Coatesville Dems: Anti-Communist pro fascist crusaders, Two Gun Bessie Burchett & Bear gun Betsy DeVos

This flyer is a solicitation for Bessie Burchett's book Education for Destruction. Burchett was a Philadelphia public schoolteacher who argued that education ought to be limited to ""a select few white Protestant Americans of high IQ."" She was pro-Nazi, anti-Catholic and Antisemitic. She resigned from West Philadelphia High School in 1941 minutes before she was about to be fired for advocating race hatred and being a Nazi sympathizer. Known as ""Two Gun"" Bessie for her habit of wearing her guns in class. She became a sought after figure as a speaker for pro-fascist and other reactionary organizations through the early Second World War years.

http://digital.library.temple.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/p15037coll15/id/677

From this perspective, Lend-Lease was nothing short of “treachery”, leaving the United States “as helpless as Lenin could have wished” (29). To quote Bessie Burchett, “The men who might defend their homes against communists are being drafted, some are being sent out of the country while locust hordes of aliens are still coming in to take their jobs . . . . Is it not significant that the men who have rushed England into this suicidal war are predominantly not of Anglo-Saxon stock? And that in our own Administration, the men who are pushing us relentlessly towards the same bottomless abyss are not of English or traditional American blood?” (30). This foreshadowed the ruin or extermination of ”the white race, white Christian civilization” (33). The “Draft Bill” was a “Dictator Bill” (31). Roosevelt was plotting to abdicate American sovereignty to British imperial and financial suzerainty (32). Russian entry into the war in June 1941 made matters starker: “If we had only kept clear of England’s war, we should now be clear of England’s evil ally” (33). All this was the consequence of ignoring “the expert advice of our great Colonel Lindbergh” (34)...

During 1940 and 1941, the old activists of the Anti-Communism Society and the Christian Front focused their rhetoric on the isolationist cause (75). In the Summer of 1940, Thomas Blisard and the C.D.C.R. led a delegation to Washington to protest changes in the Neutrality Act (76). In September 1941, some three hundred attended a “Mothers’ meeting” organized by Joseph Gallagher and Bessie Burchett at the Bethe Bellevue Stratford to protest Lend-Lease, a law “giving our armaments, clothes, food, money and our men to the British; and for what?” Britain herself was a parasite, unwilling to spare its own riches: “Why don’t they give up more of their own wealth? But no, they want ours, and all for nothing”. Bessie Burchett asserted that “Roosevelt is nothing but a Charlie McCarthy because he is nothing but a stooge, even a stooge would know he is used as a stooge” (77).

FROM:

Philip Jenkins, Hoods and Shirts: The ExtremeRight in Pennsylvania 1925-1950 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

How Our Public Schools Became a"Communist Threat"

by Paul Buchheit

Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast called the public school system a "socialist regime." Michelle Rhee cautions us against commending students for their 'participation' in sports and other activities.

Privatizers believe that any form of working together as a community is anti-American. To them, individual achievement is all that matters. They're now applying their winner-take-all profit motive to our children.

We're Sliding Backwards, Towards "Separate and Unequal"

In 1954, the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education seemed to place our country on the right track. Chief Justice Earl Warren said that education "is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms." Thurgood Marshall insisted on "the right of every American to an equal start in life."

But then we got derailed. We've become a nation of inequality, worse than ever before, worse than during the racist "separate but equal" policy of Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896. The Civil Rights Project at UCLA shows that "segregated schools are systematically linked to unequal educational opportunities." The Economic Policy Institute tells us that "African American students are more isolated than they were 40 years ago."

The privatizers clamor for vouchers and charters to improve education, but such methods generally don't serve those who need it most. According to a Center on Education Policy report, private schools serve 12 percent of the nation's elementary and secondary students, but only one percent of disabled students. Forty-three percent of public school students are from minority families, compared to 24% of private school students.

Meanwhile, as teachers continue to get blamed, the Census Bureau tells us that an incredible 38 percent of black children live in poverty.

The Underprivileged Have Been Cheated Out Of Taxes

A Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) report revealed that total K-12 education cuts for fiscal 2012 were about $12.7 billion.

Almost 90 percent of K-12 funding comes from state and local taxes. But in 2011 and 2012, 155 of the largest U.S. corporations paid only about half of their required state taxes. That comes to $14 billion per year in unpaid taxes, more than the K-12 cuts.

Untaxed and Unqualified Foundations Want To "Save Our Schools"

The "starve the beast" mentality allows the privatizers to claim that our "Soviet-style" schools don't work, and that a business approach must be used instead. Philanthropists like Bill Gates and Eli Broad and Michael Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch and the Walton family, who have little educational experience among them, and who have little accountability to the public, are promoting "education reform" with lots of standardized testing.

But according to the National Research Council, "The tests that are typically used to measure performance in education fall short of providing a complete measure of desired educational outcomes in many ways." Diane Ravitch notes that the test-based Common Core standards were developed by a Gates-funded organization with almost no public input. Desperate states had to adopt the standards to get funding.

Bill Gates may be well-intentioned, but he's a tech guy, and his programming of children into educational objects is disturbing. One of his ideas is to videotape teachers and then analyze their performances. The means of choosing 'analysts' is unclear. Another Gates idea is the Galvanic Skin Response bracelet, which would be attached to a child to measure classroom engagement, and ultimately gauge teacher performance. It all sounds like a drug company's test lab.

As noted by Ravitch and others, philanthropic organizations tend to contribute to "like-minded entities," which are likely to exclude representatives of the neediest community organizations. They are also tax-exempt. And when educational experiments go wrong, they can just leave their mess behind and move on to their next project.

Getting Past Our "Exceptionalism"

If we're willing to look beyond our borders for help, we will see the short-sightedness of our educational "reforms." Finland's schools were considered mediocre 30 years ago, but they've achieved a remarkable turnaround by essentially challenging their teachers before they're entrusted with the welfare of the children. Most Finnish teachers are unionized, and they undergo rigorous masters-level training to ensure proficiency in the teaching profession, which is held in the same high esteem as law and medicine. In keeping with this respect for learning, government funding is applied equally to all schools, classes in the arts are available to all students, and tuition is free.

As a result, Finnish students, who are not subjected to standardized testing, finish at or near the top of international comparisons for reading, math, and science.

It's not just Finland with such impressive results. Research at the National Center on Education and the Economy has confirmed that educational systems in Japan, Shanghai, and Ontario, Canada have prospered with an emphasis on the preparation of teachers for the essential task of instructing their young people.

A Strong Community Leads To Individual Success

George Lakoff summarizes: "The Public provides freedom...Individualism begins after the roads are built, after individualists have had an education, after medical research has cured their diseases..."

Public education is vital to the promise of equal opportunity for all. But it will only succeed if we work together as a community, and stop listening to the voices of profit and inexperience.