Australian Birds - The Willie Wagtail
04.30.06 (8:23 am) [edit]
Willie Wagtail:
Almost everyone must be familiar with this little black and white Fantail whose name expresses his habit of constantly wagging his long upright tail from side to side and sometimes fanning it. The Willie Wagtail lives all over Australia except in the rain forest and in heavily timbered areas. It is a very common resident of open forests and scrub, farming areas and wooded watercourses, even near creeks in the dry inland regions. It is also a very familiar bird in city parks and gardens and is quite fearless and friendly.
Like other Fantails it is active and restless, never still for long. It will sit on a vantage point watching for insects - mostly flies - and quickly snapping them up on the wing. In the country it will sit perched on the backs of cattle and is said to destroy cattle ticks. It is said also to sit on the back of crocodiles in the far north and even to picks scraps from between their teeth.
Willie Wagtail has an attractive and melodious whistling call which sounds something like 'sweet pretty little creature': this call can often be heard late into the night. It has also a scolding alarm call of chicka-chicka-chicka. Although normally a trusting little bird, it becomes very pugnacious when it is nesting and will try to drive even a hawk from its territory. The nest is a cup beautifully moulded of fine strips of bark and grass, tightly woven and bound with so much cobweb that it appears to be made of it. The Wagtail has a variety of nesting sites, usually quite low - on a horizontal limb of a tree hidden by foliage, attached to a fencing wire or house rafter or under a verandah. It may raise up to four broods in one season. It often uses the same nest, rebuilding it the following year. When nesting in a tree, Wagtails often nest in the same tree as a pair of Mudlarks.
Splinters from the Cross
04.24.06 (7:16 am) [edit]
Splinters from The Cross
Little headaches, little heartaches
Little griefs of every day.
Little trials and vexations,
How they throng around our way!
One great cross, immense and heavy,
So it seems to our weak will,
Might be borne with resignation,
But these many small ones kill,
Yet all life is formed of small things,
Little leaves, make up the trees,
Many tiny drops of water
Blending, make the mighty seas,
Let us not then by impatience
Mar the beauty of the whole,
But for love of Jesus bear all
In the silence of our soul.
Asking Him for grace sufficient
To sustain us through each loss,
And to treasure each small offering
As a splinter from His Cross.
Little headaches, little heartaches
Little griefs of every day.
Little trials and vexations,
How they throng around our way!
One great cross, immense and heavy,
So it seems to our weak will,
Might be borne with resignation,
But these many small ones kill,
Yet all life is formed of small things,
Little leaves, make up the trees,
Many tiny drops of water
Blending, make the mighty seas,
Let us not then by impatience
Mar the beauty of the whole,
But for love of Jesus bear all
In the silence of our soul.
Asking Him for grace sufficient
To sustain us through each loss,
And to treasure each small offering
As a splinter from His Cross.
BAND AIDS OR BULLDOZERS
04.22.06 (8:34 pm) [edit]
Band-Aids or Bulldozers
What's next for NCLB?
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We are now in year five of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Once hailed as a historic new federal commitment to leave no child behind, today NCLB inspires fear and loathing from coast to coast -- and beyond. Puerto Rico and Hawaii hate it too.
Every one of the 50 states has introduced legislation rejecting all or part of NCLB. Several have filed lawsuits against it. More than 10,000 schools have been put on NCLB's infamous list of "schools in need of improvement" and face an escalating series of sanctions that address neither their needs nor their challenges. Thousands more will be added to the list in the next few years as increasing numbers of schools are squeezed in the tightening vise of unreachable "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) test targets and inadequate resources. This year more than a quarter of all public schools (nearly 23,000) failed to reach AYP. Missing AYP two years in a row earns a spot on the list.
Today, NCLB is almost as unpopular as the administration and Congress that created it. With the law coming up for reauthorization in 2007, debate is heating up about whether we need Band-Aids to "fix" NLCB or a bulldozer to bury it.
So far, efforts to make NCLB more reasonable have been largely futile. Margaret Spellings, the new secretary of education, has used less inflammatory rhetoric than her predecessor (Rod "the NEA is a terrorist organization" Paige). But her department's much-lauded "flexibility" about NCLB regulations has been marginal. New guidelines allow schools to exempt more of their most severely disabled special education students from NCLB tests. Rules that require schools to give tests to limited English proficient (LEP) students in languages they don't know and then remove them from that category as soon as they know enough English to improve their scores have been modified slightly. States have been allowed to manipulate thresholds for "proficiency" and vary the number of students required before a subgroup's scores count. These changes have helped limit, temporarily, the number of "failing" schools, though a new study from the Harvard Civil Rights Project indicates that many of the changes have allowed more wealthy and white districts to avoid penalties imposed on poorer districts with more students of color.
But none of this tinkering has altered the fundamental problems with the law. Districts remain under mandate to reach 100 percent passing rates on state tests for all students by 2014. Next year, all districts are required to give math and language tests in every grade three through eight, and once in high school. Required science tests must be added by 2007–08. The testing plague is spreading so fast even the companies making millions off it are having trouble keeping up. The Education Sector, a Washington, D.C., research group, recently estimated that public schools, which already give more than 33 million tests under NCLB, must add another 11.4 million by the end of the current school year. With states spending only about $20 per student developing these tests, many are poorly made and even more unreliable than existing ones. Thirty-five percent of state testing offices reported a "significant error" by a testing contractor in scoring a state test since 2000. As researcher Walt Haney of Boston College has noted, "There is more public oversight of the pet industry and the food we feed our dogs than there is for the quality of tests we make our kids take."
But the overuse and misuse of standardized tests is only the start of the problems with NCLB. NCLB uses these test scores to impose sanctions that have no record of success as school improvement strategies, and in fact are not really educational strategies at all. They're political strategies designed to promote privatization and market reform in public education. The most well known of these sanctions are NCLB's transfer and supplemental tutorial provisions. Both encourage students (and not necessarily the "failing" students) to transfer to other schools and/or seek tutoring, mostly from private companies. Both channel funds and resources away from struggling schools and leave them further behind. [For more, see "The NCLB Hoax," www.rethinkingschools.org/specialreports/bushpl an.]
Less well known, but soon to become much more familiar, are the law's more drastic measures for schools that miss AYP for four or five years. After four years, schools are required to choose one of the following:
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Replace school staff relevant to the failure.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Put in place a new curriculum.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Decrease management authority at the school.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Appoint outside experts to advise the school.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Extend the school year or the school day.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Restructure the internal organization of the school.
After five years, the choices are:
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Reopen as a charter school.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Replace all or most of the staff.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Contract with an outside entity to operate the school.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Institute other significant governance and staffing changes likely to improve the school.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Turn over operation of the school to the state.
Since NCLB sanctions are cumulative, schools also must presumably continue to offer transfer and tutoring while instituting these measures.
These sanctions are a formula for chaos, not school improvement. Some (like extended school years and days) would require large sums of money that NCLB does not provide. Others are hopelessly vague ("a new curriculum," "other significant" changes) and others are a license to sell off public schools to private management firms ("contract with an outside entity"). But none of these strategies has any record of success when it comes to addressing the problems of educational inequality and academic achievement gaps that trigger their imposition. As researcher Gerald Bracey has pointed out, NCLB uses the phrase "scientifically based research" 111 times, but has "zero" scientific evidence to support the sanctions it imposes on the schools to improve performance.
One of the insidious effects of NCLB has been the way it has rapidly integrated itself into state systems of standards and testing. The mainstream consensus -- developed through years of governors' summits and business roundtables -- is that externally imposed standards and tests are the key to school improvement. This has proved to be fertile soil for NCLB at the state level. As the new Harvard Civil Rights study describes, "NCLB as now implemented undermines the development and implementation of states' own systems designed to reform curriculum and assessment and undermines the implementation of whole school models and long-term basic reform at the school and district levels."
Despite NCLB's unprecedented extension of federal influence over school policy, states retain considerable flexibility in defining and implementing NCLB penalties. Promoting the least harmful and most supportive "interventions" for schools on the NCLB sanctions list will be an increasingly important task for education reformers and activists in the next few years.
The Massachusetts Campaign for the Education of the Whole Child is one such promising effort. [See www.citizensforpublicschools.org.]
But state education agencies are rapidly being overwhelmed by the growing numbers of schools identified for "restructuring," ; severely limited capacity to assume responsibility for them, and a patchwork of poorly designed and largely unworkable sanctions to implement.
One obvious problem is money. A lot of attention has been paid to the debate over funding levels for NCLB, and whether NCLB provides enough money to pay for all the tests it requires or lives up to the president's promises when the law was passed. (It doesn't, of course. See "Taming the Beast," Rethinking Schools, Vol. 18, No. 4.) But there's been less attention paid to the absence of funding to support the new sanctions NCLB imposes. The legislation does have language creating a special school improvement fund. But the president has never requested, and Congress has never authorized, any money for it. Instead, NCLB "school improvement funds" are taken by diverting funds from Title I -- the single largest federal education program, originally designed to support schools with high concentrations of poor students -- away from local schools and districts to state education departments to develop plans to implement NCLB sanctions. The result is what the Center for Education Policy recently called "a shell game, in which states take funds away from districts with the greatest concentrations of low-income children and give them to other districts" to finance the imposition of NCLB penalties.
Beneath the Rhetoric
Contention over how to respond to growing numbers of schools in the latter stages of NCLB sanctions will only add to resistance against the law. Still, the prospects for correcting such fundamental flaws while reauthorizing NCLB are mixed at best.
Historically, federal education legislation has set broad policy goals and used federal funds to promote them at the state and local levels. Often these goals have reflected equity concerns like ending discrimination or providing services for special needs students. To be sure, NCLB does echo such precedents by explicitly focusing on achievement gaps and demanding that schools address them. In fact, NCLB's expressed goal of overcoming educational inequality is probably its strongest source of political support.
But beneath the rhetoric, NCLB's policy framework is toxic, bad for the health of schools and children and driven by ideological political objectives that are arrogantly indifferent to the realities of school life. It makes no commitment to bridging the deep social inequalities reflected in academic achievement gaps, but demands that schools make them disappear (and it demands more of poorer, diverse schools than richer, homogeneous ones). When schools fall short of the impossible, they face punitive sanctions that weaken their ability to serve all students and ultimately increase educational inequality instead of reduce it.
Some advocates for children and schools, desperate for signs of hope amidst the wasteland of social and economic policies emanating from Washington, have struggled mightily to find positives in NCLB. They point to the pressure on schools to account for all students, the promise of better choices for parents in the poorest communities, the emphasis on improving teacher qualifications. But five years of inconsistent and underfinanced implementation has made good on none of these promises. Reasonable people may continue to differ on various aspects of NCLB, but the core of the law has been laid inescapably bare: tests, more tests, and punitive sanctions that create a systematic and misleading impression of failure and that hurt public education far more than they help those who have been poorly served by it.
As NCLB reauthorization nears, a central question will be what can be done to limit the damage, especially since the law's harmful impact is poised to grow dramatically over the next five years as its more drastic sanctions kick in.
For several years, Democrats in Congress have resisted reopening the provisions of NCLB, warning that the current political climate was likely to encourage the introduction of even more aggressive privatization measures. This will undoubtedly be attempted next year. Renewed evidence that NCLB's sanctions are a stalking horse for privatization can be found in the President's 2007-08 budget. While overall education funding is significantly reduced, the administration found $100 million to support another voucher proposal that would make private schools eligible to receive NCLB transfer students. Some members of Congress have been pushing for such vouchers since NCLB was first proposed, and their repeated re-emergence in everything from Katrina relief packages to local Washington, D.C., "pilot programs" to annual presidential budgets heralds their inevitable reappearance in next year's NCLB reauthorization plans.
Democratic supporters of the law generally have confined themselves to complaints about funding levels, while they continue to endorse NCLB as an essentially positive program for schools. But growing local and state sentiment against NCLB assures that other issues will surface in the reauthorization process. Significant elements of the education and civil rights lobbies are committed to trying to modify NCLB and proposals for reform have already come from the National Association of State Legislators, many professional associations, and the national teachers' unions. FairTest has also put together a broad coalition of education advocacy and civil rights groups to support replacing NCLB's most harmful provisions with measures that could support better assessment practices and reform efforts. [See www.fairtest.org.]
Among the proposals likely to be considered by Congress next year are:
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Efforts to allow states to use "growth models" that give schools and districts credit for relative progress in place of more rigid AYP formulas.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Limits on the applicability of sanctions, like transfers and supplemental tutoring, to "failing" subgroups (or even "failing" students within "failing" subgroups). Currently, everyone in a NCLB-sanctioned school becomes eligible once a school is deemed "in need of improvement." (This is true even if a school is sanctioned for "inadequate performance" in consecutive years by two totally different groups.)
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Proposals to reverse the order of the transfer and tutorial sanctions, so that the more disruptive, and less available, transfer option would kick in later. This would also give a boost to private tutorial providers, who stand to profit from largely unregulated and unmonitored access to potentially $2 billion in public funds each year.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Proposals to raise funding to levels that would support both the law's testing mandates and some fraction of the estimated costs of actually reaching them (or conversely to suspend sanctions in any year the law was not fully funded.)
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Proposals to give states more leeway to issue waivers, vary assessment practices and testing schedules, and pursue their own formulas for reform.
The debate over reauthorizing NCLB is likely to show how much the bipartisan coalition that originally passed it has fragmented. Hopefully, it will also provide opportunities to limit the damage. But the Congressional debate, unfortunately, is much less likely to define lasting alternatives to the top-down, test-driven, underfunded policies that are crushing the life and the hope out of too many schools.
For that we'll need the voices of educators, students, and communities. One place those voices could make a difference will be the 2006 elections when the next Congress will be chosen. Many in the antiwar movement, frustrated by the failure of Congress to reflect the broad popular opposition to the war in Iraq, have pledged not to support any candidates who continue to support current U.S. policy. Similarly, opponents of NCLB might insist, at a minimum, on a pledge to end federally mandated testing, eliminate the direct ties between test scores and sanctions, and replace NCLB's privatization agenda with more funding and stronger support for improving the public system.
Sending people to Congress who are committed to ending both the war in Iraq and the war on our public schools would be a big step toward making good on the promises -- empty so far -- of No Child Left Behind.
Stan Karp (stankarp@aol.com), on leave from his teaching position in Paterson, N.J., is an editor of Rethinking Schools. This article appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Rethinking Schools.
Every one of the 50 states has introduced legislation rejecting all or part of NCLB. Several have filed lawsuits against it. More than 10,000 schools have been put on NCLB's infamous list of "schools in need of improvement" and face an escalating series of sanctions that address neither their needs nor their challenges. Thousands more will be added to the list in the next few years as increasing numbers of schools are squeezed in the tightening vise of unreachable "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) test targets and inadequate resources. This year more than a quarter of all public schools (nearly 23,000) failed to reach AYP. Missing AYP two years in a row earns a spot on the list.
Today, NCLB is almost as unpopular as the administration and Congress that created it. With the law coming up for reauthorization in 2007, debate is heating up about whether we need Band-Aids to "fix" NLCB or a bulldozer to bury it.
So far, efforts to make NCLB more reasonable have been largely futile. Margaret Spellings, the new secretary of education, has used less inflammatory rhetoric than her predecessor (Rod "the NEA is a terrorist organization" Paige). But her department's much-lauded "flexibility" about NCLB regulations has been marginal. New guidelines allow schools to exempt more of their most severely disabled special education students from NCLB tests. Rules that require schools to give tests to limited English proficient (LEP) students in languages they don't know and then remove them from that category as soon as they know enough English to improve their scores have been modified slightly. States have been allowed to manipulate thresholds for "proficiency" and vary the number of students required before a subgroup's scores count. These changes have helped limit, temporarily, the number of "failing" schools, though a new study from the Harvard Civil Rights Project indicates that many of the changes have allowed more wealthy and white districts to avoid penalties imposed on poorer districts with more students of color.
But none of this tinkering has altered the fundamental problems with the law. Districts remain under mandate to reach 100 percent passing rates on state tests for all students by 2014. Next year, all districts are required to give math and language tests in every grade three through eight, and once in high school. Required science tests must be added by 2007–08. The testing plague is spreading so fast even the companies making millions off it are having trouble keeping up. The Education Sector, a Washington, D.C., research group, recently estimated that public schools, which already give more than 33 million tests under NCLB, must add another 11.4 million by the end of the current school year. With states spending only about $20 per student developing these tests, many are poorly made and even more unreliable than existing ones. Thirty-five percent of state testing offices reported a "significant error" by a testing contractor in scoring a state test since 2000. As researcher Walt Haney of Boston College has noted, "There is more public oversight of the pet industry and the food we feed our dogs than there is for the quality of tests we make our kids take."
But the overuse and misuse of standardized tests is only the start of the problems with NCLB. NCLB uses these test scores to impose sanctions that have no record of success as school improvement strategies, and in fact are not really educational strategies at all. They're political strategies designed to promote privatization and market reform in public education. The most well known of these sanctions are NCLB's transfer and supplemental tutorial provisions. Both encourage students (and not necessarily the "failing" students) to transfer to other schools and/or seek tutoring, mostly from private companies. Both channel funds and resources away from struggling schools and leave them further behind. [For more, see "The NCLB Hoax," www.rethinkingschools.org/specialreports/bushpl an.]
Less well known, but soon to become much more familiar, are the law's more drastic measures for schools that miss AYP for four or five years. After four years, schools are required to choose one of the following:
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Replace school staff relevant to the failure.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Put in place a new curriculum.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Decrease management authority at the school.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Appoint outside experts to advise the school.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Extend the school year or the school day.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Restructure the internal organization of the school.
After five years, the choices are:
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Reopen as a charter school.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Replace all or most of the staff.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Contract with an outside entity to operate the school.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Institute other significant governance and staffing changes likely to improve the school.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Turn over operation of the school to the state.
Since NCLB sanctions are cumulative, schools also must presumably continue to offer transfer and tutoring while instituting these measures.
These sanctions are a formula for chaos, not school improvement. Some (like extended school years and days) would require large sums of money that NCLB does not provide. Others are hopelessly vague ("a new curriculum," "other significant" changes) and others are a license to sell off public schools to private management firms ("contract with an outside entity"). But none of these strategies has any record of success when it comes to addressing the problems of educational inequality and academic achievement gaps that trigger their imposition. As researcher Gerald Bracey has pointed out, NCLB uses the phrase "scientifically based research" 111 times, but has "zero" scientific evidence to support the sanctions it imposes on the schools to improve performance.
One of the insidious effects of NCLB has been the way it has rapidly integrated itself into state systems of standards and testing. The mainstream consensus -- developed through years of governors' summits and business roundtables -- is that externally imposed standards and tests are the key to school improvement. This has proved to be fertile soil for NCLB at the state level. As the new Harvard Civil Rights study describes, "NCLB as now implemented undermines the development and implementation of states' own systems designed to reform curriculum and assessment and undermines the implementation of whole school models and long-term basic reform at the school and district levels."
Despite NCLB's unprecedented extension of federal influence over school policy, states retain considerable flexibility in defining and implementing NCLB penalties. Promoting the least harmful and most supportive "interventions" for schools on the NCLB sanctions list will be an increasingly important task for education reformers and activists in the next few years.
The Massachusetts Campaign for the Education of the Whole Child is one such promising effort. [See www.citizensforpublicschools.org.]
But state education agencies are rapidly being overwhelmed by the growing numbers of schools identified for "restructuring," ; severely limited capacity to assume responsibility for them, and a patchwork of poorly designed and largely unworkable sanctions to implement.
One obvious problem is money. A lot of attention has been paid to the debate over funding levels for NCLB, and whether NCLB provides enough money to pay for all the tests it requires or lives up to the president's promises when the law was passed. (It doesn't, of course. See "Taming the Beast," Rethinking Schools, Vol. 18, No. 4.) But there's been less attention paid to the absence of funding to support the new sanctions NCLB imposes. The legislation does have language creating a special school improvement fund. But the president has never requested, and Congress has never authorized, any money for it. Instead, NCLB "school improvement funds" are taken by diverting funds from Title I -- the single largest federal education program, originally designed to support schools with high concentrations of poor students -- away from local schools and districts to state education departments to develop plans to implement NCLB sanctions. The result is what the Center for Education Policy recently called "a shell game, in which states take funds away from districts with the greatest concentrations of low-income children and give them to other districts" to finance the imposition of NCLB penalties.
Beneath the Rhetoric
Contention over how to respond to growing numbers of schools in the latter stages of NCLB sanctions will only add to resistance against the law. Still, the prospects for correcting such fundamental flaws while reauthorizing NCLB are mixed at best. Historically, federal education legislation has set broad policy goals and used federal funds to promote them at the state and local levels. Often these goals have reflected equity concerns like ending discrimination or providing services for special needs students. To be sure, NCLB does echo such precedents by explicitly focusing on achievement gaps and demanding that schools address them. In fact, NCLB's expressed goal of overcoming educational inequality is probably its strongest source of political support.
But beneath the rhetoric, NCLB's policy framework is toxic, bad for the health of schools and children and driven by ideological political objectives that are arrogantly indifferent to the realities of school life. It makes no commitment to bridging the deep social inequalities reflected in academic achievement gaps, but demands that schools make them disappear (and it demands more of poorer, diverse schools than richer, homogeneous ones). When schools fall short of the impossible, they face punitive sanctions that weaken their ability to serve all students and ultimately increase educational inequality instead of reduce it.
Some advocates for children and schools, desperate for signs of hope amidst the wasteland of social and economic policies emanating from Washington, have struggled mightily to find positives in NCLB. They point to the pressure on schools to account for all students, the promise of better choices for parents in the poorest communities, the emphasis on improving teacher qualifications. But five years of inconsistent and underfinanced implementation has made good on none of these promises. Reasonable people may continue to differ on various aspects of NCLB, but the core of the law has been laid inescapably bare: tests, more tests, and punitive sanctions that create a systematic and misleading impression of failure and that hurt public education far more than they help those who have been poorly served by it.
As NCLB reauthorization nears, a central question will be what can be done to limit the damage, especially since the law's harmful impact is poised to grow dramatically over the next five years as its more drastic sanctions kick in.
For several years, Democrats in Congress have resisted reopening the provisions of NCLB, warning that the current political climate was likely to encourage the introduction of even more aggressive privatization measures. This will undoubtedly be attempted next year. Renewed evidence that NCLB's sanctions are a stalking horse for privatization can be found in the President's 2007-08 budget. While overall education funding is significantly reduced, the administration found $100 million to support another voucher proposal that would make private schools eligible to receive NCLB transfer students. Some members of Congress have been pushing for such vouchers since NCLB was first proposed, and their repeated re-emergence in everything from Katrina relief packages to local Washington, D.C., "pilot programs" to annual presidential budgets heralds their inevitable reappearance in next year's NCLB reauthorization plans.
Democratic supporters of the law generally have confined themselves to complaints about funding levels, while they continue to endorse NCLB as an essentially positive program for schools. But growing local and state sentiment against NCLB assures that other issues will surface in the reauthorization process. Significant elements of the education and civil rights lobbies are committed to trying to modify NCLB and proposals for reform have already come from the National Association of State Legislators, many professional associations, and the national teachers' unions. FairTest has also put together a broad coalition of education advocacy and civil rights groups to support replacing NCLB's most harmful provisions with measures that could support better assessment practices and reform efforts. [See www.fairtest.org.]
Among the proposals likely to be considered by Congress next year are:
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Efforts to allow states to use "growth models" that give schools and districts credit for relative progress in place of more rigid AYP formulas.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Limits on the applicability of sanctions, like transfers and supplemental tutoring, to "failing" subgroups (or even "failing" students within "failing" subgroups). Currently, everyone in a NCLB-sanctioned school becomes eligible once a school is deemed "in need of improvement." (This is true even if a school is sanctioned for "inadequate performance" in consecutive years by two totally different groups.)
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Proposals to reverse the order of the transfer and tutorial sanctions, so that the more disruptive, and less available, transfer option would kick in later. This would also give a boost to private tutorial providers, who stand to profit from largely unregulated and unmonitored access to potentially $2 billion in public funds each year.
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Proposals to raise funding to levels that would support both the law's testing mandates and some fraction of the estimated costs of actually reaching them (or conversely to suspend sanctions in any year the law was not fully funded.)
· ; & nbsp; &n bsp; &nb sp; Proposals to give states more leeway to issue waivers, vary assessment practices and testing schedules, and pursue their own formulas for reform.
The debate over reauthorizing NCLB is likely to show how much the bipartisan coalition that originally passed it has fragmented. Hopefully, it will also provide opportunities to limit the damage. But the Congressional debate, unfortunately, is much less likely to define lasting alternatives to the top-down, test-driven, underfunded policies that are crushing the life and the hope out of too many schools.
For that we'll need the voices of educators, students, and communities. One place those voices could make a difference will be the 2006 elections when the next Congress will be chosen. Many in the antiwar movement, frustrated by the failure of Congress to reflect the broad popular opposition to the war in Iraq, have pledged not to support any candidates who continue to support current U.S. policy. Similarly, opponents of NCLB might insist, at a minimum, on a pledge to end federally mandated testing, eliminate the direct ties between test scores and sanctions, and replace NCLB's privatization agenda with more funding and stronger support for improving the public system.
Sending people to Congress who are committed to ending both the war in Iraq and the war on our public schools would be a big step toward making good on the promises -- empty so far -- of No Child Left Behind.
Stan Karp (stankarp@aol.com), on leave from his teaching position in Paterson, N.J., is an editor of Rethinking Schools. This article appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Rethinking Schools.
This One Is Priceless
04.22.06 (8:03 pm) [edit]
THIS ONE IS PRICELESS
Some people understand life better, And they call some of these people "retarded"...
At the Seattle Special Olympics, nine contestants, all physically or mentally disabled, assembled at the starting line for the 100-yard dash.
At the gun, they all started out, not exactly in a dash, but with a relish to run the race to the finish and win. All, that is, except one little boy who stumbled on the asphalt, tumbled over a couple of times, and began to cry. The other eight heard the boy cry. They slowed down and looked back. Then they all turned around and went back......every one of them. One girl with Down's Syndrome bent down and kissed him and said,
"This will make it better." Then all nine linked arms and walked together to the finish line. Everyone in the stadium stood, the cheering went on for several minutes. People who were there are still telling the story... Why? Because deep down we know this one thing: What matters in this life is more than winning for ourselves. What matters in this life is helping others win, even if it means slowing down and changing our course. If you pass this on, we may be able to change our hearts as well as someone else's. "A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle"
Critical Word from Wendy Alec Very Urgent
04.22.06 (12:11 am) [edit]
| Heavenly Manna |
| Subscribe Unsubscribe Change E-mail View Archive Critical Word from Wendy Alec Very Urgent!! Donna Potter Apr 20, 2006 |
I am Jewish and really never gave it much thought as a bible scholar
particularly the OT - we were and are a stiffnecked rebellious people
nothing to be too proud of ahab korah saul
in 1990 I had a visitation with Romans 11 - the HS hit me so hard and showed
me many of the end time priviliges
sonship glory fullness these things were tied in with natural Israel
and unless God removed the scales from Apostolic and Prophetic brethren they
would miss him
and I wept and wept for myself for years preaching that my brethren after
the flesh
had been replaced - how many times I had said this is the holy land as I
pointed to myself
how many times I mocked and raged at those who had a revelation of Israel
and now i found myself learning at their feet - talk about humbling
I knew Gods endtime secrets and now found myself learning from many who were
not even Spirit filled
the more i pressed in the more HS even taught me about myself my personality
my passion for social justice and revolution my intensity my pitbull
tenacity
many of the endtime truths are guarded by what we had already rejected
and tossed out - once i started to understand how God had set a natural
people
and a natural land just because he wanted to
the Word is full of tangibles things so we as humans can get it
like the tabernacle the temple feast days that we can touch and hold
why not a people that he said Jesus said i would divide the nations
sheep/goat how they treat a little nation in the middle east smaller then
michigan
as iran is threatening to nuke Israel and us it behooves us to take another
look
as islam is a bloodthirsty moon demon religion - in my local paper its like
every saturday
the religion editor is trying to get converts
we as leaders need to decide what is the Spirit saying right now
Critical Word from Wendy Alec
Donna Potter
Apr 19, 2006
A CALL TO PRAYER - ISRAEL - GAZA - PRESIDENT BUSH
HURRICANE KATRINA - AMERICA I AM CHARGING YOU REPENT
HURRICANE KATRINA - AMERICA I AM CHARGING YOU REPENT
A HARD MESSAGE - A MESSAGE OF FLINT
These past weeks - there have been many strong, clear prophetic voices
concerning Katrina from America declaring the will of the Lord and I rested
in the assuranc e that that there was no necessity for a surplus voice at
this time.
But in an extremely busy period of ministry, suddenly last week I felt the
overshadowing of the Holy Spirit over me concerning this matter and I was
deeply troubled. I sensed the fear of the Lord upon me and I knew that these
could in no way be merely my thoughts or my opinions - it is a fearful and
dreadful thing to attribute things to the hand of the Lord of Hosts that are
merely our own imaginations
That too held me off for days - Father - I said - there are enough voices
out there speaking to this issue - God said - I want you to speak - And it
was a great burden to me because I knew that so many people were suffering
so terribly and that this was a hard message and a message of flint - I
said - Father - If you really want me to I shall - but I said it with great
trepidation over this matter - I also knew that this instance was so
important to Almighty God - that I had to be so accurate in the true
discerning of his purposes a nd his intentions
ECONOMIC DECLINE
But the urgency continued - And as we were driving back home from our
studios in Washington DC to our home in Virginia - I kept seeing in the sky
huge words - ECONOMIC DECLINE and again ECONOMIC DECLINE
Then I saw an enormous hand that almost covered the sky - and I knew that it
was the hand of God Himself and I watched in absolute horror as the hand
started to lift itself - and I felt that the Lord said - I AM ABOUT TO LIFT
MY HAND FROM THIS NATION
It was such a terrible sight and a feeling of terrible dread that overtook
me that I panicked - and I said - Oh Father - NO! You cant lift your hand
from America - America loves you - America serves you - I beg you - Don't
lift your hand from America. And God said - REPENT...
AMERICA - I AM CHARGING YOU - R EPENT
And I said - Father - we are repenting for the decadence of New Orleans -
the body of Christ in America is responding dramatically to this wake up
call - both in mobilizing aid and assistance and also in repentance across
the nation for the complex and many issues that we as the body of Christ
understand led to this disaster -
TWO GREAT AND FESTERING BOIL
Then I saw an awful thing - It is an unpopular and controversial message - I
know -
THE FIRST BOIL - NEW ORLEANS
I saw a great and festering boil in New Orleans and the surrounding area
that had burst and the puss was still oozing and the Lord SAID -
Yes - it is true - my body is repenting for many of the symptoms and the
reason that this boil was able to fester in such a viole nt manner in this
area - and the words came - DECADENCE - HOMOSEXUALITY - LASCIVIOUSNESS -
LAWLESSNESS - RACISM - PRIDE - SODOM AND GOMMORAH - all of which I could see
were boiling and festering in the heart of the boil - but then I saw a small
tip of a very sharp needle move towards it - and the very INSTANT that the
tip of the red hot needle barely even touched the centre of the boil - the
boil erupted with violence because of all the toxic material and poison
already boiling inside.
And it was such an insignificant move - with a seemingly insignificant
tool - but it was the hand of the Lord that caused the boil to erupt -
THE SECOND BOIL - THE MIDDLE EAST AND GAZA DISENGAGEMENT
And then the Lord said - in the same manner - Americas role in the
disengagement of Gaza - has been as a red hot needle to the boil in the
Middle East -I HOLD MY CHURCH IN AMERICA ACCOUNTABLE
To the majority of my body in America - it has been a disregarded and
insignificant move - they have viewed it as a needle - of little effect -
but it has p ierced the boil of the Middle East and I saw the
words -UNLEASHING - BLOODLUST - VENGEANCE - POWER - LUST - GREED -
COVENANT/PACT OF DEATH - HOLOCAUST
AN IGNITION KEY CONDONED BY THE CHURCH THAT LOOSED THE HORDES OF HELL
And somehow I sensed that the fruit of this act by the American Government -
was somehow an IGNITION KEY that had opened the door to release the hordes
of hell and satanic princes to execute a timeline in the Middle East that
would speed up the times of the hunters and pave the way for the next
holocaust - and yet the CHURCH in America - had stood almost VOICELESS -
bound by PASSIVITY and A SPIRIT OF STUPOR -
And then I saw a terrible thing - I s aw millions of Christians all across
the United States of America - with their hands raised - worshipping the
Lord - their faces rapt in worship all across the nation - their bibles in
hand - dressed in Sunday best - their families seated at their side - and
then I heard horrific chilling screams and then I saw right next to them
concentration camps and the scenes of the holocaust and although the screams
were literally bone chilling and the people were screaming for help, not one
of those in the churches even turned their head to look - it was as though a
spirit of passivity and stupor had overtaken them
And the Lord said - "This is what my Church did during the holocaust as the
Jews in Europe burned - They raised their hands and they worshipped me - AND
THIS IS WHAT MY CHURCH HAVE DONE TODAY ONCE MORE BY THEIR OMMISSION OF NOT
SPEAKING OUT AS MY VOICE TO THE GOVERNMENT FOR MY PEOPLE ISRAEL -
EXPEDIENCY - THE OIL
EXPEDIENCY - and the Lord showed me - Oil - and He said "Americas oil became
a target because America sold the nation of Israel out for oil "
And He said - I AM CHARGING AMERICA - REPENT FOR YOUR SINS AGAINS T MY PEOPLE
ISRAEL
I said " O Father -many people will have a hard time believing that the
hurricane in New Orleans is connected with the roadmap and Israel
And God said again - I AM CHARGING AMERICA - REPENT FOR YOUR SINS AGAINST MY
PEOPLE ISRAEL
"For I am stirred up with wrath - says the Lord - that my people have been
forsaken and that my people Israel have been abandoned - For the voices that
whisper peace, peace" - says the Lord God of Hosts - "are not my voices -
and the voices that sue for peace in the Middle East at this time - sue for
expediency says the Lord -
For I have heard the conversations - in the hidden places of the earth - I
have heard the whispers and the strategies and the political expediencies -
and my anger has been stirred on behalf of my people Israel - and yes even
voices in my church arise and say - peace peace - but I tell you - that
pea ce is far from thee and that disaster is near -
For my hand has been stayed - but my hand can be stayed no more - For I tell
you America - that I called you to protect and to preserve and to be as salt
to the nation of Israel - yet you have instigated a covenant of death -
And yet you say that all is well - and yet you say that all is good - and
you say we are a good friend of the nation of Israel - and yet it is under
your watch and it is in this timing and in this season - that my people have
been betrayed
And where is the man and where is the woman and where is the church that
would stand up for my purpose -
For my purpose is not your purpose O Church - And my plans and purpose are
not your plans and purpose for the nation of Israel -
And yet you nod and yet you smile and yet you say among the churches of
America - It is well and good - And I tell you this day America - I hold you
in the scales for what is about to come upon my nation Israel - And you have
been found wanting
And yet you say - It is not popular to address these things - let us walk in
wisdom and let it be - and yet by your very omissions - you have granted the
enemy the power to rule - And I hold you accountable for the omissions of my
church America
For all is not well says the Lord and all is not good - For I have seen the
commissions and the dealings - for the oil and for the wealth of nations
that have changed hands behind secret doors - and I have seen the cloaking
and the hidden agreements that laid the foundations for the pact of death -
yes - even in the Whitehouse - I have seen and I have heard - and my hand is
against it and yet you say America supports Israel - but I tell you church -
that this next season lies at America's door - and I call you America
REPENT - I call you America REPENT - Repent for the fo rsaking of my people
for expediency - REPENT"
And somehow I knew that even as President Bush espoused the deals between
Israel and America - that I sensed the huge outcry against him and against
his office in the wake of Hurricane Katrina - was a warning from Almighty
God to repent at the highest levels of government before his office was
rejected by God himself.
(Please understand how hard this is for me to write as I have always been a
strong advocator of this Presidency but it seemed as though I saw him seated
at his desk - and when it came to issues of Israel I saw a black blindfold
that completely covered his eyes and was tied tightly at the back of his
head - and also that his ears were stopped by a cacophony of sounds - I saw
a HUGE VICE literally pressurizing him down and then I saw that ONLY the
CHURCH had the capacity to lift this terrible weight of the vice away from< br />crushing his shoulders and chest - the VICE was the pressure bought to bear
upon him re the issue of Israel - PUBLIC OPINION - STATUS QUO - EXPEDIENCY -
OIL - and I realized that the Lord was not holding President Bush
accountable alone - but was holding the CHURCH accountable because they were
the called ones WITH THE ABILITY to lift the pressure of the vice OFF the
Presidents neck by their own strong VOICE being lifted up in America - but
there was hardly a whisper of the churches voice -only a few lone voices
reached t he presidents ear - but the words more often than not seemed to be
stolen away by buzzing gnat like looking creatures before they could
actually take root - and the President continued to be crushed by the weight
and pressure of the vice.)
And then my attention was drawn to another strange and almost insignificant
fact - and yet suddenly it seemed to be not at all insignificant - it was
the fact that Condeleeza Rice - the voice and the Whitehouse vocal
propagator of the disengagement of Gaza and the roadmap was born in the
South in Alabama - and was at a church service grieving for her people - And
I knew that the pain she had felt for her people was a shadow to what the
God of Israel felt for the Nation of Israel . And somehow with a terrible
certainty I felt it was connected - a direct result of judgement.
And I felt the burden and the grief -this time of the Lord Jesus Christ -
for all the dispossessed and the homeless and the grieving in New Orleans
And how He loved them and grieved for them - And then he showed me - The
entire body of Christ in America who were mobilizing aid and assistance and
prayer and support in the most incredible manner - And I knew this was in
His eyes truly noble and honorable and that the Church has yet to shine and
will still be a tremendous witness in this hour - B UT THEN He said weeping -
"My Church have been blinded and sidelined as to the REAL ISSUE at stake
here - and therefore are excluding it from their view
And I frowned at the Lord - looking back to the horrific scenes on the Gulf
Coast - the total focus of my attention being there ALSO -
And I saw Jesus literally walk in front of the people trying to move their
attention from the horrific scenes o f the New Orleans disaster onto the
scenes of the future - of the dying screaming people of the second
holocaust - and He was weeping - and as the congregations noticed Him - they
would smile at Him - some even clutched onto Him - but ALL seemingly without
exception had their total focus on the present disaster in America - not
even recognizing that the major connection with judgement was the ACTION of
the American Government to ISRAEL and the horror of the turning of the
IGNITION KEY that wo uld lead to the UNIMAGINABLE - A HOLOCAUST WORSE THAN
THE FIRST HOLOCAUST in years to come
And then the Lord talked of conversations from some in His church that were
saying - "It must be the Lord in Israel - He has allowed THE GAZA
disengagement" And I realized that I TOO was guilty of this talk - and of
this omission over the disengagement of Gaza - not REALISING the ENORMITY of
the CONSEQUENCES - the tiny red hot needle that seemed so insignificant yet
was t he initiator of a covenant of deathFinally Jesus stood quietly
watching this huge congregation who were so wrapped up in the necessary and
the noble but also wrapped up in their own spiritual experience. Then
quietly he walked away - and He walked over to the Jews in the second
Holocaust and stood with the dying and the screaming and the burning, tears
streaming down His face
If we - as the Body of Christ forget the cause of Israel - We hav e truly
forgotten the cause of Jesus Christ Himself.
I charge you Beloved America - let us not lose the HAND and the protection
of Gods covering - Let us not continue to walk in the sins of omission
Let us repent before it is irreversible.
Fruits of Repentance :
America will be reprieved from a devastating economic decline
America will rem ain under the protection and hand of Almighty God -
especially the Church in America
3. If the Churches voice on the matter of Israel rises - The power of this
united voice can stop the 'covenant of death' in its tracks and the
situation can be reversed before it is irreversible - It is NOT too late in
the spirit realm - we as the Church of Jesus Christ CAN still change DESTINY
in the earth
I am Jewish and really never gave it much thought as a bible scholar particularly the OT - we were and are a stiffnecked rebellious people nothing to be too proud of ahab korah saul in 1990 I had a visitation with Romans 11 - the HS hit me so hard and showed me many of the end time priviliges sonship glory fullness these things were tied in with natural Israel and unless God removed the scales from Apostolic and Prophetic brethren they would miss him and I wept and wept for myself for years preaching that my brethren after the flesh had been replaced - how many times I had said this is the holy land as I pointed to myself how many times I mocked and raged at those who had a revelation of Israel and now i found myself learning at their feet - talk about humbling I knew Gods endtime secrets and now found myself learning from many who were not even Spirit filled the more i pressed in the more HS even taught me about myself my personality my passion for social justice and revolution my intensity my pitbull tenacity many of the endtime truths are guarded by what we had already rejected and tossed out - once i started to understand how God had set a natural people and a natural land just because he wanted to the Word is full of tangibles things so we as humans can get it like the tabernacle the temple feast days that we can touch and hold why not a people that he said Jesus said i would divide the nations sheep/goat how they treat a little nation in the middle east smaller then michigan as iran is threatening to nuke Israel and us it behooves us to take another look as islam is a bloodthirsty moon demon religion - in my local paper its like every saturday the religion editor is trying to get converts we as leaders need to decide what is the Spirit saying right now Critical Word from Wendy Alec Donna Potter Apr 19, 2006 A CALL TO PRAYER - ISRAEL - GAZA - PRESIDENT BUSH HURRICANE KATRINA - AMERICA I AM CHARGING YOU REPENT HURRICANE KATRINA - AMERICA I AM CHARGING YOU REPENT A HARD MESSAGE - A MESSAGE OF FLINT These past weeks - there have been many strong, clear prophetic voices concerning Katrina from America declaring the will of the Lord and I rested in the assuranc e that that there was no necessity for a surplus voice at this time. But in an extremely busy period of ministry, suddenly last week I felt the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit over me concerning this matter and I was deeply troubled. I sensed the fear of the Lord upon me and I knew that these could in no way be merely my thoughts or my opinions - it is a fearful and dreadful thing to attribute things to the hand of the Lord of Hosts that are merely our own imaginations That too held me off for days - Father - I said - there are enough voices out there speaking to this issue - God said - I want you to speak - And it was a great burden to me because I knew that so many people were suffering so terribly and that this was a hard message and a message of flint - I said - Father - If you really want me to I shall - but I said it with great trepidation over this matter - I also knew that this instance was so important to Almighty God - that I had to be so accurate in the true discerning of his purposes a nd his intentions ECONOMIC DECLINE But the urgency continued - And as we were driving back home from our studios in Washington DC to our home in Virginia - I kept seeing in the sky huge words - ECONOMIC DECLINE and again ECONOMIC DECLINE Then I saw an enormous hand that almost covered the sky - and I knew that it was the hand of God Himself and I watched in absolute horror as the hand started to lift itself - and I felt that the Lord said - I AM ABOUT TO LIFT MY HAND FROM THIS NATION It was such a terrible sight and a feeling of terrible dread that overtook me that I panicked - and I said - Oh Father - NO! You cant lift your hand from America - America loves you - America serves you - I beg you - Don't lift your hand from America. And God said - REPENT... AMERICA - I AM CHARGING YOU - R EPENT And I said - Father - we are repenting for the decadence of New Orleans - the body of Christ in America is responding dramatically to this wake up call - both in mobilizing aid and assistance and also in repentance across the nation for the complex and many issues that we as the body of Christ understand led to this disaster - TWO GREAT AND FESTERING BOIL Then I saw an awful thing - It is an unpopular and controversial message - I know - THE FIRST BOIL - NEW ORLEANS I saw a great and festering boil in New Orleans and the surrounding area that had burst and the puss was still oozing and the Lord SAID - Yes - it is true - my body is repenting for many of the symptoms and the reason that this boil was able to fester in such a viole nt manner in this area - and the words came - DECADENCE - HOMOSEXUALITY - LASCIVIOUSNESS - LAWLESSNESS - RACISM - PRIDE - SODOM AND GOMMORAH - all of which I could see were boiling and festering in the heart of the boil - but then I saw a small tip of a very sharp needle move towards it - and the very INSTANT that the tip of the red hot needle barely even touched the centre of the boil - the boil erupted with violence because of all the toxic material and poison already boiling inside. And it was such an insignificant move - with a seemingly insignificant tool - but it was the hand of the Lord that caused the boil to erupt - THE SECOND BOIL - THE MIDDLE EAST AND GAZA DISENGAGEMENT And then the Lord said - in the same manner - Americas role in the disengagement of Gaza - has been as a red hot needle to the boil in the Middle East -I HOLD MY CHURCH IN AMERICA ACCOUNTABLE To the majority of my body in America - it has been a disregarded and insignificant move - they have viewed it as a needle - of little effect - but it has p ierced the boil of the Middle East and I saw the words -UNLEASHING - BLOODLUST - VENGEANCE - POWER - LUST - GREED - COVENANT/PACT OF DEATH - HOLOCAUST AN IGNITION KEY CONDONED BY THE CHURCH THAT LOOSED THE HORDES OF HELL And somehow I sensed that the fruit of this act by the American Government - was somehow an IGNITION KEY that had opened the door to release the hordes of hell and satanic princes to execute a timeline in the Middle East that would speed up the times of the hunters and pave the way for the next holocaust - and yet the CHURCH in America - had stood almost VOICELESS - bound by PASSIVITY and A SPIRIT OF STUPOR - And then I saw a terrible thing - I s aw millions of Christians all across the United States of America - with their hands raised - worshipping the Lord - their faces rapt in worship all across the nation - their bibles in hand - dressed in Sunday best - their families seated at their side - and then I heard horrific chilling screams and then I saw right next to them concentration camps and the scenes of the holocaust and although the screams were literally bone chilling and the people were screaming for help, not one of those in the churches even turned their head to look - it was as though a spirit of passivity and stupor had overtaken them And the Lord said - "This is what my Church did during the holocaust as the Jews in Europe burned - They raised their hands and they worshipped me - AND THIS IS WHAT MY CHURCH HAVE DONE TODAY ONCE MORE BY THEIR OMMISSION OF NOT SPEAKING OUT AS MY VOICE TO THE GOVERNMENT FOR MY PEOPLE ISRAEL - EXPEDIENCY - THE OIL EXPEDIENCY - and the Lord showed me - Oil - and He said "Americas oil became a target because America sold the nation of Israel out for oil " And He said - I AM CHARGING AMERICA - REPENT FOR YOUR SINS AGAINS T MY PEOPLE ISRAEL I said " O Father -many people will have a hard time believing that the hurricane in New Orleans is connected with the roadmap and Israel And God said again - I AM CHARGING AMERICA - REPENT FOR YOUR SINS AGAINST MY PEOPLE ISRAEL "For I am stirred up with wrath - says the Lord - that my people have been forsaken and that my people Israel have been abandoned - For the voices that whisper peace, peace" - says the Lord God of Hosts - "are not my voices - and the voices that sue for peace in the Middle East at this time - sue for expediency says the Lord - For I have heard the conversations - in the hidden places of the earth - I have heard the whispers and the strategies and the political expediencies - and my anger has been stirred on behalf of my people Israel - and yes even voices in my church arise and say - peace peace - but I tell you - that pea ce is far from thee and that disaster is near - For my hand has been stayed - but my hand can be stayed no more - For I tell you America - that I called you to protect and to preserve and to be as salt to the nation of Israel - yet you have instigated a covenant of death - And yet you say that all is well - and yet you say that all is good - and you say we are a good friend of the nation of Israel - and yet it is under your watch and it is in this timing and in this season - that my people have been betrayed And where is the man and where is the woman and where is the church that would stand up for my purpose - For my purpose is not your purpose O Church - And my plans and purpose are not your plans and purpose for the nation of Israel - And yet you nod and yet you smile and yet you say among the churches of America - It is well and good - And I tell you this day America - I hold you in the scales for what is about to come upon my nation Israel - And you have been found wanting And yet you say - It is not popular to address these things - let us walk in wisdom and let it be - and yet by your very omissions - you have granted the enemy the power to rule - And I hold you accountable for the omissions of my church America For all is not well says the Lord and all is not good - For I have seen the commissions and the dealings - for the oil and for the wealth of nations that have changed hands behind secret doors - and I have seen the cloaking and the hidden agreements that laid the foundations for the pact of death - yes - even in the Whitehouse - I have seen and I have heard - and my hand is against it and yet you say America supports Israel - but I tell you church - that this next season lies at America's door - and I call you America REPENT - I call you America REPENT - Repent for the fo rsaking of my people for expediency - REPENT" And somehow I knew that even as President Bush espoused the deals between Israel and America - that I sensed the huge outcry against him and against his office in the wake of Hurricane Katrina - was a warning from Almighty God to repent at the highest levels of government before his office was rejected by God himself. (Please understand how hard this is for me to write as I have always been a strong advocator of this Presidency but it seemed as though I saw him seated at his desk - and when it came to issues of Israel I saw a black blindfold that completely covered his eyes and was tied tightly at the back of his head - and also that his ears were stopped by a cacophony of sounds - I saw a HUGE VICE literally pressurizing him down and then I saw that ONLY the CHURCH had the capacity to lift this terrible weight of the vice away from< br />crushing his shoulders and chest - the VICE was the pressure bought to bear upon him re the issue of Israel - PUBLIC OPINION - STATUS QUO - EXPEDIENCY - OIL - and I realized that the Lord was not holding President Bush accountable alone - but was holding the CHURCH accountable because they were the called ones WITH THE ABILITY to lift the pressure of the vice OFF the Presidents neck by their own strong VOICE being lifted up in America - but there was hardly a whisper of the churches voice -only a few lone voices reached t he presidents ear - but the words more often than not seemed to be stolen away by buzzing gnat like looking creatures before they could actually take root - and the President continued to be crushed by the weight and pressure of the vice.) And then my attention was drawn to another strange and almost insignificant fact - and yet suddenly it seemed to be not at all insignificant - it was the fact that Condeleeza Rice - the voice and the Whitehouse vocal propagator of the disengagement of Gaza and the roadmap was born in the South in Alabama - and was at a church service grieving for her people - And I knew that the pain she had felt for her people was a shadow to what the God of Israel felt for the Nation of Israel . And somehow with a terrible certainty I felt it was connected - a direct result of judgement. And I felt the burden and the grief -this time of the Lord Jesus Christ - for all the dispossessed and the homeless and the grieving in New Orleans And how He loved them and grieved for them - And then he showed me - The entire body of Christ in America who were mobilizing aid and assistance and prayer and support in the most incredible manner - And I knew this was in His eyes truly noble and honorable and that the Church has yet to shine and will still be a tremendous witness in this hour - B UT THEN He said weeping - "My Church have been blinded and sidelined as to the REAL ISSUE at stake here - and therefore are excluding it from their view And I frowned at the Lord - looking back to the horrific scenes on the Gulf Coast - the total focus of my attention being there ALSO - And I saw Jesus literally walk in front of the people trying to move their attention from the horrific scenes o f the New Orleans disaster onto the scenes of the future - of the dying screaming people of the second holocaust - and He was weeping - and as the congregations noticed Him - they would smile at Him - some even clutched onto Him - but ALL seemingly without exception had their total focus on the present disaster in America - not even recognizing that the major connection with judgement was the ACTION of the American Government to ISRAEL and the horror of the turning of the IGNITION KEY that wo uld lead to the UNIMAGINABLE - A HOLOCAUST WORSE THAN THE FIRST HOLOCAUST in years to come And then the Lord talked of conversations from some in His church that were saying - "It must be the Lord in Israel - He has allowed THE GAZA disengagement" And I realized that I TOO was guilty of this talk - and of this omission over the disengagement of Gaza - not REALISING the ENORMITY of the CONSEQUENCES - the tiny red hot needle that seemed so insignificant yet was t he initiator of a covenant of deathFinally Jesus stood quietly watching this huge congregation who were so wrapped up in the necessary and the noble but also wrapped up in their own spiritual experience. Then quietly he walked away - and He walked over to the Jews in the second Holocaust and stood with the dying and the screaming and the burning, tears streaming down His face If we - as the Body of Christ forget the cause of Israel - We hav e truly forgotten the cause of Jesus Christ Himself. I charge you Beloved America - let us not lose the HAND and the protection of Gods covering - Let us not continue to walk in the sins of omission Let us repent before it is irreversible. Fruits of Repentance : America will be reprieved from a devastating economic decline America will rem ain under the protection and hand of Almighty God - especially the Church in America 3. If the Churches voice on the matter of Israel rises - The power of this united voice can stop the 'covenant of death' in its tracks and the situation can be reversed before it is irreversible - It is NOT too late in the spirit realm - we as the Church of Jesus Christ CAN still change DESTINY in the earth
| ||||||||||
Moral Poverty costs blacks in New Orleans
04.19.06 (8:15 pm) [edit]
Moral poverty cost blacks in New Orleans
By Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson
By Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson
c 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
Say a hurricane is about to destroy the city you live in. Two questions:
What would you do? What would you do if you were black?
Sadly, the two questions don't have the same answer.
To the first: Most of us would take our families out of that city quickly
to protect them from danger. Then, able-bodied men would return to help
others in need, as wives and others cared for children, elderly, infirm and
the like.
For better or worse, Hurricane Katrina has told us the answer to the second
question. If you're black and a hurricane is about to destroy your city,
you'll probably wait for the government to save you.
This was not always the case. Prior to 40 years ago, such a pathetic
performance by the black community in a time of crisis would have been
inconceivable. The first response would have come from black men. They
would take care of their families, bring them to safety, and then help the
rest of the community. Then local government would come in.
No longer. When 75 percent of New Orleans residents had left the city, it
was primarily immoral, welfare-pampered blacks that stayed behind and waited
for the government to bail them out. This, as we know, did not turn out
good results.
Enter Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan. Jackson and Farrakhan laid blame
on "racist" President Bush. Farrakhan actually proposed the idea that the
government blew up a levee so as to kill blacks and save whites. The two
demanded massive governmental spending to rebuild New Orleans, above and
beyond the federal government's proposed $60 billion. Not only that, these
two were positioning themselves as the gatekeepers to supervise the
dispersion of funds. Perfect: Two of the most dishonest elite blacks in
America, "overseeing" billions of dollars. I wonder where that money will
end up.
Of course, if these two were really serious about laying blame on
government, they should blame the local one. Responsibility to perform
legally and practically fell first on the mayor of New Orleans. We are now
all familiar with Mayor Ray Nagin the black Democrat who likes to yell at
President Bush for failing to do Nagin's job. The facts, unfortunately, do
not support Nagin's wailing. As the Washington Times puts it, "recent
reports show [Nagin] failed to follow through on his own city's
emergency-response plan, which acknowledged that thousands of the city's
poorest residents would have no way to evacuate the city."
One wonders how there was "no way" for these people to evacuate the city.
We have photographic evidence telling us otherwise. You've probably seen it
by now the photo showing 2,000 parked school buses, unused and underwater.
How much planning does it require to put people on a bus and leave town,
Mayor Nagin?
Instead of doing the obvious, Mayor Nagin (with no positive contribution
from Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco, the other major leader vested with
responsibility to address the hurricane disaster) loaded remaining New
Orleans residents into the Superdome and the city's convention center. We
know how that plan turned out.
About five years ago, in a debate before the National Association of Black
Journalists, I stated that if whites were to just leave the United States
and let blacks run the country, they would turn America into a ghetto within
10 years. The audience, shall we say, disagreed with me strongly. Now I
have to disagree with me. I gave blacks too much credit. It took a mere
three days for blacks to turn the Superdome and the convention center into
ghettos, rampant with theft, rape and murder.
President Bush is not to blame for the rampant immorality of blacks. Had
New Orleans' black community taken action, most would have been out of
harm's way. But most were too lazy, immoral and trifling to do anything
productive for themselves.
All Americans must tell blacks this truth. It was blacks' moral poverty
not their material poverty that cost them dearly in New Orleans.
Farrakhan, Jackson, and other race hustlers are to be repudiated they will
only perpetuate this problem by stirring up hatred and applauding moral
corruption. New Orleans, to the extent it is to be rebuilt, should be
remade into a dependency-free, morally strong city where corruption is
opposed and success is applauded. Blacks are obligated to help themselves
and not depend on the government to care for them. We are all obligated to
tell them so.
The Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson is founder and president of BOND, the
Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny, and author of "Scam: How the
Black Leadership Exploits Black America."
Darrell Scott Testimony before Congress
04.19.06 (7:51 pm) [edit]
Subject: Darrell Scott Testimony before Congress
DARRELL SCOTT TESTIMONY
Guess our national leaders didn't expect this, hmm? On Thursday, Darrell Scott, the father of Rachel Scott, a victim of the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado, was invited to address the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee What he said to our national leaders during this special session of Congress was painfully truthful. They were not prepared for what he was to say, nor was it received well. It needs to be heard by every parent, every teacher, every politician, every sociologist, every psychologist, and every so-called expert! These courageous words spoken by Darrell Scott are powerful, penetrating, and deeply personal. There is no doubt that God sent this man as a voice crying in the wilderness. The following is a portion of the transcript:
"Since the dawn of creation there has been both good & evil in the hearts of men and women. We all contain the seeds of kindness or the seeds of violence. The death of my wonderful daughter, Rachel Joy Scott, and the deaths of that heroic teacher, and the other eleven children who died must not be in vain. Their blood cries out for answers.
"The first recorded act of violence was when Cain slew his brother Abel out in the field. The villain was not the club he used.. Neither was it the NCA, the National Club Association. The true killer was Cain, and the reason for the murder could only be found in Cain's heart.
"In the days that followed the Columbine tragedy, I was amazed at how quickly fingers began to be pointed at groups such as the NRA. I am not a member of the NRA. I am not a hunter. I do not even own a gun. I am not here to represent or defend the NRA - because I don't believe that they are responsible for my daughter's death. Therefore I do not believe that they need to be defended. If I believed they had anything to do with Rachel's murder I would be their strongest opponent.
I am here today to declare that Columbine was not just a tragedy-it was a spiritual event that should be forcing us to look at where the real blame lies! Much of the blame lies here in this room. Much of the blame lies behind the pointing fingers of the accusers themselves. "I wrote a poem just four nights ago that expresses my feelings best. This was written way before I knew I would be speaking here today:
Your laws ignore our deepest needs,
Your words are empty air.
You've stripped away our heritage,
You've outlawed simple prayer.
Now gunshots fill our classrooms,
And precious children die.
You seek for answers everywhere,
And ask the question "Why?"
You regulate restrictive laws,
Through legislative creed.
And yet you fail to understand,
That God is what we need!
"Men and women are three-part beings. We all consist of body, soul, and spirit. When we refuse to acknowledge a third part of our make-up, we create a void that allows evil, prejudice, and hatred to rush in and reek havoc. Spiritual presences were present within our educational systems for most of our nation's history. Many of our major colleges began as theological seminaries. This is a historical fact. What has happened to us as a nation? We have refused to honor God, and in so doing, we open the doors to hatred and violence. And when something as terrible as Columbine's tragedy occurs -- politicians immediately look for a scapegoat such as the NRA. They immediately seek to pass more restrictive laws that contribute to erode away our personal and private liberties. We do not need more restrictive laws. "Eric and Dylan would not have been stopped by metal detectors. No amount of gun laws can stop someone who spends months planning this type of massacre. The real villain lies within our own hearts.
"As my son Craig lay under that table in the school library and saw his two friends murdered before his very eyes-He did not hesitate to pray in school. I defy any law or politician to deny him that right! I challenge every young person in America , and around the world, to realize that on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School prayer was brought back to our schools. Do not let the many prayers offered by those students be in vain. Dare to move into the new millennium with a sacred disregard for legislation that violates your God-given right to communicate with Him. To those of you who would point your finger at the NRA - I give to you a sincere challenge. Dare to examine your own heart before casting the first stone!
My daughter's death will not be in vain! The young people of this country will not allow that to happen!"
Do what the media did not - - let the nation hear this man's speech. Please send this out to everyone you can
DARRELL SCOTT TESTIMONY
Guess our national leaders didn't expect this, hmm? On Thursday, Darrell Scott, the father of Rachel Scott, a victim of the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado, was invited to address the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee What he said to our national leaders during this special session of Congress was painfully truthful. They were not prepared for what he was to say, nor was it received well. It needs to be heard by every parent, every teacher, every politician, every sociologist, every psychologist, and every so-called expert! These courageous words spoken by Darrell Scott are powerful, penetrating, and deeply personal. There is no doubt that God sent this man as a voice crying in the wilderness. The following is a portion of the transcript:
"Since the dawn of creation there has been both good & evil in the hearts of men and women. We all contain the seeds of kindness or the seeds of violence. The death of my wonderful daughter, Rachel Joy Scott, and the deaths of that heroic teacher, and the other eleven children who died must not be in vain. Their blood cries out for answers.
"The first recorded act of violence was when Cain slew his brother Abel out in the field. The villain was not the club he used.. Neither was it the NCA, the National Club Association. The true killer was Cain, and the reason for the murder could only be found in Cain's heart.
"In the days that followed the Columbine tragedy, I was amazed at how quickly fingers began to be pointed at groups such as the NRA. I am not a member of the NRA. I am not a hunter. I do not even own a gun. I am not here to represent or defend the NRA - because I don't believe that they are responsible for my daughter's death. Therefore I do not believe that they need to be defended. If I believed they had anything to do with Rachel's murder I would be their strongest opponent.
I am here today to declare that Columbine was not just a tragedy-it was a spiritual event that should be forcing us to look at where the real blame lies! Much of the blame lies here in this room. Much of the blame lies behind the pointing fingers of the accusers themselves. "I wrote a poem just four nights ago that expresses my feelings best. This was written way before I knew I would be speaking here today:
Your laws ignore our deepest needs,
Your words are empty air.
You've stripped away our heritage,
You've outlawed simple prayer.
Now gunshots fill our classrooms,
And precious children die.
You seek for answers everywhere,
And ask the question "Why?"
You regulate restrictive laws,
Through legislative creed.
And yet you fail to understand,
That God is what we need!
"Men and women are three-part beings. We all consist of body, soul, and spirit. When we refuse to acknowledge a third part of our make-up, we create a void that allows evil, prejudice, and hatred to rush in and reek havoc. Spiritual presences were present within our educational systems for most of our nation's history. Many of our major colleges began as theological seminaries. This is a historical fact. What has happened to us as a nation? We have refused to honor God, and in so doing, we open the doors to hatred and violence. And when something as terrible as Columbine's tragedy occurs -- politicians immediately look for a scapegoat such as the NRA. They immediately seek to pass more restrictive laws that contribute to erode away our personal and private liberties. We do not need more restrictive laws. "Eric and Dylan would not have been stopped by metal detectors. No amount of gun laws can stop someone who spends months planning this type of massacre. The real villain lies within our own hearts.
"As my son Craig lay under that table in the school library and saw his two friends murdered before his very eyes-He did not hesitate to pray in school. I defy any law or politician to deny him that right! I challenge every young person in America , and around the world, to realize that on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School prayer was brought back to our schools. Do not let the many prayers offered by those students be in vain. Dare to move into the new millennium with a sacred disregard for legislation that violates your God-given right to communicate with Him. To those of you who would point your finger at the NRA - I give to you a sincere challenge. Dare to examine your own heart before casting the first stone!
My daughter's death will not be in vain! The young people of this country will not allow that to happen!"
Do what the media did not - - let the nation hear this man's speech. Please send this out to everyone you can
Aussie Etiquette
04.16.06 (7:30 pm) [edit]
Any puzzlement from across the Pacific, I will endeavour to sort out upon request. Think hillbilly (if you still use that term) or, in Aussie terms, okker. (LaRon, I think you'll forgive this forward...) Adele
PERSONAL HYGIENE:
1. While ears need to be cleaned regularly, this should be done in
private, using one's OWN ute keys.
2. Even if you live alone, deodorant isn't a waste of money.
3. Extensive use of deodorant can only delay bathing by a few days.
4. Dirt and grease under the fingernails is a no-no, it alters the taste
of finger foods and if you are a woman it can draw attention away from
your jewellery.
DATING:
DRIVING ETIQUETTE:
1. Dim your headlights for approaching vehicles, even if your gun's loaded
and the roo's in your rifle sight.
2. When entering a roundabout, the vehicle with the largest roo bar
doesn't always have the right of way.
Aussie etiquette
GENERAL ETIQUETTE:
1. Never take an open stubby to a job interview.
2. Always identify people in your paddocks before shooting at them.
3. It's tacky to take an Esky to church.
4. If you have to vacuum the bed, it's time to change the sheets.
5. Even if you're certain you're included in the will, it's rude to take
your ute and trailer to the funeral.
DINING OUT:
1. When decanting wine from the box, tilt the paper cup and pour slowly so
as not to bruise the wine.
2. If drinking directly from the bottle, hold it with only one hand.
ENTERTAINING IN YOUR HOME:
1. A centrepiece for the table should never be anything prepared by a
taxidermist.
2. Don't allow the dog to eat at the table, no matter how good his manners.
PERSONAL HYGIENE:
1. While ears need to be cleaned regularly, this should be done in
private, using one's OWN ute keys.
2. Even if you live alone, deodorant isn't a waste of money.
3. Extensive use of deodorant can only delay bathing by a few days.
4. Dirt and grease under the fingernails is a no-no, it alters the taste
of finger foods and if you are a woman it can draw attention away from
your jewellery.
DATING:
1. Always offer to bait your date's hook, especially on the first date.
2. Be assertive. Let her know you're interested: "I've been wanting to go
out with you since I read that stuff on the dunny door two years ago."
3. Establish with her parents what time she's expected back. Some will say
11:00 PM, others might say "Monday." If the latter is the answer, it's the
man's responsibility to get her to school on time.
THEATRE ETIQUETTE:
1. Crying babies should be taken to the lobby and picked up after the
movie ends.
2. Refrain from yelling abuse at characters on the screen. Tests have
proven they can't hear you.
WEDDINGS:
1. Livestock is a poor choice for a wedding gift.
2. Kissing the bride for more than five seconds may cause a drop in your
popularity. (Excessive use of the tongue is also considered out of place)
3. For the groom, at least, rent a tux. A tracksuit with a cummerbund and
a clean football jumper can create a tacky appearance.
4. Though uncomfortable, say "yes" to socks and shoes for the occasion.
DRIVING ETIQUETTE:
1. Dim your headlights for approaching vehicles, even if your gun's loaded
and the roo's in your rifle sight.
2. When entering a roundabout, the vehicle with the largest roo bar
doesn't always have the right of way.
3. Never tow another car using panty hose and duct tape.
4. When sending your wife down the road with a petrol can, it's impolite
to ask her to bring back beer, too.
Justice for Abuse Victims
04.12.06 (6:13 am) [edit]
In Britain, a former policeman who sexually abused three young boys gets three life sentences. In W.A. a former teacher who sexually abused three young girls geths three years (1/4). Both offenders had a history of similar offences. Both offenders were in positions of trust. Yet our justice system degrades the victims to such an extent as to deter any other victim from wasting their time coming forward. A three year sentence for a child sex offender with multiple victims is disgusting. In this case it clearly equates to one year for each victim, which, when compared to the trauma suffered by innocent children who are sexually abused , is shocking. What is it about the inpact of these types of offences on victims that the judges don't understand? To the victims it appears their comfort will have to come from the guilty verdicts, rather than the sentence. Michelle Stubbs, Advocates for Survivors of Child Abuse. W.A. |
Had a fall
04.07.06 (11:18 pm) [edit]
Hi All, have had a fall, nothing serious just stiff and sore. Went to take a photo towards the top end of my bed in which I had re arranged something, and then when I got the camera and went to sit on the bed forgot where I was and sat on the end and ended up on the floor. All the right side of me is a little stiff and sore etc. Not sure how I will be for the next few days, alright. Hugs, Jennifer