While Nation Sputters on Jobs, Wisconsin Economy Begins to Hum

[Madison, Wisc…] Earlier this month, analysts were dismayed by the nation’s anemic job creation numbers. On Thursday, state officials were pleased as they released data that showed more than half of the net new jobs added in the US in June came from Wisconsin.

“We have made difficult decisions in our state, but they are beginning to payoff,” said Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R). “The national job figures remind us that we can not rest after one month of good news; while there will be ups and downs along the way, we must help lead the nation to recovery.”

Using seasonally adjusted data, the 12,900 private-sector jobs created in June marks the largest one-month gain in Wisconsin since September 2003. The state’s net new job gain for June is 9,500 jobs, more than half of the nation’s net gain of 18,000 jobs for the same month.

Any good community organizer knows an effective protest requires two things: a bully to excoriate and a catchy slogan that resonates in the public mind.

Even though most protestors are “uncomplicated” people, don’t be deceived; staging an effective rally is not a simple task.

First, a bully must be identified. For progressives, a bully is anybody who disagrees with you politically, so there is no shortage of candidates. However, as Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” explains, it’s best to settle on one target to isolate and attack.

Next, protestors need to come up with a catchy slogan to shout at the designated bully. Most people don’t have the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s “gift” of reducing complex ideas into simplistic rhymes. This skill must be taught.

This charming six-part lesson plan is designed to stamp out (mostly) gender-based bullying from Pre-K all the way through 6th grade.

Most readers will agree that bullying is a problem and that teachers should talk to students about it in a thoughtful, reasonable manner.

But thought and reason are totally absent from the “Gender doesn’t limit you” lesson plans, which only provide children with a designated slogan to shout at suspected bullies.


Here’s an example from Lesson 4 – Biased Judgments:

To start the lesson, teachers are instructed to tell students that, “Sometimes one group of kids thinks that they are better at something than another group because of their gender.”

The teacher then tells students that whenever someone makes a highly offensive remark such as “boys are better at soccer than girls,” they should tell the offender, “Give it a rest. No group is best.”

Since repetition is crucial to the learning process, the plan provides teachers with four scenarios to read to students. After each one the class is instructed to shout, “Give it a rest. No group is best.”

Here’s one of the scenarios from Lesson 4:

(Teacher): “Paul and Vanessa are baking cookies together. Vanessa says that girls are better at baking than boys. What do we tell Vanessa? One, two, three GO!”

(Class): “Give it a rest, no group is best.”

That’s the extent of the lesson. Identify a bully (doesn’t that Vanessa sound like a monster?), give the kids a slogan to shout, and practice with a few scenarios.

It’s like that for each lesson, although the quality of the slogans varies. Here’s a Cliff’s Notes version of the lesson plans:

For the “Peer Exclusion” lesson, kids are instructed that “not letting someone play with you just because of their gender is called bullying….” Applicable slogan: “You can’t say, ‘Boys/Girls can’t play.’”

For the “Role Exclusion” lesson, students are told that, “Boys and girls can have any job they want to, or do any activities that they want.” If some insensitive lout attempts to define gender roles in the children’s presence, they are to say, “Not true! Gender doesn’t limit you.”

And so it goes for six lessons. Some of the remaining slogans include “That’s weird! Being boys and girls doesn’t matter here” and “I disagree! Sexism is silly to me.”

As you can see, the quality of the sloganeering fades with each lesson.

You can also see the “lessons” aren’t designed to develop critical thought or meaningful classroom discussions. In fact, the researchers who designed these lessons brag that “teaching students catchphrases to interrupt gender bullying” is far more effective than “using literature to challenge gender stereotypes.”

What this curriculum seems best designed for is to teach kids there’s a bully around every corner and the best way to handle him (and you just know it’s a “him”) is to shout clever slogans.

Sure, the kids whose school careers are frittered away with such tripe might not be prepared to enter the competitive world of work or college. But rest assured, these kids will know what to do when a bully like Scott Walker or Chris Christie tries to take away their seat on the government’s gravy train.

That’s right, these lesson plans will produce some wonderful union activists someday.

A) I think there is validity to this point, but it's an oversimplification. It is also not a reason to argue against school choice.

B) I do not believe anyone here thinks a student's performance is "all the teacher's fault." I do believe that most here believe that there should be some form of performance-based recognition in promotion and pay. Those teachers that work harder and put more effort in should be rewarded greater than those that just show up and don't do anything outrageously egregious enough to get fired.

As with everything, though, "the devil is in the details" of how that performance is recognized.

Unions have rules. Union members who break those rules can be placed on trial by their union and, if found guilty, can be expelled or suspended from the union. They can also be fined, as Nathaniel Musser has learned the expensive way.



Musser, a former member of the Chicago Regional Council of Carpenters, according to his lawyer, could not find work through his union. So, as union members sometimes do, Musser found work on his own–at a non-union company.

As working non-union is against many trade unions’ rules, the Carpenters’ union filed internal union charges against Musser and imposed a $300,900.00 fine against Musser.
Although Musser appealed and the fine was later reduced to $200,850.00, Musser is also fighting the reduced fine as well.

According to ChicagoUnionNews.com, Musser is alleging in his court documents that the union maintained a policy that precluded members from resigning from the union.

“If he would have known about a way to resign, he would have resigned before he worked for a non-union employer,” [Musser's lawyer Stanley] Niew said.

Joe Heilgeist, identified in court papers as a business representative and organizer of Local 250, declined to comment and the attorney representing the union did not return phone calls.

Frank Libby, president of the Regional Council, said he was unfamiliar with this particular case but said the situation was common.

“It makes sense,” Libby said. “He went to work with a non-union contractor while he held membership. You can’t do that. . . . He made a conscious decision apparently to say the hell with the union.” [Emphasis added.]

Note: If you are an out-of-work construction trade union member, before you start working non-union, check your union constitution and local union bylaws. As a union member (in most trade unions), you can be placed on trial for working non-union.

Many Americans reason that if the test covers the essential things kids need to know, then “teaching to the test” makes sense and wonder what all the fuss is about.

Frankly, I wondered that myself – until I came across “Teaching About Global Warming in Truck Country” by Jana Dean, an eighth grade science and social studies teacher in Washington state. Dean’s article is included in “Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching for Equity and Justice, Volume 1.”

In the article, Dean recounts the difficulty she had in selling students on the dangers of man-made global warming. Dean teaches in a rural community where most families still use trucks in their everyday activities. Early on in the global warming unit, one student asked if Dean was telling him he could never drive a truck like his father does.


Dean writes:
In order to sufficiently scare the children, she used a curriculum developed by the Union of Concerned Scientists that links global warming to floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires – basically anything weather-related. Then students learned how global warming is melting the polar ice caps and causing an increase in malaria and other diseases in tropical Africa.

Believing she had sufficiently primed the pump, Dean then “asked students to write about what concerned them most about global warming. As they shared aloud, I wrote down their worries on poster paper hung at the front of the class. The mood was somber. My students sat so still and silent we could hear each other swallow.”

“I thought that by then we might have been ready to look again at the causes of climate change,” Dean writes.

But instead of reaching for a science textbook, she reached for a video produced by Greenpeace that “bombards (viewers) with a message about our cars, our trucks, our factories, our consumption.” The film did not go over very well:
Dean “spent the next two weeks building science background,” which amounted to having students learn about greenhouse gases and how the manufacturing industry spews more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with every product it makes. Dean writes:

“By the end of the period they saw greenhouse gases everywhere – in tailpipes of tractors, in stockyards, in the power behind the pump, in oil wells, in the manufacturing of hydraulic fluid, in the coal that powered the cement kiln.”

Like a good propagandist, Dean issued a call to action to her students, instructing them to find ways they could “combat global warming” within their families, their school, their country and the world at large. The class identified a variety of possible actions, from taking shorter showers to urging the passage of international treaties “to decrease dependence on fossil fuels.”

The lesson culminated in a recycling program Dean’s class established for the school.
Not only has Dean crossed the line that separates teaching from propagandizing, but she spent almost a month’s worth of class time on her global warming unit, with the grand result being a few recycling bins placed around the school and a “climate of concern” among the students.

It is doubtful that Washington state’s standardized test asks students to explain how owning a truck helps contributes to global warming. That means in a nine-month school year, Dean only has eight months to teach the rest of the 8th grade science curriculum – the stuff that kids will actually be tested on.

It is clear that “teaching to the test” leaves less time for their social engineering lesson plans, which cramps the propagandists’ style in a major way.

Here’s how one social justice educator summed it up:
Parents and taxpayers want kids to leave school with the knowledge and skills that will allow them to succeed in life. That stands in contrast to the progressives’ goal of creating a generation of good global citizens who are equipped to identify and combat the suffering caused by capitalism, which is the driving force behind most of the world’s greed, inequality and pollution.

Standardized tests are designed to measure math and reading skills, but they cannot measure a student’s commitment to social justice or disdain of the free market system. Suddenly the left’s hatred of standardized testing makes sense, doesn’t it?

Only 23 percent of Illinois’ 2011 high school graduating class — public and private — met college readiness standards in all four ACT subjects tested: English, reading, math and science.

“We have teachers who have been extremely vilified for political purposes,’’
Faced with a tougher new bar for approving a strike, Lewis said she would only call for a strike vote if teachers came to her and requested it. But, given the disrespect and “loss of dignity” teachers feel, Lewis said, the likelihood of teachers wanting a strike vote is “very high.’’