Its a sad state that scouting (both for boys and girls) is in now. Indoctrination to the Leftist dogma is rampant now everywhere we look – education at all levels, churches, and now scouting are infected. All in the name of Social Justice which is another word for Socialism which is another word for Marxism. Nancy
The Girl Scout organization continues to engage in left-wing political activism, exposing young girls to liberal politicians and promoting their ideology.
“Since the 2016 Presidential election, the Girl Scout organization has placed an increasing focus on grooming young voters and future voters by sponsoring and/or promoting progressive political events, like the Teen Vogue Summit, Women’s March, and anti-Trump rallies,” Christy Volanski, co-editor at MyGirlScoutCouncil.com, told Breitbart News.
My Girl Scout Council, founded by Ann Saladin, performs research and provides documentation of the Girl Scout organization’s ties to progressive politics.
“Given Girl Scouts’ membership woes, it’s a bit surprising that the organization continues to isolate conservatives by promoting polarizing political figures and activists like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Michelle Obama, Andrew Cuomo and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” Volanski added.
The Girl Scouts’ G.I.R.L. Agenda 2018 emphasized the need to “mobilize girls” and urged “leading change through civic action.” The organization praised those women and girls who were politically active, advancing a girl-first agenda.
On its blog post that celebrated 2018, the “Year of the G.I.R.L.,” GirlScouts.org touted how its girl members “were inspired, prepared, and mobilized to take civic action” by politicians such as Democrats Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and Jill Biden.
The Girl Scouts boasted that socialist Ocasio-Cortez is an alumna of its organization and reported she attributes much of what got her elected to Congress to being a part of that organization:
Drain the education swamp: College students’ tyrannical behavior must be stopped
by Tammy Bruce Tammy Bruce, author and Fox News contributor, is a radio talk show host. December 13, 2017
In this Aug. 27, 2017, file photo, demonstrators clash during a free speech rally in Berkeley, Calif. (AP Photo/Josh Edelson, file)
How many conversations have we had with our friends, family and co-workers wondering what happened to the millennials? We expect a new generation to have new ideas and new ways of approaching the world. So how do we explain when a new generation is steeped in bullying, complaining about hurt feelings, demanding “safe spaces,” and using pride in fragile egos and weakened emotional states as the excuse to condemn free speech?
There’s more than one swamp eating away at this nation. The ignorant and intolerant meltdown of students is brought to us by a “liberal” education system determined to replace teaching with propaganda and logic and reason with unmoored emotion.
One of the more recent examples comes from last week. College students in New York were thrown out of a student-run coffee shop because their “Make America Great Again” caps violated the “safe space” rules. The offending students were accused of being fascists and given three minutes to leave the premises.
PLEASE CLICK ON THE ABOVE LINK TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE
The first article of Bill Ayers ( Weather Underground) praising the New York Democratic mayoral candidate, Bill DeBlasio leads into the second article of how DeBlasio supported Nicaragua’s Sandinista military government in the 1980’s. The third article regards DeBlasio’s position on New York City’s charter schools. If you have friends who will be voting in this New York mayoral race, please share this information to them. Nancy
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Notable & Quotable
Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers praises New York Democratic mayoral candidate Bill DeBlasio.
Oct. 17, 2013
Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers talks to New York magazine about New York Democratic mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio, Oct. 15:
Q: What should NYC voters make of de Blasio’s time in Nicaragua [with the Sandanistas]?
A: They should say that he stood up for humanity. He stood up for human rights against the blind imperial monster. That was the right thing to do then and it’s the right thing to do now. . . .
Q: What about education reform? Are de Blasio’s ideas about universal pre-kindergarten viable?
A: In a decent and humane society, universal preschool education would be a given and so would family leave for all parents, not just mothers. The fact that he at least leans away from the billionaire agenda of privatizing the public space is a terrific thing.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Bill de Blasio, From Managua to Manhattan
October 7, 2013
Nicaragua’s Marxist regime was an inspiration to New York’s leading mayoral candidate
The recent revelation that New York City mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio supported Nicaragua’s Sandinista military government in the 1980s is a reminder of the high cost Latin America pays for being the playground of the American left. It should also further enlighten New Yorkers as to the politics of the man who is the front runner in the race.The ideas of the hard left don’t sell very well in the U.S., so collectivists take them south of the Rio Grande where they believe the ground is more fertile. Their arrogant paternalism ignores the rights of the people they pretend to redeem.
Bill de Blasio, New York City’s public advocate and frontrunner among Democratic candidates for mayor, greets voters on the Upper West side along with his wife Chirlane McCray in this September 10, 2013 file photo. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
By 1988, when Mr. de Blasio went to Nicaragua to do social work in support of the Marxist revolutionary cause, the Sandinistas had been running the country for almost a decade. Their brutality was well-documented. Mr. de Blasio, who also did fundraising for supporters of the military government, either didn’t know about Sandinista repression or he didn’t care. (more…)
Colleen Hyland is a National Board certified teacher in New York.
January 21, 2013, Vol. 18, No. 18
As Republicans discuss the future of the party, abandoning conservative values need not be part of the conversation. The party can appeal to larger segments of the electorate without forsaking core principles. One case in point is a group the party has long written off: public school teachers.
Conservative values go hand in hand with teaching. Teachers see the evidence every day that stable families produce well-adjusted kids who succeed in the classroom. Many teachers are people of faith. Most of us are proud Americans who say the pledge every day with our students and mean it. We teach kids how to show respect and use proper manners by modeling them ourselves. We stress personal accountability. We are people who believe in the political process and show up each Election Day because we love our country and are responsible citizens.
Broach the idea of limited government in education and you will find many takers. Teachers are choking under federal, state, and local mandates and regulations. They are stymied by an unrealistic amount of testing that takes time out of teaching and the joy out of learning. We have been hit with layer upon layer of government bureaucracy that pulls us in countless directions. Teachers spend too much of their day with redundant paperwork, wrestling with standards that are overly complex and often contradictory. Get the Department of Education off our backs. Keep it as an information clearinghouse, but give teachers and school districts more control, not less. We crave local control for our local problems. Speak about deregulating our classrooms and we are all ears. (more…)
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s choice and tenure changes could be a national milestone.
Governors of both parties have promoted education reform, but so far no one has delivered more than Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal. This week he’ll sign two bills that offer a national model for competition and parental choice.
Louisiana’s new laws will essentially give all parents an average of $8,500 to use for their child’s education as they see fit. They can keep their child in their local public school, but they can also try to get Johnny into a more demanding charter school, or a virtual school, or into special language or career-training courses, among other options.
Nearly 400,000 low-income children—a bit more than half of all students—will also be eligible for vouchers to attend private schools. State officials estimate that about 2,000 students will use vouchers this September given private-school capacity limits, but that tens of thousands will do so over time. (more…)
In case you needed further proof of the American education system’s failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft. That’s the charge that has landed several parents, such as Ohio’s Kelley Williams-Bolar, in jail this year.
An African-American mother of two, Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father’s address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts. Not only did this stain her spotless record, but it threatened her ability to earn the teacher’s license she had been working on.
AP Photo/Akron Beacon JournalIn January, Ohioan Kelley Williams-Bolar was sentenced to 10 days in jail, three years of probation, and 80 hours of community service for having her children attend schools outside her district. Gov. John Kasich reduced her sentence last month.
Ms. Williams-Bolar caught a break last month when Ohio Gov. John Kasich granted her clemency, reducing her charges to misdemeanors from felonies. His decision allows her to pursue her teacher’s license, and it may provide hope to parents beyond the Buckeye State. In the last year, parents in Connecticut, Kentucky and Missouri have all been arrested—and await sentencing—for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts. (more…)
Who better to lead an educational revolution than Joel Klein, the prosecutor who took on the software giant Microsoft? But in his eight years as chancellor of New York City’s school system, the nation’s largest, Klein learned a few painful lessons of his own—about feckless politicians, recalcitrant unions, mediocre teachers, and other enduring obstacles to school reform.
By Joel Klein
Above: Joel Klein in Brooklyn on the first day of school, two months before he resigned as chancellor
Image credit: Ramin Talaie/Corbis
Three years ago, in a New York Times article detailing her bid to become head of the American Federation of Teachers union, Randi Weingarten boasted that despite my calls for “radical reform” to New York City’s school system, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and I had achieved only “incremental” change. It seemed like a strange thing to crow about, but she did have something of a point. New York over the past nine years has experienced what Robert Schwartz, the academic dean of Harvard’s education school, has described as “the most dramatic and thoughtful set of large-scale reforms going on anywhere in the country,” resulting in gains such as a nearly 20-point jump in graduation rates. But the city’s school system is still not remotely where it needs to be.
Education spending and student-teacher ratio are about where they were in 2004. The real problem is that tax dollars are being diverted for teacher benefits.
Thousands of California teachers turned out this week to protest potential budget cuts to education and to urge lawmakers to raise taxes. Such activism may be par for the course in Democratic strongholds like Sacramento or Los Angeles, but in conservative Orange County?
Roughly 300 protesters—teachers, parents and students all wearing red in solidarity—gathered on a grassy knoll along the bustling Harbor Boulevard on Monday. They waved signs with messages like “Stand up for schools—support tax extensions,” “Close corporate loopholes, not public education,” and one you’ll only see in Orange County: “Cut Ethnic Studies, Not Science.” Every couple of seconds a car would honk its horn in support.
Veronica Gomez, an elementary school teacher, protests in Fullerton, Calif. May 12.
Teachers swarmed me, eager to get their message across. “We need to educate our community about the tax extensions,” said Elizabeth Hoffman, a member of the California Faculty Association’s Board of Directors. “We need a rational budget process, a stable funding source that we can count on,” Linda Manion, president of the Placentia-Linda teachers unions, added, only to be cut off by Fola Odebunmi, president of the United Faculty North Orange County Community College District. “We can’t take any more!” she said. (more…)
Nothing is worse for freedom and opportunity than when big business conspires with big labor. Behold the spectacle in Tennessee, where the Chambers of Commerce in Chattanooga, Knoxville and Nashville have joined with the teachers unions to kill education vouchers.
That proposal, which has already passed the state senate, would give thousands of low- and middle-income parents in failing school districts private school options. The Tennessee Equal Opportunity Scholarship Act would provide vouchers of between $4,000 and $5,000 per child to families with an income up to roughly $42,000 a year and who live in one of the four largest school districts, including Memphis and Nashville.
In an April 27 letter repeating nearly every discredited voucher myth peddled by unions, the CEOs of the local chambers advise lawmakers to oppose the bill. The letter claims that private school funding “diverts resources away from public school improvement,” that “there is no empirical data demonstrating that vouchers improve student achievement,” and that private schools lack “accountability” and won’t be subject to “high academic standards.” (more…)
Teachers are extremely effective messengers to parents, community groups, faith-based groups and elected officials—and their unions know how to deploy them well. Happy unions can give a politician massive clout, and unhappy unions—well, just ask Eva Moskowitz, a Democrat who headed the New York City Council Education Committee when I became schools chancellor in 2002.
Smart, savvy, ambitious, often a pain in my neck and atypically fearless for a politician, Ms. Moskowitz was widely expected to be elected Manhattan borough president in 2005. Until, that is, she held hearings on the city teachers-union contract, an extraordinary document, running for hundreds of pages, governing who can teach what and when, who can be assigned to hall-monitor or lunchroom duty and who can’t, who has to be given time off to do union work during the school day, and so on.
The contract defied parody. So when Ms. Moskowitz exposed its ridiculousness, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), then headed by Randi Weingarten, made sure that Ms. Moskowitz’s run for borough president came up short. After that, other elected officials would say to me, “I agree with you, but I ain’t gonna get Eva’d.”
Politicians—especially Democratic politicians—generally do what the unions want. The unions, in turn, are very clear about what that is: They want happy members, so that those who run the unions get re-elected, and they want more members, so their power, money and influence grow. The effect of all this? As Albert Shanker, the late, iconic head of the UFT, once pointedly said, “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.”
Union power is why it’s virtually impossible to fire a teacher for non-performance. In New York City, which has some 55,000 tenured teachers, we were able to fire only half a dozen or so for incompetence in a given year, even though we devoted significant resources to this effort.