ReMARKable Blow Back On Bloomberg Money In NC Supt Race

Posted on March 9, 2016 by A.P. Dillon

money trapIt appears I am not the only one unsettled by discovering that there is substantial Bloomberg money in the NC Supt Race.
From the OnlyGunsAndMoney Blogspot:  No Lawyers – Only Guns and Money

Excerpt:

Johnson is a lawyer in Winston-Salem, a member of the Winston-Salem Forsyth County Board of Education, and is an alumnus ofTeach for America who taught high school in Charlotte. According to Andrea Dillon aka Lady Liberty 1885 who is staunch Common Core opponent, Johnson has told her he is not a fan of Common Core.

What makes me leery of Mark Johnson is a personal contribution to his campaign by our longtime friend Mike Bloomberg. Bloomberg and his daughter Emma have donated a combined $5,200 to Johnson’s campaign. Johnson says he doesn’t know why the Bloombergs made the donation. He said, “Some of his people mailed a check to me.”

Sorry, dude, but checks like that come with obligations to the donor. Just ask Virginia AG Mark Herring. If Johnson wins, will he be expected to fight to keep schools gun-free zones? Or will he argue before the General Assembly that they should overturn the law which allows concealed carriers to keep their firearms in locked vehicles on school property? Will Everytown’s joke of “gun safety” training be mandated in NC schools?

And another from the NC Shooters Association:

Candidate Recommendations
CLICK HERE to view GRNC candidate recommendations
(or go to: http://www.grnc.org/documents/2016-GRNC-Primary-Candidate-Recommendations.pdf).

here, candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction, Mark Johnson, is shaping up to be a minion of anti-gun carpetbagger, Michael Bloomberg. If you “follow the money” and draw logical conclusions:

DO NOT VOTE FOR MARK JOHNSON FOR SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION

Posted in EDUCATION, ELECTIONS | Tagged , | Comments Off on ReMARKable Blow Back On Bloomberg Money In NC Supt Race

Political Activism From The News and Observer Editorial Board? You don’t say…

Posted on March 9, 2016 by A.P. Dillon

Media ActivismGee, another politically motivated editorial from an editorial board that is clearly clueless about actual education and supports Common Core to the point of nausea? That’s so unexpected.

Before I launch into a letter to the N&O board, let’s note that Don Martin isn’t just a High Point University professor, he was a Superintendent in NC for 19 years.  Martin also ran for and won a Forsyth county commissioner seat in 2014.

I wanted to make sure of the background, because N&O’s sister paper apparently likes to ignore that type of thing.  Now, on to the letter.

Dear Clueless and Politically motivated N&O Editorial Board,

Education is important to everyone.  These are real people; real teachers, real students and real parents. We are not your personal slot machine whose arm you can pull looking for a political payday. Stop.

Much of the problems lie within the actual districts, not the legislature. North Carolina is 7th in the nation in state spending on education. It is more than half of our state budget and growing.  How fast, exactly, would you like it to grow?

And where, exactly, will these funds come from if not from a tax increase? You hoorang at the legislature about taxes, yet offer no solution yourselves. That’s very politically convenient for you to basically throw a rock and run away.

You mention per pupil spending, yet conveniently left out the $230 boost in 2015.

Also, teacher pay has steadily increased over the last 3 years, pay has seen the largest increase in our state’s history and yet you fail to ever mention that or who froze that pay in the first place.  The number 42 looks bad only when people do not realize that what separates #42 from #32 is about $2,000-2,200 dollars and that states like NY, which have high salaries and draw those salary funds largely from the federal government, skew the data.

North Carolina also is in the top ten for number of instructors per 10,000 pupils, which is a heavy load when it comes to a state that mainly self-funds. In fact, in North Carolina  salaries, benefits and pensions take up over 90% of the education budget.

Instead, this editorial board uses education funding to slam the tax plan changes which have been nationally recognized as possibly the best changes currently in play.

We throw more and more money at education in this country every year and have repeatedly done so for decades. The result has been stagnant or declining achievement. More money is not the answer, spending smarter is.  The entire editorial board would do well to read The K-12 Implosion.

School districts are historically poor stewards of the tax dollar and are rarely held accountable; most these days more concerned with making sure their “Equity Affairs” offices and “Diversity Directors” have enough funding like Wake county and Durham are.

Meanwhile, in those two districts, parents are heading for the exits from the public schools in record numbers.  Wake county has the largest homeschool population in the state and over the last three years it has been steadily growing.  The N&O has yet to ask the question of WHY parents are running, not walking, out of the public schools.

Here are some suggestions for the N&O.

How about the N&O do some actual journalism instead of preaching to a choir that would agree with you if you said the Earth was flat?

How about the N&O go get the line by line item budget for the ten biggest district and see where they waste spend their funds?

By the way — Where was the N&O when USA Today was reporting the story of how the Department of Public Instruction, under the direction of Dr. Atkinson, blew off improving the teacher screening process for North Carolina?

We received an “F” and anyone who has paid attention to NC Plotthound’s “Not A Homeschool” series knows we have a real and consistent problem in this state with teachers being arrested on various charges, assaulting students, and having sex with our kids.

Where was the N&O when Atkinson and Cobey were caught monkeying with the funds for Read to Achieve?

Thanks,

A.P. Dillon

Posted in A.P. Dillon (LL1885), EDUCATION, Media Bias, NCGA, POLITICS NC | Comments Off on Political Activism From The News and Observer Editorial Board? You don’t say…

March 8th GOP Primary Results

Posted on March 9, 2016 by A.P. Dillon

ConsequencesThese are the March 8th primary results via Decision Desk HQ.

Trump won three states. Cruz won one state. In the three states Trump won, Cruz came in second. Cruz overtook John Kasich in Michigan to come in second.

 

The vote tallies by state per Decision Desk HQ:

Idaho

Candidate % Of Votes Votes Cast Votes Behind
Cruz 45.4% 100,928
Trump 28.1% 62,466 38,462
Rubio 15.9% 35,333 65,595
Kasich 7.4% 16,515 84,413
All Other 3.1% 6,925 91,003

Michigan

Candidate % Of Votes Votes Cast Votes Behind
Trump 36.6% 494,638
Cruz 24.8% 334,994 159,644
Kasich 24.1% 326,049 168,589
Rubio 9.4% 126,867 367,771
All Other 5.1% 69,386 425,252

Mississippi

Candidate % Of Votes Votes Cast Votes Behind
Trump 47.3% 176,804
Cruz 36.7% 136,995 39,809
Kasich 8.7% 32,762 144,132
Rubio 5.1% 18,904 157,900
All Other 2.3% 8,415 168,389

Hawaii

Candidate % Of Votes Votes Cast Votes Behind
Trump 42.4% 5,677
Cruz 32.7% 4,379 1,298
Rubio 13.1% 1,759 3,918
Kasich 10.6% 1,413 4,264
All Other 1.1% 149 5,528

Per the AP this morning, this was the delegate tally:

Trump: 458
Cruz: 359
Rubio: 151
Kasich: 54

Posted in ELECTIONS | 5 Comments

LGBT Leader With Sex Offender Status Resigns From Charlotte LGBT Chamber of Commerce

Posted on March 9, 2016 by A.P. Dillon

NC SBI Sevearance 2015 photoChad Sevearance, the leader of the Transgender bathroom ordinance push in Charlotte, NC whose sex offender status was exposed by Family Values Coalition, has apparently resigned as President of  Charlotte’s LGBT Chamber of Commerce.

The resignation came on or around the 22nd of February, according to the LGBT news portal, Qnotes.

The Charlotte Observer has not reported this tidbit, but we shouldn’t be surprised by that. Keep reading and you’ll see why.

Qnotes describes Sevearance’s crime:

Court records obtained by QNotes show Chad Sevearance-Turner, 38, was convicted of committing a lewd act on a minor in 1998. He was 19 and working as a music minister at a church in Gaffney, S.C. The minor was a 15-year-old boy who attended the church.

Severance-Turner was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and he served two years before being released on parole. He has had no further violations since.

[…]

During this week’s trial, all three of the boys described waking during the night to find Severance fondling them, either at their homes or at his home. They said that in July 1998 he started making excuses to spend the night under the same roof with them.

Sevearance was born on November 11, 1977, which would make him 20 or 21 depending on the date, not 19.  Sevearance apparently maintained he was innocent the whole time.

Also, it wasn’t just one boy. It was three boys all under the age of 16, and it took a jury less than two hours to convict him. Local news outlet, GroupState.com 07/22/2000:

A Cherokee County jury took less than two hours Friday to find former youth minister Chad Severance guilty of fondling a teen-age church member as the boy slept.

Circuit Judge John Few sentenced Severance, 22, of Bessemer City, N.C., to 10 years in prison on a single felony count of committing a lewd act on a minor. He faces two other counts of the same charge, each involving a different teen-age male church member. All three boys were members of the New Harvest Church of God at 120 Boiling Springs Highway. 

Qnotes has Sevearance on the record saying this about his conviction (emphasis added):

In an interview with qnotes, Sevearance-Turner said the decision to resign was fully his.

“What I didn’t want to do was allow the right to continue to detract and to continue throwing stones at an organization that has done absolutely nothing but help individuals and our community in our city,” he said.

Sevearance-Turner declined to comment on the details of his conviction, and dismissed them as irrelevant.

“If this had anything to do with the non-discrimination ordinance, and if it had any credence or validity with what we’re discussing as a city and as an LGBT community, then I would absolutely welcome the interrogation,” he said, “but I think that it detracts from the real conversations we’re having.”

Amazing. The leader of a community pushing for the “right” to let men pee in women’s bathrooms and vice versa, and which literally opens the door for all kinds of sexual predators to take advantage, thinks his sex offender status is irrelevant.

Don’t Do It Charlotte has all three of the charges from the South Carolina Court.
View Charge 1, Charge 2, Charge 3.

Sevearance’s petition to the South Carolina Supreme Court was denied in 2002.

On the media front, the Daily Caller has an article by Demi Dowdy of the Civitas Institute in Raleigh about the Charlotte Observer knowing about Sevearance’s status on February 8th, yet they failed to report about it.

Excerpt:

The Charlotte Observer, a publication that has consistently championed the proposed ordinance, knew about Sevearance’s predatory past for several weeks. Not only were press releases sent containing this information, but follow up calls were made directly to multiple reporters on staff. (See images)

The violation of their readers’ trust is clear. And the journalistic integrity is absent. The reporters at the Charlotte Observer didn’t just turn a blind eye, they covered up the truth.

Yes, they did cover it up, they buried it. The Charlotte Observer used their own news outlet for personal activism.

Hey, remember with the Charlotte Observer memory-holed that story on Kay Hagan’s family sucking up stimulus money?  Well, now Hagan is under investigation for that very thing by the US Department of Energy.  So far, the Charlotte Observer has not reported it.

Their sister outlet, News and Observer is no better.

Both of them seem to have an aversion to using Google and both of them elevate individuals in their stories while ignoring criminal records.

Don’t forget, the News and Observer edited footage of DREAMERS upstaging Kay Hagan at a campaign rally. The News and Observer chopped up the footage, and inserted still frames with added text in them. This was done to portray the situation in the best possible light for Hagan.

The lesson here is that the average citizen has to assume the mainstream news outlets they frequent are either lying to them, are lazy or both.  What I suggest is when reading a story, Google the quoted persons or groups, you’ll be amazed at what you find — heck, it’s half of what I blog about here at this site.

Update:

As Carolina Plotthound points out, Sevearance now plans to SUE the NC Family Values Coalition.  Tucked in the bottom section of the Qnotes article:

Sevearance-Turner will remain an advisory to the board, and says he is in the process of filing a lawsuit against Fitzgerald and the outspoken activist brothers Jason and David Benham for misusing information from the sex offender registry.

Exactly how did they ‘misuse’ this information?

It’s relevant that he was convicted for committing ‘lewd’ acts on several minors. Discovery will be fun in that case, should it go forward.

Posted in A.P. Dillon (LL1885), LGBTQ Issues, Media Bias | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Charter School Numbers for 2015-16 Show Increases Again – #nced

Posted on March 8, 2016 by A.P. Dillon

apple booksLast week, Dr. Terry Stoops of the John Locke Foundation noted a steady gain in charter school attendance in the Dept. of Public Instruction report.

Check out Stoop’s newsletter here.

 

One part caught my eye and I think he’s spot on about the Char-Mecklenburg assignment debacle:

Charter schools are more popular in Region 6 than any other.  Region 6 includes Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Lincoln, and Iredell counties.  All three have significant shares of students who attend charter schools.  In Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Lincoln counties, 9.4 percent of the public school populations chose charter schools.  In Iredell County, it is 8.1 percent.  I suspect that new assignment policies in Mecklenburg County will be a boon for area charters, particularly among families who desire neighborhood schools.

Wake county’s school board is just as ‘diversity’ obsessed as Charlotte-Mecklenburg. So it’s maybe worth noting that Wake county saw a significant increase with a jump of around 1,000 more students since last year.

Wake’s breakdown over the last few years shows it’s been steadily ticking up as more charters in the area open up:

  • 2012-13: 5,798
  • 2013-14: 6,721
  • 2014-15: 8,555
  • 2015-16: 9,557

As I’ve noted in the past, homeschooling in North Carolina and, in particular in Wake county, is also booming.

In 2014-15, Wake county had the biggest homeschool school number in the state with 6,359. Those 6,359 schools had 10,407 students. View the 2014-15 report here and more homeschool information at the Division of Non-Public Education page.

The number of homeschools for roughly the same period, minus this years results which are not available yet. The first number is the number of schools, the second is the estimated number of students.

  • 2014-15: 67,804 & 106,853
  • 2013-14: 60,950 & 98,172
  • 2012-13: 53,347 & 87,978
  • 2011-12: 47,977 & 79,693

School choice is clearly booming in North Carolina.

Posted in A.P. Dillon (LL1885), Charter Schools, EDUCATION, Homeschool, Wake County School Board | Tagged , | Comments Off on Charter School Numbers for 2015-16 Show Increases Again – #nced

GED, Common Core to Blame for Denkins?

Posted on March 8, 2016 by A.P. Dillon

I recently wrote about the Akiel Denkins shooting and over the weekend, a reader of the blog pointed me at a very lengthy article in the News and Observer about him.

The article is very  long but the narrative throughout is  that people knew Denkins was no angel but the reader is supposed to feel bad for him anyway.  I feel bad when anyone loses their life, however if you’re going to sell drugs, run from cops and brandish a weapon at police… it sounds awful, but my sympathies are tempered somewhat there.

Having said that, it is quite possible this guy had no chance and that other avenues were cut off. I’ll explain. Way down in the piece is a section titled “Honor Roll Student”.

Here is an excerpt and the emphasis added is mine:

Denkins was born in February 1992. His mother, Rolanda Byrd, was 15. His father, Sean Dailey, had numerous drug arrests starting when Denkins was a toddler.

By all accounts, Denkins was a happy child, making people laugh and carrying around a well-worn football. He made the honor roll in 2002 as a third-grader at Cooper Elementary when his family lived in Clayton, getting his name in The News & Observer. But his ease with academics did not last, and he left Enloe High School without finishing the 10th grade.

Denkins’ first arrest came in 2011, a trespassing charge not long after his 19th birthday. Womack was there for the arrest, which he calls “bogus” even five years later. Denkins, he said, got singled out from a crowd of people. A misdemeanor marijuana charge followed in November of that year, and more would follow.

Still, away from the streets, Denkins showed his depth.

When he came to Neighbor to Neighbor for his GED, he took a placement test to determine his reading level. The average score for students around Bragg Street falls somewhere around the sixth-grade level, Womack said. Denkins scored an 11.8, or nearly 12th-grade level.

In GED class, he showed a hunger to learn, questioning his teachers relentlessly until he understood a lesson. Womack recalled that Denkins’ questions once took up an entire class. But once he finished, his classmates told Womack they were glad he spoke up. They hadn’t understood, either.

“Akiel was brilliant,” Hathcock said. “This is a guy who’s been through some things. He’s brilliant, but he’s shaped in an environment where he’s not thriving. He’s surviving.”

In early 2014, when the GED curriculum changed to reflect Common Core standards, the work grew exponentially harder. Denkins quit coming as often, as did many others. But he continued with the job training program and briefly found construction work in the field he wanted to work: carpentry. That job, Womack said, turned out to be seasonal.

Now, not to diminish the seriousness of the Denkins case, but I have to stress that for some time now, I’ve been railing about the GED being Common Core aligned.

Common Core itself has a racial bias to it as test scores around the nation have been spelling out.

The GED is supposed to be the ‘every man’s’ test.  It’s not. I assert that by aligning to Common Core, the GED has been turned into a test to weed out people just like Akiel Denkins and put them into a workforce silo of ‘skilled labor’.

While his actions over time that eventually led to the confrontation that ended his life are not excusable, neither is the way education elites are driving people like him down that path.

Posted in A.P. Dillon (LL1885), EDUCATION | Tagged | Comments Off on GED, Common Core to Blame for Denkins?