War on U.S. Homeschoolers Escalates

State can snatch kids thanks to Supreme Court

WND: Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, caught up in the high-profile Obamacare arguments that started today, have refused to intervene in a case where deputies threatened parents with the forced removal of their children unless they agreed to let social workers, who did not have a warrant or probable case, search their home.

The stunning conclusion came in a lawsuit brought on behalf of John and Tiffany Loudermilk, who sued officials after a confrontation at their Maricopa County, Ariz., home in 2005.

A district court judge ruled a reasonable person would believe the Loudermilks’ decision to allow social workers to search their home was coerced, in violation of the 4th Amendment, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the search was proper.

The case may not be finished yet, as the opinion from the 9th Circuit was unpublished, which means that it is not binding on future cases. Also, when the deputies appealed to the 9th Circuit for immunity, the social workers who also were sued did not, and that part of the case remains on hold at the district court level.

James Mason, chief counsel for the Home School Legal Defense Association, which brought the case on behalf of the family, told WND that the group will consult with the family and soon make a determination on the next step.

But he said the result is disappointing, because no matter the status of the appeal, the situation did develop, and the threats were made in order to give the social workers what they wanted.

The HSLDA described the situation: “For 40 terrifying minutes, this homeschooling couple had asserted their Fourth Amendment right to be free from an unreasonable search of their home. The two investigative social workers were eventually joined by six uniformed sheriff’s deputies who were called because the social workers considered the Loudermilks to be ‘uncooperative.’”

Then social workers played their “ace-in-the-hole” and threatened the parents that their five children would be placed in state custody immediately if they did not allow the search.

The case had developed after a still-anonymous tipster told authorities that there was a danger to the children in the new home. Two months later, social services arrived unannounced at the home and explained that it was an emergency because social workers decided it was an emergency at that point.

“In the two months between receiving the anonymous report and arriving unannounced on the Loudermilks’ front porch, social services clearly never believed that the situation needed emergency intervention,” HSLDA asserted. “No one ever asked a judge for a court order. But when it came time for the social workers to complete their investigation, the family’s Fourth Amendment rights just got in the way.”

It was social workers Rhonda Cash and Jenna Cramer who appeared at the home unannounced and threatened to take the family’s five children.

“She (Cash) appeared to believe that her simple inability to determine the children’s living conditions was sufficient grounds for her to remove the children from their parents,” the petition to the high court explained. That’s even though the social workers were allowed to talk to the children to see that they were fine.

The social workers called on the deputies to reinforce the threats with the force of law.

“Faced with unrelenting ultimatum that the officers would physically remove the children from the home unless they were admitted, together with a significant show of force, John felt that he had no option besides allowing the search of his home. He believed that he would be arrested and the children removed if he continued to refuse… Tiffany believed her children would be immediately removed from the home if she did not allow the social workers and officers to search her home,” the appeal stated.

The ultimate search took only minutes and uncovered no issues, showing that the “tip” was wrong.

“In this case, the lead law enforcement officer concluded that there was no basis for suggesting that exigent circumstances existed which would support a warrantless entry,” the brief explained.

Mason suggested that the outcome of the confrontation could provide a ripple effect for families confronted by authorities investigating anonymous tips in a variety of scenarios.

Find out how to keep the faith while in the world. Get “Fish Out of Water: Surviving and Thriving as a Christian on a Secular Campus”

The Education Trap and How to solve a major problem in one easy step

h/t to @michellemalkin for the photo: I wanted to share this REFRESHING sign. I love this hardworking kid, whoever he/she is!

When other major stories are not crowding it out, the media occasionally gets around to a story or two on student loan debt.  The college graduates of the last ten years or more are drowning in student loan debts.  There is a radical solution to this problem.

What is it?

Abolish the student loan program.

Liberals will immediately scream that I am anti-education.  I want to see the great masses of Americans stuck with 6^th grade educations, forced to work the fields and flip burgers or hit the highlight of their career by being able to say, “Welcome to Wal-Mart.”

Actually, nothing could be further from the truth.  I do object to state funded colleges and universities being used to indoctrinate students in liberalism and I do object to stupid programs like gay studies.  But I believe the state university and college secondary education system is one of the best things that state government does.   I believe the state college secondary education system should do what it was designed to do, namely provide a reasonably affordable college education to the tax paying residents of a state.

The unwashed liberals, in the case of Occupy Wall Street, that is literally true, just want student loans forgiven.  There is irony in Bill Clinton endorsing the Occupy Wall Street anarchy and their demands for complete forgiveness of student loans. He was the President who signed the law making student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.

In wanting student loans forgiven, the left is focusing on the symptoms and not the cause of the problem.  Student loans are the problem.  The easy access to student loans distorts and destroys the free market.   Students to not realize the cost of what they are getting.   They don’t write the check.  They just fill out the paperwork.  Sometimes instead of writing a check, they get a check back.   The money they receive back is then spent on, hopefully living expenses.  Back in the day when I was a college student, pizza and beer were considered living expenses.   Somehow I doubt that has changed.

For colleges, the student loans take the sting out of the market place.  Who cares if they have to raise tuition by twenty percent?  Instead of students talking about alternatives to State U., they just ask for more student loans.

The student loan program is probably one of the worst programs for encouraging bad behavior.  Since the federal government guarantees loans, it is a no lose proposition for banks.  They can make the loans and make a profit when people pay them back and if they fail to pay them back, the government covers the loss.

What if banks made those loans without the government guarantee?   For one thing, there would be many fewer loans.  That is not a bad thing, as the banks would be asking some important questions.

For example, if someone wanted to borrow $100,000 to get a nice Ivy League degree, the bank might ask, what are you going to major in and what are you going to do after college and how much will you make?  If the student said, well I am going to major in social work, become a social worker and probably make about $30,000 a year, the bank is going to turn that student down.  With guarantees, the bank doesn’t care whether the risk is good or not.  After all, the taxpayer will pay the bank back if the loan defaults.

The state college systems have a lot of affordable options.  Maybe a student wants to go to State U., but does not have the money.  Every state has affordable regional junior colleges where someone can start.  Students can work and help pay for their college.  There are many options if we abolish this really bad program.

One of the other benefits of abolishing Guaranteed Student loans is, it will deflate the education bubble and tuition will come down.  Market factors will start to play a role in the cost of education again.

The Guaranteed Student Loan program is the classic case of a well intentioned government program that has destroyed the market, cost the tax payers a lot of money and is now hurting the very people it was intended to help.

Ronald Reagan was right when he said the most feared words in the English language are, “I’m from the Government.  I’m here to help.”

Posted by Judson Phillips on TPN

The Education Trap

Oct 14th, 2011 | By Jeff Berwick

For decades, governments have been promoting school as being necessary. Celebrities, probably thinking they are doing the “right thing,” often promote the message “stay in school,” from people like Mr. T. and NBA players and rappers.

No one ever thinks to ask, “Hey, Mr. T., did you learn to be an actor and how to work out and grow a mohawk in school?” Nor do they ask the same questions of a bunch of multi-millionaire basketball players and rappers. Did Michael Jordan learn to play basketball “in school”? For the rappers, I don’t remember there being Hip Hop 101 in college.

All public schools in the U.S. today are prep camps for jail or for being a cubicle rat for the rest of your life.

THE SCHOOL “SYSTEM”

Jim Rohn said, “formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune.”

Today, however, formal education, often, does not even make you a living, as the cost of schooling has increased dramatically ever since the government subsidized it with grants, loans and tax benefits.

But education is not the real goal of the education system. As William Torrey Harris, U.S. commissioner of education in 1906, said, “Education… scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, head of philosophy and psychology at Prussian University in Berlin, said it even more clearly: “Education should aim at destroying free will, so that after pupils are thus schooled, they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished.”

THE 99% HAVE HAD THEIR FREE WILL DESTROYED

The saddest thing I have seen in a long time is the “We Are the 99%” page.

And it’s not necessarily sad because of the tough situation these thousands of people have found themselves in.

What is sad is that you can see how broken they are as individuals. How they bought into a system and have had all their free will drained from them. This is particularly shown by the fact that thousands of people would take the time to write out on a piece of paper all of their concerns and unhappiness with the expectation that this will CHANGE anything!

I estimate over 90% of the people on that site appear to be in rough shape due to student loans. But not one of them sees the truth. They’ve all been brainwashed to think a college education is not only a good thing, but is a guarantee of having a great life.

One starving artist had $175,000 in student loans. $175,000 in student loans? To become an “artist”? But he sounds as though it is the system that let him down. He takes no responsibility for his massive error in judgment.

Another 99 Percenter is 47, penniless and in debt after her “college education,” yet what does she want for her daughters? To put them through the same system! She has been brainwashed to believe that a “college education” is a necessary and good thing despite all the evidence in her own life that has provided that it was not.

Rather than realizing their errors, many of these people figure that writing their problems on a piece of paper on the Internet may help! Or by chasing down rich Wall St. bankers (a symptom of the problem) with pitchforks while admonishing the government (the real problem) to play a bigger role in the economy.

STUDENT LOANS ARE SLAVERY

Rather than hoping the government helps them, many of these people with student debts should be looking at ways to get out of the country.

Why? First of all, student debt is the only debt in the U.S. that is not able to be defaulted on in a bankruptcy. In other words, the starving artist above with $175,000 in debt will never be able to remove that chain from his neck as long as he lives in the country. If he were to expatriate, he could at least start fresh somewhere else.

And now the U.S. government has dropped many hints that in order to get a passport in the future, you will need to have your government debts (taxes, loans, etc.) up-to-date.

It is not much of a stretch of the imagination for the U.S. government to demand that all those behind on their student debt will be ordered to report to duty with the military. Any opposition will be met with unlimited prison sentences.

There are plenty of opportunities in the world. Look for employment in places like the Canadian oil sands, where they can’t even find enough employees. Or in booming places such as the Middle East (try Qatar) or in Asia (plenty of finance-related jobs in Hong Kong — and a 15% income tax rate).

But remember, in life, there are no “sure things” or guarantees. The government fooled you into thinking there are, but there aren’t. In real life, you just have to get out there and do it.

KEEP YOUR KIDS OUT OF SCHOOL

For those with children, keep them out of school. Any school.

Real education, today, is all free and can be done via the Internet from anywhere. All you have to do is ensure your child can read and from there they can self-educate.

MIT’s entire curriculum is available online for free via MIT’s OpenCourseWare. As well, University of the People is a tuition-free online university. Not to mention there is a YouTube video or a Wikipedia article on any subject matter you’d ever want to know.

BE A COLLEGE DROPOUT… OR DROP-IN

I am not a college dropout. I’m a college drop-in. I dropped in to college, at the behest of my mother, for a few days and quickly got out of there. Consider doing the same.

Don’t get caught in the education trap.

Regards,

Jeff Berwick

The Dollar Vigilante

JEFF BERWICK

Jeff Berwick, a self-described financial freedom fighter, is the founder of Canada’s largest financial website, Stockhouse.com.  He now writes the libertarian, Austrian-economics based newsletter, The Dollar Vigilante and is a regular speaker at many of the world’s most important investment, resource and freedom-focused conferences where he is known as the most dangerous man in finance.

View articles by Jeff Berwick

**Glenn Beck produced a personal preparedness and solution list and did a show based around it last week that he feels was given to him (divinely) as a warning.  One of the things on it was Apprenticeships.  We need to get back to having an apprenticeship system for the trades and stop pushing every child who really has no need, can’t afford it or isn’t college material to want, expect or feel they must attend college.  Most of us are for or letting our kids go into major debt for a college degree that will never compensate them in salary or job status for the debt or cost and have allowed our kids to become indoctrinated in anti-American if not down right Marxist doctrine. 

They have been dumbing us and our kids down for years in the public school system and then indoctrinating our kids in the college and universities.  The indoctrination process is now starting in Kindergarten!

Under the school/education section of Beck’s list was:

COLLEGE/SCHOOL

APPRENTICESHIPS ARE THE FUTURE.
DISCUSS THE VALUE OF SCHOOL FOR WHAT YOU CAN EARN.
DO NOT LOOK FOR LABELS THEY WILL BECOME MEANINGLESS (YALE, HARVARD, Stanford…)
FIND OTHER FORMS OF SCHOOL. ON LINE, JR COLLEGE, STATE SCHOOLS
TEACH YOUNG CHILDREN NOW THAT COLLEGE IS NOT A GIVEN
DEMAND MERIT FROM SCHOOL AND STUDENT OR PULL YOUR TIME AND $
EDUCATE YOURSELF AT ALL TIMES. ALWAYS READ.
HAVE A HARD COPY OF IMPORTANT BOOKS AND DOCUMENTS
LEARN OLD AND OR LOST PRACTICES.
MENDING/CANNING/FARMING/
LEARN TO FIX AN ENGINE
RE-LEARN READING A PRINTED MAP
KNOW WHATS IN THE NEWS (AND WHAT’S BEHIND IT). LIFE CAN CHANGE QUICKLY.
BE ABLE TO DEFEND YOUR POSITIONS BY KNOWING THE OTHER SIDE

Ask Marion~

Spend a Little Time with the Hope for America’s Future… and a Glimpse at What They Are Fighting

Excellent Show if you missed it! Audience members were college students who have had problems with their professors. This is also a story of indoctrination in our schools.

Video:  CLICK HERE -  College Students Under Fire and Standing Up Part 1

Video:  CLICK HERE   - College Students Under Fire and Standing Up  Part 2

Video:  CLICK HERE   - College Students Under Fire and Standing Up Part 3

Video:  CLICK HERE   -  College Students Under Fire and Standing Up Part 4

Video:  CLICK HERE   - College Students Under Fire and Standing Up Part 5

• Parents Outraged Over Schools 'Secret' Abortions  -  Where next?

  School Curriculum in Tucson — Treasonous

And then there is the up an coming Left…

College Students Sign Petition to ‘Ban’ Rush, Beck From Radio – But Love Free Speech

Oliver Darcy is doing his part to expose liberal ideas and hypocrisy on college campuses. Last month he produced two videos showing students willing to redistribute wealth but not grades and also refusing to pay their share of the national debt. Now he (along with his colleagues Michael Fincher and Maurice Lewis) is back, and this time he’s showing how college students who say they support free speech are willing to sign a petition to “ban” Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and other conservatives from the airwaves.

In the video, the students are not only willing to sign the petition, but some even offer their thoughts on Beck and those like him.

“That guy’s a douchebag,” one guy says of Beck. “He’s an a**.”

 

Video:  Students Who "Support" Free Speech Want to Ban Conservatives From Radio & TV

Video:  TSA Agent Worked Security At Santa Fe High School Prom  & Article

Related:

Education Indoctrination Special  -  A Must Watch for Parents, Grandparents, and Patriots Worried about America’s Youth

Indoctrination vs. Education of our Kids

Why the United States is Destroying Its Education System

Flunking the Citizenship Test

The Dumbing Down of America Series

Deliberate Dumbing Down of America - E Book download is NOW FREE TO ALL!!!
Right click and "Save Link As"
Click here to begin download
File is 6.75 MB

Michigan Teacher Threatens Tea Party's Children: Posted on CraigsList

Michigan Teacher Threatens Tea Party's Children

This is a message from a Teacher to all the Tea Bags here in Michigan. It was posted on Craigslist yesterday, during school hours.

Little tea bags (capitol)

Date: 2011-03-11, 10:46AM EST Reply to: comm-vzqqj-2259517268@craigslist.org

So you Tea Bags want to take away my hard earned blue ribbon bennies. Well guess what you scum sucking Tea Bags, I got your kids all day long in my classroom and with just a few slick questions I know who the little tea bags are! And you think you'll have the last laugh HA-Ha-Ha

Location: capitol it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

PostingID: 2259517268

Copyright © 2011 craigslist, inc.terms of useprivacy policyfeedback forum

This reminded me a bit of the Wisconsin Teacher’s Union consistently pushing the idea of their great concern for their students being the reason they weren’t in the classroom but rather out in the street protesting during school hours… and then we find out that 2/3 of 8th graders in Wisconsin could not pass their proficiency tests… and can’t sufficiently read.

Andrew Klavan: Behold! Your Public Sector Unions at Work

Video:  Andrew Klavan: Behold! Your Public Sector Unions at Work

h/t to Rose and Hello Michigan Blog

Education: Too Important for a Government Monopoly

The government-school establishment has said the same thing for decades: Education is too important to leave to the competitive market. If we really want to help our kids, we must focus more resources on the government schools.

But despite this mantra, the focus is on something other than the kids. When The Washington Post asked George Parker, head of the Washington, D.C., teachers union, about the voucher program there, he said: "Parents are voting with their feet. ... As kids continue leaving the system, we will lose teachers. Our very survival depends on having kids in D.C. schools so we'll have teachers to represent."
How revealing is that?

Since 1980, government spending on education, adjusted for inflation, has nearly doubled. But test scores have been flat for decades.

Today we spend a stunning $11,000 a year per student -- more than $200,000 per classroom. It's not working. So when will we permit competition and choice, which works great with everything else? I'll explore those questions on my Fox Business program tomorrow night at 8 and 11 p.m. Eastern time (and again Friday at 10 p.m.).

The people who test students internationally told us that two factors predict a country's educational success: Do the schools have the autonomy to experiment, and do parents have a choice?

Parents care about their kids and want them to learn and succeed -- even poor parents. Thousands line up hoping to get their kids into one of the few hundred lottery-assigned slots at Harlem Success Academy, a highly ranked charter school in New York City. Kids and parents cry when they lose.
Yet the establishment is against choice. The union demonstrated outside Harlem Success the first day of school. And President Obama killed Washington, D.C.'s voucher program.

This is typical of elitists, who believe that parents, especially poor ones, can't make good choices about their kids' education.

Is that so? Ask James Tooley about that. Tooley is a professor of education policy who spends most of every year in some of the poorest parts of Africa, India and China. For 10 years, he's studied how poor kids do in "free" government schools and -- hold on -- private schools. That's right. In the worst slums, private for-profit schools educate kids better than the government's schools do.

Tooley finds as many as six private schools in small villages. "The majority of (poor) schoolchildren are in private school, and these schools outperform government schools at a fraction of the teacher cost," he says.
Why do parents with meager resources pass up "free" government schools and sacrifice to send their children to private schools? Because, as one parent told the BBC, the private owner will do something that's virtually impossible in America's government schools: replace teachers who do not teach.

As in America, the elitist establishment in those countries scoffs at the private schools and the parents who choose them. A woman who runs government schools in Nigeria calls such parents "ignoramuses."
But that can't be true. Tooley tested kids in both kinds of schools, and the private-school students score better.

To give the establishment its best shot, consider Head Start, which politicians view as sacred. The $166 billion program is 45 years old, so it's had time to prove itself. But guess what: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently found no difference in first-grade test results between kids who went through Head Start and similar kids who didn't. President Obama has repeatedly promised to "eliminate programs that don't work," but he wants to give Head Start a billion more dollars. The White House wouldn't explain this contradiction to me.

Andrew Coulson, head of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Reform, said, "If Head Start (worked), we would expect now, after 45 years of this program, for graduation rates to have gone up; we would expect the gap between the kids of high school dropouts and the kids of college graduates to have shrunk; we would expect students to be learning more. None of that is true."

Choice works, and government monopolies don't. How much more evidence do we need?

• Indoctrination of Our Children
• For Anyone Who Missed the Special That Fox Ran Over the Weekend on Textbooks… 
• 'The Cartel': The True Nature of Teacher Unions
• The Dumbing Down of American Series
• Breaking News: Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar” Is Promoting Child Porn in the Classroom – Kevin Jennings and the GLSEN Reading List – ~~ Warning on Content ~~