In suggested lesson plans, the NEA recommended that teachers "discuss historical in- stances of American intolerance" as the lesson children and youth in elementary, middle, and high school should take away from the most dastardly attack on America since Pearl Harbor. The NEA is an American Fifth Column, an enemy within that uses our public schools to turn children and youth against their nation.

The teaching profession is one of the largest occupations in America. There are five times as many teachers as lawyers and twice as many as nurses, according to Census figures. The teaching profession also has one of the highest turnover rates. Little won- der, when you consider the lies teachers are asked to tell. The most recent national data indicates a 16% annual turnover rate and, in schools with high concentrations of poor students, the rate rises to 25%. As many as a third of all new hires leave teaching in their first three years and 46% leave in five years. Almost half of all teacher turnover is due to dissatisfaction or teachers seeking better careers.

Most Americans believe teachers are underpaid. This is a myth. Their income is more than the average American's income. According to the NEA, the average teacher today now earns $40,000 dollars a year and many teachers earn more than $50,000. When you factor in all the benefits, the cost for teaching nine months a year is somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000 dollars per teacher. When you add in seniority, advanced degrees and those in administrative positions, they can and do earn more.

Teachers are good people with a desire to help youngsters develop into good citizens, but they find themselves thwarted in many ways. Teaching to the test is the most obvious. It is a desperate effort to insure that some basic knowledge is taught in our schools. The government insists this one-size-fits-all approach is the only way students can acquire the knowledge they need to function in society, but the results are so dismal the entire system is in meltdown. By comparison, those who graduated from high school in the 1950's had a body of knowledge comparable to today's college graduates.

Saul Cooperman, a former New Jersey state education commissioner, recently took a look inside the classroom to explore the differences between the way teachers used to teach and today's demands. He noted that, beginning in the late 1970s, the latitude teachers once had was increasingly diminished. "Public education is changing as the federal government becomes increasingly involved in every classroom in America." Suffice it to say, the NEA has a death grip on the U.S. Department of Education.

But are today's teachers equipped to actually teach? In a study, What Do Teachers Teach? A Survey of America's Fourth and Eighth Grade Teachers, conducted by the Manhattan Institute and Connecticut University, English, math, history and science teachers revealed that "only a minority" favored the "teacher-directed approach." If teachers are not directing the education of students, what is their job description? Asked if they preferred teaching "specific information and skills" versus "learning how to learn", the vast majority, 74%, preferred the latter. If students do not acquire specific knowledge, why are they in school?

Among an equal number of teachers surveyed, 75% of fourth grade teachers and 72% of eighth grade teachers "believed it was more important that students approached a task in a creative, thoughtful way, and evidence of students taking that approach should have the greatest emphasis in evaluating student work." Thus we have students who learn to spell by writing a word any way that comes to mind, instead of mastering the right way to spell it. Rather than grade a student on his or her individual achievement, more than a third of fourth grade teachers and just under half of the eighth grade teachers said "they graded on a single, class-wide standard." So how is little Johnny or little Jane doing? Parents have to guess because, if left to some teachers, the class as a whole is being graded, not their child.

Compare this with the fact that, on every school day across the nation, 3,000 secondary students drop out. By the end of the 2003-2004 school year, nearly 540,000 students will leave school without having earned a diploma. The nation's high school graduation rate is 69% overall and worse in school districts that graduate less than half of their students. Those that remain in our schools graduate with test scores that are a national disgrace. We are importing physicians and engineers from other nations because we are not pro- ducing students educated well enough to enter these and other professions.

Then there is the problem of teachers who lack the knowledge necessary to teach a particular subject. There have been repeated instances where teachers who were tested failed, often repeatedly, in the very subjects they were supposed to teach.

Meanwhile, the dues of the National Education Association's 2.7 million members are being spent on political activities. This is because the Democratic Party, U.S.A., is a wholly owned subsidiary of the NEA. In cases filed by the Landmark Legal Foundation, it was revealed that the 1998-1999 NEA's Interim Financial Statements showed that $3,026,212 had been spent through April 30, 1999 on "Increased and lasting bipartisan advocacy support" and the NEA had budgeted an additional $2,033,650 for the remain- ing four months of the fiscal year ending August 31, 1999. For the fiscal years 2000- 2002, the NEA budgeted an allotment of $1,993,735 for "coordinated state-specific cam- paign development and implemented to elect bipartisan pro-public education candidates in the 2000 general election."

The NEA's agenda is not about the education of America's students. It is about turning teachers into "change agents" who indoctrinate students with a Leftist Liberal political agenda that too often smacks of anti-Americanism.

High teacher turnover, a massive school dropout rate, the low scores when students are tested on English, math, history, geography and science, and the drugging of thousands of students--these are all symptoms of the deliberate destruction of our educational sys- tem by the NEA and, de facto, the U.S. Department of Education. Throwing $49 billion dollars at this system, as President Bush has proposed, will not change this lethal threat to our nation. Ending the NEA's control of the Democratic Party, eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, and returning the education of students to the state and local level will reverse this disastrous decline.

Alan Caruba is a veteran business and science writer, a Public Relations Counselor, Communications Director of the American Policy Center, and Founder of the National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information about media-driven scare campaigns. Caruba writes a weekly column, "Warning Signs," posted on the Internet website of the National Anxiety Center (www.anxietycenter.com). A compilation of his past columns, entitled Warning Signs, is published by Merril Press. In addition to Warning Signs, Caruba is the author of A Pocket Guide to Militant Islam and The United Nations vs. the United States, both of which are available from the National Anxiety Center, 9 Brookside Road, Maplewood, New Jersey, 07040.

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