soaked with the bill.

What does that mean in real dollars and cents? Right now the average family household pays about $400 a year. The fixes that are needed over the next quarter century mean that bills could rise anywhere from $300-$550 a year, meaning water bills could skyrocket to $900 a year or more.

Crumbling infrastructure

Experts will tell you that investing now, rather than later, is a good idea and cheaper in the long run. But that’s hard to swallow for wage earners whose incomes have been stuck in neutral or worse, declining for the past decade. Add to that a raft of new tax hikes and cuts in benefits, and hard-hit Americans are in no mood to fork out even more money in new fees and rate increases.

But that doesn’t change the fact that, without improvements, the nation’s supply and delivery of fresh drinking water is in peril. In fact, the AWWA believes spending to fix the pipes and other infrastructure is likely to rise from $13 billion a year today to $30 billion in 2040.

“Delaying the investment can result in degrading water service, increasing water service disruptions, and increasing expenditures for emergency repairs. Ultimately we will have to face the need to “catch up” with past deferred investments, and the more we delay the harder the job will be when the day of reckoning comes,” said the report.

Not all of the expense of this upgrade will come from higher water bills, though much of it will. Some communities, the report said, will be double-tapped, so to speak.

“Other communities will need to collect significant “impact” or development fees to meet the needs of a growing population. Numerous communities will need to invest for replacement and raise funds to accommodate growth at the same time. Investments that may be required to meet new standards for drinking water quality will add even more to the bill,” it said.

Higher prices for everything

Is this information new? Why, all of a sudden, is water infrastructure such a big concern? Well, nothing about this is new. In fact, the AWWA warned about the nation’s crumbling water infrastructure, and the need to replace, in a report 10 years ago.

“Like many of the roads, bridges, and other public assets on which the country relies, most of our buried drinking water infrastructure was built 50 or more years ago, in the post-World War II era of rapid demographic change and economic growth. In some older urban areas, many water mains have been in the ground for a century or longer,” the report said.

“Given its age, it comes as no surprise that a large proportion of US water infrastructure is approaching, or has already reached, the end of its useful life.”

As unemployment remains stubbornly high at about 9 percent, as gasoline prices rise to nearly $3.75 a gallon on average nationwide, and as wages continue to remain stagnant or decline, you and your family are about to take on another cost increase: higher water bills.

For The Full Report Go To Natural News

5 Biggest Misconceptions About Unschooling

February 21, 2012

Activist Post

By Bohemian Mom

“Here is a nice follow up article about home schooling regarding the video we posted yesterday about school in America and how it’s a huge propaganda machine. If you want to home school your kids and teach them what they actually need to know, you should read this article.” –KTRN

Since we decided to homeschool and eventually unschool our boys, I get asked a lot of questions. It’s understandable, as the lifestyle we have chosen definitely goes against the grain of societal norms. Even I had a lot of trepidation at first, and found myself asking some of the very same questions.

It took me over five years to fully reconcile the ideas and, truth be told, I still question myself at least once a year.

Over the eight years plus since we started to homeschool, my perspective through research and experience has grown considerably. This perspective has allowed me to address the most commonly asked questions.

What about college?

This is probably the most commonly asked question. The short answer is yes, homeschoolers can go to college. So can unschoolers. And they do! Millions of them in fact. With the advent of online college courses one can simply continue with a homeschool model even in college. Otherwise a student can take tests like GED and SATs, put together a transcript or examples of their work and apply — same as anyone else does. Prestigious universities such as Yale, Stanford, and Harvard accept and even seek out homeschoolers. Oftentimes they are more prepared then conventionally schooled children to tackle the pressures of a higher education.

The longer answer to this question will be covered in the next installment of this series, so check back next Monday for my rather unconventional (but gaining more momentum) ideas regarding college, and if it really is the best path anymore.

How do children socialize and learn to work with others?

Some conformists actually argue that our kids won’t be prepared for the real world because they aren’t socialized in school. Pardon me for any typos from here on out, but I can’t help but laugh out loud at this common misconception. As if herd pressure to look, dress, or behave a certain way is required to function in the world. Or that facing daily bullies is necessary to toughen somebody up for the “real” world. Or that learning about sex or relationships is better taught by confused pubescent middle-school peers who claim to be experts because they’ve gotten to second base. It’s nonsense.

And just because we homeschool doesn’t mean we stay home like hermits. Even before adopting a travel lifestyle we were on what seemed like a permanent field trip. Hikes, waterfalls, skiing, surf lessons, science centers, museums, and play dates of all kinds, etc. Most homeschoolers use the world as their classroom and spend lots of time exploring and engaging with people.

Click here for the full report.

School Sucks – The American Way

By William Kitner

(KTRN Exclusive) I came across this video today on-line and it really hit home. I have said for the longest time that if I ever have children, I would absolutely home school them. While a lot of people think this is a fringe idea – or something only weirdos do – it’s something I think is crucial in our current American educational system. And if they think I’m a weirdo, awesome. It’s fun being weird.

I would have no problem with my kids going to school to learn math and science, but history? No way. School is just a way to indoctrinate the children – to teach them about the greatness of America and how we are always the “good guys.” The American history that is thought in school is pure propaganda. We are teaching our children constant lies – not just about history either. Take health for example. We teach the food pyramid which has been created with help from lobbyists from the meat and dairy industries. The food pyramid being taught in schools is horribly wrong, yet we do nothing about it. My children would be taught the truth – then again the truth would probably scare the crap out of them. It scares me every day.

Free Market Education vs. The NWO

February 8, 2012

Lew Rockwell.Com

By Gary North

In my report, “The Crucial Pillar of the New World Order,” I argued that education is the key to the modern New World Order, or Superclass, as David Rothkopf calls it. The system of about 20 elite universities, plus a handful of exclusive four-year private colleges, is the crucial institutional means of screening entry into the inner ring of power.

I argued that a great shift has been in progress since 1960. The best universities began to screen by means of a specific kind of intellect, namely, the ability to take written examinations. I described this as the Prussian system. It is a system based on merit, but a peculiar form of merit: performance on exams. Writing well also counts. As these formal criteria have been made the barriers to entry, legacy sons from the Old World Order have not gained entry.

The Prussian system is replacing the Oxford-Cambridge-Harvard system. The Prussian system extends its way into the K-12 educational system. There, two tracks existed until 1950: the Prussian and the vocational. What is formal and unbreakable in Germany is less formal and less unbreakable in the United States. But it exists. Today, there is a third track. There are the vocational students, the community college-bound students, and the Advanced Placement exam students. Not many students cross over.

The dreams of those Utopian Unitarians of the nineteenth century who pioneered tax-funded K-12 education are no longer taken seriously. The messianic character of American education has slowly morphed into the caretaker mentality described by John Taylor Gatto.

BREAKING INTO THE INNER RING

From the day that the Irish got off the boats in New York City and Boston in 1848, they set up parochial schools. German Lutherans did the same. So did Dutch Calvinists. They recognized the threat posed to their confessions by the supposedly Protestant but in fact Unitarian public school system. They chose to pay taxes and then fund their own school systems. They did not want their children to strive to enter the inner rings of power in the New Country. They were content to remain outside the New World Order.

If there is a symbol of the capitulation of the Irish to the NWO it is the Kennedy family. John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald was a master politician in Boston. The Irish were very good at politics. But they were outside the inner ring of Boston high society, where family connections and Harvard connections had reigned supreme since 1636. Harvard went Unitarian after 1805, but it lost none of its prestige. The Boston Brahmins were well named. The Irish were initially the untouchables.

That irked Honey Fitz’s son-in-law, Joe Kennedy. He wanted in. He knew he could not get in. So, he primed his sons to get in. Joe. Jr. Went to Harvard. Jack went to Harvard. Bobby went to Harvard. Teddy went to Harvard. When Jack became JFK, he hired the scions of the Harvard-Yale axis to serve as his courtiers.

When Lyndon Johnson replaced him in 1963, he got rid of as many of them as he could. He had no plans to enter their inner ring. The only inner ring he cared about was the one he controlled. He was a true son of Southwest Texas State Teachers College. He let the pointy-headed liberals from Harvard stick around for only as long as he could use their pointy heads to stick into his enemies’ backs.

Click here for the full report.

How Public Schools Keep Your Child a Prisoner of the State

February 1, 2012

LeeRockwell.Com

By Karen De Coster

Public education, in its current state, is based on the idea that government is the “parent” best equipped to provide children with the values and wisdom required to grow into intelligent, functional adults. To echo what former first lady Hillary Clinton professed, these public school champions believe “it takes a village” to cultivate a society of competent human beings.

As Hebrew University historian Martin van Crevald points out in his book, The Rise and Decline of the State, nineteenth-century state worshippers who wanted to impose a love of big government ideals upon the youth popularized the archetype for state-directed education. Additionally, there was an overall appetite for discipline of the “unruly” masses that reinforced the campaign to take education out of the hands of individuals. After all, the self-educated masses might resist government decrees, and this kind of disarray would be undesirable in the move toward building a powerful, controlling state apparatus. Prussia’s Frederick William I and France’s Napoleon discerned this, as did a legion of other despotic rulers throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. In a recent article published on the American Daily Herald “Dumberer and Dumberest,” Glenn Horowitz writes:

If you’re not familiar with it, the Prussian system was a teaching methodology designed to stamp out good little worker bees assembly-line fashion, trained to be complacent with their station in life and compliant with every demand of the State. An elite of those better educated but still proven unquestioningly loyal to the State were promoted to lead the proletariat, rewarded with elevated status and material success commensurate with their skills and the zeal they demonstrate in supporting the system. It specifically avoided developing creativity and independent thought, reasoning these were skills the worker classes didn’t need in their roles as mass produced labor.

Modern education is built upon a foundation set forth by tyrants. What is most disquieting about the public education mindset is that those who believe most strongly in it are convinced that there are no other suitable alternatives to the compulsory schooling provided via the public domain. The egalitarian core belief of these public education proponents is that society is responsible for obtaining, maintaining, and paying for the process of equally developing young minds.

Since the laws of the modern state that control the educational system lean heavily toward equality, federal compulsory schooling is necessarily a bias against the best and brightest of America’s children. Federalized education sustains the philosophy that schools have the obligation to treat all students as pure equals – equal in intelligence, work ethic, performance, and desire.

Such nonsense is refuted by H. George Resch in his article “Equality vs. Equity” on the Separation of School and State website. Mr. Resch contends that compulsory, government-controlled education is trying to achieve ends that are not possible due to the fact that general equality is not only impossible to define, but that biological, environmental, and cultural differences among us are so vast that a compulsory, standardized public education poses difficulties that cannot be overcome, and certainly not by a government-run school system.

It’s obvious that public schooling is neither beneficial to most students, nor is it efficient. Education is an acquired good, a good that has to meet the needs of the consumers or else face rejection in the free market. Accordingly, there is a necessity for unique, private educational institutions that cater to the urgencies of the marketplace, or home schools that provide a quality environment for each student’s direct needs.

Click here for the full report.

Will Kevin Trudeau Run For United States Congress? How To Fix America (What Newt, Mitt, & Obama wont tell you)

Kevin Trudeau is back, and he’s back with a vengeance!

Kevin outlines the beginning steps of How To Fix America. This is the information they are not telling you. You will not hear this discussed by Newt, Mitt, Obama, Trump, or any other pundits or politicians.

If you want to know How To fix America, you must watch this video.

Our liberties and freedoms are being taken away! Trudeau divulges what is wrong with America, and what YOU can do set it back on the right track!

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http://www.KevinsWiki.com

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The Kevin Trudeau Show: 1-9-12

Today is the day you have all been waiting for…KT is back, and he’s back with a vengeance! Our liberties and freedoms are being taken away! Trudeau divulges what is wrong with America, and what YOU can do set it back on the right track!

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Children of Illegal Immigrants Sue Florida Over State’s College Tuition Policy

November 3, 2011

CBS Tampa

Children of illegal immigrants living in Florida are suing the state for charging them out-of-state tuition.

Wendy Ruiz, a sophomore at Miami Dade College, is one of those behind the lawsuit.

She is paying $5,000 more than she technically has to, because her college insisted upon charging her out-of-state tuition when her parents were unable to produce legal immigration documents.

Ruiz was born in the United States, and has lived in Florida her entire life. As such, she is both an American and Florida citizen in the eyes of the law.

“It’s so unfair,” she told CBS Tampa. “I was born here. This makes no sense.”

Rather than keeping quiet, Ruiz chose to take action. She and five other college-age Floridians are now involved in a class-action lawsuit that seeks to overturn the rule.

Miriam Haskell of the Southern Poverty Law Center is working on the case.

“We believe strongly that young people … should be treated equally, and have a right to access education,” Haskell stated to CBS Tampa. “(This policy) is deterring not just Wendy and the four other plaintiffs, but scores of others in Florida.”

Gerard Robinson, the Florida Commissioner of Education, and Frank T. Brogan, the Chancellor of the State University System, are listed as the defendants in this case.

When CBS Tampa called the Florida Department of Education, the press office said they could not comment on pending litigation.

Haskell said that the case has been filed in federal court.

“This policy violates the federal constitution. This is not a state statute,” she said. “It violates the equal protection clause, which guarantees equal rights for all United States citizens. The constitution doesn’t make exceptions based on who the parents are.”

In the meantime, Ruiz is doing her best to continue with her education despite the thousands of dollars she must now pay in tuition costs.

“I have financial aid … (but) the rest I pay out of pocket,” she said. “During the week I work at the school in administrative services, and on the weekends I tutor, I babysit … I’ve been a waiter, and had other jobs.”

To make time for her jobs, Ruiz said that she has assumed part-time student status, and is presently taking eight credits in the form of three courses.

Haskell noted that, though sometimes grueling, Ruiz is still fortunate.

“Some are able to make ends meet. Some try to do later education, or take a longer time with their education,” she said. “But hundreds are completely deterred from going at all. Three of the plaintiffs (in this case) are unable to attend at all.”

The hope is to resolve the issue and see this rule reversed before it reaches trial.

“We’ve reached out to them, and given them the opportunity to talk with us before moving forward,” Haskell said. “(They have not done so) yet, but it hasn’t been too long.”

Click here for the full report.

We Bail Out Banks, But Not Desperate Students

November 1, 2011

Chicago Sun Times

By Jesse Jackson

The sign at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration revealed the struggles of America’s young: “A B.A., $30,000 in student debt and no job.” Young people are graduating from college into the worst jobs market since the 1930s while carrying record levels of student debt. The sad truth of Occupy Wall Street is that for many of the young activists, Wall Street occupied them first.

Students are borrowing twice what they did a decade ago, even adjusting for inflation. Debt has doubled in just five years. Student debt is likely to exceed $1 trillion over the next year.

As states cut back on college support and grants, college tuitions have risen faster than the cost of homes, health care or energy. Americans believe a college education is key to their children’s future, so more and more borrow what they can.

Students are now graduating with average debts of over $24,000. When I speak to families in mining towns in Appalachia, I ask how many have lost a job, how many face foreclosure, how many face costly medical bills. Many hands go up. But when I ask how many worry about student loans, the biggest portion of the audience stands up. It is working families — families stretching to give their children the chance that they never had — who are taking on the greatest debt and are at the greatest risk.

The banking industry has used its clout to make these loans the harshest of all debt. They survive bankruptcy. The lenders have broad collection powers, far greater than with a mortgage or a credit card. They can garnish wages or even Social Security payments. When payments are missed, penalties are brutal. Students who graduate and then lose their job suddenly find themselves owing twice what they signed up for.

The debt constricts normal life events. Students must put off moving out from their parents’ home, buying a car or saving for a home or retirement. They delay getting married or having children.

Defaults have soared. In 2008, more than 238,000 defaulted on their loans. The number of loans that went into forbearance or deferment (when borrowers receive temporary relief from payments) rose to 22 percent in 2007.

President Obama and his wife, Michelle, struggled to pay off student debts long after they graduated. The president increased Pell grants and provided relief that would link government loan payments to income, and provide potential forgiveness for those taking public service jobs. But despite the largest increase of student aid since the GI Bill, the debts keep getting bigger.

Click here for the full article from the Chicago Sun Times.

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