Lori Anne Madison: A testament to home-schooling

How do you spell p-r-o-d-i-g-y?

Poised, unruffled and bright as a newly minted penny, Lori Anne Madison returned to the Scripps National Spelling Bee to win yet another trophy. The 6-year-old blonde from Virginia, has just become the youngest speller eligible to participate in the competition.

Lori Anne, who is home-schooled, won over 21 other elementary and middle school spelling champs — all of whom were older than her — to win the bee, which enters her into the national competition.

Her winning word “vaquero,” the Spanish translation of cowboy, put her over the top.  Some children might have been intimidated by competing against spellers over twice their age, but Lori took it in her stride. “I was confident because I have been in spelling bees with older kids before and I judge them by who they are, not about age,” the articulate Lori Anne said. “My parents quiz me, I read and I have a really good memory,” she calmly stated.

Watch her self-assured interview on Fox News.

The last phase of the competition can be seen here. It’s well worth your time.

Gardasil: Boys become new target of lucrative drug

Parental choice or federal intervention?

Gardasil, the controversial vaccine said to treat sexually transmitted Human Papilloma virus (HPV), is now being recommended for 11 and 12-year-old boys. The drug is touted as protecting against anal and throat cancers, not a major problem with young boys. Originally it was said to prevent cervical cancer and was being sold as a panacea for girls.

Seeing Red AZ wrote about this problematic drug in July 2008.  It first gained national prominence when Texas Gov. Rick Perry mandated its use after Merck Pharmaceuticals PAC gave hefty donations to his campaign. Perry denied the donations influenced his decision to issue the executive order — bypassing the Texas legislature — from which parents could not opt in, but had to submit a written form to the State Health Department in Austin opting out of having their young daughters receive this fast-tracked, unproven vaccine, on the market less than a year.  Perry’s chief-of-staff landed a lucrative lobbying position with the drug company. 

Now, the latest recommendation by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is likely to broaden the use of the HPV vaccine, since most private insurers pay for vaccines once the committee recommends them. The HPV vaccine is unusually expensive. The three recommended doses cost pediatricians more than $300 and patients are often charged hundreds more.

But this is no bargain. Vaccinating the nation’s 11- and 12-year-old boys will cost almost $140 million annually, with the one-time “catch-up” among males 13 to 21 costing hundreds of millions more. Taxpayers, via federal subsidies, pay for about half of all vaccinations.

Not only are the CDC committee’s recommendations routinely used by private insurers to determine which vaccines to pay for, but the Obama administration’s Fed-Med legislation of 2010 requires insurers participating in health exchanges to offer vaccines recommended by the committee. The Wall Street Journal wrote in 2007 that widespread use of the drug would guarantee the drug maker billions of dollars in annual revenue.

Vaccination rates in girls have remained relatively low, as parents balked when reports were released about the lack of substantive testing on the drug, coupled with the motivating profitability factors for the drug manufacturer. So boys are the next best option for Merck & Co.

This excellent editorial on Gardasil appeared n the Journal of the American Medical Association, declaring that “serious questions regarding the overall effectiveness of the vaccine” needed to be answered and that more long-term studies were called for. The article concludes with this cogent observation: “When weighing evidence about risks and benefits, it is also appropriate to ask who takes the risk, and who gets the benefit. Patients and the public logically expect that only medical and scientific evidence is put on the balance. If other matters weigh in, such as profit for a company or financial or professional gains for physicians or groups of physicians, the balance is easily skewed. The balance will also tilt if the adverse events are not calculated correctly.”

You‘re teaching WHAT to my child?

No wonder home schooling is gaining adherents

This New York Post article on sex ed curriculum to be taught in New York City public schools is more than eyebrow raising.  The topics are shocking — yet the courses will be mandatory in middle and high schools next year.

If that’s not bad enough, check out the asterisk* marked subjects that will be taught to 11 and 12-year-old children. The specifics are graphic enough that we’ll let you check out the topics of study yourselves. There are four short paragraphs marked in this manner. Whereas the first two will have you steamed, the last two are guaranteed to enrage.

Student field trips will include a visit to the local pharmacy, where they will compare and contrast condoms in terms of brand, price, and specific features. Others will research and map out a route from school to clinics providing birth control and STD tests. The children are also directed to Columbia University’s Go Ask Alice astoundingly graphic website.

Johnny might not be able to read, but he’ll soon find out that bestiality is not a course in grooming and obedience training for pooches at the neighborhood veterinarian’s office.

The proficiency percentages of New York City school children on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests are unacceptably low. Just 22 percent of the city’s eighth graders and just 29 percent of the city’s fourth graders are reading at grade level.

Eighth-grade reading has shown no improvement since 2003. But even with “significant” fourth-grade gains, only 35 percent of city fourth-grade students are proficient in math, according to NAEP data.

Students won’t be prepared for the competitive international marketplace, but they’ll be able to price shop condoms and probably teach Bill Clinton a thing or two about….well, you know.

Here is the research report titled “Sex Ed in the NYC Public School System.” Prepared by the long-controversial SIECUS and NARAL Pro-Choice New York, it includes the Obama administration’s HHS Director Kathleen Sebelius’ stamp of approval. NARAL has gone through several incarnations since its 1969 inception — first as National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. It then became the National Abortion Rights Action League and later National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. Now it merely uses the less revealing acronym. But don’t be fooled. The objective is still to undermine family and religious values.

Vouchers give parents educational choices

Republican congressional gains, exposure of unions, enhance parental choices

Tucked in among poor test scores, falling literacy rates and slipping standards of far too many American public schools is the good news heralding the expansion of school choice across the nation. As of this month according to Dr. Edwin Feulner of the Heritage Foundation, 18 states and Washington, D.C., have policies that support private-school choice. But public-school choice options are also continuing to grow. On top of that, there are millions of children participating in K–12 courses online. Meanwhile, home-schooling and charter schools are becoming more widespread.

Arizona is among the groundbreaking reformers. In April, Gov. Jan Brewer signed legislation creating an Education Savings Account program for special-needs students. Under it, Arizona deposits 90 percent of the state per-pupil education funding into a savings account that parents control. They can use it for private-school tuition, online education, home-schooling, or to save for college. The funds follow the child instead of automatically going to the neighborhood public school, and what is unused in one year can be rolled over to the next. Up to 17,000 special-needs students are expected to be eligible for the program this year.

In fact, The Wall Street Journal has already dubbed 2011 “The Year of School Choice,” noting: Choice by itself won’t lift U.S. K-12 education to where it needs to be. Eliminating teacher tenure and measuring teachers against student performance are also critical. Standards must be higher than they are.

But choice is essential to driving reform because it erodes the union-dominated monopoly that assigns children to schools based on where they live. Unions defend the monopoly to protect jobs for their members, but education should above all serve students and the larger goal of a society in which everyone has an opportunity to prosper.

This year’s choice gains are a major step forward, and they are due in large part to Republican gains in last fall’s elections combined with growing recognition by many Democrats that the unions are a reactionary force that is denying opportunity to millions. The ultimate goal should be to let the money follow the children to whatever school their parents want them to attend.

The Boston Globe now reports that within weeks after Indiana began the nation’s broadest school voucher program, thousands of students have transferred from public to private schools, causing a spike in enrollment at some Catholic institutions that were recently on the brink of closing.

In July we covered the massive fraud in test scores in Georgia and Pennsylvania — reaching into the highest levels of school administrations.

Given a choice, parents opt for what’s best for their children. The good news is that option is now increasingly available.

No armistice in California’s lopsided culture war

Sexual minorities advance agenda with Brown at helm of state

Democrat Gov. Edmund “Jerry” Brown signed a bill yesterday making California the first state in the nation requiring that lessons about homosexuals, bisexuals and transgenders be integral to social studies programs in the state’s public schools.

Brown signed the controversial bill autjhorizing the one-sided curriculum after the Democrat majority state legislature passed the bill last week on a largely party-line vote.

State law already mandates that public schools teach about women, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, European Americans, American Indians and labor unions  — as diversity trumps unity in California.

The new law, SB48, requires the California Board of Education and local school districts to adopt textbooks and other teaching materials that cover the contributions and roles of sexual minorities, as soon as the 2013-2014 school year.

“Gay” rights advocates said they will be vigilant about making sure schools across California comply. No word from them on bringing up lagging test scores in reading, language and mathematics.

Carolyn Laub, the founder and executive director of the Gay-Straight Alliance Network that works to establish gay-straight clubs in schools, declared such clubs now exist in 55 percent of California’s high schools. Wann’a bet the Latin, math, astronomy, ROTC, FFA and community service clubs no longer exist?

Ban on homemade lunches: Obama rules in Chicago’s public schools

The Chicago Tribune demonstrates the lengths to which liberals will go to overshadow the role of parents, blatantly infringing on their responsibilities to their own children’s basic needs.  Government has constituently enumerated powers. Nannyism is not one of them.

Michelle Obama wants to tell us what and how to eat, although few of us can afford to emulate the Obama’s exclusive dietary tastes.

But at Chicago’s Little Village Academy, most students must take the school provided meals — both breakfast and lunch — or go hungry. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria. Bringing lunch from home is now verboten.

The Trib reports that dozens of students took the provided lunch but threw most of it in the garbage uneaten. No matter.  Although the children might not get their nutrition, the puveyor’s bank accounts get very fat.

Any school that bans homemade lunches also guarantees more money in the pockets of the district’s food provider, Chartwells-Thompson. The federal government pays the district for each free or reduced-price lunch provided, and the supplying commissary receives a set fee from the district per meal.

Back in 2005, the catering contract was worth $100 million in managed annual volume, servicing 613 schools and 426,812 students in the Chicago area, alone. Annual revenue at that time was projected to exceed $52 million. Under the terms of the agreement, Chartwells-Thompson, a division of Charlotte, N.C.-based, high-dollar stock trading Compass Group, provided the food service for all six regions comprising the Chicago Public Schools System. We attempted to find more recent corporate financial remuneration information from the catering company, but it appears to be well concealed. However we were able to locate this 2010 report on “Diversity and Inclusion” including their abhorrence of gender discrimination (pages 7 and 8).

The Chicago School District is the third largest in the United States, leading us to question whether this is about nutrition or mammoth sums of money.

Read the Chicago Tribune article here.

Personal data gathering at your local government school

Parents of school aged students rightly have a lot of concerns these days. Teachers belong to unions that put children behind “power” Molesters run amok, often recycling from one district to another. Teaching standards are low, and in too many instances, expectations are even lower.

So when we read that those in charge of our children’s learning have developed an Education Data Model, we sit up and take notice.

Then we see that the website states the data gleaned from America’s children can be “used by educators, vendors, and researchers to understand the information required for teaching, learning, and administrative systems,” and the “hmm-m?” factor kicks in.  Vendors and researchers? Administrative systems?

Take a scroll through the National Education Data Model early childhood, elementary or secondary educational program. Common Core Curriculum is the vehicle to put in place a database of student data.

Pajamas Media describes the data sets — which it says might be accurately described as a Brave New World. While not all of the information in these sets is currently mandatory, the level of detail being requested is unsettling.

The sets include such things as hair color, eye color, gestational age at birth (whether a child was premature or not), blood type, blood test results, birth marks, and even bus stop arrival time.

Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the Department of Education — already ensnared by allegations of insider trading — appear to be maneuvering for greater federal influence over state education boards. Chris Field writing for Townhall lists Arne Duncan as Dangerous Liberal #22 on his list of the 50 most dangerous liberals in America. No surprise that Number One is George Soros.

Read the disturbing PJM report here.

State Dept. modifies stance obliterating parental designations on passports

Engaging in pretzel-like contortions, the Obama administration is somewhat altering its announced plan to move forward with completely removing the words “mother” and “father” from passport applications for minors. The U.S. Passport Office was scheduled to replace the parental designation with the “gender neutral” terminology of ‘parent one’ and ‘parent two,’ as a nod to demands from the homosexual community.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has now instructed the State Department to modify the bureaucratic change, but not totally retreat from the original plan. The form will now ask for the names of the child’s “mother or parent 1″ and “father or parent 2.”

Obama walks the uncomfortable liberal tight walk fraught with complexities. Keenly aware of his 2012 presidential campaign, he is loathe to alienate his homosexual constituency. Neither does he want a backlash from the newly empowered congressional conservatives, whose faith-based voters — both Republican and Democrat — consider this a slap in the face of traditional family values.

The new forms are scheduled for implementation February 1, 2011.

U.S. public school texts promoting Islam; Dubai royals, publishing execs in collusion

The elected Texas Board of Education has adopted a resolution warning textbook publishers to provide fair treatment of the world’s religions – or face being snubbed by the state that buys more textbooks than any other.

The resolution, introduced by former Texas school board member Randy Rives, states: “Resolved, That the SBOE will look to reject future prejudicial social studies submissions that continue to offend Texas law with respect to treatment of the world’s major religious groups by significant inequalities of coverage space-wise and/or by demonizing or lionizing one or more of them over others,” according to a WorldNetDaily report.

The resolution, adopted on a 7-6 vote, declares that “pro-Islamic/anti-Christian half-truths, selective disinformation, and false editorial stereotypes still roil some social studies textbooks nationwide,” including some “politically correct whitewashes of Islamic culture and stigmas on Christian civilization.”  The none-too-happy Dallas Morning News reported that “three Democrats and three moderate Republicans voted against the resolution,” as the newspaper berated “members of the board’s social conservative bloc” for the move.

The resolution included pages of footnotes documenting the specific offenses discovered in various textbooks, including “patterns of pejoratives toward Christians and superlatives toward Muslims, calling Crusaders aggressors, ‘violent attackers,’ or ‘invaders’ while euphemizing Muslim conquest of Christian lands as ‘migrations’ by ‘empire builders.’”

The resolution discusses world history textbooks officially adopted for use in Texas high schools and pointed out grounds for board concerns:

“In one instance, devoting 120 student text lines to Christian beliefs, practices, and holy writings but 248 (more than twice as many) to those of Islam; and dwelling for 27 student text lines on Crusaders’ massacre of Muslims at Jerusalem in 1099 yet censoring Muslims’ massacres of Christians there in 1244 and at Antioch in 1268, implying that Christian brutality and Muslim loss of life are significant but Islamic cruelty and Christian deaths are not.”

Another point of contention is book authors “spending 139 student text lines on Christian beliefs, practices, and holy writings but 176 on those of Islam; claiming Islam ‘brought untold wealth to thousands and a better life to millions,’ while ‘because of [Europeans' Christian] religious zeal … many peoples died and many civilizations were destroyed;’ and contrasting ‘the Muslim concern for cleanliness’ with Swedes in Russia who were ‘the filthiest of God’s creatures.’”

These distortions in social studies texts are also in use across the United States.

The Dubai royal family is a major shareholder in the Education Media and Publishing Group, which owns textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Boston.

What a surprise.

What a field trip! Public middle-school students bow to Allah inside mosque

This troubling video — taken earlier this year by a parent chaperone — shows 6th graders from Wellesley, Massachusetts as they rise from prostrating themselves alongside Muslim men in a prayer to Allah while on a public school field trip to the largest mosque in the Northeast. Teachers did not intervene.

The video was taken inside the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center – Boston’s controversial Saudi-funded mega-mosque – during a Wellesley Middle School social studies trip.

Read more here.