The reader of this site will recall earlier this year when we brought as much pressure as possible on legislators and state school board members to exit from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). Utah had signed on as a governing member of this consortium which obligated us to use their tests and that was destructive of our state control of education. The State Board of Education had voted 4-10 against leaving the SBAC early in the year or late last year, but by summer we had got a commitment that the board would vote to leave the SBAC. In their August 2012 board meeting, the State Board voted 12-3 to exit. This article documented the vote and it made an important prediction which has come true.
The article said that someone within the USOE had passed information on to us that the Request for Proposal for state assessments was being specifically written by the USOE in such a way that they would have to choose a vendor that would use the SBAC’s assessments. When I published this charge, at least one state board member told me that was ridiculous.
This week the State Board appointed committee chose the “American Institutes for Research” as the assessment writer.
The USOE prepared a Powerpoint presentation (Link) on this selection and on slide 2 we see that AIR is the “Only organization currently delivering statewide, online adaptive tests approved for ESEA accountability.” The ESEA was our waiver application for No Child Left Behind. Really? AIR is the ONLY organization we can use? We’re already testing an adaptive assessment system. Why can’t we continue with that? Perhaps it’s because it’s not AIR.
“AIR is partnering with the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, a state-led consortium committed to developing tests that use technology to better measure student knowledge and to make tests accessible to all. The Smarter Balanced tests will be delivered online and include innovative items and performance tasks that take advantage of the potential of technology.”
Ahhh, so AIR is partnered with the SBAC and they are the ONLY organization to meet the RFP requirements. What a shocker.
Their mission statement says, “AIR’s mission is to conduct and apply the best behavioral and social science research and evaluation towards improving peoples’ lives, with a special emphasis on the disadvantaged.” Who are these disadvantaged they refer to and why would they focus on behavioral improvements in people’s lives?
One of the worries we had in working with the SBAC was that the lead researcher was Linda Darling-Hammond who co-wrote the book “Learning to Teach for Social Justice.” The concern was that test questions themselves could contain indoctrinating questions. Since we’ve already seen the USOE creating group-think indoctrinating questions for use in textbooks in Utah, it’s clearly a valid concern that Linda Darling-Hammond’s goals of social justice in the classroom will be realized through test questions. If you’re not sure what these other questions could look like that would be indoctrinating, check out these examples.
A quick browse of AIR’s website shows they have sections on “LGBT Youth,” “Inclusive Development,” “Commitments to the Clinton Global Initiative,” “Child Labor,” “Workforce Development,” “Health Care Delivery,” and “Behavior Change.” Several sections deal with mental health issues in youth and one includes the “Good Behavior Game.”
Why it is that Utah can’t find partners that match our values is beyond me. This left-wing, multiculturalism nonsense is why Utah can’t rise above the rest of the nation in academics. If we focused on educating our children in factual knowledge, we would soar above other Common Core states. It’s painfully obvious that the people in charge of education in this state are as extreme as they come in left-wing agendas and it’s time some of them were fired. Please contact your state legislators and send them this article and ask them strip the USOE of their funding and give it to local districts to control their own standards, assessments, and curriculum. It’s clear the fox is guarding the hen house in Utah education.
Wyoming hasn’t complied fast enough with Common Core requirements and are now facing fines by the federal government. This is conclusive evidence that Common Core is not a “voluntary state-led effort” that we continue to hear from the state office of education, but an entanglement from the federal government.
It’s not too late for Utah to exit and do something superior to Common Core. Sandra Stotsky who helped set up Massachusetts’ top rated ELA standards has volunteered to write (for FREE) the very best standards in the nation for Utah, and we could easily return to our old A- rated math standards which were at least on par and in upper grades superior to Common Core’s math standards.
We’ve previously published some of the nonsense that the USOE is pulling regarding teacher training and curriculum being produced and how heavily constructivist it is, but now here’s evidence they are actively conspiring to hide this from the public.
Internal emails that were received by GRAMA request show that Asst. Superintendent Brenda Hales had asked the people involved with the secondary math 1 book to rewrite the introduction, whitewashing it of typical constructivist terms like “inquiry.” Instead, “balanced” terminology appears verifying that this term is public code language for constructivism.
We’ve know this for years based on Alpine School District doing the same thing to lull parents to sleep over Investigations math, but now it’s internally verified. Bye, bye STEM programs. If you’re a university professor who is already crying over the poor skills freshmen enter your classes with, it’s heading downhill even faster. Read below the emails for the Mathematics Vision Project nonsense.
Has your state, district or school chosen the Integrated or International pathway of courses? The MVP classroom experience begins by confronting students with an engaging problem and then allows them to grapple with solving it. As students’ ideas emerge, take form, and are shared, the teacher orchestrates the student discussions and explorations towards a focused mathematical goal. As conjectures are made and explored, they evolve into mathematical concepts that the community of learners begins to embrace as effective strategies for analyzing and solving problems. These strategies eventually solidify into a body of practices that belong to the students because they were developed by the students as an outcome of their own creative and logical thinking. This is how students learn mathematics. They learn by doing mathematics. They learn by needing mathematics. They learn by verbalizing the way they see the mathematical ideas connect and by listening to how their peers perceived the problem. Students then own the mathematics because it is a collective body of knowledge that they have developed over time through guided exploration. This process describes the Learning Cycle and it informs how teaching should be conducted within the classroom.
Constructivism is essentially socialist math and they’ve written their description perfectly illustrating this. How bad could this be? Remember this “engaging problem” in groupthink about the groundhog?
Please email your State School Board member and ask them to stop this constructivist nightmare (http://www.schools.utah.gov/board/Board-Members.aspx). Then email your legislators (http://le.utah.gov/) and ask them to step in. It’s clear that the USOE isn’t concerned with what really works in the classroom and pushing this statewide is going to kill Utah’s math future.
Then talk with your local school board member and ask them to reject all materials coming from the USOE. There is no evidence that constructivism produces results.
Obama’s Career Tracking and Education Reforms: So Much More Than Common Core
The more you study the plans and plots of Obama and of his Federal Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, the more you see the crushing trend. They crush any individuality and local independence or control over education paths or career paths. And the Constitution be damned.
Individuals’ desires or states’ desires are not to be taken into account. The word “accountability” is used as a weapon of coercion. And the desires of the Collective Government are assumed to best determine what a student studies and what he/she becomes. “What benefits society?” they ask; they do not ask what benefits the child, or what do the parents want for the child?
The crushing and stifling effect comes from so much more than the Common Core Standards –or even than the Common national testing. The federal government wants to determine how children will be placed into an almost unalterable path that determines that student’s future based on imposed plans squeezed out of standardized tests early on in life. They call it Prosperity 2020 in Utah. They call it Obama’s 2020 Educational Initiative in D.C. They call it Education For All, a part of Agenda 21, at the United Nations. They all use nice-sounding words but they all slice away at local and individual rights and freedoms over what is to be learned and what is to be eliminated from the learning.
For example, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan makes references to “personalized learning” which sound good. But what is it, really? The removal of a student’s choices. The personalization by the government of that individual’s life path. It starts with “differentiated diplomas” which call students, to use politically insensitive words, “dumb” “mediocre” and “smart.” These “differentiated diplomas” will prepare students for differentiated careers– all determined by standardized, high stakes tests and by people who are NOT the student himself/herself. Nor the parents. (All “for the good of the collective”.) I’m not buying it. Are you?
Career Academies and “College and Career Readiness*” are the new buzzwords. The concepts sound good on the surface– to help students get diagnosed with skills and trained for specific career skills as early as possible, to make a direct leap into a career.
But think: what if the student later hates that career and has traded his/her well-rounded, meaningful, whole education for a narrow skill set? Then where is he/she going to be? Trained to be a plumber, but with desires to be a nurse? Trained to be a rocket scientist, but with desires to cook? Trained to pick up trash, but with desires to practice law? It’s not good.
The educational trend seems to benefit “society” far more than it benefits the individual. But that’s what socialists are all about. Communists, too. The individual never matters; his or her desires are not significant to The Collective.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan explains it this way:
” My goal today is to share an outline of our plan to transform career and technical education, or CTE. Then, with that as context, I’ll discuss our plans to implement the President’s proposed $1 billion investment in career academies…
…First, a career academy is a secondary school program that is organized as a small learning community or a school within a school to provide a supportive, personalized learning environment.
Second, the academy begins by the 9th grade.
Third, the academy would need to provide a combined academic and technical curriculum that includes CTE courses for which students may receive academic credit. The academy’s curriculum would be organized around a career theme—like the themes identified by NAF: Finance, Hospitality & Tourism, Information Technology, Health Sciences, or Engineering—and aligned with the State’s college-and career-ready standards*.
Fourth, a career academy provides work-based learning and career exploration activities through partnerships with local employers.
And, fifth and finally, the academy’s program articulates and reflects the entrance requirements of postsecondary education programs—to ensure that students graduate from high school ready to pursue a degree or credential.
* By the way, Duncan’s allusion to “the State’s college-and-career-ready standards” does not mean what you think it means. It’s just common core. “College and Career Readiness” is like a code term.
NO INDIVIDUAL STATE WHO IS UNDER THE COMMON CORE YOKE CAN MAKE CHANGES NOR DEFINE COLLEGE AND CAREER READY DIFFERENTLY FROM ANY OTHER STATE.
So, according to Duncan/Obama, being ready for college and career doesn’t mean being ready for college and career. Too forthright.
The term means being yoked to a substandard set of educational standards that are the same, same, same and that are non-negotiable and that are NGA/CCSSO copyrighted, with a 15% federally mandated cap on top of that copyright. (See the definition on the Ed.gov site here: http://www.ed.gov/race-top/district-competition/definitions)
Periodically we get an email asking how Common Core is going to affect homeschoolers. Up till now we’ve only been able to point out things like how the ACT test is being aligned with Common Core, thus signaling that everyone (including homeschoolers) will need to teach to Common Core standards in order to pass a major college entrance exam.
Now, however, the tie-ins are getting more direct.
When Utah signed onto the Race to the Top grant, we also agreed to adopt a P20 database tracking system to do in-depth tracking of our children. Utah selected and announced its partner early this year and called it, significantly, the P20w database. This database is meant to track children from preschool through college and into the workforce.
The objective is the old school-to-work agenda which was run out of town when it surfaced in the past. It’s simply central planning for society through identifying, labeling, and steering children in certain directions. And now we can see the plan is to bring homeschoolers into the tracking system.
The good folks that run the ROPE (Restore Oklahoma Public Education) group have found a presentation online that was from the 2011 CCSSO National Conference. CCSSO is the Council of Chief State Superintendents Organization, which is the partner organization with the National Governor’s Association which claim to have developed Common Core together. The group doing this presentation is HumRRO (Human Resources Research Organization).
In this presentation, they now admit that they want to bring homeschoolers into this database, I’m sure for research purposes, of course…
Their presentation is here and slide 35 specifically mentions homeschoolers.
Recommendations from the P-20 Data Coordinating Council
Further recommendations for the P-20 Data System:
Incorporate teacher preparation attributes (e.g.,certification type, school of origin) into the data system.
Incorporate analysis and business management tools into the system
Implement greater interactive reporting capabilities to respond to a range of stakeholders.
Include student groups not now included (e.g.,home-schooled) in the data system
Complete basic policies such as data use/access protocols, data quality standards and governance
It’s not hard to understand that once you have data, you want to have ways to slice and dice it, and do further analysis. They are definitely headed in this direction. The more information which they may find fascinating about your children, the more this database will expand because it will have everything on children from around the nation.
Just this one slide above opens up new questions about who the “range of stakeholders” will be? What greater capabilities does this need? When will private schoolers be brought into the database through force of government?
The excellent documentation gathered by ROPE on privacy issues can be read here.
Pages 8 & 9 of their document show some of the data points that are to be gathered on children including birthmark, blood type, dental prosthetics, weight, weight at birth, and voting status. These screenshots show what the site used to display, but it has been whitewashed now to not display these factors. A while back I reported on this database intrusion showing they also had tracking factors such as what time your child gets on the bus, compulsory attendance status, religious consideration, and the number of decayed teeth your child has.
The term workforce is defined as consisting of the workers engaged in a specific activity, business or industry or the number of workers who areavailable to be assigned to any purposeas in a nation’s workforce.
The public workforce system is a network of federal, state, and local offices that function to support economic expansion and facilitate the development United States workforce. The system is designed to create partnership with employers, educators, and community leaders in order to foster economic development and high-growth opportunities in regional economies so that businesses find qualified workers to meet their present and future workforce needs. (Emphasis added)
I think Homeschoolers should be lobbying state legislators to offer them some protections from any intrusion into tracking anything about what their children are learning. For that matter, I think it would be a good thing to back out of the P20w database tracking altogether. Why incur the expenses of tracking our children in this way when we didn’t get any federal funds anyway? Our children are tracked plenty at the local level. There’s no need to participate in a system that facilitates national collection of our children’s personally identifiable information.
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.
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.
Its summary states: “In order to realize the world’s commitment to ensuring education for all by 2015, important innovations and reforms will be needed in the governance and financing of global education. In 2008, Presidential Candidate Barack Obama committed to making sure that every child has the chance to learn by creating a Global Fund for Education. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has recently called for a new architecture of global cooperation… A new Global Fund for Education… must be capable of mobilizing the approximately $7 billion annually still needed to achieve education for all, while holding all stakeholders accountablefor achieving results with these resources. None of these objectives will be achieved without a major rethinking of the global education architecture and an evolution of current mechanisms for financing education… Achieving these two Millennium Development Goals, and the broader Education for All Goals… will require more capable international institutions.”
I have to ask three questions as I read this:
Since when do nations collectively finance global education?
Since when has the whole world agreed onwhat should be taught to the whole world?
Since when is the United States of America reduced to “accountable stakeholder” status over its own educational and financial decision making?
So Obama created a global education fund, using U.S. taxpayer money. I don’t remember voting on this.
And Hilary Clinton is misusing the word “inclusiveness” to now mean “no more independent sovereignty for anyone.” Meanwhile, there’s a United Nations/UNESCO program called “Education For All” that involves the same ideas and the very same key people as “Common Core”. And there’s also an “Education, Public Awareness and Training” chapter in the U.N.’s Agenda 21 goals.
Both the U.N.’s educational goals (via UNESCO and “Education for All” ) and “Common Core” do sound very appealing on the surface. Each seeks to educate by teaching the exact same standards to all children (and adults) on a national or a global scale. But both supercede local control over what is taught to students, and both dismiss the validity and importance of the U.S. Constitution implicitly.
Both UNESCO’s educational goals and Common Core are, coincidentally, heavily funded by activist and philanthropist Bill Gates, one of the wealthiest billionaires on earth. http://www.eagleforum.org/links/UNESCO-MS.pdf ( Link to Gates’ Microsoft/Unesco partnership)
Gates gave the Common Core developer/copyright holders, NGA/CCSSO, about $25 million dollars to promote his special interest, Common Core. (See CCSSO: 2009–$9,961,842, 2009– $3,185,750, 2010–$743,331, 2011–$9,388,911 ; NGA Center: 2008–$2,259,780 at http://www.keepeducationlocal.com .
The “Education For All” developer is UNESCO, a branch of the United Nations. Education For All’s key document is called “The Dakar Framework for Action: Education For All: Meeting Our Collective Commitments.” Read the full text here: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001211/121147e.pdf
At this link, you can learn about how Education For All works:
In a nutshell: “Prior to the reform of the global EFA coordination architecture in 2011-2012, the Education for All High-Level Group brought together high-level representatives from national governments, development agencies, UN agencies, civil society and the private sector. Its role was to generate political momentum and mobilize financial, technical and political support towards the achievement of the EFA goals and the education-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). From 2001-2011 the High-Level Group met annually.”
The six goals of “Education For All” are claimed to be internationally agreed-upon. But since much of what happens with the United Nations threatens the sovereignty of the United States and all sovereign nations, I do not recognize that these goals, or anything else for that matter, are “internationally agreed-upon.” Do you?
For everyone on earth to totally agree, we’d have to submit to a one-world government with a one-world constitution that would override any individual country’s constitution. There are some great thoughts on this subject here: http://www.keepeducationlocal.com/
But in the U.N.’s own words:
“Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment. Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and the Statement of principles for the Sustainable Management of Forests were adopted by more than 178 Governments at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janerio, Brazil, 3 to 14 June 1992. The Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) was created in December 1992 to ensure effective follow-up…” See: http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
So Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of action to be taken by everyone. We all apparently have been signed up to agree, whether we agree or not. I’m already getting the communist creeps.
But most of us haven’t even heard of Agenda 21 nor do we know anything about “sustainable development”.
On the linked Education and Awareness page of that same U.N. website, we learn:
“Education, Public Awareness and Training is the focus of Chapter 36 of Agenda 21. This is a cross-sectoral theme both relevant to the implementation of the whole of Agenda 21 and indispensable for achieving sustainable development.” http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/susdevtopics/sdt_educawar.shtml
Did you get that? Education is indispensable for the U.N. to get its agenda pushed onto every citizen worldwide. They just admitted it out loud. They want a strong hand in determining what is taught worldwide.
So then we click on Chapter 36. The “indispensable” implementation tool they are describing are your children’s American public schools. Yes, really:
36.2 says they plan to “reorient” worldwide education toward sustainable development. (No discussion, no vote, no input needed on this reorientation plan, apparently.)
36.3 says: “While basic education provides the underpinning for any environmental and development education, the latter needs to be incorporated as an essential part of learning. Both formal and non-formal education are indispensable to changing people’s attitudes so that they have the capacity to assess and address their sustainable development concerns. It is also critical for achieving environmental and ethical awareness, values and attitudes, skills and behaviour consistent with sustainable development and for effective public participation in decision-making. To be effective, environment and development education should deal with the dynamics of both the physical/biological and socio-economic environment and human (which may include spiritual) development, should be integrated in all disciplines, and should employ formal and non-formal methods
The take-away?
Environmental education will be incorporated in formal education globally.
Any value or attitude held by anyone globally that stands independent to that of the United Nations’ definition of “sustainable education” must change. Current attitudes are unacceptable.
Environmental education will be belief-and-spirituality based.
Environmental education will be integrated into all disciplines, not just science.
The stated objectives (36.4) include endorsing “Education for All,” achieving “environmental and development awareness in all sectors of society on a world-wide scale as soon as possible”; and to achieve the accessibility of environmental and development education, linked to social education, from primary school age through adulthood to all groups of people; and to promote integration of environment concepts, including demography, in all educational programmes, and “giving special emphasis to the further training of decision makers at all levels.”
Does that not sound like quite an agenda?
But it gets worse.
Under “Activities,” we find:
“Governments should strive to update or prepare strategies aimed at integrating environment and development as a cross-cutting issue into education at all levels within the next three years. This should be done in cooperation with all sectors of society…. A thorough review of curricula should be undertaken to ensure a multidisciplinary approach, with environment and development issues and their socio-cultural and demographic aspects and linkages.”
So, if a country like the USA, for example, has a Constitution and G.E.P.A. laws that states that its federal government has absolutely no legal right to supervise or direct state school systems, then what? How can it be done?
I’ll tell you how! Just get a U.S. President to circumvent Congress and the states’ right to educate. Just use nongovernmental groups like the NGA/CCSSO to write and copyright new national educational standards. Just pay groups to do what you are not legally authorized to do. Just create “Race to the Top” grants. Just promote a socialist education system but call it a state-led Common Core. Then get billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates to promote and pay for most of it.
And that is what has happened.
They go on to say how countries should pay for all the reorientation and values/attitudes changing for all people. And there’s even a media-to-museum rebranding blitz outline:
In 36.10:
“Countries… should promote a cooperative relationship with the media, popular theatre groups, and entertainment and advertising industries by initiating discussions to mobilize their experience in shaping public behaviour and consumption patterns and making wide use of their methods. Such cooperation would also increase the active public participation in the debate on the environment. UNICEF should make child-oriented material available to media as an educational tool, ensuring close cooperation between the out-of-school public information sector and the school curriculum, for the primary level. UNESCO, UNEP and universities should enrich pre-service curricula for journalists on environment and development topics;
(f) Countries, in cooperation with the scientific community, should establish ways of employing modern communication technologies for effective public outreach. National and local educational authorities and relevant United Nations agencies should expand, as appropriate, the use of audio-visual methods, especially in rural areas in mobile units, by producing television and radio programmes for developing countries, involving local participation, employing interactive multimedia methods and integrating advanced methods with folk media;
(g) Countries should promote… environmentally sound leisure and tourism activities… making suitable use of museums, heritage sites, zoos, botanical gardens, national parks…”
So, it should be pretty clear that there is a huge re-education program happening to all countries, the aim of which is to change people’s attitudes toward believing in “sustainable development” and environmental education. If it’s picking up litter, some other innocuous program, fine; spend trillions without taking a vote to make sure we all think alike. Stupid but harmless. On the other hand, what if, what IF, it’s something we DON’T all agree upon? There are hundreds of countries. Even if it were just up to China* vs. the U.S. to define “sustainable behavior” how would we ever agree? Paper or plastic? Paper wastes trees; plastic creates landfills. These “green-defining” issues are endless.
But the problem, in a nutshell, is simply: Whose version of “sustainable” do you want to re-educate everyone to believe –assuming that you can accept massive-scale propagandizing for the promotion of one single belief system, under which people didn’t get a representative vote)
*Sustainable thinking includes limiting by abortion the number of babies allowed to be born, in order to have control over population growth. The Chinese “One Child Policy” was introduced by the Chinese Government in 1979 with the intention of keeping the population within sustainable limits even in the face of natural disasters and poor harvests, and improving the quality of life for the Chinese population as a whole. Under the policy, parents who have more than one child may have their wages reduced and be denied some social services.” (BBC)
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Note from Editor: Amazingly, last week when Christel first published this article on her blog, the Chinese One-Child policy appears to have collapsed after a forced abortion story became an international headline causing embarrassment to the government for their human rights violations.
The more you study the plans and plots of Obama and of his Federal Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, the more you see the crushing trend. They crush any individuality and local independence or control over education paths or career paths. And the Constitution be damned.
Who is Sir Michael Barber and why do you need to know this person? He’s the new 
