Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

As Obama prepared to deliver his address to Congress on Tuesday, the Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner, Fox News' Bret Baier and Charles Krauthammer all gushed that history was being made as the first African-American president appeared before Congress.

Even Gov. Bobby Jindal, whom I suppose I should note was the first Indian-American to give the Republican response to a president's speech, began with an encomium to the first black president. (Wasn't Bobby great in "Slumdog Millionaire"?)

Are we going to have to hear about this for the next four years? Obama is becoming the Cal Ripken Jr. of presidents, making history every time he suits up for a game. Recently, Obama also became the first African-American president to order a ham sandwich late at night from the White House kitchen! That's going to get old pretty quick.

But as long as the nation is obsessed with historic milestones, is no one going to remark on what a great country it is where a mentally retarded woman can become speaker of the house?

Obama spent more than twice as much time in his historic speech genuflecting to the teachers' unions than talking about terrorism, Iraq or Afghanistan. So it was historic only in the sense that Obama is the first African-American president, but was the same old Democratic claptrap in every other respect.

After claiming that the disastrous stimulus bill would create or save 3.5 million jobs -- "more than 90 percent" in the private sector -- Obama then enumerated a long list of exclusively government jobs that would be "saved."

He was suspiciously verbose about saving the jobs of public schoolteachers. Because nothing says "economic stimulus" better than saving the jobs of lethargic incompetents who kick off at 2 p.m. every day and get summers off. Actually, that's not fair: Some teachers spend long hours after school having sex with their students.

As with the Clintons, Obama so earnestly believes in public school education that he sends his girls to ... an expensive private school. He demands that taxpayers support the very public schoolteachers he won't trust with his own children.

It is one thing to tell voters that school choice is wrong, because, you know, the public schools won't get better unless Americans sacrifice their children to the teachers' union's maw. But it is quite another for Democrats to feed their own kids to the union incinerator.

Consequently, no Democrat since Jimmy Carter has been stupid enough to send his own children to a public school.

And yet the stimulus bill expressly prohibits money earmarked for "education" to be spent on financial aid at private or parochial schools. Private schools might use it for some nefarious purpose like actually teaching their students, rather than indoctrinating them in anti-American propaganda.

The stimulus bill includes about $100 billion to education. By "education," Democrats don't mean anything a normal person would think of as education, such as learning how to talk good. "Education" means creating lots of useless bureaucratic jobs, mostly in Washington, having nothing to do with teaching.

Apparently, nothing irritates public schoolteachers more than being asked to teach. While 80 percent of the employees of private schools are teachers, only half the employees of public schools are. The rest are "coordinating," "facilitating" or "empowering" something or other.

The Department of Education alone provides more than 4,000 jobs that haven't the faintest connection with teaching. And now the stimulus bill will double the Education Department's funding. (For those of you who went to a public school, that means it will become twice as big.)

We've come a long way from Ronald Reagan promising to eliminate the Education Department, which itself was a Jimmy Carter sop to the teachers' unions.

Federal meddling in education has been an abject failure, so the Democrats' plan is to keep doing more of the same. If only there were some aphorism about people who fail to learn from history -- oh, well!

It can't be easy to reduce the educational achievement in America year after year, but the education establishment has done it! Yes they can!

Thanks to the hard work of thousands of government workers at the Department of Education and well-paid teachers' union employees, American schoolchildren perform worse on education tests for every year they spend in a public school.

It turns out that being in U.S. public schools has the same effect on people as hanging around Paris Hilton does.

In fourth grade, the earliest grade for which international comparisons are available, American students outperform most other countries in reading, math and science. Fourth-graders score in the 92nd percentile in science, the 58th percentile in math and the 70th percentile in reading, where they beat 26 of 35 countries, including Germany, France and Italy.

But by the eighth grade, American students are only midrange in international comparisons. (On the plus side, by the eighth grade they're noticeably fatter.)

By the 12th grade -- after receiving the full benefits of an American education -- Americans are near the bottom. Let X represent the number of years spent in U.S. public schools, and Y represent average test scores in math and reading -- oh, never mind.

With an additional eight years of a public school education under their belts, Americans fall from the 92nd percentile in science to the 29th percentile. While American fourth-graders are bested only by South Korea and Japan in science, by 12th grade, the only countries the American students can beat are Lithuania, Cyprus and South Africa.

Which suggests that if public education were extended all the way through college, by the time a student gets to graduate school he might very well be qualified to be ... speaker of the house!

Way to go Miss Ann!

What the Blonde One has to say about the NEA and public education in the US is absolutely true. The greatest enemy our children have is not NAMBLA it is the teacher's union.

Note the way she points out the hypocrisy of Obama and other Democrat presidents who do the bidding of the teacher's union but send their own children to private schools.

Thought crime in the new era of Obama

From The Dayton Daily News:

Mason school officials said they are taking a proactive educational approach in advance of next week's planned Inauguration Day activities.

"Inappropriate comments that may make other students, staff or families feel unwelcome or uncomfortable in school or on the bus will not be tolerated," Superintendent Kevin Bright said in an e-mail sent to parents Monday, Jan. 12.

The district, he said, expects students and staff to show respect for President-elect Obama and the incoming administration, as well as President Bush and the outgoing administration, and recognize that "while the election is a competitive process, our nation's greatness is displayed when all sides come together for a united country."

Jeff Schlaeger, Mason High School's psychologist, said "inappropriate comments" occurred around election week when doctored pictures of Obama appeared at the school, including "derogatory caricatures" of him dressed like a terrorist and signs that read "Obama '08/Biden '09."

"There were groups of students that were worked up over the results of the election," said Schlaeger, who is a member of the district's racial equity committee and curriculum organizer for MHS Freshman Diversity Week.

The school is offering a variety of events for students at every grade level, ranging from letter-writing and books, to videos, reflection and watching the inauguration itself, Bright said in the e-mail.

"We're attempting to take a more proactive approach now and, first of all, celebrate the passing of power in our country and at the same time also celebrate this historic inauguration and the election of our first African-American president," Bright said during an interview Tuesday.

Where to start. . .

First it is legal for the school to do this. Students in high school are not adults and while during school hours and on school property the school may order their behavior. However it seems a very poor lesson for the children to learn that criticism of elected leaders is out of bounds in a free society.

Second it seems that the school is looking at Obama purely through a racial lens. The idea that someone could legitimately disagree with Mr. Obama's stated policies and plans for the nation seems never to have occurred to them. It just seems to this school's administration that the only possible problem that anyone could have with the little messiah is the color of his skin.

In this I think we see a preview of how all criticism of Obama will be treated over the next four years.

I wish them luck

From The Washington Post:

Proponents of sex education programs that focus on encouraging abstinence are launching a nationwide campaign aimed at enlisting 1 million parents to support the controversial approach.

The National Abstinence Education Association, a Washington-based advocacy group, said that it sent e-mails last week to about 30,000 supporters, practitioners and parents to try to recruit participants and plans to e-mail 100,000 this week as part of the first phase of the $1 million campaign.

The e-mail is promoting the Parents for Truth campaign, which the group hopes will eventually involve 1 million parents nationwide to lobby local schools to adopt sex education programs focusing on abstinence and to work to elect local, state and national officials who support the approach.

"There are powerful special interest groups who can far outspend what parents can in terms of promoting their agenda. But we recognize that parents more than make up for that by their determination and motivation to protect their own children," said Valerie Huber, the group's executive director.

People who promote abstinence education are not foolish enough to believe that it will work in every case. They know that about 20% of teens are going to have sex no matter what you tell them and around 20% are not going to have sex no matter what kind of peer pressure they are subjected to. The goal of abstinence education is influence the 60% in between who are open to being led.



Here is the NAEA video mentioned in the Post article.

I have friends who are public school teachers who tell me that this kind of thing is not uncommon in modern public schools.

Our public education tax dollars at work

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. -- Orange County Public Schools is investigating claims that a student was forced to use a lunchbox as a toilet in front of his class at Meadowbrook Middle School.

The teacher will not be coming to school. She will be relieved of her duty with pay as the school district investigates, officials said.

"If you gotta go, you gotta go," student Quonterious Thomas told Eyewitness News in an interview Monday.

Thomas, 13, says his language arts teacher, Jameeka Chambers, gave him two options when he had to go to the bathroom at Meadowbrook Middle School in Orange County. She said he could wait until the end of class or use her lunchbox in the back of the classroom.

The sixth grader said he used her lunchbox.

"If I had waited any longer, I would have peed on myself and that would have been even more embarrassing," Thomas said, adding that his entire class of 19 students and his teacher watched.

When Thomas told his mom, she said she didn't believe it at first and later realized how traumatized he was.

"I have never, in all the days been living, ever heard about anything happening in all my life. This is a really big shocker for me," said Shameka Bryant, Thomas' mom.

Orange County Public Schools told Eyewitness News the claims are under investigation. The district has taken statements from students in the class, but has not spoken to the teacher.

Chambers has been out of town at an education conference in New Orleans. This is her first year on the job and her record is clean.

"I'm seeking counseling for him, asking questions. What was the purpose? I want to know," Bryant said.

Orange County Public Schools wouldn't specifically comment about what happened. The district says teachers have to allow students to use the restroom.

Three questions come to mind. One, was the lunchbox waterproof? Two, who emptied the lunchbox? Three, what kind of cretins are they hiring to teach school down in Florida and do you suppose that had anything to do with their population's apparent inability to figure out a simple paper ballot in the 2000 election?

Oh, and here's another question. Did the teacher, Jameeka Chambers, intend to keep on using the lunchbox to carry her lunch?

Finding some meaning in tragedy

AUGUSTA, Ark. (AP) - Rumors spread by cell phone text-messaging flew through a school after a student's suicide, rumors that other kids planned to kill themselves, that students planned to bring weapons to school, that there was going to be "a shoot 'em up." Panicked parents rushed to take their children home.

But police and officials at Augusta High School say the panic turned out to be only a way for students to avoid taking semester-ending exams.

"Somebody took advantage of a tragedy that happened in Augusta, a tragedy of a young man taking his life," Superintendent Richard Blevins said. "Somebody exploited that and I guess that made me madder than anything else. Somebody was so insensitive to use that for their own gain."

An existing ban on cell phones at the school will be enforced when the winter break is over.

If you want to know what children are like at their most basic level read Lord of the Flies and Superintendent Blevins should know that. Or perhaps not. After all as an educational bureaucrat Blevins probably hasn't had much contact with kids since his semester as a student teacher going through education school.

Fact is that someone you don't know kills himself. Nothing you do or refrain from doing can either bring him back or make him "more dead" so why not try to give his death some meaning and purpose by using it to get one over on the system?

Off to a good start

From The Washington Times:

About 20 percent of students enrolled in D.C. public schools were absent on the second day of class this week, according to attendance records provided by school system officials.

Many students who had enrolled were not present because they had not registered for classes, Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said last night. It was not clear yesterday how much of the attendance problem was due to students who had not registered on time and how much was due to students who didn't show up for other reasons.

"I think we can improve attendance overall," Mrs. Rhee said. "Attendance is something we can definitely work on."

Ya think?


Seriously who wouldn't want to go to a:

Government run institution where you are required to go whether you want to or not.

A place which you are being sent to for your own good and the good of society.

A place which you are told has the potential to make you a better person.

Where you arrive on a bus with a bunch of others who also don't want to be there.

Where the food is bad.

Where your time is scheduled for you by people who don't care what you would rather be doing.

Where your behavior is is watched by government functionaries who can punish you if you break rules that you had no part in drafting and did not consent to.

Where you are required to labor at tasks which are assigned to you and whose relevance you may or may not understand and respect.

A place with a rigid social pecking order where the strong dominate the weak, often making their lives a living hell.

I've forgotten, what am I talking about? This:

Or this:

It can be hard to tell the difference.

Some of us get brains and some of us get beauty

This is painful to watch. The poor kid is asked why she thinks that one-fifth of Americans can't locate the U.S. on a map. Her answer rambles on and she manages to mention that she thinks the US should help South Africa and something about "the Iraq".

Miss Ann takes on the YouTube Debate

CNN commentators keep telling us how young and hip the audience was for last week's YouTube Democratic debate, apparently unaware that the camera occasionally panned across the audience, which was the same oddball collection of teachers' union shills and welfare recipients you see at all Democratic gatherings.

Noticeably, Gov. Bill Richardson got the first "woo" of the debate – the mating call of rotund liberal women – for demanding a federal mandate that would guarantee public schoolteachers a minimum salary of $40,000.

So much for the "younger, hipper" audience. Maybe CNN meant "hippier," as in, "My, she's looking a bit hippy these days."

Not counting talking snowmen, the main difference in the YouTube debate audience and the audience for the earlier CNN Democratic debate is that the YouTube debate had 173,000 fewer viewers in the 18-49 demographic. So it was provably not young and, on the basis of casual observation, definitely not hip.

As usual, the audience consisted mostly of public schoolteachers. According to CNN, the highest reading achieved on the CNN feelings-knob was for Richardson talking about public schoolteachers. (Some in the audience said they hadn't been that excited since the last time they had sex with an underage student.)

B. Hussein Obama said he was for slavery reparations in many forms, but the only one that got applause was for more "investment" in schools. In Obama's defense, the precise question was: "But is African-Americans ever going to get reparations for slavery?" So a switch to the subject of education was only natural.

Moreover, a question on reparations has got to be confusing when you're half white and half black. What do you do? Demand an apology for slavery and money from yourself? I guess biracial reparations would involve sending yourself money, then sending back a portion of that money to yourself, minus 50 percent in processing fees – which is the same way federal aid works.

It was fun to hear the Democratic candidates give heart-rending reasons for not sending their own kids to public schools. Except John Edwards. He got a "woo" for sending his kids to public schools from all those "young, hip" Democrats whose greatest concern is how to transfer more money to public schoolteachers while reducing their workload.

The candidates all managed to come up with good reasons for sending their kids to private schools – with extra points for reasons that involved a family tragedy or emergency – but it didn't seem to occur to any of them that ordinary families might have good reasons, too.

In her first risible lie of the debate, Hillary said Chelsea went to public schools in Arkansas. But when they moved to Washington, they were advised that "if she were to go to a public school, the press would never leave her alone, because it's a public school. So I had to make a very difficult decision."

"Unfortunately," she said, it was "good advice."

Was it really that difficult a decision not to send Chelsea to public schools in Washington, D.C.?

This is how the New York Times recently described the schools in Washington, which it called "arguably the nation's most dysfunctional school system."

"Though it is one of the country's highest-spending districts, most of the money goes to central administration, not to classrooms, according to a recent series of articles in the Washington Post. Its 55,000 mostly poor students score far worse than comparable children anywhere else in reading and math, with nearly 74 percent of the district's low-income eighth-graders lacking basic math skills, compared with the national average of 49 percent."

So Hillary was dying to send Chelsea to the D.C. public schools, but "unfortunately" did not do so only because of the press? Did she also agonize over whether to allow Chelsea to play in traffic?

She was not dying to send Chelsea to D.C. public schools. And no Democrat cares about "education" or "the poor."

Democrats care about social service bureaucrats who make their living allegedly working on behalf of the poor – the famed "public service" the Democrats always drone on about – jobs that would disappear if we ever eliminated poverty. That's why Democrats keep coming up with policies designed to create millions and millions more poor people.

Democrats fight tooth and nail against any measures that would actually help the poor, such as allowing schools to fire bad teachers. They refuse to allow parents with children in the rotten D.C. public schools to take money out of the public school system so their kids could go to Sidwell Friends like Chelsea.

Most important, Democrats resolutely refuse to tell the poor the secret to not being poor: Keep your knees together until marriage.

That's it. Not class size, not preschool, not even vouchers, though vouchers would obviously improve the education of all students. You could have lunatics running the schools – and often do – and if the kids live with married parents, they will end up at good colleges and will lead happy, productive lives 99 percent of the time.

But Democrats don't care about the poor. They don't care about the children. They care about government teachers and other government bureaucrats – grimy, dowdy women who "woo" at political debates. Or as CNN calls them, the "young," "hip" crowd.

Ann Coulter uses sarcastic humor to combat the Left. This is particularly effective since they are such a humorless crowd. They take themselves so seriously and are, as P. J. O'Rourke famously observed, filled up to the nose holes with esteem for themselves. So when Miss Ann comes along with her needle and punctures their massively inflated ego with her humor they fall to the ground in paroxysms of foaming madness and start accusing her of every mortal sin in the multiculti bible (racism, sexism, homophobia and not "caring about the children").

However there are times when the Left manages to combine ridiculous buffoonery with pure Satanic evil to the degree that sarcasm cannot be used to effectively parody them because they have gone so far over the top that hyperbole can't catch up with them.

The public schools and the teacher's unions which feed off of them like maggots on a rotting corpse are such a case.

I know that there are still many teachers who love children and who have a genuine passion for teaching. And I know that there are still some good public schools out there. My cousin's daughter goes to one. It is near Oak Ridge, TN and many of the people who live in the district are scientists and engineers who work at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Many of them are foreign born (particularly Asian) and they were educated to very high standards and they demand the same from and for their own children. They use their power to elect the school board to force the education bureaucracy, kicking and screaming sometimes, to deliver a quality education.

That kind of school district is vanishing. It isn't so much that they are being replaced by schools where the 8th grade children are made to write an essay entitled "Why I hate America and think George W Bush should be murdered" before practicing putting condoms on dildos and doing a community service project involving handing out clean needles down at the bus stop - although all of that happens. What is happening is just a tragic and pathetic dumbing down.

Good public schools are not the only thing needed to preserve a free and prosporous society. In fact they are not even the most important thing. The public school education in nearly every nation in Europe is superior to that available in the US and Europe is still casting itself into the black hole of socialism while allowing an ascendant Islam to take over. However the fact that the Oak Ridge National Laboratory needs to staff itself with so many immigrants (who will do the jobs that too many Americans lack the education to do) is troubling and does not bode well for America's future.

Insert "Sex Ed" joke here

EAST GREENBUSH -- A social studies teacher at Columbia High School was charged Monday with repeatedly having oral sex in his classroom with a 16-year-old male student during the school day.

Late last week a rumor circulated at Columbia High School that social studies teacher Kirk James Hellwig, 37, of Patricia Lane, Saratoga Springs, was allegedly carrying on a sexual relationship during school time with one of his students.

"One of our officers who is stationed at the school was approached by two principals about the rumor," said town Police Chief Christopher Lavin. "We then searched some premises, collected evidence, interviewed numerous individuals and reviewed computer activity."

Hellwig, who is single and has taught social studies at the school since 1999, was arrested Monday morning on three counts each of felony third-degree criminal sex act and misdemeanor endangering the welfare of a child.

He was arraigned in town court Monday and released on $25,000 bail. He is set to reappear in court at 6 p.m. Thursday, unless the case is presented to a grand jury.

Lavin said the alleged victim, who told police the relationship was consensual, cooperated in the investigation and is now getting therapy. Hellwig was charged because a 16-year-old is not old enough to consent.

Hellwig and the teen allegedly had sexual contact while in the classroom alone. Officials said the relationship may have been going on since January.

"It allegedly happened at three times and at three different times of the day," Lavin said.

The brazenness of the alleged sexual tryst has shocked and dismayed district officials.


Usually it is female teachers doing this with young male students. Remember a year of so ago the story about the woman teacher who was spicing up her classes by playing "peek-a-boob" letting students look down her blouse. She was then said to have performed oral sex upon a boy, again in front of the class.