WELCOME TO THE CONTINUING COLLAPSE!
by Dr. Bruce Shortt
Exposing Government Schools:
The Youth Ministry of the State Church of Secular Humanism

July, Anno Domini 2009

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies.”
(Groucho Marx) 
 
 Here richly, with ridiculous display,The Politician’s corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.
(Hilaire Belloc)

Before we descend yet again into the news of that veritable dog’s breakfast known as government education, The Continuing Collapse has a question for you:

What are you doing to rescue children from your local pagan seminaries?

Are you speaking to friends, neighbors, and relatives about the need for Christian education and how they can make the transition from government education to Christian education?

Are you speaking to your pastor about how your church can promote Christian education?

Does your church have a First Class Homeschool Ministries Co-op [ http://www.firstclasshomeschool.org/pages/ ] ?

Are you speaking to your pastor about the truth concerning government education?

Are you responding to those who preach educational antinomianism (Christian school, homeschool, government school, whatever…) ?

Have you put up a yard sign announcing an informational meeting in your home about homeschooling or your Christian school?

When school district bond elections are announced, are you passing that information on to Paul The-Bond-Slayer [Paul Dorr: 712-758-3660 ]?

Have you Joined the Homeschool Legal Defense Association (www.hslda.org )?

Are you supporting the International Human Rights Group’s effort to defend homeschooling families in Europe (www.ihrg.org )?

If you aren’t doing any of these, by what works are you showing your faith?

And now The Continuing Collapse returns to bringing you yet more tales from the Government School Crypt…Ignore them at your peril (and the peril of your children and grandchildren).

The Poisonous Fruit of Banishing God’s Word From the Classroom

Government schools have taught for roughly two generations that bad decisions are the result of a lack of information and that if children (or adults, for that matter) are just properly informed they will choose wisely. As with so many other things promoted by the government school establishment, this view is simply false.

Although information plays a role in decision-making, values obviously play a much larger role. But, as readers of The Continuing Collapse know, the Supreme Court decades ago prohibited government schools everywhere from teaching a Christian worldview.

When the Supreme Court banished Christ and the Bible from the classroom, the eventual response of the public school system was to replace the Christian values that could no longer be taught with “values clarification” programs and other curricula that at bottom were nothing more than indoctrination in moral relativism. In this humanistic model, the role of highly trained education professionals is to provide as much information as possible so that 12 year-olds could choose “what was right for them” in such matters as drug use and sexuality.

Nowhere have the consequences of this approach to teaching “decision-making” been more pernicious than in what our highly trained education professionals euphemistically call “sex education”.

Today, as a result of decades of government school and media fueled “sexual enlightenment”, students have decided that sending other students naked pictures of themselves over cell phones is “what is right for them.”

“Sexting in Alabama”

Cell phones that go off during class have long been a headache for school administrators, but Donna Dickson said a new use for the phones has made her jaw drop.

Over a two-week period this spring, three students in one Shelby County high school were caught sending revealing pictures of themselves over their cell phones. the practice of sending nude or semi-nude photos via cell phone, is a growing problem across the country and in Alabama.
http://www.ednews.org/articles/teens-sexting-infiltrating-state-schools.html

For those who try to justify their government school habit by claiming “our schools are different”, notice that it is Alabama that is featured in the story, not Massachusetts.

“Sex Education “Has Absolutely No Place” in Our Schools – It “Promotes Promiscuity”’

And now for a little quiz.

Who made this pronouncement?

A. A group of conservative Evangelical leaders?

B. The Pope?

C.The Republican Party?

D. A conservative grassroots organization?

E. None of the above.

The answer is obviously ”E”, “None of the above”.

Who had the common sense and courage to say this? The Hindu-led Indian government…. Your pastor needs to read this.

NEW DELHI, June 12, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Indian government has rejected western-style sex education programs, saying they do nothing to solve the problem of teenage pregnancy but only exacerbate the problem by promoting sexual promiscuity.

A government report on the matter was issued in response to a citizen-launched petition against a decision by the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) to start sex-education in schools. The program had been touted as a means of preventing the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Materials for teachers and facilitators in India included explicit details about “alternative methods” of sex, including anal and oral sex, presented as a means of avoiding AIDS.

According to the government, the curriculum prepared with material from UNICEF, had “shocked the consciences” of the country and was described as “quite frightening.” If implemented, the report said, it would “promote promiscuity of the worst kind.” …

The Indian government’s reasoning stands in sharp contrast to that of the West, which, in reaction to steadily increasing rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, has invariably increased access to free contraceptives and abortion and exposed ever-younger children to more explicit sex education.

The testimony of witnesses and petitioners upon which the report was based was a stinging critique of the effects that such programs have had in the countries that have embraced them. The petitioners told the committee that the proposed curriculum would “strike at the root of the cultural fabric of our society that had been nourished over the millennia.”

If implemented, the petitioners said, the program would “corrupt Indian youth and lead to collapse of the education system.” Over all, they said, such programs are nothing more than an “education to sell condoms” that will lead to the creation of an “immoral society” and to an increase in single-parent families.

The report accused the HRD ministry, in its efforts to quash the petition, of using “technical jargon and euphemisms” in order to downplay the fears of the petitioners.

So explicit was the material in question that in the process of their submissions to the committee, petitioners had been asked not to give a PowerPoint presentation because the committee was “not comfortable with it and [it] could be embarrassing especially to the lady Members and other lady staff present.”

Petitioners had pointed to the increasing rate of teenage pregnancies in other countries, noting that in France, schools are equipped with nurses to distribute “contraceptive pills” to girls the morning after “unsafe sex.” The report also noted the situation in the UK, in which schools are “connected to abortion centers to terminate teenage pregnancies.”

Pratiba Naitthani, a co-petitioner and teacher, told the committee that “nothing was safer than abstinence till marriage.”
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/jun/09061202.html

When the vast majority of Christians in America hand their children over to government schools to be indoctrinated in promiscuity and worse,  do you wonder why Christian missionaries have a hard time making progress in India?

Our Highly Trained Education Professionals Don’t Discriminate on the Basis of Handicap

Readers of The Continuing Collapse know that physical and sexual abuse at the hands of highly trained education professionals is common in government schools.

Inmates of government schools and facilities for the mentally and developmentally disabled fare no better…

Nearly 270 employees at Texas’ 13 large residential facilities for the mentally and developmentally disabled were fired or suspended in fiscal year 2008 for abusing or mistreating residents, according to state records….

Records indicate 11 of the 269 firings or suspensions were considered Class I violations involving physical or sexual abuse that caused or may have caused serious physical injury.

Corpus Christi State School, where several former staffers are charged with staging “fight club”-type bouts among residents, disciplined 42 employees, the most of any facility. ..

The 2008 figures are the most during any of the past five fiscal years. There were 239 employees fired or suspended in fiscal 2007 for the abuse, neglect or exploitation of residents. There were 200 such disciplinary actions in 2006, 203 in 2005 and 180 in 2004, according to state records….federal investigations that found that at least 53 deaths from September 2007 to September 2008 were from preventable conditions indicating lapses in proper care.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6475958.html

“A Good Teacher Just Made An Honest and Embarrassing Mistake…”

The Continuing Collapse has pointed out repeatedly that government school-induced degeneracy is a multi-generational problem affecting today’s parents and many grandparents.

Here we have a lovely story in which an elementary school teacher distributed to fifth graders and their parents part of a homemade porn video in which she played a starring role.

ELK GROVE, Calif. (July 2) – A class of fifth graders in California got a shocking crash course on the birds and the bees courtesy of their teacher and an X-rated home video she accidentally included in a DVD of classroom memories.
The error was not caught until after the DVDs were distributed to the students and their families. Parents tell CBS 13 Sacramento that the woman is a good teacher who made an honest but embarrassing mistake…..

A former music teacher arrested for allegedly having sex with two students in a classroom will serve nine months in jail and five years’ probation. Ranee Sue Proper, 42, was sentenced June 3 after pleaded guilty to one count of criminal sexual conduct. Her name will also be placed on the Michigan State Sex Offender Registry.
http://news.aol.com/article/teacher-sex-tape/554817

A normal reaction to something like this would be that a woman making porn videos shouldn’t be anywhere near fifth-graders. Instead, parents are telling the press that she is a good teacher who just made “an honest mistake”. It makes you wonder what these parents are up to…

A Glimpse Into the Future

Our cousins across the Atlantic are always a step or two ahead of us in terms of “progressive” innovations in education. What Britain is doing today is very likely to show up knocking at the door of your government school tomorrow.

Forget about “an apple a day…”

NHS guidance is advising school pupils that they have a “right” to an enjoyable sex life and that regular sex can be good for their cardiovascular health.

The advice appears in leaflets circulated to parents, teachers and youth workers and is meant to update sex education by telling students about the benefits of enjoyable sex.

The authors of the guidance say that for too long, experts have concentrated on the need for “safe sex” and committed relationships while ignoring the principle reason that many people have sex.

Entitled Pleasure, the leaflet has been drawn up by NHS Sheffield, but it also being circulated outside the city.

The leaflet carries the slogan “an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away”. It also says: “Health promotion experts advocate five portions of fruit and veg a day and 30 minutes’ physical activity three times a week. What about sex or masturbation twice a week?”…

Mr Slack believes that if teenagers are fully informed about sex and are making their decisions of their own will in a loving relationship, they have an equal right as an adult to an enjoyable sex life…
http://ednews.org/articles/nhs-tells-children-of-their-right-to-an-orgasm-a-day-.html

Notice the “fully informed” riff? British parents in due time may be charged with medical child abuse if they attempt to discourage “fully informed, willing” children from sexual activity. If you doubt this, consider whether anyone twenty years ago would have believed that our highly trained education professionals would be promoting a lifestyle of homosexual sodomy to kindergartners?

If it is happening in Britain, you can bet it is being promoted here.

Whose Children?

Here is a little story about how the U.K. sex education lobby is pressuring the government not to allow parents to opt their children out of the schools’ progressive sex ed curriculum.

Is this a cautionary tale for us? Not at all. In at least the 9th Circuit, the Court of Appeals has made clear that parents have no right to an “opt out”. In other parts of the country, highly trained education professionals simply ignore the law. So perhaps in this respect we are a bit ahead of our British cousins.

The sex education lobby in the UK is putting pressure on the government to ban parents’ rights to withdraw their children from the controversial new sex education program that is slated to become a compulsory part of the National Curriculum from September 2011.
Parents currently have the right to withdraw their children from sex education under the 1996 Education Act.

In response to the Department for Children, Schools and Families’ request for public input on the sex education program that would see comprehensive sex-ed begin in Grade 1, “health education” groups such as the Brook Advisory Centres, a sexual health advisory service and registered charity that targets teens, claim that more sex education is needed from an earlier age to tackle teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, and that parents should not be able to remove their children from the program….

Polemical commentator Gerald Warner responded to the groups’ demands in a Telegraph article, asking: “Since when did charities dictate the rights of parents?”
He observed that, “Since even the sex campaigning fanatics admit that, deplorably, only four out of every 10,000 parents currently exercise their right to withdraw children from increasingly obscene and nihilistic ’sex education’, it is impossible for them to argue that so small an element could significantly affect the ‘healthy’ outcomes they allegedly seek to achieve. So, why bother to campaign for a change in the law?

“Because totalitarianism means exactly that: total conformity of everybody with the politically correct consensus, with no exceptions tolerated.”
Norman Wells, Director of the UK’s Family Education Trust, said his organization supports the right of parents to retain control of their children’s education and withdraw their children from the sex education program if they wish.

“It is of vital importance that schools retain discretion and flexibility in order to ensure parents remain free to withdraw their children from sex education lessons,” Wells said in a press release.

Critics of the UK Teenage Pregnancy Strategy have noted that the government’s sex ed program to reduce teen pregnancy has been a catastrophic failure.
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/jul/09071704.html

Detroit Public Schools
Moving Closer to Bankruptcy

For years now The Continuing Collapse has been telling you that reduced enrollments, which entail reduced public funding, are the Achilles heel of the government school system. Our highly trained education professionals need ever increasing amounts of money to keep the system’s tax-eating constituencies happy and to conceal incompetent financial management.

When falling enrollment results in less money, the financial corruption and incompetence of the government school establishment is exposed and the disparate elements of the government school coalition begin fighting among themselves over money.

Detroit is far from the only example, but it is a museum quality example.

Calling the Detroit Public Schools budget the worst he’s ever seen, the state-appointed emergency financial manager said today that he was unable to cut most of the deficit and is considering filing bankruptcy.

DPS will enter the next school year with a deficit of about $259 million, down from the projected $430 million deficit — and will have to push the number of job cuts up from about 1,766 to 2,451, Robert Bobb said today.
Also, in order to avoid overspending next year and further compounding the deficit, labor unions will have to agree to larger high school class sizes and about $137 million in cost-saving measures that could include unpaid furloughs and health care benefits cuts, according to the 2009-2010 draft budget.
Bobb said he expects to adopt the deficit budget by tomorrow. An amendment will be filed in August and as state budget projections change, he said. A deficit elimination plan will be filed in coming months. Other than bankruptcy, DPS may also have to expand its number of charter schools, liquidate assets and privatize major departments such as transportation, technology, maintenance, custodial and security services…

A $500,000 student retention campaign is being planned to try to counter funding losses. Only about $45 million of the $500 million DPS will get in stimulus funds can be used to offset expected state budget cuts. The budget also projects a loss of about $79.1 million because enrollment is expected to fall from about 94,054 to 83,777 students.

“We need revenues,” Bobb said.
The job cuts will reduce the number of assistant principals, counselors, curriculum leaders, substitute teachers, clerical staff and accompanists.
Keith Johnson, president for the Detroit Federation of Teachers, could not comment on the draft budget. When contacted by a reporter he said he was in a meeting with Bobb to go over it “line by line.”
The school district has overspent its budget for the past seven years, but the $259 million deficit accumulated over the past two years.

Bobb said he was unable to eliminate the deficit on time – by June 30–because doing so would’ve meant draconian cuts such as eliminating all transportation except special education, cutting security, closing more schools, radically increasing class size and eliminating all central office “except where legally mandated,” according to the draft budget.

Asked whether DPS can adopt a 2009-2010 budget with a deficit, Jan Ellis, a spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Education, said, “State law requires school districts to adopt a balanced budget.”
Last summer the school board adopted a deficit budget and that action was one of many that led the state to appoint Bobb to take over DPS finances. Bobb said the difference between the 2008-09 budget and next year’s will be the deficit elimination plan. He said past administrations were not forthcoming about the problems.
Another 60 schools may have to close over the next five years, leaving less than half of the schools DPS had in 2004.
“They said the sky was falling but they didn’t act,” Bobb said. Since starting in March, Bobb has closed 29 schools, cut central office staff, dismissed 33 principals and is planning to reform 40 schools.
“This schools system must be radically retooled,” he said.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090629/NEWS01/90629069&s=d&page=#pluckcomments

How Do We Lie To Thee?
Let Us Count the Ways…

(With apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

Even the mainstream media has gotten in on the story about how our highly trained education professionals lie about dropout rates. But these stories have naively assumed that the only “dropouts” are students who leave the school system.

As this story from Philadelphia shows, government schools are permitting students to “dropout in place”; that is, the students show up, but don’t do any work, and still get passed. The problem, as this story shows, is that they sometimes get “ratted out” to the media.

Why would our highly trained education professionals pass students who hardly show up and learn little or nothing?

Go back and reread the story about Detroit. Students who don’t “pass” are likely ”visibly” to dropout (officially leave the system), and that means less money for our highly trained education professionals.

Also note that the Philadelphia superintendent isn’t sure “where the buck stops”, except that she knows that it isn’t her desk.

Amid allegations of widespread pressure to pass even the most lax students, Philadelphia School District chief Arlene Ackerman yesterday told all teachers that she was not behind the push.

“Students should receive whatever grade they earned based on their performance and work in your class,” Ackerman wrote in an e-mail to the district’s 10,700 teachers.

Three teachers at South Philadelphia High School – and others around the city – have said that they felt pressure, both implied and stated, to pass students, even those with chronic absences and little mastery of the most basic subject matter.

Since … May 31 the push to pass at South Philadelphia, teachers from several schools throughout the district have said in interviews that similar conditions existed at their schools.

In an interview last week with an Inquirer editorial writer, Ackerman said she had launched an internal investigation of the teachers’ complaints at South Philadelphia High. She also said that the pressure to pass was likely not an isolated problem.

“I think it is probably happening in more than South Philadelphia,” Ackerman said. “I don’t think that it was just isolated at this one school, unfortunately.”…

The principal “is getting a lot of pressure from downtown to pass kids along,” said the teacher, who feared retribution and spoke on condition of not being named.
Starting in spring, the teacher said, teachers have been required to do an enormous amount of documentation before failing students. That’s on top of the district’s “Comprehensive Student Assistance Program,” which mandates teachers document supports given to struggling students.

“They make it really difficult to fail students,” the teacher said. “You have to do all this paperwork, and I know people who will pass their kids because they don’t want to do it.”

In the letter to teachers, sent yesterday afternoon, Ackerman acknowledged that “some of you may have been asked to modify grades so that no students receive less than a 59 as their final grade in your class.”

But she’s not behind that directive, the superintendent said.
“I want to make it clear to you that this is not a School District policy, nor do I agree with this practice,” she wrote.

At South Philadelphia, teachers say the pressure is both implicit and explicit and has come from principal Alice Heller and other administrators in teacher-training sessions, meetings, and a memo asking them to give students makeup work and credit for fulfilling promises such as showing up on time and wearing a required school uniform…

Another high school teacher told The Inquirer that the push to pass was ingrained among teachers….

“There’s such pressure for us to pass these students. Administrators are so keen on the numbers, but nobody seems to be concerned about where these students are,” the teacher said.

The teacher said a large number of students at the school are 17 or 18 years old and cannot read or write.

“It’s not a small minority,” the teacher said. “They must have had a succession of teachers who felt the need to pass them.”

Lisa Haver, a sixth-grade teacher at Harding Middle School, said that she had never been told she was failing too many students. But the system has certainly shifted over a number of years, she said.

It used to be the responsibility was on the student to show up every day, prepared, learn the material, and pass. Now, it’s on the teachers to justify that they’re failing a student, even one who has 100 absences or who can’t write a sentence, Haver said.

“If you’re having too many kids who fail, or you have kids who are not reaching that level on benchmark tests, the school district is saying, ‘What are you doing wrong as a teacher?’ ” Haver said. “It goes from your elementary schools to your middle schools up to your high schools.”…

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/education/20090616_Phila__schools_chief_denies_being_behind_alleged_pressure-to-pass_policy.html

Yet Another Reason Why Christians Must drive a Stake Through the Heart of the Government Education System

Christian educational antinomians – the “government school, Christian school, homeschool, whatever…” crowd – deludedly  believe that the government school establishment and our totalitarian ”progressives” are willing to “live and let live” in educational matters.

Nothing could be further from the truth. As has been pointed out by The Continuing Collapse before, the teachers’ unions and their university professor friends, among others, are just waiting for the opportunity to destroy private education and homeschooling through regulation.

As the following article points out, this might be accomplished in the course of a federal funding “takeover” of the entire school system.

If the government’s push to nationalize health care is successful, Congress and the administration will soon turn to one of their other stated priorities: education.
by Michael Naragon

Although–or, perhaps, because–liberalism has dominated public education since the 1960s, test results and competency in general continue to decline, much to the stated chagrin of officials in the school system and local, state, and federal governments.  Barack Obama has made reforming the education system in America one of his highest priorities.

“[Education reform] will require a willingness to break free from the same debates that Washington has been engaged in for decades – Democrat versus Republican; vouchers versus the status quo; more money versus more accountability,” Obama has said.  “And most of all, it will take a president who is honest about the challenges we face – who doesn’t just tell everyone what they want to hear, but what they need to hear.”
For sake of argument, what if the administration approached education in the same way they have approached health care?….

It is easy to picture the president making the same arguments about education.  Indeed, on the president’s web site, he has already made similar statements.
“At this defining moment in our history, preparing our children to compete in the global economy is one of the most urgent challenges we face,” reads Obama’s statement on education.  “We need to stop paying lip service to public education, and start holding communities, administrators, teachers, parents and students accountable. We will prepare the next generation for success in college and the workforce, ensuring that American children lead the world once again in creativity and achievement.”  Throw in the word “crisis” or “catastrophe” somewhere, and it begins to sound very much like the stimulus, cap-and-trade, and health care debates.

How might the administration go about meeting such challenges?  By  “telling [Americans] what they need to hear,” Obama could propose a federal takeover of state school systems.  Many states, like California, are already running far into the red, and education costs more than nearly every other social program provided by the state.  In some Southern states, the cost of busing alone makes up more than half of all educational expense.  A federal offer to take up such expense, or to more completely assist with such expense, would be attractive to many of the states.  States that refused to comply could be threatened with sanctions or withholding of other federal benefits.

Such action would then put the nation’s public school systems more completely under federal control.  The government’s focus would then be to eliminate the competition.  Homeschooling would be effectively curtailed by requiring homeschooling parents to possess a teaching license, master’s degree in education, or both.  A few families would commit to jumping through the hoops, but, as any educator knows, state certification boards can be very friendly or very obstructive places.  Homeschooling parents would undoubtedly encounter the latter.

Private schools would then be the target.  The government could attack them in the same way they will attack private insurance: by forcing them to provide all services provided by public schools, and to do so without raising tuition to compensate.  Private schools could be forced to take in any student, regardless of behavioral background, ability, transcript, learning disability, or physical challenge.  Washington would not be so crass as to issue an edict closing the doors of every private school (except, of course, for the ones attended by children of government officials).  They would, in the name of “competition,” ensure that most private schools could not compete.

Government schools, with their taxpayer-supplied budgets, purchase new textbooks every year, in most cases.  Private schools, particularly religious-based schools, rarely do this in order to save money, opting instead to purchase new books every few years.  Those schools could now be forced to purchase new books at the same frequency as the public schools without raising tuition.

Many employees of private schools work there in order to obtain a discount for their children to attend that school.  The Internal Revenue Service could easily begin to look at the tuition discount as taxable income, in much the same way that insurance benefits will be counted as taxable income to help pay for the president’s health care plan.  The difference in taxable income would be enough to force many employees–and their students–from the private schools and into the government network, thereby strengthening the budgets of the public schools….In the end, this is, of course, an exercise in speculation, but the parallels exist.  One of the greatest battlefields for the hearts and minds of America has taken place in the schools, and it has been overwhelmingly won by the liberal establishment thus far.  By nationalizing education and removing the last bastions of free thought and achievement from the system, the battle will have been effectively ended.
http://theconstitutionalalamo.com/2009/07/06/nationalized-education-the-next-battlefield/

The only way to prevent this from ever happening is for Christians to remove their children from government schools now. The result would be such a discrediting and delegitimation of the government school system that any proposal seeking to put more power in the hands of our highly trained educational professionals would be ridiculed and a political nonstarter.

Parents who claim Christ must stop placing their desire for their favorite middle-class welfare entitlement – “free” government daycare – above the spiritual, moral, and intellectual welfare of their children and above the safety of the families of their brothers and sisters in Christ.

That’s a wrap for this edition of The Continuing Collapse. So, TCC bids you a fond “adieu” and asks you to:
REMEMBER:
1. Feel free to circulate The Continuing Collapse. 
 
2. If you aren’t hearing about at least some these government school problems from your pastor, why is he your pastor?
 
3. FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS SEND THEIR CHILDREN TO GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS.
“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm – but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

T.S. Eliot

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