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Category Archives: American Public Schools

Modern-Day Witch Hunts and Vigilantes — the politically-correct Mob’s (sex) War against Teachers – Part 5/6

15 Apr

According to the New York Times (2009), “An analysis of census data on age difference in marriages showed that the number of marriages between women who are at least 5 or 10 years older than their spouses is still small, 5.4  percent (about 6.5 million people) and 1.3 percent (1.6 million), respectively. But both rates doubled between 1960 and 2007, according to Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College, who conducted the analysis.”

If these statistics are true, then why did the police conduct an investigation of James Hooker discovering that fourteen years ago, he may have had oral sex with a 17 year old (when he was 27)?  His accuser is 31 today.  The police must have done a lot of digging to come up with this alleged victim of statutory oral sexual rape, which may have been illegally consensual.

If the police are going to investigate one relationship between an older man and younger woman, why not investigate them all—why was James Hooker singled out? In the US, millions of older men are having intimate relationships with younger women.

If the alleged oral sex did take place, was Hooker married at the time?  Did he meet the 17 year old in a bar and did she have false ID?  Did he meet her at all and is this woman lieing because she wants to break up Hooker’s relationship with Powers and punish this man by sending him to jail because he doesn’t live by her moral standards?


Breezy – Directed by Clink Eastwood and starring William Holden and Kay Lenz

Directed by Clint Eastwood, this is the story of a May-December romance between divorced middle-aged Frank Harmon (William Holden) and ditzy teenager Breezy (Kay Lenz). Frank finds Breezy sleeping on his porch, and eventually a friendship develops that leads to an affair. All goes well until Frank’s friends put pressure on him, and he ends his relationship with Breezy. But, when a friend dies, Frank realizes how important Breezy is in his life. He apologizes, and they live happily ever after.

_______________________________

No matter what the verdict may be if this alleged crime goes to court, we will never know if this claim is true. What we do know is that Hooker has bad judgment, and he was a public school teacher. Falling in love with his former student before she graduated from high school and moving in with her was not a crime but it is turning out to be a nightmare for him and maybe many future teachers that fall in love with consensual adults that were once a student.

By the way, “alleged” means that Hooker has not been found guilty of what may have happened fourteen years ago. He claims he is innocent. In fact, if it is just his word against his accuser, how do we know the accusation is true?

In fact, if a judge and/or jury find Hooker guilty and send him to jail for twenty years to life, he may still be an innocent man. Innocent people are convicted of crimes all the time. The Innocent Project.org says that since the year 1989, two hundred and eighty nine convicted criminals serving prison sentences were found innocent due to DNA evidence… In addition, “False confessions and incriminating statements lead to wrongful convictions in approximately 25 percent of cases.”

In Hooker’s case, there is no DNA evidence—only the accusations of one 31 year old woman for something that may have happened 14 years ago.  Any expert of human memory can tell you that over time, our memories are not exact and accurate and often change. However, when tried in the court of public opinion, it doesn’t matter what the truth may be. What counts is the mob’s opinions.

Continued on April 16, 2012 in Part 6 of  the Mob’s War Against Teachers or return to Part 4

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

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Posted by on April 15, 2012 in American Public Schools, child abuse, family values, government, media, Parenting, politics, student behavior, Teaching

 

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Modern-Day Witch Hunts and Vigilantes — the politically-correct Mob’s (sex) War against Teachers – Part 4/6

14 Apr

The worldwide age of consent ranges from age 12 to 21.

The male-female age of consent to have sexual relationships in most of the United States is 16. In China—which is supposed to be a so-called brutal dictatorship that suppresses individual freedoms—the age of consent is 14 and in Taiwan it is 16.

However, in Angola the age of consent is 12/15, and in Argentina it is 13/16, which must mean when a woman starts having her period and is capable of having children between those ages, the age of consent applies. In Botswana the age of consent is 16 for girls and 14 for boys.

In fact, the most common age of consent around the globe is the age of 16—even in the United States where the age of consent ranges from 14 (one state, Arkansas) to 18, only seven of the fifty states have 18 as the age of consent. California is one of them.

In France, the age of consent is 15. In the UK it is 16. In Yemen there is no age of consent but the couple must be married to have sex. While it is legal for men to have sex with men and women to have sex with women in the US, there are many countries where this is illegal. Source: Avert.org, Age of Consent


“Harold and Maude” – 1971 cult classic movie – the sexual relationship between an 80 year old woman and a young man in his early 20s.

In the News: American Idol judge and superstar Jennifer Lopes (42) is dating a man that is age 25, and Chris Noth (57), the “Sex and the City” star,  married Tara Wilson age 30. When Noth started dating Wilson she was 20 and he was 47.

In 2010, Harrison Ford married Calista Flockhart. He was 67 and she was 45. Then there is Clint Eastwood, who has fathered at least seven children by five different women. Eastwood’s current wife is 35 years younger than he is.

James Hooker (age 41) and Jordan Powers (18), with 23 years between their ages, exercised poor judgment in acting before she graduated from high school. If the couple had waited a few more months until after she graduated from high school, the media uproar probably wouldn’t have happened and the politically correct mob led by Powers’ vengeful mother wouldn’t be supporting California’s Bill 1861whitch is threatening another American freedom that also discriminates against teachers.

Jordan Powers is not the first young woman to fall in love with an older man. In fact, younger men sometimes fall in love with older women.

Medicine Net.com says, “While no statistics are readily available, older man-younger woman couples have long existed and may be becoming more prevalent and more socially acceptable. In certain Hollywood and corporate circles, especially among financially successful men, the practice is so common that these younger women, usually second wives, have been given the disparaging nickname of ‘trophy wives’.”

However, MedicineNet.com was wrong. There are statistics.

Continued on April 15, 2012 in Part 5 of  the Mob’s War Against Teachers or return to Part 3

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

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Posted by on April 14, 2012 in American Public Schools, child abuse, family values, government, media, Parenting, politics, Public School, student behavior, Teaching

 

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Modern-Day Witch Hunts and Vigilantes — the politically-correct Mob’s (sex) War against Teachers – Part 3/6

13 Apr

According to About.com, eighteen is a magic birthday, a milestone into adulthood accompanied by great privileges as well as serious legal implications. At 18, a teen can vote, buy a house or wed his high school sweetheart (however, if Jordan Powers’ mother has her way, that list will not include former teachers). Once one is eighteen, he or she can also go to jail, get sued, gamble away his or her tuition via online poker, and make terrible stock market investments – just like anyone else that is the same age or older. That’s because an 18-year-old is considered an adult in nearly every state in the union (except for the mother of Jordan Powers).


Young Women – Older Men

To prove the fact that teachers are discriminated against, on Snopes.com message board you will discover comments that provide evidence of this double standard that has plagued teachers in the United States for more than a century.

It isn’t as bad as it was a century ago, but the discrimination against teachers still exists and may be getting worse.

For example at Snopes.com (find the link in a previous paragraph), you will read: “When my grandmother married my grandfather in 1928, she resigned her position because ‘married women could not teach school'” … “A schoolteacher must never be seen patronizing a tavern or ale house.” … “Some of the articles I dug up quoted people who maintained that they had female relatives who, as late as the 1950s, had to resign their teaching positions when they got married.” Source: Snopes.com

In fact, when I first started teaching in 1975, the Southern California school district where I worked did not allow dating between teachers that worked at the same school, and if two teachers working at the same school did marry, one of them had to transfer to another school in the district. Later, in the 1980s, that rule was abolished.


Older women looking for younger men.

In the first half of the 20th century, the Lewis Country Board of Education in West Virginia adopted the following policy: “That no married woman will be employed by the Board to teach during the school year 1934-35, and if it is discovered that any lady teacher was married at the time of her appointment or gets married at any time during the school term, her position will immediately be declared vacant.” Source: wvculture.org

These examples prove that America has always had a double standard where teachers are concerned, and it is obvious that James Hooker is a victim of this discrimination, which is similar to how many loving gay/lesbian couples are often treated by many mainstream, average Americans (according to the latest US Census data, about 132,000 same-sex couples are married in the United States, while 515,000 are unmarried but live together).

Continued on April 14, 2012 in Part 4 of  the Mob’s War Against Teachers or return to Part 2

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

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Posted by on April 13, 2012 in American Public Schools, child abuse, family values, government, media, Parenting, politics, Public School, student behavior, Teaching

 

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Modern-Day Witch Hunts and Vigilantes — the politically-correct Mob’s (sex) War against Teachers – Part 2/6

12 Apr

America’s Founding Fathers warned the American people about the dangers of the democratic mob when they created a republic (not a democracy), but we didn’t learn from them and allowed the United States to become a democracy early in the 20th century.

Now thanks to one furious mother that refuses to let her child have the freedom the law provides when a child becomes an adult at 18 years of age, California may join 23 other states where some may lose the freedom to fall in love with an older man or woman that is a former teacher.

Should falling in love with a consenting adult age 18 or older be a crime?

“Almost half of the world’s prisoners are in the United States (2.29 million), China (1.65 million sentenced prisoners), or Russia (0.81 million) – countries which account for just over a quarter of the world’s population…” Source: Prison Studies.org

The US is listed as # ONE with 743 prisoners per 100,000 people, the Russian Federation is # FIVE with 534 prisoners per 100,000 and China is # 117 with 122 prisoners per 100,000. Source: List of Countries by Incarceration Rate – Wiki

Since America is a country that often loudly announces it is the ‘land of the free’, being number one in this category should be an embarrassment casting a serious doubt on this claim.

It isn’t as if older men having relationships with a younger woman is anything new. These types of relationships may be rare compared to the average, but there are individuals that do find love with an older partner and it works.

How is this different from a relationship between two consenting adult gay men or women?

However, if Kristin Olsen’s Bill 1861 becomes law in California, 18-year-old high school girls or boys may still fall in love with any other older man or woman—no matter how old—as long as he or she isn’t a teacher.

If California joins the states that have removed this freedom of choice for legal consenting adults, 24 states may then send teachers to jail just because he or she had the audacity to fall in love (or lust) with a consenting 18 or older adult that was once a student.

I know of one teacher that worked at the same high school where I taught for almost twenty years. He married his wife soon after she graduated from that same high school.  He was in his late twenties when she was his student and they started dating the following year, with the parents’ consent (the parents also acted as chaperones—the two never went on a date alone), when she was sixteen. That was in the 1980s, and that couple has had several children and are still happily married almost thirty years later. In fact, that older teacher wanted his younger wife to stay at home and raise the kids so he worked other job besides teaching to pay the bills. He sacrificed for the younger woman he loved.

In addition, I knew another teacher at the same high school that married a 19 year old former student that attended the same school, and when they married a year or more after the younger woman graduated, the teacher was in his 50s.  A few years later, that marriage ended in an amicable divorce. The older man even voluntarily requested that the judge make the alimony higher.

Isn’t that what we have divorce for? If we make a mistake and/or fall out of love with someone we married (no matter what age they are), we have the option of divorce. Being age 18 or over means we have the right to make mistakes and learn from them without a parent interfering by pushing for punitive laws that will send more people to prison.

Continued on April 13, 2012 in Part 3 of the Mob’s War against Teachers or return to Part 1

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”

 
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Posted by on April 12, 2012 in American Public Schools, child abuse, Education, family values, government, media, Parenting, politics, Public School, student behavior, Teaching

 

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Modern-Day Witch Hunts and Vigilantes — the politically-correct Mob’s (sex) War against Teachers – Part 1/6

11 Apr

When the media erupted in its usual ‘Yellow Journalism‘ fashion after James Hooker (age 41) quit his job as a public school teacher, and left his wife and children to shack up with former student Jordan Powers (18), my first thought was that he was going to be the victim of a witch hunt, because there is a double standard when it comes to teachers.

And I was right.

According to the law in California, 18 is the age of consent where one is considered responsible for his or her own decisions and actions in life.

For example, at 18, one may join the military and die for America.

That’s what I did after I graduated from high school, but I didn’t die. After Marine Corps boot camp, at the age of 19, I was sent to South Vietnam, where 58,269 American troops were killed in combat and 153,303 were wounded of the 2.6 million US troops that served there. The average age of a soldier in Vietnam was 19, and more than eleven thousand under the age of 20 were killed.

Why aren’t more mothers protesting this choice by their adult children?

For Powers, when she turned 18, instead of joining the Army or Marines to fight/die in Afghanistan or another foreign country, she chose to live with Hooker, her former teacher from an earlier school year. She dropped out of school and he quit/lost his job, which is what happens to most public school teachers that have an affair with a student that is age 18 or older. If the student is under age 18, the older teacher usually ends up in jail.

However, now a Republican California legislator by the name of Kristin Olsen has introduced Bill 1861 to make it a felony for a teacher to have a romance with a student, even if the student is over 18.

In fact, Mercury News.com reported, “Power’s mother … continues to lobby for a bill introduced by Modesto Assemblywoman Kristin Olsen that would make it a crime for high school teachers to date students of any age.”

In addition, there are currently 23 states that make it a felony for a teacher to date a high school student even if the student is 18 or older.

No wonder America has more people in prison than any other country in the world. If California’s Bill 1861 becomes a law, it will focus only on teachers. This means if Powers moved in with a 41 year-old fireman, policeman, used car salesman, lawyer, doctor or a corporate CEO, while she was still a senior in high school, that would be legal.

If Bill 1861 passes in the state legislature, an eighteen-year-old high school student such as Powers may have a boyfriend age 18 or older, and change them daily as long as the man isn’t a public school teacher.

By focusing on teachers, Bill 1861 is discriminatory. Leaving his wife and children at age 41 and giving up his job to live with an 18 year old might be poor judgment on Hooker’s part, but it is not illegal and never should be no matter the opinions of mothers or others.

In fact, The Economist published a piece on this topic called Rough Justice in America—Too many laws, too many prisoners. Never in the civilized world have so many been locked up for so little.

The Economist reported, “Justice is harsher in America than in any other rich country… America incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany and 12 times more than Japan… Half the states have laws that lock up habitual offenders for life. In some states this applies only to violent criminals, but in others it applies even to petty ones. Some 3,700 people who committed neither violent nor serious crimes are serving life sentences under California’s ‘three strikes and you’re out’ law.”

Currently in California, a teacher can only be charged with a felony for engaging in a relationship with a student who is under 18 years of age.

Did you know that 60% of public school teachers leave the profession in the first five years and never return?  If California’s Bill 1861 becomes a law, that will be one more reason to stay away from the classroom because too many laws makes it a very risky profession—anger a student or a student’s mother, lose a job and possibly go to jail for a long time—all in the name of love with a consenting adult.

Continued on April 12, 2012 in Part 2 of the Mob’s War against Teachers

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”

 
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Posted by on April 11, 2012 in American Public Schools, child abuse, Education, family values, government, media, Parenting, politics, Public School, student behavior, Teaching

 

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The American Teacher “is not” Waiting for Superman – Part 2/2

02 Apr

The documentary, “Waiting for Superman”, on the other hand, argued that non-unionized charter schools would do a better job, and the public schools were failing the nation due to teacher unions protecting incompetent teachers.

However, according to Dona Goldstein writing for Slate, “Only 17 percent of charters are consistently better than traditional public schools at raising students’ math and reading scores.”

In fact, it helps to know who funded “Waiting for Superman” and the small fortune that promoted the film.

To discover that answer, Alan Singer, writing for Huffington Post, says, “The real question for me is where the money came from to make the pseudo-documentary and who is paying to promote a movie that no one apparently wants to see. The answer, of course, is from “Big Bill” Gates and a gaggle of hedge fund investors who smell mega-profits if government financed private for profit McSchools are allowed to muscle in on public school dollars.

“The film is executive produced and financed by Participant Media, which was founded by former eBayist Jeffrey Skoll.

“Participant Media’s current CEO is Jim Berk. When Berk was Chairman and CEO of Gryphon Colleges Corporation, he was responsible for the formation of a private company operating for-profit schools…

“The Denver-based Charter School Growth Fund, a nonprofit venture capital fund, recently announced it had secured $80 million in initial commitments with big donations coming from among others the Walton Family Foundation. Wal-Mart is also a big supporter of the Waiting for “Superman” social action campaign and seems primed to provide us with Wal-Mart Academies modeled on big box stores that destroy communities and small businesses, drive down wages, and provide us with endless quantities of junk.”


– a Conversation on “Waiting for Superman” held at Stanford University –

In addition, Dana Goldstein, writing for The Nation, says, “Here’s what you don’t see in “Waiting for Superman”:

“You don’t see teen moms, households without an adult English speaker or headed by a drug addict, or any of the millions of children who never have a chance to enter a charter school lottery (or get help with their homework or a nice breakfast) because adults simply aren’t engaged in their education. These children, of course, are often the ones who are most difficult to educate, and the ones neighborhood public schools can’t turn away.”

“You also don’t learn that in the Finnish education system, much cited in the film as the best in the world, teachers are—gasp!—unionized and granted tenure, and families benefit from a cradle-to-grave social welfare system that includes universal daycare, preschool and healthcare, all of which are proven to help children achieve better results at school.”

Note from Blog host: America’s public school teachers are expected to create miracles as if they have super powers by overcoming many almost impossible obstacles and when they don’t, they are often crucified by public education’s enemies and critics.

I know what I am talking about because I worked as a public school teacher in Southern California for thirty years and my average work week was sixty to hundred hours a week and the challenges that I faced daily were daunting to say the least.

What is a teacher to do when parents do not supervise homework at home or provide reading time?  In fact, over the years, I heard parents tell their child that if the child didn’t want to do the work the teacher assigned, they didn’t have to.

Conspiracy theories abound but in the case of America’s schools, the war being waged on teachers and their unions and the accusations that the reason the average America’s school child is mediocre is the fault of incompetent teachers that cannot be fired has all the earmarks of a conspiracy of dunces based on lies and myths that have no foundation in truth/facts.

Where is the evidence that there are so many failing teachers that it is the reason America’s students are not measuring up?  There is none.  Although there are incompetent teachers in the public schools (I knew a few – less than 5 out of hundreds), there are not enough of them.

Return to The American Teacher “is not” Waiting for Superman – Part 1

____________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

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Posted by on April 2, 2012 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, Parenting, politics, Public School, Teaching

 

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The American Teacher “is not” Waiting for Superman – Part 1/2

01 Apr

The documentary “American Teacher” focused on the low pay of teachers when compared to their peers working in the private sector with similar educational backgrounds, and the back breaking demands on most teachers (working an average 60 hours or more a week – for example, I often worked a 100 hour week often starting at 6AM when the gates to the school were unlocked and staying as late as 11:00 PM when the alarms were turned on and the gates locked).

While the film was not perfect because it didn’t mention the role of parents and other pressures teachers face, it offered a more realistic view of education in America than “Waiting for Superman” did.

Points made that many of the critical reviews of this documentary ignored were:

1. 46 percent of public school teachers leave the profession within the first five years of being in the classroom.

2. Salaries and stress are among the top reasons teachers say they leave.

3. 62 percent of our nation’s teachers must have second jobs outside of the classroom-like tutoring, mowing lawns, selling stereos, or bartending—to be able to afford to teach.

From a few positive reviews of “American Teacher” —

Mark Phillips of the Washington Post said, “A film about education that gets it exactly right… Powerful and compelling. Every policymaker should be required to see American Teacher”

Joe Neumaier of the New York Daily News said, “This heartbreaking and essential look into the lives of those who put so much into educating other people’s children ought to be seen by everyone concerned about the fate of the public school system, and the nation as a whole.” – “Sobering and powerful.” – Ernest Hardy, Village Voice

Neil Genzlinger of The New York Times said, “A heartfelt, bittersweet portrait.”

Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times said, “As we watch the individuals in American Teacher struggle with the burdens of the system places on them, it’s hard not to feel like crying, both for them…and our national culture.”

Note: I also spent thousands of dollars for educational materials over the years that I taught, and for a few years, I also worked a second job to pay the bills in addition to working summers in jobs such as construction, since I wasn’t paid as a teacher during the ten weeks of the summer break.

Continued on April 2, 2012 in The American Teacher “is not” Waiting for Superman – Part 2

____________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

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Posted by on April 1, 2012 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, Parenting, politics, Public School, Standardized Testing, Teaching

 

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What the Numbers say about Creating Jobs in America – Part 4/4

02 Mar

The first thing to learn is that the “tax cuts under President G. W. Bush did not spur investment.

“Job growth during the Bush years was one-seventh that of the Clinton years. Nixon and Ford did better than Bush on jobs. Wages fell during the last administration (Bush’s last four years in office). Average incomes fell. The number of Americans in poverty, as officially measured, hit a 16-year high last year of 43.6 million, though a National Academy of Sciences study says that the real poverty figure is closer to 51 million. Food banks are swamped. Foreclosure signs are everywhere. Americans and their governments are drowning in debt.” Source: Tax.com

Meanwhile, the GOP and their supporters such as conservative talk radio hosts like Dennis Prager continue to repeat the myth and the lie that increasing taxes on the wealthiest American will cause job losses in the United States.

To discover the truth, one must learn where the wealthiest Americans put their money.

Professor G. William Domhoff of UC Santa Cruz says, “In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers)… However, for purposes of studying the wealth distribution, economists define wealth in terms of marketable assets, such as real estate, stocks, and bonds.” Source: Who Rules America?

Since when did investments in real estate, stocks and bonds create jobs? To create a job, a product must be produced and people  must buy that product be it dinner at a local restaurant, clothing at a retail store such as Target or Costco, gasoline to fill a car’s tank, buying groceries so families may eat, buying laptops, iPads, flat screen TVs, DVDs, taking vacations, etc.

In fact, capital investment for new and improved products and services that creates jobs mostly comes from the profits of established businesses and large corporations with money to reinvest. Development money represented about 30% of the economy while 70% of the driving force of economic growth comes from consumer spending, which means when retired teachers spend their monthly check from retirement funds such as CalSTRS, they are supporting and creating jobs.

At 6:02 PM on February 26, 2012, the U.S. Census Bureau’s U.S. & World Population Clocks reported that the U.S. population was 313,087,369 people.

The wealthiest one percent of Americans equals 3.1 million people that control 34.6% of the nation’s privately held wealth, which is mostly invested in real estate, stocks and bonds. The next 19% (59.5 million people) has 50.5% of the wealth.  That leaves 250 million people with 15% of the wealth supporting most of the jobs in the United States.

After all, who buys more gasoline, drives more cars, eats more food, takes more medication, wears more clothes, uses more electricity and natural gas for heating and cooling homes, watches more TVs, uses more computers, logs onto the Internet in larger numbers, etc?

SELECT ONE ANSWER

A. The wealthy 1% equaling 3.1 million people

B. The next wealthiest 19% equaling 59.5 million people

C. The 250 million people earning and spending 15% of the total wealth in America

Remember, individuals and families do not become wealthy spending money on consumer items. Wealth is invested and saved and sits somewhere growing more wealth. Most jobs are created by people that spend money on consumer items.

The fact is that retired public and private sector workers do more to support and create jobs than the one percent of America’s wealthiest that gained the most tax breaks under President G. W. Bush and are still benefiting from those tax cuts.

Did you you know that there are more than 27 million small businesses in the US and that between 60 and 80% of all new jobs created in America can be attributed to small businesses. Source: Get Busy Media.com

However, where did the money come from to start those small businesses? It wasn’t from the wealthy with their money invested in real estate, stocks and bonds.

In fact, in an average ten-year period, 71% of small businesses fail (more than 50% fail in the first five years). Knowing that fact, do you believe the wealthy 1% will invest money in such risky ventures, which explains why the wealthy invests their money in real estate, stocks and bonds—not small businesses with a high risk of failure. Source: Small Biz Trends.com

In fact, Peter Delevett writing for Silicon Valley.com reported, “The trends suggest venture firms are increasingly shying away from companies in the “seed” stage of life. During the second quarter of 2010, for instance, the U.S. venture industry’s average seed investment was $6.8 million, according to the National Venture Capital Association. The following quarter, that number had fallen to $3.5 million.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says, “Job openings result from the relationship between the population, labor force, and demand for goods and services… In addition, changes in the demand for goods and services influence which industries expand or contract. Industries respond by hiring the workers necessary to produce goods and provide services.”

It is also worth noting “that President Obama and Democrats created more jobs in 2012 than George W. Bush did in his eight year reign of economic malfeasance.” Source: Politicus USA.com

Therefore, it is a myth, a lie, that keeping taxes low for the richest Americans creates jobs. Instead, those that have regular jobs and retired Americans are the ones that support and create jobs by spending most or all of what they earn.

In addition, according to seven recent experiments, “The ‘upper class,’ as defined by the study, were more likely to break the law while driving, take candy from children, lie in negotiation, cheat to increase their odds of winning a prize and endorse unethical behavior at work, researchers reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Source: Elizabeth Lopatto writing for Bloomberg

If these seven studies are true, why do we reward the wealthiest one to twenty percent with lower taxes when, at most, they only support 100,000 jobs, which is due to consumer spending—not job creation. In fact, the wealthy tend to hoard money while the rest of us spend it on food, clothing, gasoline, etc.

Return to What the Numbers say about Creating Jobs in America – 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 March 2, 2012 in American Public Schools, Education, government, media, politics, Public School

 

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What the Numbers say about Creating Jobs in America – Part 3/4

01 Mar

My goal in Part Two was to show what caused the national debt, why it keeps growing larger and who bears the most responsibility of that debt.

Now I will return to the CalSTRS “Retired Educator Winter 2012” newsletter, which said, “Statewide, CalSTRS benefit recipients (I’m one of them, and there are more than 200,000) received $6.03 billion in payments in 2006.  The economic ripple effect in the form of job creation as those benefits were spent totaled $9.22 billion, according to a 2007 study by the Applied Research Center at California State University, Sacramento.”

None of this was borrowed money. Educators paid a percentage of their gross earnings into CalSTRS during their working years as I did. This money was invested and earned interest, which was more than $30 billion for 2011. This money does not contribute to the national debt.

In fact, California’s economy gained $6.71 for every single dollar committed to pensions by employees, employers and taxpayers and each dollar also generated 44 cents in government revenues.

Furthermore, according to the Pensionomics: Measuring the Economic Impact of State and Local Pension Plans, these pensions support 2.5 million jobs and $358.6 billion in economic activity.


Does this sound as if the wealthy are funding the start up of small businesses?

For example, in 2006 in California, 976,233 state residents received a total of $23.52 billion in pension benefits from state and local pension plans… The average pension benefit received was $2,008 per month or $24,097 per year… Retiree expenditures stemming from state and local pension plan benefits supported 205,221 jobs in the state. The total income to state residents supported by pension expenditures was $15.1 billion.”  Source: Pensionomics – National Institute on Retirement Security (and this was just public sector pensions)

Then, according to Retirement USA, one in five private-sector workers is covered by a traditional pension while 55% of people 65 or older rely on Social Security for half or more of their income—the median income for older households with Social Security and pension and annuity income was $32,105 in 2008, not including earnings from work.

In addition, CalSTRS ended 2011 with net assets of $155.34 billion and that money isn’t sitting around gathering dust. Those billions are invested and earning money. To earn money off those investments, means someone else made money too and this generated jobs.

The CalSTRS newsletter says 53% of those billions were invested in Global Equities, which is a category of mutual funds in which investments may be made in stocks of corporations throughout the world. A portion of the fund’s assets are usually committed to American markets, although the major portions are held in equities of developing countries

In addition, 17.6% of CalSTRS funds were in Fixed Income accounts, 14.8% in Private Equities, 12.1% in Real Estate, etc.  When CalSTRS earns money from those investments, that means those investments also earned money for businesses and created jobs for Americans and for the citizens of other countries depending on where the money was invested.

However, where do the wealthy that benefited from the Bush tax cut keep most of their money?

Continued on March 2, 2012 in What the Numbers say about Creating Jobs in America – 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 March 1, 2012 in American Public Schools, government, media, politics, Public School

 

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What the Numbers say about Creating Jobs in America – Part 2/4

29 Feb

It is a tragedy how fast most Americans forget the root causes of the current financial challenges in America.

Three lawmakers, all Republicans, introduced the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act to the U.S. Senate.  During the debate in the House or Representatives, a democrat from Michigan argued that the bill would result in banks becoming “too big to fail” (sound familiar). At first, most democrats were against the bill but eventually, due to compromises, the effort of corporate lobbyists and deal making, many democrats were won over to vote for it.

Keep in mind that the Republicans won a majority position in both houses of Congress in the elections of 1994, and controlled both houses until 2006—except the Senate for most of 2001 and 2002, when the Democrats held the majority in that one House of Congress.

Therefore, in 1999, Republicans were the majority in both houses of congress. When the final Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act passed in the Senate, the vote was 90 to 8 (92%) and in the House 362 to 57 (86.3%)

Even if President Clinton had wanted to veto it, which he didn’t, he wouldn’t have succeeded since a two-thirds majority vote (66%) in both Houses of Congress is required to override a presidential veto. Since the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act arrived at the White House for President Clinton to sign with more than a two-thirds majority vote in favor, there wasn’t much he could have done if he had wanted to.

Then, during the Bush years (2001 – 2009), the United States launched three expensive wars: The Iraq War—based on false claims of Weapons of Mass Destruction—the war in Afghanistan, which was mostly neglected under Bush, and the global war on terrorism.

Due to these wars and the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the national debt exploded.

I’m sort of going off topic with this paragraph, but I saw “Act of Valor,” which is about the Navy Seals and the CIA fighting the global war on terror. I recommend “Act of Valor”. The acting may be a bit stiff but that is not the point. The realism makes this movie worth watching. This is no Rambo or Mission Impossible. “Act of Valor” is closer to the reality and what America’s Navy Seals face as they fight to protect America. Politicians and corporate lobbyists might be corrupt and greedy for power and money, but America’s men and women mostly from the working class serve in the military out of patriotism.

Back on topic—President G. W. Bush, with help from the GOP majority in both Houses of Congress, lowered taxes for the wealthiest Americans (the lowest rate in almost 80 years—the last time the rate was this low was before the Great Depression and experts say this contributed to that economic collapse).

On February 9, 2012, the official debt of the US government had reached $15.4 trillion—an increase of $5.9 trillion since President Obama moved into the White House. While the GOP blames Obama for that debt during an election year, we must not lose focus on how much Obama inherited when he was elected president.

According to the Huffington Post, lowering taxes for the wealthy costs the U.S. Treasure $11.6 million every hour.

Total, the cost of the Bush tax cut for the top 5% of income earners since 2001 is more than one trillion dollars, which is about $100 billion annually. Source: Cost of Tax Cuts.com

Interest from the national debt, which President Obama inherited from Presidents Reagan, H. W. Bush and G. W. Bush is about $400 billion annually. Source: US Debt Clock.org

On top of that $500 billion annually, the wars G. W. Bush started has cost more than $1.3 trillion since 2001—that’s another $130 billion. Source: Cost of War.com

However, the cost was more than just money. According to the Congressional Budget Office, since combat is being financed with borrowed money, the price tag for these wars is not over, and if Bush had not gone to war over false claims of weapons of mass destruction  in Iraq, 4,482 Americans would not have been killed; more than 32,000 would not have been wounded (medical care for these wounded combat veterans will costs hundreds of millions in the decades to come); about 114,000 Iraqi civilians would still be alive and Iraq has cost more than $800 billion so far.

In addition, CalSTRS probably would still be funded close to 100%, as it was in 2001, for future obligations to its 856,360 members, while the 429,600 active members paid about $3 billion dollars into the retirement fund in 2011—money taken from monthly paychecks of working educators.

Continued on March 1, 2012 in What the Numbers say about Creating Jobs in America – 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 February 29, 2012 in American Public Schools, government, media, politics, Public School

 

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