It’s great news that Tom Nida, chair of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, has been exonerated by the District Attorney General, for allegations raised by the Washington Post that he was improperly mixing his day job as a banker with his volunteer job overseeing D.C. charter schools. (Thanks to eduwonk for the tip.)

Much has already been written (also see here and here and here) about the unfair treatment the Post gave him, with its Sunday front-page headline (”Public Role, Private Gain”) worded to sell newspapers, and to its credit, the Post editorial board did take Tom’s side. But it’s a shame that this good news is relegated to the Metro section, and it’s disappointing that one won’t read an apology from the reporters and their headline writers for dragging his name through the mud unnecessarily.

Post ombudsman Deborah Howell, what say you?

In last year’s The Leadership Limbo, we learned that restrictive union contracts aren’t always to blame when teachers who shouldn’t be teaching don’t exit the profession. Too often, administrators don’t take the necessary steps to remove a teacher from the classroom; they look the other way to avoid conflict and hassles. Such behavior by principals and superintendents is now costing the Mount Vernon, Ohio, school district $200,000 to defend its firing of John Freshwater, a veteran teacher who, for years, used his science class to push his Christian beliefs and who used a laboratory electrical generator to mark crosses onto students’ arms. Says the Columbus Dispatch:

The unfortunate experience should be a cautionary lesson to other school districts dealing with teachers whose personal beliefs get in the way of their responsibility to educate: Don’t look the other way for years, even if the teacher is well-liked and personable. The mistake was not in firing Freshwater but in waiting so long to do it.

Unfortunately, the biggest losers are the students: that $200,000 lawsuit tab is enough to buy 1,666 graphing calculators, which comes out to one calculator for every three students in the district.

Visiting the LBJ Ranch in the Texas hill country this weekend, our ad hoc tour group included a gaggle of high-school students from “south of Houston.” They generally seemed pleasant, self-conscious, goofy and teenager-ish. They also seemed entirely ignorant of the 1960’s,  even the basic timeline of 20th Century U.S. history. At least one couldn’t quite remember the name of the 36th President whose ranch this was. Standing in front of the Western White House (a lovely spot on the banks of the Pedernales, by the way, shaded by 400-year-old live oaks), this lad asked the National Park Service ranger, “When did he die? Was it 1993?” The ranger looked slightly puzzled, perhaps because he had already mentioned 1973 as the year of Johnson’s death and because all the biographical material in the park conveyed that key fact. So the kid decided to clarify the subject of his query: “The guy,” he said, evidently either unable to call LBJ’s name to mind or truly unaware of where he was and why he and his pals were taking this tour in the first place.

That was the first of a grand total of two questions posed by these dozen youngsters. The second came while we were inside the President’s office (the only room one can currently tour, considering that this building was Lady Bird’s weekend residence until her own death barely 18 months ago and the Park Service is planning gradually to open more of it to visitors.) “Was he saved?” inquired a girl. That was it. We were standing in a place in which were made any number of momentous decisions involving any number of key figures in U.S. history from 1964 through 1968. (The ranger had mentioned “Martin,” for example, as the epochal civil rights act was being planned.) But the only topic of evident interest to these kids was LBJ’s relationship to God.

Stained-glass Jesus photograph by MAMJODH on Flickr

When times get rough, why do school districts cut the good stuff? It’s a very good question and one we should be outraged about, explains Mike. Read the whole argument on National Review Online.

The Catholic Church is not the only institution facing a sex abuse crisis. The Los Angeles Unified School District has an ugly scandal of its own—and teenagers are again the victims. Richard Winton, a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, has written several incisive articles on the burgeoning crisis involving a former L.A. assistant principal, Steve Rooney. According to the Times, Rooney is alleged to have had a sexual relationship with a then-15-year-old female student at the Foshay Learning Center.

The Foshay student says she told a school administrator that she was having an affair with Rooney, in which she lived with him at his downtown apartment for some time. Rather than report the improper—and illegal—relationship, the student alleges that the administrator urged her to “recant” her statements. Why was the administrator, whose name has not been divulged, so determined to cover up for Rooney? Because the student feared that the revelations would result in Rooney being criminally charged for committing lewd acts with a minor and going to jail.

Hence, Rooney was never discharged, suspended, or even investigated by the LAUSD—even though law enforcement authorities had conducted a criminal probe into accusations by the Foshay student’s stepfather that Rooney threatened him with a gun for demanding the relationship be terminated. Instead, Rooney was transferred by school district officials to Markham Middle School in South Los Angeles last year. During his tenure at Markham, Rooney is alleged to have molested two female students, one a 13-year-old, and the other 14. Apparently, Rooney used his authority at Markham to hand out hall passes allowing female students to leave class and visit him at his office. He would then drive these girls around on his motorcycle, and buy them expensive gifts, such as designer purses and iPods. He seduced the 13-year-old to his apartment before she says Rooney sexually assaulted her.

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Sometimes you read a story that makes you wonder what the world is coming to. This was the case for me regarding the Chicago Sun-Times piece about the school bus driver and his aide, who got their kicks taunting and verbally abusing disabled students.

Cathy and Richard Bedard suspected that something was wrong on the bus being taken by two of their three special-needs kids. To find out, they placed a tape recorder in the backpack of their 13-year-old daughter, Tiffany. They were stunned at what they heard once Tiffany returned home and they pushed play.

“F—ing little monster,” a man shouted at their 17-year-old son, Rick, who has Down syndrome. They also heard jokes about placing kids on the roof of the bus and threats to break a child’s finger.

The driver and his “monitor” were subsequently suspended for six weeks. But First Student Inc., which was contracted by the school district to drive eight disabled children to a special-needs school in Chicago, thought it was appropriate to reassign the two men to another route following the suspension. In other words, they got a slap on the wrist.

When the district learned of this, it put First Student on notice that school authorities were reviewing the $1.5 million annual contract and would try to bid the contract out by the end of the school year. Now, First Student has suddenly gotten serious: They have decided to fire the two men.     

“We took swift action to suspend both the driver and the monitor. Following further investigation, we are now processing their termination,” said First Student spokeswoman Kimberly Mulcahy.

This is too little, too late. The driver and his aide should have been fired immediately. Who knows how many other children—disabled or otherwise—have been victimized by these cowardly bullies. There are very few things more despicable than preying on defenseless, disabled children. They are unable to speak up for themselves, making them a particularly susceptible target for abuse.

Law enforcement authorities are investigating whether to press criminal charges. It’s about time. These men need to be taught a lesson—and a stern one at that.  

As for Tiffany and Richard, their mother, Cathy, is vowing to spend her mornings and afternoons driving them to and back from school.

“I’m very frightened at the thought of putting them on a bus,” she said.

 I wonder why.

Increasing numbers of U.S. Muslims are opting for home schooling. It’s a bad idea for one simple reason: They are segregating themselves from mainstream American society. A recent piece in the New York Times on the struggles faced by Pakistani-American girls in Lodi, California, highlights the problems caused by home schooling. Although many Muslim, as well as Christian, Jewish and secular parents view it as a necessary alternative to the social ills plaguing public schools, such as drugs, violence, promiscuity, and the celebration of the hip-hop/celebrity culture (to name just a few), the adverse consequences on their children are very real and usually last a lifetime. The biggest problem is that home schooling by traditionalist religious communities perpetuates the creation of social ghettoes, whereby students are often alienated and disconnected from the larger American culture. It fosters a kind of balkanization that, ultimately, is not good for America or for the students.

Take the case of the Pakistani-American girls profiled in The Times article. Coming from traditional Islamic families, many of the girls were forced to leave public school and study at home. This is because their parents want them to cook and clean for their male relatives and siblings. It was also done to prevent the girls from being exposed to liberating female cultural mores, such as wearing Western clothes and spending free time after school with friends.

“Some men don’t like it when you wear American clothes - they don’t think it is a good thing for girls,” says Hajra Bibi, a 17-year-old who is now studying at the 12^th-grade level. “You have to be respectable.”

Moreover, many of the parents insist the girls remain isolated so that they can intermarry with relatives or close friends from the same villages in Pakistan. The goal is to reinforce their ethnic and religious identity. This serves only to act as a bulwark against assimilation into American culture.

“Their families want them to retain their culture and not become Americanized,” said Roberta Wall, the principal of the district-run Independent School, which supervises home schooling in Lodi and where home-schooled students attend weekly hour-long tutorials.

It’s not just that these girls are being denied the opportunity to participate fully in American life. They are also the victims of a deep-seated misogyny, which seeks to reinforce the traditional Pakistani male-dominated culture. The Times piece points out it is the girls, and not the boys, who are forced into home schooling. Of the more than 90 Pakistani or other Southeast Asian girls of high school age who are enrolled in the Lodi district, 38 are being home-schooled. By contrast, only 7 of the 107 boys are being home-schooled-often due to academic-learning issues. Once the girls finish high school they are married off. Many of the boys, however, go on to university.

This may be acceptable in Pakistan; it shouldn’t be in America. I am all in favor of parental choice in education. And if some Pakistani-American parents in Lodi, or anywhere else, want to use home schooling as a way to keep their daughters isolated, educationally deprived and sheltered, that is their right. But it is their children who are losing out. Their educational development is being stunted; their professional prospects are being severely narrowed; and their integration into American society is being held back. Europe is already dealing with the serious consequences of large, unassimilated Muslim populations. America should not replicate that failure here.

The only way to reverse this trend towards voluntary religious segregation is to stress the benefits of assimilation. This should not be done through coercion or denying parents the right to home-school their kids, but the way millions of previous immigrants were successfully absorbed: social pressure and the cultural melting pot. For all of its flaws, the melting pot approach has served America-and its numerous waves of immigrants-very well. It can do the same for this generation’s Muslim newcomers.

To succeed, however, Americans must re-embrace it, and jettison the destructive ideology of multiculturalism. If we don’t, then we’ll gradually start to see a new apartheid emerging in this country-not a separation based on race (as in South Africa or the Jim Crow South), but on religion. This is a recipe for disaster.

Iran’s students are being taught the virtues of Islamic world supremacy and jihadism. This is the conclusion of a major new study on Iranian textbooks by Freedom House (read the full story here). The study, entitled “Discrimination and Intolerance in Iran’s Textbooks,” is a somber reminder that Iran’s theocratic regime is teaching its children to embrace anti-Americanism and prepare for a holy war against the West.

Saeed Paivandi, a sociologist at Paris-8 University and one of the West’s few experts on Iran’s post-revolutionary education system, looked at 95 compulsory textbooks taught in grades one to eleven. His conclusion: Iranian students are repeatedly told that humans don’t all enjoy the same rights; rather, we are classified into a distinct hierarchy—with Muslim men at the top, and women and non-Muslims occupying the lower rungs of the social ladder.

The textbooks assert that “some individuals are born first-class citizens, due to their identity, gender, and way of thinking, while others become second- and third-class citizens. Those who are excluded from the inside are victims of this discriminatory system.”

In fact, following the 1979 Islamic revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini and his mullah thugs to power, Iran has systematically imposed a series of discriminatory laws that deny non-Muslims access to senior government posts, sanction the murder of homosexuals, enforce a strict quota system for Christians and Jews in universities, and insist that all Jewish- or Christian-owned businesses be publicly designated as non-Muslim.

Iran is one of the world’s most dangerous rogue states. It seeks to acquire nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Its leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, vows to “wipe Israel off the map” and create “a world without America.” Tehran supports al Qaeda and Shiite terrorists in Iraq; through its proxy, Syria, orders political assassinations against democratically elected, pro-Western members of Lebanon’s parliament; and sponsors radical Islamist terror groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

In other words, Iran is on the march, and it is using its classrooms to indoctrinate students in hate and jihad. For example, the study reveals that the Islamic culture religious studies textbook for eighth-graders has this to say about jihad: “Defensive jihad is incumbent upon every one, the young and the old, men and women, everyone, absolutely everyone, must take part in this sacred battle, fight to the best of his or her abilities or assist our fighters.”

Another textbook, this one for seventh-graders, says this about the glories of holy war: “By taking note of the guidance and instructions provided by Islam, every Muslim youth must strike fear in the hearts of the enemies of God and their people through combat-readiness and skillful target shooting.”

These kinds of textbooks obviously disgust many practicing, devout Muslims all over the world, who rightly see them as profound distortions of their faith and a twisted perversion of the educational mission of Iran’s schools. Yet the Freedom House study also shows that Iranian classrooms are becoming breeding grounds for future Islamist terrorists.

This is just one more reason why the United States, as well as all civilized countries, needs to keep the pressure on Tehran’s oppressive regime. Education should be about opening minds in the pursuit of truth and beauty, not closing them in the service of moral darkness and human destruction.