For years, House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) didn’t pay taxes on significant parts of his income.  When the IRS discovered this, it allowed him to pay the missing taxes without any of the normal penalties.

In 2009, Representative John Carter (R-TX) introduced the Rangel Rule, HR 735, which would extend to all U.S. taxpayers the same penalty-free and indictment-free IRS treatment enjoyed by Rangel for flagrant tax evasion — as required by the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

I was thinking about this recently in a conversation where I was surprised to find that the people I was talking to didn’t know about RSA 193-H:2, which says:

On or before the 2018-2019 school year, schools shall ensure that all pupils are performing at the proficient level or above on the statewide assessment as established in RSA 193-C.

All pupils.  There are no exceptions for pupils with special needs, pupils who don’t do well on tests, or anyone else.

Now, there isn’t a school in the state that has been within shouting distance of this since it was enacted.  This means that every school in the state is in flagrant violation of the law.

So, it seems only fair that taxpayers in school districts around the state should be able to withhold their school taxes until the schools start complying with the law.

I know, I know — ‘the law’ requires them to pay those taxes. But ‘the law’ also requires the schools actually to teach kids to read.

The Rangel Rule, generalized to what we might call the Rangel Principle, simply says that if government institutions can ignore the law without penalty, then taxpayers funding those institutions should be free to do that, too.

Applied to this particular case, the penalty for withholding school taxes should be the same as the penalty for failing to teach kids to read.  Which, apparently, is no penalty at all.

The post The Rangel Principle: If Schools Don’t Have To Teach Kids To Read, You Don’t Have To Give Them Your Money appeared first on Granite Grok.

After reviewing the new Strategic Plan for Governor Wentworth Regional School District, I would suggest trashing it and starting over. While it sounded promising with their placement of academic achievement as their top priority, nothing in this document shows the community how that will be accomplished.

The rest of the document sounds more like an appeal to the federal government than a worthwhile plan for the community to rally behind.

There are a few bright spots within the document found in Focus Area 3 Family & Community Communication and Engagement, but with all of the battles raging right. now, how does anyone have confidence this will help?

I will go through the document as it’s been presented here:

GWRSD_Strategic_Plan_2024 (1)

 

Focus Area 1 Student Wellness
This section looks like it’s paving the way for the district to transition to the CDC’s Community School model. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a goal to turn every public school into a mental health and medical clinic. This may sound good on the surface, but as this transition begins to unfold, we are seeing all kinds of problems that parents should be aware of.

We’ve found personally identifiable mental health data on students being shared without parental knowledge or consent. This is a gross violation of privacy and ethics. Parents are also discovering that their children are receiving medical treatment and medication without ever being informed.

Those who are providing mental health assessments and services have not received the proper education or training to deal with some of the more serious mental health situations that arise. There are references to trauma, anxiety, depression, and even suicide. These are serious mental health issues that should only be addressed by a PhD-level Child Psychologist — not a teacher in the classroom or the school counselor.

The federal student privacy law was gutted several years ago during the Obama administration. It used to require parental consent to share sensitive data on students. That is not necessarily the case anymore. All of this data that is now being collected by various sources could be used against these students at some point.

Just visiting the school counselor can disqualify a student who wants to join the military, and now the U.S. Department of Education can now share information with other departments like the U.S. Department of Labor. Competencies are now shared with colleges and universities when a student applies for admission. What kind of behavior, values, or dispositions will be shared with future employers or colleges?

Focus Area 2: Culture of Belonging
This area begins with a call to things like equity and DEI.  (Diversity Equity and Inclusion) There is nothing about students who come from religious homes. What does equity look like in public schools? It focuses on equality outcomes versus equal opportunities. Guaranteeing equal outcomes means less opportunities for gifted students or students who strive for excellence. DEI tends to focus on race and gender, leaving out any concern for other groups of students in the school.

This is more of a WOKE focus than any focus on real belonging. Real belonging should apply to all students regardless of political views, religious beliefs, or any other identity they use to divide us.

Parents do need to understand that their children will be in a school with other children who may have a different worldview. So, how does one make a school welcoming? Certainly not this way. This way divides children by their “identity” instead of unifying them.

School officials are not there to sway children in their beliefs, but they can certainly promote a safe and welcoming environment for all children. Sometimes that means compromise, sometimes it means teaching children to show respect and kindness to others.

This focus takes a good idea and turns it into a woke agenda instead. I’d watch that equity plan closely and also note the data collection is even included within this category.

Responsive Classroom is a program that will be used. I’ve seen mixed reactions from teachers on this. Watch for discipline or lack of discipline within the school community. Will there be real consequences for unruly or bad behavior? Teachers need a classroom where they can teach and need to be supported by the administration. Reduction in discipline can become a real problem when kids learn they can get away with unruly behavior.

Focus Area 3- Family & Community Communication and Engagement
This actually sounds good, although this is required in federal law: Parent Engagement is in Every Student Succeeds Act. But what does that look like in the schools? Parents are running into resistance just trying to remove pornographic books from the school library. Parents are concerned about biological boys and girls using the restroom opposite of their biological sex. The same is true for locker rooms and sports teams. Something like this normally requires a common sense compromise so that all children are served in their public schools.

Oftentimes, parents who do not want their children exposed to pornographic books or want their children in a sex-segregated restroom are shunned and called transphobic. Picking sides isn’t a solution, but finding a compromise can be.

All competencies for each grade and subject should be included in this area. Parents should be able to access this information on the district website. Parents should also be able to observe their child’s classroom, and also feel welcomed.

Focus Area 4 – Academic Achievement
This may be the biggest disappointment. While a statement offers hope, nothing in this plan explains how this will be accomplished. Instead, there is a lot of time spent on actions that do not produce quality results. Schools now align their curriculum to Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards. These standards are dumbed down, and district administrators should be focused on identifying those problems and showing how they will raise the bar.

Multiple pathways or extended learning opportunities still require adherence to the dumbed-down standards. Where will they raise the standards for students on any path?

Differentiated instruction? How? That normally means that kids will be learning off of the computer or participating in group work as the teacher becomes a facilitator. This minimizes the important role of the teacher as an instructor. Where has this been successful at improving academic outcomes?  Changing up a classroom this way should demand independent and peer reviewed studies that show any of this improves academic outcomes.

How does the MTSS-B help academic outcomes? The Multi-Tiered System of Support for Behavior is a mental health framework. We already know the multiple problems with this federal fad. Federal money comes into the school, the school counselors turn over personal mental health data on students to Keene State BHII, and they develop a fluff report that all is well. Meanwhile, we have teachers in Keene who are leaving the profession because behavior is out of control, and consequences have been turned into mental health treatment by school personnel who are not educated or trained in the profession.

Finally, they include Portrait of a Learner in this strategic plan. This is another national fad focused on data mining personal information on your children. What does that do for academic outcomes? Nothing.

Battelle for Kids was created by Battelle, an applied science and technology company that uses technology to track behaviors. The program was incentivized through policies and grants in the 2015 federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act ESSA. ESSA replaced No Child Left Behind and was signed into law during the Obama administration with bi-partisan support. These policies are an extension of Common Core reforms.

Some of Battelle’s strategic partners that direct states’ adoption of Portrait of a Graduate is CASEL. CASEL’s Tim Shriver admits teaching academics is no longer important.

Aurora Institute, ExcelinEd which is JEB BUSH’s org (who profits off of his online Charter Schools) and KnowledgeWorks, are working towards mass data collection of children’s values, attitudes and behaviors (aka..mental health) with a company called the Data Quality Campaign.

The Data Quality Campaign was instrumental in developing states’ State Longitudinal Data Systems. So, Portrait of a Graduate/Learner is, essentially, a program to expand New Hampshire’s State Longitudinal Data System, and start tracking children into all sorts of social services including health services, and into the workforce. You can read more about that here and from the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.

In the final scheme of things, Portrait of a Graduate/Learner is the backbone for Social Credit Scoring and ESG scores for children.

New Hampshire 
As the leader in implementing competency education, New Hampshire recognized the need for a state data system that was better equipped to communicate with district systems and provide necessary supports. The Initiative for School Empowerment and Excellence reduces the burden on schools and gives information back to schools based on regularly collected data to encourage student achievement through rigorous data use and analysis.

KnowledgeWorks is a Gates-funded organization (also based in Ohio) that the State Boards of Education paid to facilitate the districts’ adoption of Battelle’s SEL framework. (Pilot programs and legislation for Competency-Based Education will align “competencies” to those in Portrait of a Graduate) Local teachers are brought into the process to determine competencies, but only for show. In actuality, they are being shifted into becoming facilitators of the SEL system, and, over time, the entire system will be geared toward SEL.

What does this strategic plan do for the students? It facilitates the data-mining of their personal information to fulfill the goals of the federal government. This isn’t about helping students, and it’s not about what parents want for their children or schools. This is a federal agenda to meet the terms the federal government laid out in Every Student Succeeds Act.

As an education researcher and parental rights advocate, I’d refuse as much of this data-mining, SEL and mental/medical services as possible. Your child’s mental and medical health is important, but it needs to be done outside the school system where you are still informed, and your child’s personal information is secure.

 

 

 

The post On Local School District’s Strategic Plan: Trash It and Start Over appeared first on Granite Grok.

Sent by a reader, this radio segment is something you should check out and, if you agree, add to your quiver of rhetorical/active arrows. Patrick Madrid is talking to a mother who is trying to defend her daughter from the groomers and queer agenda in her local public school.

He offers great advice to Anai, a valiant Catholic mom gearing up for a showdown with her daughter’s teacher. Anai’s 16-year-old daughter is facing pressure to complete an assignment that goes against Catholic teachings on sexuality, sparking a fierce defense of faith and family values. …

Patrick’s strategy is a masterclass in rhetorical judo, advising Anai to use the language of inclusivity and authenticity to advocate for her daughter’s right to hold and express her beliefs freely. This approach not only safeguards her daughter’s emotional well-being but also holds the school accountable to its own stated values. It puts the teacher on the defense rather than the other way around.

This is some excellent table-turning… Madrid explains to the caller how to put them in their own ideological box, not to be mean, cruel, or argumentative but to get their buy-in on their own stated values so they have no choice but to confront that and maybe (just maybe) they decide it is better to leave her daughter alone.

Give it a listen! (10 min).

 

 

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Warner: Hartford Has An Activist Problem – Now They Know About it

 

Martin Luther King Jr. famously said:

“Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’

Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’

Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’

But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’

There comes a time when one must make a decision that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must make that decision because their conscience tells them that it’s right.”

Monday night in the embattled town of Hartford was held a Budget and Meet the Candidates night held once a year.  The several hour meeting allows town members to hear the upcoming budget and ask questions regarding appropriations or express concerns over potential mismanagement.  Following this are speeches given by candidates for school board and select board.  Candidates typically offer a brief introduction followed by vision casting for their plans to serve the needs were they to be elected.

The town of Hartford has seen many shakeups and resignations over the past few years especially at the select board level.  At one point the board had four black citizens in a town that is 90% white and still saw members step down over cries of racism or similar complaints.  For a town that’s elected Kevin “Coach” Christie, the beloved former coach and automotive teacher at the local tech center (who is black) it can’t seem shake this popular accusation.  One prominent citizen, Joe Major, also black, sits as the executive director of the largest non-profit in town, the Aquatic Center, a massive complex visited by hundreds each day. Despite these votes of approval in town the Robin DiAngelo “find racism everywhere” gambit seems to be a steady diet.

One citizen, namely myself, has studied the culture closely over the past ten or so years.  In a town that is clearly welcoming of all, in a state that ended slavery in 1777, in a country that established civil rights and put a black man in the oval office the cry of systemic racism, led by the Black Lives Matter movement-turned-craze, resounded like a clanging gong.  The sum total of BLM’s activist led riots saw the destruction of billions of dollars in American property and the killing of more than twenty-five innocent people reverberating nearly everywhere from overseas to my tiny hamlet of Hartford.

I visited my home town of Portland, Oregon late in 2021 only to find it in shambles.  Tent cities littered the neighborhoods, burn marks covered the walls of buildings with boarded up businesses closed after 100+ days of rioting led by Antifa and Marxist revolutionaries (who had managed to get S.E. 39th street in my neighborhood renamed to Cesar Chavez Blvd), and the smell of marijuana was ubiquitous.  Black Lives Matter signs were found in nearly every yard, not due to supporting the cause but from fear of property damage if one did not comply.  A ghostly pall hung over the many colored faces of the people in my neighborhood.  The tension was palpable as I walked the streets and entered both old and new haunts and shops.  The once genial and friendly Rose City confines felt more like an open air prison being run by activist psychopaths who had taken over.

Talking with friends they said the same.  Most everyone they knew hated what was happening but were afraid to speak up thanks to the thuggish attacks from Antifa radicals who were known for acts of violence sparing no one.  Antifa even attacked a church rally on the Waterfront park pepper spraying children and assaulting women.

Antifa, the unregulated and radical enforcement arm of the new cultural Marxists, have also been seen around the country standing armed outside of Drag Queen Story Hours intending to intimidate parents and citizens who show up to object to these blatantly sexualized performances designed to groom children into queering their minds.  By “queering” is meant to break from cultural norms, in this case American, replacing them with Marxist boundary-less tendencies known as “liberation” rising all the way to sexual liberation of, yes, children.

Hartford recently held a Drag Queen Story Hour that was the subject of controversy among the select board.  Self-avowed activist Ally Tufenkjian decided to speak on the topic during a board meeting stating it was a “positive experience” despite including a hoax bomb threat that sent a shock wave through the town still reeling from the many shock waves our country has a steady diet of thanks to constant media messaging of the latest existential threat (COVID lockdowns, climate change, school shootings, rioting, wars, Jan 6th, etc.).  Fellow board member Lannie Collins responded on behalf of the town members who did not view it as a positive experience, which includes me.  I would expose the event for its patently sexual grooming of children at a board meeting two weeks after more activists showed up to denounce Mr. Collins for being “insensitive”.

My familiarity with all of these things led to my declaring a run for one of the open two-year spots on the select board.  Candidates are expected to introduce themselves and cast a vision they have for the town.  My conscience declaring it the right thing to do, I warned them of the road we are headed down with the proof being the state of my former city.

Of course, activists showed up to the meeting to denounce my warnings as “hate speech” rather than discuss the merits of my claims.  If it’s hateful to warn a tiny Vermont town to take a closer look at the source of its sudden social problems and rising incompetence at the local government level then I plead guilty.  In fact, I’ll happily declare I hate the deceptive tactics of Marxist activists, I hate their plans to abolish property rights, the nuclear family, our national boundaries and most of all their promoting the sexual grooming of our children.

For me, this is a hill worth dying on.

(To listen to my speech at the town meeting fast forward to the 1:53:00 of this video)

 

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The polls! The polls! The polls! We’re winning! We’re winning! We’re winning! So say those who persist in living in that alternative reality that the rigging of the 2020 election was just a one off. We are NOT winning. We are losing. The polls don’t matter when (among many, many, many other things to rig 2024) millions of illegals get to vote … as is now the case in Arizona thanks to the Democrats’ lawfare.

But just keep on pretending that 2024 is somehow going to be different than 2020, that Putin is the real enemy, that there is a “free press” in America, that a Republican can get a fair trial in America, etc., etc., etc.

The post BREAKING … Biden Wins Arizona appeared first on Granite Grok.

Western Journal has done an excellent job of adding some balance to the business of news and media, but I laughed out loud when I read this headline: “Biden Has All But Lost His Advantage in Key Voting Bloc that Drove 2020 Win, Devastating Poll Shows.”

I laughed because you can’t poll the voting bloc that got him elected in 2020.

To give WJ its due, the report looks at polling among 18-24-year-olds, a majority of whom voted for Biden in 2020 but, having been crushed by Bidenomics, are beginning to bleed away from Democrats, some of them toward Trump.

The trend of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 was already looking negative for Democrats according to data from the 2016 to the 2020 presidential elections, with 58 percent favoring former first lady Hillary Clinton in 2016 over then-Republican nominee Donald Trump’s 28 percent, but Trump scoring 35 percent against Biden’s 59 percent in 2020.

That’s according to Pew Research data; in Axios’ 2024 survey, however, Biden, 81, scored a little worse at 52 percent and Trump, 77, came in much stronger with 48 percent — a 4-point gap compared to 2020’s 24-point gap.

The number is not insignificant, which is likely why Whoever is Running the Biden administration is playing the “We’ll forgive your student loans” in Debt-Minor, hoping to recreate past fraud. You can fool some 18-24-year-olds most of the time, but forgiving debt doesn’t solve the real issue. Even without a school loan payment, living is 18-24% more expensive (in many cases, more), and there is nothing in the Bidenista’s economic quiver that looks different from all the shots they’ve already taken. Some of those “kids” might have even figured out that the debt payoff scheme would make everything else worse (which it would). More Biden equals more Bidenomics, which means rising misery.

The Dems can’t afford to suffer too much more voting bloc attrition. It makes it much more challenging to steal elections with faked mail-in ballots, which are the “voting bloc” you can’t poll. Biden won because of a deliberately coordinated campaign to censor objection to the chain of custody issues with mail-in voting and a night’ surge in “mail-in ballots” for Vote Fraud Joe that took as long as it takes to count to ensure he won.

That demographic isn’t in prison, not that this is a deterrent, so they are still 100% for Joe Biden. Unless or until the mysterious Mail-in-Ballot voting bloc ‘demographic” changes sides (or stays home), young adults can get as disenfranchised with Creepy Uncle Joe as they like.

Not much will change if their vote for his opponent doesn’t get counted or is erased by another brute-force act of ballot box stuffing like the one we had in 2020. Democrats will simply count longer and harder until the Democrat is declared the winner.

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Unfortunately, liberals have become mostly wacko. That is why ‘Liberal’ has become a word with negative connotations. The extreme religious right wing has always been the core of right-wing wackos. The transformation of liberals into “Karens” has been the failure of the mainstream liberals to maintain a core of self-respecting people who, in general, just want to help people.

Now, I can’t tell the liberals from the Wacko Liberals. There are a few semi-conservative liberals left but they are truly the minority. Both of the extremes are evil, but the right-wing religious nuts seem to be more compassionate of non-religious conservatives, and the right-wing conservatives have also been more accepting of less staunch conservatives.

Liberals, on average, have lost the ability to defend their beliefs. I have seen this time and time again in my being slightly right of center as I have been my entire life, but my move further right was not the conservatives gaining strength, but I was moved further right by the amount of leftists going off the rails.

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This year is the first year in 28 years in which I did not hold my nose to vote Republican (Anti-democrat). I was never a real Republican. Although
I was always a Conservative. I was a wanna-be Hippie when I was young and at that early age did not know what liberalism was. As I grew, I learned about socialism and how it closely resembled liberalism. Then, with the Nuke plant coming to New Hampshire, I realized I was not a true hippie liberal and left the protesting to others. Good thing, too; a couple of friends at the time got arrested. It could have changed my life forever.

I ended up voting 3rd party and Libertarian for many years. Until the Clintonistas drove me to the right, and I became an Anti-democrat. The following elections, up until this year, also had the remains of the leftist loony Clintonistas. Yes, they are still there, but Trump’s failings finally put me back in the realm of being against the two-party system.

I can no longer support a corrupt two-party system. Unlike the majority of liberals, I am able to clearly defend my positions and my votes, whereas the majority of liberals are unable to do so by supporting a lying, cheating, scumbag pedophile with Alzheimer’s. And I can defend with proof each of my words describing the moron in the Whitehouse today.

I had originally asked liberals for one positive thing Biden has done while in office to make the country a better place, and after a long while, I had one answer with an actual good reply. I believe it was here in Carrol County, Uncensored, too. So now I have to ask for Two positive things. (Remember, stuff like lowering gas prices does not count since they went up under Biden).

So many items that cannot be defended, such as the lockdowns under both Trump and Biden, the monetary support of the lab in Wuhan, open borders, the ignoring of the constitution by allowing illegals to remain in this country, paying back college loans for a select group of people who made bad choices, supporting the money-grubbing medical industry in its hypocritical move to mutilate physically healthy patients, allowing males to compete in women’s sports, and this administration’s blind faith in inclusion to the detriment of this country. Biden has chosen liars, thieves, and people with much less ability than these positions require, besides the fact that inclusion seems to mean even people who are far from normal. This administration has basically claimed to want a New Normal.

I don’t know if the Liberal Hippies of the ’60s would fall in line with all the loony left has to offer today, but even dictionaries are listing the word Liberal as now having negative connotations. How did the left of the 60s, who I admired, allow their cause to be taken over, and even today, with very few leftists speaking out about the extremism going on?

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