Archive for the ‘Education Reform’ Category

[From Susie Schnell]

If you are a Progressive Educator or leader on the National/Federal Level and want to get your education agenda through quickly to as many states as possible, you need the support of conservative Republicans. So…

1. You push this agenda through individual “states” instead of “federal” because we like state’s rights.

2. You appeal to their desire for “higher standards” because we believe in an educated populace.

3. You talk about modernizing schools with the latest technology and equipment

4. You partner with private institutions since it appeals to our sense of capitalism and free enterprise

5. You talk about college and jobs because this is foremost on our minds in a failing economy

6. You hold national conferences to teach these ideas to state and local school boards and get them to buy into it.

7. You write the national standards, assessments and curriculum through gov’t partnered organizations so it doesn’t seem like the govt is writing them directly.

8. You help each state board of education write their own bills for implementing this plan, either directly or by using a “model” so all states are coming up with the same laws throughout the land, but think they are being independent. (Do you really think that our state board wrote these bills independently or maybe they got help?)

9. You advertise this as a Governor’s and State’s thing to the general public so no one looks behind the curtain.

10. You get as many Republicans and conservatives to accept your plan because of the nice sounding ideas, and they don’t realize they are setting up the foundation for a federal takeover of education. Families and conservatives don’t question these conservative legislators, but trust they are only after state’s rights and what is good for the children. Without realizing it, these good legislators have enacted laws to usher in this progressive agenda.

11. Get everyone to sign off on the standards as if there’s a crisis and this must be done right now.

12. Progressives never give up. When they don’t get their way, they just go back into their caves, re-strategize, change phraseology and try again. We ALWAYS have to be on guard for new tricks.

Problems:

1. This whole idea was set up by the Federal Gov’t, USOE and dangerous national interests who are working together, like Bill Gates, Linda Darling-Hammond, Pearson, and large corporations set on making billions by partnering with the federal govt, states and local districts for a guaranteed income for years. These Public Private Partnerships threaten not only local control, but also real free enterprise for smaller businesses that have not been chosen by the govt for these contracts. What the Federal Gov’t cannot legally do, and visa versa, the other partner can accomplish. We have been tricked into thinking this is a locally grown program in Utah.

2. The next phase in this process is to develop Century 21 Community Schools which will invite more Public Private Partnerships (PPP). Big corporations contract with federal, state and local school entities to go into these community schools full time, 6-7 days a week, and provide services of free healthcare and dental, PreK-12 education, job placement programs, recreation, daycare, 3 meals a day and every service you can think of for the entire family. This has already started in Ogden School District and Ogden’s plan is to make every school in it’s district a full service community school. Arne Duncan speaks a lot about this plan and thousands of these schools are popping up all over the nation. All of this data (healthcare, psychiatry records, academic scores, meals, recreation, etc) will be a part of the state and national data base because these families go to a one-stop community center with every amenity they need. No need to go home or church or extended family.

3. Right now, we’re just talking about school records from Pre-K to college to work. That’s bad enough. But by setting up extensive data collecting technology, we are easily setting ourselves up for the next step of education when full-service 21st Century Schools will be the growing phenomenon.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1999361/utah_state_office_of_education_partners_with_pearson_for_new/

Please look beyond just Common Core, compare it with Obama’s National Education Goals, and look to see what these bills in Utah are setting up in the bigger scheme of things for the future.

Simple, local and parent-centered are the answers.

Thanks,

Susie Schnell

The Borg was an alien species that threatened the existence of the Federation in the TV show Star Trek. Their race assimilated other races into their collective through hardwired neurological attachments that would reach deep into the mind. Their belief was that central control would raise efficiency. The result was a total loss of individuality and independent thought. What is happening in the education system in this country is very much a parallel to this threat.

Lt. Governor Bell recently praised the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), but there are several important things he and others need to realize.

While the math standards themselves are pretty good, the notion that these are not national standards is inaccurate. When you have national organizations (National Governor’s Association and Chief State School Officers) collaborating to create one set of standards, you have de facto national standards.

The claim that the federal government isn’t involved in these standards is laughable. They bribed states to adopt the standards with Race to the Top grants (which would only be available for a handful of states) IF they adopted CCSS. Now, several states have sought waivers on No Child Left Behind’s annual yearly progress and the federal DOE is telling them, “we’ll grant you a waiver, IF you adopt ‘career and college ready standards’ (hint: Common Core).” Why were the Feds so interested in bribing states to get on CCSS even before a final draft was ready? They aren’t involved in this, right?

Why would Lt. Governor Bell say that Utah can adapt the standards to meet our needs and values when we aren’t allowed to modify the standards at all, except to add 15% more to them? How can he say these aren’t national standards?

If the federal government really isn’t taking over education, why have they put millions of dollars into creating assessments with organizations like SBAC, PARRC, and Achieve?

If the federal government isn’t nationalizing education, why have they mandated that states create a database to federally mandated standards to track children on 40 vital factors such as a child’s blood type, what time they get on the bus in the morning, the number of cavities in their mouths, what their religious affiliation is, family voting status, etc…? This is a total invasion of privacy. Is anyone concerned about this?

If the federal government isn’t taking over education, why have they been rewriting the laws at the federal level to strip away state and local control of education and make it look like they’ve always had legal control of education?

Can anyone not imagine the Feds soon telling the states they’ll get no federal funds for education (or perhaps ANY funds) unless they adopt this entire package? Everything is coming together for total federal control and we are embracing the Borg collective! It’s the end of individualism.

The solution isn’t found in joining the collective. It’s found in a return to true local control and giving parents MORE responsibility and authority for their children’s education. Each time we remove authority and responsibility from parents over their God-given mandate to teach their children, their interest and involvement lessens because they know, “the schools are going to educate my child.” Until we put the burden back on parents for their child’s success, education will continue to decline.

Links to the above points can be found here: http://www.utahsrepublic.org/dropping-the-common-core-state-standards/

Do you have a successful school? Lots of good teachers doing a good job educating students? Do you enjoy the federal dollars you receive for funding? The feds are about to turn that peanut butter and chocolate combination into cyanide and chocolate. (chocolate being the good local teachers just to clarify the analogy :))

A few days ago congress was presented with an 860 page education bill from Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa. The Heritage Foundation has started a review of the bill and notes:

For example, the bill would codify Obama Administration education priorities, such as the “equitable distribution” of effective teachers among schools. It would eliminate “adequate yearly progress”—the onerous federal requirement that mandated every child be proficient in reading and math by 2014—but would replace it with requirements that states prove they have “college- and career-ready” standards, giving Washington more control over the content taught in local schools.

Good news for schools on getting rid of AYP but if you’re successful, it’s time to chop that school up and send some of those teachers to failing schools to make sure they get quality teachers too. Oh, and don’t miss the great news that the Feds aren’t mandating national standards, they’ll just force you to be on “college- and career-ready” standards. Gee, I wonder where we can find national standards that will fit that bill? Oh yeah, the CCSS are available for use. We’ll just force everyone taking federal dollars to get on those standards so the federal assessments being rolled out will apply nationally. The factory model of education can continue but with total control from the top.

Educators and legislators, if you thought NCLB and AYP were bad, wait till this rolls out. You’ve got to get us off the federal welfare dime or what’s coming isn’t going to be good for anyone. Teachers are going to lose jobs in places they like, they’re going to lose freedom to teach what they deem necessary and be forced to teach to a national test, and children are going to lose any hope of having an education customized to their needs because the factory belt model of compulsory education is going to become more vise-like than ever.

What is being done? Heritage is pushing forward with an “A-PLUS” plan to bring accountability to parents and taxpayers while reducing the federal footprint, but I do not think this will happen in time to help our state. State lawmakers and educators need to work together to completely eliminate all federal funding and reject all mandates that come from Washington.

On this current education nightmare bill above, Washington always seems to have a way to get these things through, but thankfully the House is controlled by the Republicans so the Democrats are going to have a hard time getting this bill passed. Senator Rand Paul talk here about introducing 100 amendments to stop this bill in its tracks. I hope he’s successful.

Related post: http://www.utahsrepublic.org/dropping-the-common-core-state-standards/

Dropping the Common Core State Standards

Still think the Common Core Standards are just a state initiative? Ask yourself these questions and think again.

1. What do you call it when standards are adopted from a national body and a state isn’t allowed to modify anything they just adopted except to add up to 15%? De facto federal/national standards
2. What do you call it when national assessments funded by the federal government and led by a Marxist researcher will measure the effectiveness of common core standards? National assessments overseeing national standards
3. What do you call it when national tracking is done on both academic and non-academic factors to ensure that students are scoring well on these assessments? A massive violation of privacy and national assessments and standards
4. What do you call it when the federal government engages with textbook publishers to create curriculum based on common standards? A national curriculum and national standards
5. What do you call it when federal dollars for state education come from countries like China and states like California? Immoral because our grandchildren will pay for their parents education
6. What do you call it when the federal department of education rewrites the laws on the books to eliminate and redirect local and state control of education to the federal government? Tyranny and national control of education
7. What do you call it when state officials and agencies fail to connect the dots on these items? A tragic lack of foresight

The Governor, State Board of Education, State Office of Education, and all others who buy into the story that the Common Core Standards are just a collaboration of individual states are in for a shock when they find out they cannot escape this transition to tyranny because they didn’t have the foresight to get off the federal funds now while there might still be time.

If adopting the Common Core means (and it WILL since we take federal money) we have to take national assessments, national data tracking, national curriculum, teachers teaching to the test which obviously means their failure to follow the national curriculum will result in their loss of a job (so they will proceed to follow the indoctrinating curriculum), and national control, we should immediately move to drop the Common Core standards and look for creative alternatives to save the 9% funding we get from the federal level. No intrusion or authority like this is given in the U.S. Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land.

Further, no loss of freedom can be recovered without tremendous effort. Giving up that freedom for a pocketful of money is so shortsighted that anyone who votes for any measure that includes federal funding of education should be immediately campaigned against and removed from office. For example, someone running for school board who touts “conservative principles” yet tells the public they’ll bring in the federal dollars should never hold any office of public trust that has budgetary authority.

If you believe the day is coming when people cannot buy or sell except through the collective entity (Revelation 13:17), what do you think is coming for education? Do you think the education establishment will escape it? Not a chance. That’s where this scenario starts by indoctrinating people to accept collectivism.

I applaud the resolution against national standards which the National Federation of Republican Women recently passed. You can read it here:

http://educationviews.org/2011/10/11/resolution-against-national-standards-for-schools-a-warning-from-oklahoma/

Are you willing to finance your child’s education on the backs of your grandchildren? Shame on you. Anyone who argues in favor of federal funding of state education should not be involved in our education system. Demand your legislators end all federal funding of education in this state. There are plenty of creative solutions to financial challenges and it’s high time we started looking to implement some of them.

Related Post: http://www.utahsrepublic.org/jumping-off-the-federal-education-train/ (shows the Feds are forcing states to adopt Common Core or not receive a waiver on NCLB’s annual yearly progress requirements)

I received an interesting email today with a link to this document (PDF: Don Powers Assessment of Federal Education Law). Don Power’s is an attorney who was reviewing federal education laws. He starts off his report with this explanation:

“For this report we were asked to see if the federal government was conducting testing and analysis contrary to the requirements of federal law. We must report that under present legislation in the United States Code Annotated (USCA) the Department of Education (DOEd) can do what it wants relative to testing and analysis and the local schools have no control or input on what the DOEd wishes to accomplish, if the local school is receiving federal funds in any form. There is more explanation within the body of the report.”

What Don discovered was this:

“What we discovered is a transition to a tyrannical form of government. Sections of the USCA that supported local, states’ rights and local control of schools as well as sections that placed restrictions on the Federal DOEd were being repealed all together and in instances replaced by sections that grant more control to the federal level. We also checked other areas of the USCA and found this to be the rule, and not the exception. From the historical records, that we could check with our meager resources, it has apparently been going on since before the1960’s.”

Don lists several specific examples in his report. As I have already posted on this website, the federal government is moving toward the most intrusive data collection practices on our children that have ever been done. You can read it here and speculate as to how your child’s dental records being tracked will produce a student who is better at math.

Please read this post if you are unfamiliar with the problems of the Common Core State Standards.

Original link to Don’s report:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/67396352/Don-Powers-Assessment-of-Fed-Education-Law

Standards

At the Republican state convention a few months ago I had the chance to speak with Utah Governor Gary Herbert for a few minutes and so I brought up the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The governor assured me they weren’t a prelude to a national takeover of education (which by some measures we could conclude that already happened years ago). The governor said the CCSS was the product of states getting together and collaborating to improve the standards.  That is true in part. The states got together. However, some states had better standards than what was produced in the CCSS documents. Rather than 50 experiments in education, we will now have 1. Success and failure is now 100% for our country in either direction, rather than 2% per state. Will the CCSS work? Nobody knows. They’ve never been used. They weren’t even complete when they started being adopted by states. Assessments weren’t ready to look at, but “don’t worry, everything necessary for this system to work 100% is in process…”

When the evidence is examined as a whole, it is difficult to not see the CCSS as the prelude to a national melding of education into a giant pot.  It’s not like everything is isolated and we certainly can’t say that the standards are independent objects for the states to manipulate. If a state signs on, they can’t modify the standards except to add a little to them. So lets look at what else we know is happening that is pushing forward to compliment the CCSS.

Curriculum

Article: Common Core Writers Craft Curriculum Criteria

What? The people that wrote the standards are now telling curriculum designers how to design the curriculum? That sounds like a national curriculum in the works. But that’ll never happen so don’t worry about that.

Assessments

Article: State Consortium Scales Back Common-Test Design

So you have these “state” standards which are being pushed with the odd national anticipation that very soon all the states will adopt them (even if the standards are worse than their current successful standards such as in MA and CA). Shown on this SBAC timeline, that will be by late this year (2011). By 2013 they will be pilot testing the assessments, field testing in 2014, and 2015 will be when we have “final achievement standards.”  The SBAC is one of a couple of consortia that have received massive amounts of federal funding to develop a set of assessments that will match the CCSS. SBAC’s senior researcher is Linda Darling Hammond, proponent of social justice in the classroom, and constructivist extraordinaire. Anyone want to guess what these assessments will be asking and how they will influence the “final achievement standards?” Does anyone think the CCSS might change by 2015 based on these tests and developing “final” standards?

Tracking

Once you have the standards, curricula to teach them, and assessments to measure student progress, the next thing you’ll want to know is information about the students to see how they are progressing (and of course you’ll want to track the teachers so you know who the ones are that most successfully get students to answer the correct questions on the SBAC social justice tests).

http://www.utahsrepublic.org/education/common-core-database-intrusion/

Connections

If you didn’t read the post the other day on Marxism and CCSS, here’s the flowchart from page 20 of that pdf someone produced.  Everything fits nice and neat together. I haven’t looked into it myself, but from the title on this map, these relationships all seem to get identified in the Race to the Top grant.

Financial Cost

I have read estimates that in California alone, implementing these new standards will entail spending several hundred million dollars. Nearly every state was hoping to get Race to the Top funds but only a handful did. Not surprising, Utah got nothing and so implementation of these new standards will be a significant new expense for our state. It will involve teacher training in the new standards, new textbooks written to the standards, and additional costs for switching out assessments and such. Why on earth would we create massive new costs when we already have pretty good math standards and we have high unemployment and a financial disaster brewing in our country?

Local Control

Everyone’s favorite buzz-phrase but which only a few really cherish. The only local control that is going to exist after this will be for home schoolers and private schools. Accepting this package, and make no mistake it is a package, will terminate local control and allow for Educrats in Washington D.C. to determine what is taught, how it’s taught, what’s tested, and what’s tracked. If we’re lucky, they’ll share a little bit with us at the local level.

Science Standards

Here’s a great piece from Ze’ev Wurman on the newly proposed CC science standards. His conclusion as an engineer and educator who has served on the California Academic Content Standards Commission that reviewed the adoption of Common Core for California, is that these standards are going to develop students who appreciate science rather than actually learn science. You can read his article here entitled Education to Raise Technology Consumers instead of Technology Creators. These standards will only serve to dumb down our children and allow for further deteriorating our scientific prowess (if we can even call it that anymore).

Conclusion

There are many people who believe the CCSS are good standards. No doubt they may be better than what some states were using, but that’s no reason to kill innovation between the 50 states, nor to allow for all these separate components to join together. It’s out of our hands though. The only way to avoid this is to reject the CCSS and be a state that is free to innovate and educate as we see fit.

For more information about the CCSS, check out the Truth in American Education website.

When John Taylor Gatto was given the teacher of the year award in New York City, the gathering got more than they bargained for in his acceptance speech. He lambasted the public education system and took it to task for destroying education in this country. Gatto’s concluding paragraph here hits the nail on the head by bringing education back to where it should be…centered in the family.

http://www.naturalchild.org/guest/john_gatto.html (read the whole excellent speech here)

“Family is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents – and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 – we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. The curriculum of family is at the heart of any good life, we’ve gotten away from that curriculum, time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during school time confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds. That was my real purpose in sending the girl and her mother down the Jersey coast to meet the police chief. I have many ideas to make a family curriculum and my guess is that a lot of you will have many ideas, too, once you begin to think about it. Our greatest problem in getting the kind of grass-roots thinking going that could reform schooling is that we have large vested interests pre-emptying all the air time and profiting from schooling just exactly as it is despite rhetoric to the contrary. We have to demand that new voices and new ideas get a hearing, my ideas and yours. We’ve all had a bellyful of authorized voices mediated by television and the press – a decade long free-for-all debate is what is called for now, not any more “expert” opinions. Experts in education have never been right, their “solutions” are expensive, self-serving, and always involve further centralization. Enough. Time for a return to democracy, individuality, and family. I’ve said my piece. Thank you.”

Amen. Time to decentralize and bring local control and pro-family oriented education back in vogue.

Last month a friend of mine sent me a link to a document which I knew I had to read. The title of this document is ”Common Core State Standards and Race to the Top – An Introduction to Marxism 101.” The manuscript was prepared by Jenni White, Lynn Habluetzel and Jo Joyce, part of the Restore Oklahoma Public Education project (website).

With 179 footnotes in 19 pages of text, this is a document that needs to be read and then put into the hands of every school board member to help them understand that what they’re being told about CCSS not being part of any national agenda, is false. This paper does an excellent job of pulling everything together from a history of education as it used to be, to the corruption brought into the system by John Dewey and company.

After the paper concludes on page 19, several appendices follow comparing traditional and progressive education (including specific pages on differences in the approaches to math and English education). Specific contrasts are also made between Karl Marx and Thomas Jefferson, and John Dewey to Ben Franklin. There is also an amazing chart on page 20 of the document which shows the flow of money and cooperation between Race to the Top and a huge assortment of entities, many of which are mentioned in the document.

You can access the document at the link above, or get the pdf here. Please send a copy of this to your school board members.

Common-Core-State-Standards-and-Race-to-the-Top-An-Introduction-to-Marxism-101

A great new website has arrived that shows the interrelated nature of all the education reforms that have come out such as NCLB, RTTT, CCSS, and other wonderful acronyms you didn’t realize were ruining your child’s education. :) I strongly encourage you to spend a little time on this site and see how Bill Gates and Pearson publishing are gearing up to produce a national curriculum to accompany the CCSS which are essentially turning into national standards.

http://truthinamericaneducation.com/

Be sure to see how the Gates Foundation has *bribed* many organizations to buy into their reforms. On the list are Achieve and Fordham, 2 organizations I previously trusted to be objective but not any more.

http://truthinamericaneducation.com/?page_id=311

I also strongly encourage you to check out their “tool kit” with important links to resources on stopping CCSS. Please use your influence with legislators and school board members to help them understand why this is a bad idea. Some think that this is all being done in a small box. It’s not. It’s vast and interconnected from many different points. The CCSS is only one part of a plan to allow the feds to control education and lose what little local control we have.

http://truthinamericaneducation.com/action-center/tool-kit/

You can also read about Race to the Cradle here as the government gets involved in Pre-K funding.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/race-to-the-cradle/

Kristen Shumway contacted me with a great idea recently. She lives in Alpine School District but the idea is worth sharing for other parents to get organized similarly. There are so many issues related to curriculum choice at our schools that having a body of local parents involved in this way makes a lot of sense especially if other parents at the school know about the group and can share concerns and ideas. These groups could easily become the “go-to” group for curriculum and activity choices as they become the involved parents who are most concerned with their children’s educational material. The Investigations math failure (click for new article from MD) and similar constructivist programs which Alpine School District and others continue to use K-12 continue to be shown an utter failure around the country. ASD has no studies to support the use of these programs and ignores the studies showing vastly superior programs such as Singapore, Saxon, and a few others. Parents need to mobilize at the local level and get the information out to parents in their own schools. I’m not sure if Kristen realizes the scope of what she’s sort of offered to do, but I’m so glad parents like her are getting involved.

Kristen mentions below that she will hold a meeting in her home, but I’m hopeful she’s overwhelmed with people like YOU :) wanting to do this at their own school and she’ll need a bigger meeting location.

Here is her email and contact information:

I would like to begin forming parents’ groups that would be associated with each high school, and the elementary and junior high schools that feed into it.  For example, my kids go and will go to PGHS.  I would like to start a group that could discuss the district issues, national tests, etc. per high school and its feeder-schools.  (According to a friend of mine, school districts on the East Coast are usually set up this way.)

I am hoping that by creating parent groups per high school we could create nascient “school board training groups” where parents could get educated, practice their skills, and exercise their voices on behalf of the people they care about most–their own children. Over time, if this idea takes off, these groups could start pushing for change on local levels, be elected to boards, and hopefully unite, creating a force that could give parents more voice in the education of our children.  Ideally, we could push for decentralized, smaller school districts.

As I see it, there is little strength among parents because there is no gathering and training place.  If parents have a problem, they have to come up with their own network.  PTA’s are really just an extention of the teachers’ interests to a large extent.  But a PACE group (Parent Alliance for their Children’s Educations) would be a group where we could disperse information and discuss goals for our own schools–tapping some of the positive energy Charter schools enjoy.  Also, parents could address problems/concerns and then prepare their solutions to be presented as powerfully and unitedly as possible.

We need a positive focus on building and improving.  Obviously there is a lot to fight against, but people are more powerful when they are fighting for something. I think these groups would be amazing training for citizenship and political activity as well.

So please send me your ideas and comments.  I would like to include them in a meeting I will be organizing at my home. Let me know (by email or phone) if you would like to be involved and how.    Anyone who would like to come help with ideas for creating a structure, defining goals, etc., is welcome.  Afterwards, I will post the results, and we will go from there.  We will need individuals who are willing to spearhead things in their schools.  This is a start-up so don’t count yourself out.  Anyone with the desire to improve their school for their children can gain experience along the way, just like the rest of us.

Kristen Shumway 801-701-0641

Sheldon Shumway 801-556-3431

kristen dot shumway at gmail dot com