Greenie propaganda invading the schools

Green California Schools Summit - The largest sustainable summit and expo to focus on bringing green technology and natural products into K-12 schools in California (December 4-6, Pasadena, California) announces the addition of Laurie David, Academy Award winning documentary film maker, and Cambria Gordon, children's book writer, as general session keynotes on December 6. They will join acclaimed scientist, educator and author Bill Nye "the Science Guy."

On December 5 the summit will be opened by Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard and will feature a keynote by actor and legendary environmentalist, Ed Begley, Jr. Parents, teachers, community organizations, school officials will come together at the summit to learn how children are affected by their school environment and what can be done to implement sustainable healthy green solutions. Experts have found that sustainable technology is not only good for the environment, but it also enhances the teaching and learning environment for students.

The Green California Schools summit is the first major event to address all aspects of the state's high performance school revolution - from planning, building and operations to curriculum and "green culture." Seventy-five educational workshops and sessions, led by top state and national experts, will cover issues ranging from funding sources for green projects to empowering students to become the next generation of environmental professionals. The exhibition floor will include a model green school building and more than 200 companies offering cutting edge green products and services.

"This is the first major opportunity that we've had in California to focus completely on K-12 schools in terms of the potential for energy savings and sustainability," said California State Architect David Thorman. Secretary of State and Consumer Services, Rosario Marin, whose agency approves all public school construction and financing, and Secretary of Education, Dr. David E. Long, join Thorman as co-chairs of the event.

About the Speakers

Among many other accomplishments, Laurie David is a global warming activist and producer of the Academy Award-winning film, "An Inconvenient Truth" and the HBO documentary "Too Hot Not to Handle." She also executive-produced "Earth to America!," a primetime comedy special about global warming. One of the foremost voices in global warming, Vanity Fair called her the "Bono of Climate Change." Her co-author on "The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming," Cambria Gordon, is an award-winning copywriter, children's book writer and environmentalist.

Published by Scholastic/Orchard Books in September, "Down-to-Earth," has earned praise for making a complicated subject child friendly. "I've never seen a more comprehensive explanation of the phenomenon in so few words," wrote Hank Greeen of the New York Times, ".they make the science relevant and enjoyable with abundant visuals and conclude with some meaty ways for kids to make a difference." Kirkus Reviews describes the book as having "A humorous tone, eye-catching graphics and celebrity connections (that) lend pizzazz to this volume."

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The Laurie David book (above) is certainly simple -- the truth is much more complex

A fundamental scientific error lurks in a book calculated to terrify schoolchildren about "global warming", Robert Ferguson, SPPI president, announced today: "The Down To Earth Guide to Global Warming", by Laurie David and Cambria Gordon, is intentionally designed to propagandize unsuspecting school children who do not have enough knowledge to know what is being done to them."

A new SPPI paper (http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/other/childrensbookerror.html) briefly examines a cardinal error, found on page 18 of the David book, where she mousetraps children: "The more the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the higher the temperature climbed. The less carbon dioxide, the more the temperature fell. You can see this relationship for yourself by looking at the graph. What makes this graph so amazing is that by connecting rising CO2 to rising temperature scientists have discovered the link between greenhouse-gas pollution (sic) and global warming."

The SPPI paper states, in part: What really makes the David-Gordon graph "amazing" is that it's egregiously counterfactual. Worse, in order to contrive a visual representation for their claim that CO2 controls temperature change, the authors present unsuspecting children with an altered temperature and CO2 graph that reverses the relationship found in the scientific literature.

The manipulation is critical because David's central premise posits that CO2 drives temperature, yet the peer-reviewed literature is unanimous that CO2 changes have historically followed temperature changes.

Case in point, on page 103 of their book, David cites the work of Siegenthaler et al. (2005). However, Siegenthaler et al. clearly state the opposite, that CO2 lags "with respect to the Antarctic temperature over glacial terminations V to VII are 800, 1600, and 2800 years, respectively, which are consistent with earlier observations during the last four glacial cycles."

"Parents and teachers should be concerned enough to demand that the publisher, Scholastic Books, recall, pulp and correct the error before mores copies reach innocent children.," said Ferguson.

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Australia: Lesbian child abuse OK -- of course!

No penalty. If it had been a male teacher ....

A former teacher has escaped immediate jail after succumbing to her love for a troubled student and having lesbian sex in bushland in Perth. Elizabeth Anne Crothers, 50, received a two-year jail term, suspended for two years, in the Perth district court yesterday after a jury found her guilty on one count of indecent dealing and one count of sexual penetration. In WA, lesbian sex is legal at 16, but the age of consent rises to 18 when one of the couple is in a position of authority over the other - as in a teacher-student relationship.

Crothers was tried on 21 counts of indecent dealing or sexual penetration of a pupil in her care between November 1998 to March 1999. She admitted having a full sexual relationship with the teenager but insisted it happened only after the girl left school in March 1999.

A jury yesterday cleared Crothers on 19 charges but found her guilty on one count of indecent dealing and one count of sexual penetration. Those charges related to Crothers digitally penetrating the girl and allowing the teen to digitally penetrate her in bushland in Perth's hills in February 1999.

The girl told the court she shared her first sexual experience with Crothers who seduced her when she was a troubled student. Crothers, a mother of two, admits she was stupid to meet a student outside school. But she insisted it was not until 2000 that she began fondling and kissing the girl, engaging in mutual digital penetration and giving and receiving oral sex in a live-in relationship that lasted several years.

Judge Michael Muller said the pair were in love and Crothers had resisted a sexual relationship with the "tortured'' child until succumbing in an isolated incident. He found she had not groomed the girl for sex and encouraged her to leave school and home so Crothers could exploit her. "I cannot find you induced the girl to leave school to take advantage of her sexually,'' the judge said.

But he said the breach of trust was very serious. He sentenced the weeping Crothers to two years on each count, to be served concurrently, and suspended the term for two years. She had faced a maximum penalty of 10 years for the sexual penetration and five for indecent dealing.

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The education consequences of a Labor Party win in Australia's imminent Federal election

Howard believes he has changed the country during his four terms, most notably to be "less politically correct", he said in an interview with me at Kirribilli House two weeks ago. And he knows that it is on education, the touchstone issue that divides Rudd and Howard, where the Opposition Leader bears the heaviest burden of political correctness.

Rudd's party has long been hostage to the education unions and educationists of the so-called progressive left, who persist with 40-year-old radical theories such as whole-word reading and student-directed learning, despite a generation of conclusive proof they do the most harm to the underprivileged children they profess to care most about. As Janette Howard, a former teacher, said during my interview with her husband at Kirribilli House, education is the ground zero of the culture wars, which she prefers to call a "standards war".

In her travels with him on the campaign trail she has found that "people are concerned about what [children] can't do anymore, that they can't spell, they can't add up . or they don't know enough history". "There's real anger about that," agreed the Prime Minister.

But Rudd has somehow managed to bypass the anger about education standards. Instead he has dazzled everyone with promises of an "education revolution" which offers little of substance other than giving laptops to every year 9 to 12 student and providing high speed broadband, as if technology is any substitute for good teachers, discipline in the classroom and the ability to read, write and think. In fact, excessive emphasis on technology confines the teacher to be a mere facilitator.

As high school teacher Jane Sloan put it so eloquently in our letters page on Tuesday: "I find myself increasingly reluctant to take up the types of mediated communication that instruments such as interactive whiteboards, computers and data projectors facilitate. "I am not particularly interested in feeding my students' desires (some would feel it as a need) to be entertained - which is how these tools are marketed to us. I believe education should be about enlivening imaginations, not simply providing people with a stock of commercially generated images and sensations that they can scroll through in their minds when the situation requires them to be thoughtful." Sloan sees students "struggling to express their ideas in writing because they have limited vocabularies, and lack the fluency and facility that the majority of educated native speakers once had".

Restoring standards in education would be the real education revolution. Concerted attempts to muscle the Labor states, which control schools, have begun under the former education minister Brendan Nelson, and now Julie Bishop, albeit with mixed success. The Government has been pushing ways to improve teacher training, introduce performance pay for teachers, push phonics as a necessary part of early reading programs, allowing more parental choice, regular assessment, a national curriculum and a more rigorous history syllabus.

It is one of Howard's greatest achievements to have incrementally dragged the debate on education away from the progressive wreckers, despite the boast of Australian Education Union president Pat Byrne, that "the conservatives have a lot of work to do to undo the progressive curriculum". His problem this election has been that Rudd will not be baited on these ideological traps, refusing for instance to be drawn into a Lathamesque "hit-list" of private schools, prompting the NSW Teachers Federation to express "disappointment".

But the monkeys on Rudd's back are such high priests of political correctness as Byrne and Wayne Sawyer, the former NSW English Teachers Association president who famously blamed the last re-election of the Howard Government on the failure of teachers to brainwash their charges and form a "critical generation". Denying such people the dues they believe they deserve after nearly 12 years in the wilderness will be the real test for any Rudd government if it is genuine about improving education. But it's hard to believe they will risk the wrath of the Howard-haters.

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