U.S. History No Longer a Requirement for History Majors at George Washington University

From TheCollegeFix.com:

George Washington University recently changed its requirements for history majors, removing previously key courses for the stated purpose of giving students more flexibility.

The department eliminated requirements in U.S., North American and European history, as well as the foreign language requirement. Thus, it is possible that a student can major in history at GWU without taking a survey course on United States history.

The new requirements mandate at least one introductory course, of which American history, World History and European civilization are options. Yet, like at many elite universities, the introductory course requirement may be fulfilled by scoring a 4 or a 5 on the Advanced Placement exams for either U.S. History AP, European History AP or World History AP.

Earlier this year, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni released a report revealing that fewer than one-third of the nation’s leading universities require history majors to take a single course in U.S. history. George Washington University now joins those ranks.

“A democratic republic cannot thrive without well-informed citizens and leaders. Elite colleges and universities in particular let the nation down when the examples they set devalue the study of United States history,” ACTA President Dr. Michael Poliakoff said in a statement announcing the report.

Some scholars dismissed the report’s findings, however, arguing that most students enroll in U.S. history classes regardless of whether it’s required, so handwringing over the lack of the requirement is moot.

GWU History Department Chair Karin Schultheiss, several history professors, and the university spokesman did not respond to repeated requests this month from The College Fixfor comment.

At GWU, history majors must take eight to ten upper level courses: one on a time period before 1750, and three on different regions of the world, including Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Previously, students were required to take two courses focused on Europe and North America and complete a thesis or capstone project. Though the thesis requirement still exists, students can choose to complete “digital capstone projects” instead.

This change was motivated by a need to “recruit students” and “to better reflect a globalizing world,” according to faculty comments to the George Washington University student newspaper, The Hatchet.

Faced with declining enrollment, from 153 majors in 2011 to 72 in 2015 to 83 in 2016, the history department decided changes were necessary, it reported.

Department chair Schultheiss told the Hatchet “the main gain for students is that they have a great deal more flexibility than they had before, and they can adapt it to whatever their plans are for the future. Whatever they want to do, there’s a way to make the history department work for them.”

The push for enrollment may also have been motivated by a new funding formula for GW’s colleges that began in 2016, the Hatchet reports. Money for each department is now linked to the number of students enrolled in a that major’s classes. Each school will now receive $301 for every undergraduate student in a class, incentivizing majors such as history to offer classes that will be popular.

Faculty said that the new system incentivizes the individual schools to create popular classes to attract students to boost revenue.

The previous funding formula was related to how many students were majoring in a college. But according to Vice Provost for Budget and Finance Rene Stewart O’Neal, that system did not give the fullest picture of how many students were taking classes in a specific school, as many students choose to take courses outside of their major.

Brown University Erects Slave Memorial, Opens Center to Study Need for Reparations to African Americans

By Danette Clark:

“The Slavery Memorial”, a four and a half ton cast iron ball and chain sculpture, now sits on the front campus of Brown University. Next to it, a granite plaque with the following inscription:

This memorial recognizes Brown University’s connection to the trans-Atlantic slave trade …. In the eighteenth century slavery permeated every aspect of social and economic life in Rhode Island. Rhode Islanders dominated the North American share of the African slave trade, launching over a thousand slaving voyages in the century before the abolition of the trade in 1808, and scores of illegal voyages thereafter. Brown University was a beneficiary of this trade.

The memorial, Brown says, recognizes the university’s “connection to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the work of Africans and African-Americans, enslaved and free, who helped build our university, Rhode Island, and the nation.”

The memorial was dedicated on September 27th of last year. One month later, Brown hosted an opening ceremony for the new permanent home of its Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.

Planning for both the Center and The Slavery Memorial began in 2006 when the university released a report on slavery and reparations.

The 107 page Slavery and Justice report, the result of an initiative spearheaded by former Brown University President Ruth Simmons, made a series of recommendations “designed to acknowledge the school’s slavery-tainted past.”

According to The New York Times, in 2003, Simmons appointed a Committee on Slavery and Justice charged with spending two years “investigating Brown’s historic ties to slavery; arrange seminars, courses and research projects examining the moral, legal and economic complexities of reparations and other means of redressing wrongs; and recommend whether and how the university should take responsibility for its connection to slavery.”

According to the report, it was discovered that several of the university’s early supporters, including its founder, Rev. James Manning, and its first treasurer, John Brown, were slave owners. Nicholas Brown Jr., however, for whom the university was named, was a staunch abolitionist.

Brown’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice describes itself as “a scholarly research center with a public educational mission… that creates a space for the interdisciplinary study of the historical forms of slavery while also examining how the legacies of slavery shape our contemporary world.”

In 2012, I undertook a very extensive research project on the reparations movement in America, a movement that [likely not surprising to many] completely encircles President Obama. The information I gathered was so vast that it ultimately resulted in a six-part series instead of a single article.

In that Reparations Agenda series, I explained how reparation activists have admitted that they have learned, through failed lawsuits and other attempts to gain monetary reparation for African Americans, that their movement will never succeed unless they can establish — first through public perception, then through the courts — that there is a legacy of slavery that exists today. In other words, there must be a perception or belief among the majority that African Americans are still suffering under an oppressive system or society, or under, as some have referred to it, “The New Jim Crow.”

Brown University’s Slavery and Justice report contends just that. Specifically, the report states as follows:

… the nation also continues to be marked by profound racial disparities in most measures of human welfare, including education, employment, wealth, rates of incarceration, access to housing and health care, infant mortality, and life expectancy.

Surveying the state of racial politics in America today, the rancor and raw emotions that discussions of racial issues seem instantly to arouse, it is hard to resist the conclusion that the United States is such a society.

As explained in Part 5 – The Reparation Agenda: Obama’s Race Rhetoric Literally Scripted by Reparations Movement…, President Obama said it best — coincidentally or not, in such a way that would most benefit the movement — when he said this:

But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Notice in the quote from the Brown report above that it considers a society steeped in ‘racial politics’ and ‘raw emotions aroused by discussions of racial issues’ to be evidence of a society scarred by the ‘legacy of slavery’. Again, according to reparation activists, this legacy must exist in order to succeed in proving that blacks in America are entitled to reparations.

The Brown report was written and released in 2006. Consider how more so our society has become one marred by racial tension and raw emotions since President Obama took office. How convenient for the movement.

Numerous universities have since followed Brown’s lead in researching their own ties to slavery. Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Emory, the University of Virginia, University of Alabama, and University of Maryland, to name a few, have completed their research and released their findings, some along with a formal apology for their historic ties to the slave trade.

Brown University is home to the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, the 22-year-old education reform movement pushed across the nation by Obama and Bill Ayers, starting with their previous work on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and continuing today.

The Annenberg-backed Coalition of Essential Schools and their affiliates are notorious for teaching Critical Race Theory, which says that white supremacy in America is the root cause of racial inequality. In other words, selling students on America’s ‘legacy of slavery.’

According to the Providence Journal, former Brown President Ruth Simmons spoke at the opening ceremony for the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice last October, encouraging more universities to take on the task of “shining a light on racial tension, human trafficking, and inequality.”

In 2009, Simmons was appointed by Obama to the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships.

Go here to read more on the Reparation Agenda.

New Initiative Seeks to End JROTC Programs to ‘Counter the Dangerous Nature of Conservatism and Militarism in Public Schools’

By Danette Clark

In an effort to remove anything and everything resembling patriotism and military-style discipline and teamwork from public schools, a new initiative has been launched that specifically targets JROTC, Starbase, Young Marines, and several other voluntary school programs.

“A National Call: Save Civilian Public Education”, launched late last year, is the effort of several progressive organizations to “confront the conservative, corporate, and military influences in our educational system” and to counter their “dangerous nature.”

From the website, SaveCivilianEducation.org:

The signers of this statement believe it is urgent for all advocates of social justice, peace and the environment to recognize the dangerous nature of this problem and confront it with deliberate action.

The most aggressive outside effort to use the school system to teach an ideology with ominous long-term implications for society comes from the military establishment.

On the site’s “Where Do We Go From Here?” page, a call is made to others to join their efforts:

Progressive individuals, organizations, foundations and media all have important roles to play in confronting the conservative, corporate and military influences in our educational system.

To that end, the initiative provides a list of “ideas for action,” which includes speakers pools to address youth groups, classrooms and youth conferences, and the support of outreach and educational initiatives that “teach progressive values to young people.”

“Organizations supporting efforts to introduce history and civics lessons from a progressive perspective” are also recommended. Among those are Communist Howard Zinn’s Zinn Education Project and Rethinking Schools, an organization whose curriculum editor, Bill Bigelow, admits that he wants to “tell students that they shouldn’t necessarily trust the ‘authorities,’” and says that he sees “teaching as a political action… to equip students to build a truly democratic society.”

Bigelow, an endorser of the Save Civilian Education initiative, also teaches that George Washington was not a hero, but a war criminal.

One particular Rethinking Schools resource, Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, was banned from Tucson, Arizona classrooms because it was found to be extremely hostile toward whites and depicted America, in general, as a racist and oppressive nation.

Other endorsers of the initiative are Iraq Veterans Against the War, Code Pink co-founder Madea Benjamin, former California Senator and former Weather Underground Organization leader Tom Hayden, and far left MIT professor Noam Chomsky, all of whom have partnered for years in their anti-U.S. military efforts.

Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) is a Communist-led anti-war organization that continually works to increase its presence in public school classrooms.

Both IVAW and Code Pink partner with some of the most radical anti-Israel organizations in the world, like Al-Awda, for example, an organization that denies Israel’s right to exist.

IVAW speakers have been known to show graphic war images to students while blaming U.S. soldiers for murdering innocent civilians.

For example, as recently reported, U.S. military veteran and IVAW member Ethan McCord can be seen in a video telling high school students that U.S. soldiers are trained from day one to dehumanize the enemy and also “to dehumanize civilians here at home”. Later in the video, McCord refers to military recruiters as pimps and the army as their whore.

In a 2011 resolution on Palestine, IVAW described the United States’ military support of Israel as a “coordinated strategy to dominate the Middle East.”

Another endorser of the initiative, Countering the Militarisation of Youth, says they oppose any U.S. military presence and influence in education as well as in social media, entertainment, fashion, and even public events such as parades and memorials.

The group says their work is “breaking the cycle of teaching violence to young people”, yet ironically, they partner with groups like the Muslim Students Association, an organization founded by the jihadi terrorist group, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Save Civilian Education claims that some military programs sneak into schools under the cloak of STEM education, and therefore, calls for an end to those as well.

Also a ‘threat’, they say, are lesson plans and coloring books created by tea party groups that “teach a conservative interpretation of the Constitution, where the federal government is a creeping and unwelcome presence in the lives of freedom-loving Americans.”

According to the group, the problem with this kind of curriculum and with programs like JROTC, Young Marines, and Starbase, is that they have the “effect of popularizing military values, soldiering and, ultimately, war.”

JROTC is a voluntary program that says it exists to teach students character education, student achievement, wellness, leadership, and diversity, while preparing them for college and to be leaders in a diverse workforce.

The JROTC curriculum includes “education in citizenship, leadership, social and communication skills, physical fitness and wellness, geography, and civics.”

Starbase, also a voluntary program, says its mission is to expose the nation’s youth to the “technological environments and positive civilian and military role models found on Active, Guard, and Reserve military bases and installations, nurture a winning network of collaborators, and build mutual loyalty within communities…”

Through the Starbase program, students can “study Newton’s Laws and Bernoulli’s principle; explore nanotechnology, navigation and mapping” and “use the computer to design space stations, all-terrain vehicles, and submersibles.”

The Starbase website says the program seeks to “motivate students to explore Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM)” and “serves students that are historically under-represented in STEM, such as those who live in inner cities or rural locations, are socio-economically disadvantaged, low in academic performance or have a disability.”

Middle School Diversity Day Speaker: ‘Gender is a lot more than what your genitalia are’

Photo above not from EAGnews (I just think it’s funny).

From me @ EAGnews.org:

Piedmont Middle School’s annual “Diversity Day,” included Cuban music, dance, jazz, hip-hop, and a transgender man who grew up a girl in Southern California.

Volunteers helped to organize the event and some parents brought foods representing their cultures while students were rotated through the classrooms to hear 16 speakers “representing different races, disabilities and sexual orientations.”

The driving force behind the annual celebration is the combined effort of Piedmont art teacher Kim Lipkin and film class teacher, Anne Smith, according to San Jose Mercury News.

It was in Lipkin’s classroom that students heard the story of Ali Cannon, a transgender man who grew up a girl in Southern California.

“Cannon talked about his journey, including feelings that he was different, rejection and ostracism by other girls in middle school and his final decision to change his gender.”

“We think of boys and girls in terms of biology, what’s between your legs,” Cannon said, “when gender is really a lot more than what your genitalia are. People identify all along the spectrum of what they feel inside.”

In another classroom, Piedmont parent Brij Kothari, president of Planet Read, talked to students about teaching people around the world to read.

Kothari told Mercury News that he believes diversity days are important.

 “The Piedmont school district is open to learning about other cultures, and the importance of that in a globalized world cannot be understated,” he said.

According to the news report, the school’s annual event has given middle-schoolers “a glimpse of the wider pluralistic world” for the past 15 years.

“Seeing diversity in simply racial terms does not account for the differences found in any community,” says Lipkin.

“You see the kids they are happy, they have their arms around each other and are very, very engaged with the people who are coming to talk about their lives,” Lipkin said.

“Everybody thinks it’s a race issue, but there are many ways you can be diverse and express diversity,” she said. “There is diversity within any culture, any color or any race.”

Diversity Day celebrations like this one take place in many public schools across the country.

In 2012, Gorham Middle School in Maine came under fire for a Diversity Day presentation that, according to parents, “turned sexual in nature.”

According to WCHS News, the school’s ‘Civil Rights team’ hosted representatives of the group PRYSM, Proud Rainbow Youth of Southern Maine, to talk about gender diversity and discrimination.

One parent, however, said her son told her that the presentation turned into a discussion about homosexual foreplay.

 

Brooklyn High School Gives Passing Grades for Eating, Watching ‘Jurassic Park’

From EAGnews.org:

Instead of meeting minimum requirements in English, Math, and Science, teachers at John Dewey High say hundreds of students have been given passing grades for things like playing games, eating lunch, and watching “Jurassic Park.”

According to the New York Post, several sources claim that the school is passing kids with the help of a shady “credit recovery” program that students sarcastically call “Easy Pass.”

The system was put into place to boost graduation rates and “allows failing pupils to get passing grades by playing games, doing work online or taking abbreviated programs that critics argue lack academic rigor.”

One source says that some students were even given science credit for watching the movie “Jurassic Park.”

Dewey’s graduation rate has improved significantly under the four-year tenure of Principal Kathleen Elvin, who sources say is the architect of the grade-fixing scheme.

The Post reports that in 2009, the state Education Department showed Dewey’s graduation rate at 56 percent, but by last year, the rate had steadily climbed to 74 percent.

The city’s own figures, which include summer graduates, reported Dewey’s graduation rate increased seven points since 2012 – from 72 percent to 79 percent.

Martin Haber, a former teachers union rep at Dewey High, who retired last June, calls it a “bogus way of improving the graduation rate.”

“The teachers have been under heavy pressure by their assistant principals to pass as many students as possible,” he added.

Haber also spoke with CBS2 about the easy pass system, stating that, for example, “if a student played a game in the computer room on the computer, that was a credit.”

CBS2 spoke with several teachers at the school who claim that both the city and Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina have known all about the scheme, and that the school’s principal and her administrators are the ones who pressured them into “all manner of things to pass failing students.”

One teacher, too afraid of being fired to reveal her identity, told the news source that grades were basically just changed “en masse.” She claims Principal Elvin not only allowed it to happen but has encouraged it. “She has set it down that if you don’t follow her rules she will crush you. She’s a horror,” the teacher said.

Several teachers also reported that city investigators came to the school on December 3rd to speak with them, and although the investigators were given the names of some of the students whose grades were changed and other details of the so-called “credit recovery program,” nothing has been done.

John Dewey High School senior Jacob Pena told CBS2 that students get credit for homework and eating food. “There’s like a senior house, where people get credits just for basically being in study hall,” said Pena.

Among other accusations against Dewey, says the NY Post, is that teachers licensed in one subject, such as English, were violating state education laws by passing kids for recovery programs in math.

Sources also told the Post that make-up “academy” programs were set up during winter and spring breaks when kids were awarded credit for doing little work.

Blended “Project Graduation” courses were also provided to give kids an opportunity to earn credit for a variety of subjects. Teachers reported, however, that they were shocked to later see students who failed those courses listed on the graduation rolls because the assistant principals and department heads changed their grades.

“It’s academic fraud,” said a Dewey insider.

According to the Post, the city’s Department of Education has confirmed the ongoing investigation, but declined to comment further.

Chancellor Farina’s office recently put out a statement saying the Department of Education is cooperating with the schools’ special prosecutor, and adding “any findings of wrongdoing are taken very seriously and those responsible held swiftly accountable.”

Teachers at the school also apparently have a beef with the way Principal Elvin has decided to handle disciplinary matters at the school in recent weeks.

On Monday, the NY Post reported that the school has recently resorted to giving misbehaving students foam stress balls to squeeze when they get angry.

Teachers say that using stress balls instead of real punishment is just one example of lax discipline at the school.

The Post says one parent reported that she gave administrators permission to punish her son to correct his behavior, but Dewey officials told her that wasn’t their style.

“They said they don’t do punishment,” said Marie Vil. “They said he doesn’t sit down in class. He plays too much in class. He was disrupting the class. The school gave him a stress ball.”

‘Virulently Anti-Israel’ Palestine Teaching Trunk Being Used in Washington State Schools

From EAGnews.org:

The largest independent Jewish newspaper in the U.S. has published an article advising Jews against living in America because of anti-Semitic indoctrination in our schools.

The recent Jewish Press article, titled “Why Jews Should Stay in Israel,” specifically warns of the Palestine Teaching Trunk, a new curriculum that has made its way into at least a few Washington State high schools.

The controversial curriculum was created by Linda Bevis, a lawyer, activist, and former high school social studies teacher.

Bevis’ Palestine Teaching Trunk – both an actual trunk of teaching material that can be checked out by educators for temporary use and downloadable online content – contains videos, activities, and 700 pages of information that Bevis says “provides multiple perspectives” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are others, however, who strongly disagree.

Rob Jacobs from the Israel advocacy organization StandWithUs Northwest not only sees a problem with the contents of the trunk, but, according to The Jewish Sound, also questions “why the same people who put ads highly critical of Israel on the sides of Metro buses and local billboards should be offering its teaching materials in our schools.”

Jacobs is referring to the fact that Bevis is co-founder of the Palestine Information Project and the Seattle Palestine Solidarity Committee, sister organizations that produce propaganda declaring that “the racism and colonialism of the Zionist movement, with its quest for an ethnic supremacist state, remain the fundamental causes of the current conflict.”

As recently reported, the Palestine Solidarity Committee also advocates for the boycott of Israeli made products and of companies doing business with Israel.

In an effort to push back against the Palestine Teaching Trunk, StandWithUs Northwest has asked highly respected faculty from around the country to review the contents of the trunk. According to the organization’s Facebook page, Prof. Michael Weingrad, Academic Director of the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at Portland State University, has declared the trunk to be a “virulently anti-Israel high school curriculum,” adding that reading through the material “felt like swimming long-distance through a sewer.”

In November, The Weekly Standard published a three-page article on the Palestine Teaching Trunk, referring to it as a collection of “solemn idiocies” that “lurk with malice… ignorance and dishonesty.”

According to the Standard article, the trunk’s recommended reading list includes books by Rashid Khalidi, the Columbia University professor with ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization, and leftist professor and political activist, Noam Chomsky.

No less than five other books recommended were written by former Columbia professor Edward Said, who the Standard reports has declared that “Jews are not truly a people because their identity in the Diaspora is entirely the result of external persecution.”

According to The Jewish Sound, Sarah Stroup, a Professor of Comparative Religion and Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, says the curriculum “puts words and political intentions in the teachers’ mouths.”

Stoup also notes that the curriculum focuses heavily on emotions, so “the topic is bound to give lies to emotions.”

For example, as reported by both The Weekly Standard and The Jewish Sound, the trunk includes a game called the “The Occupation Game,” which uses “action cards” like these:

You try to prevent a soldier from inappropriately touching your sister at a checkpoint. Spin the wheel:

1-2: go to ARREST
3-4: go to BEATING
5: go to Action Card #21
6: they berate you and let you go

You are shot by Occupation soldiers and die instantly.

You hover over the world for some time, unable to leave because you love and fear for your family and friends.
You have desires but no power. You wait, along with the living, for the Occupation to end.

When the Jewish Sound interviewed Linda Bevis in mid-November, she stated that so far, only three teachers had checked out the trunk, but about 200 people had visited the website.

Since that time, the trunk as been presented at social studies conferences in Oregon and Washington with the support of the Washington State Council for Social Studies.

 

UN Backs Chicago Ordinance Championed by Bill Ayers’ Wife that will Require Schools to Teach on Reparations

By Danette Clark

For the second time in eight years, the United Nations is condemning the U.S. Government and the City of Chicago for failing to provide redress to several criminal suspects who claim they were tortured by former Police Commander Jon Burge and officers under his command between 1972 and 1991.

This time, however, the UN is also backing a Chicago City ordinance that, among other things, will require the city’s schools to teach “a history lesson about the Chicago Police torture cases and the struggles to hold those accountable and to seek reparations for the survivors and affected family members.”

According to eNews Park Forest, both in 2006 and 2014, lawyers with the People’s Law Office, who are also members of the organization, Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, presented shadow reports to the United Nation’s Commission Against Torture in support of reparations for the Jon Burge torture victims.

Amnesty International, USA and Black People Against Police Torture, and the National Conference of Black Lawyers also submitted reports on the matter.

As a result, on November 28th, the UN Committee called on the U.S. Government to provide redress by supporting passage of a city ordinance currently pending before the Chicago City Finance Committee.

The ordinance, proposed by City Council Aldermen Proco Joe Moreno and Howard Brookins in October of 2013, currently has the support of 26 of the council’s 50 members. Only one more vote is needed to pass.

According to Chicago Torture Justice Memorials (CTJM), which is a project of the People’s Law Office:

The ordinance would serve as a formal apology to the survivors; create a Commission to administer financial compensation to the survivors; create a medical, psychological, and vocational center on the south side of Chicago; provide free enrollment in City Colleges to the survivors; require Chicago Public Schools to teach a history lesson about the cases; require the City to fund public memorials about the cases; and set aside $20 million to finance this redress…

 CTJM and the People’s Law Office say Burge and other officers used torture to coerce more than 100 African-American men and women into confessing to crimes they did not commit. However, they say no one was ever convicted because federal authorities allowed the statute of limitations to expire.

In June of 2010, Burge was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice for denying that he and others engaged in acts of torture. He served three and a half years in federal prison and was released in October to a half-way house to finish out the remainder his four and a half year sentence.

In a 2012 document titled “History of the People’s Law Office“, the law firm states that it was founded in the wake of the 1968 Democratic Convention for the purpose of defending political activists and protesters arrested during that time. The firm’s first clients were Bobby Rush and Fred Hampton, leaders of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party.

In 1973, Supreme Court Justice Douglas described the People’s Law Office as a “firm almost exclusively devoted to the criminal defense of ‘militants’ and ‘radicals,’ including Chairman Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party and Bernardine Dohrn and Marc Rudd of the Weatherman faction of the SDS.”

Now, more than 45 years later, Bernardine Dohrn, wife of domestic-terrorist-turned-educator Bill Ayers, continues a close association with the People’s Law Office by serving as an advisory board member to the firm’s CTJM project.

In a 2009 book she co-authored with Ayers, Race Course: Against White Supremacy, Dohrn wrote about reparations for the Burge torture victims.

Beyond that, however, both Ayers and Dohrn have spent decades pushing the idea that all African Americans are owed something because they are victims of an oppressive white American system.

As such, the proposed ordinance may also be a step toward that same end. In fact, CTJM admits that the reparations ordinance seeks to provide compensation to not only Burge victims and their families, but also to “African American communities impacted…”.

Specifically, CTJM says the ordinance will “create a community center on the south side of Chicago that would provide psychological counseling, vocational training, referrals and other services to the torture survivors, their family members and the communities affected.”

In 2002, Chicago became the first city in the nation to pass a Slavery Era Disclosure Ordinance. The ordinance, proposed by long-time friend of President Obama, Dorothy Tillman, requires companies wishing to do business with the city to research its records to determine whether they or their predecessors ever profited from slavery.

Tillman admitted the ordinance was originally designed to gather information to make a case for reparation lawsuits to be filed against corporations.

Last month, EAGnews reported that a Baltimore school administrator took students to a reparations conference keynoted by Minister Louis Farrakhan. Just prior to that, it was reported that the Mount Vernon City School Board hosted a weekend conference on reparations with students, parents and community members.

Perhaps progressive educators are finally getting down to the real reason for all of those ‘white privilege’ and ‘critical race theory’ lessons they’ve been teaching.

To learn about President Obama’s involvement in a wide-spread movement for slave reparations, read my 6 part Reparations Agenda series which starts here: Part 1 — The Reparation Agenda: Obama’s Religion of Reparations – The Pro-Reconciliation Church.

 

 

 

School Administrator Takes 11-Year-Olds to Reparations Conference Where Farrakhan Calls for Violence in Response to Ferguson

EAGnews.org exclusive:

“At the end of the day… it’s about how we connect to our youth and help develop them to become our future,” says Anthony Pena, a Booker T. Washington Middle School administrator who took more than forty students between the ages of 11 and 15 to a conference on reparations for African Americans.

The 2nd Annual Black United Summit International (BUSI) conference, the theme of which was “Re-Claim, Re-Pair, Re-Form, Re-Produce, – REPARATIONS NOW!”, took place at Morgan State University and was reportedly attended by more than 2,000 “students, community leaders, and distinguished guests.”

Keynote speaker to the conference was Nation of Islam leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan.

According to the Nation of Islam publication, Final Call, the event was sponsored by the Student Government Association of MSU.

Final Call reports that Morgan State University Professor Dr. Ray Winbush gave an “enlightening yet easy to understand presentation on reparations” wherein he said there have been studies indicating that “if you calculate the free labor of enslaved Blacks in building the Western world, it would amount to roughly 10 trillion dollars.” Winbush added, however, that “it is about justice… not a handout.”

Director of the Hip Hop group, Hip Hop Detoxx, also gave a presentation to students on “how sound, imagery and language impacts their thinking and guides their actions.”

Among those attending the event was Jill Carter, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates and Pastor Jamal Bryant, the nationally known pastor who was arrested in October while protesting in Ferguson.

According to the Baltimore Sun, Bryant said he was arrested when he and a group of other pastors and rabbis called for the police of Ferguson to “repent for being an evil citizen.”

Special guests included Pam Africa, founder of the International Friends and Family of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, former Defense Minister of the Baltimore Black Panther Party, and “dozens of other Christian pastors, Muslim Imams, Nation of Islam officials and members of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity.”

To mark the conclusion of the conference, Farrakhan addressed attendees with a more than two hour longspeech that included a reference to white people as “crackers” and a call for “retaliation” for the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

Specifically, Farrakhan held up what appeared to be the Quran and said that both it and the Bible have a “law of retaliation” in them. “A life for a life,” he said.

Farrakhan continued:

As long as they kill us and go to Wendy’s and have a burger and go to sleep, they’ll keep killing us. But when we die and they die, then soon we’re going to sit at a table and talk about it! We’re tired! We want some of this earth or we’ll tear this goddamn country up!”

Farrakhan also condemned President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and others for telling protesters to “cool it,” stating:

They know an explosion is going to come. You leaders are the worst. Tonight in Ferguson everyone is on edge. White folks ain’t never been on edge after they’ve killed a Black man. Tonight they’re on edge. So on edge that our president has come out from behind the curtain to ask Black young people, ‘cool it.’

You leaders are the worst. When you talk to young people, you can’t feel that you’re missing them? Parents, you can’t feel when you’re talking to your children that this is a new generation and they don’t want to hear your compromising? But time has moved on. Your day of leading our people is over.

You preachers—your day of being the pacifier for the White man’s tyranny on Black people is over. You’ve got to know they’re not going to hear you anymore.

The Nation of Islam publication, Final Call, was founded by Louis Farrakhan in the 1930s as the Final Call to Islam. The paper often publishes articles on Farrakhan’s push for reparations to be paid to African Americans for slavery.

In April of this year, Farrakhan spoke in Chicago on the subject of “Revitalizing the Reparations Movement.” Also a speaker at the event, which was attended by Chicago State University students, was President Obama’s former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Houghton Mifflin Uses Honored Vietnam Vet to Promote Questionable High School History Textbook

By Danette Clark

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, now a Pearson Education partner in providing online educational content for schools, has created a video showcasing one of its interactive textbooks for iPad.

The book, titled The Americans, a Houghton Mifflin Harcourt iBooks Textbook, was written by Gerald Danzer. The hardback print of the book was first published in 1997 and has been re-printed by both Houghton Mifflin and McDougal Littell in recent years.

The new Houghton Mifflin video promoting the iBook version of The Americans features Marine Vietnam Veteran Tommy Lyons.

According to Hope for the Warriors, Tommy Lyons returned home from a tour in Vietnam to later organize a committee of veterans to pay tribute to the 25 sons of South Boston who died during the Vietnam War. Together, they created the South Boston Vietnam Memorial, the first of its kind in the nation. The memorial was dedicated on September 13, 1981.

Lyons later became Director of the Community Services Department at MassHousing Agency, a member of the Secretary of the VA Advisory Committee on Homeless Veterans, Chairman of the Massachusetts Veteran and War Memorial Commission, and a member of the Governor’s Veterans Advisory Council and Chairmen of the Sub –Committee on Veterans Housing.

While the Houghton Mifflin video does well to show Lyons as someone to be respected and thanked for his military service, the textbook it promotes likely paints a picture of America that Lyons would not agree with.

According to a 2010 article from Red State, the American Textbook Council found the print version of The Americans to contain both satisfactory and “grossly deficient or inaccurate” information.

Red State also notes that, according to a link they viewed at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s website, another reviewer gave the Houghton Mifflin textbook an “F”.

Joel Spring, author of Corporatism, Social Control, and Cultural Domination in Education, wrote that textbook reviewer and author Edward J. Renehan “charged that their was a “leftist political bias” to The Americans.”

While the Thomas Fordham link is no longer accessible and details as to why the book received poor reviews are hard to find on the web, one reviewer of the new iBook had this to say:

Revision at its finest…

Another example of how American history is rewritten to slant a particular ideology. It is a shame that students are subjected to a version of American history that only focuses on examples of racism, sexism and societal classes. Missing from this text are all of the real examples of great Americans who helped make this country unique as compared to any other that have inhabited the Earth. The text design is flashy and most of the iBook Author’s widgets are employed, however the content is much to be desired. The books authors have definitely towed the politically correct line throughout and have failed to provide students with alternative interpretations of many historical events, decisions and issues.

In 2011, Christian Action Network conducted a study of high school texts containing pro-Islam bias and distributed it to more than 500 school administrators nationwide. Included in the study was Houghton Mifflin’s The Americans, Reconstruction to the Twenty-first Century, also written by Gerald Danzer and also formerly published under the McDougal Littell imprint.

To be fair, the new iBook version of The Americans did receive two positive customer reviews on its iTunes download page. However, one of those reviewers, referring to her/himself as “a modern social educator”, states that he/she is “cynical” about other US history texts that are “too fluffy” and “nationalistic.”

In other words, this progressive, social justice educator favors The Americans over patriotic history texts.

It seems unlikely that former Vietnam Veteran Tommy Lyons would agree.

In a 2008 interview, when asked, “What on earth possessed you during a war to go into the Marine Corps?”, Lyons responded:

Me and five buddies from high school were patriotic and we wanted adventure and to see the world. We enlisted together. As it turns out, it was the second smartest decision I ever made. So much good has come out of having been a Marine. The first smartest choice was marrying my wife.

In a 1983 interview with WGBH, when asked what he thought about the anti-war movement during that time, Lyons said he didn’t pay any attention to it because, for him, joining the military was a tradition in his family and in his town.

When asked what he thought about other kids his age trying to avoid the draft, Lyons responded:

Joining the Marine Corps, to me, was no big deed.

Other kids were going to college to find out where they were at. I knew that when I went to Paris Island, I was gonna come out of there much more ahead than if I went to college.

According to dcmilitary.com, in recent years, Lyons and his Boston committee of friends have organized numerous fund-raisers for the children of Marines killed and wounded in action.

In further recognizing Lyons’ many accomplishments, dcmilitary.com continues:

When the Medal of Honor Society had an honorary cruise on the USS Constitution in Boston Harbor for them, who did they ask to arrange it?

When a wounded Marine from the Beirut Marine Barrack’s bombing needed someone local in Boston to look out for him and his family, who did they ask?

When Clint Eastwood was having the gala first opening in Boston of his movie ‘‘Flags of our Fathers” about Iwo Jima, who helped make sure the Harvard-MIT-Boston College Naval ROTC cadets got front row seats?

Lyons has worked in the state government in Massachusetts, run restaurants and bars, administered a shelter for homeless veterans and a myriad of other jobs. On the side, Lyons also runs the Semper Fidelis Society of Boston.

According to Army and Marine combat veteran Greg Kelly, who recently served both in Iraq and Afghanistan, his friend Tommy Lyons often uses this “fitting quote”:

Poor is the nation that has no heroes. Shameful is the nation that having them, forgets.

State Mandated Invasive School Survey Asks 11 Year Olds About Drug Use, Sexual Behavior

EAGnews.org exclusive:

Parents in at least one Maryland county are raising concerns about a survey that asks middle-schoolers about their sexual history and drug use.

According to NBC Washington, the Maryland “Youth Tobacco and Risk Behavior Survey” contains questions like “Have you ever used heroin (also called smack, junk, or China White)?” and “With how many people have you ever had sexual intercourse?”

One mother told NBC Washington that those questions struck her has questions you wouldn’t ask an 11 year old.

Other questions that may be way too much for middle schoolers, but are included in the survey nonetheless, include:

* How old were you when you had sexual intercourse for the first time?

* The last time you had sexual intercourse, did you or your partner use a condom?

* Have you ever sniffed glue, breathed the contents of spray cans, or inhaled any paints or sprays to get high?

* During the past 30 days, how many times did you use marijuana? and

* Have you ever seriously thought about killing yourself?

Another Frederick County parent – obviously quite peeved about the questions being asked of his 12 year old daughter – went so far as to write a Baltimore Sun opinion piece referring to the survey as ‘inappropriate and offensive probing’ and calling “major foul” on the Maryland State Board of Education for allowing it.

According to the state, Maryland began participating in the Youth Risk and Behavior Survey in 2005 when the Maryland General Assembly mandated that the survey be conducted every two years.

Questions on sexual behavior, sexual violence and sexual identity were included for the first time in 2013.

Several districts nationwide, like Baltimore City Public Schools, for example, receive funding from the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health to conduct Risk Behavior Surveys and report the findings to the federal government.

According to the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, who publishes the results of the survey, data is collected from high school students on the following “sexual behavior measures” and “sexual violence measures”:

* Ever had sexual intercourse;

* Had sexual intercourse during past three months;

* Drank alcohol or used drugs before sexual intercourse;

* Had sexual intercourse with four or more people during lifetime; 

* Age of first sexual intercourse;

* Used a condom during last sexual encounter;

* Used birth control pills, IUD or implant, shot or birth control ring during last sexual encounter;

* Ever physically forced to have sexual intercourse when you did not want to; and

* How many times during past year did someone you were dating force you to do sexual things that you did not want to do.

„Data is also collected from high-schoolers on sexual identity. Specifically, students are asked to identify themselves as either “heterosexual (straight),” “gay or lesbian,” “bisexual,” or “not sure.”

When taking the survey, students are asked not to include their name and are told if they are not comfortable with a question, they can leave it blank. However, many would likely agree with Frederick County parent, David Bittle, who writes, “it is not the responsibility of the Maryland State Board of Education to delve into such matters, especially where such young and impressionable minds are concerned.”