Bureaucrats vs. Children and Taxpayers

Yesterday, a leftist judge used children as human shields to rule in support of the ongoing shakedown of Texas Taxpayers known as the 'school finance trial.'  This was expected.  The real action will be in the State Supreme Court later this year or early next.

This ruling, however, was the third opportunity Cahnman's Musings has had to observe the mendacity of education bureaucrats up close in the past week.  Education bureaucrats go to extraordinary lengths to protect what they're doing, but almost everything they do is pointless.  Educational bureaucrats are a drag on Texas' economy.

Last week, Cahnman's Musings went undercover at the Texas Association of School Administrators conference.  These are the folks who birthed CSCOPE.  These are the folks going to see Bill Ayres' gal-pal Linda Hammond on our dime.  What struck us about the conference, however, was the amount of money and time it wasted on hot air.  TASA spent three days talking (and talking, and talking) about NOTHING, they accomplished nothing, yet they held this conference on our dime.

The other opportunities were last week's CSCOPE hearing and yesterday's attempted shakedown.  In each, the bureaucrats showed little interest in addressing public concerns but a lot of interest in protecting the money.  The concept of humble public service is lost on these people.

Educational bureaucracy is a sweet boondoggle.  You get a six figure salary, at taxpayer expense, to sit around talking but you never have to accomplish anything.  You get to use children as human shields whenever anyone questions your stewardship of the people's money.  I understand why education bureaucrats go to extreme lengths to protect that kind of gig.  I just wish they would stop hiding behind children.

CSCOPE or CSCAM?!?

On-point broadcasting did a special on CSCOPE the other night.

Anonymous Teacher:



Highlights:

• Teaching Reading without Great Books.
• "There are just huge gaps in CSCOPE."
• Teachers are evaluated on how closely they follow CSCOPE.
• Parents should "hold the elected School Board in your district accountable over CSCOPE."

Dr. Stan Hartzler:



Highlights:

• Kids are going to need a lot of remedial education.
• They're deliberately dumbing down our kids.

Ginger Russell:



Highlights:

• CSCOPE promotes Agenda 21 and Malthusian economics.

Janice van Cleve:



Highlights:

• 800 school districts across Texas have purchased CSCOPE.

Dr. David Stovall:



Ms. Mac:



Highlights:

• CSCOPE is filled with progressive education.
• About Control, not education

Stanley Kurtz: Radical in Chief

With the CSCOPE scandal bringing stealth Marxism back into focus, its worth reviewing Obama's history:



Highlights:

• There were extended periods of Obama's life when he was an open socialist, including a phase as a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary.

• There's a surprisingly long paper trail re: Obama.

• Obama's community organizer pals thought of themselves as socialists, they just didn't say so.

• American socialism changed during Reagan's presidency: "de facto control over the economy from below."
• ie. Community Organizing
• Example: ACORN's role in creating the Housing Bubble.
• Obama's overall strategy.

•  Obama has lived his whole life in 'a thoroughly socialist world."
• Frank Marshall Davis
• Obama was an open Marxist-Leninist revolutionary in college.
• Obama attended socialist scholars conferences in NYC from 1983 to 1985.
• Obama saw himself at the cutting edge of 'resisting Ronald Reagan."

•  Bill Ayres was part of the Chicago Stealth Socialism network.
• Brought Obama onto various education related boards.

•  Chicago school 'reform' was Ayres brainchild.
• Smokescreen for 'community control of government' to move in a long-term socialist direction.
• Taking over via a long term series of local elections.
• Allied with then Chicago mayor Harold Washington.

•  Moving to the suburbs meant 'abandoning' poor minorities in the inner-city.
•  Government programs, not self-improvment.

•  'Socialism from below' is embedded into all sorts of Obama-era legislation (ie. Dodd-Frank)

• Obama wants to have a class-based battle over the Bush tax cuts in 2012.

• Obama's mentors thought that, if class became the primary dividing line in American politics, we'd move towards Socialism.

The Bill Ayres/CSCOPE Connection

Well, that didn't take long.

Yesterday, the Wichita Falls Times Record News reported:

CSCOPE documents also claim connection to Linda Hammond, a proponent of the nationalized Common Core movement that Texas has rejected in favor of its own standards.

That would be the same Linda Hammond who Bill Ayres endorsed for Secretary of Education in the (then) incoming Obama administration in 2009:

Of course I would have loved to have seen Linda Darling-Hammond become Secretary of Education in an Obama administration.  She's smart, honest, compassionate, courageous, and perhaps most striking, she actually knows schools and classrooms, curriculum and teaching, kids and child development....What makes education in a democracy distinct is a commitment to a particularly precious and fragile ideal, and that it is a belief that the fullest development is all is the necessary condition for the full development of each.

Accuracy in Media details the endgame for Ayres and Hammond:

Both Ayres and Hammond were leaders in the small schools movement.  She has been published in a collection edited by Ayres.  Both have been proponents of ending funding disparities between urban and suburban schools, ending standardized testing, and attacking 'white privilege.'  She has been a board member for CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning), a group housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago, that provides studies of, and services for, Emotional Intelligence in schools -- but really emotional manipulation aimed at making students global citizens.

The 83rd Texas Legislature has no business authorizing any public education funding until it gets to the bottom of CSCOPE.