HARRISBURG — State lawmakers are seeking ways to compensate children sent to detention centers by a pair of Luzerne County judges charged with taking kickbacks for sending juvenile defendants to facilities in Luzerne and Butler counties.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Stewart Greenleaf said yesterday he would hold a hearing to find ways to help the children and their families. One option is to provide money from the crime victims compensation fund, said Mr. Greenleaf, R-Montgomery.

The hearing, which has not yet been scheduled, is at the request of Republican Sens. Lisa Baker and John Gordner, whose districts include parts of Luzerne County.

They made the request yesterday, the same day a third Luzerne County court official was arrested in the ongoing corruption probe.

Court Administrator William T. Sharkey Sr., 57, of West Hazelton, yesterday agreed to plead guilty to embezzling more than $70,000 in illegal gambling money seized by authorities between June 1998 and June 2008.

Two other county court officials were charged last week with fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud.

Judge Mark A. Ciavarella and former Senior Judge Michael T. Conahan are accused of taking $2.6 million for sending children to two facilities owned by Pittsburgh businessman Greg Zappala.

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During the school year, young people should be in class. But truancy has become such a problem, the Dallas City Council is considering expanding its current child and teen curfew to include the daytime.

Currently, teens under 17 years old can’t be out past 11 p.m. during the week and midnight on weekends.

“For me, it’s like the night time curfew is enough for me,” Kristle Castaneda agrues. “It (a change) wouldn’t be reasonable at all.”

Annette Offord, a 10th grader who was not in class during the day Tuesday, doesn’t like it, either.

She says she’s not in because she was trying to get enrolled at another school.

City officials hope the tighter policy will curb truancy, which Mayor Pro Tem Dr. Elba Garcia says has been linked to residential burglaries.

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Sarah-Kate
Times Online
February 1, 2009

Couples who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an unbearable burden on the environment, the government’s green adviser has warned. 

Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming. He says political leaders and green campaigners should stop dodging the issue of environmental harm caused by an expanding population.

A report by the commission, to be published next month, will say that governments must reduce population growth through better family planning.

“I am unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate and how many children they think are appropriate,” Porritt said.

“I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible. It is the ghost at the table. We have all these big issues that everybody is looking at and then you don’t really hear anyone say the “p” word.”

The Optimum Population Trust, a campaign group of which Porritt is a patron, says each baby born in Britain will, during his or her lifetime, burn carbon roughly equivalent to 2½ acres of old-growth oak woodland - an area the size of Trafalgar Square.

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  Giant images of president projected onto classroom walls disturb kids, parents Steve Watson Infowars.net Wednesday, Jan 28th, 2009

Several disturbing stories have come to our attention over the past weeks and days that further highlight how sections of the American population have elevated Barack Obama to a dangerously inflated “messianic” status normally only associated with Royalty or totalitarian leaders.

What makes the following accounts so much more insidious, however, is that they all involve children.

Perhaps the most insidious is to be found on the Tree of Liberty forum where a concerned parent from Las Vegas reveals that his 1st grader son has complained of having to pledge allegiance every day at school to a huge projected image of the new president.

The post reads:

My son, who is in 1st grade, came home yesterday saying that he didn’t want to go back to school anymore. So I asked him why? He said that during the Pledge of Allegiance the teacher put up a large image of Obama next to the flag. I asked him if he was sure of this and I suggested to him that maybe the teacher just put up an 8×10 photo of the president. He said, “No, it is a large picture of Obama and when we are done Ms. **** turns off the image.” I also asked if they did this for Bush last year? He again said, “No.” This was my sons first day back to school since before Christmas, he was on a 5 week track break.

My wife volunteers a couple of days each week with helping out with my sons teacher doing various duties. She said that she would come in early this morning to see what was going on. She just got back and reported that this was true and then some. She said she waited out in the pod area and could see inside 3 of the 5 class rooms in this section of school. She said that when the kids stand each teacher flips on the classroom overhead and a full body image of Obama, with six U.S. flags behind him, comes up about 4 feet away from the flag that hangs on the wall. She said that the image has Obama staring straight at you with no facial expressions, just a serious look. I asked my wife if Obama had his hand over his heart? She said that she was so taken aback by this that she didn’t see it. What is worse is she said that all of the kids in each class faced Obama instead of the flag that hangs in the corner. What the heck is going on? Guys and gals, I need some advise on how to approach this. I can be somewhat hot headed so I need to plan accordingly with what to say to the principal when we go in to inquire about this. I am sure I will be brushed off so what is my next step? Obviously it will be the school district but then who? ACLU, Veteran groups, Christian groups? Who would be interested in this vile activity? This is happening in the Clark County School District here in Las Vegas, Henderson area.

(Article continues below) Anyone in their right mind will realize that Americans are not supposed to “pledge allegiance” or “service” to a president. The U.S. Constitution, that piece of paper that Obama clumsily swore to defend and protect, states quite clearly that elected representatives are supposed to act in “service” of the people’s best interests, not the other way around. Imagine the outcry that would have ensued if it had been revealed that huge images of George W Bush were being projected onto the walls of schools every day during his presidency. Indeed, a similar incident in 2006 did cause waves of consternation when video emerged of children at a so called “Jesus Camp” being asked to worship a life size cutout of Bush. Seemingly, now that Obama is president this activity is not restricted to “wacky” religious gatherings and is becoming commonplace throughout schools in America. Another concerned parent relates a similar story on our own PrisonPlanet forum:

I live in Toledo, Ohio & my 3 kids (16, 13 &10) had to watch the inauguration & ceremony in our Toledo Public Schools. My 13 year old daughter is supposed to write a letter to President Obama & my 10 year old is supposed to write 5 facts & 5 opinions on President Obama. what do i tell them so i dont get CSB called on me?

Given that he has been described as the “global leader”, it is quite apt that Obama worship is apparently not restricted to U.S. schools. Two weeks ago the Toronto Star reported on how Rowntree Public School now has its own “Obama curriculum” complete with a theme song that “blasts” out the following lyrics from speakers in the school every day:

“Building blocks of a new vow/ A million stops and a new route …”

Children are asked to complete “Obama video worksheets” while learning all about the president’s life, but apparently not what his policies are or even what party he represents. As part of the curriculum the students were asked to write a letter to the president, which is also featured in the article (see opposite). The final paragraph states “You are the best because you are the first African American president in the United States of America!” and the children end by promising that they will “always remember your slogan, ‘Yes we can!’”. The “Obama curriculum” is clearly not an isolated phenomenon. We have also recently reported on how one teacher has suggested removing from school curriculums all classic novels that explore racial prejudice in society, purely because Obama is now president. When added to the footage of glassy eyed children singing beautiful melodic songs about Obama (see below) and the now infamous footage of the Obama youth brigade children blindly reciting what their elders have told them to, these stories add up to a disturbing overall trend.   The youth brigades of Nazi Germany and the former Soviet Union are obviously an extreme form of this kind of blind indoctrination, however they were more like scout organizations, their doctrines were never openly instituted in schools! Perhaps even more disturbing is that there is no significant authoritative pressure pushing this kind of activity in schools. Clearly the teachers instigating the activities in the incidents related above are doing so of their own will, the phenomenon is a cultural one. The fervor with which Obama is being received by portions of the American public is reaching a frightening level. It has come to the point where the new president is literally being hailed as the anointed savior of humanity. We have flocks of celebrities encouraging Americans to “pledge service” to Obama, a disturbing notion given the fact that Obama has promised to found a “national civilian security force” and institute forms of compulsory community service for all Americans. It is one thing for naive adults to buy into such groupthink, but to also subject young children to this, a mentality akin to the desperate prole worship of Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984, is profoundly foreboding for any so called free society.

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Alex Jones’ The Obama Deception — Coming March 15 Alex Jones The Obama Deception will be the first hard-hitting film to expose Obama, his agenda & handlers cutting through all the media hype, side-issues and Left/Right rhetoric. Alex has made several films exposing the Bush agenda and will approach the Obama Administrations plans from the same non-partisan point of view looking past the frontman in the White House to the real owners on Wall Street, in the Bilderberg group and at the Federal Reserve. Please help spread the word about this powerful new film. Make sure everyone you know whether they claim to be a Democrat, Republican, independent or none of the above sees this film before it is too late. The Obama Deception hits DVD on March 15.

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OCEANSIDE, Calif. – John Corcoran graduated from college and taught high school for 17 years without being able to read, write or spell. 

Corcoran’s life of secrecy started at a young age. He said his teachers moved him up from grade to grade. Often placed in what he calls the “dumb row,” the images of his tribulations in the classroom are still vividly clear. 

“I can remember when I was eight years old saying my prayers at night saying, ‘please, God, tomorrow when it’s my turn to read please let me read.’ You just pretend that you are invisible and when the teacher says, ‘Johnnie read,’ you just wait the teacher out because you know the teacher has to go away at some point,” said Corcoran.

Corcoran eventually started acting up to hide his illiteracy. From fifth through seventh grade he was expelled, suspended and spent most of his days at the principal’s office. 

The former teacher said he came from a loving family that always supported him. 

“My parents came to school and it no longer was a problem for me reading because this boy Johnnie — the native alien, I call him — he didn’t have a reading problem as far as the teachers were concerned. He had an emotional problem. He had a psychological problem. He had a behavioral problem,” said Corcoran. 

Corcoran later attended Palo Verde High School in Blythe, Calif. He cheated his way through high school, receiving his diploma in June 1956. 

“When I was a child I was just sort of just moved along. When I got to high school I wanted to participate in athletics. At that time in high school I went underground. I decided to behave myself and do what it took. I started cheating by turning in other peoples’ paper, dated the valedictorian and ran around with college prep kids,” said Corcoran. 

“I couldn’t read words but I could read the system and I could read people,” adds Corcoran. 

He stole tests and persuaded friends to complete his assignments. Corcoran earned an athletic scholarship to Texas Western College. He said his cheating intensified, claiming he cheated in every class. 

“I passed a bluebook out the window to a friend I painstakingly copied four essay questions off the board in U.S. government class that was required, and hoped my friend would get it back to me with the right answers,” Corcoran said. 

In 1961, Corcoran graduated with a bachelor’s degree in education, while still illiterate he contends. He then went on to become a teacher during a teacher shortage. 

“When I graduated from the university, the school district in El Paso, where I went to school, gave almost all the college education graduates a job,” said Corcoran.

Rest Of Article

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Google: Graduated But Not Literate

It’s hardly shocking that a new federal report on adult literacy finds that the more formal education Americans have, the better they do on tests that measure practical literacy. “The National Assessment of Adult Literacy,” released Thursday by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics, shows that citizens with a college education were significantly better able than their peers to understand and analyze the information they confront in their everyday lives. So, as Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, director of the Institute for Education Sciences, put it at a new conference Thursday: “Education works — that’s a good thing.”

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But at a time when colleges and universities are under the microscope and policy makers are increasingly seeking to measure the student “outcomes” that they are producing, the report is hardly a pat on the back for higher education.

Not only does it find that the average literacy of college educated Americans declined significantly from 1992 to 2003, but it also reveals that just 25 percent of college graduates — and only 31 percent of those with at least some graduate studies — scored high enough on the tests to be deemed “proficient” from a literacy standpoint, which the government defines as “using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.”

“This seems like another piece of hard evidence, a fairly clear indication, that the ‘value added’ that higher education gave to students didn’t improve, and maybe declined, over this period,” said Charles Miller, the former University of Texas regent who is heading the U.S. education secretary’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education. “You have the possibility of people going through schools, getting a piece of paper for sitting in class a certain amount, and we don’t know whether they’re getting what they need. This is a fair sign that there are some problems here.”

The report, which extrapolates its findings from a survey of 19,000 Americans aged 16 and up, aims to measure what the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, Mark Schneider, called “reading for purpose” — how well citizens can process information to do what’s necessary to work and live (sample questions are available here).

It assesses three types of literacy: “prose literacy,” which is the ability to comprehend continuous texts, like newspaper articles and the brochure that comes with a new microwave; “document literacy,” the ability to understand and use documents to perform tasks, like reading a map or prescription labels; and “quantitative literacy,” which are the skills needed to do things like balancing a checkbook or calculating the interest on a loan from an advertisement.

Based on their scores, participants in the survey were deemed to have “basic,” “intermediate” or “proficient” literacy (Whitehurst noted that a National Research Council committee that recommended the literacy levels initially called the highest level “advanced,” but that department officials ultimately concluded that the skills required for that category — comparing viewpoints in two editorials, for instance, or calculating the cost per ounce of different grocery items — weren’t really all that advanced.)

Over all, the average prose and document literacy scores for Americans were basically flat between 1992 and 2003, though the scores on quantitative literacy rose from an average of 275 to 283, out of a maximum of 500. The scores of women rose in two of the three categories (document and quantitative literacy) over that period, while those for men fell in two of the three (rising only in quantitative). Scores for black Americans rose, while those for Hispanics declined.

Scores rose as one moved up in educational attainment, as the table below, examining prose literacy, shows. But the table also shows that scores fell from 1992 to 2003 for virtually every educational level, and the declines were steepest, by and large, the further up the ladder one moved. The contrast was even steeper in the realm of document literacy. Scores declined by three points or less for those who had at most a high school degree, while the average document literacy score for college graduates dropped by 14 points, to 303 from 317, and by 17 points for those with some graduate education (to 311 from 328).

Average Prose Literacy Scores by Education Level, 1992 and 2003

As the raw scores have declined over time, so too have the proportions of the college educated who proved themselves “proficient” on the literacy tests, the study finds. Thirty-one percent of college graduates tested as proficient in prose literacy in 2003, down from 40 percent in 1992; the proportion of those proficient in document literacy were 25 percent in 2003 and 37 percent in 1992. For those with at least some graduate school, 31 percent were document literate in 2003, down from 45 percent in 1992.

Miller, Whitehurst and college officials offered a range of possible explanations for the numbers that all of them viewed as troubling. Several of them cited societal factors such as declining interest in reading and a culture that increasingly “takes as heroes people who dropped out of school in eighth grade and made a gazillion dollars,” as Ross Miller, director of programs at the American Association of Colleges and Universities, who said it was “hard not to be embarrassed by the data.”

Others noted that significantly more Americans are involved in higher education today than was the case a decade ago — 12 percent of the 2003 population were college graduates, compared to 10 percent in the 1992 study, for instance, an increase of about 4 million people — and most of that growth has come among populations that tend to be academically underprepared. “It doesn’t take a genius to look at the test scores that a lot of our urban schools produce to know something’s not quite right there,” said Ross Miller, though he made clear that he was not trying to transfer blame entirely to elementary and secondary schools.

He and other researchers agreed there was significantly more work to be done to determine whether (a) colleges are taking students who have been significantly underprepared by their previous schools, (b) the colleges are failing to catch those students up, or © both. The fact that Americans as a group are getting more formal education at higher levels “should have pushed up the levels of literacy in the country,” said Schneider of NCES. Why it has not, he said, “gives us pause.”

Like other commentators, Doug Hesse, a professor of English and head of the honors program at Illinois State University, who is active in the National Council of Teachers of English, has some theories. “This is exactly emblematic of what’s going on in our culture now,” he said, in that students (like most of us) are barraged with “flashes and bits of material” — “here’s a sound bit, here’s a sound bite, here’s a factoid” — and “not really much asked to use the information or analyze it in some way.”

Hesse also cited “sobering” data about the amount of time students spend on their studies. One study at Illinois State found that honors students were assigned an average of fewer than 50 pages of reading a week, and that two of five students acknowledged completing less than half of that work. “Students seem to spend a lot of time on Facebook, and when you think about the literate practices involved in Facebook, that’s probably not contributing a lot to the scores on something like this literacy test,” he said.

For Charles Miller, the head of the federal higher education commission, said it was impossible to know for sure whether the damning data in the literacy report necessarily mean that colleges are doing too little to prepare their graduates to think for themselves. But what seems evident, he said, is that colleges need to be able to measure how much they are contributing to students’ knowledge — which they can do only by more consistently testing what their graduates know and have learned.

“We don’t have a clue what they’re really learning if you don’t measure it,” he said.

— Doug Lederman

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