Daily Babe News

From ign.com; If you're like us, you've picked up an issue of Playboy and wondered, "where do they find these babes?" Well, not necessarily where you'd expect.

In the case of Today's Babe of the Day, Kassie Lyn Logsdon, it would be the mountain resort town of Lake Arrowhead, California. Playboy's Miss May 2010 descended from her village in the San Bernardino mountains to grace us with her jaw-dropping beauty in an unparalleled, month-long transition from no modeling experience to Playmate of the Month. "How does that happen", you ask. [read more]

From The Post Chronicle; A school teacher at Isabelle Jackson Elementary School may lose her job after accidentally giving her students a sex tape.

Crystal Defanti, a teacher from the Isabelle Jackson Elementary School, has accidentally given a personal sex tape to her fifth grade students - and parents are mortified.

Defanti wanted to give her students a DVD that rounded up memories from the school year when she unknowingly left scenes of a sex tape of herself on the video. [read more]

From American Thinker; Do not believe that post-invasion intelligence invalidates our justification for using military force against Saddam's Iraq. The truth is the exact opposite. The US was fully justified to use military force against Iraq, even knowing what we know now -- especially knowing what we know now. We should not allow the false story -- almost accepted as fact -- as we head into a Presidential election, to go unchallenged.

The False Story

"The United States invaded Iraq based on false premises. The administration orchestrated a public relations drive to prove that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and connections to the 9/11 terrorists - both proved false." USA Today

While these two sentences came from USA Today, they describe the words behind the music of the "Bush lied, people died" meme echoing throughout the media chambers since at least 2004. The lies in just these two sentences are almost Shakespearian in their layered texture. The statement even lays out a false premise in accusing the Bush administration of using false premises. If lying is an art, our media have mastered it.

The Premise

Our invasion of Iraq was not based on a public relations drive; it was based on Public Law 107-243, otherwise known as the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq, passed by the 107th Congress in October of 2002 . (Herein referred to as the "Authorization".) It passed the House with a vote of 296 to 133 (by 69%) and the Senate with a vote of 77 to 23 (by 77%), including 58% of Senate Democrats. In short, it was overwhelming; it was bipartisan; and it was law. [read more]

From The Weekly Standard; "You are quite evidently deranged."

That is what the founder of Teach for America (TFA), Wendy Kopp, was told when she first asked her Princeton adviser for permission to use her senior thesis to develop an idea for a national teaching corps that would put America's brightest college graduates in classrooms teaching America's lowest-performing students. Fortunately, Wendy Kopp is as stubborn as she is smart, and she not only wrote her thesis but, since her 1989 graduation, has worked tirelessly to turn her idea into reality.

Today, Teach for America has over 5,000 active "corps members" who are teaching 440,000 students in hundreds of America's toughest public schools. And TFA has become one of the most selective and sought-after post-graduation programs: Twelve percent of Yale's class of 2005 applied to become TFA teachers; only a handful were selected.

Perhaps most important, many of TFA's 20,000 alumni are now at the forefront of the burgeoning education reform movement. TFA alums are fueling what the Washington Post calls the "TFA insurgency" by starting successful charter schools, such as the growing KIPP Academy network, and assuming leadership positions in school systems across the country, including the District of Columbia, where Michelle Rhee, a TFA alum, was appointed chancellor last year. [read more]

From Debra Saunders at Real Clear Politics; 1997 saw the height of the Math Wars in California. On the one side stood educrats who advocated mushy math -- or new-new math. They sought to de-emphasize math skills, such as multiplication and solving numeric equations, in favor of pushing students to write about math and how they might solve a problem. Their unofficial motto was: There is no right answer. (Even to 2 + 2.) They were clever. They knew how to make it seem as if they were pushing for more rigor, as they dumbed down curricula. For example, they said they wanted to teach children algebra starting in kindergarten, which seemed rigorous, but they had expanded the definition of algebra to the point that it was meaningless. On the other side were reformers who wanted the board to push through rigorous and specific standards that raised the bar for all California kids. Miraculously, they succeeded, and they took pride in the state Board of Education's vote for academic standards that called for all eighth-graders to learn Algebra I.

Now many of those who fought on ground zero are afraid that the current board members will vote to undermine that standard. Earlier this month, many of those educators wrote to board President Ted Mitchell, urging that the board reject a vote they believe would undermine the Algebra I standard. The board tabled the measure until later. The fight continues.

Because this is an education issue, educratese obscures the issue, so bear with me. Understand that while the board members maintain that they voted to make Algebra I the standard for eighth-graders, there isn't an explicit requirement. The official Mathematics Content Standards for California Public Schools has a chart that lists Algebra I as a math standard starting in the eighth grade, but, with a nod toward local control, it is not explicitly required for the eighth grade. [read more]

From Ace of Spades; Ahahahahaha. Of course. Her previous bouts of lunacy already granted her college credits in that field like an AP test of dementia.

And the school -- North Carolina Central University -- has an honor code, and yes, that honor code forbids students from making maliciously false claims.

But we all know -- something happened. Must have. She said so.

From Tampa Bay 10; The stories in the news about inappropriate relationships between teachers and students have been overwhelming. There was even a substitute teacher in New Port Richey who got in trouble after investigators say she had a relationship with an underage student.

Well, another Pasco County substitute teacher's job is on the line, but this time it's because of a magic trick.

The charge from the school district — Wizardry!

Substitute teacher Jim Piculas does a 30-second magic trick where a toothpick disappears then reappears.

But after performing it in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land 'O Lakes, Piculas said his job did a disappearing act of its own.

"I get a call the middle of the day from head of supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, 'Jim, we have a huge issue, you can't take any more assignments you need to come in right away,'" he said.

When Piculas went in, he learned his little magic trick cast a spell and went much farther than he'd hoped.

"I said, 'Well Pat, can you explain this to me?' 'You've been accused of wizardry,' [he said]. Wizardry?" he asked. [read more]

From Baltimore Sun; The trouble began, Jolita Berry said, when she asked a girl in one of her art classes at Reginald F. Lewis High School to sit down.

The student did not obey, coming closer to confront the teacher. "She said she's gonna bang me," Berry said. "I said, 'Back up, you're in my space. If you hit me, I'm gonna defend myself.'"

But Berry, who is 30 and started her job teaching art at the Northeast Baltimore school in December, did not defend herself. The girl caught the teacher off guard as other students cheered her on and screamed, "Hit her!"

"She just started beating on me relentlessly," Berry said, recalling the Friday morning incident that left her with a sore shoulder and a broken blood vessel in her eye.

As it turned out, one of the kids in the class was recording what happened on a cell phone. Video footage was posted on the social networking site MySpace and aired on local television news, showing a teenage girl hitting a woman lying on the floor. [read more]

From The Smoking Gun; Meet Kelly Sweet. The eighth grade teacher, 26, is facing a felony rap for an alleged sexual encounter with a 14-year-old boy in her Milwaukee apartment earlier this month.

As noted in a Circuit Court criminal complaint, the Deer Creek Intermediate School teacher was watching a movie with the boy on March 9 when she initiated illicit contact while the pair was seated on her couch (Sweet had been resting her head on the boy's lap). The charged assault involved Sweet allegedly "grinding her pubic mound" against the victim.

The educator, pictured below in a Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office mug shot, was named in a March 20 criminal information charging her with sexual assault of a child. If convicted, Sweet could face a maximum of 40 years behind bars.

From Capitalism Magazine; “Gifts with Strings a Knotty Issue,” is the latest in a recent stream of articles about academics going berserk because BB&T, under the direction of CEO John Allison, has made contributions to universities with the stipulation that Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged be included somewhere in the schools’ curricula. For those who have not yet read Atlas, let me begin by saying a few words about the novel in order to set the context necessary for understanding the hostility of certain academics toward the book.

Atlas Shrugged is a spellbinding mystery about a man who said he would stop the motor of the world—and did. But the book is more than a wonderful suspense story; it is also a profound philosophical treatise dramatizing: the fact that reality is absolute (i.e., that facts are facts and cannot be wished or prayed away); the fact that reason is man’s only means of knowledge and basic means of survival; the fact that the requirements of man’s life constitute the standard of moral value; the fact that pursuing one’s rational self-interest is moral because doing so is necessary for one’s life; the fact that the initiation of physical force against a human being is immoral because it stops him from acting on his rational judgment (i.e., his basic means of living); and the fact that laissez-faire capitalism is the only moral social system because it is the only social system that bars physical force from social relationships, thereby enabling everyone to act fully in accordance with his own rational judgment and thus to live fully as a human being. The theme of Atlas Shrugged is a condensation of all of this: the supreme role of reason in man’s life.

Given the forgoing, it should come as no surprise that many of today’s academics loathe Rand and Atlas. “Absolutes? Reason? Egoism? Banning force? Capitalism?”—you can hear them shrieking in horror. Nor should it come as a surprise that these hostile-to-reason academics are coming unglued at the idea of Atlas being included in university curricula: The ideas presented in the novel clearly correspond to reality and thus are persuasive to students and threatening to the academic status quo.

What is a little surprising, however, is the ridiculously transparent nature of the “arguments” used in the efforts to keep Atlas out of the academic mix. [read more]

From KNBC; In the past two weeks, three female teachers have been arrested in the Tampa, Fla., area, accused of having sex with male students.

First came the arrest of a middle school math teacher, Stephanie Ragusa, 28. She was charged with having sex with a 14-year-old, authorities said.

Investigators monitored phone calls between teacher and student in which Ragusa allegedly acknowledged having sex with the boy.

Last Thursday, high school honors English teacher Mary Jo Spack, 45, also was arrested. She is accused of meeting a 17- and an 18-year-old student at a liquor store and leading them to a motel room, where more students allegedly joined the party.

Spack was reportedly overheard having sex with one teen in the shower, police said. [read more]

From TBO; A middle school math teacher was arrested today and accused by the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office of having sex with a 15-year-old boy.

Stephanie Marie Ragusa, 28, of 15324 Lake Bella Vista Drive, Tampa, was charged with five counts of lewd and lascivious battery.

According to the sheriff's office, Ragusa had a sexual relationship with the teen when she was a teacher at Davidsen Middle School in Tampa last year. The teen, whose name was withheld by the sheriff's office because he is a juvenile, was not a student of Ragusa's, authorities said.

Ragusa and the 15-year-old had sex five times from Oct. 1, 2006 to May 4, 2007, investigators said. [read more]

From The Conservative Voice; The Washington Times reports the latest liberal-progressive-socialist curtailment of personal freedom.

"California courts have held that under provisions in the Education Code, parents do not have a constitutional right to educate their children in their own home," said the Feb. 28 ruling by the California Appellate Court for the second district.

When they wish to overrule long-standing political liberties, liberals look to precedents of so-called international law and other nations' customs. The socialist European Union, and Germany specifically, provide ammunition for abrogating educational liberties.

Why the animus of liberal courts and teachers' unions against home schooling?

The obvious answer is that home schooling does a better job, revealing the poor quality of public education. Less obvious is the desire of home-schooling parents to teach Judeo-Christian moral principles, which directly conflicts with the public school aim of teaching the secular religion of liberal-progressive-socialism. Propagating that mind-set necessitates identifying as ignorance all ideas of fixed and timeless moral principles.

Such was the work primarily of John Dewey, the leading liberal-progressive theoretician of the early 1900s. He taught Columbia University students that Darwinian evolution had proved that everything, including morality, was continually evolving. In such a world there can be no timeless principles of morality. Rules for social behavior are simply whatever intellectuals think they ought to be in matters of sexual orientation, sexual promiscuity, and every sort of sensual gratification. [read more]

From SF Examiner; A California appeals court ruling clamping down on homeschooling by parents without teaching credentials sent shock waves across the state this week, leaving an estimated 166,000 children as possible truants and their parents at risk of prosecution.

The homeschooling movement never saw the case coming.

"At first, there was a sense of, 'No way,' " said homeschool parent Loren Mavromati, a resident of Redondo Beach (Los Angeles County) who is active with a homeschool association. "Then there was a little bit of fear. I think it has moved now into indignation."

The ruling arose from a child welfare dispute between the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and Philip and Mary Long of Lynwood, who have been homeschooling their eight children. Mary Long is their teacher, but holds no teaching credential.

The parents said they also enrolled their children in Sunland Christian School, a private religious academy in Sylmar (Los Angeles County), which considers the Long children part of its independent study program and visits the home about four times a year.

The Second District Court of Appeal ruled that California law requires parents to send their children to full-time public or private schools or have them taught by credentialed tutors at home. [read more]

From American.com; Math 55 is advertised in the Harvard catalog as “prob­ably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country.” It is leg­endary among high school math prodigies, who hear terrifying stories about it in their computer camps and at the Math Olympiads. Some go to Harvard just to have the opportunity to enroll in it. Its formal title is “Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra,” but it is also known as “math boot camp” and “a cult.” The two-semester fresh­man course meets for three hours a week, but, as the catalog says, homework for the class takes between 24 and 60 hours a week.

Math 55 does not look like America. Each year as many as 50 students sign up, but at least half drop out within a few weeks. As one former student told The Harvard Crimson newspaper in 2006, “We had 51 students the first day, 31 students the second day, 24 for the next four days, 23 for two more weeks, and then 21 for the rest of the first semester.” Said another student, “I guess you can say it’s an episode of ‘Survivor’ with people voting themselves off.” The final class roster, according to The Crimson: “45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male.”

Why do women avoid classes like Math 55? Why, in fact, are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physi­cal sciences?

Women now earn 57 percent of bachelors degrees and 59 percent of masters degrees. According to the Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2006 was the fifth year in a row in which the majority of research Ph.D.’s awarded to U.S. citizens went to women. Women earn more Ph.D.’s than men in the humanities, social sciences, edu­cation, and life sciences. Women now serve as presidents of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and other leading research universities.

But elsewhere, the figures are different. Women comprise just 19 percent of tenure-track profes­sors in math, 11 percent in physics, 10 percent in computer science, and 10 percent in electrical engi­neering. And the pipeline does not promise statistical parity any time soon: women are now earning 24 percent of the Ph.D.’s in the phys­ical sciences—way up from the 4 percent of the 1960s, but still far behind the rate they are winning doctorates in other fields. “The change is glacial,” says Debra Rolison, a physical chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory. [read more]

From WWTI; The Lisbon Central School teacher who admitted to having an affair with a student has pleaded guilty in St. Lawrence County Court to satisfy the charges against her.

33-year-old Christel C. Gravlin plead guilty today to one count of 3rd degree Rape in a deal that will see her sentenced to no more than six months in jail followed by ten years probation.

Gravlin initially plead innocent in December to Rape 3rd Degree, Criminal Sex Act 3rd Degree and Endangering the Welfare of a Child.

Gravlin was accused of having oral sex and intercourse with a 15 year old male student on November 25th during the course of a relationship that lasted one to two weeks.

The affair came to light after an incident at a high school basketball game on November 30th, when, intoxicated, Gravlin made statements about an affair to a group of students and others who were sitting near her. Gravlin confirmed the affair in a three-page signed statement to police, attributing the affair to depression, alcohol, prescription drugs and pressure from the boy. [read more]

From News & Observer; A professor's comments on Down syndrome and abortion angered some students on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus this week.

Professor Albert Harris told students in his embryology class Monday that he thinks fetuses with Down syndrome should be aborted.

In his lecture notes, he wrote:

"In my opinion, the moral thing for older mothers to do is to have amniocentesis, as soon during pregnancy as is safe for the fetus, test whether placental cells have a third chromosome #21, and abort the fetus if it does. The brain is the last organ to become functional."

Harris, who has taught at UNC-CH for 35 years, said he has said the same thing many times before. He says it to spark discussion.

But Lara Frame, a senior in Harris' Biology 441, said the biology classroom is no place for opinion.

"Biology is not an opinion subject," said Frame, an anthropology and Spanish major from Charlotte. "It's a facts-based subject. And though abortion is legal, it's not a fact that you should abort every baby with Down syndrome. [read more]

From Reason Magazine; In 1995, the liberal New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis advised his young readers—a constituency he mistakenly assumed existed—that if they felt wounded, were abnormally thin-skinned, or desirous of professorial protection against a delicate sensibility, they might consider enrolling at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, an institution possessing rigorous safeguards against various forms of "harassment." This was all rather surprising to Lewis because, as he noted, "Speech codes at universities had seemed to be on the decline. Several were held unconstitutional. So it is of more than parochial interest that an extraordinarily sweeping code should be proposed in this supposedly liberal-minded state."

It is distressing then that, 12 years hence, these Stakhanovite commissars of sensitivity are still laboring against nature. The virus of teenage insensitivity has proven stubbornly resistant to social engineering schemes. According to a new report from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an indefatigable organization devoted to protecting free speech on campus, Lewis's decade-old advice has sadly gone unheeded.

FIRE's "Spotlight on Speech Codes 2007" (PDF) found that a full 75 percent of the 346 colleges surveyed "continue to explicitly prohibit various forms of expression that are protected by the First Amendment." To qualify as a "red light" violator—the worst of three designated classifications-a school must have "at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech." These include overly restrictive anti-harassment policies and broadly worded prohibitions against "degrading comments" and "hostile" learning environments. It found further that only 4 percent—yes, 4 percent—of schools surveyed had "no policies that seriously imperil speech." [read more]

From AP; A confidential, nationwide list of 24,500 teachers who have been punished for a wide array of offenses was made available to the public Friday by a Florida newspaper.

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune created a searchable database of the teachers' names after waiting for years to gain access to the list. The paper began seeking the material as part of its earlier reporting on teacher sexual misconduct in Florida. It obtained the list from the Florida Department of Education.

The list, gathered and maintained by the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification, does not provide any information on why any of the teachers were disciplined. Sexual misconduct, financial misconduct, criminal convictions and other misbehavior all can bring disciplinary actions against teacher licenses.

A nationwide Associated Press investigation earlier this year sought five years of state disciplinary actions against teachers and the reasons behind them. In the years the AP studied, 2001 to 2005, roughly one-quarter of all disciplinary actions against teachers involved sexual misconduct.

The AP's seven-month investigation found 2,570 educators whose teaching credentials were revoked, denied, surrendered or sanctioned following allegations of sexual misconduct. [read more]

From Sun-Sentinel; Police say a Bartow High School student hoping to improve her math grades through extra credit instead got a lewd request from her teacher.

Isaac Nathan Tillis was arrested after repeatedly telling the student she could earn an "A" if she gave him oral sex. According to authorities, he lured the girl into a teacher's lounge bathroom on Wednesday, but once inside police and the girl sprung a trap.

The 16-year-old was wearing a hidden listening device, which recorded Tillis' proposition after he dropped his pants, police said. The 29-year-old teacher had also scribbled his request on a hall pass, an arrest report stated.

Officers arrested Tillis and charged him with soliciting a lewd sex act from a minor.