Was the Hammurder raised by a single mom too?

via Ann Coulter – March 13, 2013 – TROUBLE IN THE NANNY STATE.

The only thing single mothers are “victims” of is their own choice to have sex with men they’re not married to. Liberals seem to believe that drinking soda is voluntary, but getting pregnant is more like catching the flu.

It would be hard to make the case that fast food, plastic bags and cigarettes do more damage than single motherhood.

– Controlling for socioeconomic status, race and place of residence, the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single mother.

– At least 70 percent of juvenile murderers, pregnant teenagers, high school dropouts, teen suicides, runaways and juvenile delinquents were raised by single mothers.

– A study back in 1990 by the Progressive Policy Institute showed that, absent single motherhood, there would be no difference in black and white crime rates.

So liberals don’t try to make that case. They just say they’re against “shaming” and then go back to shaming gun owners, non-recyclers, smokers and “Big Gulp” aficionados — while subsidizing illegitimacy.

Read the whole thing

via Obamacore: The White House Takes the Schools – By Stanley Kurtz – The Corner – National Review Online.

President Obama’s bid to control what your children learn in school is surely one of the most important and disturbing of his many transformative plans. Not only is Obama’s attempt to devise what is in effect a national K–12 school curriculum arguably unconstitutional and illegal, the fact that most Americans have no idea that the new “Common Core” (a.k.a. Obamacore) even exists may be the most troubling thing about it.

Today’s Washington Post features an article on the controversy being kicked up by the new English curriculum that 46 states and the District of Columbia are just now waking up to. Not coincidentally, this new education war is hitting less than a month after Obama’s re-election, just in time to prevent the public from taking the most effective step it could have to block the changes. You have to get nearly to the end of today’s Post article even to get a hint of the fact that Obama is the real force behind the new curriculum. Following that link takes you to an article that more frankly lays out Obama’s role in commandeering the substance of what’s taught in the nation’s schools. The print version of this September 21, 2012 article featured a more revealing headline than the web version: “Education overhaul largely bypasses Congress.”

Read the rest at National Review and everything else from Stanley Kurtz.

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image courtesy shutterstock / Valerii Kotulskyi

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France’s Socialist President Calls for End of Homework

via Pencils Down? French Plan Would End Homework : NPR.

In the name of equality, the French government has proposed doing away with homework in elementary and junior high school. French President Francois Hollande argues that homework penalizes children with difficult home situations, but even the people whom the proposal is supposed to help disagree.

It’s 5:30 p.m. and getting dark outside, as kids pour out of Gutenberg Elementary School in Paris 15th arrondissement. Parents and other caregivers wait outside to collect their children. Aissata Toure, 20, is here with her younger sister in tow. She’s come to pick up her 7-year-old son. Toure says she’s against Hollande’s proposal to do away with homework.

“It’s not a good idea at all because even at a young age, having individual work at home helps build maturity and responsibility,” she says, “and if it’s something they didn’t quite get in school, the parents can help them. Homework is important for a kid’s future.”

….

There’s another big reason the French government is making changing school policy a top priority, Gumbel says.

“The French are discovering — to their horror — that their performance internationally has been declining over the last 10 years. The French actually are performing [worse] than the Americans in reading and science,” he says.

This is a huge shock, Gumbel says, to a country that long considered itself an education pioneer.

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via The Future of School Choice | Hoover Institution.

If you were designing a K-12 education system from scratch, with no preconceived notions, and taking full account of the breathtaking technological innovations that have made possible a high-quality, highly personalized education for every child, what would that system look like?

Chances are that it would look little like the hidebound, bureaucratic, expensive, top-down, one-size-fits-all, command-and-control, inefficient, reform-resistant, administratively bloated, special-interest manipulated, obsolete, impersonal bricks-and-mortar system that represents the most disastrous failure of central planning west of Communist China and south of the United States Postal Service.

And yet, that is the system to which the vast majority of American schoolchildren are consigned. Little wonder that American high schoolers rank 21st out of 30 economically advanced nations in science literacy and 25th in math. Our nation cannot continue to thrive so long as our schools are pumping out mediocre graduates who cannot compete effectively in the world economy.

The proliferation of school choice—through open public school enrollment, magnet schools, charter schools, school vouchers, and scholarship tax credits—has expanded educational opportunities and competition within American K-12 education. Charter schools, in particular, often provide world-class educational programs to a growing number of children, and they sometimes offer individualized, technology-based programs.

But most existing school choice programs provide variations of the same nineteenth-century model that continues to dominate K-12 education: classroom-based instruction in a bricks-and-mortar setting. The school choice programs operate within a system in which the vast majority of funding is directed toward school districts, based on student counts. Charter and voucher programs make that funding transportable to particular types of alternative schools, but do not give families full control of funding to maximize opportunities for their children.

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via France to Cover 100 Percent of the Cost of Abortions – By Veronique de Rugy – The Corner – National Review Online.

The French national health-care system is called Sécurité Sociale. It is currently running a $13 billion deficit, but President François Hollande has some ideas about a new direction for the program. For starters, in 2013, it will start covering the cost of abortion entirely. That’s right: If you get an abortion in France, the “government” will pick up the tab and it won’t cost you a dime. But in the name of fiscal responsibility, the president will pay for the new spending by taxing seniors. Hes planning on imposing a tax of 0.15 percent on retirees, which will double in 2014. To be fair, the revenue from the new tax is not just meant to cover the new “abortion” spending, but also to reduce the deficit. We’ll see how well that goes.

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via News from The Associated Press.

BOSTON (AP) — A couple from Hong Kong has sued a U.S.-based college admissions consultant for failing to get their two sons into an Ivy League university as he had allegedly promised.

Gerald and Lily Chow say in their suit filed in U.S. District Court in Boston that they gave Mark Zimny more than $2 million to get their sons into an elite American university, preferably Harvard.

Hat tip: Drudge

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via My Way News – Baby bust continues: US births down for 4th year.

NEW YORK (AP) – U.S. births fell for the fourth year in a row, the government reported Wednesday, with experts calling it more proof that the weak economy has continued to dampen enthusiasm for having children.

But there may be a silver lining: The decline in 2011 was just 1 percent – not as sharp a fall-off as the 2 to 3 percent drop seen in other recent years.

“It may be that the effect of the recession is slowly coming to an end,” said Carl Haub, a senior demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization.

Most striking in the new report were steep declines in Hispanic birth rates and a new low in teen births. Hispanics have been disproportionately affected by the flagging economy, experts say, and teen birth rates have been falling for 20 years.

Falling births is a relatively new phenomenon in this country. Births had been on the rise since the late 1990s and hit an all-time high of more than 4.3 million in 2007.

But fewer than 4 million births were counted last year – the lowest number since 1998.

Among the people who study this sort of thing, the flagging economy has been seen as the primary explanation. The theory is that many women or couples who are out of work, underemployed or have other money problems feel they can’t afford to start a family or add to it.

The economy officially was in a recession from December 2007 until June 2009. But well into 2011, polls show most Americans remained gloomy, citing anemic hiring, a depressed housing market and other factors.

The report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is a first glimpse at 2011 birth certificate data from state health departments. More analysis comes later but officials don’t expect the numbers to change much.

Early data for 2012 is not yet available, and it’s too soon to guess whether the birth decline will change, said the CDC’s Stephanie Ventura, one of the study’s authors.

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image courtesy shutterstock / Big Pants Production

DOVER, Del. (CBS) – Three daycare employees were arrested on Monday for allegedly watching and encouraging toddlers to fight each other while under their care.

According to Dover Police, three employees from the Hands of Our Future Daycare in Delaware were arrested after a cell phone video showed employees watching and encouraging two 3-year-olds fight each other.

Tiana Harris, 19, Lisa Parker, 47, and Estefania Myers, 21, were charged with Assault, Endangering the Welfare of a Child, Reckless Endangering and Conspiracy for the incident, which occurred in March of 2012 and was captured on cell phone video.

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via More Abandoned Children as Europe Austerity Wears On – Business News – CNBC.

As the euro zone debt crisis deepens and austerity measures take their toll across Europe, the number of young children and babies abandoned across the region has increased, according to local charities.

The rise in the abandonment of infants across Europe is most visible in the spread of “baby hatches” or “boxes” across Europe, where unwanted infants are left anonymously.

The phenomenon was previously more prevalent among immigrants, but it is becoming more widespread among financially desperate members of the local population.

The hatches are sensor-activated so when a baby is placed, an alarm is activated and a carer comes to collect the child. Despite the practice being widely viewed as contravening the 1953 European Convention on Human Rights, of the 27 EU member countries, 11 countries still have “baby hatches” in operation, including Germany, Italy and Portugal.

In those countries where hatches are illegal, the number of infants abandoned in hospitals, clinics and churches has also risen, raising concerns among European charities, the UN and the European Commission that austerity measures and increasing social deprivation are the catalyst for the rise in child abandonment.

According to SOS Villages, a European charity that attempts to help families in financial hardship before abandonment occurs, in the last year alone 1,200 children in Greece and 750 in Italy have been abandoned. That is almost double the 400 children abandoned in Italy a year ago, and up from 114 children abandoned in Greece in 2003.

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