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Category Archives: Education

The Private-Sector, Jealousy-Misery Media Factor – Part 3/5

17 Dec

Another example of how misleading Don Thompson’s AP piece, Public retirement ages come under greater scrutiny, was: “With Americans increasingly likely to live well into their 80s, critics question whether paying lifetime pensions to retirees from age 55 or 60 is financially sustainable. An Associated Press survey earlier this year found the 50 states have a combined $690 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and $418 billion in retiree health care obligations.”

What Thompson doesn’t mention is that some states managed their pension funds better than others did.

A March 2011 report on the Best and Worst State Funded Pensions by Adam Corey Ross of The Fiscal Times offers a more balanced picture.

Ross writes, “State pension programs across the country have undergone a major transformation, as more and more of them are cutting back the amount of money they set aside for retired workers, gambling that they can meet their obligations through investments instead of savings…”

In fact, Ross lists the best fully-funded state pensions, which are: New York, Wisconsin, Delaware, North Carolina, Washington, South Dakota, Tennessee, Wyoming, Florida and Georgia. He also lists the worst state pensions where the gamble did not pay off.

California falls between the two lists and is struggling to fill the funding gap. The following video explains why.

In addition, nowhere does Ross or Thompson mention that California has two state pension plans.  There is CalPERS and then there is CalSTRS.

The California State Teachers’ Retirement System [CalSTRS], with a portfolio valued at $148.2 billion as of October 31, 2011, is the largest teacher pension fund and second largest public pension fund in the United States. CalSTRS administers a hybrid retirement system, consisting of a traditional defined benefit, cash balance and defined contribution plan, as well as disability and survivor benefits. CalSTRS serves California’s 852,000 public school educators and their families from the state’s 1,600 school districts, county offices of education and community college districts.

How well funded is CalSTRS to meet its future obligations?

CalSTRS makes it clear that “It’s important to understand that the risk of facing depleted assets exists approximately 30 years from now versus actually facing insolvency today.”

Note: Due to losses from investments during the 2008 global financial crises, the CalSTRS retirement “fund took an enormous hit to its stock portfolio when the market plunged during the heart of the recession, losing nearly $43 billion — roughly 25 percent of its value — from June 2008 to June 2009.”

Continued on December 18, 2011 in The Private-Sector, Jealousy-Misery Media Factor – Part 4 or return to Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Posted by on December 17, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, government, Journalism, media, politics, Public School, Teaching

 

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The Private-Sector, Jealousy-Misery Media Factor – Part 1/5

15 Dec

During my full-time university days on the GI Bill [1968 - 1973] before I graduated with a BA in journalism, I learned how easy it was for the media to make mistakes while practicing what is known as Yellow Journalism to boost profits.

And Yellow journalism [based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration] is what Associated Press [AP] did when it ran Public retirement ages come under greater scrutiny by Don Thompson on December 14, 2011.

For example, how would you feel if you read, “Patrick Godwin spends his retirement days running a horse farm east of Sacramento, Calif., with his daughter? His departure from the workaday world [he worked thirty-six years in public education and was the superintendent of one of California's 1,600 school districts] is likely to be long and relatively free of financial concerns, after he retired last July at age 59 with a pension paying $174,308 a year for the rest of his life.”

That previous quote was in the second paragraph of Thompson’s AP news piece and it is extremely misleading because of what it doesn’t say.

How many in public education do you think will earn that kind of money in retirement?

What AP doesn’t tell us is that in 2010 the average member-only benefit for retired public school educators in California was $4,256 a month before taxes [less than a third of what Godwin earns in retirement] and that only 16% of educators that retired in 2010 worked as long as Patrick Godwin did.  The median years of service was 26.6.

For example, if you were one of the educators that retired after 26.6 years of public service [the median] and was only 55 years old [the earliest you may retire and collect], using the CalSTRS retirement calculator, that person would earn about $2,130 a month before taxes—much less than the $14,525.66 that Godwin earns each month.

I calculated once that if a public school teacher in California taught for 42 years or more, his annual retirement income would equal what he earned the last year he worked.  In public education, less than 4% retire in the 100% category.

In fact, 9% retired in 2010 with 10-15 years of service in public education, 11% with 14-20 years, 15% with 20-25 years, 12% with 25-30 years, 23% with 30-35 years, and 16% with 35-40 years. Source: CalSTRS

The reason that AP’s Don Thompson ran with Patrick Godwin’s retirement income as his example is called sensationalism designed to cause an emotional response so people will talk about it. Word of mouth attracts readers and an audience.

In addition, Godwin was a school district superintendent at the top of the public education pay scale, which represents about 0.2% of the total.  That means 99.8% of public educators in California do not earn as much as Godwin did while working as a school district superintendent.

The result is that many readers may believe that most public educators in California will retire with Patrick Godwin’s annual retirement income.  However, this is far from the truth since most will not come close, but Thompson’s piece doesn’t say that.

The reason AP’s Thompson distorted the facts so much is because of audience share, which determines how much a media source [TV, newspaper, talk show, magazine, Blog, etc] may charge to advertisers, and balancing the news and telling the truth often does not achieve this goal because profits are the foundation of the private sector media.

It’s a simple formula: if you don’t make a profit you go out of business and everyone working for you loses his or her job so almost everyone plays the same Yellow Journalism game, and then there is the politics of money.

To understand why Thompson wrote such a misleading news piece, it helps to understand the trend away from private-sector pensions that were once similar to current public sector-pensions and the answers are in the numbers.

Continued on December 16, 2011 in The Private-Sector, Jealousy-Misery Media Factor – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on December 15, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, Journalism, media, politics, Public School, Teaching

 

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America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States – Part 5/5

21 Nov

In China, those that work harder and do a better job, regardless of self-esteem or happiness, tend to prosper. in fact, Asian-Americans have the lowest self esteem in the United States.

Gallup studied China’s work ethics. Not surprisingly, the credo “work hard and get rich” is by far the most popular choice, selected by 53% of respondents. About one in four Chinese (26%) opt for “don’t think about money or fame, just lead a life that suits your own tastes,” while less than a tenth of Chinese identify with all the other responses. Perhaps most telling: Only 2% of Chinese choose the collectivist exhortation to “never think of yourself, give everything in service to society.”

In short, it would appear that the country’s commitment to material self-betterment through hard work is firmly rooted and unchallenged.

However, in the United States, a Yahoo.com, ABC News piece said, “Between 1979 – 2007, the income of the top 1% of Americans increased by 275%. For the other 99% of Americans, income only increased 29%.”

The problem is that when prices of everyday items such as food goes up due to inflation, many people cannot afford to buy them. In addition, equity in homes, where most of middle class wealth is, lost value.

Studies also show that countries that have a large income gap such as the US, also have high numbers of unemployed, incarceration, teen pregnancy, poor health and lower life expectancy.

In fact, prison inmates by race breaks down to: White 58.6%, African American 37.9%, Latino/Hispanic 34.3%,  and Asian 1.7%.  That’s right. For Asians it was one “point” seven percent and Asian-Americans graduate from high school and college in the highest ratios.


Chinese Education: Social Life and Work Ethic

In addition, the King’s College of London’s World Prison Population List reports, “The United States has the highest prison population rate in the world,” while China doesn’t even make the top sixteen list.

The US has about 2.3 million people behind bars at 756 per 100,000 people, and China has 1.56 million at 119 per 100,000.

It may not surprise you that Chinese-Americans, which includes all Asian-Americans, have the lowest teen pregnancy rate too.

U.S. Birth Rates for women  aged 15-19 in 2009 by Race/Ethnicity was 70 per 1,000 for Hispanic;  59 per 1,000 for Black/African-American; 24 per 1,000 for White non-Hispanic,  and 14 per 1,000 for Asian-American/Pacific Islander.  Source: cdc.gov

Since the lack of an education often lands Americans in prison, low paying jobs or unemployed, one would think that working hard to earn an education would be popular in the US, but it isn’t.

Instead, in the US, it is the old blame game. “It’s the teacher’s fault that  I earned a failing grade or the class was boring.” It doesn’t matter if the child does homework, studies for tests or reads, it’s still the teacher’s fault.

The Wall Street Journal in From College Major to Career says, “Choosing the right college major can make a big difference in students’ career prospects, in terms of employment and pay… Some popular majors, such as nursing and finance, do particularly well, with unemployment under 5% and high salaries during the course of their careers.”

In addition, the attitude of America’s Baby Boomers is not much better than the children they raised that are now having trouble finding jobs because they did not take earning an education seriously as most Asian-Americans do.

The next question should be, “How long will the United States hold onto global super-power status with attitudes such as these?”

Return to America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States – Part 4 or start with Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on November 21, 2011 in Education, family values, Parenting, Public School

 

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America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States – Part 4/5

20 Nov

“What are these jobs that Americans will not do?” Slate.com asked. “Do they exist or are they a figment of the business community’s imagination? It turns out that their claims are largely true—there are plenty of jobs Americans avoid.


Manufacturers Looking for Skilled Workers

Let’s take a tour of them.

“Americans shun pretty much any unskilled labor that requires them to get their hands dirty: landscaping, entry-level construction, picking fruits and vegetables (Reuters reports that “up to 70 percent of U.S. farm workers are estimated to be undocumented, totaling about 500,000 people”), cleaning hotel rooms, busing tables, and prep cooking in urban restaurants,” and “American workers appear to be less interested in some kinds of factory jobs.”

In addition, “Americans, it seems, are also less willing to take stressful jobs that require lots of training and long hours, and that require them to work in unpleasant environments…”

For example, “The American Hospital Association says there are 118,000 nursing vacancies in the United States.”

In fact, the Washington Business Journal reported October 2011, “U.S. manufacturing companies have as many as 600,000 jobs that they cannot find workers with the proper skills to fill, according to a survey by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute.”


What the American Self-Esteem Boosting Parenting Movement did to the US – Did your child have fun today by skipping homework and avoid reading a book?

The survey found 5 percent of current manufacturing jobs are unfilled due to lack of qualified candidates, 67 percent of manufacturers have a moderate to severe shortage of qualified workers, and 56 percent expect the shortage to increase in the next three to five years.

What about China? Do the Chinese have a similar attitude?

Continued on November 21, 2011 in America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States – Part 5 or return to Part 3

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on November 20, 2011 in Education, family values, Parenting, Public School

 

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America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States – Part 3/5

19 Nov

DailyKos.com says, “American’s won’t work 12 hour days , $5 an hour for seven days a week.”

However, in 1973 after graduating from college on the GI Bill (working nights and weekends), my first job was 12 or more hours a day sometimes six and seven days a week on a salary without overtime.

Change.org says, “Despite high unemployment, Americans won’t work as farmhands. Have you ever read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which is about two Caucasian drifters working as farmhands moving from farm to farm to survive? at 112 pages, it is a small book and I recommend it.

I know, I taught Of Mice and Men to my high school age students for more than a decade.

The Center for Immigration Statistics tells us what the are that jobs “educated” Americans won’t work at. CIS says, “Of the 465 civilian occupations, only four are majority immigrant. These four occupations account for less than 1 percent of the total U.S. workforce. Moreover, native-born Americans comprise 47 percent of workers in these occupations.

“These high-immigrant occupations are primarily, but not exclusively, lower-wage jobs that require relatively little formal education.

“In high-immigrant occupations, 57 percent of natives have no more than a high school education. In occupations that are less than 20 percent immigrant, 35 percent of natives have no more than a high school education. And in occupations that are less than 10 percent immigrant, only 26 percent of natives have no more than a high school education.”

With no choice, American born citizens will work jobs most educated Americans refuse to do.

In fact, in October 2011, the New York Times reported about a Colorado farmer that decided to hire locally unemployed Americans instead of immigrant labor.  It took the farmer six hours to learn he had made a mistake.  At lunchtime, the first wave of local workers quit and never came back. Some of the workers said the work was too hard.

Since most Asian-Americans value education and work harder than most to earn one, they tend to stay in school longer.  In fact, Asian-Americans  had the lowest unemployment rate of all ethnicities. In 2010, 12.5% of Hispanic or Latino, 10% of African-Americans , 8.7% of Whites but only 7.5% of Asian-Americans were unemployed.

Continued on November 19, 2011 in America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States – Part 4 or return to Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on November 19, 2011 in Education, family values, Parenting, Public School

 

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America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States – Part 2/5

18 Nov

My parents generation is the one John Steinbeck wrote of in Cannery Row. One review says, “The novel depicts the characters as survivors, and being a survivor is essentially what life is all about.” The same theme permeates Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men.

However, today, many Americans have forgotten the sacrifice it takes to survive and expects government to bail them out. In addition, many only give lip service to education but do not instill the value of education and hard work in their children.

My father, at 14, was mucking out horse stalls at Santa Anita Race Track in Arcadia, California—the sort of work immigrants do today.


It started in America and swept around the globe!

My mother worked in a laundry and at home, she baked and decorated cakes for special occasions that she sold to neighbors, co-workers, friends and family.

My older brother worked most of his life until the day he died at 64 in 1999 working the jobs that immigrants do.  When he didn’t have work, he spent his days going to dumpsters looking for cardboard and searching the roadsides for empty soda cans and beer bottles to sell at the local recycling place.

Richard, my brother, “once” told me shortly before his death that he was proud he never collected a welfare check or depended on government handouts. The Latinos he worked with called him The Horse, “El Caballo”, due to his strength.

When I was fifteen, I went to school during the day and worked nights and weekends [30 hours a week] washing dishes in a coffee shop often until 11:00 PM only to be at high school the next day by 8 AM.

After a few years in the US Marines and a tour in Vietnam, I washed cars, swept floors and bagged groceries in a super market while I attended college on the GI Bill.

One summer job before my fourth year of college had me cleaning empty 50,000 gallon stainless-steel tanks at the Gallo Winery in Modesto, California. It was a dangerous job cleaning out the tanks where the wine was fermented, and I witnessed fellow workers injured and rushed to the hospital.

However, the generation that won World War II and made American strong and powerful is mostly gone or retired. Today, the work ethic in America has changed.  The reason it changed has a lot to do with the way children have been raised since the 1960s by parents obsessed with their children’s self-esteem and happiness, while making sure these children never face a boring day and blaming teachers for the child’s bad grades instead of holding the child responsible.


Unfilled jobs due to skills gap

Since 1960, the US has not won a single war.  After more than a decade and about 50,000 dead, we lost in Vietnam. Today, after another decade at war, we are still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan with no victory in sight.

It’s as if today’s younger generation is incapable of making the sacrifices the Great Depression (1929 – 1942) generation did when 25% of all workers were completely out of work. Some people starved and many lost farms and homes.

Continued on November 18, 2011 in America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States – Part 3 or return to Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on November 18, 2011 in Education, family values, Parenting, Public School

 

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America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States – Part 1/5

17 Nov

Unless many Americans change their attitudes toward parenting, education and work, the United States will cease to be a super power.

With about 14 million Americans unemployed, millions of illegal aliens still find work in the US.

In February 2011, the New York Times reported, “Despite continuing high unemployment among American workers, record deportations by the Obama administration and expanding efforts by states to crack down, the number of unauthorized immigrants in the work force — about eight million — was also unchanged, the Pew report found. Those workers were about 5 percent of the American work force.”

Then on November 4, 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, “Both the number of unemployed persons (13.9 million) and the unemployment rate (9.0 percent) changed little over the month. The unemployment rate has remained in a narrow range from 9.0 to 9.2 percent since April.”


Unskilled immigrants are competing with unskilled Americans–mostly high school dropouts.

Imagine, if the government told unemployed Americans, “Work or starve! If you need a job, we will educate you and/or transport you to where that job is even if it is a job that only illegal immigrants have worked before.” If that happened, the unemployment rate in the US would drop from 13.9 million to less than six million and hover around 4%.

If these shunned jobs were the only choice after the standard unemployed “benefit year” [which is 52 weeks] ran out and the benefit checks stopped coming, the choice would be to go back to school and then work where there is a job, any job, anywhere or become homeless unless a friend or family member is willing to support you.

However, taking jobs away from illegal immigrants and giving them to unemployed American citizens is not why I’m writing this series. I wanted to know why Americans spurn jobs millions of illegal immigrants are paid to work at in the US.

Continued on November 18, 2011 in America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on November 17, 2011 in Education, family values, Parenting, Public School

 

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Substitute Teaching is not a “Tea Party”

05 Nov

During the 1976-77 school year, I subbed daily in a half-dozen school districts during the first semester.

Substitute teaching is not easy.

Whoever called first at five in the morning — that would be the school district where I taught.

I taught in Arcadia, Monrovia, San Dimas, Rowland and a few other Southern California school districts I’ve forgotten. Most of the time, I worked in Rowland Unified in La Puente, where I interned the previous year.

When some of the teachers in Rowland knew they were going to be out, they requested me in advance and my calendar quickly filled up.

After the Winter Break, I was called to sub at Romier Elementary for a fifth-grade class.


Watch the video and discover what it is like from another substitute teacher more than thirty years later.

The teacher had a heart attack and was in the hospital. Two weeks later, the principal offered me a long-term position for the rest of the year when the regular teacher died.

I consider that fifth-grade class as the one from Dante’s Inferno, and I worried that this would end in me losing my teaching credential while landing in jail for murder and mayhem.

I asked, “Why me?”

After all, there were many substitute teachers with more experience. This was my first year. However, I needed the job.

That’s when I learned that I had been the thirteenth substitute teacher for that class — not a good omen. The other twelve left after the first day and refused to return.

However, I survived two weeks and discovered why the regular teacher probably had his heart attack and died — a rather drastic way to escape those kids.  He should have quit or retired.

In addition, I knew why I had survived — a combat tour in Vietnam as a United States Marine had prepared me for this teaching job.


This video shows a substitute teacher that lost control. With students like these, I cannot blame her. Do you know that half of new teachers quit within three years and never return to education? This is one example that explains why.

That fifth-grade class had thirty students in it. Half the boys were hyperactive, which probably isn’t the politically correct term to call them but too bad since over the years, political correctness has become a language bully.

One boy, James, would attack anyone that stared at him for more than a few seconds. It didn’t matter if the student staring at him was a girl or a boy. He jumped the other students and his fists started flying.

James should have been America’s secret weapon in Vietnam.

Another example why it is so challenging to teach in America’s public schools may be found at Narcissism at its Best.

As a substitute teacher, it would have been nice to have a black belt in judo or karate. I knew one sub that did, and he started every a class with a demonstration of his skills to tame the wild beasts.

Once the class from Dante’s Inferno was mine, I moved the desks around to create a better arrangement for controlling the hyperactive gang.

I moved the teacher’s desk and placed two bookshelves behind it to form a space in a corner large enough to hold one desk so no one could make eye contact with James.


Another recent substitute experience.

The problem was, James wouldn’t sit still, and I had to keep my sonar turned on. When I sensed he was moving, I’d throw my arm up as if it were one of those arms at a railroad crossing to keep James from getting out and causing a train wreck with the other students he attacked.

At times, when it was too quiet in that cubbyhole hemmed in with bookshelves, I’d discover James on top of his desk spinning on his head like a top with his feet in the air.

If I saw any child from that wild bunch lifting a fanny off a chair, I’d fling myself across the room twisting my face into a Marine Corps drill sergeant‘s evil, killer mask.

“Don’t move another inch,” I’d say in a menacing tone that threatened bodily harm. There was never a dull moment. It was in that class that I perfected the killer sociopathic stare that would serve me well until 2005 when I was paroled from the classroom after thirty years.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

  Note: This revised and edited post first appeared as a three part series on January 31, 2010 in Substitute Teaching is not a “Tea Party” – Part 1

 
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Posted by on November 5, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, Public School, student behavior, substitute teaching

 

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Blind, Deaf, and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail — Part 4/4

30 Oct

Since so many Hispanic/Latinos and African-Americans live in poverty, you may believe poverty is the problem, and the facts support this progressive politically correct opinion. After all, in 2010, the National Poverty Center reported, “27.4% of blacks and 26.6% of Hispanics/Latinos were poor, compared to 9.9% of non-Hispanic whites [caucasions] and 12.1% of Asians.”

If you support  this “politically correct” opinion, think again as we visit one “tiny” rural Kansas school district.

Liz Goodwin writes in The Lookout, “The average student at the Waconda school district of 385 kids scores better than 90 percent of students in 20 developed countries on math and reading tests, according to The Global Report Card, published in the journal Education Next.

In Waconda school district, “Most of the students are white, and no kids need English language learning classes.”

However, 65% of these white students qualify for free or reduced federal lunches, which is an indication that they live in poverty.

The formula for success in the Kansas Waconda school district is that “almost every parent shows up for parent-teacher conferences at the elementary school level and participation stays high in the older grades as well.

[Note—the public school where I taught (1975 - 2005) always had more than 70% Hispanic/Latino students, and less than 10% of parents came to parent-teacher conferences annually]

In addition, the district keeps its pre-kindergarten to third grade classes “very” small so the teachers may deal with a lot of problems quickly and early in child development.

A third difference is that the district keeps an assessment card of each student and that card follows the child from grade to grade. The card lists skills the state expects each child to master in each subject and teachers update the cards continuously.

Another factor is that this small Kansas district does not follow education trends. “We don’t believe in the next biggest thing or the next biggest theory,” the superintendent, Jeff Travis, said, “We’ve not made any major changes.”

[Note: the public schools where I taught in Southern California implemented many of the biggest theories and these education trends often made my job as a teacher more difficult and the situation worse]

In conclusion, according to Robert Weissberg, “Regardless of geography, everybody, white, black, and brown, knows what a bad school is — a school dominated by poor black and Hispanic students.”

However, it doesn’t matter if one is an American conservative, moderate or liberal, few muster the courage to speak this truth even when that truth is supported with solid facts.

Return to Blind, Deaf and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail – Part 3 or start with Part 1

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on October 30, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, media, Parenting, politics, Public School

 

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