Should Parents Drug-test Their Teens?

By RICHARD ZWOLINSKI, LMHC, CASAC

Edited by  I, Praetorian, MA, PPS, WTF

Most drug use begins with experimentation and recreational use during the teen years sometimes as early as 11 or 12 years-old; from there it often graduates into habituation, abuse, and dependence, that is, addiction. Not to mention all the negative and life impacting  social problems that accompany. Each day, thousands of people enter addiction treatment programs and many of them are teens (most with compounding emotional problems).For the author and most addiction professionals (and many mental health professionals), the answer is unequivocally yes. The information gleaned from testing individuals of all ages for drug abuse is essential.

Obviously, prevention–before any substance use begins–is all important. But, since drug use is a part of our culture (not a good part) and it isn’t all that hard for teens to get a hold of drugs, sometimes prevention isn’t a realistic option. Public Schools do their best but often lack the trained staff (counselors) and suffer from dwindling funds to try and accomplish lofty but imperative task with. Now here's the caveat where parents come in. Ideally parents should create a supportive family/home culture where pre-teens and teens are comfortable talking with them about their lives. But society is complicated and today many parents face many issues that previous generations really didn’t have to face. Many simply don’t know their kids are doing drugs (or drinking) until there is already a problem. (Some parents are also abusing drugs or alcohol and can’t themselves model healthy behaviors). However, parents should not use testing to demean or show control over a child that shows no symptoms or signs of usage. Sometimes a functioning addict will feel so hypocritical about their own using that they won't try and intervene with their child even when things become obvious.

Parents should be educated on the signs of drug and alcohol abuse, and there are many parenting resources available. They should know that once they think they might have identified a problem, confrontation (especially when done incorrectly), doesn’t always work—teens might be embarrassed or too scared to tell their parents what they’ve been up to or they simply don’t want to stop abusing substances and prefer to rebel against their parents.

Therefore, home drug testing for children and teens, has become more and more popular. In fact, I see parents and their pre-teen and teenage children who’ve been abusing substances,  in the course of my work and many times the parents have found out because of home drug tests.

The Pattern was established long before I was born. But For kids today,  experimenting with alcohol and marijuana starts at a young age.    That’s the “trap.”  Starting perhaps with hanging out with older kids that were part of the wrong crowd.  Their use went much broader than alcohol and marijuana.  Eventually drug usage broadens, ultimately becoming a daily habit.  Young addicts may repeatedly deny drug use to family, blowing off accusations such as changed behavior as growing pains.   

But with all classes of street drugs there is a common pattern with the adolescents and young adults. The earlier children get help, the more successful the treatment rate. Most parents share with me that they wish they could have recognized the signs earlier, or a way to test their children.

How have parents responded to your products? How have teens responded?

While some parents approach home drug testing with skepticism, most show overwhelming support. Once they over come the fear and stigma.

What are the ethical issues involved in parents testing their children?

Asking your child to take a home drug test may be uncomfortable, but there’s nothing unethical about it.  Parents are exercising good ethical, moral, and family Judgement by making sure their children are drug-free. Parents are reinforcing that they care about their child’s development and transition to adulthood.

Parents also need to know that they are allowed by law to test their children.

Right. Legally, there are no issues involved with drug testing your under-age child.

Are addiction treatment professionals supportive of the idea?

Yes. In my experience, most agree that early detection and treatment can keep a child out of treatment facilities for the rest of their life.  Substance abuse is a potentially life-threatening problem so prevention and early detection are extremely important. On the other side of that coin, the younger a child is when they first begin to use mind altering substances; without treatment, the more less likely they are to seek and be successful in treatment as adults .Of course they are also more likely to be imprisoned and often involved in violent crime as well.

Signs of an Overdose! What if No One Called for Help? Would You?

Signs of overdose

• Snoring deeply

  This is often and understandably mistaken for sleeping

• Turning blue

• Not breathing

• No initial signs at all

   the effects can kick-in hours after the initial hit

What not to do

Things you should never do if you think someone has overdosed. 

        * Never put people under a cold shower or in a cold bath .

        * Never pick someone up to walk them around.

        * Never smack, hit or hurt to try and bring them round.

        * Never inject someone with salt water

The only affects any of these things might have, is to cause more damage, increase the likelihood of the person dying and/or delay the time it takes to call an ambulance.

What to do

Call 911
If you are searching to find out if someone you are with is Overdosing you should call 911 right now because you are worried that they are overdosing and you are looking for information on signs of overdosing and what to do. It is simple. Don't take a chance with that person's life.                                                                   
 Call 911 

YOU MAY SAVE A LIFE BY SHOWING THE COURAGE YOUR FRIENDS DON'T

Signs of an Overdose! What if No One Called for Help? Would You?

Signs of overdose

• Snoring deeply

  This is often and understandably mistaken for sleeping

• Turning blue

• Not breathing

• No initial signs at all

   the effects can kick-in hours after the initial hit

What not to do

Things you should never do if you think someone has overdosed. 

        * Never put people under a cold shower or in a cold bath .

        * Never pick someone up to walk them around.

        * Never smack, hit or hurt to try and bring them round.

        * Never inject someone with salt water

The only affects any of these things might have, is to cause more damage, increase the likelihood of the person dying and/or delay the time it takes to call an ambulance.

What to do

Call 911
If you are searching to find out if someone you are with is Overdosing you should call 911 right now because you are worried that they are overdosing and you are looking for information on signs of overdosing and what to do. It is simple. Don't take a chance with that person's life.                                                                   
 Call 911 

YOU MAY SAVE A LIFE BY SHOWING THE COURAGE YOUR FRIENDS DON'T

Missing Boy's Remains Found in Suspect's Refrigerator...

New York City: Police have arrested a man in the killing of an 8-year-old boy whose dismembered body was found Wednesday in the suspect's freezer and a trash bin in Brooklyn, N.Y., the New York City Police Department said. Levi Aron, 35, was apprehended Wednesday after making statements that "implicated" him in the killing of Leiby Kletzky, who had stopped to ask the suspect for directions on his way home from camp, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said.

July 13: Police guard the entrance of the apartment where Leiby Kletzky lived with his family in the Brooklyn borough of New York.

Kelly said the child's dismembered remains were found early Wednesday in Aron's refrigerator and in a plastic garbage bag dumped into a trash bin in Brooklyn. "This was a horrendous crime," Kelly told reporters during a press conference Wednesday. Leiby was last seen walking home from Boyan Day Camp in Borough Park, Brooklyn, just before 5 p.m. Monday. A grainy surveillance video shows a man walking near the boy, who is seen in the footage wearing a backpack as he walks down the street, police said. Kelly said the boy appeared to be lost and had asked Aron for directions. He said the boy's parents had agreed to let him walk seven blocks alone from his day camp to a location where he was supposed to meet his mother.

"This is the worst nightmare that can happen to anybody," Rabbi Berish Freilich, a senior leader in Brooklyn's Jewish community, according to a Fox News report. Freilich, who knows the boy's family, described the neighborhood in the tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community of Borough Park as "very safe." "It's an extremely safe area for children," Freilich said. "This is devastating for everybody. Who would think of hurting an innocent young boy?" Kelly said he does not believe Aron knew the boy and described the alleged crime as "totally random."

"It was just happenstance and the terrible fate for this young boy," he said.
Kelly said that approximately 35 minutes after Leiby left the camp, he was inside the suspect's 1990 brown Honda Accord. Kelly said the suspect made statements that indicated he brought the boy to his apartment, where killed him and dismembered his body. Investigators tracked Aron with the help of surveillance video that showed him being approached by the lost boy.

Police then visited Aron's third-story attic apartment at 2:40 a.m. Wednesday, where they found body parts believed to be Leiby's inside the man's freezer.
"When detectives asked where the boy was, Aron nodded toward the kitchen," Kelly said, adding that deputies then found a cutting board and large amounts of blood.
The rest of the body was found inside a red suitcase that had been tossed into a trash bin in another Brooklyn neighborhood, police said. Kelly said statements made by the suspect indicate "he panicked and that's why he killed the boy."

Formal charges are pending against Aron, who lived alone in the apartment in a building shared with his parents. Aron, whose birthday is Wednesday, once had a summons for urinating in public but otherwise did not have a criminal record.

Aron has lived most of his life in New York, working as a clerk at a maintenance supply company in Brooklyn, but about a couple of years living in Memphis, Tenn., where he worked briefly, Kelly said. He lived about a mile away from the boy and was believed to be Orthodox Jewish. Kelly said detectives were investigating whether he had a history of mental illness. Kelly said there was no evidence of a sexual assault, and said it didn't seem like Aron had ever seen the child before.

The medical examiner has yet to determine the cause of death, he said. The New York Post, citing sources close to the investigation, reports that that boy was suffocated before he was dismembered.
Thousands of people had joined the search for Leiby, who was last seen near 44th Street and 12th Avenue in Borough Park. Investigators hunting for the boy noticed the man on the video going into a nearby dentist about 5:30 p.m. Monday, police said. The dentist, located later in New Jersey, said he remembered someone coming into the shop who wasn't a patient, but who was paying a bill for a patient there.

Kelly said Leiby waited for Aron at a street across from the dentist's office for about seven minutes before the two got into his vehicle. Freilich said Leiby was the only son of the Kletzky family. The couple has four daughters, and the husband works as a driver for a private car service.
New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, whose district includes the area, said the outpouring of support for the boy and his family has been tremendous. "This is beyond the pale," Hikind told FoxNews.com. "In this neighborhood I represent, crime is really nonexistent ... You'd never dream in a million years there's something to be concerned about."

Hikind said that while the man may have killed the child because he panicked, "no one is asking the question of why he picked him up in the first place." "This guy is an adult, an older person," he said. "This has to be a wakeup call for parents everywhere." A community-funded reward for information leading to the child's safe return was raised on Tuesday to $125,000 as police checked schools, synagogues, homes and businesses for any clues into the boy's disappearance. As many as 2,000 people took to the streets Monday to search for Leiby, and crowds returned again on Tuesday, with buses carrying some volunteers in from New Jersey. Members of the community where the boy lived described him as obedient and unlikely to talk to strangers.


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/07/13/thousands-turn-out-to-search-for-missing-brooklyn-boy/#ixzz1S5pPgnHc

Just When You Thought it was Safe to Go Back to Moreno Valley...

July7, 2011

By MVGordie, MVGordie.com

Moreno Valley Mayor Richard Stewart tells a citizen to quit calling police over violations of Moreno Valley‘s laws and ordinances.

 Moreno Valley:   Moreno Valley Mayor Richard Stewart tells a citizen to quit calling police over violations of Moreno Valley‘s laws and ordinances. The City of Moreno Valley has developed laws which deal with noise abatement, as well as other public nuisances; these laws are enforced by the Moreno Valley Police Department as well as Code Compliance Officers. However Mayor Richard Stewart surmises that calls which total two in all, are borderline unlawful acts, and may deem you to be a chronic complainer.

Where will we be as a society if we begin to ignore the law, or refuse to act upon it? Isn’t Moreno Valley already fighting a stigma as a lawless crime ridden city?

Now our own Mayor comes out and speaks like a gang thug with the concept of “Stop Snitching,” how will that sit with those who view our city as crime pit from hell?

Here are his words exactly: "Your continued complaints are without merit for the most part. Phoning the police numerous times may be borderline unlawful and may brand you as a chronic unfounded complainer."

"Without merit for the most part..." what is that supposed to mean? (besides they are not totally without merit).

Mayor Stewart doesn't stop there, he goes on to say if a law passed by the City is found to prevent the City for making a profit regardless of the nature and reasoning behind the law, he will simply change it (kind of like when he said the same thing to Council Jesse Molina as was once shown on this site).

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...The Right To Be An American is the Right to Protest FOR Right

Here are three good reads to help fill the enormous gap between the surface hullaballoo about the nation's education crisis generated by WFS and Education Nation and the angry mob of teachers and educators who are seething against what some are calling the "war on teachers," (and their unions) -- Dana Goldstein's piece in The Nation about the successes of union-management collaboration (here), Jonathan Gyurko's piece on what Guggenheim left out of his piece (here), and Nick Lemann's New Yorker commentary about the overheated crisis rhetoric surrounding so-called reform (here). I'm hoping that there will be more about this in the mainstream sometime soon -- sketching out not only the controversies surrounding Guggenheim's proposed solutions but also the practical and political limits of going to war against traditional schools as we now now them. You'd think that the resounding defeat of Fenty and Rhee would have made this clear, but perhaps there wasn't enough time for it to sink into the journalistic consciousness enough before the WFS media juggernaut came through. Thank you. Alexander Russo July 19, 2010 Education Week.

I've really got to stop plag... recycling these articles.

School reform won’t help all (Most) struggling students. Though some will succeed, others will continue to fail.

Demonizing teachers for the failures of these students is both easy though misguided and counterproductive in that it misses the target for students with no support from home...
It appears that a  philosophical backlash is gaining momentum, as important empirical evidence and some insightful truths have begun to emerge on the national educational frontline. One of these truths, as AFT President Randi Weingarten noted in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, is that the evidence shows that the market-based reforms, which are so much in vogue today, have not delivered. While self-described education reformers may suggest that we double down on these reforms—such as creating more charter schools, implementing voucher programs, using student test scores to evaluate and compensate teachers, and relying more and more on corporate executives and business practices to run school districts—Weingarten suggests a different path, a path taken by the world’s most successful education systems:

These countries focus on developing great teachers and giving them the autonomy to hone their craft. There is an ethos of working together to continuously improve. They de-emphasize excessive standardized tests and test prep, and each has a well-rounded curriculum that engages students in gaining knowledge by developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills—not by rote memorization. These countries provide a more equitable education for all students, and they offset the effects of poverty through on-site wraparound services such as medical and dental care and counseling.

Another truth is that demonizing teachers is not a good starting point for a school improvement plan. As Dave Eggers and Nínive Clements Calegari write in the New York Times, “No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition. And yet in education we do just that.” The disrespect for teachers extends to salaries, which have declined in real terms over the past 30 years. Today, 62 percent of teachers work a second job, and 46 percent quit before their fifth year. The high turnover rates cost school systems more than $7 billion annually. As Eggers and Calegari write, “There is no silver bullet that will fix every last school in America, but until we solve the problem of teacher turnover, we don’t have a chance.”

All the best evidence shows that leading countries like Finland, Singapore and South Korea respect and revere their teachers. They support and mentor them, and give them the tools and conditions they need to do their jobs. While we are celebrating Teacher Appreciation Week, we should pay close attention to how these nations develop, support and respect their teachers.

It’s also true that teachers’ experience and class size matter. That’s the case in an Orlando, Fla., school highlighted by the New York Times’ Michael Winerip, who focuses on three sisters who live at a homeless shelter and get a terrific education at Fern Creek Elementary School. The school, where 20 percent of the students are homeless, has received an A on the state report card for each of the past five years. The principal credits experienced teachers, small class sizes and strong discipline.

Finally, a piece by Joe Nocera in the New York Times, titled “The Limits of School Reform,” points out some important truths. Nocera revisits a New York Times Magazine article about M.S. 223, a school in the South Bronx whose principal and teachers struggle valiantly to educate homeless children. Sometimes successful, sometimes not, the school offers a lesson for would-be school reformers, Nocera believes:

What needs to be acknowledged, however, is that school reform won’t fix everything. Though some poor students will succeed, others will fail. Demonizing teachers for the failures of poor students, and pretending that reforming the schools is all that is needed, as the reformers tend to do, is both misguided and counterproductive. Over the long term, fixing our schools is going to involve a lot more than, well, just fixing our schools.

The bottom line: Evidence does matter. It should guide us as we seek to transform schools and improve student learning—and it shouldn’t be ignored. 

Why Did For-Profit College Stocks Rise After the Gainful Employment Rule Was Released?

 by David Halperin

On Thursday, June 3, 2011 the Obama Administration issued its long-awaited “gainful employment” rule, aimed at pushing for-profit colleges and career training schools to stop ripping off students and taxpayers. Although there are good programs in the for-profit sector, many programs are high-priced and low-quality, and some programs, as we have learned from recent government and media investigations, appear to be little more than straight-up swindles: Recruit students to fill slots, collect the federal checks, leave the students without career skills or options. Repeat.

The dramatic rise of such schools over the past decade has left hundreds of thousands of students deep in debt. For-profit colleges now have about 10 percent of US students, 25 percent of federal financial aid, and nearly half of all student loan defaults. Many of these schools get 90 percent of their revenue from federal grants and loans.  Left unchecked, this sector could produce a new subprime-like debt crisis.

The reaction to the new rule has been all over the place. Among representatives of for-profit schools, responses have ranged from “Congress must stop this rule” to “we’ll have to see what happens.” Groups who advocate holding these schools accountable (including Campus Progress), have issued statements with sentiments varying from “thanks Obama Administration!” to “thanks for nothing.”

Some insist that money talks and cite a rally in for-profit college stocks as proof that this is a critical victory for the industry.

I think the rule gives bad actors in the industry a few more years to do their worst. But their unrestrained orgy of waste, fraud, and abuse at taxpayer expense inevitably will come to an end.

It’s certainly true that the final rule is significantly weaker than the rule that the Administration proposed last summer (and even the standards of that original rule were too low). Under the final rule, a program can systematically fail to provide value to students and still be eligible for federal financial aid.  Sixty-five percent of students from a program can fail to pay back their loans, and loan repayment from a school’s graduates can consume 30 percent of their disposable income, and the program will nevertheless remain eligible [PDF] for federal grants and loans.

In fact, a program would have to slip below those low standards three out of four years in order to lose eligibility. That’s pathetic. But amazingly, some of today's for-profit programs would likely fail those standards because they are so high-priced and so low-quality. The Department of Education says that five percent of for-profit programs will run afoul of this rule and lose their aid.

So even under these low standards, the very worst programs will eventually have to shut down. But also, crucially, a much larger pool of bad programs will have to improve their performance for fear of being part of this bottom five percent. Before, there was little incentive to do more than take students’ and taxpayers’ money. Now industry players know they will have to provide at least some value or lose the federal aid that keeps them alive. Also important is that the new rule will provide students and the public with critical information about the effectiveness of individual career college programs. The programs that will have the best reputations will be those that keep debts low and prepare people for jobs that really exist—exactly what students want. These changes could help millions of students.

So what has driven up the for-profit stocks, at least for now?

First, the market values certainty. Few people are giving this rule a big hug, which suggests that the Administration may have found the political center between the fact-based arguments of our coalition and the cynical position of the for-profits, who have spent tens of millions of dollars on a furious campaign of lobbying, litigation, advertising, and political contributions in an effort to maintain the status quo. The concessions made by the Administration are likely to make the rule harder to overturn in Congress. So the rule may well be the standard that guides the industry for a while.

Second, Wall Street is focused on short-term profits. Even more significant than the degraded quality standards of the final rule is the extended delay in making the rule effective—programs are not at risk of losing eligibility until 2015. So for-profit companies can hope that the 2012 election will bring a new President and Congress that will overturn the rule. Some bad actors also could adopt a strategy that, rather than seeking to comply with the rule, instead starts to loot the assets of their schools, cutting costs and quality even further, and going out in a blaze of glory until the rule catches up with them in 2015.

If the for-profit education business is ultimately compelled to reform, it will be because the gainful employment rule is just one part of a changed landscape. The Administration already has issued other rules aimed at curbing misinformation and over-aggressive recruiting practice by for-profits. Senator Tom Harkin continues to hold public hearings focused on misconduct by these schools. Eleven state attorneys general have joined together to investigate for-profit abuses. More and more students who have been misled and mistreated by these schools are speaking up and even going to court.  And media investigations have exposed more bad practices in the industry and widespread abuses of students who need help the most–low-income people struggling to support families, students of color, and our veterans. Finally, there is now a strong coalition of civil rights, consumer, educator, and student groups, representing millions of Americans, that is determined to hold bad schools accountable and protect students and taxpayers.

Collectively, these developments will make it more and more difficult to sustain a business model based on deception, low investment in students, and skyrocketing prices. For-profit education companies will be forced to clean up their acts or shut their doors.

It would be a travesty if the for-profits now spend even more money—largely money that comes from taxpayers—on a continued pressure campaign to avoid accountability. But if the industry refuses to back down, Congress should act in the interests of fiscal responsibility, our economy, and especially our students, and resist efforts to roll back the new rules. Republicans and Democrats should support directing federal resources to programs that actually help students to learn, graduate, and succeed in the job market.

David is the Director of Campus Progress and a Senior Vice President at the Center for American Progress.

"Waiting for Superman" - selling the broken miracle

The Nation

by Dana Goldman

Here's what you see in Waiting for Superman, the new documentary that celebrates the charter school movement while blaming teachers unions for much of what ails American education: working- and middle-class parents desperate to get their charming, healthy, well-behaved children into successful public charter schools.

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.

Here's what you don't see: the four out of five charters that are no better, on average, than traditional neighborhood public schools (and are sometimes much worse); charter school teachers, like those at the Green Dot schools in Los Angeles, who are unionized and like it that way; and noncharter neighborhood public schools, like PS 83 in East Harlem and the George Hall Elementary School in Mobile, Alabama, that are nationally recognized for successfully educating poor children.

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.

In other words, Waiting for Superman is a moving but vastly oversimplified brief on American educational inequality. Nevertheless, it has been greeted by rapturous reviews.

"Can One Little Movie Save America's Schools?" asked the cover of New York magazine. On September 20 The Oprah Winfrey Show featured the film's director, Davis Guggenheim, of An Inconvenient Truth. Tom Friedman of the New York Timesdevoted a column to praising the film. Time published an education issue coinciding with the documentary's release and is planning a conference built in part around the school reform strategies the film endorses. NBC, too, will host an education reform conference in late September; Waiting for Superman will be screened and debated there, and many of the reformers involved in its production will be there. Katie Couric of CBS Evening News has promised a series of segments based on the movie.

Meanwhile, mega-philanthropist Bill Gates, who appears inWaiting for Superman, hit the road in early September to promote the film; while he was at it, he told an audience at the Toronto International Film Festival that school districts should cut pension payments for retired teachers. Other players in the free-market school reform movement, most of whom had seen the documentary at early screenings for opinion leaders and policy-makers, anticipated its September 24 release with cautious optimism.

The media excitement around the film "is beginning to open up an overdue public conversation," says Amy Wilkins, vice president at the Washington advocacy group Education Trust. "Do I think the coverage is always elegant and superior and perfect? No. Of course there is going to be some bumbling and stumbling. But the fact that the film is provoking this conversation is really important for teachers and kids."

Indeed, a tense public sparring match over the achievement gap, unions and the future of the teaching profession is already under way. In August the Los Angeles Times defied the protests of unions and many education policy experts by publishing a searchable online database of elementary school teachers' effectiveness rankings. The newspaper's calculations were made using a new statistical method called value-added measurement, which is based on children's standardized test scores and which social scientists across the political spectrum agree is volatile and often flawed.

In Washington, Mayor Adrian Fenty lost his re-election bid in part because of black voters' skepticism toward his aggressive school reform efforts, led by lightning-rod schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who pursued an agenda of closing troubled neighborhood schools, instituting a privately funded merit-pay program for teachers and firing teachers and principals deemed ineffective. And at the federal level, President Obama's signature education program, the Race to the Top grant competition, pressures states to implement many of the most controversial teacher reforms, including merit pay based on value-added measurement.

Yet under the radar of this polarized debate, union affiliates across the country are coming to the table to talk about effective teaching in a more meaningful way than they ever have before. These stories of cooperation, from Pittsburgh to Memphis, are rarely being told, in part because national union leaders are worried about vocally stepping out beyond their members, and in part because of the media's tendency to finger-point at organized labor.

As in the work of influential magazine writer Steven Brill, this intra-union ferment is ignored in Waiting for Superman. The film presents teachers unions as the villains in the struggle to close the achievement gap, despite their long history of advocating for more school funding, smaller class sizes and better school resources and facilities. Guggenheim represents the unions through Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.5 million–member American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Ominous music plays during some of her interviews, which are presented alongside footage of Harlem Children's Zone founder Geoffrey Canada and former Milwaukee superintendent and school-voucher proponent Howard Fuller complaining that union contracts protect bad teachers.

But in real life, Weingarten is the union leader most credited by even free-market education reformers with being committed to retooling the teaching profession to better emphasize professional excellence and student achievement.

"The education landscape has changed pretty profoundly, and the unions have to adapt," says Tim Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a Teach for America (TFA) (profit focused, neo-con backed,) offshoot often seen as a counterweight to (the purpose of Public Schools) the power of unions and teachers colleges. "It's no longer just school districts they're dealing with but charter schools, accountability measures that flow from Washington and new governance structures such as mayoral control and state takeovers.

"Teachers unions have really struggled over the last two decades to recruit good, visionary new leadership prepared to help the unions navigate this," Daly continues. "There are exceptions. The most glaring, notable exception is Randi. She has a long career ahead of her."

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The Cost of Courage

Libertarians' and Ultra Conservatives' New (old) Hero - Ayn Rand. Her affair of words with and in defense of Child Molester/Serial Butcher David Hickman... Her idolized "Super Human"

Re-warmed Hedonism and the Apostle of Greed

click on the title for in-depth analysis