Posted on 03/23/2013 5:35:52 AM PDT by IbJensen
March 22, 2013 (American Life League) - An exemplary math and computer science teacher has been unjustly escorted out of Benson High School by police following a protracted battle with school officials about Planned Parenthood’s presence in the school and its association with his students.
(Bill Diss)
Bill Diss was notified on Tuesday after the last student left his class that he was being placed immediately on administrative leave “pending a recommendation to the superintendent that you be dismissed from your employment with Portland public schools for reasons that have been discussed with you.” The mild-mannered Mr. Diss told STOPP that he was given only a few minutes to gather his belongings before police escorted him out. He was ordered not to return to the Portland, Oregon, school where he has taught for 11 years.
Mr. Diss is an outstanding teacher, who recently was awarded certification and recognition as the only teacher in Oregon who is qualified to teach college level computer science to high school students for dual credit. He has taught at the college and high school level for a total of 18 years.
Planned Parenthood has been in pursuit of Mr. Diss since 2007 when he began organizing efforts to stop Planned Parenthood. A STOPP press release from February of 2009 noted that Planned Parenthood of Columbia Willamette wanted Bill Diss’ teaching license revoked. The press release quoted American Life League’s Jim Sedlak: “Bill has organized one of the most effective efforts against Planned Parenthood in the country. It’s no surprise Planned Parenthood will resort to anything—even going after his teaching license—in order to silence him.”
Bill was opposing, on his own time, outside of any school activities, the construction of a Planned Parenthood killing center in an African American neighborhood in Portland. The Planned Parenthood business was eventually built, and today targets minority women for abortions.
Planned Parenthood was unsuccessful in its revocation bid but, incredibly, a decree came from the school district that Bill could not indicate that he was a teacher at Benson or that he taught for the Portland schools when he was giving talks outside the school.
Things really started heating up again at the beginning of the 2012-2013 school year when Planned Parenthood of Columbia Willamette began to push its Teen Outreach Program (TOP) in partnership with Benson High School. The program is fueled by a multi-million dollar Obamacare teen pregnancy prevention grant, funneled through a coalition of Planned Parenthood affiliates. Benson High is located in the inner city, where sixty-two percent of the students qualify for free or reduced price lunches.
On September 17, 2012, Planned Parenthood operatives entered Mr. Diss’ classroom where he was tutoring students in basic math skills and other subjects. They expected to be given the floor to recruit students for the Teen Outreach Program. Because Mr. Diss had been notified that TOP representatives were coming to speak to the class and they produced ID showing they were from Planned Parenthood rather than TOP, Mr. Diss asked them to leave his classroom. They left, and a few moments later the principal and vice principal came to remove Mr. Diss from class.
The next day he was forced to sit through a Planned Parenthood presentation. “They were extremely aggressive in obtaining the children’s signatures by promising them all sorts of gifts and cash,” Bill said. Planned Parenthood filed a formal complaint against Mr. Diss with the school. You can read STOPP’s coverage about the events of that day and the TOP permission forms here.
Mr. Diss later discovered that the TOP permission form that was sent home the first day of school to Vietnamese-speaking parents used his name in a way that made it seem that he approved of the program. Mr. Diss’ attorney sent a notice to Planned Parenthood and Portland Public Schools complaining of defamation and demanding a retraction of information they sent to parents that indicated he approved of Planned Parenthood and the TOP program. He also noted harassment, emotional distress, and civil rights violations by the school in persecuting him and his Christian faith—all of which have been ongoing since the beginning of the school year. The school never issued a retraction.
Since then, Mr. Diss has received biweekly letters from the school, in effect nit-picking his teaching skills and accusing him of things like too much repetition in his mathematics classes, where he was told he could not teach the multiplication tables to math deficient students and could not review factoring. Students were allowed to withdraw from his classes because they did not want to do the extra work required to bring them up to speed in math. He has been through a dozen administrative hearings this year. Two weeks ago he was informed that his contract will not be renewed next year. When he was booted from the school on Tuesday, the only reason given was “for reasons already discussed.”
It is outrageous that Mr. Diss—an outstanding, well-loved teacher—has been totally trampled by this school district at the behest of Planned Parenthood because he cares deeply about the welfare of his students, and for exercising his First Amendment rights to speak out about the injustice of having Planned Parenthood in the community and in the classrooms. The TOP program he objects to even allows students to leave the campus after hours with Planned Parenthood employees.
Let us not forget, Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette is the same organization that is behind the disgusting video website Take Care Down There that features skits with such titles as “Horse Penis Virus,” “Bring your sister,” “I didn’t spew,” “Hot & heavy,” “Let me do me,” “Threesome,” and the “Down There Song.”
This is the influence that Mr. Diss is fighting. And this is what he has been harassed, and summarily dismissed, for fighting. If you are an Oregon resident who is concerned about this huge injustice, contact your state legislators and the state board of education and pass this information along to them, asking that they help right this horrible wrong. In addition, please pass this information along to other residents of Oregon and ask them to take action.
In many many many counties around this nation there are **NO** private schools. My county is one of these counties. Private schools ( mostly religious and church-based) were put out of business decades ago. It is very hard for a business to compete against a price-fixed monopoly cartel.
Fundamentally, socialist-entitlement, single-payer, state compelled, and price-fixed cartel schooling **was** and **is** built upon a corrupt foundation.
**IT CAN NOT BE REFORMED** ( Yeah! I am shouting.)
AMEN! Bro!
NEA = Satan = Communist bump
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Teachers ARE the NEA. The majority of teachers make the NEA what it is. If teachers didn’t want the NEA to be what it is, it would change. Parents, school board members, and legislators have NOTHING to do with the NEA. If the NEA is corrupt it is because the majority of TEACHERS ARE CORRUPT!
Remember that when some teacher wants you to think that they are a resurrected Mother Teresa.
Remember this when you see sweet and innocent children boarding their school prison buses.
> Public schools cost a minimum of $10,000
Where do you live? Here in NH, it’s closer to $20,000 per student, and that doesn’t even include the teachers pensions or the bus contracts.
> Remember that in the time of Adam Smith parents paid the professor directly.
The Noah Webster model of Bible based education served this country best. We achieved nearly 100% literacy under that model. Participation in the local school was voluntary. Home schooling was common, especially among the pioneers.
Then Horace Mann brought the Prussian Model of state-funded, compulsory education to the U.S. Within 50 years, the Noah Webster model had been almost completely displaced by the Prussian model.
In the early 20th century, John Dewey introduced “Progressive Education”. The name speaks for itself.
Carl Rogers, in the latter half of the 20th century, introduced “Affective Education”, where teachers were to become “change agents”. This was cut from the same cloth as the Maoist “Cultural Revolution”.
Tax-funded, government-run, compulsory education MUST BE abandoned. While we still have the law on our side to do this, we must remove our children from these government school collectives and educate them ourselves, or form our own local school cooperatives.
It is very discouraging to read these threads and posts. When even conservatives fail to recognize that government schooling is the very definition of a godless socialist and police-enforced program...well...I fear our nation is doomed.
> You “get it”.
Heh. Home-schooling 8 kids right now. The “professionals” would call two of them, “special needs”. My experience is that they’re ALL “special needs”. That’s what makes home schooling so effective.
However, taxes keep going higher and higher. The public school establishment adamantly opposes sharing any of this with non-state schools. Charter schools are only “semi-private,” The controlling idea is that every child is a ward of the state, that if you want an upgraded education for the child in your custody, then it has to come out of your pocket. To put it another way, only the rich and other members of “the ruling class “really get to “own” their children.
The problems started when the influx of money to the schools (and thus control) moved from the local community to the state and then later to the federal level. The idea that public schools of any sort are automatically "bad" is ludicrous.
There's some great conservative thinking on this thread including yours.
The Northwest Ordinance was the government charter for the public education system. (Among other purposes for that document, such as formalizing the process by which states were formed out of territories.) This foundation of public education explicitly declared that RELIGIOUS PRINCIPLES are an essential part of education, since they are the source of our moral code.
The Declaration of Independence says that we're "endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." It also states that the Founding Fathers "pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred Honor" to making the new Republic succeed.
Who was this "Creator"? Why did they believe that He was the source of what are now called "natural" rights? And why did they believe their honor to be sacred if their fortunes and even their very lives were not? What does "sacred" mean anyway?
Left-wing secularists are quick to point out that only the Constitution has the force of law, and the Declaration does not. But the Declaration has value beypnd measure as a statement of our Founding Fathers' PRINCIPLES, much like the party platform of the Democratic Party. And the Northwest Ordinance has the same force of law as the Constitution.
I understand the need for federal and state level funds for public schools. After all, many areas are impoverished (particularly with a socialist government destroying jobs and any incentives to create new jobs), and providing such funds enables children in those regions to get good quality educations, and escape the poverty cycle.
But federal and state level control of the curriculum, and especially extra-curricular BS like Planned Parenthood and its culture of death, must be sharply curtailed. They need to be sure that a very basic and very robust system of teaching math, English reading and writing skills, and lab science (not sex education) is followed and interscholastic sports are conducted in a consistent and safe manner. That is all.
There is one more aspect to consider and that is “taylorism,” the idea that a school can be run as a factory, with “education” as its product. This, unfortunately appeals to the business class and keep them from realizing that any school “system” is as essentially inefficient as any other government agency. A school is only as good as its “tradition”, and if that tradition is The NEA/AFT tradition, it is “progressive.”
btr
If Hannity had a brain, he would bring this guy in to talk about planned parenthood in the schools and the public school system’s intolerance for intellectual and honest examination of what they do to children and communities.
Mentally ill in a criminal sort of way.
Public schools cannot reform because the system is a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are unable to reform themselves.
Why are bureaucracies unworkable?
They contradict the laws of human nature, giving no incentive to improve since the teacher is neither rewarded or punished for doing a good or bad job. No competition is at work since they have a captive audience and are unaccountable to the consumer (parent).
In the words of the brilliant Ludwig von Mises, “In the bureaucratic machine of socialism the way toward promotion is not achievement but the favor of the superiors.”
In fact, teachers who are efficient incur the wrath of their peers (”You make the rest of us look bad”).
The Blessed Mother by virtue of the grace granted to her as the Mother of God incarnate and as the spiritual Mother of all believers in Christ is the greatest intercessor any of us could ever have. She was the only person present at His conception, birth and death and spent more time with Him than any other human being. Ask yourself the question where would the wedding party at Cana have been without the intercession of the Blessed Mother? By following her counsel "Whatsoever He shall say to you, do ye." we get closer to Christ. Per Matrem ad Filium
"For as the body is one, and hath many members; and all the members of the body, whereas they are many, yet are one body, so also is Christ." 1 Corinthians 12:12
"I desire therefore, first of all, that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all men:" 1 Timothy 2:1
Godless schooling is obviously a violation of religious parents' rights, and can never be considered good in any meaningful sense.
Moreover, compulsory schooling itself is a modern, socialist invention, which came from Bismark's Germany.
Its notorious history and early fusion with behavioral psychology in the late 1800s should be well-known here, and there should be no need to repeat it.
But what follows below is just one problem that demonstrates how schools are fundamentally flawed, even from a secular perspective.
The standard, and often strangely arcane, high school curriculum, is measured in units of time, or Carnegie units. Yes, we can thank the famous industrialist, exclusively, for this irrational system.
Why irrational?
Has anyone ever asked you how many classes you've taken in Microsoft Office? Or do people ask whether you know how to use Microsoft Office?
Placing children in rooms, talking to them, and expecting them to learn is... ludicrous, or at least woefully inefficient.
If the object of compulsory schooling is for students to master a subject, students should be told that they may leave the class once they pass a test of mastery.
How much faster will they learn? How focused will they be?
Once my homeschooled students figured out, at age 8, that they could go out to play, once their work was done, they finished in 2 hours. Not only that, they found mom's planner, and would pull it out before she woke up, often to be finished before mom got out of the shower.
So that gave them an extra 6 hours each day to do whatever they wanted, in comparison to kids in school. If anyone is wondering about their skill level, my eldest just received an academic scholarship that payed her small tuition at a state college.
So why don't schools implement this system?
BECAUSE SCHOOLS AREN'T ABOUT LEARNING.
Why? It's all spelled out in this book that's available on line for free, for anyone who's interested.
The Underground History of American Education
8 kids? You rock!
Schooling is harmful to children in every sense, in principle. Even private schools are harmful. Compulsory government schools are simply worse.
See my post #57, and especially the book mentioned at the end.
The model of schooling that was forced upon the American people, and later adopted by private schools, was the invention of humanist utopians and behavioral psychologists, from the very beginning.
> 8 kids? You rock!
There were nine. One just got married.
:)
Perhaps where you live. Where I grew up, local control was still the rule up until "desegregation". Yes, there was some interference from the state, but the president of the school board ran the schools pretty much as he (rarely she) saw fit.
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