There is an organized effort to end public education, and that begins, of course, by removing the practitioners. Just imagine how you would end the medical practice of a hospital… remove the experienced practitioners.

Nothing will stop these determined radicals who desire an ignorant public who will buy the lies they disseminate, because they will have no knowledge of the past, and no skills to critically evaluate anything that they hear?

Want proof? This was published in ED Week’s online “Teacher”. : April 13, 2011 Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — “The House Education Committee on Tuesday approved a bill that would add dishonesty, insubordination and negligence to the list of reasons for which a career teacher could be fired.” Wow. THE PRINCIPAL, of course, gets to define”insubordination,” and set the rubric for “negligence”!
And there is more in this AP flash: “School teachers in Oklahoma could be fired for a host of new reasons under a bill that cleared a House committee, raising concerns of opponents who contend educators are on the front line of a Republican assault on public education. State Rep. Lee Denney, R-Cushing, says the goal of her bill is to ensure that good teachers remain in the classroom, while school districts have broader ability to get rid of ineffective teachers.”

Yeah, right! My experience, and that of thousands of superbly successful teacher-practitioners who were harassed out of their chosen career, offer the evidence that makes a lie of the litany “WE ONLY WANT TO KEEP THE BEST!”

The NAPTA site (www.endteacherabuse.org) has the stories of abuse from teachers across the nation. Karen Horwitz proved long ago, that the war on teachers is deliberate and nationwide, White Chalk Crime!

I WAS the best! I was in demand for the excellent service I provided and the mastery of my profession, pedagogy. I was a celebrated teacher in 1998, having won the NY State (NYSEC) “Educator of Excellence” award after Harvard and the Univ. of Pittsburgh studied my teacher-practice when they selected my classroom as a cohort for the National Standards research. (Yes! THAT research — funded by Pew as part of the Clinton 2000 education initiative).

I was, four times, included in “Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers, while tenured at a NYC middle school in the last decade of my career as a teacher. My little magnet middle school opened in 1990 and I was the only teacher of English in the 6th and 7th grade. I wrote the curriculum as they gave me nothing but a room, which (I supplied with books and teaching materials, too). Eventually I was the sole teacher of English in seventh grade.

Thus, when the students were at the top of the city in reading and writing, and when they were accepted at the top high schools, it was the curriculum THAT I wrote and my practice that they credited for their success; (to this day, by the way, these former students — now adults — write and tell me what I meant to them). I heard my name on the crosstown bus, as that ‘writing’ teacher. Forty kids vied for every seat in my class. I was the very sort of teacher that all the rhetoric we hear these days, describes… the BEST! Educated, experienced, dedicated and very, very talented in understanding how to facilitate learning.

My excellence meant nothing as my salary rose, and a venal principal teamed with a malicious superintendent (both with private agendas) to subject me to abuse of my civil rights, knowing that I was powerless. I enabled learners to think, and thus to take meaning from text and to write.

Gosh! That is why I needed to be removed. These oligarchs who are taking over our country cannot possibly allow the facilitation of such skills. They count on an ignorant and complaisant middle class, distracted by financial woes, by turmoil in Africa and nuclear problems in japan (and of course distracted by Charley Sheen Brittany Spears, Sully and the latest celebrity storm of the moment.

Utterly ignorant about the past (thanks to a school system that cannot relate historical truth) our people have no idea what once existed or how it came to be. Like the creatures on Orwell’s “Animal Farm” to many generations have passed since the forefathers created a government for the people and by the people, and posted the social contract on the barns’ wall.

The greatest loss of our best teacher-practitioners is to the citizens of this country, because the children are not kids for long, and they need the professional teacher who knows how the brain acquires skills, not just facts, so that the pigs do not get elected to the legislature where they undo the American dream even as they trash the Constitution.

One last thing. I use the term Practitioner or TEACHER-PRACTITIONER, because the effort to demonize those who practice this profession have demoted teachers to the role of baby-sitters. We are enablers and facilitators of learning. This was the core mantra of the National Standards RESEARCH, the real study our of Harvard, for which, as I mentioned , MY PRACTICE was chosento be a cohor .

The STANDARDS research was never about TEACHING. It was all about LEARNING. The STANDARDS research was suborned, and transformed to be synonymous with “standardized testing.”

Nowhere is there a word printed about THE GENUINE NATIONAL STANDARDS FOR LEARNING, so that these puppet-masters can chorus a national rant to: get those bad teachers out!

The pigs are in the farmhouse, and the animals have no idea that there has been a coup d’état!