THE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT PROBLEM AND THE SCHOOLS

As an Australian, I live in a country that DOES have control over its borders and where both major political parties support that control. It is always a wonder to me that the USA does not have similar control. The excerpt below is from immigration campaigner Frosty Wooldridge

As a teacher, I sat dumbfounded last May 16, 2005, when the Rocky Mountain News inked a story, "What Happened?" to a stunned Denver, Colorado audience. In a five year study starting in 1999 in Denver Public Schools, 5,663 students started the eighth grade. Five years later, only 1,884 graduated from high school. That's a 65 percent drop out/flunk out rate! That's pathetic, if not frightening.

What was the cause? First of all, 30,000 illegal aliens, speaking 40 different languages, attended Denver schools. Our classrooms suffered thousands of kids functionally illiterate in English with parents functionally illiterate in English and Spanish. The classrooms featured so much incompatible diversity that it created horrific tension, stabbings and death. Thus, American kids suffered a profoundly dumbed-down educational process. One in five teachers quit or transferred out of those Denver classrooms every nine month cycle during those five years.

Last week, the Denver Post announced that 30 percent of teachers in Denver schools were not coming back next year. This is a nationwide travesty. Why? As a teacher, I taught in the inner city in the 1970s. It's exasperating beyond understanding to walk into a classroom where children suffer learning disabilities, broken homes, teen pregnancies at 14, 15, 16, multiple languages and violent confrontations with other ethnic groups. It's impossible to teach. I left my idealism in the ghetto and escaped to a suburban school. But, today, teachers can't escape because over 1.5 million illegal alien students with more than 100 languages attend our kids' schools nationwide. We witness a national breakdown in education. Last week, Superintendent Roy Romer of Los Angeles public schools resigned in frustration and defeat. California schools match the violence of a war zone.

Can you imagine such a failure rate across the country? Can you imagine the consequences of an illiterate generation leading this Republic into the 21st century? Folks, this country won't make it. Where is the outrage?

It takes four aspects for a free and democratic society to maintain itself. It requires a highly educated population that can write, read, think and vote intelligently. It takes a similar moral code whereby everyone adheres to the common good. It requires a similar code of ethics whereby citizens adhere to honesty, doing what is right and maintaining those ethics throughout the social fabric. Finally, it takes a similar language that allows citizens to discuss, debate and resolve problems. We compromise all four with an invasion exceeding four million new people into the USA annually-20 million illegals to date and climbing. We allow the disintegration of our nation without a whimper. Where is the outrage?

Last Monday, February 20, 2006, the Rocky Mountain News reported, "Mile-High Drug Hub" making Denver the leading center for drug distribution in the United States. It's part of MS-13 Gang's dispersal of $128 billion in drugs crossing our border with Mexico every year. Ironically, Congress guards South Korea's border with 37,000 troops with our billions in tax dollars, pats down gray-haired ladies at our airports, spends $80 billion annually on the war on drugs, but leaves our border unguarded allowing that $128 billion in drugs to cross year after year. Additionally, terrorists from any country can walk over the Mexican border with a 99 percent chance of succeeding. Where is the outrage?

With a growing illegal alien population exceeding 300,000 in Colorado, the state House legislators on Wednesday of last week defeated six bills to stop illegal alien migration. One particular bill, HB 1134, would have given cops the ability to arrest, detain and deport illegals. It was soundly defeated after dozens of citizens, including this Coloradan, testified to support the bill's passage.

I demanded, "We are tired of being collateral damage for illegal aliens. We're tired of being raped, killed, robbed and our schools being trashed by multiple languages while our medical systems take better care of illegals than our own citizens."

Representative Francesca Natividad Coleman remarked that it was a Federal issue. I retorted, "We're the ones getting killed and raped here locally and we're tired of it." Last year, three Coloradans were killed by illegals; Greeley, Colorado suffered 270 hit and run car accidents alone; eight rapes by illegal aliens in Boulder and thousands of robberies. Where is the outrage?

To top off the crisis in our Denver schools, the Rocky Mountain News reported the next day, February 21, 2006, "Welfare Surges 45%" with an increase of 4,743 cases. They said it was tough job hunting, but neglected to mention that 300,000 illegal aliens in Colorado stole jobs from Coloradans in every sector: drywall, construction, landscaping, fast food, house painting, janitorial, paving and dozens of other jobs formerly worked by Coloradans. Where is the outrage?






HOW TO GET YOUR KID A GOOD EDUCATION IN BRITAIN

With what the government leaves you of your money

There are ways of playing the system. All you have to do is put your social conscience on hold for a couple of decades, ignore every educational pledge made by prime ministers past, present and future, and be prepared to change jobs, houses, friends and quite possibly religion for the sake of the kids' schooling. If you are single-minded enough to do that, read on. If you aren't, read on anyway. It's always entertaining to know how the pushy middle classes live.

First, though, alarm bells are ringing. Your child is already born? Then you are leaving its education dangerously late! As the latest Good Schools Guide reports, some private schools now accept bookings from embryos - accompanied, of course, by a hefty deposit. As for a place at one of those coveted Catholic schools which in some cities are the only source of top-quality free education, even embryos are too old. If you aren't attending Mass at least a year before your child's conception, you won't get the necessary Good-Catholic accreditation. The Church of England is, as always, easier going - but not much. To be certain of a place at an oversubscribed C of E school, be sure that the vicar spots you dusting the pews at least a year before you want your child to join.

Why are such shameless shows of mock- piety necessary? Because amid the alleged sinking sands of British state education, "faith schools" are seen as rocks of stability. That's the respectable answer. The ruthless, calculating answer is that, if all your other plans go awry, it's vital to have the local church school as the least-worst fallback.

But suppose that you are thoroughly secular and too honest to pretend otherwise. Can you trust the state system to deliver your child to a decent university? That depends on where you live. The trouble with journalists who prattle about education in national papers is that most live in inner London. Wonderful for chic restaurants and trendy galleries. Terrible for state secondaries. So they project a lurid picture of state education across the country as a whole. That's a monstrous libel. There are now many pockets of excellence, even if the overall picture is patchy. Areas such as Suffolk, Hampshire, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, North Yorkshire, East Lothian and Gloucestershire now have genuine comprehensives that can rival the best private schools. And although other big cities have their underperforming schools, none has the problem of London - which, because of its size, can give parents the oppressive feeling of being trapped in a borough where no good secondary education is available.

It's quite likely, then, that the most effective investment you can make in your child's education is to move home. True, you will end up in a smaller house for twice the mortgage, because property prices in areas with good state schools are notoriously exorbitant. And you will have landed yourself with extra commuting expenses as well. But comfort yourself with this thought. If you stayed in the city, you would probably feel compelled to bail out your children into private schools. That could easily cost 100,000 pounds per child. Do the arithmetic . . . and then start house-hunting.

Of course, saving money isn't everything. Idealistic parents search for schools that share their values and seem capable of bringing out the best in their children. Which is fine - except that this assumes that it is parents who make the choice. I have bad news. It's not. Very few good schools, state or private, are short of pupils. The best are enormously oversubscribed. Some of the country's 200-odd selective grammars have ten pupils contesting each place. Unless you opt for the neighbourhood sink comprehensive, on the grounds that you are in love with the head teacher or certifiably mad, you will not be choosing your child's school. The school will be choosing you.

And to emerge triumphant in the scramble for coveted secondary places, you need to be making plans at least ten years earlier. Don't even think about relying on the local state primary to equip your child to pass either "Common Entrance" (the standard exam used by many private secondaries) or a selective grammar's entrance tests. It won't happen.

So you have two options: paying for extra coaching in the evenings, which has a whiff of the remedial about it, or paying for a prep school. In counties such as Kent and Buckinghamshire - which have fine selective grammars but not many acceptable comprehensives - large numbers of parents have realised that it makes sense to invest early. They pay for the prep-school education that will help their children sail through the entrance tests for the (free) state grammars.

But the best preps are also choosy. So the age at which children start being crammed gets earlier and earlier. There are actually private nurseries in London that specialise in training two-year-olds for the test that will admit them to the pre-prep that feeds the prep that feeds St Paul's. Madness. And I haven't even mentioned the coaching needed to make a favourable impression when the head teacher does selection interviews. No, not with your child. With you.

Nor does the agony stop once your child is safely in a good secondary. These days it's far from certain that kids will take their GCSEs and A-levels in the same establishment. Such is the fear of slipping down the league tables that some hotshot academic schools, particularly in the state sector, "encourage" pupils not heading for straight As to further their post-GCSE education elsewhere (though they will usually deny this vehemently in public). More worry for parents.

Does all this terrify you? It should. But permit me to end on a provocative personal note. Back in the Eighties we bred three children. We lived in London, but didn't move house. We didn't go private. We didn't even turn Catholic. They all went to nearby state schools. They mingled with rough kids. Yet they turned out fine. A fluke? Quite possibly. But it does raise an interesting question. Is all of this angst really necessary?

More here






An internet browsing fee??? "[Australian] Schools have warned they will have to turn off the internet if a move by the nation's copyright collection society forces them to pay a fee every time a teacher instructs students to browse a website. Teachers said students in rural areas would bear the brunt of cuts if the Copyright Agency was successful in adding internet browsing charges to the $31 million in photocopying fees it rakes in from schools. The agency calculates the total due by randomly sampling schools each year for materials they copy, and extrapolating the results. The battle between the schools and the agency will go to the Federal Court over its attempts to make schools pay for asking students to use the web. Negotiations between the Ministerial Council on Education Employment, Training and Youth Affairs, representing the schools, and the agency have broken down over plans to change the scheme to include a question in the survey on whether teachers direct students to use the internet".

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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