Two British children were punished for not kneeling down and praying to Allah:

Irate parents said a religious education teacher at the Alsager High School in England told students to wear Muslim headgear during a lesson on Tuesday. “But if Muslims were asked to go to church on Sunday and take Holy Communion, there would be war,” the grandfather of one of the students said.

The two boys belong to a class that includes 11- to 12-year-olds, and after their refusal to participate they were given detention, the story says.

Another parent, Karen Williams, told the Mail: “Not only was it forced upon them, my daughter was told off for not doing it right. They’d never done it before and they were supposed to do it in another language.”

Deputy Headmaster Keith Plant said the teacher has given her version of the incident but he declined to elaborate.

According to a statement from the Cheshire County Council on behalf of the school: “Educating children in the beliefs of different faith is part of the diversity curriculum on the basis that knowledge is essential to understanding.

Still looking for the story where Islamic students were punished for not lighting the Menorah or doing the Sign of the Cross.

Hat Tip: Kai

What would Sir William Wallace do?

Thousands of primary pupils were prevented from making Father’s Day cards at school for fear of embarrassing classmates who live with single mothers and lesbians.

The politically correct policy was quietly adopted at schools “in the interests of sensitivity” over the growing number of lone-parent and same-sex households.

It only emerged after a large number of fathers failed to receive their traditional cards and handmade gifts.

Family rights campaigners last night condemned the policy as “absurd” and argued that it is marginalising fathers, but local authorities said teachers need to react to “the changing pattern of family life”.

There are alternatives to banning Father’s Day. Perhaps the teachers could have reached out to fathers and asked them to be male mentors to those children without fathers. They could have had them make father’s day cards to their fathers anyway, regardless of if they were dead or absent. They could have had them write another card for their mother to show they appreciate them more than once a year.

There are alternatives to this, they just weren’t explored.

A spokesman for East Renfrewshire Council said: “Increasingly, it is the case that there are children who haven’t got fathers or haven’t got fathers living with them and teachers are having to be sensitive about this.

“Teachers have always had to deal with some pupils not having fathers or mothers, but with marital breakdown it is accelerating.”

Ok, so the last thing you want to do is to have the boys with fathers show them how important they are to the family. The last thing you want to do is tell fathers who are there that their children love them. Let’s not reinforce the idea of family and fathers being important. That would be insensitive.

Sir William Wallace wouldn’t stand for this. Imagine that Parent-Teacher conference for a second.

A government school principal has banned the Pledge of Allegiance in his school. Not because he objected to the term “Under God,” but he was afraid the Pledge would offend Muslims. Because, apparently, there is no God in Islam:

At least one Muslim community leader says he feels the same way. Muhammad Najieb says that ‘God’ is central to the Muslim faith, and there are several references to him in every prayer.

Islam is a monotheistic religion, just like Christianity. This multi-culti nit wit has not only offended Muslims with his ignorance, but has actually “caused hurt feelings, and may foster bitterness and division within the community.”

Which goes back to Jim Quinn’s First Law: Liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent.

Each morning, my kids start their schoolday with the Pledge. There is no government knucklehead there to tell me they can’t say it because it might offend some protected class or group. Yet another benefit of homeschooling.

Hat Tip: Islam in Action

So, your kid is finally graduating. You see them climbing the stairs to the stage to get the diploma, hear their name called, and almost cheer. Almost, because had you cheered, you would have been arrested.

Yeah, arrested. I just don’t understand why this would even be considered:

Authorities say seven people attending high school graduations in Rock Hill, South Carolina, are facing charges after police say they cheered while students’ names were being called.

Authorities say six people at Fort Mill High School’s graduation were charged Saturday and a seventh at the graduation for York Comprehensive High School was charged Friday with disorderly conduct.

You can’t applaud the graduation of your child from high school now? Does this make sense to anyone? Same story, different source:

More than 500 Fort Mill High School Students graduated Saturday at Winthrop Coliseum. The audience and the graduates were told in advance that cheering during the ceremony was forbidden. They were even warned that if they did make noise, they’d be removed from the coliseum by the Rock Hill Police.

But one family says they had no idea just how far the police would go. “I think this was one time for my son to go out of his box. And it was the wrong time to do it,” said the father who asked not to be identified.

Two of his children were arrested and handcuffed by police for cheering when their sibling’s name was called.

“There was no profanity,” said the dad. “And they were both put in handcuffs,” he said.

The siblings were also slapped with a criminal charge. Four other people at the Fort Mill High Graduation were also arrested. Another man was arrested at the York Comprehensive High School commencement for cheering as well.

Conform. Do not stand out. Become part of the collective. Resistance is futile. Welcome to the Educational Industrial Complex.

This girl was told by officials in the school system that finishing high school a year early would not affect her “valedictorian status because she earned her four years of high school credit in the district’s schools.”

They were wrong:

Grapevine High School senior Anjali Datta holds the highest grade-point average of the 471 students graduating from Grapevine High School this year.

In fact, Grapevine-Colleyville ISD officials believe her GPA of 5.898 may be the highest in the high school’s history.

It’s still not enough to make her the valedictorian, which brings a one-year college scholarship from the state.
Her closest competitor’s GPA is 5.64. No one disputes that she’s the top student in her class numerically. The problem rests with another number entirely.

Anjali rocketed through high school in only three years.

But a school district policy states: “The valedictorian shall be the eligible student with the highest weighted grade-point average for four years of high school.”

She’s possibly the best student this school has ever seen, and the mind-numbed bureaucrats who run things there are ruining her graduation, and her chance at a scholarship, because she did in three years what it took the rest to do in four. They are punishing excellence!

Anjali says she and her parents are baffled.

“I have not heard of any educational institution penalizing a student for excellence – for completing a demanding set of classes ‘too quickly,’ ” said her father, Deepak Datta. “Anjali’s experience will surely send a strong negative signal to other talented students trying to excel.

“They will most certainly be discouraged from trying to do their best – instead will be more focused on gaming the system.”

Meanwhile, you have other government schools handing out valedictorian status to TWENTY-THREE STUDENTS!

EDMOND — Students chosen as valedictorians and salutatorians in high schools all across the nation have historically been the ones with the highest grade point averages.

In the Edmond school district, valedictorians and salutatorians are students having the highest grade point average through the fall semester prior to graduation.

“The valedictorians will be the students having all A’s; the salutatorians will include the students with all A’s except for one B,” said Edmond North counselor Allison Schneider.

“Designation of the valedictorian/salutatorian honors will be based upon a four point grading scale. All grades are averaged including all repeated courses.”

To qualify as a valedictorian or salutatorian, the student must be enrolled in the Edmond School District at the beginning of the fall semester of his/her senior year.

Edmond’s three high schools including Memorial, North and Santa Fe boast a total of 57 valedictorians and 19 salutatorians representing their 2007 graduating classes.

There can be no weighting of grades. No one can be made to be inferior or superior. We are all part of the collective now.

We are the educational industrial complex. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

This story popped up on our Google reader, mistakenly identified as a homeschooling story. This is not homeschooling, this is not about homeschooling. This is stupidity, on the part of a parent and a government school.

Rebecca works on an abstract picture. I’ll bet the school paid for the paper and the colored pencils…and that sofa. (photo by Kevin Mingora/The Morning Call)

Rebecca Maykish skipped school. Not for one day, or one week, or even one month. She quit going to school in fourth grade. She is now 17. Rebecca and her mother never claimed that she was being homeschooled. That would require that they put their own money and effort into her education. They did not notify the school that she would no longer be enrolled. No, she simply stayed home. She was, and is a public school student who does not attend class. In fact, the mother ruled out the possibility of teaching Rebecca at home.

Rebecca says she reads for pleasure, enjoying parodies such as ”Zen of the Zombie,” a mock self-improvement book. But her writing skills are weak and she can only do basic multiplication and division on downloaded worksheets. She estimates she spends three hours a day learning. Barbara Maykish has opted not to homeschool her, saying she worried that she would not be able to help Rebecca with her math and writing problems.(emphasis mine)

Because Rebecca is enrolled as a government school student, the government must provide an adequate education. Since she refuses to go sit in the classroom, the local school board decided to pay for school to come to her. Unfortunately, she just didn’t like her tutor. Or boarding school. Or any other type of actual studying. Now, teen magazines, she enjoys. Modeling classes are fun. And field trips to New York and Toronto are the coolest.

All of these things were paid for by the Palmerton Area school district, to the tune of $46,361. A brief run-down of some of the approved expenses:

• $3,892 on at-home instruction, and hundreds more on educational software
• $2,100 for Rebecca to take classes at the Barbizon modeling academy
• Nearly $6,000 to attend summer camp in Ferndale, N.Y., and go on field trips to Toronto and New York.
• $54 for subscriptions to Seventeen, Teen Vogue and Teen People magazines
• $222 to board the mother’s dogs while visiting Rebecca at a California boarding school
• $2,329 for mother and Rebecca to fly to boarding school
• $500 for tuition and spending from March-May.

So what are Rebecca and her mother planning to do now?

Now that she is 17, Rebecca could legally drop out, but she says she wants to earn a diploma. She can attend Palmerton Area High School until she is 21, but she thinks a cyberschool or another boarding school would be better options.

Another boarding school? According to Rebecca, she was having a great time and making new friends at her previous boarding school, but then the. . .well, the SCHOOL part just scared her away. How would a second SCHOOL be different? Now, if she’s truly scared of sitting in a classroom, cyberschool might be an option. Cyberclasses have been around for several years now though. Why wasn’t it considered with the first $46,000 handout?

Because her daughter has gone the past year without any formal education, Barbara Maykish said she thinks she might need another compensatory education fund.

Ridiculous.

When Rebecca came home, she and her mother had no plan for her education. Palmerton school officials tried to work out a new individualized education plan for her, but Barbara Maykish and school officials could not reach an agreement.

The government has already wasted too much of our money dealing with these fools. Let them wallow in their own stupidity.

And please, let’s stop giving homeschooling a bad name with these clowns.

A lock-down was caused by a brawl involving more than 600 prisoners- er, students. Although from the pictures, it looks like a prison, it is actually Locke High School in South Los Angeles. Now, I’m not familiar with schools in large cities; the largest school I ever worked in was in Iowa City. However, I just don’t see how a love for learning can be fostered inside this type of environment.

“Some of my kids were crying because they were walking to class with friends and they got jumped.”

If you are moving through the day in a state of fear, you certainly can’t be expected to do well in your studies. Who can concentrate on science or history while wondering when or where the next fight will break out? It seems that, while this was the biggest fight in some time, it certainly wasn’t isolated.

This school year has been particularly difficult, with near-daily fights — albeit on a much smaller scale — during much of the fall and winter.

“There are just fights upon fights upon fights now.”

The school has been especially plagued by tagging crews — the school employs two full-time workers just to paint over graffiti, said Green Dot’s Kelly Hurley.

The school had cut the funding for non-police security aides in half. There were two police officers assigned to Locke High School. It wasn’t nearly enough for this brawl.

the school police force brought in about 60 officers after receiving word of the brawl. The Los Angeles Police Department also dispatched more than a dozen patrol cars and about 50 officers.

Eventually, police began to swarm onto the campus, and White said the students began fighting the officers, who responded with their batons.

You can’t blame the school alone for this one though. Some blame must be placed on the parents who raise their children to think that this type of activity is acceptable, or who abandon their children to be raised by a system that teaches moral equivalence, in which any decision you make is acceptable, as long as you believe in what you are doing. I applaud the parents of those students who were tempted to join in, but stood strong and said no.

“They asked for my help, but I’m graduating,” he said. “I’m done with all that.”

Articles like this illustrate why there has recently been an increased interest in homeschooling among minorities. DREAH at Notes From A Homeschooling Mom has an interesting point of view on why the black community has been slow to start homeschooling, and encouragement for families who would consider keeping their kids at home.

I can only hope that more families follow DREAH’s example, and give their children the education they deserve. We certainly can’t, and shouldn’t, depend on the government to do it.

One of the great advantages of homeschooling versus attending a government school is the flexibility in scheduling and the ability to tailor a program of study to an individual student. Mattias Gassman is a great example of this. This over-achiever will graduate from college one week after graduating high school. And we’re not talking about a degree in liberal arts.

Mattias Gassman, 18, will graduate summa cum laude with two bachelors’ degrees from Iowa State University on Saturday. He majored in biophysics, German and classical studies.

Gassman started taking college courses when he was in fifth grade and enrolled full-time at age 14. ISU officials said he completed more than 232.5 credits, which is twice the number needed to graduate.

Gassman’s parents home-schooled him and by age 11 he scored high enough on the SAT to enroll in Latin 101 at ISU. School officials said he earned an “A” in the course.

“He was very self-directed. He might spend several weeks studying geography, then a period of time immersed in another subject,” said Brigitte.

Contrast Mattias’ success with public schools, where 30 percent or more of students will drop out of school without even a basic education. The freedom to choose your own path, or the lock-step of the failing government school? You decide.

According to WikiAnswers, the national average cost for public school students is “$9866 per year.” I hate answers that aren’t referenced, so I kept looking for the answer to the question:

What is the national average cost per student in public school?

From a July 2004 article,

Well Education Weak noted recently that an estimated $501.3 billion in taxpayer money is spent for education in the United States.

Crunching the numbers, we found that’s an average of over $10,000 per K-12 student, and that it takes four taxpayers to raise this amount.

So now we are up to around $10,000 per kid. Any other stats?

In Virginia, Prince William County “has a projected annual cost per pupil of $10,496, compared with $12,917 in Fairfax, $12,461 in Loudoun, $17,500 in Arlington and $17,968 in Alexandria.”

Pocket change. According to the Washington Post:

We’re often told that public schools are underfunded. In the District, the spending figure cited most commonly is $8,322 per child, but total spending is close to $25,000 per child – on par with tuition at Sidwell Friends, the private school Chelsea Clinton attended in the 1990s.

For a little perspective, The Center for Education Reform puts the cost per student at private schools nationally at $4,689, $3,236 for Catholic Schools. That is a national average. It might be more or less where you are, but I would put money it isn’t more than what DC is spending.

How did they come to that number? Addition and division:

To calculate total spending, we have to add up all sources of funding for education from kindergarten through 12th grade, excluding spending on charter schools and higher education. For the current school year, the local operating budget is $831 million, including relevant expenses such as the teacher retirement fund. The capital budget is $218 million. The District receives about $85.5 million in federal funding. And the D.C. Council contributes an extra $81 million. Divide all that by the 49,422 students enrolled (for the 2007-08 year) and you end up with about $24,600 per child.

Those must be some outstanding students learning in state of the art learning environments, right? Not so much. In fact, when I started researching the state of DC’s schools, the first resource I found was a seven part Washington Post investigative series titled “Fixing D.C.’s Schools.”

Seven part, fifteen stories. That has to be one seriously malfunctioning school system. But the funding is higher than most school systems in the country.

This is the same mechanism that wants control of your health care. Is there any doubt where the quality of care will be in ten years if they get it?

And just so you know how much does homeschooling costs, per student, per year?

As much as you make it cost. And I don’t have to steal anyone else’s property to fund it.

Hat Tip: Why Homeschool

There it is again. That incessant liberal tendency to act completely stupid in the face of possible rational behavior.

The North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission has been hosting a marksmanship contest for high school students for 30 years. The marksmanship club at East Wake High School was ready to compete, but had the rug pulled out from under them by the school’s principal:

Less than a day before the March 15 district round of the decades-old N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission competition, one of East Wake’s principals, with the support of the area superintendent who oversees that school, stopped the team from participating.

The reason: Ammo and students don’t mix, the school officials said.

Good call. Let’s have a group of kids practice for months to become dead-eyes, but prevent them from competing because of political correctness. Brilliant.

Let’s get something straight also. This is the action of the principal, not the state. The state allows this type of education. In fact, it encourages it:

That call pits school policy against state law that allows firearms education at schools. The decision also runs counter to the efforts of wildlife agencies, hunting organizations and gun groups to recruit youths to replenish the dwindling number of hunters. It also underscores the tension between the fear of school massacres and the traditions of rural Wake, where hunting is still common.

I remember when I was in high school, it wasn’t uncommon to see rifles hanging in the back windows of student’s vehicles. Today, that type of thing would get you suspended and investigated.

I understand the need to prevent school shootings, but this isn’t the answer. These kids worked hard to compete. They didn’t join this group to become schoolyard snipers. And if they did, then all you did was make them angry and give them a reason.

A little common sense goes a long way, but not all the way to the school administration’s office.

Hat Tip: Reason

For the record, not gonna happen to a homeschool student:

This is what happens when you deal with a bureaucracy, a lifeless emotionless, brainless entity that can only apply rules and regulations without common sense, context or logic. How ridiculous.

Here’s a kid who actually looks to his father for help when he needs it, and the school punishes him for it.

Hat Tip: Breitbart

I think this might have been an assignment I actually turned in on time. Make a protest sign for an issue or against an issue, and bring it to school. This should end well:

It was an assignment for history class–to make a protest sign for or against an issue, and Melanie said she chose illegal immigration. Her sign read, “If you love our nation, stop illegal immigration.” Somehow, Melanie said the sign got passed around lunch and angered a group of Latino students.

Don’t these students know that Latinos getting angry at an illegal immigration sign is, like, reverse racism or something. I think they are stereotyping themselves somehow.

So, in the spirit of academia and free speech, they decided to not only beat the crap out of Melanie, but threaten to rape her also:

“I didn’t know any of these people,” she said. One young, she claimed, jumped on her back and he put her in a choke hold. “We have brick walls in the middle school and he slammed my face on the bricks.”

Melanie said a group of boys also threatened to rape and kill her.

Of course, since a high school is filled with people trained to teach your children better than you, and since we know that schools are there to protect children, you can rest assured in the knowledge that the school would handle this situation.

Eventually, the boys let her go and when she went for help, she was ordered back to class, and told she could not call her parents, she said.

Well, yeah. Isn’t that what you would do? If not, you are obviously not educated enough to handle complex issues like this. (Is my sarcasm coming across thick enough? This is print, so I have to lay it on pretty thick…)

So, here’s my questions? Will these kids be brought up on hate crime charges? This was obviously racially motivated.

And have the students been suspended pending review? Will Al Sharpton march for young Melanie, or the Latinos who assaulted her?

And why would you assign such a stupid assignment for history class?

Hat Tip: Wizbang

UPDATE:

Via KLTV 7:

Charges are being filed against 13 year old Melanie Bowers by Athens ISD through the Henderson County District Attorney’s office for filing a false report, said AISD officials today.

Bowers claimed earlier this week that she was beaten and threatened - with killing and rape, no less - by a group of students at Athens ISD last Friday, for creating a protest sign saying, “If you love our nation, stop illegal immigration.”

After Melanie’s accusations, administrators reviewed school survellience videotape of the incident - which, instead of showing students beating or attacking her, showed Bowers scratching herself on her arms, face, and neck, and walking through the halls of the school calmly long after she claimed the incident happened.

After Melanie’s parents were presented with that information and the video, the school confronted Melanie, and she admitted that she made the story up.

What a stupid thing to do. This girl needs to be severely punished.

Charter schools are still publically funded, and therefore, not allowed to endorse or promote religion, let alone facilitate religous activities. But a substitute teacher says the “Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights” is an Islamic school, which “shares the headquarters building of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, whose mission is “establishing Islam in Minnesota.”

Katherine Kersten of the Star Tribure broke the story:

Amanda Getz of Bloomington is a substitute teacher. She worked as a substitute in two fifth-grade classrooms at TIZA on Friday, March 14. Her experience suggests that school-sponsored religious activity plays an integral role at TIZA.

Arriving on a Friday, the Muslim holy day, she says she was told that the day’s schedule included a “school assembly” in the gym after lunch.

Before the assembly, she says she was told, her duties would include taking her fifth-grade students to the bathroom, four at a time, to perform “their ritual washing.”

Afterward, Getz said, “teachers led the kids into the gym, where a man dressed in white with a white cap, who had been at the school all day,” was preparing to lead prayer. Beside him, another man “was prostrating himself in prayer on a carpet as the students entered.”

“The prayer I saw was not voluntary,” Getz said. “The kids were corralled by adults and required to go to the assembly where prayer occurred.”

Islamic Studies was also incorporated into the school day. “When I arrived, I was told ‘after school we have Islamic Studies,’ and I might have to stay for hall duty,” Getz said. “The teachers had written assignments on the blackboard for classes like math and social studies. Islamic Studies was the last one — the board said the kids were studying the Qu’ran. The students were told to copy it into their planner, along with everything else. That gave me the impression that Islamic Studies was a subject like any other.”

After school, Getz’s fifth-graders stayed in their classroom and the man in white who had led prayer in the gym came in to teach Islamic Studies. TIZA has in effect extended the school day — buses leave only after Islamic Studies is over.

The state has visited the school three times - in five years.

Hat Tip: Little Green Footballs

And officials say if he hadn’t acted when he did, the students’ injuries would have been much worse:

Rolling downhill in a bus with his screaming classmates and no driver, a fast-acting 11-year-old jumped behind the wheel Monday and steered the bus into a pillar, stopping it from careening out of control.

The bus sits against a pillar it hit after an 11-year-old student took the wheel as it began to roll.

Some children jumped out the side door and rolled into the street. The driver, Michael Weir, had stopped for fuel and was in the station’s restroom when the bus started to roll with 27 children aboard.

Fifteen children suffered minor injuries and were treated at hospitals and released. The boy who stopped the bus likely saved the children from worse injuries, authorities said.

“This kid did some quick thinking,” said Larry Gray, a fire department spokesman.

(Source)

First thing I thought was, “Why is he stopping for gas when he is driving kids?” I guess that is not only unusual but illegal:

State law prohibits bus drivers from leaving their vehicles at any time when students are on board and drivers are not allowed to stop for gas during their route, said Scott Blake, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Education.

Yet another headline that you will not see associated with homeschooling.

Remember, your children should be in school, taught by people qualified to provide the education your son or daughter deserves, even when it includes a beatdown from their classmates.

A Delta High School teacher who allegedly gave his students permission to beat a classmate who was late for class has been charged with child abuse.

Brian Havel, 22, was teaching English at the school March 14 when the boy arrived after class started.

“In his class, the disciplinary process was X amount of sit-ups or push-ups in a certain amount of time. He either wouldn’t or couldn’t complete them,” Delta interim Police Chief Roger Christian said of the punished student.

The boy’s classmates volunteered to administer an alternate punishment.

“The class made a suggestion that if he couldn’t finish, we ought to be able to punch him, and (Havel) agreed. So 10 to 15 students got to hit him,” Christian said.

Havel has resigned and is no longer at the school, said Delta principal Delaine Hudson. Havel couldn’t be reached for comment.

This clown is now facing child abuse charges. But at least he was qualified to teach, right?