Are there really Common Core librarian standards?

Yup. Because if there’s one thing you want is a set of standards for librarians in how they deal with patrons! :) Sent in today by alert citizens, check this out.

Tiffany Hall at the USOE sent out this letter:

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Dear parents:

School librarians are an important part of a school community. They are licensed teachers who work with students to promote research and inquiry skills, media literacy, and reading engagement. Over the years, their responsibilities have evolved as resources and techniques have changed. These changes are reflected in the 2014 revision of the Utah Standards for Library Media.

Over the last year, these Standards have been revised by a committee of library media experts from Utah schools, communities, and universities. On Friday, May 9, the Utah State School Board reviewed and discussed the Utah Standards for Library Media (grades 6-12). They voted to allow the Standards to move forward to public comment. On Monday, May 19, the Standards were posted on the USOE website for all interested members of the public to comment after reading them.

Review, insight, and comments from all stakeholders in Utah—teacher librarians, teachers, administrators, and parents—are a critical part of this public comment session! Please read them and submit your feedback before August 17, 2014.

After the public comment session, all comments will be reviewed and incorporated as appropriate into the Standards. The final document will be presented to the Board for their review.

Click here to go to the revised Standards and the link to the public comment form.

Thank you!

Tiffany Hall

K-12 Literacy Coordinator/Library Media

Utah State Office of Education

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The parent who sent me this commented with this:

Please take a quick look at the new, USOE-approved Utah Standards for Library Media, and then comment on the USOE Web site before Aug 17, 2014. Here is one of the standards you might find interesting:

1.2.4. Maintain a critical stance by questioning the validity and accuracy of all information. [emphasis added]

To me, this exemplifies how Progressive education teaches children to doubt the existence of truth (moral relativism), while Classical education teaches children to confidently and logically pursue truth.

Always be polite when you leave comments. :)

Another parent pointed out that Gate’s funded Achieve published their CC implementation guide for librarians in Oct. 2013 and now we see Utah creating Common Core librarian standards. Utah certainly doesn’t act like its in the driver’s seat with anything related to Common Core. If “they” build it, Utah will follow. http://www.achieve.org/files/CCSSLibrariansBrief-FINAL.pdf

Now let me take this path on moral relativism on questioning the validity of ALL information. This is what educators call “critical thinking skills” and national educators define it as critically thinking about everything you’ve been taught…at home.

“…educators must resist the quest for certainty. If there were certainty there would be no scientific advancement. So it is with morals and patriotism.”
– John Goodlad / Education for Everyone: Agenda for Education in a Democracy, Woods Learning Center, pg. 6

[schools] should liberate students from the ways of thinking imposed by religions and other traditions of thought.”
-John Goodlad, “Education and Community,” in Democracy, Education, and the Schools, Roger Stone, pg. 92.

“…a student attains ‘higher order thinking’ when he no longer believes in right or wrong. A large part of what we call good teaching is a teacher´s ability to obtain affective objectives by challenging the student’s fixed beliefs. …a large part of what we call teaching is that the teacher should be able to use education to reorganize a child’s thoughts, attitudes, and feelings.”
-Benjamin Bloom, psychologist and educational theorist, “Major Categories in the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives,” pg. 185

Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished …
-Bertrand Russell, quoting Gottlieb Fichte the head of psychology that influenced Hegel and others.

Have they been successful in the public education system? Absolutely.

Research shows that 70% of children stop attending their church within 2 years of graduating from high school.

The Pew Institute also shows Millennials as turning away from their family’s faith.

We are in a culture war. Common Core is just a powerful piece on the chess board, but it’s not about Common Core. We have to go back to the root of the evil tree to see the anti-God, socialistic thinking that went into this plan to capture children. John Dewey is one of the heads of the hydra who is admired by educators. He said this:

“I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends. I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.”
-John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed, January 1897

Common Core isn’t the ultimate problem. It’s the system’s design that is at the root of the problem. If you want to take down the system, you have to understand true principles of education. I strongly encourage you to go to www.agencybasededucation.org, read the 5 principles and mission statement on the home page, get on the mailing list, and like the organization on Facebook. Each year there is a conference held in November. This year, one of the speakers will be Neil Flinders, author of “Teach the Children: an Agency Approach to Education.” Neil inspired me to form this organization and you won’t want to miss this event as he is an authority in this very area and will be presenting on educational philosophy.

8 thoughts on “Are there really Common Core librarian standards?”

  1. Oak, you question the validity and the accuracy of information. This website is a result of that questioning. Would that make you a moral relativist? I’m not sure what you want. Do you want kids to believe everything they read on the internet or in a book or watch on TV? I just don’t get what you want? Perhaps you could re-write that standard for me, so I’ll understand.

    1. Royal, it’s their agenda. The point is, those behind Common Core and many of the education reform efforts are moral relativists that want children to question everything their parents or religion have told them. That’s the meaning behind “critical thinking” skills is to teach children to think critically about the things they’ve been taught by home and church. When you read what the reformers have written, they have a clear agenda but couch it in niceties that parents accept unless they take the time to really dig in and find out what’s behind the curtain.

  2. Thanks for taking the time to communicate with me. It is very helpful.

    So if I understand you correctly, students should not be taught critical thinking skills (questioning skills) in school because they will take that skill set home and question their parents decision-making and their own religious beliefs instilled into them by their parents?

    Now tell me if I’m wrong here, but gathered from what I’ve read in the past on your site and others, this is especially important in Utah and Utah County because of the BYU-Alpine, Nebo, Provo, and Jordan partnership (CITES) where the BYU School of Educations’ hero, John Goodlad and his moral relativist philosophies were brainwashed into prospective teachers’ minds. These teachers are subsequently hired around Utah and Utah County. Through their lesson planning and constructivist pedagogy, they are surreptitiously having students question their religious beliefs and questioning their bedtimes while wading through primary source evidence on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Even worse, through moral relativism and a constructivist style of teaching, students are forming their own opinions about the primary and secondary source record rather than simply embracing acceptable viewpoints. Is this correct?

    I know this is a lot, but I want to understand and understand correctly.

    1. Aside from the obvious mocking, you’re close. It’s totally appropriate for children to learn critical thinking skills, just not Goodlad’s version of them. Critical thinking skills are obviously beneficial through all of life. The way a person *should* acquire critical thinking skills is by being directed to source documents to determine truth, not the moral relativism Goodlad, Dewey, & co. try to foist on children. The end result is that across America, a huge percentage of children that graduate from high school are leaving their churches. This is not a coincidence. It didn’t happen 50 or 100 years ago. It’s accelerated since Dewey/Goodlad philosophy took root in education systems. Check out Charlotte Iserbyt’s book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America where she calls Goodlad “America’s premier change agent.” It’s free to download at http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com

      1. Okay, so riddle me this? Let’s say that Goodlad, Dewey, Marx, or Satan himself created that contentious Librarian’s standard, wouldn’t it boomerang on them? I mean, if you are teaching kids to question the validity of “all” sources and information, wouldn’t they also question these socialists who are trying to take over Utah County and America? It just seems strange they would write such a standard if they wanted to hide their agenda. The way the standard is written, teachers would have to overtly teach the students to question their religion (and politics since they are intertwined in Utah and other environs). The standard says nothing about teaching kids to question their parents or their own religious convictions. The teachers I’ve talked to have been trained to use those critical thinking standards in the context of their subject areas and to use primary and secondary sources for critical analysis as you contend. I just don’t see teachers doing anything different here. This is Utah County, and the bulk of teachers are extremely conservative in their political views, and most are strong LDS people.

        I’ve followed your writings and yes, I’ve already listened to good, elderly, Charlotte, about these education conspiracies over the years. For it’s day, it would be believable. What I’m seeing in real life in 2014 is much different. I’m seeing a group of corporations trying to take control of the schools and what is taught in the schools without public oversight. For instance, I’m aware of several schools in California that were labeled failing under NCLB and then turned over to Pearson. Pearson then told all teachers that they cannot bring in outside materials at all and must teach exclusively from Pearson textbooks which were purchased with taxpayer money for all students. (No conflict of interest there). Well, that also means every kid gets a nice heavy dose of the Common Core since Pearson advocates for the Common Core. There is no public oversight because there is not school board in charge of a corporate run school. A whole bunch of companies and people advocate for the Common Core. Bill Gates and Exxon/Mobil come to mind first. Remember all those Exxon/Mobil commercials on TV pushing the Common Core? Could you please link Goodlad, Dewey, Marx, etc to these corporations that are pushing hard for the Common Core. It just seems strange that a private corporation would advocate the agenda of a communist cabal who would simply nationalize these corporations. Am I missing something? I just don’t think there is a communist plot, but I do believe there is a corporate plot to take over our schools and tap into state coffers. That is much more apparent and obvious than the old 1950’s and 1960’s John Birch stuff being recycled.

        1. Well, I happen to know of 2 teachers in ASD middle schools who have been subtle in their history teaching about communism such that children of strong conservative families came home one day and said, “communism isn’t all that bad.” The parents were blown away. We like to believe everyone around us thinks like us, but it simply isn’t true, and it’s pretty easy for a charismatic teacher to slant something so that when a child gets one piece of truth and one falsehood and the teacher doesn’t point out the difference or leaves out key facts that would expose this, it’s going to taint the child’s views. I also know of one other teacher in ASD who was sharing anti-LDS viewpoints with his class “just to get them to think.” That conservative bastion of BYU partnered with Goodlad for over 25 years and used him as their education consultant.

          A number of people would probably be surprised to learn that BYU’s education department is involved with NAME, a revolutionary Marxist organization (http://www.utahsrepublic.org/byu-education-department-member-of-revolutionary-name-organization/). Another connection of BYU’s ed department is to NRMERA, another far leftist organization tied to Bill Ayers (http://www.utahsrepublic.org/byu-ed-dept-and-nrmera/). Then there’s another prof in the BYU ed department that is their “Jungian scholar,” a Marxist philosophy (http://www.utahsrepublic.org/byu-ed-departments-jungian-scholar/).
          Now when BYU holds an education conference for its 5 public school partnership districts (which Goodlad helped set up in 1983), what do you suppose they talk about? BYU has been the host university for Goodlad’s NNER organization’s annual conference and they used to have presenters alongside ASD administrators at every conference till a couple years ago when we helped force them out of Goodlad’s organization. Talks at these conferences ranged from social justice, to implementing the gay agenda in the classroom. BYU’s ed department is not conservative, and they push Goodlad into all these districts. ASD is totally sold on Goodlad. They’ve passed out his books for years. One school in Orem (I think it was Mountain View) gave copies of one of Goodlad’s books to all the legislators and officials in Orem. Whose philosophies and techniques are being pushed into classrooms? All under the guise of “well BYU’s people said to use this and do it this way, so constructivism must be right.”

          I totally oppose the corporatism driving education and that’s exactly what Common Core is with Gates financing it and buying into Pearson and other publishers and they designed CC and came out with the first materials and got states to adopt fast which crushed smaller publishers. I oppose privatizing schools. I even oppose charter schools on a philosophical level because they falsely compete against private schools, though one of my children is going to attend a charter school this year because they use Saxon math.
          If you want to link Goodlad and Gates, use Google. I bet there are connections easy enough to find, but it’s not important. They both have dangerous agendas. In 2004 Gates signed a contract with UNESCO to create a global education system. Goodlad is a total globalist. They both want a one-world government in my opinion.
          This is an awesome chart if you haven’t seen it before, which shows a ton of connections around the 4 reform areas of Common Core. These relationships were all pretty much established before CC was adopted so that the reforms could be put in motion quickly.
          https://www.utahnsagainstcommoncore.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/RTTT_Grant_Connections.jpg

  3. Sounds like quite a tangled web of competing interests in education. It looks like we have Marxists on one side and Corporatists (Fascist ideology) on the other. These links will make for some interesting reading today.

    I remember that story about “Communism isn’t all that bad.” I thought it was just one teacher. There was another one that said that too? Were they connected in some way? (attend BYU, go to a Goodlad workshop, etc).

    1. Yep, two teachers. Don’t know connections aside from they are both in ASD teaching at different Jr. Highs.

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