August 14, 2011, the Sunday after the straws aligned in the Iowa cornfields and a Texan two stepped into the 2012 race at the South Carolina Red State gathering, a shofar horn quieted a massive gathering for proactive support of Israel at Atlanta’s Georgia World Congress Center.

A few months before, on May 31st, Americans United With Israel started a Facebook account that would organize this peaceful rally. According to their new webpage, the afternoon event was not “a religious expression, but an American expression for those supporting Israel… to support the Israeli Government’s call for peace.”  The organizers were both Hassidic and Christian. The crowd, in the thousands, was equally diverse, Gentile and Jewish and multi-racial.

The Atlanta Jewish Times ad for the event touted Consul General Ophir Aviram and conservative Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) as speakers. But a surprise guest speaker was the liberal Congressman John Lewis (D-GA).

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Given to children in the third to eighth grade, the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT) were meant to gauge each student’s abilities in reading, mathematics, English/Language Arts, Social studies, and Science.

In the Atlanta Georgia School District, hours after the students handed in these tests, an alleged 140 teachers feverishly erased wrong answers and penciled in correct answers. An alleged thirty-eight principals were equally busy. Later, superintendants above them tried to muzzle the whistleblowers and rewarded the erasure users with rewards for improved effort.

In the decade leading into 2009 the Atlanta Public Schools students’ scores rose so dramatically that its Superintendent Beverly Hall was named the  “2009 Superintendent of the Year.” By June of 2009 Hall stepped down from her post, days before the release of a report documenting the systemic efforts by teachers and school administrators to boost student results.

It was the dramatic rise in test scores followed a precipitous drop of scores the following year that prompted Georgia to pursue a legal investigation of the CRCT results. The PDF summary of the reported CRCT investigation worded the raw result: “Thousands of children were harmed by the 2009 CRCT cheating by being denied remedial education because of their inflated CRCT scores.”

CRCT was said to be the benchmark of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Parents and educators claimed that the tasks demanded by such federal mandates forced teachers to teach to these tests. To limit education hours to the input of test answers, some say inhibits greater educational experiences for gifted students.

But can we say that mandates alone forced many educators to focus on the testing and some to manipulate false results? Many too quickly, too easily point fingers at others.  However, Providence pricks the individual conscience. For a society’s beneficial functioning the children–with the best of their abilities–should be nurtured by adults to read, to calculate, to communicate, to socially engage, and to reason.

We who are parents must give pause and consider our roles in this nurturing or education.

By DNA or adoption or fostering, we are to parent the children with us. Shouldn’t our lives with them fix in us an inner gauge of our children’s schooling? If we daily engage with our children’s lives–read with them, interact with them, oversee homework alongside of them–can we not glean whether or not our children need remedial intervention?

Finally, how will parents now engage with the educators and the system we leave our children with? It would behoove parents to spend less on the extracurricular frills suburbanites crave. It is time to refocus family time, PTA meetings, school board meetings, and get back to the basics.

As a conservative Tea Party patriot I confess I joined the online enthusiasm over the special election to fill the late Senator Edward Kennedy’s seat. We who say we stand on principles were upended the afternoon of Thursday, July 15, 2010. The Tea Party endorsed candidate Scott Brown swung his vote in Senate for the financial reform bill. Should anyone be in shock?

We knew who Scott Brown was not.

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The number of people filing new claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week by the largest amount in three months. The big surge was a setback to hopes that layoffs were declining.

The Labor Department says that applications for unemployment benefits rose to 471,000 last week, up by 25,000 from the previous week. It was the first increase in five weeks and the biggest jump since a gain
 of 40,000 in February.

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As a mom of young adult children, I was almost ticked off by the April 20th Fox Report‘s picture of a school lunch branded, “SECURITY THREAT.” Retired admirals and generals just released an alarming report: 27% of young adults are not mission ready to defend our nation,that’s one in four of our grown children. Retired military leaders are on the attack against unhealthy school lunches. They urge Congress to legislate changes and educational initiatives.

The visual charts exposed the ill health of American young adults, fact over bulging fact:

• 1996 -1998  One state alone recorded over 40 % of 18-24 year olds obese.
• 2006-2008,  Thirty-nine states recorded 40% or more 18-24 year olds were obese.
• 1995-2008 140,000 young adult recruits were deemed too heavy for the military.

Granted a few states did not have sufficient data to be rated, but still do citizens want our Congress to heed, for the sake of “National Security,” this military request?

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