Who is Sir Michael Barber and why do you need to know this person? He’s the new Marc Tucker with a clear global agenda. At last month’s British Education Summit he gave a speech entitled, “Whole System Revolution: The Education Challenge For the Next Decade.” He’s all about global citizens, sustainability, and human capital. Barber is the Chief Education Advisor to Pearson. Pearson was involved with Common Core from the very beginning and is one of the largest providers (if not #1) of curriculum for schools.
Here are two articles to get better acquainted with Sir Michael Barber.
“If you want irreversible reforms, work on the culture and the minds of teachers and parents,” Barber says. He says this is important; otherwise, parents or traditionalists might repeal what’s been done because of their “wish for the past.” He defines “sustainable reform” as “irreversible reform” and aims to “make it so it can never go back to how it was before.”
God’s plan of happiness for mankind is centered in the family. The family is the place where moral values are passed from parent to child and where the true education of children takes place. There is no substitute for a loving home. It is among the highest crimes to work toward or allow the destruction of the relationship between parent and child.
There is no question that we live in times in which the family is under assault. There is a definite agenda to get children away from their families at younger ages and for more time in the day so that the influence of a mother and father is diminished in the lives of their children.
Prominent educators and politicians illustrate this disdain for families in this way:
“Most youth still hold the same values of their parents…ifwe do not alter this pattern, if we don’t resocialize, our system will decay.” -John Goodlad (1)
“[schools] should liberate students from the ways of thinking imposed by religions and other traditions of thought.” -John Goodlad (2)
“Public education has served as a check on the power of parents, and this is another powerful reason for maintaining it.” – John Goodlad (3)
“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well – by creating the international child of the future.” -Dr. Chester M. Pierce, Harvard Professor of Education and Psychiatry (4)
Age 5 is too late according to Dr. Pierce. The goal is to separate children from parents as early as possible so the parents are no longer the primary driver of values for a child. If children can bond with teachers and peers at early ages, there is less chance they will ever acquire their parents’ values, especially since Judeo-Christian values and beliefs can’t be raised in Government funded schools.
Linda Darling-Hammond, author of Teaching for Social Justice in the Classroom, and someone recommended by Bill Ayers to President Obama for his Secretary of Education post, wrote:
“If the promise of the Obama education agenda is realized, in 2016 we could see a nation in which all children have access to the health care, housing, and high-quality preschool experience.“
Preschool gets as much prominence as socialized medicine and housing? That’s pretty telling of these people’s priorities. Get children early.
Could it be because there is another golden carrot being dangled in front of us in the Federal Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge grant? States that “are leading the way with ambitious yet achievable plans for implementing coherent, compelling, and comprehensive early learning education reform” appear to have a shot at yet more federal funding.
Could it be because the Federal Secretary of Education indicated there was a preference for obtaining Race to the Top (RTTT) funds for those states that implement early education initiatives?
Notice how the feds use us over and over again?
In Utah’s RTTT application we committed to this expansion of early learning.
Project Five: Improving Early Learning Outcomes (supports Invitational Priority 3: Innovations for Improving Early Learning Outcomes)
Utah will:
…
· Maintain and expand full-day kindergarten to eligible students and use data to identify and replicate high-performing projects and practices; and
· Support early intervention programs for high-need Pre-Kindergarten (Pre-K) children by reviewing data and reports from the Utah Preparing Students Today for a Rewarding Tomorrow (UPSTART), Early Learning Initiative (a Waterford Institute Project for in-home, computer-based preparation for school success), CTE sponsored preschools, and other state preschool programs.
Rationale: The foundation for success in reading and mathematics begins before kindergarten. This is especially true for economically disadvantaged students, English language learners, and students with disabilities. We have learned from our optional extended-day kindergarten initiative, that early intervention at the preschool level is essential to narrowing achievement gaps.
“Early learning accountability – holds programs geared towards ensuring that students enter kindergarten ready to learn accountable for results.” …
“Expand the scope of diagnostic reviews to encompass the examination of early learning opportunities and other community-based supports for student achievement and attainment. These efforts could encompass gathering information on the proportion of young children who are participating in high quality early childhood programs, the prevalence of family engagement and education programs for parents of young children, and the extent to which elementary schools have built partnerships with early learning and child care programs to align standards, curricula, assessment and professional development efforts from early childhood through grade 3.”…
“Consider more far-reaching and fundamental efforts to enhance and mobilize communities, families, early education programs and other partners to complement the influence of school-based improvement initiatives. As stated earlier in this Roadmap, the Taskforce believes in the concept of shared accountability. While the focus of this Roadmap is on the school, district, and state role in improving student achievement, research tells us that families, communities, and other programs can have a large impact on student achievement. States may want to consider involving these entities as wrap-around supports for students, schools, and districts.”
Are you kidding me? Early childhood standards, curricula, assessment, and professional development???
The next-generation state accountability system mentioned above was implemented by Utah earlier this year. The state issued a press release that they had implemented a P-20W longitudinal database tracking system for our children? The “P” is for preschool, and the “W” is for workforce. This is the same old school-to-work tracking concept that has been around for years and is one of the reasons Common Core moves a significant emphasis from literature to informational texts to better prepare workers instead of independent thinkers. We’ve been had. Common Core was just the vehicle to get states on a massive school-to-work database and get state funded preschool started.
Another name for this is Outcome Based Education. It’s been actively implemented before in Nazi Germany for training children from very young ages to be independent of parents, and to be trained for the workforce. The goal is to allow the state central planners to indoctrinate youth as social servants with loyalty to country, instead of individuals who have the freedom to live as they choose and share in their parent’s Judeo-Christian values. They will serve the greater good by becoming what they are told they are fitted to be.
One example of this separation between parent and child is the constructivist approach to textbooks. In many cases there are no textbooks that a child can take home and let the parent help explain concepts that a child might not understand. In cases where there are textbooks, many times they do not have math problem examples or instruction in the books. The Utah State Office of Education (which is full of constructivists) produced such a textbook, and the Granite and Jordan School Districts did for students as well. These constructivist textbooks break down family relationships. They take away the ability of a parent to provide assistance with their child’s homework by refreshing their memory on how to do those problems. It sets up teachers as the people who are smarter than parents because they know how to do the problems, so parents lose credibility in the eyes of their children.
Why is Utah following this path? State funded preschool is a good intention found on the road to hell. It will start with those who are “at-risk” and some study will say it helped those children. Then studies will be promoted that say it was a success with those children and it will be even more successful if all kids are given the choice. Then it will be so successful that all children just need this preschool by state mandate. Think it won’t happen? Consider Sweden.
Sweden has gone down the slippery slope and now demands that parents turn over their children as young as 1 year old to state daycare, and forces private schools to teach the state curriculum as you can see in this video.
Here are some resources that Dr. Himmelstrand references:
1) Sweden implemented government funded day care and encouraged women to leave the home to work. 30 years later they have psychological issues in youth, decreased education results, discipline problems, high rates of sick leave especially among women, deteriorating parental abilities, and more. (slides or full paper)
“We find that prekindergarten increases reading and mathematics skills at school entry, but also increases behavioral problems and reduces self-control. Furthermore, the effects of prekindergarten on skills largely dissipate by the spring of first grade, although the behavioral effects do not.”
Finally, we uncover striking evidence that children are worse off in a variety of behavioral and health dimensions, ranging from aggression to motor-social skills to illness. Our analysis also suggests that the new childcare program led to more hostile, less consistent parenting, worse parental health, and lower-quality parental relationships.
For Dr. Neufeld, the capacity for healthy relationships is meant to unfold in the first six years of life. “It’s a very basic agenda,” he says. “By the fifth year of life if everything is continuous and safe then emotional intimacy begins. A child gives his heart to whomever he is attached to and that is an incredibly important part….The first issue is always to establish strong, deep emotional connections with those who are raising you. And that should be our emphasis in society. If we did this, we would send our children to school late, not early.”
Other research concurs. In the books “Better Late Than Early” and “School Can Wait” by Raymond & Dorothy Moore, they show research illustrating significant problems with early education. The Moore’s research was highly endorsed as critical to healthy childhood development, and their evidence actually shows that children are better off emotionally and learn better when they are a little more mature and more fully bonded with parents.
A couple years ago I received an email from a teacher in Utah county who was very familiar with a pre-school pilot program being run in one of the school districts. Young children were being put on a bus in the dark hours of the morning and sent off to school. There wasn’t much learning going on because the children were so homesick the teachers spent a lot of time nurturing instead of teaching. They were supplanting the role of the parents.
Here’s a proposal. Utah has a funding issue. We say we want off the federal funds and strings. According to the USOE, about 12% of our education funding comes from the federal government. What if we dropped pre-school, kindergarten and first grade and start children at an older age as they do in Finland (which isn’t hurting for educational success). Removing these (and maybe even 2nd grade or cutting it to half a day for just basics) should knock out a significant portion (if not all) of the 12% of our state education budget that comes from the federal government and allow us to exit the federal string of bad ideas like NCLB and Common Core. Until children enter school, strongly encourage parents to read to their children and teach them basic things at home. A family focused on the education of their children will do more to emotionally and mentally prepare their children to learn at school than they will ever get in the first couple years of a public school. It’s not hard to learn what’s missed in early grades when a student is better prepared to learn.
In 1995, the LDS church issued an official document entitled the Proclamation on the Family. Although it’s never been canonized, we consider this document to have the weight of scripture as it came under the signatures of our church leadership (consisting of what we call the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles). This document concludes:
“We call upon responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society.”
Government sponsored preschool is just the next excuse for government to remove the influence of parents from their children at earlier ages before a child imprints the Judeo-Christian values of their parents. Lets not let this happen in Utah. We can’t afford adding another grade level to education, and we really can’t afford the further erosion of the family. I pray that responsible citizens and officers of government will find ways to protect and preserve the family as the fundamental unit of society, not secondary to compulsory education which is the largest social engineering experiment propagated on the family.
————-
Footnotes
(1) Education Innovation, Issue 9, “Report of Task Force C: Strategies for Change,” Schooling for the Future, a report to the President’s Commission on Schools Finance, Issue #9, 1971.
(2) “Education and Community,” in Democracy,Education, and the Schools, Roger Stone, pg. 92.
(3) Developing Democratic Character in the Young, pg. 165
(4) Address to the Childhood International Education Seminar, 1973
The letter below was sent in by a parent in Park City. The High School has apparently agreed to participate in a study where students will give DNA samples to a lab as an outbreak drill to test new lab equipment. The purpose is that in the future, they may want to determine how new H1N1 type diseases are spreading.
The letter says this is going to be an anonymous collection, but I believe this is inappropriate for a school to do without written consent from parents. In the letter below, it ends:
“If you do not contact us in one of the ways listed above, you are giving your consent to participate.”
So if an outbreak, or scare of one, happens in the future, will a lab be able to use that as an excuse to sweep in and take DNA samples of students, perhaps storing individually identifying data on them, without getting parental consent because it’s a crisis? Don’t think that can’t happen. People give up personal information all the time when there is a crisis without even thinking twice about it.
State Code specifies certain things about schools administering surveys to students and requiring opt-in forms and other stipulations.
53A-13-302.Activities prohibited without prior written consent — Validity of consent — Qualifications — Training on implementation. (1) Policies adopted by a school district under Section 53A-13-301 shall include prohibitions on the administration to a student of any psychological or psychiatric examination, test, or treatment, or any survey, analysis, or evaluation without the prior written consent of the student’s parent or legal guardian, in which the purpose or evident intended effect is to cause the student to reveal information, whether the information is personally identifiable or not, concerning the student’s or any family member’s:
Not listed in the block below this paragraph is DNA and yet it states written consent is required in collecting data in tests whether the information is personally identifiable or not. Perhaps legislators need to revisit this section of code, but it seems like the proper thing for Park City schools to do in any type of study they want students to participate in would be to get opt-in forms signed by parents, and not make them opt-out.
Parents in the school district there should ask the district for their FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) policy and clarification on the protections afforded student information.
WILLIAMS: Governor, what do you make of ‘Common Core’?
ROMNEY: You know, I think it’s fine for people to lay out what they think core subjects might be and to suggest a pedagogy and being able to provide that learning to our kids. I don’t subscribe to the idea of the federal government trying to push a common core on various states.
It’s one thing to put it out as a model and let people adopt it as they will, but to financially reward states based upon accepting the federal government’s idea of a curriculum, I think, is a mistake. And the reason I say that is that there may be a time when the government has an agenda that it wants to promote.
And I’m not wild about the federal government having some kind of agenda that it then compensates states to teach their kids. I’d rather let education and what is taught state by state be determined state by state, not by the federal government.
The American Principles Project released this explaining exactly how the 2009 stimulus bill was a takeover of education when used as a weapon by the Obama administration.
Romney Takes Stand against National Curriculum Standards
Supports Local Control of Curricula at Education Nation Summit
Washington, DC – Today, American Principles in Action (APIA) praised Governor Romney’s stated opposition to a national curriculum, commonly known as the Common Core, choosing instead to let states and communities decide public school curricula.
“We applaud Governor Romney’s bold support for states and local communities to decide what’s best for their children, restoring power over education from the hands of the federal government to where it belongs,” said APIA’s Emmett McGroarty. “He is right to warn that the national authorities may have an agenda and should be prevented from pushing it on the states. Unfortunately, just as with Medicare reform, the federal government has resorted to coercing now more than 40 states into adopting the Common Core.
“Congress intended the 2009 Stimulus Bill as a life-line for the states, but President Obama turned it into a weapon through his Race to the Top program. In order to compete for Race to the Top money, states had to quickly sign onto the Common Core and related assessments without having a chance to meaningfully review the Standards and before the assessments were even developed.
“States competed in Race to the Top by demonstrating their commitment to President Obama’s education policy, in effect surrendering to an education monopoly. Their citizens were cut out of the process.
“President Obama has continued to coerce the states by requiring them to sign onto his education policies in order to get relief from No Child Left Behind.
“We urge both candidates to commit themselves to ending the federal government’s political coercion of the states and their citizens, and to ending the Race to the Top program.”
American Principles in Action is a 501 c (4) political advocacy group affiliated with American Principles Project, a 501 c (3) policy organization committed to rededicating the United States to its founding principles.
The Washington Post just started a series of articles on President Obama’s achievements in office and this one deals with education. Here are some clips and comments.
In 31 / 2 years in office, President Obama has set in motion a broad overhaul of public education from kindergarten through high school, largely bypassing Congress and inducing states to adopt landmark changes that none of his predecessors attempted.
Yep, and bypassing states to offer school districts money directly so they could be tied to federal strings.
He awarded billions of dollars in stimulus funding to states that agreed to promote charter schools, use student test scores to evaluate teachers and embrace other administration-backed policies. And he has effectively rewritten No Child Left Behind, the federal law passed by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush, by excusing states from its requirements if they adopt his measures.
Yep, adopt “his measures” and get out of NCLB. His measures = adopt Common Core.
Under Obama’s framework, teachers with weak ratings tied to student achievement could lose their jobs, while high ratings could mean bigger paychecks.
Obama was able to propel change two ways. With states clamoring for relief from No Child Left Behind, and Congress stalled five years over reauthorizing it, the president forged ahead with his agenda rather than waiting for Congress to act.
A.K.A. violating the supreme law of the land and getting away with it.
He used his authority to issue waivers from No Child Left Behind to 33 states.
Where exactly did he get that authority again? Last I checked (and it was fairly recently) the president didn’t have a lot of authority, and education wasn’t on the short list of things he was empowered to control.
The administration also leveraged $4.3 billion in stimulus money that Congress approved for education, creating a series of competitive grants known as Race to the Top, pumping to a new level this type of award. In the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, federal officials dangled the stimulus money to persuade struggling states to make big policy shifts.
Yea, persuade states like MA who were doing great to drop their standards.
“They’ve pioneered it,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative research group. “Making states compete for a limited pot of money and awarding it to the most serious state is pretty unusual.”
Most serious? MA got turned down for RTTT money in round 1 and only changed their application to show they would adopt Common Core’s lower standards and suddenly they got federal funds in round 2.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan likes to point out that Race to the Top funding represents less than 1 percent of the $500 billion spent in this country annually for elementary and high school education, but that it has had an outsized impact.
That’s the power of money and federal strings. Give a little, and own it.
With 33 states excused from No Child Left Behind and six other waivers pending, more than half the country is now adhering to the administration’s educational policies, rather than those formed by Congress.
Doesn’t this concern anyone?
While Republicans on Capitol Hill endorse much of the Obama education agenda, they say Duncan has overstepped his authority.
“We shouldn’t allow one person to decide the priorities in education and what the policies in education are,” Kline said. “That’s way, way too much power in one person.”
Amen. Now try to rein it in…
Unanswered is whether the Obama policies will boost achievement and graduation rates or better prepare students for colleges and careers.
None of the top-performing countries against which the United States is frequently compared — in an unflattering light — use any of the techniques advocated by Obama. Finland, which leads the world in student achievement, has no merit pay or standardized tests except for a national exam that all students take at age 16. Instead, Finnish teachers write the tests to measure their students’ progress.
A recent study by the Brookings Institution found that common standards won’t necessarily improve student performance. And the idea that merit pay leads to better teaching is not backed up by research.
Lets not let a thing like “it’s not being done in top-performing countries” stop a quality takeover by the feds.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but we all get excited about getting something for nothing. The internet is full of free stuff and has radically altered the way we engage with each other and is one of the greatest disruptive innovators in history.
Open source software has helped change the way we view software business models. Now open education initiatives promise to do the same thing for education and disrupt things in a major way.
Many people are aware of MIT’s online courses you can learn from for free, and then there’s Apple’s iTunes U project which allows for all kinds of material to study from a wide variety of sources. Other open education initiatives invite contributors to license their content and educators are able to purchase it from them.
So how could open education be a bad thing when sharing knowledge like this seems so wonderful? Knowledge is a wonderful thing. Being able to learn is at the center of human growth and joy. However, when knowledge isn’t true, or when it is used to indoctrinate into a political ideology, there is a great danger to society.
George Soros’ name is well-known. As a billionaire he has used his vast resources to take down the economies of a few countries, fund many leftist organizations such as ACORN, SEIU, MoveOn.org, and the ACLU (and over a hundred others). When he invests his resources, it is because he sees an opportunity to promote his far-left agenda.
Soros’ Open Society Institute recently partnered with the Department of Education to promote a global education initiative. Part of that initiative is to fund the “open education” movement. George Soros doesn’t invest in things he can’t feel a measure of control to advance his agenda.
This is eerily reminiscent of the agreement signed by the Gates Foundation with the United Nations education organization UNESCO in 2004 to create a global education system. The Gates Foundation soon put things in motion to bring about the nationalization of the American education system first, to advance the global education movement. He did this by donating millions of dollars to the National Governor’s Association and the CCSSO (Council of Chief State Superintendents Organization) to create Common Core. Gates then paid the national PTA two million dollars to ignorantly promote it nationwide. Overall, the Gates Foundation has put over $100 million into creating and promoting Common Core.
President Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, is a big supporter of the Open Education movement and wants teachers to have access to the world’s knowledge. I mean, it’s great that teachers are going to have that access in free resources, but who is going to prepare those materials? Who will review and approve them? (Hopefully not the same people that did the Jordan and Granite math textbooks)
It’s the same agenda that Arne Duncan often talks about and is associated with the United Nations Agenda 21 movement. The big buzzword is “sustainability” and Sec. Duncan is all over it. Sustainability is meant to be the carefully couched word that means everyone needs to recognize we have limited resources and someone a lot smarter (and more powerful) than you should be in control of determining how you live, eat, and breathe. It is part of the United Nations’ and George Soros funded Agenda 21, which is a blueprint for global communism by control of populations and property. It has a variety of paths it advances through, but the green movement is a major part.
In a speech Sec. Duncan gave to the Sustainability Summit in 2010, he opened his views up to the world. I recommend you read his talk if you are interested in the full meal deal, but here are some relevant clips.
“We at the Education Department are energized about joining these leaders in their commitment to preparing today’s students to participate in the green economy, and to be well-educated about the science of sustainability. We must advance the sustainability movement through education.
We need to support activities that provide a variety of educational and training opportunities for teachers and students. A lot of important work is happening at the local levels in states and districts. Maryland is close to adopting a requirement that high school graduates demonstrate environmental literacy before they earn their diploma.
The U.S. Green Building Council is working with school districts and universities to incorporate green technology into schools. These schools not only are good for the environment, they provide a better learning environment for students—and they are cost efficient. The council is bringing together the nation’s strongest advocates for education—representing more than 10 million members across the country to build a national infrastructure of healthy, high-performance schools that are conducive to learning while saving energy, resources and money. I’m especially excited to hear that this fall the coalition will be reaching out to groups beyond education in the private and public sector. There’s a federal role in supporting this work. We fund the National Clearinghouse on School Facilities, which is a national leader in helping K-12 leaders make school facilities green and sustainable.
…But their work goes beyond our infrastructure. The team is working to create policies that support state efforts to prepare students for jobs in the green economy. At the initiative of the green team, the Department recently issued grants to five states to develop career pathways that will support the green economy. These career pathways will define the academic knowledge and vocational skills that students will need to prepare themselves for green jobs in architecture, agriculture, energy, transportation and waste management. The National Research Center for Career and Technical Education is working closely with these states and, where appropriate, with the business community to design the programs of study that will lead to success in the green industry.
…But our commitment has to be about even more than career pathways. It also has to prepare all students with the knowledge they need to be green citizens. In our Blueprint for Reform, the Obama administration is making an unprecedented commitment to promote a well-rounded education for our children. And for the first time, we are proposing that environmental education be part of that well-rounded education.
The Blueprint is our proposal to reauthorize and fix the No Child Left Behind Act. As many of you know, NCLB held schools accountable for student achievement in reading and mathematics. That has led to a narrowing of the curriculum, and no one—teachers, parents, or students—is happy with the state of affairs. We want all students to have access to a well-rounded, world-class curriculum—and that curriculum should include environmental literacy. For the first time ever, the Department of Education will be supporting locally developed models that teach environmental science.”
Isn’t it a little strange that the Obama administration is giving waivers from NCLB for adopting Common Core when 2 years ago he said they were going to reauthorize and fix NCLB? Hmmm, could it be that Common Core, *IS* the re-authorization and fix they were looking for?
Did you notice that Duncan mentions going beyond schools into groups in the private and public sector? That may be part of what’s called 21st Century Schools and Utah is now implementing them through a *FEDERAL GRANT* (ie. strings attached) serving 99 community sites and 21,000 students. What could possibly go wrong with this? Look at page 4 of this document to see the type of indoctrination that is happening.
Some readers will be familiar with John Goodlad from emails I’ve sent out in the past. Goodlad is a prominent national educator and came to BYU in 1983 to help set up the Public School Partnership with surrounding school districts. In 1986 he invited BYU’s Education Department to join his NNER (National Network for Educational Renewal). In time, he fundamentally transformed the education department to almost fully adopt and endorse his agenda. BYU’s Ed dept. even hosted one of his national conferences a few years ago and Goodlad had a conference promoting social justice in the classroom a year ago, and had terrorist/educator Bill Ayers as a keynote speaker at his national conference a year or two ago as well.
Charlotte Iserbyt was a senior policy advisor in the Department of Education during the Reagan administration and she documented the effort to dumb down America by copying documents and publishing a book you can get for free online called, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. In that book, she calls Goodlad, “America’s premier change agent.” His agenda is to fundamentally transform America through the education system.
Goodlad’s agenda is termed the “Agenda for Education in a Democracy” (AED) and by Democracy he literally means direct Democracy, moral relativism, and not the republican form of government the Constitution guarantees to us. In all of the United States there are 30 Goodlad designated “AED Scholars” who he trusts enough to bestow this honor on. Utah is home to at least 4 of them. There are 2 at BYU in the McKay School of Education, and 2 in Alpine School District’s administration. I could provide many quotes from Goodlad, but here are a few relevant ones that illustrate his agenda.
“Educators must resist the quest for certainty. If there were certainty there would be no scientific advancement. So it is with morals and patriotism.” (Education for Everyone, p. 6.)
“Most youth still hold the same values of their parents…if we do not alter this pattern, if we don’t resocialize, our system will decay.” (Education Innovation, Issue 9.)
–John Goodlad: “Report of Task Force C: Strategies for Change,” Schooling for the Future, a report to the President’s Commission on Schools Finance, Issue #9, 1971.
“[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.
“Public education has served as a check on the power of parents, and this is another powerful reason for maintaining it.” – John Goodlad, Developing Democratic Character in the Young, pg. 165
“It is my expectation that Teacher Education for Democracy and Social Justice will become a rich resource for continuing this multi-layered conversation-from democratic belief to democratic action-that is the hallmark of educational renewal.” -John Goodlad’s forward to “Teacher Education for Democracy and Social Justice,” Nicholas Michelli and David Lee Keiser
“Enlightened social engineering is required to face situations that demand global action now… Parents and the general public must be reached also, otherwise, children and youth enrolled in globally oriented programs may find themselves in conflict with values assumed in the home. And then the educational institution frequently comes under scrutiny and must pull back.” – Dr. John I. Goodlad, “Guide to Getting Out Your Message,” National Education Goals Panel Community Action Toolkit: A Do-It-Yourself Kit for Education Renewal (September 1994); 6
Better re-read that last quote. The goal is globally oriented programs like the International Baccalaureate which is a UNESCO partnership program emphasizing sustainability teaching to children and collectivist, socialist indoctrination. Watch the video at the bottom of this page for some very alarming quotes including the anti-family, pantheistic agenda UNESCO espouses.
Another buzzword by educators is a goal of critical thinking training in schools. The purpose of this is to teach and indoctrinate children to think critically about the morals and teachings they have received at home and church. As I have said elsewhere, this doesn’t mean all your children’s teachers in public schools are following this philosophy and trying to indoctrinate them. It just means that they are being fed this philosophy in schools of education and they are susceptible to it and some are passing it on event inadvertently because they trust schools of education where they are told things like “all the studies show this is the best way to teach.” The Texas GOP just added a section to their party platform opposing this indoctrination.
We also see that Goodlad recognizes that when parents wake up to these facts, sometimes they rebel and then it causes the educators to “pull back” for a time. That’s why he says that “parents and the general public must be reached” or else the values they teach children in the home will conflict with the values Goodlad intends to put upon them in the classroom, namely socialism and moral relativism. This is where those 21st Century Schools and Community Learning Centers come in to allow for parents to come and get the steady stream of “sustainability” education.
One of several Goodlad posters at BYU/MSE
One of the great misconceptions at BYU’s McKay School of Education is that they can push Goodlad so heavily and not have the negative aspects of his agenda seep through to students, teachers, and administrators. In Alpine school district, at least one school bought and passed out one of Goodlad’s books for every teacher and area legislators a few years ago. They can say they don’t believe *everything* Goodlad teaches when you press them on it, but when you hang his posters in the halls and put up plaques with his quotes on them, and openly praise him, you’re sending an overpowering signal to people that you agree with his humanist, moral relativistic, atheistic, social justice, anti-family philosophies. Goodlad gains nationwide credibility when his organizations show he’s a partner with BYU.
Key to the effort of 21st Century Schools is a cradle to grave database tracking system that will hold data on citizens. One of the requirements of Common Core grant funding was to set up a statewide longitudinal database. In Utah this was called the P20w system for preschool to grade 20 (college graduation) to workforce. This is the same Outcome-Based Education nonsense that was defeated in the 90’s by concerned citizens. Mark Tucker wrote a letter to Hillary Clinton after Bill was elected congratulating her and outlining things he would love to see happen to nationalize education and make schools little more than training centers for society’s central planners to determine at early ages where children should go into the workforce. It’s all happening now. Career aptitude tests are being prepared for kindergarteners and 3rd graders, and under Common Core in Utah, by 7th grade students are placed into a math track that will determine what their top math level will be when they graduate.
So where is the Open Education movement today? In the state of Utah, the State Office of Education has fully embraced Open Education initiatives. In January of 2012, they issued this press release stating:
“The Utah State of Office of Education (USOE) today announced it will develop and support open textbooks in the key curriculum areas of secondary language arts, science, and mathematics. USOE will encourage districts and schools throughout the state to consider adopting these textbooks for use beginning this fall.
Open textbooks are textbooks written and synthesized by experts, vetted by peers, and made available online for free access, downloading, and use by anyone. Open textbooks can also be printed through print-on-demand or other printing services for settings in which online use is impossible or impractical. In earlier pilot programs, open textbooks have been printed and provided to more than 3,800 Utah high school science students at a cost of about $5 per book, compared to an average cost of about $80 for a typical high school science textbook.
…The decision to pursue open textbooks at scale comes after two years of successful open textbook pilots led by David Wiley of Brigham Young University’s David O. McKay School of Education. Each pilot was conducted by the BYU-Public School Partnership in partnership with the Utah State Office of Education. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation provided funding. Mathematics and science textbooks will be based on books originally published by the CK12 Foundation, a not-for-profit organization based in California founded with the mission to produce free and open source K-12 materials aligned to state curriculum.”
Interesting that this is funded by the Hewlett Foundation, a foundation with close ties to George Soros and the Gates Foundation, and has as one of its goals, population reduction through family planning and reproductive services (last 2 paragraphs here).
As noted in the press release, David Wiley at BYU is in charge of Utah’s pilot program and he has listed his resume online. Among his accomplishments he lists the following: Director, USU Center for Open and Sustainable Learning; Founder, Open High School of Utah; and Associate Director of the Center for the Improvement of Teacher Education and Schooling (or CITES for short). CITES is the Goodlad training center at BYU for teachers and administrators in the BYU Public School Partnership districts to get indoctrinated in the Goodlad educational philosophy before stepping into their roles of shaping our children’s minds. CITES is an organization we have previously written up for not cooperating with an audit that Orem Senator Margaret Dayton was pursuing.
This isn’t to say that David Wiley and all the other people associated with CITES and BYU’s MSE are bad people (David is actually very pleasant in email correspondence I’ve had with him). They’ve just embraced parts of a philosophy that I believe is destructive of American values. No matter how noble some of their goals are like providing open education resources, significant dangers lie ahead. Soros and his education partners are powerful globalists with money and influence looking to push their agenda, and now that the framework is in place, they will pump propaganda into open source materials.
In fact, it appears to have already reached Utah through these types of channels. The recent Granite & Jordan school district math textbook fiasco with textbook problems full of inappropriate leftist propaganda (link 1, link 2, link 3) was a result of copy/pasting math problems from open source materials according to one school board member. People like George Soros know that as schools move toward cheap, open materials, they can insert thousands of propagandizing, social justice type questions which will wind up being thoughtlessly inserted into textbooks for students. No true “critical thinking” skills are required for copy/pasting math problems from one source into another and Utah’s population is as gullible and ready to accept this nonsense as anyone. Even the NCTM has added a new book for teachers on how to teach for Social Justice in the classroom.
Some people will continue to try and dismiss all of this and label it a “conspiracy theory” in the hopes that busy or thoughtless people will ignore it. There is no need to theorize about what is happening in education. It’s plain and simple, out in the open, conspiracy fact. Anyone can research and read exactly what this is all about and I encourage people to read the information in all the links above where it is abundantly clear. In their own words they are moving the national education system into a global system to indoctrinate children. This agenda will be even more obvious in the next article posted to the site.
The chart below illustrates the behemoth that was set up by the federal government and “conspiratorial” partner organizations like the Gates Foundation, PRIOR to them enticing the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State Superintendents Organization with $20 million to get together and create a set of Common Core state standards. They didn’t care what the states developed, they just wanted them all on the same page tied to the same federal strings that would light up this network and be the final piece in the puzzle of nationalizing education. Why has the Gates Foundation put over $100 million into the creation and promotion of Common Core? Because in 2004 they signed an agreement with UNESCO to create a global education system.
Click to enlarge
To see a fairly detailed timeline on the implementation of Common Core, please read this post titled The Common Core Lie.
Please share this information with friends, neighbors, and your legislators. It’s not too late to work together to get Utah off federal money which accounts for less than 12% of Utah’s annual education budget revenues (page 4). Being off the federal funds will allow us to chart our own course as it should be.
As for the open education movement, there is a tremendous amount of good that can come from sharing true knowledge and making it freely available. However, much greater scrutiny must be exercised by schools and districts in selecting materials appropriate for students. Much greater involvement from parents examining their children’s school work must also be attended to. With broad-based submissions in the open education space, comes a serious quality control issue. This can be seen both in instances of propaganda finding its way into Granite and Jordan School District’s, and if Jordan school district really had “unsolvable” problems in their book, clearly the materials they chose to use weren’t vetted well, indicting both the author of those materials, and the individuals selecting the materials to use.
Early on in this fight we pointed out that the federal government was funding $350 million to 2 assessment/testing consortia, the SBAC, and PARCC. We said that since they are receiving federal funds, it would allow the feds to possibly receive information that they shouldn’t have access to. In Utah we fought to get us out of the SBAC for several reasons such as it being led by social justice advocate Linda-Darling Hammond. We didn’t want propagandizing math problems on tests, but we were ridiculed for suggesting such a silly thing because Utahns would never have that appear on materials our children receive.
<cough>Granite & Jordan school districts</cough>
Today we learn from the Missouri Education Watchdog website that this week the SBAC met with State Chiefs to discuss some financial issues. Odd that an entity that received so much money from the feds is having financial issues… ;)
Having identified financial problems at the SBAC, they have now determined to “identify areas of commonality with the other assessment consortia, PARCC, and see if the two groups can share a consultant on those common points. It is not a stretch to see that these two groups are probably going to have to combine in the future in order to remain sustainable. Then we will truly have national standards.” (link)
Missouri Education Watchdog is exactly right. Combining the 2 mega assessment consortia will result in a singular national exam that will be what nearly every teacher in the country teaches to. Consolidation will lead to a single curriculum and the rush to grade teachers based on their classroom performance will kill innovation as they all standardize to cover the same material on the same day for the same test.
When States do their RFP’s for assessments they should not accept any bid from SBAC or PARCC related entities and affiliates.
It appears Jordan School District may have lied to teachers telling them to pull problems out of student math books that were unsolvable. Early this week, 9th grade teachers using the homegrown Secondary Math 1 book that we exposed last week (article 1)(article 2) for having propagandizing problems in them, told students they needed to rip out 12 pages from their books and pass them forward to the teacher to be shredded because some problems in the book were unsolvable. One quick thinking teen stuffed the pages in his/her backpack and took them home and the parent sent them to me.
Now I haven’t attempted to work these problems to see if any are unsolvable, but don’t you think if that was the case, teachers would have just had students cross out a handful of problems instead of tearing out pages that actually contained legitimate problems on them?
So what’s on these pages you ask… Some of them contain clear propaganda. Others appear to have been axed for pretty minor infractions such as one page where the only thing I see is a war game scenario of Battleship and you have to plot enemy shipping lanes (ie. equations) on a graph and find the intersections where you lay your mines where they are likely to find an enemy ship. Probably overboard to rip that out.
However, try this one on for size.
14. A polling organization reports that 52% of registered voters preferred candidate W. The polling technique used has a margin of error of 3%. (The results are considered to be accurate within a range of 3% on either side of the reported figure.) a. What are the upper and lower boundaries for the actual percent of voters who support candidate W? b. Represent the upper and lower boundaries using an absolute-value equation. c. Is it possible that candidate W is not actually preferred by the majority of voters? Explain.
A perfect opening for a teacher to say, “interestingly, candidate “Dubya” did become president with a minority of votes because of the flawed electoral system in our country.”
They ripped out a pretty fun looking “Ohio Jones” problem (Indiana Jones’ lesser-known younger brother) for no apparent reason unless it really was unsolvable, but again, why not just cross it out? It ends with “Follow these words and the temple will reveal its secrets to you. Fail, and you will fall to your doom.” Pretty harmless considering the context and parallel to Indiana Jones movies. The other side of this page was straight math problems.
There is a problem set on another page to determine if relationships are functions. One was “The national debt with respect to time.” I think that should be a required problem for every student at every grade level.
Page 118 is a full page fraudulent scheme math problem where you have to calculate how much money you’ll get back at the end of each week of sending out letters and getting friends to write letters requesting money. The thing about this problem is one of the questions says, “Ploys like this are illegal. Can you see why? (Explain)” I actually don’t mind this problem too much because it does point out that it’s illegal and helps children to understand why. Though, in today’s society, I suppose this could fill some young entrepreneurial mind with an idea… :)
Here’s one on page 125 that is a bad idea:
Bingham Rumors At Bingham High, Savannah, a 10th grader, decides to start a rumor. On the first day of school, she tells 3 students the rumor and gives them instructions to repeat the rumor (and instructions) to 3 more students the next day, etc. a. Create a table (Days, Students ) b. Create a graph c. Is the function discrete or continuous? d. Write the domain and range using appropriate notation. e. Why is the equation y = 3x? f. If each student follows these instructions, how many students will hear the rumor on day 6? On what day will all 2400 students hear or rehear the rumor?
No need to give students reason to try this experiment and see how far and fast a rumor will spread.
Page 156
22. Strapped for cash, you decide to borrow money from a local crime lord. This turns out to be yet another instance of poor judgment on your part. At 22% interest per year, how much will you owe on a loan of %5,000 after one year? What about after three years?
Borrowing from a crime lord? Creating a home grown math textbook was yet another instance of poor judgment on Jordan and Granite School District’s parts.
Page 165 contains a problem labeled “Medicine” where you are an Olympic athlete who is considering taking cold medicine and you have to calculate the half-life of it to make sure it’s out of your system before drug testing at a certain time. They could have just renamed this one “How to pass a drug test.”
Page 181
Population and Food Supply (from illustrativemathematics.org) The population of a country is initially 2 million people and is increasing at 4% per year. The country’s annual food supply is adequate for 4 million people (now) and is increasing at a constant rate adequate for an additional 0.5 million people per year. 1. Based on these assumptions, in approximately what year will this country first experience shortages of food? 2. If the country doubled its initial food supply and maintained a constant rate of increase in the supply adequate for an additional 0.5 million people per year, would shortages still occur? In approximately which year? 3. If the country doubled the rate at which its food supply increases, in addition to doubling its initial food supply, would shortages still occur?
Gee, I wonder what kind of discussions this would generate???
Granite School District should follow suit and also pull these page.
If you’ve never seen Radical Math (http://www.radicalmath.org/), it’s social justice propaganda mixed into math problems just like these.
Where did these problems come from? How did they get in children’s textbooks? Who reviewed these problems and gave the OK? What can we expect in the future?
Not all cost savings are worth the savings as Jordan and Granite have both clearly shown.
A victory for parents as KSL news is reporting that Granite school district has pulled a couple of the inappropriate math problems we pointed out this past week. Click the link to see the news story where the newscaster ends by saying “students won’t be traumatized by [the inappropriate math problems], only by the math itself.”
We really need to move past telling people math is hard and people can’t do it. There are plenty of examples of people that succeeded when they applied themselves. Just ask Jaime Escalante of whom the movie Stand and Deliver was made.
Granite SD spokesperson Ben Horsley mentions pulling the problems on the serial killer, and the loan shark (one we didn’t post the other day in our math propaganda article). If you live in Granite and Jordan school districts, raise your voice and have them remove the other inappropriate math problems from the book.
If you want to see someone go through several of the book examples on video, check out the YouTube video below showing several other indoctrinating questions in the textbook. However, he didn’t know Granite and Jordan school districts were 2 separate districts so forgive him for that at the beginning. He also didn’t mention the very first problem in the book is an assignment on group-think.
I have no idea who this person is as this was done independent of this website.
I received this email yesterday. ASD is Alpine School District. I’m assuming #3 below is chopped off so we can’t see all of it. The first 2 problems….enough said.
“Oak, my daughter is taking Algebra I online through ASD. She just texted me this screenshot of her work right now:”
Who is Sir Michael Barber and why do you need to know this person? He’s the new Marc Tucker with a clear global agenda. At last month’s British Education Summit he gave a speech entitled, “Whole System Revolution: The Education Challenge For the Next Decade.” He’s all about global citizens, sustainability, and human capital. Barber is the Chief Education Advisor to Pearson. Pearson was involved with Common Core from the very beginning and is one of the largest providers (if not #1) of curriculum for schools.
