Townhall...
3rd Graders
Indoctrinated in School Budgeting by Milwaukee Teacher
By Kyle Olson
6/10/2011
I was seeing red this morning when I read this first-person account of
3rd grade socialist indoctrination in Millwaukee Public Schools.
It came from Dale Weiss, an MPS teacher and devoted radical.
“The process of addressing budget cuts with my students taught me an
incredible amount,” Weiss recently wrote. “I learned that laying a
social justice foundation for young students is a complex process. I
learned when issues are addressed, they need to be revisited many, many
times.”
“Social justice foundation?” Oh wait, dear readers, the giddy and proud
Ms. Weiss explains how she set the 8- and 9-year olds up for a fall:
“Several weeks later, right as the bell was about to ring at the end of
the school day, I casually mentioned to my students that I wanted to
learn more about doing art with children since Ms. Sue [the art
teacher] would not be with us next year. The students clearly were
taken off guard:
“But I thought if we wrote letters to the school board there would be
more money for MPS and we could keep Ms. Sue.
“Michael and Dakota read their letters at that meeting, and they asked
for more money for our school. I really thought we would get more
money. But now I don’t think it happened.
“Looking at the disappointment on their faces, I realized I had
unintentionally led my students to conclude that if we believed
something to be unfair and took action, the unfair situation would turn
into a fair one. I remembered saying over and over: ‘There is always
something you can do to try to turn the unfair situation into a fair
one.’
Yet my students heard something quite different. In their hope and
optimism as 8- and 9-year-old children, they knew that their actions
would bring about a miracle. My heart sank; I felt I had let my
students down.”
To Ms. Weiss and other unionists, the students are little more than
political pawns in their game. They’re setting them up to do their
dirty lobbying work.
Weiss once called those pesky, fact-filled textbooks “the enemy of
progressive education.” In advice to first-year teachers, she explained:
“In content areas where I felt the strongest, I tried out many
different ideas and did my best to be creative. But in areas where I
felt a lot more challenged, I stuck real close to those textbooks. This
helped me gain a better grip on the curriculum as well as understand
how students grasp ideas and learn. Then, I was better able to slowly
move away from the textbooks and create more of my own curriculum.
“Much of my first year of teaching was spent trying to bring together
the world of my political activism and passion for equity and justice,
with the new world I was entering as a teacher. I know I made lots of
mistakes and learned some things the hard way. But I learned a lot of
valuable lessons as well.”
This is Social Justice Indoctrination 101. This is not teaching 3rd
graders to read, write and compute basic math (not to mention
appreciate America and its importance to world history). This is
enlisting them in the Big Education army to do the bidding of the
adults who want Viagra coverage maintained, even if it means axing the
school librarian.
It’s not fair for school teachers to brainwash young students in their
political philosophies. If they were true educators, they would present
all sides of an issue (if third graders could understand the
complexities of most issues) and let them draw their own conclusions.
It’s also not fair for teachers to use children as props in their
political movement. Parents send their kids to school to learn how to
read and write. I’m sure very few parents want their children taught
the fundamentals of Marxism from a sympathetic perspective.
Do Weiss and teachers like her really believe they are being paid to
spout their nutty political beliefs in the classroom? She and her kind
are a colossal waste of tax dollars and should be removed from the
Milwaukee school payroll.
Read it with links at Townhall
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