While illegal immigrants send families back to Mexico as the heralded stimulus fails to stimulate the economy, and while tea party participants make their voices heard through elections of Republicans, fat and happy government workers continue in their missions of padding electoral rolls for Democrats. Among these are Census Bureau officials, who are scheduled to spend $133 million between January and May to get people to fill out their forms arriving in March.
Among the outreach efforts is the Census in Schools program, aimed at getting students to serve as go-betweens for the Census Bureau and parents (with educational materials as a bonus). One of these events included Bancroft Elementary School in Wilmington, Delaware, where students last month donned Census 2010 t-shirts and were visited by Sesame Street characters; Democrat Senator Tom Carper; Governor Jack Markell; Anthony W. Miller, deputy secretary of the Department of Education; and Robert M. Groves, director of the U.S. Census Bureau. Earlier this month, Florida Governor Charlie Crist launched the Census in Schools program in North Miami.
I tried to visit such program activities in Georgia. When I first talked to Pamela Page-Bellis of the Atlanta Regional Census Center, she enthused over the phone that some schools hold “full-fledged large events,” while others just take advantage of Census Bureau curricula. She would get me some information about activities at Atlanta-area schools, she promised. Then she asked me which publication I wrote for. She did not return subsequent phone calls.
The Census Bureau offers school principals with curriculum materials in social studies and math. But principals are also enjoined to “use social studies, English language arts, math, and mapping skills to educate students about the census.” The Census Bureau openly states that its curriculum “seeks to enlist students as advocates for participation in the 2010 census, in their homes and communities, especially in communities that might otherwise be undercounted or overlooked and, as a result may lose out on a wide range of benefits” (emphases retained). Read: federal aid, especially for illegal immigrants.
In November, the Census Bureau sent representatives to the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference in Atlanta, one of the many efforts of political and ideological groups there. Census Bureau representatives also visited the meetings of the National Alliance of Black School Educators and the National Council of Teachers of English.
Assembled social studies teachers earning graduate or continuing education credit heard from the Census Bureau’s Linda Bennett that it’s a matter of money from the feds: schools that want money for programs for non-English-speaking students need an accurate count of such students — confidentiality guaranteed. Bennett went to great pains to describe the measures taken at every level of the bureaucratic chain to ensure that Census Bureau officials do not obtain identification of respondents, much less pass it on to immigration officials. Such assurances about confidentiality are repeated in the letter sent home with students. (But while the feds have put their efforts into educating students about keeping parents safe from immigration officials, they seem not to have done such a good job in ensuring that census canvassers do not have criminal records.)
The leftist Scholastic magazine, which had a ubiquitous presence at the conference, prepared the Census Bureau curriculum materials. The materials for high school students emphasize the need for an accurate count in order to ensure compliance with the Fair Housing Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They also mention redistricting.
Perhaps that is the motivation for Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, who barely squeaked past his white and more business-friendly opponent Mary Norwood in the November election. He requested $100,000 from a city council that is dealing with a severe budget crisis, crumbling infrastructure, and rampant crime. This is in addition to the $3,500 allocated by the Census Bureau for additional “census outreach” aimed at hard-to-count groups, according to Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Dan Chapman, who attended a media brunch hosted by Jerry Gonzalez’s Georgia Latino Complete Count Committee. (The Georgia Latino Complete Count Committee seemingly supplements the official Georgia Complete Count Committee.) Since that December luncheon with advocacy journalists, Chapman has been beating the drums for an accurate count, editorializing in a news article that “some members of Gov. Sonny Perdue’s statewide census committee aren’t considered welcoming toward undocumented immigrants who are as legally entitled to be counted as Perdue himself.” Chapman’s favorite source, Jerry Gonzalez, is also president of GALEO, an organization that promotes the Dream Act, which grants legal status to certain children of illegal aliens, namely those who are good students. (The Dream Act was promoted at the NCSS conference as well.)
But what the flagging economy can’t do, the Census Bureau seems to be trying to do: to make illegal aliens feel welcome and comfortable enough to report their numbers. They’re using children to reach parents, particularly those who don’t speak English and whose legal status is questionable. That legal status is not a concern of the Census Bureau, as evidenced also by their video of a boot maker who says in Spanish that he came here to work. How did he get here? Does he have a green card? Those questions are not addressed.
What I saw at the NCSS conference indicates that teachers and government entities collude without reservation in indoctrinating children, when they think they are speaking amongst themselves. It is difficult to get answers from the Census Bureau when they know you do not share their and teachers’ views. Phone calls went unreturned and Page-Bellis, whose cell phone voicemail tells reporters to leave a message with deadlines, did not return my call.
All this suggests that many things are going on behind school doors with government officials that they don’t want you to know.
For a full description of how the Census Bureau and other government and ideological groups use the classroom, see my report, “Indoctrination without Apology: Social Studies Teachers Share Strategies on How to Mold Students” (published by America’s Survival, Inc.).
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