Private School Teacher Accused of Rape, Hired By New York City Department of Education

Rodney Alejandro

[From article]

A former Queens biology teacher who allegedly forced an underage student to repeatedly have sex and demanded she have two abortions skirted authorities after a prominent Catholic school quietly fired him, allowing him to work for years in city public schools, officials report.Modal TriggerRodney Alejandro
Rodney Alejandro abused the 15-year-old girl at St. Francis Preparatory School in Queens, and then went on to work for the Department of Education, a 2015 probe by the city’s Special Commissioner of Investigation charges.
First a city substitute in 1998-99, he worked from 2004 to 2010 at Robert Wagner Jr. Secondary School for Arts and Technology in Long Island City and was fired after his state license expired, officials said. He then went on to teach at a religious school in Georgia.
His reported victim, now 43 and living in Queens, declined to comment but confirmed to The Post horrendous details she published in a 2014 blog. The Post is withholding her name.
Alejandro, now 52, allegedly began raping the girl in January 1988.
By the summer of 1988, she got pregnant for the first time and she says “Alejandro forced her to have an abortion,” the SCI reports.
When she got pregnant again in January 1989, “Alejandro insisted upon an abortion,” the report says. The student says she became so depressed that she failed the school year.
“At this point, I was suicidal,” she wrote.
St. Francis Prep never disciplined Alejandro. Instead he “resigned and left the school in good standing,” the SCI found.

http://nypost.com/2016/05/08/teacher-who-allegedly-raped-student-landed-job-at-doe-probe/

Teacher who allegedly raped student landed job at DOE: probe
By Isabel Vincent and Melissa Klein
New York Post
May 8, 2016 | 6:50am

Cambridge, MA Teacher Opposes Misguided Priorities

Rose Levine with students

This teacher expresses a rational observation about imposing tests on local schools by government bureaucrats. There is no transparency who decided to limit the choices to two tests, and no option to eliminate them. Recall the scandal in Atlanta where administrators went to prison for altering test results to cover-up poor statistics. No mention of the role of teacher unions in this process. See e.g., award winning teacher John Taylor Gatto's book, Dumbing Us Down.

[From article]
it's all part of the same, failed attempt to measure what cannot be measured using tools that are inaccurate and crude. Schools have not always been this way. Schools need not continue to be this way.

http://cambridge.wickedlocal.com/article/20151226/NEWS/151228241/?Start=1

LETTER: Standardized testing is not educationally meaningful
By Rose Levine
Fifth-grade teacher, Graham & Parks School
Posted Dec. 26, 2015 at 8:15 AM
To the editor:
Cambridge Chronicle
Rose Levine, fifth-grade teacher, Graham & Parks School

US Education Bureaucracy Intentionally Dumbs Down Students

[From article]
Perhaps you are an eternal optimist, hoping the Education Establishment will reform itself. I have bad news: the top people in education like what they're doing just fine.
[. . .]
G. Stanley Hall [, John] Dewey's mentor said: "Reading should no longer be a fetish. Little attention should be paid to reading."
[. . .]
Professor Hall would be proud of our dumbed down K-12 schools. So please don't expect the Education Establishment to fix things. It's up to you.
[. . .]
The Education Establishment has a largely hidden ideological agenda intended to transform every aspect of the school. Their first concern is not academics or learning, no matter what they say. The real emphasis is on creating cooperative children. In this way, children become accustomed to being on the same level, as socialism requires. Additionally, cooperative children are docile, controllable children. Let's be realistic: our ideologues will not be able to create their brave new world if students learn to think for themselves. For concerned citizens, the first order of business is resisting this political agenda whenever possible.
[. . .]
the Education Establishment doesn't leave much to chance. They have created an interlocking array of bureaucracies, unions, foundations, think-tanks, political parties, publishers, media, and agents of influence. So you can expect a continuous bombardment of wrong-headed answers. Everybody needs to dig in his heels. Stay focused on some simple points: if these people were sincerely trying to improve education, would we have 40 million functional illiterates? Would our schools be mired in widely acknowledged mediocrity? Would more than one third of the students entering college need remedial education?
[. . .]
A hundred years ago, Frank Norris wrote a famous book called The Octopus. It was about the interlocking, all-powerful railroad company. Today's Octopus is the Education Establishment. There seem to be more than 100 separate entities that exist to make public schools conform to liberal/progressive templates.
[. . .]
multicultural means that your kids are supposed to learn as much about foreign cultures as about their own country. American third-graders know the names of rivers in China but don't know the word Mississippi. That's just quackery, and sneaky as well. There is nothing accidental about it.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/12/only_you_can_prevent_bad_public_schools.html

December 16, 2015
Only You Can Prevent Bad Public Schools
By Bruce Deitrick Price

Feminist Teachers Discriminate Against Boys

[From article]
War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. And inequality is equality – at least in the mind of Karen Keller, the Bainbridge Island Review, and their enablers.
[. . .]
Keller, a kindergarten "teacher" at Captain Johnston Blakely Elementary in Bainbridge Island, Wash., was refusing to let the boys in her class play with Legos during free play time.
[. . .]
If you're acquainted with the mental illness masquerading as teaching philosophy today, you can imagine this woman's problem. As the BIR explained, "Keller … watched with discouragement as self-segregation defined her classroom – her boy students flocked to the building blocks while her girl students played with dolls and crayons and staples, toys that offered them little challenge or opportunity to fail and develop perseverance."
[. . .]
"[W]e have been discouraged by the number of unfair personal attacks made against [Keller]" – including "hate phone calls at her classroom and vicious messages on Facebook" [. . .] Hmm...I wonder if the BIR was discouraged by the hatred directed at Christian businessmen persecuted for not wanting to cater faux weddings or the Christian pizza-shop owner forced into hiding by death threats.
[. . .]
If Keller is really so concerned about girls being discouraged by the boys' presence (a pity science hasn't yet weeded those creatures out of the species), there's a simple solution: create separate boys' and girls' Lego areas. But this wasn't good enough for her; she had to stick it to the boys for being boys.
[. . .]
Reality: hardly anyone, if anyone at all, really believes in equality. Equality is simply a ruse used when convenient to advance leftism, and it remains operative only until inequality better serves that end. Just witness the college "anti-racism" protesters who recently ejected whites from their "safe areas."

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/11/feminist_teachers_lesson_plan_discriminate_against_boys.html

November 24, 2015
Feminist Teacher's Lesson Plan: Discriminate against Boys
By Selwyn Duke

New York City Schools Failing

[From article]
She sums it up this way: “NYC is lost. Totally.”
Every American should be keenly concerned about understanding and saving New York City, because your own city is probably using the same bad methods and heading toward the same level of failure.
[. . .]
We have leadership that knows nothing and leaves us with poorly designed garbage and no one to train.
[. . .]
Then we need leadership that pushes what works! We have neither! It’s exhausting to work with these people.
I know an aide who works closely with a principal. She tells me the following, ‘He wants the kids to fail because that's where the money is; he gets more money for Special Ed so he wants to keep his Special Ed classes full.... He doesn't want them to learn to read. The charters are taking all the kids so he wants to have Special Ed and ELL classes to fill the school. That's where the money is.’ Honest! This is what she says.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/06/nyc_is_lost_totally.html

June 11, 2015
'NYC is lost. Totally.'
By Bruce Deitrick Price

NH Politicians Lament Parental Oppositon To Common Core

[From article]
This video is going viral and it SHOULD. It’s bad enough that parents are frustrated by the Common Core aligned curriculum that is destroying any chance at their child’s future in a math field. But now we have a New Hampshire State Representative bothered by parents who contact him and exercise their voice in this democratic process.
[. . .]
There was overwhelming support by parents in favor of SB101 which would prohibit the state from requiring implementation of common core standards. Why? Because parents are fed up with these new academic standards in math and English.
This petition already has almost 1500 signatures calling for the end to Common Core in NH.
Where are all of those parents who want Common Core? No where to be found.
[. . .]
We can also look at past comments from the U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan who also patronized moms who opposed Common Core as, “….white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were…”
We’ve got news for the elitists who think they know better than parents, we do know what we are talking about and we still don’t like Common Core.

http://stopcommoncorenh.org/sccnh/2015/03/31/nh-democratic-representative-disparages-parents-who-contacted-him-with-their-opinions-on-common-core/

NH Democrat Representative Disparages Parents Who Contacted Him With Their Opinions On Common Core

Progressive Education Fails To Educate

[From article]
Just as the Chinese have flooded our markets with cheap, flimsy products, progressive education has flooded our nation with cheap, uninformed minds. I believe that leftist black Americans are an embodiment of the worst outcomes of this type of education. Intellectually crippled by progressive education’s inferior pedagogy, most of the black Americans that I know have learned to use anti-white multiculturalism as the de facto replacement for the cultural self-respect that they feel continues to be denied them on account of slavery and Jim Crow. They have learned to “level the playing field” by denigrating and rejecting European history and culture, attitudes which are tolerated and even reinforced in both public and private K-12 schools. Since they reject the cultural roots and heritage of Western Civilization, they never actually learn that rich history. This is what puts them at a disadvantage in society -- not the color of their skin.
[. . .]
But I would always disagree because as shocked and depressed as I was over his election in 2008, it was Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012 that helped to confirm my worst suspicions about black America.
In spite of lingering double-digit black unemployment, increasing black homelessness, food pantries with block long lines, inner-city schools that were still failing to meet even nominal standards of proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and headline news levels of racial strife, blacks still gave Barack Obama 93% of their vote.
[. . .]
they had unequivocally bought into Barack Obama’s dreams to “fundamentally change” the country. Barack Obama’s “Change!” was implicitly anti Western Civilization. Third, America could continue to elect black presidents from now until Kingdom come. This will never change black people’s enmity towards whites and their culture. For many blacks, Barack Obama’s elections were a symbolic middle finger to Western Civilization and all of the progress that has come from it -- progress, which of course they have benefited from.
[. . .]
At worst, these communities are just too ignorant or angry to care. The angry ones will never be able to see themselves as anything other than casualties of the white man’s greed and his various never-ending wars. The ignorant ones, like those in my neighborhood, are just ignorant. And although, I know that a classical Christian education is a big part of the answer to all of this, I’m no longer sure that the black community, at large, is even worth it.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/11/giving_up_on_black_america_.html

November 15, 2014
Giving Up On Black America
By L.E. Ikenga

Common Core Labels Students Forever, No Privacy Protections

[From article]
This follows them from the cradle to the grave,” said Tracy Ramey, of Pennsylvanians against Common Core. Her group, along with Pennsylvanians Restoring Education, recently wrote Corbett to demand the shutdown of the state’s Pennsylvania Information Management System (PIMS) in all 500 school districts.
“What’s alarming is what they are doing with the data,” Ramey said.
The process, set to play out throughout the country in what critics call a “womb to workplace” information system, was originally developed by the Department of Labor and contains information on every U.S. citizen under the age of 26. Most of the information on individuals is collected while K-12 students are in school, and includes names, grades and information such as personality traits, behavior patterns and even fingerprints. The state of Pennsylvania was one of the early adopters of the data mining and contributed to the framework for a nationwide program.
Both groups allege that any state entity as well as outside contractors can access personal information.
[. . .]
"The second problem is that the data then becomes a ‘decision making model,’” she added. “This is where the violations of privacy are expanded for information to be used for ‘interventions.’ This is a civil rights violation.”


http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/12/02/womb-to-workforce-anti-common-core-advocates-allege-data-mining-on-students/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+foxnews%2Fmost-popular+%28Internal+-+Most+Popular+Content%29

Critics say Common Core includes collecting psych data on kids
By Perry ChiaramontePublished
December 02, 2014
FoxNews.com

Misguided Education Priorities

[From article]
Such "educators" teach minorities born with an incredibly valuable windfall gain -- American citizenship -- that they are victims who have a grievance against people today who have done nothing to them, because of what other people did in other times. If those individuals who feel aggrieved could sell their American citizenship to eager buyers from around the world and leave, everybody would probably be better off. Those who leave would get not only a substantial sum of money -- probably $100,000 or more -- they would also get a valuable dose of reality elsewhere.
[. . .]
If you prefer to get your education in the comfort of a library, rather than in person amid the horrors, you might study the history of the sadistic massacres of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire or the heart-wrenching story of Stalin's man-made 1930s famine in the Soviet Union that killed as many millions of people as Hitler's Holocaust did in the 1940s.
Mao's man-made famine in China killed more people than the Soviet famine and the Nazi Holocaust combined. And we should not deny their rightful place in history's chamber of horrors to the 1970s Cambodian dehumanization and slaughters that killed off at least a quarter of the entire population of that country.
[. . .]
slavery was a worldwide curse for thousands of years, as far back as recorded history goes.
[. . .]
More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after blacks were freed in the United States.

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2014/10/14/draft-n1904942

Irresponsible 'Education'
Thomas Sowell
 Oct 14, 2014

MA Schools To Teach Social Justice, Global Knowledge

[From article]
Over the the last few weeks, Michael Calvanese, newly appointed principal at Duggan, has been hiring and recruiting new teachers to join his team in an effort to shape a school experience that focuses on character development and a respect for others as well teaching them English, math and science skills.
[. . .]



The social justice theme at the school will help “students explore connections to community issues, environmental stewardship, global knowledge and understandings and equity,” according to its web site.
Calvanese said teachers will strive to incorporate social justice concerns into other subject areas. A science class focusing on energy might include conservation concerns, he said.

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2014/07/springfields_duggan_school_add.html

Springfield's Duggan School transforming into social justice magnet school
ByCarolyn Robbins | crobbins@repub.com
on July 30, 2014 at 6:21 AM, updated July 30, 2014 at 6:24 AM

Eighth Graders in CA Conclude Holocaust Never Happened

[From article]
An eighth-grade English assignment that was meant to develop students’ critical thinking skills has, instead, created some 50 new Holocaust deniers.
In May, Rialto Unified School District leaders came under intense criticism after it was revealed the district’s roughly 2,000 eighth-grade students were given an in-class essay assignment in which they were asked to consider if the Holocaust was “an actual historical event” or if it might have been “a propaganda tool that was used for political and monetary gain.”
Students were directed to “research” the issue and take a position on it, supporting their conclusion with “textual evidence” – printouts of information culled from three websites, one of which was a Holocaust denial site.
When news of the assignment broke, Rialto Unified school officials attempted to soothe angry community members by stating that none of the students actually argued that the Holocaust did not occur.
But an investigation by Los Angeles Daily News proves otherwise.

http://eagnews.org/shock-districts-critical-thinking-assignment-led-at-least-50-students-to-conclude-holocaust-never-occurred/

SHOCK: District’s ‘critical thinking’ assignment led at least 50 students to conclude Holocaust never occurred
July 15, 2014
BEN VELDERMAN

Teachers Unions Prevent Improved Student Learning

Three articles about teacher's unions preventing improvement of student learning.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/hentoff061114.php3#.U7qC7d0--yM

Jewish World Review

June 11, 2014 / 13 Sivan, 5774
Expanding the reach and lifelong impact of teachers
By Nat Hentoff

* * *

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/hentoff061814.php3#.U7qDt90--yM

Jewish World Review

June 18, 2014 / 20 Sivan, 5774
Personalized education while changing places of learning
By Nat Hentoff

* * *

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/hentoff062514.php3#.U7qEXd0--yM

Jewish World Review

June 25, 2014 / 27 Sivan, 5774
Teachers' job security more important than kids' futures?
By Nat Hentoff

AZ Teacher Who Criticized Common Core, Cursed At Online By Education Officials

[From article]
Emails back and forth among high-ranking Arizona Department of Education officials show that state officials intimidated a Tucson fifth-grade teacher and, in one instance, called him “a f*cktard” because he criticized the state’s implementation of Common Core.
The emails are now public because of a Freedom of Information request submitted by the Arizona Daily Independent.
The teacher, Brad McQueen, originally raise the ire of state education officials in February when he penned an anti-Common Core op-ed in the Independent (that later went viral locally).
McQueen, a 10-year teaching veteran, had worked on the state’s Common Core-aligned standardized tests. In the op-ed, he criticized Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and state education bureaucrats for, among much else, “willingly handed over control” of educational standards in exchange for increased federal funding.

http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/30/arizona-education-officials-intimidated-anti-common-core-teacher/

Emails Show Arizona Education Officials Intimidated Anti-Common Core Teacher, CALLED HIM ‘F*CKTARD’
9:23 AM 06/30/2014
Eric Owens
Education Editor

Spending Other People's Money Society Rules Media in Cambridge MA

[From New York Post editorial]
Behind both the Warren bill and the executive order the president signed earlier this week is the same philosophy that created a mountain of student debt that is $1 trillion and climbing.
This is a federal aid regime that encourages ever-more student borrowing, which in turn fuels university spending that then drives up tuition faster than general inflation.
If President Obama and Sen. Warren were right, the explosion in federal aid over the past decades would have made college more affordable. The reality is otherwise.

http://nypost.com/2014/06/13/obamas-old-college-try/

Obama’s old college try
By Post Editorial Board
June 13, 2014 | 10:15pm

* * *

[From Cambridge Chronicle editorial]
Most of America’s college grads are in a deep hole because of money they borrowed and invested in their educations. Outstanding student loans now total more than $1.2 trillion. One borrower out of seven defaults on student loans within three years of beginning payments.
This isn’t just a burden on graduates and their families, it’s a drag on the economy as a whole. Young people saddled with debt don’t buy furniture or cars. They linger in their parents’ homes rather than start families and households of their own. Their inability to spend is one of the factors that has kept the economic recovery from gaining momentum.
[. . .]
While it might be an easier pill for Republicans to swallow if the student loan bill’s costs were offset by a provision that was less a partisan lightning rod than a tax hike, Warren defends it. Given the state of the economy, she argues, which is a more worthy investment: college education for America’s young adults, or tax loopholes for its wealthiest earners?
[. . .]
Consider it a graduation present to the Class of 2014. 

Clearly 215 miles from New York City there is no concern for logic or for wasting taxpayer funds. The Cambridge Massachusetts weakly paper appears to be a cheerleader for the Spending Other People's Money Society.

http://cambridge.wickedlocal.com/article/20140614/NEWS/140618406
EDITORIAL: A better deal on student debt
Posted Jun. 14, 2014 @ 8:25 am
CAMBRIDGE Chronicle

Poverty Won The War On Poverty

[From article]
after trillions dumped into education at all levels since the Great Society, with the educational gap persisting between whites and Asians and blacks and Hispanics, it is apparent the education industry has not only failed the nation. It has no idea how to close that gap.

http://buchanan.org/blog/legendary-failure-liberalism-6414

Legendary Failure of Liberalism
Tuesday - May 20, 2014 at 7:30 am
Pat Buchanan

Propaganda Used to Discredit Successes of Charter Schools

[From article]
Charter schools are hated by teachers' unions and by much of the educational establishment in general. They seem to be especially hated when they succeed in educating minority children whom the educational establishment says cannot be educated.
Apparently it can be done when you don't have to hire unionized teachers with iron-clad tenure, and when you don't have to follow the dogmas in vogue in the educational establishment.
[. . .]
Charter schools are hated by teachers' unions and by much of the educational establishment in general. They seem to be especially hated when they succeed in educating minority children whom the educational establishment says cannot be educated.
Apparently it can be done when you don't have to hire unionized teachers with iron-clad tenure, and when you don't have to follow the dogmas in vogue in the educational establishment.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell042914.php3#.U2b1vd0--yM

Jewish World Review

April 29, 2014 /29 Nissan, 5774
Politics Versus Education
By Thomas Sowell

Misguided Abuse of Power By Teachers Unions

[From article]
One of the claims is that these alternative schools drain money from the public schools. But expenditures per pupil in the public schools have risen during the era of the spread of alternative schools.
[. . .]
Then there is the claim that alternative schools "skim the cream" of the students, and that this explains why their test results are better. But many, if not most, charter schools select among their applicants through a lottery

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell043014.php3#.U2b2xd0--yM

Jewish World Review

April 30, 2014 / 30 Nissan, 5774
Demonizing the Helpers
By Thomas Sowell

Burning Out Teachers

[From article]
in Paterson, NJ, a first-grade teacher became the focus of a witch hunt for using a social network as a coping mechanism. While decompressing, she vented on her Facebook page, "I'm not a teacher -- I'm a warden for future criminals!" Despite her forewarning being statistically credible, the blatant disrespect to the PC gods resulted in her termination. Political correctness is another untaught skill that must be mastered by teachers who want to survive inner-city schools.
[. . .]
Coincidentally, these numbers are comparable to the incarceration rates between Blacks and Whites, but I digress. The Obama administration created the African-American Education Initiative, which illogically wants public schools to reduce disciplinary actions against Black students. Overall, disciplining Black students is really a slippery slope, especially if the teacher is White. Whenever a White teacher disciplines a black student, the unspoken burden of proof is on the White teacher to prove that he/she isn't racist.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/the_other_dropout_problem_in_urban_schools.html

September 23, 2013
The Other Dropout Problem in Urban Schools
By Taleeb Starkes

Education Reform Urged

[From article]
In education, we did much the same thing, going from the one-room schoolhouse — much like a blacksmith shop, where the teacher taught as he/she pleased, and students learned as individuals — to an industrial-model school where students were separated by age and moved along what amounts to an assembly line. Students come in at one end as kindergartners, move step by step along the assembly line getting standardized instruction, and emerge at the other end as graduates. In the industrial era, it worked pretty well, turning out lots of future assembly-line workers, already familiar with following instructions, standing in line, and starting work when the bell rang.

Glenn Reynolds advocates many of the same solutions as John Taylor Gatto. See 

http://enoughroomvideo.blogspot.com/2013/08/dumbing-us-down-by-john-taylor-gatto.html 

for some of Gatto's ideas. 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367688/school-instapundit-interview

JANUARY 7, 2014 4:00 AM
The School of the Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds on reforming education, the Internet, and more.
An NRO Interview

Dumbed Down Population, False Beliefs

[From article]
On Sept. 17, Constitution Day, a student at Modesto Junior College was told to stop distributing copies of the Constitution until he had filled out the requisite forms for permission to use the college’s designated “free speech area.” The Bank of England is putting Jane Austen on a new 10-pound note because without a woman on some notes, British currency would “not command respect and legitimacy.” Queen Elizabeth II is on all notes.
[. . .]
MSNBC, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Gov. George Wallace’s attempt to prevent the integration of the University of Alabama, identified Wallace as a Republican.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/will112813.php3#.UpeSaN00i6Y

Jewish World Review
Pardon these turkeys: Give thanks to the year 2013
By George Will
November 28, 2013