Trickle Up Poverty (34 page)

What Clyburn failed to mention in his attempt to paint the right as violent in their reaction was that someone on the left had actually fired a gunshot through a window of the office of Virginia Republican Representative Eric Kantor. Apparently this would be okay with Democrats, perhaps because Kantor is Jewish or just because he’s a Republican. Kantor had chosen not to publicize the incident precisely because he didn’t want to appear to be politicizing it, but after Clyburn’s intemperate and misleading remarks, Kantor made a public statement about the incident, chastising Democrats for politicizing the issue of violence as he, like other Republicans, spoke out against it.

What Representative Clyburn also failed to mention is that it was equally likely that sympathizers with Obama’s agenda threw rocks through the windows of their own congressmen and tried to blame the incidents on their opponents.

Readin’, ‘Ritin’, and Radicalism: Education’s Role in the Ministry of Propaganda

On March 30, 2010, President Obama, with a few strokes of his pen, nationalized the student loan industry. This makes the federal government the arbiter of a financial service to students that, even in the best of lights, has led to the bloated and undeserved rise in the costs of college education over the past forty years. The takeover makes the Department of Education “one of the country’s largest banks—originating more than $100 billion in federal student loans each year.” That’s number one. It also displaces more than 35,000 workers in the financial industry, replacing them with government employees.13

This new government takeover was tucked away in the healthcare bill that the president rammed through Congress. What does education have to do with health care? Nothing. Why did they sneak it into the ObamaCare bill? A separate student loan bill had been passed by the House in 2009, but it was not taken up by the Senate. That’s why it was tucked away in the healthcare bill, too.

But beyond the financial and employment implications of the bill, it’s also likely to change the face of higher education even further, with a federal bureaucracy having a say over who gets money for college and who doesn’t. The situation is ripe for the imposition of leftist political views on the process of funding higher education. So obviously, schools that adhere to the leftist party line are more likely to get federal dollars than those that don’t.

What’s more, we’ll no doubt be seeing affirmative action standards applied where the distribution of dollars for college is concerned. They’ll likely go to everyone from illegal aliens to those in selected racial and ethnic categories before they go to Caucasian Americans, for instance. And it’s highly unlikely anyone will ever need to worry about paying back their college loans. The American taxpayer is, once again, on the hook for potential irresponsible behavior on the part of those who, in this case, receive college tuition guarantees.

The whole process also reeks of the potential for the same political cronyism that characterizes the distribution of stimulus dollars. By a nearly two to one margin, stimulus money has gone to Democratic recipients over Republicans. In addition, there seems to be no relationship between need and funding. Districts with high unemployment rates are not getting a proportionate share of stimulus money, with many truly needy districts receiving no funding at all.14 There is no way the same dynamic will not be at work with the government in charge of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of education money, and there’s no way the government will not use that financial clout to further contaminate educational content and freedom of expression on college campuses, pushing further and further to the left.

The Federal Government’s role in underwriting student loans in order to “make college more affordable” began in 1965, with the passage of the Higher Education Act. The original act was intended to encourage “leveraging private financial markets and competing for the right to lend to students,” according to the Federal Government’s Student Loan Facts website. The legislation created a Fannie-Freddie-like agency, the “Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP), a public-private partnership of schools, students, loan providers, and the government that has financed the dreams of millions of Americans since 1965,”15 again according to the partnership’s website.

Since that time, thanks in no small part to the government’s intervention in the college tuition market, the cost of attending college has skyrocketed. In 1965, tuition at the University of Pennsylvania was $1,530 per year, with room and board costing $1,000 a year.16 Today that $1,500 annual tuition has grown to $38,97017 Add another $7,748, the average cost of room and board at an American university during the 2009-2010 school year,18 and you have a total of almost $47,000, a nearly 20-fold increase in the cost to get a university education for a year. And, in 1960, to cite a non-Ivy League example, the fee for tuition and room and board at the University of Oklahoma was $660 for an entire year. In 2009, that number had risen to $15,077, a greater than 2,000 percent increase.19 The cost of attending college rose 80 percent in the first decade of this century alone.20

Because federal guarantees essentially cut out market forces as determinants for the cost of a college education, something akin to what has happened to healthcare costs has occurred. For, as in the healthcare industry, when you’re not directly spending your money for a service, and when what you owe is guaranteed even if you default, nobody pays nearly as much attention to how much things cost as they do when they are personally the guarantors of payment. And with the federal takeover of the student loan business, conditions are now ripe for government even more closely controlling the content of educational material and the conditions under which American students will be allowed to go to college.

When you add in the Federal Textbook Act signed into law in August, 2009, by President Obama, you have another nail in the coffin of freedom of expression on the campuses of what has become the American equivalent of the Soviet gulag archipelago. That law, which is supposed to control the pricing and availability of textbooks at colleges and universities that receive federal funding, is now also seen as a vehicle to control their content. Among other things, the law requires textbook publishers to provide “a description of the substantial content revisions made between the current edition of the college textbook or supplemental material and the previous edition, if any.”21 It’s another invitation to the Federal Government to take over control of our and our children’s daily lives, and Barack Obama will not pass up the chance to increase his power.

The Obama administration is also moving to strengthen the hold of unions on the public education system. The appointment of Arne Duncan to the position of Secretary of Education was the first step in furthering that end. Duncan comes out of the Chicago City School system, where he was Superintendent of Schools from 2001 to 2009. By the time Duncan assumed that post, much of the damage to the city’s school system had been done. The reason?

Chicago was one of the cities where outcome-based education got a firm foothold and where its principles were put into practice in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. As a result of the virtual collapse of Chicago’s public schools that followed implementation of that leftist policy, graduation rates plummeted and literacy virtually disappeared among the city’s students. In fact, nearly half of Chicago’s high school students dropped out of school during the five years “mastery learning,” as it was then called, was the mode of instruction in that school system.22

Of course the media hide such failures from the taxpayers who foot the bill.

Largely because of the abject failure of this educational approach, the overtly communistic National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers’ union in the United States, withdrew its support for “mastery learning,” renamed it Outcome-Based Education, and resumed its assault on educational integrity and excellence by gradually re-implementing the methodology’s principles more broadly in American schools. Bush Education Secretary Rod Paige called the NEA a “terrorist organization,”23 largely because the results of the pedagogy they’ve forced on our nation’s students are so disastrous.

Outcome-Based Education’s methodology dictates that until all students have mastered the content in a given subject area, no students are able to advance to the next. Remediation is given to those unable to keep up, while those who have already mastered a unit’s objectives on the first pass are given supplemental work to do as they wait for others to catch up. The intent with this method is to eventually wipe out the differences between high achievers and low achievers, making it possible for every student to achieve the same outcome. The real desired outcome is to stultify and suppress the achievement of the best and the brightest. In order to do this, school curricula have had to be dumbed down to such an extent that the material could not possibly be challenging to an intellectually gifted student.

While Duncan was not at the helm in Chicago during the Outcome-Based Education disaster, he’s nonetheless continued his assault on excellence for American students, and he’s done this overwhelmingly at the behest of the teachers’ unions. Among the moves that Duncan has either initiated or condoned since he came to his current position are the withdrawal of voucher funds for Washington, D.C., students to attend the schools of their choice rather than be permanently victimized by a public school system that is one of the worst in the United States, if not the world.

This move, initiated during Obama’s tenure, demonstrates that not only does the administration not have minority students’ interests at heart, in fact, they’re actively working to keep minority children from the chance for educational excellence, despite the fact that the voucher program has produced admirable results in the Washington, D.C., area. In addition to enabling the nineteen hundred students who received voucher money to realize gains in math and reading achievement, the program has also improved the safety of the students involved and greatly increased parental satisfaction with their children’s educational progress.24

That would be reason enough for an administration bent on making sure that minority students are denied equal opportunity; the fact that unions gain more power when voucher money is withdrawn sealed the deal for this most racist, anti-achievement president and his Education Secretary.

Duncan has also overseen the distribution of $4.35 billion of our money under what’s known as the “Race to the Top” fund.25 Actually, he’s only distributed about $600 million of the money. That’s because, in selecting the recipients, Duncan insisted that “winners must garner broad support from teachers’ unions and local school boards.” Florida, one state that implemented many of the other changes looked-for in those getting Race-to-the-Top grants, lost out largely because it had only 8 percent approval from its teachers unions. Tennessee and Delaware, two of the states that paid obeisance to the teachers’ unions, were awarded roughly $500 million and $100 million respectively.26

But perhaps the most damning indictment of our public school system and the abjectly criminal role the unions play in keeping our children, especially our disadvantaged children, in education hell was recently brought back to light with the death of an educational pioneer, Jaime Escalante. Escalante’s enduring educational legacy, celebrated in the film “Stand and Deliver,” was created when he took a group of poor inner-city students at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles and, through intensive classroom instruction, taught them advanced math skills that enabled them to score as well as, if not better than, students in much more affluent districts.

At the peak of his success, more of Escalante’s students passed Advanced Placement calculus than did those at Beverly Hills High School. Because Escalante believed every student should have the opportunity to excel, he didn’t limit the number of students in his classes to the teachers-union mandated thirty-five. He often had fifty or more students in his classes. This, of course, earned him the wrath of the unions. They managed to strip him of his position as chair of his school’s math department, and Escalante eventually left the school.27

Liberals, with the support of teachers’ unions, also used to protest prayer in schools. That was until students started praying to Barack Obama. Now they rejoice as second graders sing Obama’s praises at B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington, New Jersey, substituting Jesus’ name with that of Obama.28

This type of indoctrination into a leftist worldview is consistent with goal number seventeen of the Communist Party as read into the Congressional Record in 1963 by Florida Congressman Albert Herlong Jr.:

Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.29

You’d better read that again.

Beyond the examples of the indoctrination of young minds into socialism are the efforts to undermine and erase evidence of our Judeo-Christian heritage. As Barack Obama himself has said, “Whatever we once were, we’re no longer just a Christian nation.” In fact, pagans following an “earth-centered religion”—such religions include Wicca and Druidism—have been granted worship space at the Air Force Academy.30 This neopaganism is to religion as Renaissance fairs are to history. PC forces everyone, teachers and chaplains alike, to nod and go along or lose their careers.

There are glimmers of hope for our taking back the federal education system that has been so dominated by leftists for the better part of the past century. As with so many similar issues, the resistance to federal corruption must often start at the state level. While the left has overseen the rewriting of American history as taught to our children, in the spring of 2010, Texas educators are rewriting that state’s textbooks to correct the misrepresentation and politicization of U.S. history that has dominated textbooks. They’re explaining that, for instance, Founding Father Alexander Hamilton was not a proponent of strong central government, as the left has portrayed him, in doing so ignoring such Hamilton pronouncements as “It’s not tyranny we desire; it’s a just, limited, federal government.”31 They’re explaining that Theodore Roosevelt was a socialist and that, far from ending the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s big-government policies actually caused it.32