In a nutshell: Secretary Arne Duncan violated federal law seeking to punish state school disability programs, got caught big time, and a federal Dept. of Education official is here in Utah on a “routine” visit. Time for a protest.

What you are about to read should result in congressional hearings and Arne Duncan probably being fired as the US Secretary of Education.

Federal law sets forth certain things that can be done under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). No one may circumvent those laws. Only Congress can change laws, but because of the current Executive Branch’s agenda to bring states under federal control, grant-based regulations and mandates have increasingly been created by Secretary Duncan, in violation of the Constitution.

On June 24, 2014, Secretary Duncan circumvented congress and issued mandates for changes in the way state special education programs are evaluated. (http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/new-accountability-framework-raises-bar-state-special-education-programs)

“To improve the educational outcomes of America’s 6.5 million children and youth with disabilities, the U.S. Department of Education today announced a major shift in the way it oversees the effectiveness of states’ special education programs.”

He then went on to explain what changes he is mandating.

Eight U.S. senators prepared a letter explaining the violations of law involved in Duncan’s action and asked the Secretary a number of very pointed questions. Evidently, Senator Hatch from Utah walked that letter into a meeting, interrupting it, to deliver it to Secretary Duncan. The senators’ letter is embedded at the bottom of this article.

In essence, the mandate changes the way the school funding game is played by suddenly announcing that historical NAEP test score data will be used retroactively to evaluate federal funding on schools that have children with disabilities. As the senators’ letter points out this is a very clear violation of the law.

Duncan calls this new framework, “Results-Driven Accountability.” It’s simply unconstitutional and illegal. The press release states:

“Last year, when the Department considered only compliance data in making annual determinations, 41 states and territories met requirements. This year, however, when the Department includes data on how students are actually performing, only 18 states and territories meet requirements.”

Why are they so eager to tell states they aren’t meeting requirements? So they can enact more requirements. It’s the way things work for those in power. Tell schools they aren’t performing and then punish them with additional requirements.

Utah happens to be coming up short and is on the list of states that “need assistance.” The USDOE continues, “If a state needs assistance for two years in a row, IDEA requires the Department to take actions such as requiring the state to obtain technical assistance or identifying the state as a high-risk grant recipient.”

So Utah is at risk of losing federal funds due to the feds moving the goal post and mandating, against the rules of the game, that teams retroactively enact the new rules. Suddenly the score that was 14-0, is 0-0.

Now I’m no fan of federal funding in any respect and I’d love to see it abolished, but until we are able to accomplish that, this is an egregious violation of the law and should result in Duncan and maybe others being short-timers on the hill for their actions.

NAEP was supposed to be for a common set of data between the states and was mandated to never be used for high stakes testing determination.

So what kind of “technical assistance” does the USDOE have in mind?

“As part of the move to RDA, OSERS [Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services] will fund a new $50 million technical assistance center – the Center on Systemic Improvement – to help states leverage the $11.5 billion in federal special education funds which they currently receive to improve outcomes for students with disabilities. In addition, OSERS will be working with each state to support them in developing comprehensive plans designed to improve results for children with disabilities.”

Because so many states were suddenly deemed to be below threshold (without knowing that’s how they would be evaluated), we’re going to see a new federal “assistance” center because obviously the states aren’t capable of educating children with disabilities. We “need” that federal help…  (Oh, and Common Core isn’t being pushed by the feds either, of course.)

Interestingly, Gregory Corr, the Director of Monitoring and State Improvement Planning at OSEP (Office of Special Education Programs), is coming to Utah *right now* to do some type of investigation. This is beyond normal. Directors don’t go to states on “routine” visits.  I understand he will be at the State Office of Education on Thursday.

Please come to the protest on Thursday at 11:00 – 12:30 at Royal Wood Office Plaza, 230 West 200 South. The parking lot is shared with the US post office. Help tell the the feds to stop violating the law, stop violating Utah’s sovereignty, and stop messing with children with disabilities. It’s OUR education system. Lets give Greg a “warm” welcome. Bring your signs.

Secretary Arne Duncan Busted

Two stories I just received. What is it going to take for you to do more than sign a petition?

“My daughter, _______ who lives in ______, is on the Community Counsel for _____ High.  A few days ago in one of their meetings, the floor was opened for those on the council to express any concerns they have.  She brought up Common Core and some of the others indicated their concerns also, but a teacher that she knows personally, who was in attendance, said, “We are not allowed to mention Common Core.  It is now called Desk Standards–but it is really Common Core.”
Just thought that I’d pass that on.” -SS

“So I have to say that I’m pretty upset. I picked up my son from school today and asked how his day was. He told me he got earbuds today; when I asked him what for he said he was working on a tablet and needed them. He went on to tell me he was working on a program (don’t know what it’s called but he logged into Pearson.net) and it was a match game. So when he made a match, the tone was a binaural beat. If he didn’t get the match correctly it “screamed at him” another binaural beat that he described… ‘it went through my body and made me shake, I was unable to type because it was like an electricity shock.’ I told the school that I did not want him using any portable device provided by the school. I was not informed about this, of course. Has anyone had their children mention something like this? I asked him if there are any of his classmates who do not participate but they all do. The teacher instructed the class that they cannot sit out on this exercise. – LP

When an untested math standards and curriculum are forced on children nationwide and their emotional, psychological, and intellectual abilities are not considered, you have a one-size-fits-all recipe for disaster and it boils down to institutional child abuse. What are you doing to help good candidates get elected this November?

Watch this second grader’s “love” of math after being in Common Core.
http://truthinamericaneducation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/MOV956753.mp4

Jon Fidler wrote a great article here which contains this first bit from Leslie Castle. Please read the whole article.

http://www.locallydirectededucation.com/2014/common-core-the-purpose-exposed/

After a parent expressed concern about an indoctrinating assignment to state school board member Leslie Castle, Leslie responded:

“It is my opinion that public school is a place for children to be exposed to, not indoctrinated by, many ideas and opinions that are found in the American landscape. I can’t imagine students leaving the public school system having only been exposed to the opinions and experiences that are found around their own dinner table. That would be true indoctrination and a travesty of true education.

To hide from your child the fact that many American’s do not share your view of gun rights would be indoctrination and social engineering, in my opinion. To explain to your child that all Americans have the right to have different opinions from their parents’ and from their own is a first step in the valuable lessons of social justice and self-actualization.”

Leslie, you would make the socialist/humanist education “expert” John Goodlad proud. Goodlad wrote, “A century has passed since the prescient educational historian Ellwood Cubberley wrote the epigraph with which this writing began: “Each year the child is coming to belong more to the State and less and less to the parent.”

“My only disagreement with his observation pertains to the implication of our owning children. We parents do not own our children; we just rent them for a while. Given the extent to which what he was troubled about has expanded, however, his reference to state ownership may well be appropriate.”

(2010, Washington Post, Goodlad on school reform: Are we ignoring lessons of last 50 years?)

Thank you Leslie for yet another reason we desperately need partisan elections…

This week I received two comments on the Common Core math standards which are worth reading and understanding. This first is from Ze’ev Wurman, a former member of California’s Academic Content Standards Committee, and a U.S. Dept. of Education official under George W. Bush. Someone asked Ze’ev about Euclidean geometry in Common Core’s standards. This is his response:

“Common Core did not throw out Euclidean Geometry. Common Core replaced the way the fundamental theorems of Euclidean Geometry (relating to triangle congruence such as ASA, SAS, SSS) are supposed to be proven in the classroom to an experimental method with a track record of failure. Consequently, proving Euclidean Geometry theorems is bound to be no more than arm waiving under Common Core, and the beautiful edifice of logical air-tight deductive geometrical reasoning is bound to be lost. To add insult to injury, Common Core only lightly touches on traditional body of theorems relating to triangles and circles, making it’s geometry a shallow course.

In Common Core’s defense one could argue that many Geometry courses already today give a short shrift to logical proofs and to exploring geometrical relationships of triangles and circles. This is true for some courses, yet not for all of them. What Common Core does is that it codifies such shallow treatment of geometry to be the normative one, forcing even serious courses to be dumbed down to mediocre and shallow levels.”

This next comment is from Dr. Wayne Bishop, mathematician at California State University. Long time opponent of fuzzy math, he helped bring down the awful standards California adopted in the 90’s that devastated their state, and brought about their excellent 1999-2000 standards and framework which were among the best in the nation prior to their downgrading them for Common Core. This letter was in response to one of the questions on Governor Herbert’s recent survey. I don’t know which question this was a response to. Emphasis mine.

Although the words claim otherwise, the effect is highly pedagogical in support of a philosophy called “constructivism” that has a long history of repeated failure. I was very active in replacing California’s model of such in the 1990s with superb standards, the California Mathematics Content Standards with approved curricula and consistent assessments. Regrettably, California made the same mistake as Utah to “buy into” the misguided Common Core State Standards mirrored in the Utah ones. The words that the CCSS-M are tied to the best international standards are simply meaningless. FAR better would be to abandon the Utah form of the CCSS-M and replace the document with the far clearer and appropriate former California Mathematics Content Standards.

One of the problems is a deliberate, but disguised, avoidance of competence with arithmetic in the early grades. They are filled with nice-sounding words that are essentially content-free; pedagogy trumps specified/testable competency that is so critically important through ordinary fractions, percent, and ratio and proportion word problems. The lack of confirmation of arithmetic competence is dismissed by professional math education “experts” by ubiquitous, and inappropriate, access to calculators. By contrast, Japanese classrooms look very different:

http://www.linfield.edu/linfield-news/students-and-prof-examine-why-japan-outsmarts-u-s-in-math-scores/

“Students sit in rows and are expected to listen quietly. Teachers rely on direct instruction rather than investigative mathematics, but although they ask few questions, the questions they do ask are useful in guiding student understanding.”

The biggest surprise was a shocking lack of technology in Japanese classrooms. “Not a single student pulled out a calculator during class,” Drickey said. There were no overhead projectors, televisions, computers or laptops.

“But lack of reliance on technology may lead to higher scores for Japanese students,” she said. “The ability to think mathematically, without the aid of an outside source, could help students process mathematical problems more accurately and efficiently.”

As an experienced professor of mathematics who has taught our course designed to prepare prospective high school geometry teachers (Math 430 Modern Geometry), I am especially appalled the geometry standards that, again, echo the CCSS-M. To actually prove congruence (much less similarity) using transformations instead of the traditional sophomore Euclidean geometry approach, is something that no high school student is capable of doing without exceptional leadership, in part, because it is in none of the available books. Instead of making the subject harder (as an honest treatment would), the effect is the removal of proof from the high school mathematics curriculum. The very words in the CCSS-M and Utah Standards pass traditional sophomore proof on to college geometry which denies high school students the greatest gift of the ancient Greeks to modern human thought, semi-formal deductive logic. Sin has many forms but one of its more insidious ones is failing to educate students to the best of our ability under the misguided notion that if it’s especially challenging for some students, water it down so that everybody can “succeed”.

Professor of Mathematics
California State University, LA

Click here to listen to Dr. Jim Milgram warn how Common Core will devastate America’s technical prowess.

https://soundcloud.com/alice-linahan/hoosier-kids-deserve-better-gov-mike-pence-protest-dr-jim-milgram