“According to the Scriptures, education is primarily the parents’ responsibility and is to be a natural part of everyday life. Education is accomplished through a meaningful trusting relationship. Education is discipleship.”

“I realized that I had blindly accepted a limited view of education, simply associating it with an academic pursuit of knowledge. Academic instruction, however, is only a small part of God’s plan—a means to an end, not the end in itself.”

To read the entire article, visit the College Plus website. College Plus has an excellent program for students 13 and over to earn college credit more quickly and at less expense than by traditional methods. Check them out!

May 2006 photo provided by art teacher Judith Cohen shows her sitting in front of cardboard boxes …

Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that’s what they want to do.

Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its “rubber rooms” — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues — pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year.

“You just basically sit there for eight hours,” said Orlando Ramos, who spent seven months in a rubber room, officially known as a temporary reassignment center, in 2004-05. “I saw several near-fights. `This is my seat.’ `I’ve been sitting here for six months.’ That sort of thing.”

Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.

“It is extremely difficult to fire a tenured teacher because of the protections afforded to them in their contract,” spokeswoman Ann Forte said.

The data identify the longest-serving person stuck in a rubber room as a teacher who was accused of sexually abusing a child and yanked from his classroom 5-1/2 years ago.

Because the allegations were never proved, and because he refuses to quit his job, he collects his full annual salary – up to $95,000.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090622/ap_on_re_us/us_rubber_rooms

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2008/05/04/2008-05-04_teachers_in_trouble_spending_years_in_ru.html

After examining records in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, the AP found that 2,570 educators had their teaching licenses taken away, denied, surrendered voluntarily or restricted from the period of 2001 through 2005, all as a result of sexual misconduct allegations.

Misconduct cases against teachers, coaches, administrators and aides are surfacing at a rate of more than one every two days of school. They include theft, cheating and fraud. But most involve inappropriate relationships, pornography, and – often – sex. Some are characterized by multiple victims, secrecy, and long-term emotional damage to children. Source: http://www.auburnpub.com

Although in the AP study, 90% of the abusers were male teachers, Worldnetdaily has an extensive list of female teachers accused or convicted of sexual involvement with their students.

Approximately 15% of students will be sexually abused by a member of the school staff during their school career.  In a survey of high school graduates, 17.7% of males and 82.2% of females reported sexual harassment by faculty or staff during their school careers.  Approximately 14% of those surveyed said they had engaged in sexual intercourse with a teacher.  In a survey conducted by the AAUW in 2000, it was reported that roughly 290, 000 students had been targeted for physical sexual abuse by school employees between 1991 and 2000.  Source: http://www.sexualharassmentsupport.org

Maybe you think this couldn’t happen in your community’s schools?

“From my own experience — this could get me in trouble — I think every single school district in the nation has at least one perpetrator. At least one,” says Mary Jo McGrath, a California lawyer who has spent 30 years investigating abuse and misconduct in schools. “It doesn’t matter if it’s urban or rural or suburban.” Source: Foxnews

A victim of convicted teacher, Troy Mansfield, filed a civil suit against the school only to have a federal judge dismiss the case, saying administrators had no obligation to protect her from a predatory teacher since officials were unaware of the abuse, despite what the court called widespread “unsubstantiated rumors” in the school.

Frequently teachers that are accused of sexual misconduct will resign before their license is revoked or administrators agree to suppress information about their misconduct in exchange for their resignation, allowing predatory teachers to teach again in another district or state. As a result some abusive teachers aren’t caught until they have victimized several students.

Please bring your children home where you can protect them!

Related Articles

http://www.msnbc.msn.com

http://sexualharassmentsupport.org/speakupse

http://www.oregonlive.com

http://www.pittsburghlive.com

A surprisingly large number of teachers have not actually studied the subjects they teach. For example, although most social studies teachers in grades 7 through 12 are certified, only 20 percent of them majored or minored in history. Overall, the majority of today’s public school teachers majored in education as undergraduates rather than any specific subject area. (Source: http://www.ppionline.org)

Ten states now require all new teachers to hold a major in a specific subject field other than education. An additional 19 states and the District of Columbia require only secondary school teachers to hold a major in an academic subject. (1999 data)

Ironically the national teacher unions oppose teacher certification tests designed to screen out incompetent teachers. Perhaps it’s because of the large failure rate among prospective teachers, particularly minority teachers. In 1998, of 1,800 Massachusetts teachers taking the test, 60 percent failed.

According to a September 2001 Chicago Sun-Times series that reviewed test scores for elementary, junior/middle and high-school teachers in Illinois, 67,118 teachers were tested between July 1988 and April 2001 and 5,243 failed at least one test while 1,308 failed three or more. On basic-skills tests alone, 66,769 teachers were tested during the same period and 2,132 failed at least one test, 414 failed three or more tests and 868 failed to pass any basic-skills test.

According to the National Center for Policy Analysis, or NCPA, 35 states use a test called Praxis I to certify that graduates have sufficient general knowledge, professional skills and subject knowledge to teach in a public-school classroom. In 1998, Virginia’s then-governor, conservative Republican James Gilmore, reported that as many as one-third of would-be teachers in his state flunked the test. Virginia has the country’s highest cutoff score for Praxis I, and experts say scarcely one-half of the prospective teachers nationwide who took the test would have made the Virginia cut.

• According to a report commissioned by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future:
• Fewer than one-half of the nation’s 1,200 teachers colleges meet professional standards of accreditation.
• In recent years, more than 50,000 teachers who lack training for their jobs have entered teaching annually on emergency or substandard certification.
• More than 40 states allow school districts to hire teachers who have not met basic education requirements, and more than 12 percent of new teachers nationwide begin with no training at all.
• When Pennsylvania evaluated its teacher testing, it discovered that teachers could qualify for positions in hard-to-fill subject areas just by signing their names.
• In Hawaii, one-half of new hires failed either to complete or pass certification exams.
• In Long Island, N.Y., a superintendent who decided to give teaching applicants an English test normally given to 11th-graders discovered that only one in four could pass.
• Among the 21 states using the Praxis I math test to screen teachers, most set cutoff scores so low that applicants could miss 40 percent of questions and still pass.

Source: Worldnet Daily http://worldnetdaily.com

How difficult are these tests? Here are a few sample questions from the Praxis tests and a link to additional questions so you can test yourself.

Which of the following is equal to a quarter of a million?

a. 40,000
b. 250,000
c. 2,500,000
d. 1/4,000,000
e. 4/1,000,000

Which of the following fractions is least?

a. 11/10
b. 99/100
c. 25/24
d. 3/2
e. 501/500

Martin Luther King Jr. (insert the correct choice) for the poor of all races.
a. spoke out passionately
b. spoke out passionate
c. did spoke out passionately
d. has spoke out passionately or
e. had spoken out passionate

Math Sample Questions
http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/PRAXIS/pdf/5730.pdf

Reading Sample Questions
http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/PRAXIS/pdf/5710.pdf

Writing Sample Questions
http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/PRAXIS/pdf/5720.pdf

General Praxis Test Site
http://www.ets.org/

Conclusions from the Fordham study:

Similarly, we can assume that no one knows the condition and quality of public schools better than teachers who work in them every day. Teachers, it is reasonable to assume, care about education, are reasonably expert about it, and possess quite a lot of information about the schools in which they teach. If these teachers are more likely than the general public (which may not have nearly as much information or expertise in these matters) to send their own daughters and sons to the public schools in which they teach, it is a strong vote of confidence in those schools. If they do not, then we might reasonably conclude that those in the best position to know are signaling a strong ‘sell’ about public education in their communities.

The data again show that urban public school teachers are more likely than either urban households or the general public to send their children to private schools. Across the states, 12.2 percent of all families (urban, rural, and suburban) send their children to private schools —a figure that roughly corresponds to perennial and well-known data on the proportion of U.S. children enrolled in private schools. But urban public school teachers send their children to private schools at a rate of 21.5 percent, nearly double the national rate of private-school attendance. Urban public school teachers are also more likely to send their children to private school than are urban families in general (21.5 vs. 17.5 percent).

Source: http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/Fwd-1.1.pdf