About three miles south of Beverly Hills in the upper-middle class neighborhood of Beverlywood is Hamilton High School.  An otherwise ordinary Los Angeles Unified School District-sponsored juvenile detention center, Hamilton is home to a couple of well regarded magnet programs, particularly the Academy of Music Magnet.  The Music Magnet is the old stomping grounds of pop stars, Broadway talent, and even Hollywood A-listers who were drawn to a public school program that has a focus on the arts.  Yet, even this rare LAUSD high school that students actually want to attend has become a casualty of the horrendous budget crises in the state of California.

Reporter Steve Lopez was dispatched to the scene to write up the various cutbacks for the Los Angeles Times.  Lopez is known for being the journalist whose articles on a schizophrenic musician inspired the Robert Downey Jr./Jaime Foxx film The Soloist.  Then all of a sudden, what had the makings of a compelling human interest piece on one of the handful of quintessentially Hollywood high schools quickly devolved into a sob story about how these poor teachers and students have been victimized by the dastardly Republicans and their resistance to tax hikes.

How did he do this?

First, Lopez paints a rosy picture of the school by glowingly describing a performance by the jazz band and cherry-picking quotes raving about teachers; his portrayal of Hamilton is a lot like Sean Penn’s depiction of Iraq in Team America:

As it happens, Hamilton is my local high school and I have family and friends who have graduated from the Music Magnet in recent years.  To put it bluntly, many of their experiences didn’t resemble the mythical land of incredible teachers and students anxious to learn that Lopez describes.  An anonymous Hamilton graduate told me she recalls students doing cocaine in the state-of the art auditorium (which was overhauled with a lavish grant to the Music Magnet)—in fact, the source recalled students showing up to class on an assortment of drugs.  Faculty members were seen “celebrating” with students at cast parties after plays.

And I thought programs like these were meant to keep kids off drugs. (more…)

This past May, a group of sixth grade middle school students from the Wellesley, Massachusetts Public School District visited the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center as part of a school sponsored field trip. Our sister site Big Peace recently revealed the details of this visit, as well as the controversial ties that the center’s parent organization, the Muslim American Society, has to terrorism as what federal prosecutors have labeled as “the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.” Recently surfaced video footage from this trip as recorded by a parent chaperon depicts a series of activities that occurred as part of the Muslim mid-day prayer service at the center’s mosque.

Some of the activities observed in the video not only push the boundaries of the appropriate role of schools in facilitating religious understanding, but they introduce elements of blatant discrimination that could be especially challenging to the average ten or eleven year old. It’s an angle to this story that does not appear to have been discussed to date.

Before the prayers commenced, the field trip attendees were religiously segregated. As seen on the video, the parent describes that the women chaperons, female teachers and schoolgirls were asked to leave the prayer area, while the boys were invited to stay and participate in prayer with the men.

Such religious and gender discrimination arguably violates Title IX and Massachusetts state education codes, as reflected in the Wellesley Public School anti-discrimination policy: (more…)

Despite the fact that the United States spends more per student on education than any other nation in the world, students of the American educational system have scored well below average on worldwide rankings of mathematical and literacy proficiency.  Why is this?  The engaging and thought-provoking documentary, “The Cartel,” attempts to answer that very question.  Using New Jersey, the number one state in educational spending, as an example, the film investigates the various obstacles that stand between our country’s children and a first rate education.

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While the film delved into numerous issues, from bloated salaries to lack of oversight in spending, two of them were the most infuriating.  The first is the fact that the teachers’ union vehemently opposes any meaningful reform that it sees as a threat to its power.  While, as the film expresses, there are plenty of individual teachers who care about their students and put forth their best effort in the classroom, the NEA has become a bloated political organization that is interested only in protecting its power rather than in educating the students it pretends are its highest priority.  For instance, the NEA and its state chapters exert massive political influence over who is chosen to fill administrative posts that will negotiate contracts with them.  This enable them to keep policies in place such as the tenure system that manifests itself in a ridiculously unbelievable 99.97% teacher retention rate in New Jersey.  Watching Joyce Powell, head of the NJEA, try to spin her way around the facts presented to her is both laughable and maddening.  Until this mammoth self-serving organization can be dismantled, reforming public education will continue to be futile endeavor. (more…)

In May of 2004 the New York Times published an article entitled “Health Care Leads Other Issues in Canadian Vote.” The substance of the article was that in the elections that were upcoming, the future of the Canadian health care system was the predominate issue. On the one side were liberals seeking to reverse the trend of privatizing diagnostic services and increase federal aid to provincial governments. On the other conservatives were trying to increase private sector involvement as a way to lower costs and increase service. In spite of the Canadians patriotic zeal for their system, the article makes it clear that there was a growing recognition among citizens and politicians that the system was in the words of the Times, “ailing.” The waiting times for care were growing longer not shorter, the availability of doctors and nurses was becoming sparse especially in rural areas, opinion polls during the previous decade indicated a rising dissatisfaction with medical services and most significantly the cost of delivering medical care had grown so expensive that many provinces were being forced to “trim their budgets for education and other vital services.” Mind you this information came not from the Heritage Foundation but the New Liberal paper of record: The New York Times. (more…)