State School Board Candidate Joel Wright in District 9 posted these shocking screenshots to Facebook exposing a pretty clear cut case of unethical engagement by ASD board member JoDee Sundberg and a principal who in turn appears to have violated election laws to support JoDee’s campaign.
What you can read below is a textbook case of how the entrenched establishment works. They elect someone like JoDee Sundberg or John Burton who do anything the district asks of them, and then to get re-elected, turn to the establishment to protect them. They are a massive political party that citizens have an extremely difficult time defeating. What you are about to read is yet another major reason for partisan school board elections in Utah so that citizens have an opportunity to run for school board and be vetted by a smaller number of elected delegates who can dig into a candidate and ignore the sound bites and get to the heart of issues.
Read the fear that fills these emails. They are in full panic mode. The game plan never changes…total fearmongering against those who think independently and challenge the status quo. Look at the nonsense that Wendy Hart’s opponent has published about her, causing Wendy to write a full rebuttal (particularly troubling after she had the nerve to walk out before the debate last week).
Start with JoDee Sundberg’s letter below as she pleads for help to school employees on their school email accounts, endangering numerous ASD employees and unethically asking them to engage their subordinates. Then Principal Keith Conley responds trying to rally the troops using his school email account and engages in extreme statements and instructs his subordinates how to vote. No facts, just fear. The sky is falling if they don’t retain their power.
State law prohibits the activities of the principal. ASD’s policies have also been violated and both JoDee Sundberg (16 years on the board – can’t feign ignorance) and Principal Conley know it.
“1.1.3 Internet services provided by the school district are not intended for personal, political or private use. Employees have no expectation of privacy associated with the use of the Internet.”
“1.2.1 While on paid leave, certified employees may not engage in political activity including:
1.2.1.1 Actively campaigning for candidates for public office in partisan and nonpartisan elections.
1.2.1.2 Fundraising for political organizations, political parties, or candidates.”
What’s the punishment for doing so when not on leave?
Take Action – Read below and then call/write
1) Now please call the Lt. Governor’s office since Lt. Gov. Cox is in charge of elections violations. If he fails to take immediate action and waits till after the election, it will embolden the establishment that they are a law unto themselves and can get away with anything. They already have this attitude. This seems like a pretty clear violation of the law and involves a superior pressuring subordinates to take action, and using public taxpayer equipment and resources to campaign for a specific candidate.
2) Then call Governor Herbert and make sure he steps up and enforces the law. The Governor cannot simply brush this off. Tell him to support partisan elections. His office can be reached at 801-538-1000.
3) Finally, if you’re able, attend Alpine School District’s board meeting Tuesday night at Westfield Elementary (380 S. Long Drive, Alpine, Utah) at 6:00 PM. You must sign up prior to the meeting starting to make public comment so be a few minutes early if you’d like to ask how ASD handles infractions of their policies particularly when a school board member and principal are involved.
Here’s the stunning exchange. Summary follows:
What do you think? Is JoDee’s email ethical? Would you vote for her? Here’s a quick bullet list of a sitting board member communicating with ASD principals whose livelihood can be affected by board decisions.
I need your teachers’ help
I need them to walk neighborhoods and campaign for me
They need to share a message about how wonderful the schools are because of my efforts because my opponent will destroy it all if he’s elected
Also I need our other service personnel and administrators to help
If our teachers won’t help, I NEED TO KNOW and my campaign is sunk
My opponent will dismantle ASD because he’s an extremist while I am completely objective and normal
I am visiting SCHOOL COMMUNITY COUNCILS (another election law violation for SCC’s that don’t give equal time to all opponents)
I need the teachers to vote and take 5 people with them
I know I’m begging you but I need your help
I need your money and John Burton needs your money
After a meeting where Wendy Hart had the nerve to bring up state laws she’d researched about clubs engaged in sexual topics, we barely passed the motion to support the gay/straight alliance club, and if I’m not re-elected things will get much worse
No summary of Principal Conley’s letter is needed. Unfortunately, this principal has crossed the line.
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Please everyone, get out the vote for Maynard Olsen in Orem, Wendy Hart in Alpine, Highland, and Cedar Hills, and Chris Jolly in American Fork.
This comment was posted to Facebook by Jared Carman and I wanted to make sure it got wider notice so it’s here for your information. Jared serves on the Utah instructional materials committee and so he receives significant amounts of books throughout the year to review.
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How Common Core Is Creating a Generation of
Less-informed Voters
(What I learned reviewing over 500 Common Core books from all the major publishers)
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LEARNING 101: Kids learn what they practice.
In a typical Common Core practice item, children as young as 6 and 7 are given two “opinion” passages to read, usually on a social issue of some kind. The passages are short. The children are directed to read the passages, form “their own” opinion, based on one of the passages (an inherently biased exercise, but that’s a separate issue), then ADVOCATE for their opinion in writing, using information from the opinion pieces as supporting evidence. Net, net: Read little to no actual information, then form your own opinion, supported another person’s opinion.
Consider the following:
– The word “opinion” or “argument” is mentioned 38 times in the 110 Common Core writing standards.
– Under Common Core, opinion-forming practice and testing is required for EVERY student in every grade, even Kindergarten.
– “Opinion writing” testing is a central feature of the SAGE/Common Core tests.
What do you get when you combine low-info opinion practice, with messages (from the “informational texts”) to organize, resist, influence, strike, stand up, sit in, and vote, vote, vote…and you do this regularly for thirteen years?
An entire generation of highly-opinionated, less-informed voters.
Alyson Williams, one of the parent reviewers of SAGE tests, made this comment in the same thread:
That is the SAGE writing assessment. I saw no other format… the student must read several excerpts, and argue in writing one point of view or the other citing directly from the provided passages to support her argument. While many parents were concerned about the content (recall the examples last year of books vs. video games) I am concerned that even with neutral content the repetition of this kind of writing practice over and over for years, especially when it is computer graded by a technically limited rubric, is not a very valuable exercise to great writing (or thinking) rather conditioning a test-taking skill at best. Worse, however is that it seems likely to result in a generation of people who are not independently seeking truth and employing classical logic or analytical thinking, but willing to form opinions without in-depth knowledge or greater context but on the carefully edited ideas served up in the digest form of popular media.
Warning for all you non-religious types… I’m about to exercise my first amendment right and share my secular and religious thoughts based on my personal beliefs as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and quote a couple scriptures and LDS church authorities below in support of my beliefs. Naturally all of this article is my own opinion and I’m not speaking for the church. Just in case anyone might get confused about that… ;)
Periodically someone asks me a question like this: “how does this ________ nonsense get into our children’s schools?” Lately I’ve had that blank filled in with social justice. It seems to have gained an unfortunate sympathetic ear among people because they think it’s about helping the poor, when it reality it does just the opposite. There’s a load of articles on the web about how various Common Core players and organizations have come together to promote social justice through the curriculum and assessments they have developed. This article will not focus on those elements, but on the misguided concept of social justice.
A couple weeks ago, someone sent me a link to an article from BYU’s Frontier magazine which is an online magazine for alumni of their college of physical and mathematical sciences.
In the Fall 2014 issue on page 18, you’ll find an article entitled “Solving social injustice one math problem at a time.” The article is about Dr. Kate Johnson in BYU’s Math Education department and her background and experiences which lead her now to entwine social justice into her math teaching.
As if it isn’t hard enough for children to do word problems on new concepts, lets add social justice into the mix so they can feel the plight of the poor and downtrodden and learn about how evil capitalism is.
Now some parents might want this type of class for their child. They might say, yes, I want my college child well rounded by wrestling with these issues in math class instead of laser focusing on the theories and functions of math so that when they go to teach little children, they can help them understand how the rich are evil and the poor are oppressed. Love live the Communist Manifesto!
News flash: This style of teaching isn’t going to improve math education, nor will it fix social injustices. Social justice is the gospel of envy, not Christ’s gospel of love.
It is abundantly true that the scriptures teach us to take care of the poor. However, in each instance, the Lord is commanding people to take care of the poor as a matter of free will, using our agency in an individual charitable endeavor.
Lets get started.
Here are relevant quotes from the Frontier article about Dr. Johnson (emphasis mine):
“Through struggling with how to handle the hard questions her students raised about the world, Johnson realized that math could help them sort through the many differing points of view. The way this is done is through typical math tasks, like a story problem, but the subject of that story problem would be sharing wages in a sweatshop rather than sharing crayons in a classroom.
“The ultimate goal of teaching math for social justice is to help kids better understand the world around them in conjunction with math,” Johnson said. “Students are going to talk about those issues whether or not we give them math as a tool to do so, and so to me, we should be giving them math as a tool to think and talk about those issues so they can see the utility of math and so they can make stronger arguments.”
…
“I’m interested in teachers’ identities, as it pertains to mathematics teachers, particularly in the context of teaching math for social justice,” Johnson said. “So basically that’s like teaching math in contexts that help bring to light social issues in addition to teaching key math principles. If that’s the way you are going to teach math, then how does your race, gender, class, or awareness of your privilege play a role in the way you teach about those topics? Basically, when you state it broadly, I’m interested in how who we are shapes what we do as teachers.”
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“I realized that teachers are learners too, in part because I got student teachers and I just started to become interested in the kinds of things they needed to know in order to be productive math teachers,” Johnson said.
…
“I wanted to broaden my impact,” Johnson said. “When I was a high school teacher, I used to say that I was teaching the world one deaf student at a time, and then when I went back to school to be a teacher educator, I said teaching the world a little more than one kid at a time. Because if you impact one teacher, it will impact more children that way, and teaching math through social justice to those teachers will bring about greater social change.”
This article in Frontier is all about this particular teacher and I’m not publishing this to get her in trouble because she certainly isn’t by any means the only teacher educator doing this. I just felt compelled to expose what is happening in our schools of education where teachers are taught and ultimately comes to your children’s classrooms. Many of the educators in BYU’s Education and Math Education departments embrace John Goodlad, Bill Ayers, and Linda Darling-Hammond’s left-wing philosophy on social justice. They have attended workshops, joined their organizations, read their books, and even presented at their conferences. I believe the year was 2006 when BYU even hosted Goodlad’s NNER conference. Here’s an ad from just a few years ago for Goodlad’s conference to teach teachers how to implement social justice and the GLBT agenda in your children’s classrooms.
John Goodlad’s NNER advertising a teacher training. Also note the GLBT training for teachers.
Social Justice 101
So what is social justice? I found this awesome 5 minute video online that explains this concept really well. I particularly loved the statement by the U.N. that if you believe truth and justice are concepts independent of their agenda, you are essentially an enemy of social justice. Truth is so overrated…
I periodically engage in discussions online with people who espouse that it is the government’s responsibility to take care of the poor and that the government is well within its rights to do this. But they fail to remember one core principle of our government which is that it was established by the people, for the people, and of the people. When the people created the government, we delegated to government the ability to do certain things we have a right to do ourselves in order to make those things more efficient. I have a right to defend myself and my property so we created a sheriff and the military to protect those things on a larger scale so I can focus on other things. On the other hand, I don’t have a right to go to my neighbor’s home and take $500 from him and give that money to someone else I know is needy, so I can’t get government to do that for me and keep my hands clean of robbery. Frederick Bastiat called this “legal plunder” in his classic work, “The Law,” when people use government to do things to others that they can’t legally do themselves.
These people further claim that the scriptures and Christ’s teachings justify redistributing the wealth. But what did Jesus teach?
Did Jesus go to the Romans and ask them to exact a tax on the rich to help the poor? No.
Did he go to the Sanhedrin and ask them to do likewise? No.
He told the rich young man to go sell *what HE had* and give it to the poor.
He watched the widow cast in her 2 mites and announced that she had given more than all the rich yet didn’t mention how evil the rich were for not caring for her needs.
Did he organize a redistribution effort among his church? No. He taught compassion, charity, and to put away our jealousy and envy.
The gospel is one of individual responsibility with individual mandates to care for the poor. We have no right to force someone to salvation by making them take care of the poor and in so doing, create just the opposite effect within the breast of those whose compassion we need.
What does our progressive taxation system do? We say if you make X amount of income, you pay 15% taxes. If you make up to Y, then you pay 28%. And so on up the ladder. The more you make the larger the percentage you pay. What does that do to a person who makes more money?
It can destroy their ability to be very charitable.
It makes them feel like they are already giving more for social programs and they don’t need to do more individually.
It destroys the entire holy principle of charity because those with wealth don’t have the opportunity to *give* someone money. It’s taken from them and they never see the needy people it helps, thus causing them to not have their hearts moved with compassion on the plight of the poor. Social justice ROBS the rich of this critical enrichment activity.
What was the Lord’s plan? 10% whether you’re rich or poor? A fascinating contrast, don’t you think?
The very people who want to have the wealthy to have compassion upon the poor have erected a system that prevents it from being possible. They have created a system of hatred where the rich feel taken advantage of. Where did this progressive taxation idea come from? The father of modern-day envy, Karl Marx, a co-author of the Communist Manifesto. This document is the exact opposite of the God-inspired U.S. Constitution. Only in an atmosphere of liberty, can the gospel of Jesus Christ thrive. Personal choices are paramount to the gospel plan. When some seek to overthrow that plan by focusing on social justice instead of God’s justice, and enact man-made systems of charity instead of God’s perfect system of charity, they mingle the philosophies of man with God’s perfect plan of salvation for his children and corrupt society through vanity.
Think about this…some people are born into wealth and some into poverty. It is a social injustice, but it is not injustice on the part of our divine creator who has a perfect plan for each of his children. His plan is to exalt his children and bring them back into his presence. In some instances, that necessitates trials of wealth, and for others trials of poverty. Each individual is born into this world with their own unique challenges to deal with but it is their own personal plan of salvation that God crafted for them. Under no circumstance does the wisdom of man exceed the wisdom of God. We should stop trying to serve the Lord in the devil’s way. Only the gospel of Christ can provide the spiritual salvation God’s children need.
“In a complete reversal from a century ago, many today would dispute with Alma about the seriousness of immorality. Others would argue that it’s all relative or that God’s love is permissive. If there is a God, they say, He excuses all sins and misdeeds because of His love for us—there is no need for repentance. Or at most, a simple confession will do. They have imagined a Jesus who wants people to work for social justice but who makes no demands upon their personal life and behavior.”
If I may offer an interpretation of what he’s saying… The people had turned to wickedness but they thought that a collective salvation under the gift of God’s incredible mercy for his children would save all of them regardless of their personal choices. They made up a false Christ by imagining a God that makes no demands on our *personal* lives, yet they weren’t forced to comply with heaven’s mandates.
In the April 2013 conference, Elder Christofferson gave another great talk which included much about temporal redemption for the poor. In this talk he pointed out that sometimes when needs are more widespread, larger organizations may need to be involved when needs exceed the ability of individuals to personally take care of the problems.
“Some forms of temporal redemption come by collaborative effort. It is one of the reasons the Savior created a church. Being organized in quorums and auxiliaries and in stakes, wards, and branches, we can not only teach and encourage each other in the gospel, but we can also bring to bear people and resources to deal with the exigencies of life.People acting alone or in ad hoc groups cannot always provide means on a scale needed to address larger challenges. As
State School Board Candidate Joel Wright in District 9 posted these shocking screenshots to Facebook exposing a pretty clear cut case of unethical engagement by ASD board member JoDee Sundberg and a principal who in turn appears to have violated election laws to support JoDee’s campaign.
