A Reporting Problem Looms: L.A. Times Story on Laid-Off Teachers is Plagued by Non Sequiturs and Omissions

By Nicholas Stix
October 14, 2009
VDARE

If you’re writing a news story about thousands of laid-off educators—27,000 in California alone—what do you then abruptly begin talking about in the same article? Why, the need for spending millions of tax dollars, in order to encourage people to go into teaching, natch.

(Hey, the millions in graft are the idea of the Nobel Prize-winning John Doe calling himself Barack Obama, so it’s got to be brilliant! And for those of you who demur, what are you, a bunch of racists?!)

The story is, An education problem looms:

“In a time of layoffs, the state hopes to inspire a new generation of educators,” by L.A. Times uninvestigative reporter, Seema Mehta.

Remember that name! That lady is going places.

Granted, Mehta gave the story a pretext to give it a wisp of plausibility: 55,000 California teachers could retire over the next seven years. Thus, we need to support “Obama’s” plan to spend 30 million taxpayer dollars, in order to entice people into spending up to six of the best years of their lives, and possibly $280,000 (2009 dollars), in order to get teaching degrees.

Mehta: “The state is facing a looming teacher shortage as baby boomers reach retirement age and fewer young people are expected to enter the field.”

Shortage shouting, even in the teaching biz? Paging Rob Sanchez!

Mehta’s story lurches back and forth between propagandists’ calls for hiring more teachers, and individual sob stories profiling laid-off teachers. (Unlike with illegal alien sob stories, however, these stories are legit, but Mehta refuses to put them in context.)

The Obama administration has requested $30 million for a national campaign that focuses on young adults and mid-career professionals and on such high-need areas as science and math. In addition to reaching out to potential teachers, the U.S. Department of Education hopes to improve training programs. President Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan plan to hold events in the fall highlighting the importance of teaching to the nation’s future.

“It’s a noble profession. In many other countries, children do aspire to be teachers, and they are regarded as some of the most important people in society,” said John White, the education department spokesman. “That’s what we need to do, so that we not only replace the teachers who are retiring but bring the most talented people to the field. . . . We need them to aspire to be the next generation of teachers.”

The California Teacher Corps was formed earlier this year, with the goal of placing 100,000 new teachers into classrooms over the next decade. The organization focuses on recruiting professionals who are changing careers.

First of all, the numbers don’t jibe. As many as 55,000 California teachers retiring over the next seven years, extrapolates to as many as 78,570 over the next ten years, not 100,000.

But the numbers could be made to jibe. If the 55,000 retirement figure is in the ballpark, California likely will need at least 100,000 new teachers over the next ten years, due to the 800-pound gorilla in the room, which Mehta never mentions: immigration.

However, the same immigration that continually drives the need for new teachers, guarantees that there is ever less money to pay for them, as poor, unskilled, illiterate aliens, “legal and illegal,” drive out what is left of the state’s educated, skilled, American tax base.

Mehta never asks why highly educated, middle-aged professionals, or “the most talented people,” would want to undertake the expense, time, and risk of studying to become teachers, when there is no guarantee of a job, and the California Department of Education is run by racist State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell, who claims that white teachers are at fault for the black-white achievement gap.

Meanwhile, in the name of “diversity,” O’Connell welcomes incompetent black and Hispanic teacher candidates.

Mehta also never cites critics of the politicized, anti-intellectual, and expensive credentialing process, which entails an unconstitutional, political litmus test, and which exists to protect the jobs and power of racial socialist teacher ed professors, and to put off millions of talented, highly educated people, particularly from fields such as math, science, and engineering, who would be assets in the classroom. Want to attract more talented teacher candidates? Then throw out teacher ed (i.e., propaganda)-based, as opposed to discipline-based credentialing.

Conversely, when Mehta cites “Obama’s” purported plan to improve training programs, if we look at the track record of “Obama” and his terrorist partner, Bill Ayers, in wasting $159 million in Chicago Annenberg Challenge money, such “improvement” will mean further politicization and anti-intellectualism, which will further drive away “the most talented people.”

“Obama” wants to con (white) people into wasting their lives, and taking on debt that they may never be able to repay, chasing a chimera.

Perhaps most importantly, Mehta never mentions that many of the same California school districts laying off American teachers have for years been busily importing Filipinos and Mexicans under H1-B, non-immigrant visas. However, when those “non-immigrant” visas run out, the non-immigrants are not going anywhere. And those districts will still find the money, with which to hire incompetent, racist, blacks and Hispanics.

Going back to the Clinton administration, the majority of the occupations projected for the greatest growth have been in “non-tradable domestic services,”, like retail salesman, truck driver, waitress, nurse aide and home health aide (and those jobs are increasingly going to blacks and aliens).

In May 2004, economist Paul Craig Roberts asked rhetorically,

“Why then will Americans attend universities? Will Wal-Mart require an MBA to stock its shelves? Will nursing homes want their patients bathed by engineers?

Obviously, education and retraining are not answers to job loss from US employers substituting foreign labor for American labor.

And then the Greatest Depression hit.

We’ve left the “information economy” in the dust, and now have an ignorance economy. Obama and his media cronies want everyone to go to college, in order to reward and politically consolidate the power of the racial socialists running the antiversity, one of Obama’s greatest institutional strongholds.

So, the real story, the one Seema Mehta never told, is about immigration and racism, coming … and coming.