Days ago, Utah’s legislature wisely voted against UT HB177, a bill that on first glance appeared to be good, claiming simply to teach how to prevent rape. But the bill was complex.
It have would mandated instruction to minors not only in sex refusal skills, but also in sex consent skills, for children beginning in seventh grade. That bill’s sponsors, Rep. Carol Moss and Sen. Kathleen Riebe, have not given up. Today, March 1, 2021, Senator Riebe is attempting to rush a very similar bill, UT SB229.
The bills differ only slightly.
HB177 would have started in grade 7 while SB229 would start in grade 8. SB229 adds teaching sex consent and sex refusal to children two times, and adds contraception device and method instruction. Both bills would have schools teaching children that sexual consent among children is harmless, as part of teaching them that rape is a crime and/or how to use contraceptives. Remember, Utah schools already teach students what contraception is, along with teaching reproductive anatomy, pregnancy, childbirth, etc., but SB229 adds the “how-to” element to contraceptive methods and devices.
It is unclear how schools would teach step by step contraceptive instruction without violating law that prohibits instructing minors in intricacies of erotic behavior. It is also unclear how schools would teach children that it is criminal to transmit nude photos, and it’s statutory rape to permit sexual consent between a child and an adult– yet sexual consent between minor children is supported.
The “if” phrase: “if refused by another individual” (line 40) means that the school or state will not offer protection to a child experiencing a sexual advance, if child sexuality can be named “consensual” now.
Whether sexual advances come from adults or other children, children deserve protection and not the confusion that the teaching of child-authorized sexual consent will create. Yet SB229 also says schools will teach minors they may (or may not) choose to “refuse sexual advances by a minor or adult at any time, regardless of whether the student has previously expressed acceptance of a sexual advance by the minor or adult” (line 38-39).
That type of instruction is both confusing and dangerous.
Line 58 adds “healthy relationships, including recognizing sexual assault” to sex ed for Utah schools. What does that phrase “healthy relationships” mean, and who gets to define it?
Since the bill has zero dollars appropriated for its implementation, it’s fair to assume that schools will use free “curriculum” that exists. The nation’s largest free provider of sex education, Planned Parenthood, defines and portrays healthy relationships in the following video (do not show this to children).
This “instruction” would not be mandated by SB229 –but it would not be prohibited, either. And since SB229 does not provide funding for a Utah-specific way to teach consent and refusal, it is fair to assume schools would be using this and curricula like it, since it would no longer be disallowed.
Also, line 62 inexplicably removes from Utah sex education the phrase “fidelity after marriage” as a method for preventing infectious diseases. WHY?
Children deserve to be protected. This bill will result in children being sexualized and indoctrinated by groups including SIECUS and Planned Parenthood, rather than simply teaching children the truth about reproduction and sex. It’s not sex ed, but sexuality ed. There is a difference.
Please, tell your senators and representatives to vote NO on SB229.
It’s that time of year again: time to print out, sign, and deliver the opt out forms that allow your child to skip the tests that don’t bless their lives.
The test is called RISE instead of SAGE now, in Utah, but it’s common core/ Fed-Ed rebranding.
Why opt out?
The whole point of school is to teach children, not to judge or micromanage them; to bless, and not to stress. The government-centered tests are stressful and waste time and money. They don’t enrich children. Teachers don’t even get to see them, and neither do parents. They only enrich testing companies. That’s a business motive, not a child-centered motive.
Several years ago, I explained more in a “Ten Reasons to Opt Out” post. That link is here.
Why is there a single “yea” vote for HB118? I really want to know.
It can’t be about funding. Zero federal dollars are on the line if HB118 passes, or not. This was clarified by Superintendent Dickson in a recent state school board meeting. You can see it at minute 17:00-20:00 here:
It can’t be about improving the academic experience of a child. Not a single child in our state is benefited by the test. The SAGE/RISE is not the type of test that a child can learn from, or that a teacher can gain insight from– no one gets to see it. Despite not benefiting kids, HB118 will raise the test to an extremely important status since taking the test may result in parties, prizes, and easy GRADES. Less class time will be spent on education that’s not in the narrow band of tested skills. Teachers won’t be teaching as much, because they will have to teach directly to the test. That cheats students. It creates a terrible temptation for students who care about their grades, to skip new learning and substitute test-taking. I taught high school English for many years, and required students to write MLA-formatted research papers— following having read, researched, drafted, revised, and learned to create citations and works cited pages. How can a SAGE/RISE test replace that? Students are human beings– they are not going to choose to do rigorous classwork if they can easily get a high grade for just taking a test.
It can’t be about improving the mental health of a child. Countries that raise the stakes of testing see increased youth unwellness and suicide. Doing poorly on the high stakes test, or fearing that one might do poorly, increases test anxiety and youth depression. This understanding alone should make our senate unanimously vote NO on HB118.
It can’t be about an honest belief that this test is a fair measure. Last year, this legislature passed HB201 which made illegal the use of the SAGE test for grading teachers, so why now, do some in the legislature believe the test should be used to grade children?? This especially makes no sense, considering the fact that SAGE test producer AIR explained, “When you’re using a test for accountability, you’re not really using it to measure the kid. You’re using it to measure the school, or the teacher, or the district.” VP of AIR, Jon Cohen. See min. 3:07 at https://vimeo.com/80927107
It can’t be about accountability. Some proponents of the bill cite “accountability” as the reason they’re voting for it. Accountability for whom? AIR said it’s not a valid measure for a student. HB201 said it’s not a valid measure for a teacher. Yet HB118 seeks to use SAGE/RISE to measure a student and to pass out grades based on the test. The test isn’t accountable to Utahns. Students and teachers and parents don’t get to see what questions were missed; so it is of no benefit to those for whom education exists.
PLEASE vote no on HB118.
Sincerely,
Christel Swasey
Daniel Thatcher <dthatcher@le.utah.gov>,
David Hinkins <dhinkins@le.utah.gov>,
Evan Vickers <evickers@le.utah.gov>,
Jerry Stevenson <jwstevenson@le.utah.gov>,
Karen Mayne <kmayne@le.utah.gov>,
Ralph Okerlund <rokerlund@le.utah.gov>,
“amillner@le.utah.gov” <amillner@le.utah.gov>,
“dipson@le.utah.gov” <dipson@le.utah.gov>,
“dkitchen@le.utah.gov” <dkitchen@le.utah.gov>,
“jiwamoto@le.utah.gov” <jiwamoto@le.utah.gov>,
“kriebe@le.utah.gov” <kriebe@le.utah.gov>,
“rwinterton@le.utah.gov” <rwinterton@le.utah.gov>,
“ssandall@le.utah.gov” <ssandall@le.utah.gov>
Please vote no on HB118. The bill contains five big red flags.
1. The first one is a pawn-off, trading real educational experiences and fair grading, for participation in the big standardized test and an easy grade. That’s a shady trade.
See line 13: “allows at teacher to use a student’s score on certain assessments to improve a student’s academic grade”.
2. The second big red flag: equating test-taking for actual student competency toward college in a way that can allow students to never learn certain things (that aren’t on the federally aligned test).
Line 83 says that a teacher may use a student’s score on the high school test to improve the students academic grade OR to “demonstrate a student’s competency within a relevant course.”
Lines 142-145 say: “LEA shall allow a student to earn course credit toward high school graduation without completing a course in school by a) testing out of the course; or b) demonstrating competency in course standards.”
Since only 15 people in the state may view the test, most students, teachers, legislators and parents are blocked from seeing the test. How would academic competency and equality be verified? It won’t be. It’s false to say, without viewing and analyzing the two things being compared, that one thing (the standardized test) matches another (Utah-defined, teacher-defined, academic competency). Moreover, wherever Utah standards and teachers have tried to teach above and beyond Common Core standards, those differences may go away, since they can’t benefit, students taking these tests for their grades.
3. The third big red flag is the twisting of a good principle: parental accomodations for students’ best interests. The bill cites the good Utah code that “a student’s parent or guardian is the primary person responsible for the education of the student, and the state is in a secondary and supportive role… has the right to reasonable academic accommodations”.
But it’s out of context. Test taking pressure has nothing to do with empowering parents. It is not a “reasonable academic accommodation” (regardless of whether it’s a parent’s or a teacher’s idea) to redefine what quality academics are; to trade teacher-created, meaningful and robust coursework for a passing score on a big, nationally standardized test. It simply is not reasonable.
I taught English for many years, in high schools and at Utah Valley University. I can imagine how many students would rather gamble on a big standardized test, than actually read novels, and actually write MLA-formatted essays and reports. This bill has the power to make a joke of legitimate educational expectations of teachers. Talk about dumbing down effects!
4. Fourth, there is the issue of opting out rights. Pressuring (or tempting) students and parents to quit opting out, incentivizing that temptation with the lure of an easier grade, will surely have the bill’s desired impact of reducing opt outs and will put the state in greater compliance with federal wishes– but the question is, at what cost ? Do we really want Utah to pressure and coerce people into opting in to something they have determined isn’t a valid measure of their child?
5. Fifth, the bill will alter Utah’s education culture, making it more and more test-centric. That move that has been shown in many places, outside the US and inside it, to drive up anxiety, depression, and suicide rates.
At what cost are we incentivizing and valuing the SAGE/RISE Common Core tests? How many students will opt in, and lose the opportunity to be held accountable for real academic experiences? How many parents and students will get into a family fight because the student wants the easier grade, but the parent does not feel right about opting in to the test?
How will watching HB 118 pass; seeing Utah bullying its own people into taking this test, then affect the federal confidence level that it can continue to enforce unconstitutional, federally-orginated change in Utah education? How many will suffer anguish due to the increasing high-stakes test pressure? How many suicides will be partially or completely resultant from the change that makes Utah increasingly test-centric in deciding how it values students?
Please vote no on HB 118.
Sincerely,
Christel Swasey
Utah Senators:
Wayne Harper ,
Deidre Henderson ,
kcullimore@le.utah.gov,
lfillmore@le.utah.gov,
Daniel McCay ,
Daniel Thatcher ,
Jacob Anderegg ,
dhemmert@le.utah.gov,
Keith Grover ,
Curt Bramble ,
ssandall@le.utah.gov,
amillner@le.utah.gov,
Allen Christensen ,
gbuxton@le.utah.gov,
Jerry Stevenson ,
Stuart Adams ,
Todd Weiler ,
Ralph Okerlund ,
Lyle Hillyard ,
rwinterton@le.utah.gov,
David Hinkins ,
Evan Vickers ,
dipson@le.utah.gov
– – – – – – –
This week, KUTV produced a short t.v. article about HB 118. I happened to be interviewed as a mom in favor of retaining the right to opt out of the high stakes tests. Here is that link.
The title of KUTV’s article is false. There is no risk of a 90 million dollar loss in funding if we don’t pass HB 118.
Alisa Ellis, a state school board representative, showed that the notion is false, and that Utah is at no risk of losing federal funding. She wrote:
HB118 is sweeping through the legislative session based on a false premise.
There is a growing misconception that we need to incentivize students to take the end of year tests or we are at risk of losing federal $$. This is completely false.
Please take a moment and watch our board meeting from last October.
It would be well worth your time to watch the entire segment but if you don’t have time here are a couple of places that are critical.
Beginning at 6:25-
As our opt-out rate increases above the 95% participation threshold, the federal government requires that we change our calculation. In our board meeting the Superintendent estimates about 5 schools would be affected in the state.
We would look at the lowest 5% performing schools in the state and then the change in calculation would only occur if any of those schools had more than 5% opt out.
It’s also important to note that we aren’t even required to send the calculations to the Federal government. We simply have to run a report and post it for public consumption.
Beginning at 17:50 –
I asked if our opt out numbers continue to climb if we are at risk for losing federal $$$. The answer was no.
Please reach out to the Senate Education committee and ask them to vote no on HB118.
Senator Henderson – dhenderson@le.utah.gov Senator Davis – gdavis@le.utah.gov Senator Fillmore – lfillmore@le.utah.gov Senator Grover – keithgrover@le.utah.gov Senator Hillyard – lhillyard@le.utah.gov Senator Millner – amillner@le.utah.gov Senator Reibe – kriebe@le.utah.gov Senator Stevenson – jwstevenson@le.utah.gov
History itself must be holding its breath to see what happens next. H.R. 4174,Foundations of Evidence-Based Policy, a bad bill for liberty and privacy, awaits President Trump’s signature –or his veto.
I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not a data expert. I’m pretty good with reading, though.
In reading, I noticed:
The bill creates an inventory of citizens, their land, and their money. It includes indentifiable info (pii).
It is actively hostile toward, and seeks to alter, policies and laws that uphold privacy rights.
The bill allows the federal government to collect, archive and share personally identifiable information.
The bill authorizes government to break confidentiality pledges and punish citizens based on the perceived accuracy of data citizens submit.
The bill actively seeks to “convert” databases that don’t match its machine-interoperability standards.
An agent who shared/sold sensitive information from these databases might receive zero punishment.
The bill forces agencies and instrumentalities to share data with other agencies.
The bill empowers the Deep State, not allowing elections for data heads. Bureaucratic appointees only.
The bill authorizes federal agents to use private organizations and individuals to mine data.
The bill replaces informed consent with (pointless) informed public comment.
Below this video is a detailed, language-focused, page-specific, quote-laden excavation of the bill. It is more detailed than the video.
FACT #1: The bill creates an inventory of citizens, their land, and their money.
The new, federal “comprehensive data inventory” will feed into a “federal data catalog” and it’s “statistical” data includes “the whole, or relevant groups, or components within, the economy, society, or the natural environment” (page 17). What else IS there on earth, that isn’t covered under people, money, and nature itself?
An interesting spot to detect this in action is on page 19, where an exception is granted to the Energy Information Administration: “Data or information acquired by the Energy Information Administration under a pledge of confidentiality…shall not be disclosed in identifiable form” –meaning, obviously, that data acquired by agencies other than EIA –even under a pledge of confidentiality– CAN be disclosed in identifiable form!
FACT #2: It is actively hostile to laws that uphold individual or local privacy rights.
The bill does not clearly forbid ANY type of data sharing, nor does it forbid anyone from at least requesting sensitive data access– and the bill treats privacy statues or policies as obstacles.
See page 2: “evidence-building plan… shall contain… a list of any challenges to developing evidence… including any statutory or other restrictions“. See page 22: “…Statutory constraints limit the ability of these agencies to share data...” So state privacy laws are limiting the federal ability to share data? This reminds me of The Princess Bride movie. It’s Prince Humperdink (this bill) trying to steal Princess Buttercup (students’ data) from Vizzini (state SLDS databases) “You’re trying to kidnap what I’ve rightfully stolen.”
In the bill, neither the term nor the concept of “privacy rights” is ever mentioned. Agencies are advised that the motivation for letting the public think agencies honor “pledges of confidentiality” is that not doing so will affect data quality: “Declining trust of the public in the protection of information provided under a pledge of confidentiality… adversely affects both the accuracy and completeness of statistical analyses.”
FACT #3: The bill allows the federal government to collect and archive and share personally identifiable information.
The bill redefines many terms so that the words don’t really work the way you might think that word would work. This reminds me of The Princess Bride, too.
The bill doesn’t overtly lie, so much as it assumes you don’t know what it’s talking about, or that you won’t notice its fancy footwork.
The bill defines a “nonstatistical purpose” as “affecting the rights, privileges or benefits ofa particular identifiable respondent“. In contrast, the bill defines “statistical purpose” as “analysis…without identifying the individuals”. However it’s not actually a contrast: in addition to “statistical purpose” it also defines “statistical ACTIVITIES” –as “components within the economy, society or the natural environment”. Notice that since statistical activities can be a “component within” society, it can be information about one person. which sure sounds like individuals are included. So both nonstatistical purposes and statistical activities in this bill do include personal information.
Also, the bill defines “evidence” as:“information produced as a result of statistical activities conducted for a statistical purpose.” Note that the word “information” is adjective-free. It didn’t say that evidence is only aggregated data, statistical-purposed data. It’s anything-goes, collected information, collected while aiming to find statistical-purpose data. So if, in the process of developing methods or resources (or anything, anything– they also mention sampling frames and models and other activities) the researcher or bureaucrat happen sto stumble upon some unrelated information, well, that’s evidence. Evidence is any information gotten as a result of activities about “components” within society, or the economy, or nature.
FACT #4:The bill authorizes the government to punish citizens based on the accuracy level of the data they submit.
The bill reveals that its agents plan to break confidentiality when citizens or organizations are accused of submitting false information (whatever that really means). Such citizens will be punished in two ways: first, government pledges of confidentiality will be broken and the person or organization’s identifiable information will be used; second, the person or organization will be prosecuted by law enforcement. Page 20 says, “information collected…under a pledge of confidentiality may be provided…to a law enforcement agency for the prosecution of submissions… of false statistical information under statutes that authorize criminal penalties or civil penalties”.
Who gets to define “false”? Who will determine whether the information was really false? Who ensures that information was really submitted by the very person being punished? How does the government return confidentiality to the person if the accusation proves to be mistaken?
FACT #5: The bill actively seeks to “convert” databases that don’t match its machine-interoperability standards.
Under “Guidance tomake data open by default” (page 7) Agencies are advised to convert data that are not machine-readable: “ensure that any public data asset of the agency is machine-readable“. Everything is to flow interoperably toward the three main designated agencies: The Bureau of the Census, The Bureau of Labor, and The Bureau of Economic Analysis. Those three form the new federal database. (P.S. The Labor and Education Departments are poised to merge.)
It’s interesting to note that in the case of public education, states gullibly accepted the millions of “free” federal grant dollars for their databases when common data standards and common core came knocking. Interoperability mandates of fed-paid, state databases set us up for this bad moment, when easily, the feds can now take what states should never have collected/shared beyond the walls of the school itself. That money came conditionally: the grant language said that state databases had to be nationally interoperable. Agencies other than state school systems that don’t already have matching data standards will see this bill’s implementers try to convert them. (Don’t do it.)
FACT #6: An agent who shared or sold sensitive information from these databases might receive zero punishment.
There is a little loophole under “Fines and Penalties”. A person who deliberately shares or sells information could either get a punishment, or NO punishment. On page 21, it says that an agent or employee who “willfully discloses the information in any manner to a person or agency not entitled to receive it, shall be guilty of a class E felony and imprisoned for NOT MORE THAN 5 years, or fined NOT MORE THAN $250,000, or both.”
Not more than five years could mean one day, or no days. Not more than $250,000 could mean a penny, or nothing at all.
FACT #7: The bill forces agencies and instrumentalities to share data with other agencies.
Page 26 says, “Presumption of accessibility for statistical agencies and units: …the head ofan agency shall… make any data asset maintained by the agency available upon request to any statistical agency or unit“. (P.S. “unit” is one, as in one department or one person.)
And when privacy is spoken of, it’s in suggestion-mode: that agencies “take into account” the “risks and restrictions related to the disclosure of personally identifiable information” and “take into account” any “security considerations“. There’s a stark contrast from the bill’s forceful “shall” language concerning data mining. “Shall” is used 116 times in the 29 page bill, but never regarding the protection of privacy rights. Instead of what should have been written– something like “agencies shall notdisclose personally identifiable information” the bill’s creators just asks agents to “take into account risks and restrictions“. That’s a toothless and blind defense. Over and over the bill gives “shall” mandates about data inventory like the one on page 10, which says that every agency head “shall to the maximum extent practicable, develop and maintain a comprehensive data inventory”.
FACT #8 The bill empowers the Deep State. It weakens representation– our Constitutional right to representative governance.
The bill mandates that the top dogs in every one of the innumerable agencies must be be appointed (page 3) from among agencies’ “existing employees” (page 29) –meaning Deep State loyal bureaucrats, untouchable by any vote. Additional authorized agents are defined as anyone with a pulse: consultants, contractors, employees of contractors, even self-employed researchers (page 16).
Because the bill redefines the word “agency” to mean “executive agency” –which means it includes not only the long list of household-knowledge executive agencies (like Department of Transportation, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, etc.) but also all the departments and all instrumentalities of each federal agency– the bill uses and empowers the deep, unelected bureaucracy known as the “Deep State”.
FACT #9: The bill authorizes the federal agents to use private organizations and individuals to help mine data.
On page 5, agencies are told to work on “interagency and private sector coordination”. On page 9, the bill asks agents to “engage the public“ and calls for “hosting challenges, competitions, events or other initiatives designed to create additional value from public data assets”.
FACT #10: The bill replaces informed consent with (pointless) informed public comment.
On page 24, it says: “Whenever a written agreement concerns data that respondents were required by law to report and the respondents were not informed that the data could be shared... the terms of such agreement shall be described in a public notice… a minimum of 60 days for public comment.” Notice that there is no consequence or change that can happen due to the public comment; no mention of the data after comment time NOT being shared.
Now, let’s just reason together about this bill, and its facts.
The title is its own clue: Foundations of Evidence-Based Policymaking. The bill is a punch in the gut to privacy and representative governance. Evidence holders (bureaucrat councils) become the new policymakers. Where does evidence-based policymaking put power? In the hands of whoever holds the evidence– not with We, the People. Think about it: policymaking will be done by those who hold the evidence, not by those from whom evidence has been collected. Citizens are demoted to being data, and decisions will be made by those unelected policymakers who frame and interpret that data. And this is a foundational bill; more of the same is coming.
Do the “algebra” inside the bill. (You have to solve for X, excavating definitions and then inserting them where the word surfaces). Doing so shows the word-gaming going on to hide the power grab of this bill, with power going away from individuals and into the hands of a huge new system, not managed by the elected representatives.
If you’ve skimmed the bill, you might be thinking: “The bill does include one privacy officer in the 23 officer federal board that will run the nationwide system, and it does mention privacy and confidentiality.”
Friends, it’s a game of words.
Only a fool would believe lip service about privacy that tinsels a bill, while it mandates so much authority and access to data for agents and agencies. Please remember three things:
There is information that MUST stay secret, for reasons of national security and for individual Constitutional privacy rights.
If this bill were legitimate, such information would not only be clearlyforbidden from being shared, but also nobody would be given power to share that information, ever.
This bill does not clearly forbid sharing of identifiable information, and, for certain agencies and agents, power exists to share it.
A person cannot serve opposing masters (Matthew 6:24) and a bill’s purposes cannot be traveling in two opposite directions at the same time. This bill wants you to believe that a bird can simultaneously fly north and south. While the “pledge of confidentiality” words pull one way, the data-sucking mandates of the bill pull the other way. The data-sharing “shall” mandates in this bill prevail, especially since the privacy-mentioning lines are weak and loop-hole-y.
They are obsessed with gathering data –at any cost.
The obsession may stem from sincere intentions about how data collecting might help society, but look at the cost. It’s federal creation of a system (using pre-existing local databases) to create one river of citizens’ data– all mined by mandate, without informed consent of the individuals being data-mined. We, the People under this bill’s full implementation will soon become prisoners of intimidation, cowering under lockstep policymaking, instead of directing our own government.
Data is not the enemy. Data can be used for good or ill. But individual rights will always matter more than efficiency.
As Jane Robbins pointed out to Congress: “The problem arises when the subjects of the research and analysis are human beings [with rights!] … The analyses contemplated by the commission go further than merely sharing discrete data points… they involve creating new information about individuals via matching data, drawing conclusions, and making predictions about those individuals, so in essence, the government would have information about a citizen even he or she doesn’t have.”
Last year, I called Trey Gowdy’s office and talked with a staffer there, trying to understand why this patriot would promote the FEPA bill. The staffer said that because veterans are suffering, due to corruption in their hospital systems and other systems, Trey Gowdy wanted to support them with more accountability by federal agencies to Congress. The problem with this angle is that Congress is just one more entity that has to request access to all this federal data. Creating this huge data mining system is not going to solve all the problems of corruption and mismanagement, and in the process of trying, it will harm liberty and privacy, or set up a system that can do so!
There’s danger in the “Evidence Based Policy” bill that the majority of Congress just passed— oddly without any hearing or any debate— which you now will either sign into law or veto. I’m praying you’ll veto; praying you’ll remember your campaign promise in New Hampshire to protect privacy rights. You said, responding to Ann Marie Banfield, “Close the loopholes… you gotta have privacy, you gotta have privacy.” The American soul agrees with your statement.
But HR4174 dramatically alters and harms privacy rights for Americans. The bill’s fact sheet should be called a deceit sheet instead; it says that no new federal database will be created, but fails to mention that by linking all federal and state agencies, by mandating tech interoperability and by making no proper protections for personally identifiable information, no provision for informed consent of pii being shared between agencies, this bill sets up a system using databases already in existence that’s as real as the new federal database that the fact sheet promises isn’t being made.
I’ve followed the public meetings of the commission that created this bill, the Commission for Evidence-based Policy (CEP). Buried inside lengthy, incredibly boring hours of audio, were some very important revelations about the purposes and goals of the CEP, and of this bill. For example, when one attendee asked CEP leadership whether linking pii (personal individual data) between agencies such as the Social Security Agency, Census office, etc., might alarm privacy minded Americans, the response was that this initiative must move patiently, and not “rip off the band-aid” from the American people. In other words, CEP leadership was potently aware that this initiative was extreme and shocking, or could be.
As Dr. Karen Effrem pointed out, a government that has access to virtually unlimited, personal data about its citizens, collected by thousands institutions— and private businesses, too— has an intimidating effect on its freeborn citizens, even if it never uses the information against them.
As privacy expert Barmak Nassirian said of this type of legislation:
“Tracking autonomous free individuals through most of their lives in the name of better information for the benefit of others may be justifiable, but its extremism should at the very least be acknowledged and addressed.”
The bill’s fact sheet neither acknowledges nor addresses its extreme disfiguring effect on American future privacy.
Why not? It’s the same reason that the bill was passed during the Christmas break, under the radar, without the light of debate or any hearing, the very reason CEP leadership said they mustn’t “rip off the bandaid” obviously.
The bill is sooo very long— of course— and written in a deliberately uninteresting way; unnecessary lengthiness and wordiness discourage anyone from reading or understanding it. Its deceptive and Swiss Cheese holed fact sheet, as well as its (unenforceable) lip service to privacy rights, has further confused congressional reps.
It’s not confusing to the CEP, which created the bill. Its goals have been crystal clear from day one. In its public meetings, CEP openly and repeatedly stated that research and data collection were of vital, almost worshipful, import.
Nothing else, not state laws, not agency policy, not even (consent of the governed) individual privacy rights—- nothing must be permitted to block the collection of data for research and evidence building, said CEP.
But I ask you, President Trump, is the value of voluminous data, even for the noblest of causes, higher than the value of liberty?
Privacy really matters —much more than we happy Americans often realize. I think about communist countries such as China, where privacy rights are gone. There, citizens are tracked and are given behavior modification reward or penalty points that impact their lives. If a citizen exercises free speech, criticizing the government, and loses points, that citizen may no longer have simple rights, like the simple right to ride the public bus. How would the Chinese government know that an individual criticized the government, and alert the bus system, without inter-agency linking such as HR4174 creates? It would not have been possible.
Now, in China, they could be collecting evidence for noble causes, too: the bank robber or rapist might be excluded from the bus along with the disgruntled freedom lover. There are always two sides to every coin.
Remember the recent IRS scandal when businesses who used terms like “patriotic” were targeted by the agency’s list called “BOLO” (Be On Look Out). They were horribly dominated and harassed by corrupt power holders at IRS.
How would similar harassments roll out under HR 4174, with increased access by “researchers” using inter-agency databases containing personal information on individuals and children— including, for example, religious, gender, political or financial standing?
Which side of this coin are you on? Is it efficiency and big data access, Big Brother style? Or is it individual rights and unhack-able, local control?
The question isn’t whether federal evidence building will end up mostly helping, or unintentionally hurting, the people it is written to govern. A more essential question is, does Washington have the right to access and grant others’ access to collected evidence on me or you— without informed consent by the individual?
Even though Americans cannot call the White House today (the answering machine says it’s due to the shutdown) we can tweet @POTUS @WhiteHouse @RealDonaldTrump —or send an email. (Scroll to the bottom of this article for easy contact links).
Please alert (plead with) President Trump to veto this already passed bill, HR 4174, that Congress passed WITHOUT a hearing, so stealthily, during the Christmas break when supposedly none of us are paying attention.
—Except that some are! Like the barking dogs who sent the alarm down the valley to alert others that Cruella DeVil was doing her evil, please join us and be a barking dog today.
If President Trump gets this message, he can veto.
Word of mouth, person to person, tends to be stronger than marketing initiatives.
Even if Trump doesn’t veto in time, Americans need to become aware quickly about what this bill will do. So bark!
HR 4174 doesn’t promote informed consent by individuals for agencies taking personally identifiable information for “sharing.” It promotes data sharing across federal agencies and between state and federal entities. HR 4174 will not make America great again! It will make America more like communist China, less like the America of liberty and justice for all, because its whole point is to collect EVIDENCE on you and me, and to create evidence-based policies, based on one-size-fits-all, federal moral values.
Do you want to give your own and your child’s and your neighbor’s privacy away —to public-private research partnerships, whom you never elected and cannot fire? Do you want all agencies to alter their databases to make them all interoperable and therefore much more in danger of huge scale hacking?!
This bill comes from the CEP (Commission for Evidence Based Policy) which formed thanks to Patty Murray, Paul Ryan and Obama a few years ago with a mission to consolidate ALL data of ALL Americans from ALL sources into one “central clearinghouse”.
Now, the fact sheet on the bill denies that it’s creating a new, central, federal data repository. This is on the surface of the words, true. But linking thousands of federal and state agencies’ data interoperably IS creating a new system that actually operates as a new federal repository— of data not given by individual informed consent. That’s flat out theft— especially in the context of the CEP’s history and stated goals (such as getting rid of protective student unit record bans).
The title of the commission, and of this bill, sounds innocuous. Evidence based policy making. But even back when the CEP was first organized, even though it came in part from Republican Paul Ryan, I was in full panic mode, and wrote about CEP’s goals and meetings, a lot. Search this blog.
Now the CEP’s privacy dismissing plot is to become US law (unless we see a veto from President Trump).
People won’t be able to ignore its effects.
When ALL data from ALL sources gets combined (for research purposes only, they promise us) into the de facto central clearinghouse, freedom can quickly go away.
The CEP wants access for officials and researchers to ALL DATA. This is not anonymous data, but Pii (Personally Identifiable Information) on children and adults from everywhere—every US school, every test and tech based report or assignment, data from every document held by public private partnerships including preschools, hospitals, foster families, the social security department, criminal justice departments, both state and federal; the IRS, the CIA, the FBI, the EPA, the TSA, student loans, colleges, universities, including private corporations in public private partnerships, and much much more. When personal data is accessible to a “researcher” or bureaucrat, whether a legitimate policy maker or a nefarious hack, without YOUR informed consent, that’s very, very, exceptionally bad news.
Without revisiting too many historical CEP conference details —you can read those by searching CEP on this blog— just let me share one telling fact that has always stuck out in my mind…
(And yes, this is an appropriate time to be freaking out and taking action)—
This I can not forget:
One of the top dogs at the CEP said— during one of the endless, hours-long conferences that CEP held— that the CEP mustn’t act too FAST in its research-based enthusiasm to take over Americans’ data. That, he said, would be “RIPPING OFF the band-aid” (of privacy) from the American people. (Too obvious! Someone might notice.)
Well, some of us do notice. President Trump, please notice!
Please tweet @POTUS @WhiteHouse @RealDonaldTrump to ask Pres. Trump to veto this bill.
The switchboard is not taking calls, but you can call your local congressional representative in-state, and send an email to Trump at www.whitehouse.gov/contact.
Please also send an email to Rep. Hice thanking him for his wisdom and courage in voting no. https://hice.house.gov/contact/
After tonight’s public hearing of the school board in Salt Lake City, I spoke with the state school board’s lawyer, and he promised to review the document, below. I told him it will show him that the new rule (which the hearing protested) is illegal, along with being harmful to a child’s education. I will keep you posted…
October 30, 2018
Dear State School Board,
As a mother with children in elementary and high schools; as an experienced, licensed teacher currently serving as a special needs aide in a public school; and on behalf of members of United States Parents Involved in Education, I request that rule R277-404-6c be stricken from Utah’s rules. The rule states: “an LEA shall reasonably accommodate a parent’s or guardian’s request to allow a student’s demonstration of proficiency on a state required assessment to fulfill a requirement in a course.”
Thoughtful reading reveals that the rule assumes for the state unprecedented authority to begin to use “a state required assessment to fulfill a requirement in a course”.
There can be no “reasonable accommodation” for violation of law, nor for manipulative education policy. The new rule attempts to legitimize an illegitimate thing;to let the state (or school) tempt students to barter away legitimate course work in exchange for participation in the state’s exercise titled the SAGE/RISE assessment.
That barter is an unheard-of deviation from good education. Never before have K-12 standardized test scores been used for exchange, in trade for legitimate education. The schools will “pay” students by releasing them from some course work and will determine– at least partially if not maximally– a student’s grade in a class if he or she engages in the SAGE/RISE exercise.
It’s bad education policy, but it also violates laws.
Under Utah law, a school “may not reward a student for taking an assessment” (https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title53G/Chapter6/53G-6-S803.html). It simply may not. Is this rule’s offering not a reward to students? The rule tantalizes students with the lure of easy grades– especially if schools weigh the SAGE/RISE as a large portion of course fulfillment. Meanwhile, students who opt out of the tests may face increasingly difficult class work, if schools try to strong-arm them to take SAGE/RISE, which some schools will, faced with the threat of opt outs lowering the school’s’ test-based school-grade.
Under Utah law, a school “shall consider multiple academic data points when determining an accommodation”. (https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title53G/Chapter6/53G-6-S803.html). Even though this rule exalts SAGE/RISE, setting a parturient exchange rate that equates strenuous coursework with government-test taking; still, the SAGE/RISE is what it was designed to be– an attempt to measure schools, not students. It never claimed to be a replacement for individuals’ learning experiences. The test’s maker, American Institutes for Research, declared that “When you are using a test for accountability, you’re not really using it to measure the kid. You are using it to measure the school, or the teacher, or the district” (VP Jon Cohen, min. 3:07). https://vimeo.com/80927107 A SAGE/RISE score is thus not a valid academic data point to consider when determining student accommodations.
Moreover, in a law called “Parental right to academic accommodations” (https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title53G/Chapter6/53G-6-S803.html) we learn that “Each accommodation shall be considered on an individual basis and no student shall be considered to a greater or lesser degree than any other student”. In contrast to that law, the new rule elevates “reasonable accommodations” only for some: those who opt in. Opting out is protected and cannot be punished. –But this rule will end up punishing vulnerable populations, including those with mental, academic or emotional disabilities, as well as minorities, who statistically suffer most from high stakes testing. They cannot legally or ethically be coerced to opt in; they will not have equal opportunity under the new rule. This is significant.
Utah law holds opting out as an important freedom: “upon written request of a student’s parent or guardian, an LEA shall excuse the student from taking a test that is administered statewide” –and the state is to remain in a “supportive role to the guardian”. Utah law requires the state to be in a supportive role, secondary to the guardian. Neither the state nor the school can usurp the authority of parental, educational best judgment. Tempting students to manipulate their parents into opting them in to tests, either for easy educational rewards or other reasons, is usurping. (How is it supportive to guardians for the state to create this scenario: “Dad, Mom, I don’t have time to write my research paper; I don’t want to read this literature for the final; the state/school says I can skip requirements if I take the SAGE/RISE test –so sign this accommodation note”?)
In addition to breaking the letter and spirit of Utah’s laws, the new rule lacks wisdom, integrity and common sense. It belittles the teaching profession, it ignores the impossibility of verifying its “exchange rate”; it ignores the lack of SAGE/RISE test validity approval; it disregards the voice of the people and responds to moneyed lobbies; and it is not well-intentioned toward children..
Consider:
The rule denigrates the judgment and value of a teacher. A teacher’s work is teaching, including customizing projects and finals and reports for students. Why is that life-work to be dismissed with a cheap trade for a SAGE/RISE score?
Evaluation is impossible, of the alignment between a course requirement and the SAGE/RISE. Teachers are never permitted to preview SAGE/RISE tests– nor read them after they are given– and that “confidentiality” means that equating (or trading) that test –for anything– is meaningless.
Few, if any, tests would be worthy to replace high-quality course requirements, but in the case of SAGE/RISE, there is an abyss of foundational abyss. SAGE, used by both Florida and Utah, went under serious scrutiny –after Utah was already using it– when Florida commissioned two independent companies to verify its validity. (This may have happened, in part, because a famous Utahn offered $100,000 to the State Office of Education if it would produce evidence that the SAGE test had been tested for validity. The State Office could produce nothing.) Then Florida, using Utah students’ scores as its guinea-pig study of SAGE validity, found pages and pages of egregious problems (see page 172-177). The independent verifiers admitted that SAGE demonstrated “notable exceptions” to the use of “best practices”. See the full report of SAGE’s defects here: https://www.flgov.com/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/FSA_Final_Report_08312015.pdf In light of that report, does it make sense to use this test (or RISE, which is not materially different) as real currency in a trade against educational experience and work?
The rule disregards the voice of the people, who have written laws to protect the right to opt out. The rule responds instead to unelected agents and moneyed lobby groups which aim to increase Utah’s opt-in rate. The USBA lobby’s stated priority for political lobbying this year is quashing the rights of students and parents to opt out of SAGE/RISE, saying: “students… should participate in state created end-of-year assessments, and educators should be allowed to encourage and motivate students to do their best on the state exams.” http://usba.cc/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/JLCPriorities.pdf Interestingly, this board gets pressure, but no financial reward, from the federal government for increased opt-in rates. It also gets pressure from USBA to promote increased opt-in rates. But this board (and USBA) might remember that state law prohibits schools or educators from bribing (“encouraging and motivating”) students to take the SAGE/RISE tests. It is nothing but selfish for adults to bribe students –for the benefit of adults’ interests (school grading, school funding, etc.)
Rather than complying with USBA pressures, this board should prioritize truly child-centric, parent-and teacher-supportive, honest education. Let’s not enshrine the manipulation of children through acceptance of this rule. Let’s not become the school bullies that our state laws so firmly stand against. Let’s strike R277-404-6c from the books.
Your presence is requested at a special hearing this Thursday, November 1, 2018 from 5:00 to 6:30, in the Board Room at the State Office of Education, 250 E. 500 S., Salt Lake City.
Written comments may be submitted before close of business on Wednesday, October 31, 2018, here: rule.comments@schools.utah.gov
If you wish to make public comment at the hearing, in person, that request must be made before the close of business on Wednesday, Oct. 31, to lorraine.austin@schools.utah.gov
This special hearing is in response to three parent-teacher groups’s requests:
United States Parents Involved in Education
Return to Parental Rights
United Women’s Forum, Salt Lake County Chapter
Each of these groups will be speaking for ten minutes at the hearing. Other parties will be permitted to speak as time allows, with priority given to those who make the request by email on the previous day (see above).
In September, Utah’s executive branch published the “Utah State Bulletin” which contains many new rules on a host of subjects. Rule No. 43183, beginning on page 14, called R-277-404, is titled “Requirements for Assessments of Student Achievement”.
Under 6(c) the new language states that a school (aka LEA) “shall reasonably accomodate a parent’s or guardian’s request to allow a student’s demonstration of proficiency on a state required assessment to fulfilla requirementin a course.”
This language needs to be stricken from the rules. The language subtly, yet dramatically elevates the status of the SAGE/RISE/Common Core tests, without merit, without valid reason, and with unethical, damaging future effects.
Now, unless this rule’s language is stricken from the rules, here’s the new opt out scenario: any requirement in a course could potentially be skipped, if a school decides to allow a SAGE/RISE/CommonCore test score to replace it, with parental approval. So, the student who used to be opted out of the government test by his or her parent, will now be strongly tempted to persuade his or her parent to opt in. “I don’t have time/don’t want to write my final paper. I didn’t have time/don’t want to read the literature; the school says I can skip this requirement if I take the SAGE/RISE/CommonCore test and if you sign this form.” This may drive a wedge between a student and parent. It can create a wedge between a student and hard course requirements. It can damage a teacher’s professional judgment and his or her course-designing value.
If SAGE/RISE/CommonCore tests weren’t controversial, if they weren’t secretive, so that a teacher could actually correlate a course with this test, to see if it actually measured the thing that the new rule language implies that this test can adequately replace, that might almost make sense.
But the tests remain controversial, and they are secretive, and they cannot be correlated with the course offerings of any given class by virtue of that secrecy.
I taught high school English and English at UVU, for a combined total of about 9 years. (I have also taught third grade.) As an English teacher, I imagine how this rule would play out. Think about it.
Good teachers tend to assign challenging, classic literature to be read, and challenging essays and reports to be written. Often, final exams and writing assignments feel like burdens to students, but they are, in fact, blessings. (How else will students know how to research, draft, write and edit a well-referenced, fully cited, MLA-formatted paper at the end of the class? Not from a government screen-based test.) And would any student need to really know the literature to pass a government/CommonCore test? No. A student can just read little snippets on the test and bubble in the multiple-guess responses.
Students will not grow from burdens they can skip. Do we really want to put into state law the option to “get your parents to request that the government test will fulfill the essay writing/literature final/ other requirement of the class” ?
The executive for Utah’s SAGE test (AIR VP Jon Cohen) stated that “when you’re using a test for accountability, you’re not really using it to measure the kid, you are using it to measure the school, or the teacher, or the district.” 3:07 in the video clip:
Please consider making time in your day to show up, or at least to send in written comment on this issue.
Rule 277-404 6c might seem like small, barely significant language, but its effects may prove to be huge. Besides seeming seriously unethical, implicitly encouraging students to beg their way into an opt-in to Common Core-aligned testing, the effects may be very long-lasting and damaging to an individual child’s education.
Educational freedom needs defending. Children need defending. Parental rights need defending.
As its new legislative priority, the USBA lobby has set this bullying doozy: forcing all students to take the Common Core tests and getting rid of the parental legal power to opt a child out of taking the tests, for any reason.
The Lehi Free Press reported that USBA passed a motion: “…every student that receives the benefit of state-funded education should participate in state created end-of-year assessments…” While students are taught not to bully others, the state may set the example of bullying both students and parents with this new priority.
Meanwhile, the state is also trying to convince parents and teachers that the much-hated Common Core SAGE tests are gone, so we should have no reason to opt out; trust the new Common Core RISE tests, they say.
This USOE video promoting Utah’s new, Common Core RISE test, which will replace Utah’s Common Core SAGE test for most grades, can do nothing to appease unhappy parents and teachers, because RISE is so similar to SAGE. The film praises the things it shared in common with the SAGE test. And that is like praising the rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Watching the promo film, I felt sad as lovely teachers, with beautiful things to say, each avoided speaking directly about the dark issues of the Common Core tests. The issues with SAGE testing that caused about 10% of all Utah parents to opt their children out of the tests, are STILL THERE in the test called RISE.
If you watch the film to the end and are still wondering, “What specifically are these interviewees praising? And what’s improved with RISE over SAGE?!” — just go to the Utah State Office of Education’s “Frequently Asked Questions” link. It confirms that there’s no real difference, despite what the film implies.
Wendy Hart of Utah’s largest school district, Alpine District, has said of RISE, “It’s like saying that the city got a new library– because they replaced the catalog software. But the building, the books and the patrons are the same.”
State Board members, local board members, and Utah teachers who oppose RISE (as they opposed SAGE) were of course not invited to participate in the filming of this taxpayer funded, RISE-promo film.
The facts are that as with SAGE, with RISE: parents are still not in the loop, the tests are still secretive, the tests are still not local, are not coming from teachers of these students; the tests are still founded on controversial Common Core standards, not local charter standards or Utah-built standards, and the tests are still collecting academic and nonacademic data to share with corporate, federal and state entities (not just with the teachers, as the film implies). https://www.schools.utah.gov/file/04be9c35-71ea-41e2-8a78-2dc39195ad6f
The initiative to try to get Utahns to embrace RISE illustrates the new bullying hierarchy: the federal government is strong-arming the state government via ESSA, and so the state now has decided to strong-arm parents, asking them to strong-arm the students.
The RISE test promo-film is step one toward forcing the kids. But the story really began with federal ESSA. For backstory, read Utah State School Board member Michelle Boulter’s article at her campaign website, and Autumn Cook’s article published by The Federalist. The Federalist article by Autumn Cook details the federal mandating drive for tests, that may soon quash Utah’s rights to opt children out of tests for any reason. She raises many interesting questions, including this one: “Utah’s hightest opt-out rates occur among economically advantaged, non-minority student populations with highly involved parents… so will this agreement direct Title 1 money away from schools with higher financial needs and toward well-to-do schools with high opt out rates? And what form with federal remediation of non-compliant local schools take?”
At stake are the following freedoms: academic freedom within Utah schools; the freedom for a parent to opt a student out of testing– for any reason; freedom for a school to follow its own, foundational education charter (rather than veering toward new, test-centric curriculum– to avoid being labeled a failing school) the freedom for a school not to pressure students and parents to take Common Core tests, the freedom for schools to actually be different from one another; the freedom for parents or elected representatives, not the federal government, to determine which schools “need” remediation.
Please write or call your school boards, state board members (at Board@schools.utah.gov) and legislators: https://le.utah.gov
Tell them that you expect them to protect children from bullying at any level, and that you expect them to defend academic freedom, school freedom, parental rights, and student’s rights.
When federal ESSA passed in 2015, it claimed veto power for the federal education department– over every state’s educational plan. Utah humbly asked the feds for a waiver, so that Utah would remain free to opt out of federally promoted tests. (Until this time, Utahns were unquestionably protected by state law that claims primary authority for parents, with schools/state in a supporting role.) The federal department said no to Utah’s waiver request.
So, state school board and legislators are in a pickle: will they honor state law and protect parental rights, or honor federal ESSA’s unconstitutional veto power, and force all parents to force all children to take Common Core tests?
The state school board is divided on this question. –That’s interesting, since the Utah board was not even permitted by the state superintendent to vote on our new plan –which the federal government has now vetoed.
“…In short, the public was not given the chance to weigh in on the ESSA plan because those who were elected to represent them were never given the chance to see or to vote on the new plan. Instead, administration and a single board member presented a plan to the federal DOEthat puts it in direct conflict with Utah State law–a state law which prohibits the violation of natural parental rights. In the end, after being denied repeatedly, Utah became fully compliant with Federal dictates, setting aside the promise of the state’s ability to forge their own educational path.
And now, thanks to further ESSA provisions, Utah must submit to federal “auditing” – an invasive probe to determine why so many parents are opting out of assessments, and thereby placing non-compliant schools in a status of “failure” or “remediation”, to be put under the purview of federal overseers.
… exactly what is the paltry amount of funding Utah receives from the federal government? Unfortunately, the answer will shock and anger you: a whopping 6% of our entire educational budget for the 2017-2018 school year. Of that, the amount Utah stands to lose if it stops playing this ridiculous game of “Mother May I” is significantly less (around 2% of Utah’s educational budget).
Utah parents, we are literally selling our birthright as the natural guardians of our children for a mess of pottage – and a pathetically meager mess of pottage at that. And why is the amount so small? Because any dollar that is sent to Washington naturally shrinks as it goes through its laundered process of paying the salaries, benefits, and pensions of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats. That dollar shrinks to practically nothing before it ever comes back to the states…
…This isn’t about opting out of a test; this is about where we believe our rights come from. Either our rights come from God or man. It should be unacceptable to all Utah parents that we must ask permission of the federal government concerning our children. I urge parents to contact their state legislators requiring them to come up with that 6% – by spending less somewhere else – so we can take back our children’s education. Please contact your State Board members [Board@schools.utah.gov ] and let them know that you expect them to defend your parental rights. This is an election year and we the people hold the power.”
After reading state school board member Michelle Boulter’s letter and local Alpine District board member Wendy Hart’s comments on the subject, I wrote to the state board. Kathleen Riebe wrote back. Here is that exchange. –And here is the email if you want to write, too:Board@schools.utah.gov
Letter one:
Dear Board,
ESSA is pressuring Utah to subvert our state laws and parental rights. Please don’t do it.
I agree with state school board member Michelle Boulter, who wrote:
It’s a terrible idea to pit teachers against parents who opt out of Common core tests. Caving to federal demands that the state quash testing opt outs does that.
The problem isn’t the parents opting kids out of Common Core testing, nor can we blame teachers/schools who, fearing mislabeling due to low scores resulting from opt outs, might pressure parents to opt in.
The problem is office of education bureaucrats who mindlessly swallow unconstitutional suggestions made by the federal DOE, and who misadvise state school board members, without respect for principles of local control, telling them to nod and sign.
Listen to the wisdom of elected officials who have spoken clearly on the ESSA situation: Michelle Boulter and Wendy Hart. They point out that we can and must protect the state’s liberties as well as relationships between parents and teachers.
As an opting-out parent of children in public schools, and as a certified Utah teacher, thank you.
Christel Swasey
Pleasant Grove
Response one:
Thank you for your concern.
As a parent, teacher and a taxpayer, I appreciate that my students have an opportunity to display their knowledge and that they were taught the content required. About 90% of our families share my feelings.
Transparency and accountability are major concerns of my constituents.
USBE has worked hard to find a solution with the federal government. The board will follow the laws and work with the legislature to seek new funding to ensure the best opportunities for all our students.
Kathleen Riebe M.Ed.
State School Board Member
District 10
801-599-5753
Letter two:
Dear Kathleen,
Thank you for responding.
There are over 650,000 enrolled public school students in the state of Utah. If about 90 percent are opting to participate in Common Core testing, that leaves about 65,000 students, and 130,000 parents, who are opting out. That’s no small potatoes.
Does it feel right to you to eliminate the authority and conscience of 195,000 Utahns, especially considering the fact that Utah law places primary authority to parents, with the state/schools in a secondary, supporting role.
They’re opting out for a plethora of very valid, very important reasons. Some kids become anxious and depressed to the point of suicidal behaviors due to high-pressure testing. Some parents don’t approve of the secretive nature of the tests, and of the tests’ never having been tested or validated independently. Some parents oppose psychometric evaluation embedded in academic tests. Some parents recognize that these tests pressure schools and teachers, even against their school chartersand their professional judgment, to redefine their curriculum and teaching traditions.
I implore you to support the rights of these people and the Utah law that puts parental / family authority first in education.
Although the greedmeisters are never again going to call what they promote by the now-toxic name of Common Core, still, the march toward common-everything moves forward like a communist conveyor belt, under the radar of most people.
That common core of greed is everywhere, like a misbegotten Midas touch. And those who are devoted to children are pitted, knowingly or not, against those who are mostly devoted to the tax dollars that children represent to them, even though the stupidity of the common core is now household knowledge– even the latest Disney trailer for the new Incredibles 2 mocks the “new math for life”.
The fed-corp partnerships repeatedly do this. They take over pieces of education, pieces of what is supposed to be supervised and owned by you and me. Someday, if and when the power agendas fully align, what will freedom look like? The child or teacher who wants to have a distinct, uncommon experience, won’t be able to have it; like a small flower trying to take root where an enormous machine has been built, without soil (freedom) nor sunshine (access to whole truth) that small flower will have to give up trying to be a flower. The common everything machine is not built to recognize the presence of a flower. It is Economy First: Persons Last.
The stupidity and the danger of where we have allowed ourselves to sit is bad enough– but the worst part is that the struggle’s not over. We are mid-struggle.
We should stop –STOP– right now– handing our power away. Look at our losses, our choices:
Weallowed the federal government to define common educational data standards (CEDS) in partnership with a private club called Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).
That was a power giveup.
We took money (each state did) from the federal government, to build fed-designed “State Longitudinal Database Systems” that sucked up data about individuals in our states, and now, if the CEP gets its way, that data will, without our consent, be up for grabs to any federal researcher or federal agency or any corporate crony the feds want to “authorize” to see that data– which is data citizens don’t even have about themselves.
That was a power giveup.
We, the states, allowed the huckster David Coleman to “architect” a new education system for all math and English, despite his zero qualification for such an effort, despite its utter unconstitutionality, despite the low quality of the standards themselves.
Another power giveup.
And, right now, we are in the process in Utah of allowing the sick-joke of a set of science standards called Next Generation Science to become the rule of science education in our state, a move that will strangle academic freedom and delete much of classic science curricula, stupidly, to make room for a preponderance of propaganda and unsettled science doctrines: global warming, Darwinian evolution, and human blame for all of earth’s flaws. So, in the wings: another power giveup.
All these have been crimes of greed and negligence for which we cannot fully blame our now-overlords. We had, and still have, the freedom to walk away.
But the one crime that hasn’t fully ripened yet, the big one that churns my stomach and makes me ill, is the Common Sexuality Standards movement, truly a soul-stealing movement. CSE hides behind the respectable title of “sex education”. But it’s not education at all. Rather than teaching biological and moral facts to children, CSE aims to sexualize children, and not only to sexualize them early, but to normalize every and any sexual perversion, early. See CSE’s common sexuality standards for download here.)
If you haven’t seen the video, see it –but don’t show it to your children.
CSE / LGTB promoters know that many, maybe even most, Americans, are God-fearing, chastity-cherishing, family-focused people –whose religion can be twisted against them. So they call the practices or teachings of a devout Jew, Mormon, Baptist, or Hindu American “unkind” or “intolerant” or “old-fashioned”. They say then that inclusion of the transgender or pedophaelia agenda would be kind and tolerant, and many times they beat that American with his or her own good nature.
But it does not work with every person. Some people say to the name-callers, “I do not care what you call me; You will not force your agenda on my child.” They might even be able to say, “I have done my homework and I know who pays you to push this lie-laden agenda on me.” And lies they are. Gender is an eternal and essential characteristic of every human being.
It always seems to boil down to masses of money, and never seems to be about the well-being of children at all, whenever new education agendas are shoved down our throats. Important new research from Jennifer Bilek at the Federalist.comnames the lecturers and fat-cat investors in biomedical companies, who are teaching and funding transgender organizations and programs –for huge, huge amounts of money. J.B. Pritzker. Penny Pritzker. Jennifer Pritzker. George Soros. David T. Rubin. Martine Rothblatt. Drummond Pike. Warren and Peter Buffet. Jon Stryker. Mark Bonham. Tim Gill.
According to Bilek, it won’t end with transgender operations and transgender counseling nor with the surgical and mental meddling with children against their families’ concerns. It ends never, because proponents are grooming young people for a lifetime of expensive, never ending surgeries and expensive services. It’s making money by cultivating human self-hate, particularly body-hate. Gobs of money can be made from stirring up such hate.
Bilek writes: “Bodily diversity appears to be the core issue, not gender dysphoria; that and unmooring people from their biology via language distortions… Institutionalizing transgender ideology does just this. This ideology is being promoted as a civil rights issue by wealthy, white men with enormous influence who stand to personally benefit…
“…Rothblatt suggests we are all transhuman, that changing our bodies by removing healthy tissue and organs and ingesting cross-sex hormones over the course of a lifetime can be likened to wearing makeup, dying our hair, or getting a tattoo…
“It behooves us all,” Bilek concludes, “to look at what the real investment is in prioritizing a lifetime of anti-body medical treatments for a miniscule part of the population, building an infrastructure for them, and institutionalizing the way we perceive ourselves as human beings”.
Stopping CSE standards and the accompanying philosophies from infiltrating our curricula may help stop a disorder from growing into the enormously lucrative business that its investors hope it will become.
My hair catches on fire when I hear about more standards being shoved at the states by corporate-federal partners, because I believe that constitutional, local conscience, not federal or corporate intentions, should determine what a child’s standards should be.
To me, it’s a matter of huge consequence: whether to give away my power of finding and defining truth for a child, to then be determined by a corporate-federal partnership’s board meeting, or whether to retain that power.
But this post is written for people unlike me, those who ask, “what’s wrong with common NGSS science standards; isn’t this just a modern science update?”
I want the public to realize that the NGSS standards are not the standards to which anyone should aspire, not even for those who believe that standardizing education nationally and globally is a good idea.
Here are ten reasons to flee from the Next Generation Science Standards.
NGSS DODGES MATH
NGSS standards were rated a “C” by Fordham Institute. Fordham suggested states that are seeking science updates should check out Massachusetts’, South Carolina’s, and Washington D.C.’s superior science standards:
“NGSS aren’t the only alternative and, in the judgment of our reviewers, they aren’t nearly as strong as the best that some states developed on their own. A state with shoddy science standards should also consider replacing them with those of another state that’s done this well.”
What was Fordham’s “C” rating of NGSS based upon? Its review included these reasons:
“… Our expert team was disappointed by what they found, and didn’t find, by way of math, especially in relation to physics and chemistry…
“… Far too much essential science content was either missing entirely or merely implied.”
… There is virtually no mathematics, even at the high school level, where it is essential to the learning of physics and chemistry. Rather, the standards seem to assiduously dodge the mathematical demands inherent in the subjects covered.”
And then, this surprise:
“… Where NGSS expectations require math in order to fully understand the science content, that math goes well beyond what students would have learned in classrooms aligned to the Common Core.
2. NGSS IS COMMON CORE FOR SCIENCE — FROM THE SAME FUNDERS AND DEVELOPERS
The Next Generation Science Standards and Common Core were each birthed and funded by Achieve, Inc., with the Gates Foundation. It’s no secret: NGSS boasts of being aligned with Common Core. See Appendix A #7: “The NGSS and Common Core State Standards (English Language Arts and Mathematics) are aligned.”
Achieve, which directed the Common Core of English and math, is the developer and partner of NGSS science standards “on behalf of the lead states and other partners”. NGSS explains: “Achieve is leading the effort… Achieve coordinated the second phase of the NGSS development process”.
3. NGSS SCRAMBLES “INTEGRATES” SCIENCE
A Common Core-shared attribute of NGSS science is the integrating of science subjects.
This means dissolving distinct classes in biology, chemistry, physics, etc., as we know them today, to be replaced by conceptually-based (not math based) integrated science. At every grade level, children will be taught a watery version of these integrated subjects. This dilutes the expertise of teachers, too, who must change from teaching the richness of biology or chemistry or physics, to teaching a simplified, mostly mathless, conceptual mix of all the science subjects integrated at all grade levels.
4. NGSS THREATENS INQUIRY FOR STUDENTS
NGSS standards for sixth graders include this: “design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment”.
The assumption that minimizing human impact on the environment is always the right thing to do is unscientific. Think of all the remarkable human decisions that have blessed the earth’s environment. The assumption that humans should be monitored is, likewise, politically and academically narrow-minded.
How can students learn the scientific method, creating hypotheses and then proving or disproving theories with evidence, reason and intellectual debate– when NGSS holds assumptions and many scientific theories as already settled science? NGSS sets into concrete certain things that the scientific community has not settled. Is global warming a theory or a fact? Is Darwinian evolution one of many theories, or is it a fact? Is the idea that humans are to be blamed for the globe’s problems a settled science, or a fact? Is the theory of intelligent design (God) a scientifically mentionable, debatable question, or a settled fact?
Even though I side with intelligent design (a literal, actual God) I would not force this belief or its opposite into the science curriculum as the only allowable conversation. Scientific, political and religious freedoms demand open minded discussion and debate.
But NGSS frowns upon this.
Some who believe that NGSS is just “updating” school science say that any opposition to NGSS comes from closed-minded creation believers who want to push their religions into schools. But both Darwinian evolutionists and in Bible-based creationists should hope for freedom of thought and of scientific inquiry and debate. Otherwise, there’s no freedom nor true science at all– just dogma.
5. BELIEVE IT OR NOT, NGSS ACTUALLY OPPOSES OBJECTIVITY
In Kansas, Citizens for Objective Public Education (COPE) sued the state for adopting NGSS because of a lack of objectivity. The lawsuite wasn’t based on the idea that NGSS dismisses intelligent design (creation) –although it does– but instead, based on the idea that the NGSS promotes a religion of its own that crushes objective thought about the design and/ or evolution of the earth. So, NGSS stands accused by COPE of being its own religion (evangelizing the sustainability movement at the expense of scientific discussion)– while NGSS accuses opponents of the same thing.
Science standards should not be about Darwin vs. God. They should promote open inquiry for truth. As board member Wendy Hart of Alpine School District in Utah wrote:
“I know many believe the opposition to NGSS is purely religious. For me, it is purely scientific. Our ACT science scores are better than the NGSS states… The math associated with physics and chemistry is currently taught and applied…. I don’t think science standards should compel or repel belief one way or another. It is not our role as public educational entities to dictate belief systems for the students in our purview. True scientific inquiry does no such thing.” More here: http://wendy4asd.blogspot.com/2015/05/state-standards-burden-of-proof-rests.html.
6. NGSS PUTS A CEILING ON SCIENCE: “ASSESSMENT BOUNDARIES”
Fordham Institute noted that “… Inclusion of assessment boundaries… place an unintended but undesirable ceiling on the curriculum that students would learn at each grade level.” Why would science standards control or limit assessment boundaries? I can only guess that the standardization of tests is more important to NGSS than the power of a student to learn science.
7. NGSS OFFERS NO LEGITIMATE UPDATES
The dull, gray flavor and language and goals of the promotion of NGSS is the same as for common core. For example, “The NGSS are designed to prepare students for college, career and citizenship” and “Science concepts in NGSS build coherently from K-12“.
I think: if NGSS came up with the idea of preparing kids for college, what were classic science standards doing, then? How did our standards manage to churn out Nobel Laureate scientists and amazing U.S. astronauts, doctors and engineers? Were previous science standards an incoherent mess of scrambled eggs? Are we helpless without top-down education dictators? The truth is that this is not an update to science, but a skewing of it, to become a political tool to influence young people.
8. NGSS DELETES LEARNING
Fordham noted, as others have, that “Far too much essential science content was either missing entirely or merely implied”. NGSS literally deletes some scientific subjects, and grossly minimizes others. This is probably the most egregious, and most grimly ironic, of NGSS’s academic crimes.
What does that deletion of science look like, close up?
A sixth grade science teacher from Morgan County, Utah, Dana Wilde, wrote:
“My biggest concern with the NGSS is that key science concepts are missing… Why is matter and energy repeated throughout 6th-8th grade as almost an overkill of that subject, whereas other key science concepts are completely removed from the new standards? This is very concerning to me as a 6th grade science teacher… Virtually all the science concepts we have been teaching in 6th grade are not part of the new standards, with the exception of heat energy. The new standards are very environmentally heavy and move [away] from talking about microbes, heat, light, sound energy, space and astronomy to mostly global warming and human impacton the environment… The new proposed standards are not exciting topics for 11 and 12-year-olds, nor are students mature enough at this age to sift through all the information and misinformation that is out there about global warming (one of the performance tasks required in the new drafts). It’s not that I don’t think students should learn about these topics, it’s that I don’t believe it should be in the 6th grade curriculum… I believe the Next Generation Science Standards were not written by anyone who has spent the last 20 years in a room full of 6th graders.”
Another 5th and 6th grade science teacher from Southern Utah, who asked to remain anonymous, wrote this letter to Utah’s superintendent:
“I am doing this anonymously because of the tensions… I don’t have faith that those of us that have a different opinion will be allowed to voice our opinions without repercussions…. I love helping young people discover their potential, but these standards are stifling my ability to do just that. I will never sabotage my students’ learning for a political agenda…”
The teacher’s letter listed three examples of political sabotage in the new science standards:
“6.2.4 Ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century, 6.4.1: Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment, and 6.4.3: Construct an argument supported by evidence for how increases in human population and per-capita consumption of natural resources impact Earth’s systems. These are very odd requirements to put in a 6th grade science standards. These belong in a college level environmental debate class, not in a 6th grade classroom. I have seen the other NGSS standards for the lower grades, and they do not allow a teacher to delve deep into each concept. They require a very shallow teaching of the standards. I understand that the theory behind this is that each year will build on the previous year. That is not how younger minds work. Students need an understanding that they can take with them.”
A science and math teacher who has been compelled to teach Common Core math and NGSS science standards at Mar Vista Heights High School, at Imperial Beach, California, wrote:
“At the high school level, NGSS standards require integrated science, just like common core requires integrated math. My school tried integrated math in the 1990’s and abandoned it as a bad idea. Now, I am teaching integrated math III.
“However, science is different than math. Most math teachers have enough background in algebra, geometry and statistics to teach any level of integrated math. It is the rare science teacher who has expertise in all science domains: earth science, biology, chemistry and physics.
“NGSS writers posited that chemistry and physics principles like Newton’s laws, the gas laws, and atomic structure would be so thoroughly apprehended by 8th grade, that it would not be necessary to teach them in high school. In high school, student are to create reports and videos that explain the energy transformations behind global warming and how Darwin’s laws of evolution correctly explain the development of life.There are almost no high school chemistry or physics standards in NGSS.
“I personally believe that the existence of global warming caused by human activity (burning fossil fuels) is settled science. I also think Darwin was a gifted scientific observer, whose theory of evolution is well-founded. On the other hand, why overweight the standards with these two controversial topics? I am not saying ignore them, but they are central to these new science standards and they do not need to be.
NGSS was never pilot tested and was rushed into existence before people had a chance to vet it. Therefore, NGSS is full of errors and horribly misaligned.NGSS is another of those dreams held by a rich powerful man that has been ramrodded into existence. Luis Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM, started campaigning for these standards in 1995. In 1996, he talked the National Governors Association into making him chairman of a new non-profit named Achieve Incorporated. Achieve was charged with making his standards dream a reality… Like Gates’s Common Core, Gerstner’s NGSS is terrible education policy that came about because America’s democratic process and the principal of local control of education were sundered.”
Julie King, A PTA mom who serves on the Community Council in Utah’s Alpine School District, wrote:
“…There are holes in the NGSS. There is a lack of computer science as well as chemistry, and the lack of any human anatomy is what raises a red flag for me. Why would we completely eliminate human anatomy?
“… There is obvious bias in the standards…. Part of true science is being willing to question things and doubt. We need to look at what our focus is. When there are over 50 mentions of climate change and only one reference to electric circuits, we are overemphasizing one idea and excluding others. Am I ok with my kids learning about climate change? Absolutely! But I am not OK with my kindergartener being asked to solve global warming. The following is a kindergarten standard: Communicate solutions that will reduce the impact of humans on the land, water, air, and/or other living things in the local environment.
“…Do you know what kindergarten science should be? The five senses, weather, and the life cycle of a butterfly and ladybug. Maybe planting seeds and learning about how plants grow… With less than 3 hours a day, kindergarten should largely be about reading and learning to follow rules… not about rationing paper so that less trees are cut down.”
9. DISHONESTY: ALSO, WHAT NGSS SHOULD REALLY ADMIT
Visit NGSS’s hogwashy, vague and frankly boring website. Even just for a minute. Doesn’t it sound scienc-y and savvy? How can a math-slaying, science-erasing set of science standards look so slick?
Now visit a state office of education’s website for evidence that NGSS is being used. It’s hard to find. States know that the public is against common standards as a movement. In my state, the officials pretend we’ve no intentions of using NGSS. But it’s not really so.
The NGSS are designed to standardize U.S. students’ science learning and testing, for the convenience of unelected bureaucrats and for the financial gain of NGSS partners, also meeting the social and political goals of NGSS funders and UNESCO.
NGSS will curtail scientific debate in schools and will dismiss academic freedom of teachers, to promote the controversial, U.N.-based initiative of sustainable development, which seeks to bring about forced, global redistribution of resources by stirring up earned and unearned guilt in human beings.
NGSS is promoted under the banner of “updating science” but NGSS will mimimize the teaching of science subjects: electricity, astronomy, anatomy, chemistry, math, etc., in favor of finding enough room to focus on sustainable development programming.
To silence its critics, NGSS will call critics unfashionable, or religious, or stupid.
If you haven’t already, please watch the video that documents the promises Utah’s superintendents made to citizens that we’d never adopt common science standards.
10. NGSS REMOVES LOCAL CONTROL
Like the math and English Common Core standards, the NGSS science standards are locked up by the people who made them and are double bolted by the tests and curriculum to which they are aligned. A local, nobel prize-winning scientist or a state superintendent or a dad will have absolutely no say in what students will learn as truth when we’re all shackled to NGSS.
NGSS-based tests may label your child or your school as incompetent if he or she has freedom of thought that goes beyond NGSS “scientific” assumptions and standards.
For certain, NGSS is no friend of local control.
Maybe because of the standardization of education data standards, maybe because of the standardization of federal, unconstitutional mandates and the conditional money they come with, maybe because of the standardization of federally approved school testing, now maybe our state office of education believes that saying “no” to common science standards is too much like swimming upstream.
Maybe we don’t believe we have power anymore. Maybe we believe other people are better off deciding for us what’s best for us. But if so, we are wrong.
The U.S. Constitution is still the supreme law of this land. That means people, not bureaucrats, are to have the power over their own lives –and it means that education is to be a local, not a federal, authority.
Stand up and make your voice heard.
Just because the corporate greed and political goals of Microsoft and Pearson and the United Nations match the standardization movements of the NGSS (and of CCSS and CSE and common library standards and common art standards) it does not mean that we don’t have the power to say no to these partnerships whose gaze is on our tax dollars.
I encourage you to continue to write to her, and call. Here is the superintendent’s email address, the board’s address, and a few curriculum directors’ addresses: Sydnee.dickson@schools.utah.gov Board@schools.utah.gov Diana.suddreth@schools.utah.gov Rich.Nye@schools.utah.gov
We are compelled to use what the USOE/USSB put into place; our families are the public education consumers; we truly deserve transparency.
My letter asked: “To what degree does Utah maintain constitutional control over science education?” and “Are we using a common core for science without public consent?” Other people’s profoundly relevant letters, with deeper insights into the problems with NGSS common science, are posted below.
Perhaps this is the truth: maybe, as soon as Utah started buying common tests from American Institutes for Research (AIR) Utah might have forced itself to use the NGSS common science standards, since AIR writes tests for multiple, common core and common science-using states.
If that’s true, it’s a big a problem, because citizens and members of the legislature have been, on record, promised –by current and past superintendents –that Utah would not use common science standards.
The state office now has crossed off the part of the agenda that previously said “MOU – Various – Science assessment bank with other states” and moved it, without explanation, to the finance committee for another day. (Should we assume they are discussing paying for the common science before ok-ing it with us?)
Wendy Hart, a member of Utah’s largest school district’s school board, warned about the dangers of NGSS common science standards in a video made a few years ago, posted here. She also gave permission to post her recent letter to the state school board. (Below video.)
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January 3, 2018
Dear Finance Committee Members,
I am writing to ask two things regarding the MOU for sharing science test bank items, scheduled for tomorrow morning’s discussion.
1. Since an MOU is a formal, legally-binding document, I think it would be in the public’s best interest to view the terms of the MOU prior to discussion by the committee. I would ask that you postpone discussion on this issue until the public has had a chance to view the actual language of the MOU and to offer comment. I would suggest that board policy should dictate full disclosure of all contractual agreements prior to discussion, with proper notification.
2. I would also ask you to not rush into any adoption of the MOU until such time as the science standards are formally adopted for all testing grades, 3-11, and are shown to be compatible (or exactly the same as) those standards from the participating states.
What is tested is what is taught in the classroom. David Coleman, President of the College Board and Lead Writer of the Common Core ELA standards, has said, “Teachers will teach towards the test. There is no force strong enough on this earth to prevent this…The truth is…tests exert an enormous effect on instructional practice, direct and indirect.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePrXlPQdVDw quote is at 1:26. So, that means whatever those test items are, we will be teaching to them, regardless of what standards we may or may not yet have adopted. Adopting this MOU would be a de facto adoption of the science standards most common to the states involved in the agreement.
That said, adopting what I presume to be test bank questions from other states with common science standards (arguably NGSS) would be an end run around the statutory process of standards adoption and your purview as elected officials. I also wonder whether the parent panel would be reviewing those test bank questions as part of their charge. If not, that would be another statutory concern.
I know many believe the opposition to NGSS is purely religious. For me, it is purely scientific. Our ACT science scores are better than the NGSS states who test all their juniors (and better than the national average, as well). The math associated with physics and chemistry is currently taught and applied. Fordham’s comment is that the NGSS “seem to assiduously dodge the mathematical demands inherent in the subjects covered.” Also, integrated science is much more problematic than integrated math (and I promise you don’t want to get me started on what a nightmare integrated math is) since teachers don’t major in science, but in biology or chemistry or physics.
A full six months before the board received the grade 6-8 science draft, every school district in this state was given the opportunity to send representatives to a training at Weber State on the “new” science standards. It looked as if the adoption of the NGSS was a foregone conclusion. (And despite claims there are significant differences between SEED and NGSS, there is very little substantive difference.) After finding that out, it appeared that the public discussion and adoption was a mere formality.
This MOU signals something similar. I am not opposed to losing the debate on adopting NGSS as long as the process is done in the open, with full-disclosure, public comments, and an actual discussion of where our current science standards are lacking and how the NGSS fill that need. I may disagree, but I am willing to concede when my position is not popular, as long as it is done in a transparent, fully-informed way. I am opposed to putting the testing before the standards adoption and allowing the tail to wag the dog, as it were.
Please hold off on adopting the MOU for test bank items that may or may not fit with our current science standards, but will have the appearance of circumventing the standards adoption process outlined in state law and board rule.
As for the religious issue, I don’t think science standards should compel or repel belief one way or another. It is not our role as public educational entities to dictate belief systems for the students in our purview. True scientific inquiry does no such thing.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read and to listen. I would be happy to discuss this or any issue with you at any time.
If you will be attending the USBA conference, please make sure to say “hello.”
I know the time and energy that you put into serving us. I am extremely grateful for your dedication and sacrifice on our behalf.
Sincerely,
Wendy Hart
Highland, UT
_______________________________
Jakell Sullivan, a researcher and parent living in the same county that Wendy Hart and I share, wrote the following letter to the state board and superintendent:
______________________________
Dear Superintendent Dickson and State School Board,
Can someone answer a few questions for me? They are:
1. Is this Memorandum of Understanding something that has already been signed?
2. If so, where can citizens read it, and see what this Memorandum of Understanding is costing taxpayers?
3. If not, why is this item already in the Finance Committee?
4. Were you aware that:
On its website, American Institutes for Research (AIR) makes it appear that Utah already entered into an MOU, as of August 2016, with 9 other states–to share assessment items that support Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)?
This is interesting because Utah is supposed to have its own, unique Science Standards. AIR lists Utah’s Science Standards’ writer, Brett Moulding–who is also a Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) team lead writer–as an expert in helping them shift states into Next Generation Science Standards assessments. I note that Mr. Moulding’s organization, the Partnership for Effective Science Teaching/Learning (PESTL), received a federal grant under ESEA Title IIB (see page 5 here) and is working with 5 Utah districts to improve science teaching and learning. The National Science Teachers Association says that the 5-district collaborative supports the NGSS.
My conclusion, based on the above items, is that through AIR’s oversteps, and through federal teacher/learning grants, Utah may be ceding control of our science standards. And, that an assessments MOU with other states will ensure that reality.
I hope to hear from you about how the Board can ensure public confidence in Utah’s Science Standards and Science Assessments. Questar, Utah’s newest assessment company, was the first assessment company to meet global technology specs for interoperability of tests and test items between assessment platform vendors–as funded through Race to the Top:
This, also, appears to be an egregious overstep of state and local control over assessment content, and curriculum control, that I hope State Board members can address with each other, with legislators and the Governor’s office.
All the best, and thanks,
JaKell Sullivan
Parent – Highland, UT
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In my next blog post, I will respond to the question of “What’s wrong with NGSS common science?”
Dear Superintendent Dickson, State School Board, Diana Suddreth, Rich Nye, Governor Herbert, Tami Pyfer, and Legislators,
To what degree does Utah maintain constitutional control over science education?
I’m writing to clarify whether Utah has or has not adopted controversial, common science standards (NGSS) and whether we are using those non-approved standards in current or future tests for K-12 children, without proper vetting and fully informed public consent.
I’m trying to reconcile promises –made by multiple superintendents to the public and to the legislature, that common science standards would never happen because of political and “philosophical differences”– with the attached PDF from the board’s website. It says that a science MOU in common with other states is set to be approved this Wednesday.
Utah’s voting taxpayers strongly oppose common, nationalized standards; some because of content, and some because nationalized programs work against intellectual freedom and local control.
Anti-Common standards sentiment was powerfully illustrated in Utah’s last gubernatorial election, when Governor Herbert was booed at conventions for his promotion of Common Core, and was beaten when GOP delegates voted. He very narrowly won the final vote after changing his speeches with sudden, fervent promises to repeal the Common Core.
Those promises lacked integrity and evaporated after the election, but the illustration makes clear that Utahans want the common standards gone.
It can be alarming when superintendents make promises that common science standards will never take over here, when no vote to approve common NGSS standards has happened, and yet the public can see that someone is furtively, gradually, replacing Utah’s traditional science standards with controversial NGSS standards.
On the Board’s PDF, we see that Utah is set to approve use of a common test bank for students’ science tests. Since tests are based on standards, and since Utah’s official policy is that we have our own science standards, not the common NGSS standards, how can Utah share a test bank with many other states? Without using the common science standards that they use, or without making those states use our science standards, it doesn’t make sense.
Please clarify.
What makes sense, but won’t likely be admitted, is that the current Superintendent and her co-workers personally buy into the philosophies of the ed tech elite, inspired by the Pearson- Microsoft-Gates cartel. They admire Gates and NGSS. Unlike many of their fellow Utahns, they love the common standards, so they are using their positions of power to guide the state in the direction to which they personally subscribe, against the will and without the knowledge of the people.
Shouldn’t these moves be transparent to the public? It seems our top education officers give lip service to local control, but in actions, create the very opposite.
Students and taxpayers who value liberty and classic education standards deserve informed consent and open debate, prior to Utah’s use of any kind of additional common standards.
“Consent of the governed” is a crucial founding concept, one of the best phrases ever penned, one I hope this group will ponder before moving further away from local control.
I apologetically interrupt your Christmas and New Year’s festivity– and mine– to post this public service announcement.
Common Core science, aka national NGSS science, is poised to pass. It will be the “truth” guide for your child and mine, without input from locals, starting this Wednesday in Utah– unless many speak up, fast.
Despite years of promises by Utah superintendents, past and present, that Utah would never jump on the common science standards wagon because of the philosophical and political mindset gap, the Utah State School Board is set to approve a memorandum of understanding this coming Wednesday that will align Utah’s science test question bank with NGSS (national, common science standards: Next Generation Science Standards.)
Below is a screenshot of the consent calendar item, available at the Board website.
Also relevant is this video, where science standards were promised by superintendents and high ranking bureaucrats –in face to face public meetings held by interrogating legislators and local school board members– never to become nationalized and common in Utah classrooms. (Posted below.) It’s a powerful documentary of Utah’s science standards’ lies. Please watch it.
It’s time to contact the board and your bulldog friends in the neighborhood and in the legislature.
The superintendent and her bureaucrats will tell you that it’s old fashioned to resist common core science standards and testing; I say that scientific intellectual freedom, and my empowerment over my own children’s locally directed education, are more real than the “modernity” of just the left wing’s version of “science”.
The real question is, as it always has been, “Who gets to decide?” Whose version of reality and science is the most reliable? Even if NGSS had it right, which it doesn’t, do you want to hand over the reins of control to NGSS, any more than you wanted to hand over the reins of math and English to Common Core 1.0?
Is anyone honestly opposed to having students govern and own their own private data? Are reputable organizations openly, actively working around systems to get hold of individual students’ data?
Yes. There are so many that it’s overwhelming to learn. The biggest organizations that you can think of, both political and corporate, are either looking away from scary privacy issues, or are actively engaged in promoting the end of student data privacy for reasons either research-based or greed-based (or both).
Trendy, probably well-meaning power brokers profit hugely from data sharing –done without the informed consent of students and parents. Most of them probably aren’t thinking through what they are doing, nor of its effects on individual freedom. Many of the richest and most powerful of them (even Betsy DeVos herself) were here in Salt Lake City last week at the Global Silicon Valley convention; attendance there cost $2,795 per person, which is a clue to how exclusionary the conspiracy of greed really is and how it fears pushback from teachers and parents and lovers of liberty. That is a conspiracy of greed against local control.
I am not fighting greed. I believe in capitalism even with its greedy warts, because capitalism represents freedom.
It’s piracy that I balk at. And the student data-mining madness is absolute piracy. Parents, students and teachers were never asked for consent prior to having their data mined by the schools or the schools’ agents. In some cases, that data is already being held against them.
How can this be happening? Is it really happening? Can we comprehend it?
To make it simple, look at this notification of inspection. It seems snoopy, yet reasonable. I found it in my suitcase when I came home recently from San Francisco.
Think about it.
Did you as a student, a parent, or a teacher, ever receive a “NOTICE OF INSPECTION”?
No! Of course not. You are being given less respect than a suitcase. Children are being scrutinized for academic, social and psychological data, their data saved in State Longitudinal Database Systems and in third party corporate data systems, without informed consent and without notice. That is snoopy –and unreasonable.
“Partnershipping” education-data piracy is happening rampantly. It includes all the states who took the federal bribe and then created a student stalking system known as the State Longitudinal Database System (SLDS). The data piracy includes the U.S. Department of Education (see its EdFacts Data Exchange and its Datapalooza conferences and its official student-data partnership with private groups such as the Council of Chief State School Officers and National Governors Association.) The data piracy party includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce –and the United Nations. (See the U.N. Data Revolution) The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is in. (Just see how much money Gates gives to, and earns from, this movement.) The federal Commission on Evidence Based Policy, the Data Quality Campaign, American Institutes for Research, the United Nations’ Data Revolution Initiative, Pearson, Microsoft, and Jeb Bush’s Foundation are in. Betsy DeVos does nothing, nothing to stop it. Nothing.
Lest we believe that it’s all bad guys, far away, realize that the Goliaths of data piracy also includes locals: the Utah Data Alliance, Utah’s Prosperity 2020, The Utah Chamber of Commerce, the University of Utah’s K-12 research database (SLDS) and many Utah corporations.
These groups are financially thriving financially from the common use of Common Educational Data Standards (CEDS) and Common Core academic standards, which go hand in hand. They also thrive on the lack of proper protections over student data privacy, although many of them give loud and proud lip service to caring about student data privacy.
Hearing these groups claim commitment to student privacy (after having listened to the CEP‘s meetings, or after having seen what the USDOE did to shred protective FERPA law) is like hearing a boat captain boast about the safety of his vessel to passengers who have been handed sandwiches instead of life vests. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look into the federal Commission on Evidence Based Policy (CEP) for starters.
It’s pretty fascinating, but inspiring at the same time, to see that some people are thinking through all of this: a group of smart, conservative Republicans and smart, progressive Democrats are joining forces because they see student data privacy being of extreme, non-negotiable importance. The non-bought, pro-privacy coalition, called The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, has just released its Parent Toolkit for Student Privacy, which it calls “a practical guide for protecting your child’s sensitive school data from snoops, hackers, and marketers”.
I’m not anti-data or anti-progress. Invention and science are wonders! I balk at, and hope others will consider, the idea that personal privacy of children is being taken without their consent and without their parents’ consent, for cash.
The conspiracy of greed does not want to talk about that.
It just wants to keep collecting the golden eggs.
It’s up to individual parents to care and to act, to protect student data privacy. State school systems are not going to do it; they are taking huge grants from the feds, on an ongoing basis, to beef up the “robust data systems” instead.
Yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order to reclaim local control of education, and then handed his pen to a school teacher who was watching the event. Watch her at minute 10:00. She is tearful. This executive order meant something to her. Teachers are weary of being micromanaged, standards-whipped, undermined and data-mined. They want peace.
But it isn’t the federal government alone that has stunted teachers’ and students’ freedoms, and this executive order alone does not have the power to fix what’s broken in American education. What local control advocates are fighting is the mighty, wealthy partnership of government to corporate ed-tech. It’s the marriage of enforceable power to greed.
Possibly, an executive order might get the feds out of teacher’s laps, but guess what? Business interests will still be sitting there. Most of them think that there’s nothing wrong with businesses influencing policy– but there is. We can’t un-elect a corporation. We can’t attend their private meetings. We can’t vote for what will be put into the educational computer programs that our children are to be fed. We can’t get rid of the influence of businesses if we do not like what they’re doing; that’s why the business industry must be kept out of public education. The voice of the voter and of the mom and dad and teacher and student must never be quashed under the brute strength that industry plus government can become.
The federal government is neither the main nor the sole entity undermining local control –nor is this a left/right argument. On both the left and the right, at both federal and state levels, watch the monied partnerships combining. The huge combinations are what we’re fighting, and their huge influence are why we’re losing.
All of these combinations rely on common data standards. They must have standardization –or out of their hands slips the golden goose.
What most people don’t know, and what DeVos won’t say, is that the Common Core movement was never just a set of academic standards; it was a set of data standards from day one.
Global data-standardization of all things in education, from tests to curriculum to teacher evaluations to student pathway setting to school grading, is much more controlling than a little old set of math and English standards could ever be!
That private group was called the CCSSO. The very same CCSSO partnered with the National Governors’ Association to create the Common Core academic standards.
Both CEDS and CCSS form the heart of the Common Core movement. Neither are gone.
Those data standards and education standards are embedded into the vast ed-tech reform market and school systems. Few people outside the tech elite know this. So we fall for the rebranding efforts of lobbyists, legislatures, and even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, over and over again.
States rename their academic standards (as Utah did with Utah Core Standards) but the truth is that we still use the common core academic tests and common data standards. These are not locally controlled.
Because the federal government is only a co-creator of the monster known as the Common Educational Data Standards (CEDS), I don’t see how reducing federal overreach into local academic decision making will help us all that much; the other co-creator, CCSSO/NGA, promoting a centrally planned standardization movement itself –which feeds on investors and has trillions to play with— will thrive on.
(For those who think centrally planned standardization of education data is faulty conspiracy theory, I repeat: check the CCSSO’s official statement: “Common Education Data Standards Initiative is a joint effort by CCSSO and the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) in partnership with the United States Department of Education.”)
This is something that Trump’s executive order does not mention. Neither does DeVos.
I can’t trust DeVos to obey the spirit of this executive order. Sweet as she may come across, DeVos embodies the problem that arises when half-truths become acceptable to society. Listen to the Michigan Moms against Common Core. They have history, losing Devos when she fought against parental empowerment and against the repeal of Common Core in Michigan. DeVos’ interests were better served by Common Core’s continuation.
Ask anyone who works in education, or in the education publishing or tech industries, if Common Core is gone. They live it every day.
How can DeVos say that?
DeVos leans on the latest version of No Child Left Behind/ESEA, called ESSA, as evidence that Common Core is gone, saying that states are in the driver’s seat. She’s wrong.
ESSA does not use the term “common core” as a requirement, sure; but it requires states to demonstrate to the feds that they’ve adopted standards aligned to the same definition that the feds have promoted (common core).
Under ESSA, the feds can withhold funding and can veto states’ educational decision making agendas! (“You can have any color as long as it’s black.”)
ESSA pushes everything Obama wanted: the tsunami of nonconsensual data mining requirements; federally set moral/social values in schools (social emotional learning, or SEL); federally defined preschools and social services; and “college and career ready standards” which is code for Common Core.
For more on how ESSA/ESEA does not end Common Core nor create local control, read more: here and here and here.
Short on time? Skip straight to this quote from Obama’s Secretary Duncan, who gloated when Congress passed ESSA: “I’m stunned at how much better it ended up than either [House or Senate] bill going into conference. I had a Democratic congressman say to me that it’s a miracle — he’s literally never seen anything like it… if you look at the substance of what is there . . . embedded in [ESSA] are the values that we’ve promoted and proposed forever. The core of our agenda from Day One, that’s all in there – early childhood, high standards…”
If ESSA was such a win for local control, why was Duncan calling it a miracle for his agenda? More to the point, can anyone honestly say that DeVos’ push for ESSA isn’t promoting the Obama agenda?
Trump’s executive order aims to be a local control enforcement mechanism, but because it relies on ESSA, it can never really achieve its stated purpose, “to ensure strict compliance with statutes that prohibit Federal interference with State and local control over education“.
The order aims “to protect and preserve State and local control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, and personnel of educational institutions, schools, and school systems” which is wonderful, but the next few phrases are where I get stuck. They add: “…consistent with applicable law, including ESEA, as amended by ESSA, and ESEA’s restrictions related to the Common Core State Standards developed under the Common Core State Standards Initiative.”
This seems self-contradicting.
I will admit that I have been doing some laughing this week. I laughed hardest (probably inappropriately) when I saw DeVos say on Fox News, while standing stylishly in front of the White House, that there’s no such thing as Common Core anymore.
Realize that Secretary DeVos has been directed to examine the overreaching actions of her department, while she’s in complete denial that Common Core is a problem and in denial about any partnership between her own department and the creators of Common Core/Common Data Standards, even existing. She’s also promoting the same agenda that GSV and Obama promoted (see below).
Isn’t this like asking the arsonist to serve as fire chief?
A few weeks ago I wrote that this year’s host for the mega education tech conference was Salt Lake City, and that the conference’s co-sponsors, Global Silicon Valley and Arizona State University, had posted a white paper describing their vision and agenda. I was pretty mad that they were taking $2,795 per person to attend this ed tech conference. I was even madder that their real agenda, found in their white paper, was full of pro-Common Core and anti-local control plotting.
But now I’m madder.
The 300-plus page, foundational white paper has been deleted from the internet.
If you go to the GSV website, or to the conference website, or to my own blog’s links to that document, vamoosh! Gone.
This, just a few days before the conference is to begin? Why doesn’t GSV want its agenda widely known anymore? Why not?
I thought I’d post a screen shot of that document’s key page: page 302.
This “Strategic Battle Plan” of Global Silicon Valley and Arizona State University (and Bill Gates and everyone, pawns or knaves, on the ed-tech bandwagon) began with Common Core.
It continued with universal preschool vouchers and No Child Left Behind 2.0 (which is ESSA.) It goes on to school choice, knowledge as currency, tax credits for employee training, and the elimination of locally elected school boards.
The elimination of locally elected school boards.
This is not something that we should take lightly.
Republicans are just as guilty as Democrats in actively destroying local control by worshiping ed tech. Pay attention to this battle plan.
UPDATE 4-28-17: A friend found an online copy of that deleted document. Here is the link to the full document: http://www.educationindustry.org/assets/documents/KnowledgeCenterDocs/2012%20american_revolution%202.0%20gsv%20advisors.pdf
ON SCHOOL CHOICE:
One of the steps on that page 302 agenda (above) is school choice.
I know that many good people have been taken in by the “school choice” idea, so I want to address that briefly.
School choice is no long-term choice! The words sound good, and of course in a free country we need choices– but what do these words mean to ed reformers, and in context of government dollars?
Tax dollars will flow from government coffers to private schools, instead of parents’ dollars flowing to private schools. With government money comes government accountability; in 2017, accountability is spelled D-A-T-A. If you value student data privacy, if you value a private school being allowed to set its own academic, religious, social and moral values, then don’t be sucked in to the school choice movement. In the long run, this movement is taking away what autonomy means, or meant, to a school.
Lastly. And yes, this is related.
Do you know that there is a federal Commission on Evidence-based Policy (CEP) that exists to argue about how and where to house citizens’ personally identifiable data centrally? No one’s suing. They should be.
Data that has been nonconsensually gathered by federally designed school systems called “State Longitudinal Database Systems” (SLDS) plus data that has been gathered by a multitude of other state and federal agencies and organizations is now to be housed either in one federal repository or in a few consortia of repositories, if the CEP gets its way.
The arguments of the CEP members remind me of that line in The Princess Bride: “You’re trying to kidnap what I’ve rightfully stolen!”
Laughter is not always my response to the crazy, crazy stuff that is going on in education reform. But for today, it is.
I’m still an optimist.
Angels greatly outnumber devils. I see greatness in individuals who are doing their best, still thinking outside the box as much as they are able– teachers, principals, parents, grandparents, and yes, even legislators. I see individuals doing what they can, wherever they stand and they are making a difference. The incredible liveliness and buoyant spirit in children is not going to be permanently crushed, not even by the robotic idiocy of tech worship that is plaguing education systems today.
I absolutely believe that the oppression of standardization is less than a fleck of dust in God’s huge wind.
Obama has set up a shadow educational governance system.
It’s called Education44 –in honor of the Fed-Ed programs of Obama, 44th president of the United States.
Shadow governments are creepy.
Shadow governments are not elected, so they can’t be un-elected. They aren’t accountable. They aren’t subject to sunshine laws– no transparency. They have nothing to fear except the great American wake-up.
They get their power by pretense, by assuming power roles, rather than earning legitimate power through an actual election. Education44 has power because it is so connected to the big ed-tech money funneled in Common Core-aligned systems from the U.S. taxpayer.
You’ve heard of political correctness? How about educational correctness? If you are educationally correct, you are aligned with Education44 and the ed-tech industry as defined by Bill Gates/Microsoft/Pearson/Obama; you are in ed reform for money, but you pretend that you are in it for the kids.
The Education44 website promotes socialist ear candy in programs such as the “Promise Neighborhoods” that will provide “wraparound services through school communities” for “access to longer school days and year, affordable food and healthcare, and extracurricular activities”.
Education44 also promotes “guidance letters” that Obama, Secretary King and Secretary Duncan pushed on American schools. It promotes many, many other education “reforms” that are controlling and/or harmful to American autonomy and freedom, but for each program, it uses “ear candy” terminology so that each appears, on the surface, harmless.
I have learned to beware of vague “ear candy” terminology.
For example, Education44’s supposed priority (and apparent motto) is “protecting students“. Where in the U.S. Constitution did we ever delegate any role over children to the federal government? That’s the job of a family, not of a federal bureaucrat –and not of business owners (Bill Gates) in greedy partnership with government.
Education44 seems less about protecting students and more about dividing and controlling students.
Check it out: one of its programs “My Brother’s Keeper” focuses on male students “of color” only; too bad if you are a female child or are not seen as an “of color” child. Another of its “guidance letter” programs focuses on protecting only certain religious/ethnic groups –with no mention at all of “protecting” the rest of the students; protected are the “Syrian, Muslim, Middle Eastern, or Arab… Sikh, Jewish, or students of color”. Another program is called, simply, the Enforcement Unit. It sues private schools and colleges.
Its website promotes common core in the same code-phraseology for common core that the ed reformers always have: (College and Career Ready, or College and Career Standards, or College and Career Grants). It admonishes all to continue the [Common Core] goals via Obama’s Race to the Top:
“Adopting college-ready, globally competitive academic standards and tests
These partnerships can’t be called conspiracies. They are openly acknowledged. Yet they are conspiratorial in nature because they work their greedy, money-grubbing agenda under the radar of the average person. And the agenda is so sadly, always anti-local control, anti-individual autonomy, anti-classical education, anti-privacy… and none of it was ever subjected to a vote.
None of these ed “partners” are elected to do education reforms, any more than Education44 is. An elected school board has that job; in some states, legislators do.
But neither rich pants Bill Gates, nor the now-nobodies Obama, Duncan and King, nor ed-tech lobbyists near or far have any authority to be telling you what to teach your child.
They do it anyway. Because they can. Because so few stand up to them.
Neither the federal USDOE nor these shadow governments and wannabe business-education partnerships have any basis in the Constitution. Let’s give education back to WE THE PEOPLE, where the Constitution assigned it in the first place.
Eight congressmen have banded together to try to restore the constitution by deleting the federal Department of Education.
President Ronald Reagan, while in office, aimed to make this happen. Recently, parent and educator groups have been pleading for this to happen. Campaigners have often spoken about this idea, since it guaranteed applause from voters. However, last month, in a clear, one-sentence-long bill, eight congressmen actually wrote the bill to take down the Fed-Ed monster.
It says only this: “The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2018.” That’s it. That’s the whole bill.
It’s short, but it’s powerful. H.R. 899 (if it gets a hearing and a vote) ends the reign of the unconstitutional, federal department, and aims to restore money and power to the states. –Remember, the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment states: ” The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Original H.R. 899 sponsors are: Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky (twitter: @RepThomasMassie ) Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia, Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina, and Rep. Raul Labrador of Idaho.
Rep. Massie said in his press release, “Neither Congress nor the President, through his appointees, has the constitutional authority to dictate how and what our children must learn… Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development. States and local communities are best positioned to shape curricula that meet the needs of their students. Schools should be accountable. Parents have the right to choose the most appropriate educational opportunity for their children, including home school, public school, or private school.”
Original co-sponsor Rep. Walter Jones agreed: “For years, I have advocated returning education policy to where it belongs – the state and local level. D.C. bureaucrats cannot begin to understand the needs of schools and its students on an individual basis. It is time that we get the feds out of the classroom, and terminate the Department of Education.”
Co-sponsor Rep. Raul Labrador added: “I’ve always been a proponent of empowering parents, teachers and local school boards who best know our children and their needs. Eliminating the U.S. Department of Education is the most important step we in Congress can take in returning decision making to the local level.”
Co-sponsor Rep. Andy Biggs noted: “Education of our students should lie primarily with parents, teachers, and state and local officials who know how to meet their individual needs best. Since its inception, the Department of Education has grown into an unrecognizable federal beast, and its policies have helped foster Common Core across the country. It is time the one-size-fits-all approach by the federal government is ended and authority is returned to the local level.”
Rep. Massie also pointed out that President Ronald Reagan would have cosponsored this bill. In September 1981, about a year after the federal Department of Education began operating (1980) President Ronald Reagan said:
“…[W]e propose to dismantle two Cabinet Departments, Energy and Education… [E]ducation is the principal responsibility of local school systems, teachers, parents, citizen boards, and State governments. By eliminating the Department of Education less than 2 years after it was created, we cannot only reduce the budget but ensure that local needs and preferences, rather than the wishes of Washington, determine the education of our children.”
Learn more about the bill in the video interview with Rep. Massie below. In the video, when answering a question about who now opposed his bill, Massie said that there are opposers who believe that D.C. has cornered the market on genius, who feel that the rest of America should rely on those situated in D.C.; but most people want to keep educational decision-making and education money local; opposers are few.
According to its vision document entitled “American Revolution 2.0”, the pro-Common Core investment group GSV Advisors is plotting a lucrative U.S. “revolution” (GSV’s own words) that will include pushing the school choice movement and abolishing locally elected school boards. GSV is co-hosting its huge ed-tech summit in Utah in May with Arizona State University.
The very fact that a financial institution has a 27-point business plan that involves removing local control in education –and that it’s promoting that vision to a national elite-only audience ($2,795 ticket) right here in Utah, in a few weeks –is very unnerving. How many voters who want to preserve local control can afford a $2,795 ticket?
Look at page 302 of the GSV vision document if you think I am inventing this madness about eliminating local control.
GSV lists a “Strategic Battle Plan” for fifteen years, with 27 steps to that plan. First of the twenty-seven steps is “Common Core”. Fifth is “No Child Left Behind 2.0” (which was ESSA). Twenty-first is “Eliminate Locally Elected School Boards”. Read. Share it with your ed-tech friends.
This vision feels as creepy as it feels greedy. Remember, this is coming from a financial investment company, but the document’s title is “American Revolution 2.0” –and in its conclusion, it poses in the language of the founding fathers, pretending to care about, or to even comprehend, liberty:
“A System whose characteristics are thus marked by every example which may be defined a failure, is unfit to be the platform of the knowledge citizens of the future….We, therefore, the Representatives of Education Innovators of the United States of America, solemnly publish and declare, that our students ought to have the chance to succeed, that they have access to the best learning technologies, and that as free and independent learners, have the full power to choose their path to success in life. And for the support of this Declaration, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
Using the language of our noble founding fathers to promote this greedy, $elfish, anti-liberty agenda –brazenly pretending to do it for the cause of liberty –is sickening to me.
I would never, ever, ever invest in any of these networks of companies that profit from the destruction of local control of education. Boycott Pearson, Knewton, Aspen, Lumina, and the countless, countless ed-tech groups that are in this collusion against local liberty. Don’t use CEDS common data standards for education. Don’t profit from the thieves of liberty. Walk away.
I am certain that the average person working for Pearson or Gates or Aspen or Microsoft or Lumina may have no idea that he/she is daily empowering a devastating collusion against local liberty in U.S. education, yet the fact remains that this is exactly what’s happening.
And Utah friends, it’s happening under your noses.
In a few weeks, in May 2017, international big names in the ed-tech world will convene in Salt Lake City at GSV’s Ed-Tech Summit with ASU.
The average person can’t go. It costs $2,795 per person, just to walk in the front door of the two day conference.
The very long list of summit speakers includes former Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan and GSV founder Deborah Quazzo, who is listed as “a prolific angel investor” who leverages “technology in the global $4.9 trillion education and talent technology sectors.”
A prolific angel investor? I’m not sure what that means. I do know that Quazzo is the co-author of the GSV document “American Revolution 2.0” that aims to eliminate locally elected school boards.
Here she is, onstage with Bill Gates at last year’s summit.
Deborah Quattro and GSV! Our ed-tech industry is looking to these for guidance?! It makes me quake to think that hundreds of ed-tech leaders will listen to her, to Arne and to the others. Will they see the GSV vision document as some sort of blueprint, recklessly forgetting the God-given Constitutional rights and duties of local control of education? Such rights go away when unelected businesswomen, philanthropists and governments “partner” behind the backs of voters and take over what used to be real learning, the kind that happened between one teacher and her students. The new ed-tech allows extremists’ philosophies, dumped from socialist think tanks through massive online curricula, to fill student devices and minds, thinly disguised as pedagogy.
The list of sponsoring companies at Salt Lake City’s upcoming GSV summit? I bet you can already guess. These are the not-so-secret combinations: Gates. Lumina. The Center for Education Reform. National Geographic. USAFunds. Amazon. Microsoft. Et cetera.
It isn’t every day that one of the original #StopCommonCore moms runs for U.S. Congress.
America, please support this mom; if every one who read this donated even five or ten dollars, that would buy many thousands of signs or mailings for Sheri Few’s important, but financially limited campaign.
The article below is a guest post by Sheri Few.
I want to thank Christel for the opportunity to explain why I am running for Congress and why my election is so important for those of us concerned about education in America today.
All my children attended public schools and I could see firsthand the problems in education, from proposed standards for sexuality education to anti-American and pro-Communist propaganda in geography and history books. I decided to get active and fight for change.
I formed South Carolina Parents Involved in Education (SCPIE) in 2000 and began a newsletter informing parents and taxpayers about public education instruction problems, from teaching children they evolved from apes to teaching young children to put condoms on bananas, to anti-Christian/anti-American rhetoric.
Like many of you, I’ve been attending Donna Hearne’s Educational Policy Conference in St. Louis for many years, where I’ve learned so much more about the intentional agenda in public schools to transform our country’s government through the minds of our children – hearing all along about Common Core forerunners: Goals 2000, Outcome-based Education, School-to-Work, and No Child Left Behind.
Around the same time, I became politically active; joined my local Republican Party and was soon the Chairman and member of the State GOP Executive Committee. This provided a platform for the changes I saw necessary in public education. The work of SCPIE writing newsletters turned to educating lawmakers and advocating for and against education policy. I also became active in the Tea Party movement.
Although I knew what was being taught, I mistakenly left my children in public schools, thinking I would no longer have a voice if I withdrew them to homeschool. Now, to my chagrin, my oldest son has rejected his Christian faith because of what he learned in public schools. He also believes the climate change hoax and has adopted many other liberal philosophies. I now never recommend that anyone put their children in public schools.
Six years ago, Jane Robbins from the American Principles Project approached me to help expose the Common Core Standards in South Carolina.
I created a PowerPoint and began traveling my state, making presentations to audiences in nearly every county about the problems with Common Core and the data-mining tests.
Three years of work resulted in the bi-partisan, unanimous passage of a legislation rescinding our agreement with the Smarter Balanced Testing Consortium and a requirement for the State Department of Education to rewrite the English and Math standards.
In 2014, I ran in the Republican Primary for State Superintendent of Education in a field of nine candidates. narrowly missing the runoff by less than 2 points (in South Carolina, if one candidate does not receive 50 percent plus one, the top two vote-getters enter a runoff election).
The new Superintendent was charged with rewriting the English and Math standards, but to no one’s surprise, my state ended up with Common Core rebranded as South Carolina College and Career Ready Standards.
Even our state’s Education Oversight Committee did a comparison and found the standards to be 91 percent aligned to Common Core and they would have been more like 98 percent aligned if there hadn’t been a separate law passed the year prior mandating the return to memorization of Math facts and cursive writing.
SCPIE expanded in 2015 into a national organization adding a Leadership Team of colleagues from around the country who led the fight against Common Core in their state.
We had conference calls twice a month, and as we shared our very similar experiences with Common Core, we agreed that the problems originated with and are perpetuated by the federal government, so we set our goal to end the U.S. Department of Education and all federal education mandates.
Our movement grew quickly and thirty state chapters have been created, coupled with an exemplary Advisory Board of national leaders.
President Trump’s decision to name my Congressman, Mick Mulvaney, to lead the Office of Management and Budget, created a vacancy for his seat. I prayed about running, talked about it with my husband, made several calls to people in the District who supported my run for State Superintendent of Education, and talked to national Common Core leaders about a possible run.
Everyone I spoke with agreed that there is no one in the U.S. Congress that fully understands the problems in public education. I also analyzed the returns from my 2014 Superintendent’s race and found that I had finished FIRST in the Fifth District, winning by more than 3,000 votes over my eight competitors.
I announced my candidacy in the Republican Primary for South Carolina’s 5th Congressional District in mid-January, and as of this writing, there are seven other Republicans who have filed with the Federal Election Commission.
This is where I stand out from my opponents in this very conservative district that President Trump won by nearly twenty points. Most are “establishment” Republicans who have raised taxes, supported Common Core or sat silent on issues of political correctness.
And none of the others in this race have a clue about education policy and the ongoing problems with Common Core and the data-mining tests that are used to enforce the standards.
I am writing my story to urge you to help me win this election and be our voice in Congress.
I am determined to win and am working 24/7 to do all I can to make that happen, but I need to raise a lot of cash to get my message out to this sprawling district. Several of my opponents are wealthy and can self-fund their campaign, but I am just a mom activist who has volunteered and spent personal resources most of my adult life to fight for the children of this country and to maintain our free Constitutional Republic.
I took a trip to D.C. recently to meet with political action committees, hoping to gain endorsements and financial support. Many of them said they will see how much money I can raise on my own first, and they will be looking at the financial disclosures due the end of this month to gauge who they might support.
I talked to them about the importance of our issue and explained that what is being taught in public schools is fundamental to many of the problems our country faces politically. I explained the intentional agenda to change our form of government through the liberal indoctrination of our country’s children and pointed to the evidence of the fact that most young Americans wanted the self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders for their President. We must stop allowing our tax dollars to fund this agenda.
Please help this mom activist go to Washington D.C. to be our voice. Seize the moment with me while we have a Republican-led Congress, and a bold president who does what he said he would do. Time is of the essence if we are to preserve our Constitutional Republic. I need your help.
Please donate any amount to my campaign, but please give a lot of thought to contributing $250 or more right away, so I can list your name on my FEC report as one of my strongest supporters. Alternatively, would you consider a weekly pledge of $10, $20, $50 or $100 for the remaining nine weeks of the campaign?
Many of you have never contributed to a candidate before. I hope you will consider making your first contribution to help me win this seat.
This election is too important to lose, because with President Trump’s election and Republican majorities in the House and Senate, it’s time to seize the moment and work as aggressively as possible to move our conservative agenda as fast and as far as we can.
I’m planning to run an aggressive campaign, and I have no fear of calling out my opponents for enabling those who are taking away our freedoms. Too many conservatives lose elections because they are afraid to stand up when the left attacks. I welcome it.
I am working twelve to sixteen hours a day, making calls to raise money, speaking at events and issuing press statements, because I know I can win this race. I need your help and support from others across America who are concerned about our nation’s future. Please do what you can today.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, for considering my candidacy, and for all the work you do to take back our schools.
Several freedom-loving groups, including Parents and Educators Against Common Core Standards, Georgia Against Common Core, United States Parents Involved in Education, and the Patriot Journalism Network #PJNET have joined forces for a Twitter rally today, directed primarily at new Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and President Donald Trump, to #KeepYourPromise to #StopCommonCore.
Please participate. Go here or here to join the fun. Go here to sign up for a free Twitter account.
The New Piracy: Personal Data Used “For Research” Without Consent
Today, you may listen to the third open, public meeting “to receive stakeholder input” held by the federal Commission on Evidence-based Policymaking (CEP). It’s being held all day in San Francisco. Just dial 800-857-4620 and use passcode 4837647#. The leader of the meeting is CEP Chair Katherine Abraham.
I’ve renamed the meeting “The New Piracy: Personal Data Used ‘For Research’ Without Consent”. It’s a far less boring title, and it’s closer to the truth of what’s actually being promoted in these meetings.
Previously, these hearings were livestreamed and posted on YouTube. I have not been told why that kind of transparency ended, but it did. If you want to read the messages of testifiers, rather than listening, here’s a link to presenters’ written testimonies. In contrast to so many other testifiers, Dr. Karen Effrem’s written testimony for today’s meeting makes sense to me. Here’s the link to hers and the others’: https://www.cep.gov/hearings/2017-02-09.html#presentations
Here’s an agenda link (that does not include the written-only submissions for today’s conference agenda): https://www.cep.gov/content/dam/cep/events/2017-02-09/2017-2-9-agenda.pdf
Why listen to a deadly boring, all-day meeting? Because I can hardly imagine a meeting with more power to influence the destruction of American children’s future liberties. Even though the CEP has only existed for less than a year, and was just created by Paul Ryan and a handful of other congressmen, it holds influential power with Congress over matters of data privacy, or the end thereof.
The CEP and the vast majority of its testifiers (business people and researchers) want the CEP to recommend to congress that state agencies (like school systems) and federal agencies (like the Social Security Administration and departments of the military and others) and other nongovernmental groups (that similarly collect personally identifiable information from citizens, en masse) should combine forces and data in a centralized “clearinghouse”.
The main issue of discussion seems to be whether to put such a clearinghouse under federal rule or under the rule of a consortium of universities.
Why the universities? –Because almighty research is the false god by which this movement justifies itself. Almost every testifier says that it’s far too cumbersome and inconvenient for researchers to go from state to state and agency to agency, asking for permission to access personally identifiable information for the research.
Proponents (of working past, or of removing, the federal ban on any centralization of personally identifiable information) never mention the fact that the data itself was taken without informed consent. Think of it. In the case of the millions and millions of records held in school systems’ State Longitudinal Database Systems (SLDS) no child nor parent was ever asked whether data about the child’s personal data: his or her academic abilities, nonacademic characteristics, family address, demographic data, behavioral data, medical data, or IEPs, might be shared with researchers without that family’s knowledge or consent.
They talk about “evidence-based policy” but never about informed consent.
They talk about the magic of research, but never about unintended consequences.
And they never talk about the constitutional right to not have citizens’ “personal effects” taken away by the government.
Please vote YES on HB 136 by Rep. Mike Kennedy. This bill gives the state board authority to ignore fed-ed mandates. It’s the bill Rep. Dave Lifferth ran last year and it passed the House then, but didn’t make it to the floor of the senate on the final night.
Please vote NO on HB 215 by Rep. Brian King. This bill is trying to change Utah from an abstinence education state to align to a set of national, common sex ed standards called “comprehensive sexuality education standards” that are truly disturbing. See video on the national CSE standards: https://vimeo.com/152728936
Please vote YES on SB 115 by Rep. Jake Anderegg. This bill eliminates the criminal penalty on parents whose children are truant and reduces it to an infraction.
Rep. LaVar Christensen 801 550 1040
Rep. Bruce R. Cutler 801 556 4600
Rep. Justin L. Fawson 801 781 0016
Rep. Francis D. Gibson 801-361-0082
Rep. Eric K. Hutchings home 801-963-2639 SPONSOR
Rep. Bradley G. Last 435-817-0064
Rep. Daniel McCay 801-810-4110
Rep Kim Coleman 801-865-8970
Rep. Michael E. Noel 435-616-5603
Rep. Derrin R. Owens 435-851-1284
Email:
Val Peterson <vpeterson@le.utah.gov>,
LaVar Christensen <lavarchristensen@le.utah.gov>,
Francis Gibson <fgibson@le.utah.gov>,
Eric Hutchings <ehutchings@le.utah.gov>,
“Bradley G. Last” <blast@le.utah.gov>,
Mike Noel <mnoel@kanab.net>,
dowens@le.utah.gov,
bcutler@le.utah.gov,
kcoleman@le.utah.gov,
Daniel McCay <dmccay@le.utah.gov
linked at Florida’s Stop Common Core Coalition here.
January 9, 2017
Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee
428 Senate Dirksen Office Building, Washington, DC 20510
Dear Chairman Alexander, Ranking Member Murray, and Members of the Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions Committee,
We, the undersigned leaders of a nationwide coalition of grassroots parent groups, wish to raise significant concerns about Secretary-designate Betsy DeVos, and request that you ask her these questions about education, standards, privacy and autonomy issues:
1) We understand that your website statement right after your appointment that you are “not a supporter – period” of Common Core was meant to reassure activists that you oppose the standards and will honor Mr. Trump’s promise to get rid of Common Core.
Please list your efforts during your extensive period of education activism and philanthropy to fight the implementation of the standards.
2) In your November 23 website statement you mention “high standards,” and in the Trump Transition Team readout of your November 19th meeting with the president-elect, you reportedly discussed “higher national standards.”
Please explain how this is different from Common Core. Also, please justify this stand in light of the lack of constitutional and statutory authority for the federal government to involve itself in standards, and in light of Mr. Trump’s promise to stop Common Core, make education local, and scale back or abolish the U.S. Department of Education.
3) Would you please reconcile your website statement that you are “not a supporter – period” of Common Core with your record of education advocacy in Michigan and elsewhere – specifically, when you have, either individually or through your organizations (especially the Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP) that you founded and chaired, and of which your family foundation is still the majority funder):
Been described as supporting Common Core by Tonya Allen of the Skillman Foundation in the Detroit News?
Actively worked to block a bill that would have repealed and replaced Michigan’s Common Core standards with the Massachusetts standards, arguably the best in the nation?
Actively lobbied for continued implementation of Common Core in Michigan?
Financially supported pro-Common Core candidates in Michigan?
Funded Alabama pro-Common Core state school board candidates?
Threatened the grassroots parent organization Stop Common Core in Michigan with legal action for showing the link between GLEP endorsement and Common Core support?
4) The Indiana voucher law that you and your organization, the American Federation for Children (AFC), strongly supported and funded requires voucher recipient schools to administer the public school Common Core-aligned tests and submit to the grading system based on those same Common Core-aligned tests. The tests determine what is taught, which means that this law is imposing Common Core on private schools. Indiana “is the secondworst in the country on infringing on private school autonomy” according to the Center for Education Reform because of that and other onerous requirements, and the state received an F grade on the Education Liberty Watch School Choice Freedom Grading Scale.
Do you support imposing public-school standards, curriculum and tests on private and or home schools?
5) Through Excel in Ed and the American Federation for Children, you have influenced legislation that has made Florida a “leader” in school choice, yet the majority of students, especially those in rural areas, in states like Florida, still chooses to attend traditional public schools. Public school advocates in Florida complain that expanded school choice has negatively affected their traditional public schools, even in previously high performing districts.
As Secretary of Education, how will you support the rights of parents and communities whose first choice is their community’s traditional public school?
6) You and AFC have been strong supporters of federal Title I portability. As Secretary of Education, would you require the same public school, Common Core tests and the rest of the federal regulations for private schools under a Title I portability program as Jeb Bush recommended for Mitt Romney in 2012 (p. 24)? If yes, please cite the constitutional authority for the federal government to be involved in regulating schools, including private schools, and explain how this policy squares with Mr. Trump’s promise to reduce the federal education footprint.
7) The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires secretarial approval of state education plans for standards, tests and accountability. Will you support state sovereignty by approving the state plans in line with Mr. Trump’s vision of decreasing the federal role in education, or will you exercise federal control by secretarial veto power over these plans?
8) The Philanthropy Roundtable group that you chaired published a report on charter schools, but did not mention the Hillsdale classical charter schools, even though they are in your home state of Michigan and Hillsdale is nationally renowned for its classical and constitutional teaching and for not taking federal funding. Have you or any of your organizations done anything substantive to support the Hillsdale model aside from a few brief mentions on your websites? If not, do you want all charter schools in Michigan and elsewhere to only teach Common Core-aligned standards, curriculum and tests?
9) During the primary campaign, President-elect Trump indicated that he strongly supported student privacy by closing the loopholes in the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), saying the following to a parent activist:
I would close all of it,” Trump replied. “You have to have privacy. You have to have privacy. So I’d close all of it. But, most of all, I’d get everything out of Washington, ‘cause that’s where it’s all emanating from.
Will you commit to reversing the Obama administration’s regulatory gutting of FERPA and to updating that statute to better protect student privacy in the digital age?
10) We are sure you are aware of serious parental concerns about corporate collection and mining of highly sensitive student data through digital platforms, without parental knowledge or consent. But the Philanthropy Roundtable, which you chaired, published a report called Blended Learning: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Supporting Tech-assisted Teaching that lauds the Dream Box software that “records 50,000 data points per student per hour” and does not contain a single use of the words “privacy,” “transparency” [as in who receives that data and how it is used to make life-changing decision for children], or “consent.”
Will you continue to promote the corporate data-mining efforts of enterprises such as Dream Box and Knewton, whose CEO bragged about collecting “5-10 million data points per user per day,” described in your organization’s report?
11) Related to Questions 9 and 10 above, there is currently a federal commission, the Commission on Evidence-based Policymaking, which is discussing lifting the federal prohibition on the creation of a student unit-record system. If that prohibition is removed, the federal government would be allowed to maintain a database linking student data from preschool through the workforce. That idea is strongly opposed by parent groups and privacy organizations.
Will you commit to protecting student privacy by recommending to the Commission on EvidenceBased Policymaking that this prohibition be left in place?
12) As outlined in a letter from Liberty Counsel that was co-signed by dozens of parent groups across the nation, the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) plans to add subjective, invasive, illegal, and unconstitutional survey or test mindset questions to the 2017 administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
What will you do to rein in NAGB and protect the psychological privacy and freedom of conscience of American students?
13) Through commissions, programs, federally funded groups, the newly passed Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the proposed Strengthening Education Through Research Act, and other entities, there has been an explosion of effort to expand invasive, subjective social emotional learning (SEL) standards, curricula and assessment.
What is your view of SEL and what will you do to protect student psychological privacy and freedom of conscience?
Thank you for your willingness to hear and address the concerns of hundreds of thousands of parents across this nation.
Should you need any further detail on any of these issues, I am acting as point of contact for this coalition.
Karen R. Effrem, MD President – Education Liberty Watch
In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck stole chickens. Huck’s father had taught him how to stomach chicken theft.
That reminds me of the way the federal CEP (Commission on Evidence Based Policy) stomachs human data theft. Huck said:
… Pap always said, take a chicken when you get a chance, because if you don’t want him yourself you can easy find somebody that does, and a good deed ain’t ever forgot. I never see pap when he didn’t want the chicken himself, but that is what he used to say, anyway.
Just as the Finn thieves lied to themselves, saying that they might do society a favor while they did themselves a favor, stealing chickens, so ed reformers and CEP data gatherers lie to themselves and to the public. After all, the CEP doesn’t do its own thieving; why should it judge or disclose the immoral origins of the data?
CEP simply says that it wants to centrally house data (that’s previously been taken, without permission from citizens, by school State Longitudinal Database Systems and by other entities.) CEP members wring their hands over the inconvenience they have endured, not fully being able to access all the pii. So also say the elite researchers and Gates-linked business people testifying at CEP’s public hearings.
Maybe you didn’t know that citizens’ data is being taken without our permission.
Think: when did you receive a permission slip from the school district, or from the state, asking you to sign away all student academic and nonacademic data for the rest of your child’s life? Never.
YetSLDS systems do track a child for life. That’s what “longitudinal” means: through time. They call it P-20W. That means preschool through grade 20 and Workforce. Life.
Well, now you know. And we can’t opt out of the data theft system. I tried. The biggest, most vibrant source of citizen data is our public school system, and the government is unwilling to stop stealing from us in this way.
I do not use the word “stealing” lightly, nor am I exaggerating. Personal data is literally being confiscated without informed consent or permission of any kind, via school databases linked with many state agencies. Every digital record created by students, teachers, counselors, school nurses or administrators can be stored (and shared) from there.
No one seems to notice these articles about stolen pii.
And on it goes. Data points are taken and taken and taken –about both academic and nonacademic lives. Schools feed aggregate data and pii into federally-created “State Longitudinal Database Systems” (SLDS). Because SLDS systems use common educational data standards (CEDS) that the federal-corporate partners created, that data is portable and re-shareable (or re-stealable).
Many people believe that federal FERPA privacy laws protect the data, but it doesn’t. It used to. The Department of Education shredded the protective parts of FERPA several years ago. What’s actually protecting student privacy right now is the territorial unwillingness of agencies to share all data.
But the CEP is out to change that.
CEP will lead you to believe that it’s all about benefiting society. But that’s a side show, because data is the new gold. Everyone wants the data!
Sadly, individuals aren’t guarding this irreplaceable gold; most people aren’t aware that this pii is so valuable, that it’s being taken –and that it’s THEIRS.
Meanwhile, the elite at the CEP speak about data as if it’s oxygen, free for all, belonging to all. It makes sense from their (bottom line) point of view; governments and ed vendors have financially benefited from SLDS’s taking students’ data since about 2009, when SLDS databases were installed in every state by federal grants, and when federal FERPA changes allowed almost anyone access, for supposed research purposes.
Luckily, there’s so much territorialism by the various holders of the taken data that it hasn’t yet been centrally housed all in one spot. The federal EdFacts Data Exchange has some data. Each state’s SLDS has tons of data. Universities, hospitals, corporations, criminal justice agencies, and other organizations have other caches of pii. But the elite (the federal government, globalists, corporate elite, and some scientists) are desperate to have one national “clearinghouse” so that they can see and use our data to their own designs. They speak a smooth line in each of their CEP hearings. But don’t forget: that data is your life. Yours. Not theirs.
There was a recent three hour conversation that you most likely missed last week. Held in Chicago, this “public” hearing of the federal Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking (CEP) discussed what should be done with the pii (personally identifiable information) that federal agencies, state agencies, counties, school systems, hospitals, criminal justice systems, colleges and other organizations have collected. They’ve been discussing this all year long.
I picture Pap with a crate of stolen chickens. I picture his pirating friends with their own crates nearby. I think there might even be a few crate-holders who ethically came by their chickens, but the federal Chicken Evidence Policy says that all chickens go in one central pen, on an ongoing basis, so all the elite can access the chickens conveniently– conveniently for everyone except the chickens and their owners.
When you listen to their hearings, you find that the federal CEP is leaning toward creating a federal clearinghouse where every individual’s data can be centrally managed. CEP is also hoping to overturn the federal ban on unit-record identifiers.
Welcome to the real live prequel to Orwell’s 1984.
Do I sound calm? I’m not. This makes me almost unspeakably angry.
While trusting parents, teachers, school administrators and students are being used as pawns in the great data-gathering heist, arrogant members of Congress, of science, of CEP, of big data, are assuming authority over MY life and yours in the form of our personally identifiable data. And who is stopping them?
Despite a huge number of public comments that told the CEP that Americans want the CEP to get its hands off our data, the CEP moves ahead at a steady pace. And why not? We can never un-elect this appointed group that Congress created less than a year ago. What motivation would CEP have to actually incorporate the public comments?
As the Missouri Education Watchdog pointed out in October, there was only one man in America who seemed to care about protecting citizen privacy at that month’s hearing. Mr. Emmett McGroarty testified to the CEP that what they were doing was wrong. Similarly, at last week’s January 5 CEP hearing, there was only one woman who spoke ethically about children’s data privacy rights. She did a magnificent job. Everyone else testified that data should be gathered in one place, or possibly in a few places; and none of the others mentioned permission or informed consent. I took pages and pages of notes, since the meeting was only public in the sense that I could listen in to it on my phone.
It wasn’t filmed. It wasn’t truly public. It’s aiming to fly under the radar because it’s theft.
Huck Finn’s father’s plan to later share the stolen chickens didn’t make the chickens less stolen. Other people’s information doesn’t suddenly become your “scientific research” or your “evidence” for “evidence-based policymaking” just because Congress created a commission and appointed you to chat about it.
Shame on the CEP. Shame on all who turn a blind eye to this evil, open assault on the basic freedom of personal privacy.
Only those with a special phone number and access code can listen in by phone to tomorrow’s ironically titled: Open Public Hearing of the CEP (Commission on Evidence based Policy making) in Chicago. It seems anything but an open to the public meeting. But if you are in Chicago, it’s here: Ralph Metcalfe Building Room 331, 77 West Jackson Blvd., Chicago 60604, from 12-3:30 central time.
The topic is Public Law 114-140, the CEP says; that’s sort of a disguise for what seems to be the real purpose of the CEP’s formation, which seems to be overturning the federal ban on taking individual data, without individuals’ consent, to a centralized, federal place.
The CEP was created this year. This is the second of three public hearings. The third one is to be on February 9, 2017, on the West Coast.
At http://www.cep.gov you may sign up to appear and give public comment at that third, final hearing.
Check out the hundreds of comments written in response to the invitation to submit commentary to the federal CEP. You will find an overwhelming number who do not want the federal government to create federal unit tracking for individuals.
(There are small and big groups who proclaim that creating a federal unit tracking system is a great idea, for various (less vital) reasons. Privacy, schmivacy, they say: just overturn the student record ban. Bill Gates. The U.N. There’s one group that calls itself “The Young Invincibles” that released a Student Agenda for Postsecondary Data Reform calling for collecting data on all students directly to the federal level.)
FYI, this fight– for and against removing privacy rights– is not new. Three years ago, privacy-enders were, for various reasons, pushing for a bill (Senator Rubio’s and Senator Warner’s) that would have done exactly what the CEP is aiming to do right now. See this 2013 article on what Bill Gates’ think tanks and Rubio/Warner had planned.
Some now wonder if the federal CEP commission will try to hijack well-intentioned bills, such as Rep. Mia Love’s Know Before You Go bill, in order to achieve their privacy-ending scheme.
Here’s the bad news:
Even though there were SO many comments given to the CEP commission stating, like this classic: “Our personal information is not for your use. Keep your hands off of it. This is just plain wrong. Stop it.” –Still, public comments are only public comments. There is nothing in the law that created the CEP commission (less than a year ago, CEP was created by Paul Ryan and company) that states that the CEP has to respect the wishes of the people who send in public comments. That’s what happens when you allow appointees to run the show. The public has no actual recourse, no voting power, when it hates how this appointee-driven show is being run.
So tell your senators and reps.
They do have power.
And privacy is huge. It’s basic to American freedom. Remember that part in the fourth amendment to the Constitution about being safe from intrusion in our papers and personal effects?
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
The Fifth Amendment further protects property (and privacy):
“No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
Do something small. Write one letter. Make one phone call. Tell your representatives that you expect them to represent your will on this. We have to defend our rights; no one else cares if we don’t care.
“The U.S. Department of Education, in the Trump regime, is starting to look like a Jeb Bush sweep. Betsy DeVos was on the board of Jeb’s Foundation for Education Excellence, which is…”
I am so annoyed. Those words actually came out of the mouth of the CEP Commission leader: “Ripping the Band-Aid (of data privacy and control) probably would not fly.” But pulling it off using (in his words) “baby steps” is the CEP’s plan, he said in the video of yesterday’s meeting.
Four-hour federal meetings posted on YouTube are not fun to watch. These arrogant –and, let me remind you, unelected CEP members, who we cannot possibly fire (they’re appointed) –spout blah-blah-blah that can consistently be summarized as something like: “… I feel great about the way we persuade the elite and rob Americans of privacy –without widespread knowledge and completely without consent.”
Wait: Before I say one more word: TOMORROW, 12-14-16, is the deadline for public input on privacy v. fed authority over data —here’s the comment link.
Please comment, even if all you write is something very short and very simple: “I believe in informed consent. I oppose non-consensual data mining. Stop this madness.” Do it, please: https://www.regulations.gov/docket?D=USBC-2016-0003
You and I both suspect that zero consideration will be taken by the CEP of the comments from the public. Do it anyway. Don’t let them think nobody sees or opposes this assault on personal data privacy. And yes, it’s about disaggregated data. See the quotes below, repeatedly speaking about PII. (Personally Identifiable Information as defined in federal FERPA includes so much, even biometric information: behavioral data, DNA samples, nicknames, bus stop times, family history, academic history, fingerprints, blood samples, etc.)
Since CEP has disabled embedding of its public meeting, I’m embedding a video that suffices as a metaphor for the whole thing, before I tell you what went on in the meeting itself.
See how this carnivorous sundew plant injests this insect? It illustrates the stealthy federal hunger for individuals’ data. As individuals (the insects) are drawn to the sweet federal dollars (nectar) coming from the hungry plant (federal government) the tentacles of the plant (federal data mining; SLDS and CEDS) become more and more attached until the insect finally loses all autonomy.
Here’s one where a carnivorous plant lures and later digests a mouse.
If state legislators and administrators would exercise some self-reliance, tighten their financial belts, turn to ourselves (localities) to fund schools and other agencies instead of using federal funds or national, corporate lobby cash, which only give money in exchange for data– then the federal and global data mining traps would fail.
States are stupidly giving away our vital liberties, addicted to the sweet, sticky money that we’ve been lapping at federal troughs.
I am longing to see evidence that our friends in freedom (in D.C. or here in Utah) are making the smallest peep to protect our children from this ongoing, slow-motion, tsunami-like data grab. Maybe it’s happening behind the scenes. I pray at least that that is so.
So, unembedded, if you want to hear the federal “Let’s Take Student Data Without Consent” Commission (aka CEP Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking) is saying, check out this link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXasJLAWgtc
Ironically, CEP disabled the video‘s embedding function (it’s a public meeting) but if you look at this link, at hour 1:25 to 1:31 you’ll hear this question from an attendee, followed by a CEP response that summarizes the event:
“Let me try and ask what I think is a very difficult question, and I don’t expect you to be able to answer it, but maybe we can start a conversation that could be useful to us. So, I see census as having made a lot of steps to move in the kinds of directions that are suggested or anticipated by the Commission bill, in that you are working to bring data from other agencies or you have, into the — you’ve broadened their mission and you are bringing together data from many agencies and allowing researchers in and outside of government to access the data that you’ve brought together. What are the ways that you could expand those efforts? Um, and I’m not suggesting that we talk about a single statistical agency across government, but how could there be more of a coordination or maybe a virtual one statistical agency where census is playing a coordinating role, or what kinds of movements in that direction should we think about? What kinds of things have you thought about? What are the barriers to moving toward more coordination between the statistical agencies?”
The response at 1:29 from the CEP:
“…One of the biggest constraints that everybody involved in this sort of endeavor faces is the different rules that are attached to data that are sourced from different agencies or different levels of, you know, whether it’s federal or state… that if there was broad agreement in, that, you know, if there was one law that prosc– had the confidentiality protections for broad classes of data, as opposed to, you know, here’s data with pii on it that’s collected from SSA, here’s data with pii on it that’s collected from the IRS; here’s data with pii on it that’s collected from a state; versus from a statistical agency– if data with pii on it was treated the same, you know I think that would permit, you know, organizations that were collecting pii-laden data for different purposes to make those data available more easily. Now, that’s probably a pretty heavy lift… do this in sort of baby steps as opposed to ripping the band aid. I think ripping the band-aid would probably not fly.”
Summary: the CEP just said that “ripping the band-aid” of privacy off the arm of the American people will “probably not fly”; so the CEP has got to “do it in sort of baby steps.”
I don’t think I’m going to watch the rest of this dog and pony show. I’m going to write again to Mia, Jason, Mike and Gary.
What are you going to do? Send CEP a comment? Email your legislators? Say a prayer for the privacy of American people? Re-read 1984 to motivate yourself to care?
You can attend the CEP’s next public meetings in various places across the nation by visiting the CEP federal site here.
A news bomb about the theft of student data exploded in Utah’s Deseret News last July, but nobody noticed, apparently.
The article’s headline — “Wrongful Termination Lawsuit Puts Spotlight on Utah Autism Rates” — focused primarily on things other than the data theft. It highlighted former University of Utah research professor Judith Zimmerman’s allegations that university researchers were falsifying Utah’s autism rates.
But to me, the unheadlined bomb that the article dropped was the 750,000 students who had their data and their families’ data stolen by unauthorized “researchers”. The families now have no way of knowing this happened.
Zimmerman was fired for raising concerns about protected student data that she said the researchers had “compromised and accessed without proper authority.” She told the Deseret News that unauthorized individuals took 750,000 sensitive records with neither parental nor schools’ consent. This private “medical and educational information” included “names, birthdays, information about medical characteristics… special education classification and parents’ names and addresses,” reported the Deseret News.
How would these families now be notified? I wonder: with the whistleblower fired and with a years-long lawsuit and likely gag orders pending, the only people who now could potentially contact those families would be still employed at the university –who, being accused of the wrongdoing, certainly won’t go out of their way to inform the affected families right now.
I’m not going to discuss the ways in which the stolen records, and the children they represented, are vulnerable to potential crimes of credit card fraud, health insurance identity theft, crimes of predatory stalkers or the mandates of well-or-ill-intentioned governmental activists.
I’m here to ask –and answer– a very simple question that I hope readers are asking: how could this have happened? How were three quarters of a million records of children just lying around under the noses of any unscrupulous university researchers?
You, your children, and your grandchildren are in the SLDS whether you like it or not –unless you pay 100% of your own money in tuition for a 100% private school, and always have. There is no other way to opt out. I’ve tried.
Don’t get me started about how blindly stupid Utah is (all states now are) for having –and continuing to support– the SLDS.
We’re subject to this SLDS data surveillance system simply because in some USOE cubicle, some clueless grant writer responded to Obama’s mess of pottage and decided that the state of Utah might exchange students’ privacy for a $9.6 million dollar federal grant.
Utah traded all students’ data records, longitudinally (permanently) into this data-slurping machine, euphemistically titled the State Longitudinal Database System, which the feds designed and oversaw— all for the love of money and nonconsensual research.
Without parental consent, Utah children’s data now is daily being collected –using schools to vaccum it up. This is not a legitimate situation, but you can’t blame schools. They are being used. They have to give daily data to the state/fed system, or they lose funds/grind to a halt. In a recent Utah rulemaking statement, we read: “all public education LEAs shall begin submitting daily updates to the USOE Clearinghouse using all School Interoperability Framework (SIF) objects defined in the UTREx Clearinghouse specification. Noncompliance with this requirement may result in interruption of MSP funds.”
So we can’t believe the ear candy we’re told, about how this data mining is about keeping data on kids so teachers can do their best teaching. It’s not staying in the local school for teachers and administrators to legitimately peruse, but it goes into the federally designed, federally interoperable SLDS database held at UECP/U of U which many state agencies can peruse and which the feds can already partially peruse.
Every state has an SLDS system. The feds paid the states to build them. The feds told the states how the SLDS’s had to be built. Utah got nearly $10 million to make Utah’s federal SLDS in 2009. And the grant’s been renewed to keep trading cash for students, in recent years.
Utah children and their families thus have their data sucked away to where unelected, unaccountable “researchers” are entrusted with data via SLDS. The University’s “Utah Education Policy Center” (UEPC) is a founding partner in the Utah Data Alliance, which controls Utah’s SLDS system. According to UEPC’s website:
“Five other partners include the Utah State Office of Education (public education), Utah System of Higher Education, Utah College of Applied Technology, Utah Education Network, and the Department of Workforce Services. UEPC serves as the research coordinator for the Utah Data Alliance. UEPC coordinates access for individuals and organizations interested in collaborating with the Utah Data Alliance, or researchers interested in accessing data for research purposes.”
That’s a long answer to a short question. That’s how the data got stolen.
Here’s the follow up question: what’s keeping the other millions of records of students from going the same way that those 750,000 records went?
Ask your legislator that question. Ask him/her to show you any proper privacy protections that are actually in place. (FERPA was shredded; don’t let them pretend there’s protection anymore under FERPA.)
We do not even have the freedom to opt out of SLDS tracking. But all of this can change– if more good people speak up– act.
How did the fox persuade the gingerbread boy to get on his back? The fox said that he would never eat him, but would surely protect the gingerbread boy from everyone who was trying to eat him on the dangerous side of the river.
On shore stood the hungry horse, the farmer, the dog, the others– and the fox said that he could help the gingerbread boy to get away. The fox protected the gingerbread boy like the federal government is protecting your child’s personal data.
Every time I read an official promise like this recent CEP statement (and there are so many; even the federal alterations to FERPA sounded like the CEP statement) –I think of the gingerbread boy. The CEP (federal “Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking”) promises that the government only wants more individual “data in order to build evidenceabout government programs, while protecting privacy and confidentiality.” I think of the fox “protecting” the gingerbread boy.
That fox wanted to eat the boy just as much as the dog and the farmer and everyone else did. Even the gingerbread boy probably suspected it, but he really, really wanted to cross that river.
When the government says that it can and will protect privacy while accessing greater amounts of data, I think:
Betsy DeVos, America’s newly appointed Secretary of Education, is quite adorable. She interviews like America’s Sweetheart, her name sounds like Betsy Ross, and she says she’s opposed to the Common Core.
As Jane Robbins recently noted, “It simply doesn’t make sense that DeVos would contribute boatloads of money to – and even lead — organizations that actively push a policy with which she disagrees. Would a pro-life philanthropist write checks to Planned Parenthood because the abortion mill provides the occasional Pap test?”
A true liberty lover would only do this if she, like so many Americans, doesn’t fully understand what the Common Core machine is doing. I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt. I know a lot of good people who have only the vaguest idea what the Common Core machine is doing or will do.
So let’s clarify.
The Common Core machine loves money, not children. It clearly steals from children. It really is that simple.
I’d like to see DeVos speak out about the following:
Money, money, money –and comforting ear candy– make the machine’s operators feel great about being it’s operators.
Ever since Bill Gates openly courted American legislators in 2009 and identified as a “large, uniform base of customers” the sitting ducks (schools) waiting to be bankrolled, schools and legislative ed committees have become the hot market for businesses and philanthropic activists. This power grab, away from parents and local school boards, toward the corporate-governmental partnerships, has been monumental.
How many ed tech salesmen, governors, senators or representatives have really stopped to consider consequences –intentional or unintentional– of the standardizing of everything in education and in education governance?
It has been, and continues to be, a mad dash toward Gates’ vision of schools as the shiny, shiny, “uniform customer base”:
If you’ve seen the latest Disney movie: remember how the creepy bling-crab looks at Moana? That’s how I picture Mr. Bill “Uniform Customer Base” Gates, the ed tech corporations, the government data miners, and the business-model charter pushers, looking at schools.
School dollars are so shiny! It’s the money, not what’s best for children, that they see.
But as I watched DeVos’ interview in which she explained her vision of the school choice movement, I thought: she’s sincere in her belief. She really buys the school choice line.
But has she (or most Americans) really thought it all the way through?
It’s as if we were buying a house. We love the curb appeal and the front door of the School Choice idea. We take a step inside and shout, “Sold!” But… what about the rotted attic that no one checked? What about the weird, moldy basement? Is there a kitchen? Are there enough bedrooms?
Why aren’t more people asking SERIOUS questions about School Choice and about the Common Core machine? Because the words on the surface just sound good? Because the entryway of the house looks fantastic? (Who would be opposed to allowing disadvantaged kids in to better schools? Who wouldn’t like choice? That’s sweet ear candy, right?)
The notion of school choice is a false choice, because where government dollars are, government mandates are.
It’s like the old Ford ad:
Think about it.
Vouchers for school choice are not reimbursed cash; they’re government subsidies, and anything that the government subsidizes, it regulates.
The beauty of private schools has always been freedom. Parents can pay the nuns to teach their Catholic children right out of the Bible. What happens when a disadvantaged child from a Catholic family takes a government voucher to pay for private religious school tuition?
That particular money can destroy that particular school.
By putting vouchers into private schools, we turn those private schools into government-regulated schools (aka public schools) and those private schools will not longer be free to teach –things like religion or morality. Nor will those private schools be free to continue to protect data privacy of teachers or students; human data is alwaysone of the items that federal monies trade schools for, in exchange for cash. Read that paragraph again.
“He who pays the piper calls the tune” means that if the feds pay then the private schools, as pipers, have to play what they’ve been paid to play. And that’s the music of the Common March.
The beauty of (some) charter schools has been the illusion that parents had more say in what went on (almost like a private school). But under Common Core, that’s changing. Many charter schools now have businesses running them, not elected board members running them. Where’s the local control in that? This gets rid of voters’ voices, parents’ voices. With the Great Commonizing, even legitimate, good differences between public schools and charter schools seem very temporary.
I am guessing that DeVos doesn’t know that the Common Core machine is building a socialistic, factory model of education according to the vision of the Tucker-Clinton conspiracy. I’m guessing, too, that she hasn’t heard (or dismisses) what whistleblower Charlotte Iserbyt has been saying for years:
“The goal of school choice… is the takeover of the public and private school sectors through partnerships with the corporate sector in order to implement socialist work force training… Carnegie Corporation, in its little blue book entitled “Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies” 1934, called for using the schools to change our nation’s free market economy to a planned economy.” Hmm– a planned, centralized economy– that means, no local control. I don’t believe that’s what DeVos really hopes to build. I don’t think she, or Heritage Foundation, or FreedomWorks, have really thought this all the way through while wearing their Constitution-framed glasses.
In her Florida interview, DeVos said (minute 7:40-8:09) that she wanted people to rethink the public school “system that was brought to us 200 years ago by the Prussians, very much an industrial, factory model of education… Technology has brought so many new opportunities… we need to allow people who are innovative and creative to come and help us think differently about how we can do education”.
I don’t think she understands that the factory model’s exactly where the school choice movement eventually leads: First, it leads there because vouchers can strip private schools of religious, moral and academic freedom, and second, because if we move away from the elected-board-run public schools to business-owned, no-elected-board charter models, we have erased our own voices and votes even in public education.
While you’re folding laundry or jogging later today, listen to Constitution-defending lawyer KrisAnne Hall as she explains the trouble with DeVoss, vouchers and school choice in this podcast.
Hall notes that Americans are confused about their desire for limited government and local control versus their desire for big socialist programs: “Amongst our conservative circles… we want limited government –unless we want government to define marriage. We want limited government –unless we want government to control our consumption of plants. We want limited government –unless it has to do with education.”
As president, I will establish the national goal of providing school choice to every American child living in poverty. If we can put a man on the moon… we can provide school choice to every disadvantaged child in America…”
If you remember nothing else from this blog post, remember this:
School choice and vouchers are not for all American children; they are for those whom the federal government will designate as recipients. It’s favoritism and it’s socialism and it’s legal plunder: A pays for B to go to the school of B’s choice. If A doesn’t pay, A goes to jail.
Whether B goes to this school or that one is only a partial liberty because all the schools receiving money from government school vouchers must abide by federal regulations: data mining kids, removing religious and academic liberty from private schools, and controlling teachers.
A Related P.S.
WANNA TESTIFY?
On January 5, 2017, there will be a new public hearing in Chicago, where unit record identifiers and Public Law 114-140 will be discussed. The federal Commission on Evidence-based Policymaking (CEP)’s boiled-down purpose seems to be to cater to the federal/corporate desire for more student “evidence,” in the form of school-gleaned personal data, minus student/parental rights of privacy/ informed consent; but, to do it with the “public input” box checked off. So let’s comment. If you can go to Chicago, go. If not, submit written comment to CEP.
To learn about the last such hearing, click here and here.
CEP information:
Submit your request to participate to Input@cep.gov no later than Sunday, December 18, 2016
Include in your request the following information:
Name and Professional Affiliation (if applicable)
2-3 Sentence Abstract
Written Statement (preferably in .pdf format)
Commission staff will inform you of your assigned speaking time and logistical details no later than December 23, 2016.
Visit CEP.gov closer to the event date for webcast and caption details.
Additional Upcoming Meetings & Hearings:
December 12, 2016, Washington, DC (National Press Club) – Federal Models for Evidence – Building
January 13, 2017, Washington, DC (National Academy of Sciences) – State and International Models for Evidence- Building
February 9, 2017, San Francisco, CA – Public Hearing
I would absolutely love to see Betsey DeVos at that CEP Chicago hearing next month. I would love to see her fight for students’ data privacy rights against the federal Commission on Evidence-based Policymaking (CEP). I want to see her true colors.
I so hope that I’ve read her completely wrong; I so hope she’s truly opposed to what the Common Core Initiative has wrought.
Alyson Williams, who worked in data management for the publishing industry, a mother who has written and spoken much about education and data reforms over the past several years, has just given a speech at the Agency Based Education Conference.
She asks us to consider how current trends toward consent-less gathering and use of student data are to be affected by frameworks already in place (such as SLDS databases) and by new movements, such as the federal Commission on Evidence-based Policymaking (CEP) and the Competency-based Education reforms now arising in many legislatures (including Utah’s) today. She points out that a key cheerleader for Competency-based Education is Marc Tucker, the avowed enemy to local control of education who is, nonetheless, a mistakenly respected advisor to the Utah legislature. How might Marc Tucker’s CBE Baby affect my children and yours?
I agree with Joy Pullman: “I shouldn’t have to give a flying fig about whom Donald Trump picks for this position.”
But we care, and the figs are flying, because there’s so much power unconstitutionally wielded by the executive branch over local education.
Although Trump did say in a campaign interview that he wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, it does not look as though that’s going to happen, sadly. The next best thing is to name a local-control oriented, constitution-loving Education Secretary.
A similar public letter from Parents Against Common Core asked Trump to consider, along with Dr. Bill Evers, Dr. Larry Arnn, Dr. Sandra Stotsky, Dr. Peg Luksik, or Dr. William Jeynes.
Frighteningly though, this week Trump interviewed Michelle Rhee, one of the top ten scariest education reformers in the nation, for the job; the scandal-pocked former Commissioner of Education in D.C. and author of a creepy ed reform book, “Radical” is no friend to children, to opt-out liberty, or to the free market. Of “letting them choose wherever they want to go,” she said, “I don’t believe in that model at all.” So, Goodbye freedom, under Rhee.
There should be no chance that she’s chosen. (Even though she’s suddenly, cutely, dressing in red, white and blue to meet the president elect, do not be fooled!)
I hope Trump’s receiving a storm of anti-Rhee letters this week from parents and educators at his public input website. He’s probably going to make his announcement this week. Please, please speak up.
This must-read article is partially reposted from Emily Talmage’s blog (Maine mom against common core). I think my favorite part is the video clip at the end, depicting a real cat and a real alligator, where the cat swats and intimidates the alligator, causing it to retreat in fear. What an iconic metaphor for what we the little people are trying to do as we fight the machine.
Several weeks ago, I wondered in a blog post whether or not public education would survive the next administration. Admittedly, I was all but certain at the time that Hillary Clinton would be our next president, and my predictions were more than dismal: more screen time for even our youngest children, inflated local budgets, invasive school-wide and individual data collection, a proliferation oflow-quality online K-12 and higher education programs, etc.
Ever since the big shock of Tuesday night, however, I’ve been scrambling to say something coherent about what we can expect now that Donald Trump really is going to be our next president.
Will public education survive?
Here’s the funny (and by that I mean incredibly scary) thing about federal public education policy: the big agenda – the real agenda – seems to survive no matter who is put in charge.
The real agenda – the ongoing march toward a cradle-to-grave system of human capital development that relies on the most sophisticated data collection and tracking technologies to serve its unthinkably profitable end – is fueled and directed by a multi-billion dollar education-industrial-complex that has been built over the course of decades.
It’s an absolute beast, an army of epic scale, and it’s a system that has the same uncanny ability to blend in with its surroundings as a chameleon.
Take, for example, the new “innovative assessment systems” that are being thrust on us every which way in the wake of ESSA. Under the banner of free market ideology, the far-right American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is promoting the very same assessment policies that far-left groups like the national unions and the National Center for Fair and Open Testing are now pushing. And though some claim that one ideology is merely “co-opting” the ideas of the other, the reality is that they lead to the same data-mining, cradle-to-career tracking end.
Consider, too, the massive push for blended, competency-based, and digital learning – all unproven methods of educating children, but highly favored by ed-tech providers and data-miners.
Most of these corporate-backed policies were cooked up in Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, and then made their way not only to the far-right ALEC, but also to left-leaning groups like the Center for Collaborative Education, the Coalition for Essential Schools, and the Great Schools Partnership. Depending on what sort of population each group is targeting, these wolves will dress themselves up in sheep’s clothing and make appeals to different values. For the right, they will package their policies in the language of the free market and choice; for the left, they will wrap them in a blanket of social-justice terminology.
Pull back the curtain far enough, however, and you will see they are selling the same thing.
There is, of course, no question that Hillary Clinton has been deeply entrenched in the education-industrial-complex for many, many years – even profiting from it personally – and that the big agenda was going to move full speed ahead if she were elected.
But what will happen now that we’re guaranteed to have a President Trump?
Unfortunately, we need look no further than the man leading Trump’s education transition team to understand how much trouble we are in.
Not long ago, Gerard Robinson, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was one of only eleven members of the Executive Team of Jeb Bush’s “Digital Learning Now!” council, along with Joel Klein of NYC Public Schools, Gregory McGinity of the Broad Foundation, and Susan Patrick of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning.
Former Gates Foundation executive Tom Vander Ark, who sits on the board of the world’s creepiest education organizations while overseeing a giant portfolio of digital and online learning companies, picked Robinson as one of his top ten reformers to watch back in 2010.
It should be no surprise, then, that Robinson recently told EdWeek: “I see [Trump] supporting blended learning models, alternative learning models,” and that he will “likely want to continue significant investments in colleges and universities, but also closely track how well graduates do in the labor market.”
For those of you now protesting that Trump said he would get rid of the Department of Education, well, President Reagan said that too, but then he sponsored a report called “A Nation at Risk” which kicked the role of the federal government in education into high gear. According to Robinson, Trump may “streamline” the department …whatever that means.
As for rumors circulating that either Ben Carson or William Evers of the Hoover Institute will be tapped for the role of Education Secretary under Trump, I think we’re more likely to get someone akin to what Robinson told Edweek: “Someone from the private sector, who may not have worked in education directly, but may be involved in philanthropy or some kind of reform.”
So what does this mean for us? For our kids, our schools and our communities?
More than likely, it won’t be much different nor any less dismal than what I wrote when I assumed Hillary would be president: more screen time for even our youngest children, inflated local budgets to support one-to-one tech initiatives, invasive (way more invasive) school-wide and individual data collection, and a proliferation of low-quality online K-12 and higher education programs.
Unless!
And this is a big unless..
Unless parents and activists from across the political spectrum can mobilize now and stand up now to say enough is enough. We knowwhat the big agenda is, and we aren’t going to manipulated by superficial policy change anymore.
This means that those who lean right can’t afford to go back to sleep once they hear talk of school choice and vouchers and the elimination of Common Core, and those leaning left can’t afford to throw in the towel or be led astray by phony anti-privatization movements run by neoliberal groups pushing the same darn thing as everyone else…
Zeide is a scholar and a lawyer, not an activist for student privacy. She lays out the pros and cons of Competency Based Education with probing ethical questions.
She also notes at minute 14 that there is a movement to use unit record data, which I have been stressing in recent posts concerning the activities of the federal CEP — “Commission on Evidence Based Policymaking”.
She does not use the word “Orwellian,” speaking of unit record data, but I do. If that governmental stalking of individuals idea bothers you, give online comment at the CEP Commission’s website. That CEP comment deadline is this weekend. Be heard.
If words don’t come easily, just say that student privacy is very important, and that consent is important, and that a move to a database of individual unit records is unacceptable in our free country.
Utah’s liberty-loving, anti-common core community did a lot of happy dancing last night when candidates Alisa Ellis, Michelle Boulter and Lisa Cummins won three seats on the state school board. This election showed what can happen when people actually get to vote, instead of having the governor appoint board members, as had happened for so many years in the past.
Utah’s board finally has vibrant voices and votes for parent-and-teacher directed, not federal-corporate directed control of curriculum, testing, and student data.
Although the Utah anti-common core community was saddened that the heroic Dr. Gary Thompson (pictured above with Senator Mike Lee and Lisa Cummins) did not win his bid for a seat on the state school board, his campaign had an undeniable impact in raising awareness about student mental health, student data privacy, and the supremacy of family /parental rights. How often Dr. Thompson repeated this truth: “Parents are, and always must be, the resident experts of their children”.
The spirit of what Dr. Thompson’s all about thrives in Alisa, Michelle and Lisa.
The news of three of our strongest freedom-fighter parents taking three seats on the state school board is nothing short of miraculous.
Here are 6 reasons that a vote for Trump will help preserve freedoms for our children– including freedom from Common Core– contrasted with 6 reasons that a vote for Hillary (or a third party who can’t beat her) will dramatically reduce the future freedoms of our children.
Reason #1:Religious Liberty and Freedom of Conscience
Hillary’s aiming to remove religious liberty and freedom of conscience from schools and from society. She has called for this:
“All the laws we’ve passed don’t count for much if they’re not enforced… laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” (see video minute 8-9)
“‘I would like them to pray for guidance and to pray for our country because we need prayer now almost more than we’ve ever needed it before.”
How might presidential stands for or against religious liberty trickle down into school curricula, and into laws concerning churches and homes?
Reason # 2: Trump’s opposed to Common Core.
His campaign video about education explains that America must “end Common Core,” which he calls “a disaster” because “education has to be local“. At rallies like this one in Wilmington, North Carolina, he’s said: “We’ve got to get rid of Common Core.”
On a Fox News interview, when asked if he would cut departments, Trump said, “I may cut the Department of Education“.
In the March presidential debate, Trump said, “Education through Washington, D.C., I don’t want that. I want local education. I want the parents and I want all of the teachers, and I want everybody to get together around a school and to make education great.” This contrasts greatly with Hillary, who mocked local control.
She called Common Core nothing more than a “political failure.” She said, “…this was a political failure because they negotiated something and they had no real agreed-upon program for explaining it and selling it to people so that they left an opening for those who were always in the education debate, who don’t think anybody should be told anything about what to study, even if it’s the multiplication tables. You know, that that should all be left to local control. And then you get into more complicated areas, as we all know, that that’s just totally off limits.”
Reason # 3:Trump’s got Evers.
Trump’s opposition to the Common Core machine aren’t just words. Check out who Trump chose for an education advisor: Williamson “Bill” Evers.
I had the honor of helping to transport Evers to a Stop Common Core speaking engagement in Salt Lake City a few years ago. I remember the leather satchel he carried, which overflowed with books– all titles about federalism and states’ rights.
Reason #4: Trump’s free from the NEA and AFT (abortion-promoting) national teachers unions, which fully endorse Hillary.
Both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) back Hillary Clinton, and both financially uphold Planned Parenthood and other controversial groups and initiatives.
Even so, when Hillary presented her keynote speech at the recent National Education Association (NEA) conference, she was booed –why?
She spoke of cooperation between public charter schools and public schools. She’s not talking about sporting events or dances, folks. She wants all schools to be controlled by her public-private partner-shipping elite agenda.
Democratic-leaning NEA takes an anti-charter stand, but Hillary is aiming to play both sides with her private-public school initiatives. She knows that the Common Core machine is comprised of two machines, both of whom she needs: the corporate machine, comprised of Pearson, Microsoft/Gates, etc. (these make money starting charters and selling ed tech aligned to common standards) and the government machine (this gains control by using common data mining systems and common tests and teacher evaluations). This is what Hillary is speaking of when she speaks of her educational technology agenda, built on public-private partnerships).
Trump doesn’t need Gates’, Pearson’s, the NEA’s, or the AFT’s funds, and he’s not bound to their political standards. Hillary, though, is bound; Bill Gates, her Foundation’s top $25 Million+ donor, remember, is also the leading promoter of Common Core Education and Data Mining. He was almost her vice presidential pick. Hillary’s not about to get rid of Gates’ precious baby, the Common Core.
Reason #5: Trump’s not about Hillary’s 1998 Marc Tucker successful conspiracy against local control.
The infamous Tucker-Hillary letter, a detailed plot outlining how Hillary and Tucker planned to turn America into a socialistic machine using national school standards and “large scale data management systems” (school-work data) is part of the Congressional Record from 1998. You can read the PDF files of each page of Marc Tucker’s “Dear Hillary” letter in the 1998 Congressional Record through these links:1234567.
Hillary and Tucker are still working hard to implement their plot, nearly twenty years later. Tucker‘s at NCEE, where his reports still spout sickening ideas such as: “the United States will have to largely abandon the beloved emblem of American education: local control“. Meanwhile, Hillary’s whole “Initiative on Technology and Innovation” is a detailed, updated extension of their 1998 conspiracy letter against local control.
Will Americans be smart enough to decipher her witchery of wordplay to see her plan for what it really is?
Whose vision keeps children safe? How will voting third-party bless children?
If you want your home –or local school– to have defenders– gun-owning teachers and principals— and if you believe as our founders did, that self-defense and gun ownership are vital American values, vote for Trump.
If you want to be disarmed and at the mercy of an unaccountable government, and if you are comfortable with the murder of babies, then vote for a third party candidate, or Hillary. It is the same.
A final note:
Many of my constitution-loving friends are voting for Castle (or McMullin) and tell me that Trump is only slightly, if at all, better than Hillary, and say that voting for either Trump or Hillary is condoning evil and will thus draw the displeasure of God.
I beg to differ.
God holds us accountable for the world we allow to come upon our children by our votes– far more so, I imagine, than He weighs our dream vote or “statement” vote which we might cast for a candidate who will never be elected to stand against our actual enemy.
Is just “what’s in our hearts” what matters here– or is what matters the real vote, a vote for actual power, that affects actual lives, and actual deaths?
Trump’s commitment to the American dream’s basic foundation: religious liberty, self-defense/gun rights, educational liberty, the right to life, and freedom from governmental micromanagement, are unarguably, eternally significant differences between these, the only two candidates who are within hope of winning this presidential election.
Will not the consequences of voting for Hillary (or third party)– thus enabling the loss of the basic American rights outlined above– draw greater grief and displeasure from God?
The testimony of Emmett McGroarty of the American Principles Project (APP) stood out from the other testimonies that were presented, and is posted in full below, with permission from APP. Many of the other organizations whose representatives testified do financially benefit from the privacy-stomping, data-mining, gold rush, including the Data Quality Campaign, American Institutes for Research, etc. But APP does not. APP exists to maintain local control, constitutional rights, and individual privacy rights.
On the video, Mr. Emmett McGroarty of APP testifies at about hour 2:45 to 3:07. To see the agenda of who else was slated to testify at this hearing, click this link: final-cep-oct-21-agenda_updated-1
Testimony Abstract:
We urge the Commission to resist calls to repeal the statutory prohibition on the development, implementation, or maintenance of a federal student unit-record system. Such a system would curtail liberty interests of the individual, would invite the collection and use of ever-more data, and would fundamentally alter the relationship between the individual and government in a way that is incompatible with our constitutional republic.
Statement by Emmett J. McGroarty, JD
The Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking was created to pursue a laudable goal: To improve analysis of the effectiveness of federal programs. But when such a pursuit is used to justify collecting, conglomerating, and tracking massive amounts of Americans’ personal data, as is certainly true in the realm of education, it’s necessary to examine the dangers and the tradeoffs. American Principles Project (APP) believes that such activities suppress the liberties of the people and pervert the relationship between the people and government. We urge the Commission to reject calls to establish a federal student unit-record system and to engage in such Orwellian activity.
Section 134 of the Higher Education Act wisely prohibits the development, implementation, or maintenance of a federal student unit-record system (one that would allow the government to collect personally identifiable information (PII) on individual higher-education students and link education data to workforce data). Recently, though, an orchestrated demand for repeal of this prohibition has been swelling. According to well-funded organizations with a vested interest in accessing that data for their own purposes, the federal government suffers from data-deprivation. Think how much more efficiently our nation could operate, and how much more the government could help people run their own lives, if it maintained a centralized repository tracking almost every conceivable data point about every citizen – where he attended school, what courses he took, what grades he earned, what extracurricular record (good or bad) he compiled, what jobs he applied for, what jobs he got, what salary he made, whether he was promoted, what salary he earned in his new position, whether he lost his job and why, whether he joined the military, what sort of military record he established, whether he was arrested and for what, whether he went to jail, and on and on ad infinitum.
This is not a description of a free and open United States of America. This is a description of a totalitarian society that keeps tabs on its own citizens – for their own good, of course. It’s also a description of what would inevitably happen with the establishment of a student unit-record system, all in the name of “better consumer information,” “accountability,” and “transparency.”
What’s wrong with a federal unit-tracking system?
First, it would compile students’ personally identifiable information (PII) without their consent – or even their knowledge that their data is being collected and disclosed. It’s one thing to collect data from a student who voluntarily (which of course presumes actual notice of the program) participates in a government program and understands that participation will expose his PII to program administrators; it’s quite another to forcibly suck every individual into a datacollection system simply because he enrolled in an institution of higher education. Telling that student that he must hand over his personal data to promote a greater good as defined by bureaucrats and lobbyists – or even worse, just dragooning him without telling him anything – is simply un-American.
Second, the purposes of the proposed system would be so open-ended that the repository is certain to be expanded over time to centralize data far beyond collegiate and employment data. In the creative bureaucratic mind, literally everything can be linked to education. So why stop with employment data? Why not see how one’s education affects his participation in the military? Or his health? Or his criminality? Or his housing patterns? Or the number of children he has? Or whether he purchases a gun? Or his political activity? Inquiring bureaucrats want to know, and every question can be justified by citing “better consumer information.”
And will this dossier created on every citizen become permanent? Presumably so. If the goal of providing maximum consumer information is to be achieved, both historical and current data – constantly updated and expanded – must be compiled and preserved.
Perhaps this expansion won’t happen. Perhaps the federal government, in stark contrast to its behavior over the last 100 years, will stay within its boundaries. But reality-based Americans know the government will push the envelope as far as it possibly can, as it always does. And they know that giving that government access to such a treasure trove of data is dangerous to privacy and to individual liberty.
Third, the idea that this massive repository of PII will be protected against unauthorized access and data breaches is quite simply delusional. Less than a year ago, a hearing of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform revealed the shocking lack of student-data security throughout the U.S. Department of Education (USED). The problems encompass both lax controls over the people allowed access to sensitive data, as well as outdated technology and inadequate security to prevent unauthorized access.
USED’s system contains over 139 million Social Security numbers (largely through its office of Financial Student Aid), along with sensitive borrower information about students and families contained in the National Student Loan Database. The findings of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and the General Accounting Office were disturbing:
Of the 97,000 account/users with access to this information (government employees and contractors), fewer than 20 percent have undergone a background check to receive a security clearance.
The security mechanisms protecting that data are grossly inadequate. As one OIG witness testified, “During our testing . . . OIG testers were able to gain full access to the Department’s network and our access went undetected by Dell [the vendor] and the Department’s Office of the Chief Information Officer.”
USED ignored repeated warnings from OIG that its information systems are vulnerable to security threats.
That the federal government should now consider ballooning the sensitive data contained in these insecure systems is at best misguided and reckless.
Even if the data systems were secure, the Obama administration’s gutting of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) means that government education officials (federal, state, and local) now have enormous leeway to disclose PII on individual students without their consent. Pursuant to the recent FERPA regulations, these officials may share private PII with other government agencies, nonprofit entities, corporations, researchers, and literally anyone on the planet as long as the disclosure can be characterized as an audit or evaluation of a (broadly defined) “education program.”
Will the new conglomeration of student data be fair game for disclosure under these regulations? The danger is too real to dismiss.
The philosophical problem with a federal student unit-record system is that it treats free-born American citizens as objects of research and study. It assumes that the goal of benefitting others in society, in vague and theoretical ways, authorizes the powerful federal government to collect and disseminate millions of data points on individuals – without their consent. This fundamentally changes the relationship between the individual and government. Collecting and holding massive amounts of data about an individual has an intimidating effect on the individual—even if the data is never used. This is even more so the case when the collector has the force of the law behind it. Our republic rests on the idea that the citizen will direct government. That cannot happen where government sits in a position of intimidation over the individual.
Submitted by:
Emmett J. McGroarty, Esq.
Senior Fellow
American Principles Project
If you wish to testify, there will be additional public hearings in various places across the country. You may also submit written testimony online.
Here’s a P.S. to all of the above from me, Christel, because I am absolutely screeching and screaming over this and wish more people would get it, would speak up and would speak out.
It does not take a brilliant lawyer to understand how wrong this is– although it’s nice to have the brilliant Mr. Emmett McGroarty, and words cannot describe the debt that freedom lovers owe to APP and McGroarty.
But this unit-record identifier issue is not, at heart, complicated, nor should it be the least bit intimidating –to anyone in this country, of any age or occupation. Get involved. Say something.
Ask people to think:
Who holds the keys and drives education? It should be those closest to each individual child: the parents, the teachers, and the principal. They are the most accountable and care the most.
But today, because “We, the People” collectively have not been paying attention, corporations and governments have taken too much power over DATA –and that’s daily increasing. If CEP goes in the direction that it seems to be going, then soon, individual student record identifiers will track individuals so that governments and corporations can “see” and “help” us all. Heaven save us from that kind of help.
The federal and corporate push for ever more individual data is supposedly to improve education and workplaces for the children, but this agenda does not seem to serve children, but to treat them as “human capital” –experiments, worker bees and lab rats, while making certain groups unbelievably rich, meaning rich both in money itself, and also rich in data –which in our day equals money.
Our country went through the land rush, the gold rush, but now it’s the data rush.
Now it’s data mining instead of strip mining.
WE are the ones being mined—by BigGov-BigBiz-BigEd.
If the push for personally identifiable information sharing succeeds fully, we will not own ourselves.
The sweetest and most naiive among us are thinking, “It’s okay if the corporations and governments know everything about me, about my children, my finances, my religious beliefs, gun rights, sexual morality beliefs and more– because I don’t do anything wrong.
By whose definition do you not do anything wrong? Do your values and beliefs match those of the government’s so perfectly that you can trust its judgment and its interventions over your own?
And now that SEL (Social Emotional Learning) standards for K-12 are being developed and promoted to track “non-cognitive” factors, starting on children and moving into the workplace, it seems not even our personal psychology is to be permitted to be private any longer. What types of emotions or beliefs or traditions are mentally or socially “at-risk” and by whose definition? When we give up power over our own data privacy, we give up at least some control over our own judgments of values.
What makes us certain that the world that federal SEL activists and the CEP Commission wants is the same world that I or you or other free people want? Just look at what the federal activists are doing! Don’t give them more power over us!
As Dr. Karen Effrem and Jane Robbins recently pointed out at The Federalist:
“The new federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) …requires rating schools based partly on “nonacademic” factors. ESSA … pours money into SEL programs, “which may include engaging or supporting families at school or at home” … training school personnel on “when and how to refer… children with, or at risk of, mental illness,” and implementing programs for children… “at-risk” of academic or social problems, without ever defining “at-risk” …ESSA language urges school officials to cast a wide net for special education in school-wide “intervention” and “support” programs, allowing schools to sidestep parental consent requirements. [There’s a] planned revision of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the test referred to as “the nation’s report card,” to assess mindsets and school climate… [There’s] funding for federally controlled and funded “social emotional research” in the proposed Strengthening Education Through Research Act (SETRA)—a bill supported by individuals and corporations that will profit handsomely from all this sensitive data to help them mold worker bees for the global economy… A third federal initiative is USED’s bribery of states to promote SEL standards and data-gathering on preschool children via the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge grants. These grants, along with the preschool grants in ESSA and Head Start, promote “Baby Common Core”-style SEL standards and data-collection.”
Please find a way to stand up and say no to the call for using “Unit-Record Identifiers,” no matter what the reasoning may be. Say yes to personal privacy, personal responsibility, and to family-based, individual-based, local control of social and emotional and academic and religious values.
Senate President Niederhauser and House Speaker Hughes
The State School Board race has never drawn much attention before. But this year, the Salt Lake Tribune reported, businesses and even top-tier elected officials are personally campaigning and fundraising for and against certain candidates.
Yesterday’s headline was: “Niederhauser and Hughes ask Business Leaders to Help Defeat UEA-Backed School Board Candidates“. Yesterday, too, business organizations such as the Utah Technology Council and the School Improvement Association joined Niederhauser and Hughes in a fundraising webinar that promoted a slate of pro-Common Core candidates who happen to be not favored by or funded by national teacher’s unions.
I understand why someone with a conscience would campaign against out-of-state big UEA-NEA money buying Utah’s state board election. So they should.
But I don’t understand why these groups have chosen to campaign against both the anti-Common Core candidates (in blue) as well as against the UEA-backed candidates (in red) as they showed in this slide at yesterday’s insider fundraising webinar:
But my bigger questions are: how do the Speaker and the Senate President dare to campaign for Common Core candidates, thus going directly against Governor Herbert’s call to end Common Core alignment in Utah?
Have they forgotten the reasons that their party is strongly opposed to all that the Common Core Initiative entails?
Have they forgotten Governor Herbert’s letter that called for an end to Common Core and SAGE testing just four months ago? (See letter here.) For all the talk about wanting to move toward local control and to move against the status quo, this seems odd.
Next to the governorship, there aren’t more powerful offices in the state than those held by House Speaker Hughes and Senate President Niederhauser. So what does this powerful endorsement of a certain slate of candidates signify?
First, it signifies what is probably a sincere concern for (partial) local control: In the fundraising webinar held yesterday (by Hughes, Niederhauser, the School Improvement Network and the Utah Technology Council) the following slide was displayed: Out of $308,512 raised for the political action of the Utah UEA (teacher’s union) $300,000 of it came from out of state. Hughes and Niederhauser are right in being alarmed at that money’s probable effect on local control.
(What they didn’t highlight is this: all of the anti-Common Core candidates’ funding, combined, doesn’t come close to what even one of the UEA-funded candidates are spending because none of them are backed by corporate or political powers.)
Secondly, it signifies Utah leadership’s alignment with Obama’s vision for education, which among other things mandates sidelining certain subjects in favor of others. Niederhauser told the Tribune that he didn’t want any board member’s vision to “dominate the board” which, to him, meant to “supplant business and technology representatives.” So he wants to make sure that business and technology is at least as dominant as any other interest. The School Improvement Network is of the same opinion.
We could ask why. Why, specifically, would legislators be endorsing the fields of business and technology over the fields of languages, medicine, history, social work, the arts or any other thing? And where’s the idealogical division between what NEA wants and what Niederhauser-Hughes want? Is it fair to speculate that NEA corporate funders are in competition against the Education First corporate funders, and all of this is just an economic struggle pretending to be a struggle for the children’s best interests? Utah tax dollars are, after all, the passionate pursuit of multiple players in the now $2 Billion per year ed tech sales industry.
Many people know that both Hughes and Niederhauser’s political campaigns are heavily funded by Education First, a Utah political action committee for Prosperity 2020 that puts businesses first.
Not voters first. Not education –broadly– first; this is education as defined by the ed-tech sales industry and by Obama’s 2020 vision. Read it in their own words. In an Tribune op-ed taking credit for passing legislation that Education First had lobbied for, you’ll see little focus on funding for paper and pens, school basketballs, violins, gluesticks, old-fashioned books, or heaven forbid, large teachers’ salaries– no, ed funding to Education First means to fund the priorities that precisely (coincidentally?) match Obama’s 2020 vision: early childhood education (which competes with free enterprise/private preschools), workforce development (China-styled central planning) “community schools” (Obama’s vision to integrate healthcare with academics and with socio-political movements “using government schools as a hub”) and standardized personalized learning (an oxymoron that cements Common Core academics and its data tags).
Don’t mistake this as a fight between tech lovers and tech haters. None of the candidates for state school board are anti-technology, though the smart ones are pushing for improved laws governing student privacy in this modern age.
So what are Hughes and Niederhauser really saying when they say they’re for the pro-tech candidates? What does that really mean? That Utahns should sit back and let the ed tech sales industry, or businesses, sit in the driver’s seat for educational decision-making? That’s the stated aim of Education First (in Utah) and of Obama’s 2020 (nationally) and, according to his Tribune quote above, it’s also the aim of President Niederhauser.
Education First doggedly, directly, lobbies citizens, governments, and school districts, to strong-arm their narrow vision, that businesses should “help” direct education. They refer to my child and yours as the economy’s. They call children “human capital” on their website. This is, when ripe, the 1992 Hillary-Tucker dream coming true, with the collective economy dictating to the individual on the assembly line.
Education First wants a high “concentration of science and engineering occupations” in Utah, which you may or may not agree with; what I hope you do agree with is that this new, business – public ed partnershipping governance system, with business being handed power to influence schooling, when taken to the extreme, is fascism. In fascism, there’s no distinction between government and business. And the voter has no say.
Do we want to walk down that slippery slope? Do we want the Education First business community to be given power in schools?
Whether promoting science and engineering at the expense of other subject and careers is the will of the people, or not, really doesn’t come in to the discussion. Prosperity 2020 has said that businesses will “provide a business oriented plan to improve results” for schools.
If Hughes or Niederhauser would respond to my emails to them, I would ask them this: how is it any more helpful toward Constitutional local control– if that is what you really want– to let businesses take over the driver’s seat for educators, as your financial backers aim to do, than for out of state (NEA) funding to call the same shots? Either way, students and schools and voters lose personal freedoms to self-appointed experts who think they know best.
So when Niederhauser worries that “big money groups effectively buy the election,” he is right. The hundreds of thousands of dollars pouring in to NEA-UEA approved candidates’ purses should raise eyebrows. But shouldn’t the same eyebrows rise too, seeing in-state big money groups like Education First and Prosperity 2020 now, as in the past, funding the pro-Common Core candidates –and funding Hughes and Niederhauser themselves– effectively buying the election in the very same way?
Meanwhile, none of the liberty-first, anti-Common Core candidates, Alisa Ellis, Lisa Cummins, Michelle Boulter or Dr. Gary Thompson, are richly funded. All they really have to stand on is true principles of liberty –and word of mouth.
Many voters know that Common Core is anti-local control. The Governor almost lost in the primary to anti-Common Core challenger Jonathan Johnson because of this. The Governor was repeatedly booed at political conventions this year because he had been such a promoter of the Common Core, prior to his turnaround. What will the governor say about Niederhauser’s and Hughes’ current effort? More importantly, what will voters say?
Dr. Gary Thompson, a district 10 candidate for state school board, said today:
“I was pleased the that the Speaker of the House and Senator Neiderhauser identified who the “anti common core” education candidates are in this election. I was pleased to be labeled as one of them. This provides a clear choice for members in the community to chose from as they please. Comments made by the Speaker in regards to the UEA did not receive a prior endorsement by this campaign. I look forward to having a professional, cordial discussion with my UEA endorsed opponent on September 28thregarding education issues that will affect our children in District 10″
For anyone wanting to watch the debates between state school board candidates, please check that schedule here.
Pictured below are the candidates for state school board that I endorse, whom the UEA, NEA, UTC, SIN, Senate President and House Speaker do not:
For true local control of education:
Alisa Ellis, Michelle Boulter, Lisa Cummins, Dr. Gary Thompson.
Recently, a friend mentioned that she was happy that Common Core was finally gone, and that we could finally look toward something better.
Why did she think the Common Core Initiative was over? It’s grown.
But it’s hidden, for the most part. Feds and states don’t use the term anymore because it’s so unpopular; in my state, they call it “Utah Core Standards” –although, if pressed, state school boards will admit that these are Common Core: they have to be, or they wouldn’t get federal funding. Also, the D.C. legislators were told that the new federal law, ESSA, had gotten rid of Common Core and had returned control to states. How untrue that line was; the Department of Ed had just renamed it “Challenging State Academic Standards”. Common Core standards and data tags are still in the driver’s seat for all the new movements in ed reforms: from the #GoOpen Initiative, Open Educational Resources movment, and the Learning Registry to federal SETRA which is being voted on right now. Read on.
(Don’t get depressed. We can take bold action to reclaim many of our lost freedoms. We know that pretending that everything is fine, or pretending that it’s too late or too difficult to change things, is wrong. So choose the right.)
First, remember this: Common Core academics and data mining are utterly married.
The most “commonizing” thing about the Common Core Initiative was neverthe set of academic standards (“Common Core State Standards”- which have recently been federally renamed “Challenging State Academic Standards”. We can call them anything we want as long as the feds can see that they still align to the data and testing programs so that we can be tracked.)
In the screenshot below, we read that CEDS is a partnership that includes the federal Department of Education and the CCSSO (private co-copyright holders over the Common Core academic standards). Whether you think the capacity for government to monitor free citizens over the course of our whole lives is good or bad, you can’t deny that that was and is the agenda of CEDS and SLDS.
This screenshot is the reason that I’ve never understood why so many say that Common Core has nothing to do with data collection, and that saying so is a conspiracy theory; these are clearly conspiracy facts: the government conspired with the private trade group CCSSO to standardize educational data nationally –without allowing legislatures or voters to vote on the matter, simply by calling the initiatives voluntary and by using cash incentives to make the standardization initiatives happen. Money for both the academic standards and the data standards came from two main sources: unelected philanthropist Bill Gates, who profits wildly from the initiatives, and from the federal Dept. of Education. Follow the money trails if you want to know what’s being built.
Federally approved academic standards, bad as they are, can still be interpreted locally to some extent. Federal data standards, though, are like matching keys in matching locks: there’s only one way they’ll work, and that’s if they are exactly, precisely the same.
So CEDS standards are used in all fifty states’ database systems because the funding and instructions for construction of those systems using CEDS came from the feds. CEDS standards are also used in the federal EdFacts Data Exchange. They’re also used in the digital testing, whether it’s end of the year testing or embedded curricular testing, in every state. They’re also mandated every time your state gets a new federal cash infusion for its State Longitudinal Database System. If your state moves toward embedded tests in an effort to get rid of over high-stakes testing, as my state is, then CEDS will still be used and your child will still be tracked. Now with the federal push for “Community Schools” that must share students’ medical and mental health data, combined with academic data, common data standards across agencies has become the federal “must”.
CEDS interoperability and standardization are the height of fashion and efficiency, but are also the death of individual flexibility and local control and citizen data privacy. Worse, the education reformers, both political and corporate, are not content to just standardize academic standards, testing, and data mining tags between states. They also want to standardize these things globally.
(If humans were angels, this might not pose any problem. The history of the human race, however, tells a sad tale of bullying and tyranny that has been significantly interrupted only by America’s noble founders. Since we cannot trust human nature generally, the U.S. Constitution logically placed checks on human power, and placed balances against human ambition, so that individual freedom would not be deleted by the noble-or-not initiatives of bullies. Humans are not angels, and giving so much power to governmental– especially globally governed– entitites, is flat-out stupid. Where are your rights to freedom of speech, of religion, of conscience, when the Constitutional rights have been demoted in the move toward global citizenship, and global data mining?)
The twin movements (of global content regulation over education and of global data standardization) are quickly apparent in these three things:
THE LEARNING REGISTRY – a gateway for “approved” federal data and lessons, partnered with global data and ed systems; this is the main tool of the #GoOpen initiative. The Learning Registry defines itself as “a new approach” to “sharing data” that aggregates information about the “publisher, location, content area, standards alignment, ratings, reviews, and more.” It claims that finding educational resources and assessing their quality is a “burden” on educators. That responsibility will be taken over, to unburden educators– by the federal dept. of ed working with the federal dept. of defense. As much as I love to give and receive, I don’t want to share or have shared with me, educational content under the moral and educational “guidance” of the department of defense and of education. Appealing to my sense of altruism is not going to help. Ironically, Midgely admits that the love of money is the root of #GoOpen. At minute 13:52 in that video, he says, “to be honest, there’s a lot of money to be made as well”. He says that digital badges will be the common currency of K-20 and adult, corporate education. Although Midgely says that “you don’t have to conform your data sets,” and “we accept native formats” and that the system is peer-based, not censored, I think: but it’s run by the federal government. How is that peer-based? Who runs the show? What happens, down the road, when an educational resource hasn’t been run through the registry filter? Is it the orphaned, unusable resource? This registry was designed by the Dept. of Education, by federal Deputy Director of Ed Tech, Steve Midgely (whose video about the registry is here. ) Is it not weird that this learning registry is co-created by the Department of Defense and the Department of Education? And that its global partners include the “federated community” of the Soros-partnered Ariadne in Europe; the Global Grid for Learning, a Gates baby; the U.N.’s OER and more? Is this registry going to marginalize traditional, classical books and lessons even further than Common Core’s glorification of “informational text” did to English literature? Remember: Common Core never outlawed Shakespeare, but it endorsed informational text reading in the English classrooms to the point that many public schools today have no room for much Shakespeare. The endorsement of whatever the Learning Registry finds endorsable, will likely marginalize other content, if and when the registry becomes the new pink. Endorsement means the feds are picking winners and losers.
THE #GoOPEN INITIATIVE – the name of the federal campaign serving the learning registry. For it, the federal Dept. of Ed is proposing a regulation to make it impossible to receive federal funds for any curriculum building that doesn’t fit in with the registry and #GoOpen. Local ideas for public education will not be funded if not in line with the registry and the campaign to #GoOpen. (Utah is one of the main guinea pigging states in #GoOpen. Not proud of that claim to fame.)
TRANSFER OF THE INTERNET FROM THE U.S. TO THE GLOBALISTS – Sept. 30, 2016 is Obama’s date to make that reality. Have you read the letter from a tiny handful of Republican legislators that exposes the huge mistake this transfer will be for liberty? The internet is now used by the whole world, but it is an American national treasure, and its key operating functions were funded by U.S. taxpayers. Why give authority over the Internet away? The letter points out that transferring power over the Internet away from the U.S. will “greatly endanger Internet freedom” (look at how countries like China and Iraq censor the writings of their citizens online.) It points out that it will “significantly increase the power of foreign governments over the internet.” It also points out that U.S. taxpayers funded the key operating functions of the internet. The supreme law of our land, that upholds freedom from censorship and freedom of religion, can not exist in the soon to be globally-governed internet future. What will happen to the ways in which we learn, if the Internet is to be controlled by countries who do not prize free thought?
Like a recurring nightmare, Race to the Top 2.0 is here.
Race to the Top #1 is an ugly story from 2009 that some Americans might not know. Picture the Federal Department of Money riding in a buggy, driven by the Secretary of Education. There are 50 horses (taxpaying states) pulling his load, and 5o sticks (RTTT grants and data systems) with 5o carrots (RTTT monies) dangling in front of each horse. Carved into each carrot is the word “Race to the Top” to make the horses feel noble, and not embarrassed about so lustily chasing the cashcarrots, because the horses can then say that they only chased the cashcarrots to improve education.
But it was never, ever about improving education. It was about implementing a labeling system for individuals, lifelong (with State-federal-corporate data tags) and it was about controlling education from the top. Regardless of what we are now calling Common Core (“Challenging State Academic Standards” is ESSA’s latest name) –it was the common data tags and systems that married corporate greed to the federal power agenda by labeling individuals, tests and digital curricula uniformly, and nationwide (CEDS).
Race to the Top 1.0 dangled huge money lures in front of state education departments. If the state boards of education took the bait, they might or might not ever see the cash, but the buggy drivers (feds) had successfully lured all the states into driving in the direction they wanted them to drive– and they only had to give out the money to a few “winners”. (Utah was not a RTTT grant winner).
Where did they drive the states? In the direction of big “Fed Ed” –by signing on to Common Core standards, Common Educational Data Standards, State Longitudinal Database Systems, aligned tests and more.)
It isn’t called 2.0 by the feds, but instead is called the ridiculous title of: The Elementary and Secondary Education Act as Amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority.
What a name. The anachronym would be TEASEAAABTESSAIADA.
Just call it 2.0.
It’s like the first Race to the Top in its federal bribery, coercion, and control grabbing from states.
Like Race to the Top 1.0, it increases data mining of children without parental consent. 2.0 requires federal study of children’s data by peer reviewers including psychometricians and requires states to “collaborate” with federal data mining agents at the Institute of Educational Sciences.
Like 1.0, it pushes federally aligned tests, but this time, states are encouraged to get away from parent-opt-out-able standardized tests by using other systems: “an array of innovative assessments” which will likely mean stealth/gaming assessment.
Like 1.0, cements Common Core Standards but under the new name of “challenging State academic standards,” which are, of course, still aligned to the federal-corporate common data tags.
In USPIE’s recent blog post, we read more about these federally proposed regulations which must be commented upon LOUDLY AND FIRMLY by citizens, teachers, and legislators. The deadline is September 9th for comment and that commenting link is here:
Before you comment, you could read this summary –provided by USPIE parents: (footnotes documentation also below.)
“The following are specific areas in which the proposed regulations are egregious in their attempts to impose a common, Federal education system, stripping parents and SEAs of what little local control of education remains, and in many ways contradicts and undermines the law in which they are intended to provide guidance.
PROPOSED 200.76:
Clarifies that any innovative assessment design can be used as long as it meets the Department’s requirements and is aligned to the State’s “challenging academic standards.”
NOTE: In other words, only assessment designs aligned to Common Core and approved by the Department can be used. This is contrary to the meaning of “innovation,” and flies in the face of ESSA prohibitions.
Gives States “flexibility” by allowing them to choose computer-adaptive statewide tests, so long as they align to “challenging State academic standards,” and are approved by the Department.
NOTE: This gives the illusion of flexibility while still ensuring States’ assessment systems align to the Common Core State Standards. Furthermore, since 2013 countless computerized testing malfunctions have been recorded leaving invalid results and wasted classroom time.1
Requires applications to be peer reviewed to help the Secretary of Education determine whether an applicant will be able to successfully meet the requirements. The peer review panels will include “psychometricians” (psychometrics is the modeling of test taker responses (behavior) in response to items (situations),2“measurement experts,” and “researchers.”
NOTE: These peer review panel members will collect data on children’s behaviors while testing, which is well beyond the scope of assessing a child’s knowledge…
Requires applications to include a description of how a State’s innovative assessment demonstration will align to” challenging State academic standards.” NOTE: The Department is requiring States to align to the subpar Common Core State Standards in order to receive funding. Parents are not fooled by the rebranding.
PROPOSED 200.77:
Requires a State Educational Agency to prove it has collaborated with “experts” including the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the lead Federal agency in charge of data collection, and in the planning, development, implementation, and evaluation of innovative assessments.
NOTE: The entire mission of IES is to collect data on America’s school children and share it.3
Requires State Educational Agencies (SEAs) or consortia to ensure assessments are “accessible for all students including children with disabilities and English learners. An SEA may also incorporate the principles of Universal Design for Learning in developing its innovative assessments.”4
NOTE: Universal Design for Learning uses computerized assessment programs to track a child’s brain function.5
PROPOSED 200.78:
Is aligned with the principles of President Obama’s Testing Action Plan, as is much of the proposed regulations. The criterion of the President’s plan will help SEAs or consortiums to develop “an array of innovative assessments so that we may learn from a variety of models rather than establish a preference for one particular approach.”6
NOTE: Obama’s Testing Action Plan states that there are “other means” of measuring a student’s performance alongside assessments such as school assignments, portfolios, student surveys, school climate, etc. This will certainly encourage more surveys given in schools and lead to more data mining.7
Clarifies the selection criteria the Secretary will use to evaluate an application and permit the Secretary to provide Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority to an SEA or consortia of SEAs.
NOTE: Under ESSA, the federal government is prohibited from funding the development of assessments. 8
Requires SEAs to ensure that each Local Education Agency (LEA) has the technological infrastructure to implement the [aligned] testing system.
NOTE: This requirement will incentivize increased State spending in order to compete to receive Federal funds. Very few states have the necessary technology9 to support the federally designed testing system, and ESSA prohibits the Federal Government from mandating “… a State or any subdivision thereof to spend any funds or incur any costs not paid for under this Act.”10
Requires an SEA or each SEA in the consortium to annually report to the Secretary updates on the implementation of the innovative assessments. Definitions of innovative assessments may include: “cumulative year-end assessments, competency-based assessments, instructionally embedded assessments, interim assessments, or performance and technology-based assessments.”
NOTE: These types of assessments are based on the mastery/competency/performance based education model or blended learning where children will be assessed and data mined all day long electronically and through projects.11 The federal government is incentivizing states to implement computer adaptive, nationally-aligned assessments and education models through a pilot grant. This is all prohibited in ESSA.12
Requires States, for selection purposes, to include continuous improvement process assurances for “developing or improving balanced assessment systems that include summative, interim, and formative assessments, including supporting local educational agencies in developing or improving such assessments.”13
NOTE: Testing consortia providers such as the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium offer a complete assessment kit including formative (daily classroom testing tools through their digital library of computerized learning video games, etc.), interim, and summative assessments. As these new pervasive testing systems are incentivized by Federal funding, the potential of data mining will be expanded to all day long, every school day. As testing evolves into a daily activity embedded in the curriculum, the opt-out movement will die, and parents will lose more authority over their children’s education.
PROPOSED 200.79:
Requires States and consortia to annually measure the progress on the Academic Achievement indicator of at least 95% of all students.
NOTE: Under ESSA, States are still obligated to the 95% participation rate of the burdensome NCLB, but with even more restrictions as opt-outs are added into the rate and with punitive actions taken against schools with low participation rates.14
States an SEA may use their innovative assessment system for purposes of academic assessments and statewide accountability only after the Secretary determines whether an SEA’s innovative assessment system is of high quality.
NOTE: “No State shall be required to have academic standards approved or certified by the Federal Government in order to receive assistance under this Act” (ESSA).15
Wendy Hart, a star board member of my local district, Alpine School District, is so dedicated to transparency that she keeps a blog about her work. I have permission to repost her important (latest) blog post here. Please read it, act, and share.
(Side note: The Alpine School District Board is philosophically divided when it comes to a vote, with half of the board voting for local control and the other half voting for federally originated agendas. This November, when local control voter and board member Brian Halladay steps down, voters will either replace him with local control supporter Rachel Thacker, or with federal agenda supporter Mark Clement. I support Rachel Thacker. Until November, we have these three who consistently vote in harmony with my own conscience: Wendy Hart, Brian Halladay, and Paula Hill.)
The ESSA public comment period has a deadline of Monday, Aug. 1, 2016.
In December, 2015, Congress passed the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), nicknamed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). At the time, I said I was opposed to it, due to the 1 step forward, 2 steps backward attempt at ‘removing’ federal control in education. I still believe ESSA to be a net negative (Yes, as bad or worse than NCLB). However, those members of Congress who voted for it, generally, see the regulations that the US Dept of Ed have put out on ESSA to be an egregious overreach of the law, itself. (Find the Regulations here:http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/essa/index.html?src=essa-resources)
In June, I attended a training session on ESSA presented by the National School Boards Association (aptly titled: A New Federalism). The presenter, an attorney, recommended that we work with our legislators to remove the ability of parents to opt their kids out of state testing. The consequence, she said, would be to jeopardize our federal funding under ESSA. So, the one avenue parents have to protest and to protect their students is under attack by the ‘new’ supposedly kinder, gentler, less-federal-encroachment law. Additionally, I asked how they would be able to do this when some states, like Utah, for example, have opting out codified in state law, the state law predates ESSA, and under the 10th Amendment, the states would have jurisdiction in this area that the feds clearly do not. Her response, paraphrasing, “Since the monies in ESSA are ‘voluntary’, you will not be able to get someone to challenge it on 10th Amendment grounds.” In short, by taking the federal monies from ESSA, we are subverting state (and natural) law–voluntarily.
Also, the ESSA includes the ‘Family Fixing Policy’ as it is described by education blogger Peter Greene. I wrote about this at the end of last year:
http://wendy4asd.blogspot.com/2015/12/jan-4-2016-deadline-to-support-family.html Nothing we want taking place in our state. The concern is that if the Feds have the ability to (which it appears they do) to force states to do what they want, then the State Board will have no options (other than rejecting federal funding) in creating their ‘Family Engagement Plan’. It will have to come very close to what the US Dept of Ed has proposed.
Incidentally, the NSBA presenter mentioned that the regulations overseeing how Special Education students are dealt with under ESSA were, to put it bluntly, a nightmare. She said they were not out for public comment yet, but they were on the US Dept of Ed website. I haven’t found them yet, but if you do, please let me know.
Take Action on ESSA:
1. An organization, US PIE (US Parents Involved in Education) has as its goal the elimination of the US Department of Ed. It has drafted a letter to send to Congress. You may add your name by emailing afew@uspie.org and asking to be added to the letter. Include your name and title and state.
2. Comment on the US Dept of Ed regulations BY AUGUST 1 (MONDAY)! https://www.regulations.gov/comment?D=ED-2016-OESE-0032-0001
3. Contact your members of Congress and make sure they know the Dept of Ed is over-stepping it’s bounds.
4. If you like twitter, use the hashtag #ReignInTheKing and #StopFedEd
Wendy Hart also blogged about parents needing to participate in the upcoming board meeting, where a new bond would be voted upon (whether or not to place that decision on the ballot for voters to determine this fall). See that here, too.
Jane Robbins and Jakell Sullivan co-authored this article at Townhall.com, which is reposted here with permission. Please note the links to learn more.
In May 2014, conservative columnist George Will warned that Common Core represented the “thin edge of an enormous wedge” and that “sooner or later you inevitably have a national curriculum.”
Will’s concern is now closer to realization. One lever the U.S. Department of Education (USED) may use to hasten this outcome is the #GoOpen Initiative, through which USED will push onto the states Common Core-aligned online instructional materials. These materials are “openly licensed educational resources” (Open Educational Resources, or OER) – online resources that have no copyright and are free to all users. Utah is part of the initial consortium of states that will be collaborating in #GoOpen.
#GoOpen is part of a larger global and federal effort to institute OER in place of books and traditional education (in fact, USED appointed a new advisor to help school districts transition to OER). More disturbingly, another part of this scheme increases the federal government’s ability to monitor and track teacher and student use of these online resources – and perhaps even influence the content.
This outcome could result from a related, joint USED-Department of Defense initiative called the Learning Registry. The Registry is an “open-source infrastructure” that can be installed on any digital education portal (such as PBS) and that will facilitate the aggregation and sharing of all the linked resources on the Registry. The idea is to “tag” digital content by subject area and share on one site supposedly anonymous data collected from teacher users (content such as grade-level, recommended pedagogy, and user ratings). That way, Registry enthusiasts claim, teachers can find instructional content to fit their particular needs and see how it “rates.”
Putting aside the question whether USED should push states into a radical new type of instruction that presents multiple risks to students and their education (see here, here, and here), the Learning Registry threatens government control over curriculum. Here’s how.
USED has proposed a regulation requiring “all copyrightable intellectual property created with [USED] discretionary competitive grant funds to have an open license.” So, all online instructional materials created with federal dollars will have to be made available to the Registry, without copyright restrictions.
[Federal law prohibits USED from funding curricular materials in the first place, but this Administration’s violation of federal law has become routine.]
The Registry will compile all user data and make “more sophisticated recommendations” about what materials teachers should use. So federal money will fund development of curricular materials that will be placed on a federally supported platform so that the feds can make “recommendations” about their use. The repeated intrusion of the word “federal” suggests, does it not, a danger of government monitoring and screening of these materials.
And speaking of “user data” that will fuel all this, the Registry promises user anonymity. But consider the example of Netflix movie ratings, in which two researchers were able to de-anonymize some of the raters based on extraordinarily sparse data points about them.
Despite Netflix’s intention to maintain user anonymity, its security scheme failed. How much worse would it be if the custodian of the system – in our case, USED – paid lip service to anonymity but in fact would like to know who these users are? Is Teacher A using the online materials that preach climate change, or does he prefer a platform that discusses both sides? Does Teacher B assign materials that explore LGBT issues, or does she avoid those in favor of more classical topics? Inquiring bureaucrats want to know.
In fact, in a 2011 presentation, USED’s bureaucrat in charge of the Registry, Steve Midgley, veered awfully close to admitting that user data may be less anonymous than advertised. Midgley said, “[Through the Registry] we can actually find out this teacher assigned this material; this teacher emailed this to someone else; this teacher dragged it onto a smart board for 18 minutes. . . .” [see video below]. The Registry will also use “the math that I don’t understand which [will] let me know something about who you are and then let me do some mathematical operations against a very large data set and see if I can pair you with the appropriate relevant resource.”
Sure, all this will supposedly be done anonymously. But teachers should hesitate to embrace something that could possibly reveal more about them than they bargained for.
USED would protest that this is all hypothetical, and that it would never abuse its power to influence teachers and control instructional content. But with this most ideological of all administrations, denials of ill intent ring hollow (remember Lois Lerner?). If the power is there, at some point it will be used. Never let an “enormous wedge” go to waste.
Thank you, Jakell Sullivan and Jane Robbins, for this eye-opening report.
It is one of the ironies of life that Secretary King’s name matches his actions as throne-sitter at the unconstitutional U.S. Department of Educsation. As Secretary of Education, he has followed in the outrageous, extreme, fully socialist footsteps of his predecessor, Secretary Arne Duncan.
Tonight, U.S.P.I.E. (U.S. Parents Involved in Education) is pushing back, hosting a nationwide #StopFedEd twitter rally to raise awareness.
Join us.
Tweet about the outrageous encroachments of the Department of Education. Tweet about our current Secretary, John King, also known as “The King of Common Core.” You can learn more about Secretary King by reading posts and articles that many have written, for years, about his education shenanigans. (#ReinInTheKing)
Let the U.S. Department of Education know that millions of voters, teachers, parents and legislators aim to stop its monstrous agenda that wants to eliminate local control of schooling. Let them know we are not blind to the unwanted data gathering agenda, the teacher-stifling agenda, the collectivist agenda, nor the encroachments that abound in the new federal ESSA. Let them know that we will not put our heads in the sand while Secretary King and his unconstitutional department has its heavy-fisted, unkind, unconstitutional way with our tax dollars and our children.
This is America; we, the people, standing on the U.S. Constitution, claim our rights and reject this King! Tweet it, Facebook it, LinkedIn it, Pin it; share your voice. We demand educational local control and liberty and true, high quality education.
Use the hashtags #ReinInTheKing and #StopFedEd, please. If you want to find out more about USPIE, click here. To join the twitter rally click here, or just tweet #ReinInTheKing and #StopFedEd, with whatever message you wish to send @ federal and state leadership
Below is a letter to be delivered this week to the U.S. Congress. It is written by U.S.P.I.E. and has been signed by pages and pages of names of leaders of U.S. organizations and individual teachers and parents and voters. That official list of signers will be available soon, as the deadline is tonight. If you want to be a signer, email Ms. Few at: afew@uspie.org
Here is the letter:
United States Parents Involved in Education (USPIE), a nationwide, nonpartisan coalition of state leaders with thirty state chapters focused on restoring local control of education, do hereby submit opposition to the proposed regulations of Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) accountability and state plan rule-making. USPIE is joined in our dissent by many other local and national organizations with shared goals as cosigners to this letter.
As part of our opposition, we point to Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Lamar Alexander’s comments concerning ESSA, “…it prohibits Washington from deciding which schools and teachers are succeeding or failing.” As well, Senator Alexander states, “…the new law explicitly prohibits Washington from mandating or even incentivizing Common Core or any other specific academics standards.” These two quotes point directly to our opposition. As Senator Alexander explains, ESSA “prohibits Washington” from being entrenched in education. As detailed below, we find this to be untrue.
In a thorough review and analysis of the proposed regulations against the Act, written into law in January of 2016, we found five main areas where the requirements of the regulations supersede States’ rights as defined in the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The five areas include: The Power of the Secretary of Education, accountability through data reporting, accountability through assessments, state plan requirements, and identification for targeted support and improvement. Below are bulleted concerns where we believe federal overreach impedes states’ rights. These beliefs correspond with specific sections of the proposed regulations.
THE SECRETARY OF EDUCATION IS GRANTED MORE POWER OVER STATES
Proposed 299.13 allows the Secretary to control how States are to submit their education plans and the deadline by which they are to submit.
Proposed 299.13 states the Secretary is authorized to establish consolidated State Plan Programs, information about these programs, the materials needed for these programs, and to set all assurances for the programs for adherence.
The proposed regulations allow the Secretary to amend requirements for implementing Title I programs including requirements for States when submitting their State Education Plans.
Proposed 299.13 say if States make any changes to State Education Plans, the Secretary must approve.
46 of ESSA: The Secretary can withhold funds if States fail to meet any of the State Plan requirements.
**Recommendation: The Secretary should not be allowed to amend requirements. Title I should be implemented as the law states, not how the Secretary thinks it should be carried out. States should not be bribed into complying with regulations issued from any government agency.
DATA REPORTING IS EXPANDED AT THE COST OF THE STATES
Proposed 200.20 gives States “flexibility” to average data across years or combine data across grades because averaging data across school years or across grades in a school can increase the data available as a part of determining accountability.
Proposed 200.20 will also require States who combine data across grades or years to also report data individually for each grade/year, use the same uniform procedure, and explain the procedure in the State plan and specify its use in the State report card.
ESSA is supposed to give flexibility and more control to States by decreasing the burden of reporting requirements. Proposed regulations 299.13 and 299.19 will expand data reporting for “States and LEAs in order to provide parents, practitioners, policy makers, and public officials at the Federal, State, and local levels with actionable data,” which will entail additional costs for States. These reports must include accountability indicators to show how the State is aligned with a College and Career Readiness Standard (Common Core).
Proposed regulations 200.30 and 200.31 will implement requirements in the ESSA that expand reporting requirements for States and LEAs “in order to provide parents, practitioners, policy makers, and public officials at the Federal, State, and local levels with actionable data,” and information on key aspects of our education.
Proposed 200.17 clarifies data disaggregation requirements. It states that the n-size used to measure test scores and graduation rates of any subgroup for state accountability purposes should not exceed 30 students.
Proposed 200.21 through 200.24 require LEA’s to include evidence-based interventions in order to receive improvement funds. Such interventions include the safe and healthy school environments and the community and family engagement plans. These plans include the heavy use of surveys—student surveys and home surveys.
**Recommendation: We recommend removing these regulations, letting States decide subgroup size as ESSA states
**Recommendation: We recommend not expanding data collection. Along these lines, we recommend the federal government not collect data on children at all.
RIGOROUS STANDARDIZED TESTS ARE THE MEASUREMENT FOR STUDENT SUCCESS
(These regulations heavily incentivize keeping Common Core as State standards)
Proposed 200.12 will require a State’s accountability system to be based on the challenging State academic standards (Common Core) and academic assessments.
Proposed 200.13 will require States to establish ambitious long-term goals and measurements of interim progress for academic achievement that are based on challenging State academic standards (Common Core) and the State’s academic assessments.
Proposed 200.14 states assessments provide information about whether all students are on track to graduate “college-and-career-ready” (Common Core).
Proposed 200.15 will require States who miss the 95% participation requirement to: a) be assigned a lower rating (200.18); b) be assigned the lowest performance level under State Academic Achievement (200.14); c) be identified for target support and improvement (200.19); and d) have another equally rigorous State-determined action, as described in its State plan, which the Secretary has to approve.
States who miss the 95% would be required to develop and implement improvement plans that address the law participation rate and include interventions.
Proposed 200.15 will require States to explain in its report card how it will factor the 95% participation rate requirement into its accountability system. (This is not flexibility; this is the government telling States what to do.)
Proposed regulations will ensure that States who fail to meet the 95% rate have rigorous actions taken (lower rating, identified for targeted support/improvement), providing incentive for schools to ensure all students take the annual State assessments.
Proposed 200.18 requires each school to receive a single “summative” grade or rating, derived from combining at least 3 of the 4 indicators used to measure its performance. Further, the regulation “forbids” states from boosting school’s rating if it has made substantial improvement in the 4th non-academic category.
Proposed 200.15 requires states to intervene and/or fail schools who do not meet the 95% participation rate on the state test.
**Recommendation: We recommend letting states determine their own rating system and choose other indicators of school performance.
**Recommendation: We recommend taking emphasis off Common Core aligned assessments and giving teachers the freedom to teach.
**Recommendation: We recommend removing these regulations as it violates the provision of the ESSA to recognize state and local law that allow parents to opt-out their child from participating in the state academic assessments.
STATE PLAN REQUIREMENTS
Proposed 299.13 will establish procedures and timelines for State plan submission and revision and the Secretary is authorized to approve revisions.
Proposed 299.14 to 299.19 will establish requirements for the content of consolidated State plans.
Proposed 299.16 will require States to demonstrate that their academic standards and assessments meet federal requirements.
Proposed 299.19 will require states to describe how they are using federal funds to provide all students equitable access to high-quality education and would include program-specific requirements necessary to ensure access.
Proposed 299.13 outlines requirements for an SEA to submit in order to receive a grant. The state must submit to the Secretary assurances in their plan including “modifying or eliminating State fiscal and accounting barriers so that schools can easily consolidate funds from other Federal, State, and local sources to improve educational opportunities and reduce unnecessary fiscal and accounting requirements”.
**Recommendation: We recommend removing these regulations and allowing States to establish State plan procedures and timelines.
IDENTIFICATION FOR TARGETED SUPPORT AND IMPROVEMENT
Proposed 200.15 will require subgroups (homeless, military, foster, etc.) to adhere to the 95% participation rate along with their peers.
Proposed 200.19 will provide parameters for how States must define “consistently underperforming.”
Proposed 200.24 grants States additional funds for low performing LEAs but instructs how States must use these funds.
Proposed 299.17 will include State plan requirements related to statewide school support and improvement activities.
Proposed 200.24 says if schools do not show improvement by a set time, SEAs may take additional improvement actions including: a) replacing school leadership; b) converting to a charter school; c) changing school governance; d) implementing new instructional model; or c) closing the school. This is called, “whole school reform.”
Proposed 200.19 and 200.23 also talk about the use of whole school reform.
**Recommendation: We recommend giving States the power to define schools which “consistently underperform” and allowing States to decide appropriate improvement activities.
We, the undersigned, agree to these points and respectively ask Congress to reconsider the regulations as written. Our suggestion is the regulations are retracted and either rewritten so they closer align with the law or they are completely discarded and States are left to interpret the law as they see fit.
Lastly, USPIE leadership is more than willing to meet and discuss these points, our recommendations, and solutions with any Congressional member at a time and place convenient to them. Like you, we would like to see education brought to a level where all children, teachers, schools, and communities succeed.
Guest post by Dr. Sandra Stotsky, published with permission from the author;
article was originally published July 8, 2016 at New Boston Post.
Dr. Sandra Stotsky
Last week, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts stopped voters from weighing in on a citizen-backed initiative to repeal Common Core.
In her opinion, Chief Justice Margot Botsford blocked on a technicality the petition to let voters decide whether to keep Common Core or revert to the state’s own educational standards. Her reasoning? The measure, she wrote, was unconstitutional because the portion of the ballot question that required the state to release used test items is unrelated to the transparency of state tests.
Got that? Justice Botsford thinks that release of used test items is unrelated to the transparency of state tests and standards as a matter of coherent public policy.
It was an oddly-reasoned decision since any classroom teacher in Massachusetts could have told her that the annual release of all used MCAS test items in the Bay State, from 1998 to 2007, was clearly related to the transparency of the state tests and very useful to classroom teachers. Among other things, the information allowed teachers to find out exactly what students in their classes did or did not do well and to improve their teaching skills for the next year’s cohort of students.
Botsford could have asked test experts as well. Any test expert would also have told her that the transparency of an assessment begins with an examination of the test items on it, followed up first by the names and positions of the experts who vetted the items on all tests at each grade level, and then by information on how the pass/fail scores for each performance level were determined, and the names and positions of those who determined them.
Botsford could also have found out from the testimony of those involved with the state’s tests from 1998 to 2007 that the cost of replacing released test items is negligible. It is not clear if her unsupported belief that there is a high cost for replacing released test items was what led her to conclude that the petition addressed matters that were unrelated to each other. As Botsford indicated in her ruling, “the goal of the petition…
… comes with a significant price tag: as the Attorney General agreed in oral argument before this court, implementing section 4 will require the development and creation of a completely new comprehensive diagnostic test every year, which means a substantial increase in annual expense for the board — an expense to be borne by taxpayers and to be weighed by voters in determining whether increased transparency is worth the cost.
In 2015, Attorney General Maura Healey certified the petition for placement on the November 2016 election ballot. But the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE) was not content to let the democratic process play out, so they brought a lawsuit — seemingly paid for by grants to the MBAE from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — to stop the matter from ever reaching the voters.
Both Botsford’s decision that the petition was unconstitutional and the unanimous agreement by the other justices as part of a “full court” session are puzzling, given the thorough review the petition had received from the Attorney General’s office. Here is how one of the pro bono lawyers who wrote the petition for the organization collecting signatures to place it on the November 2016 ballot described the vetting process to me (in a personal e-mail):
The process for an initiative petition has a series of check points. The initial draft is reviewed by the staff in the Government Bureau in the Attorney General’s Office (AGO). They look at the proposal to identify whether the proposal meets the threshold of the Constitutional requirements. The Government Bureau is made up of the best attorneys in state government. This review raised no flags.
After the collection of the signatures and submission to the AGO, the language is published and offered for public comment. It was at this point (in 2015) that the MBAE weighed in and opposed the petition (in a Memorandum of Opposition), using arguments that were dismissed by the AGO but that were later used in 2016 with the Supreme Judicial Court (as part of the MBAE’s lawsuit). In 2015, the review includes the staff attorney who oversees the petitions, the chief of the Government Bureau, the chief of the Executive Office (the policy-making administrative part of the AGO) and the Attorney General herself. This is a strictly legal discussion on the merits. … In my opinion, she decided it on the legal issues alone. And she and her staff decided that the petition passed the Constitutional requirements.
Now there can be legitimate differences on legal issues. But we structured the petition with the advice of a former U.S. attorney and his staff at his law firm. We passed several reviews at the Attorney General’s Office, including a contested review. The AGO’s brief on behalf of the petition was strong.
We had a petition that was complete, parrying threats that would have undermined the repeal of Common Core. The Attorney General understood that and supported our desire to bring it before the public.
To date, the parent organization that collected about 100,000 signatures for the petition has received no explanation from the lawyers who wrote the petition for them about why there was a unanimous decision by the Supreme Judicial Court that the petition was unconstitutional (on the grounds that there was a lack of connection among its sections, even though all the sections were in the original statute passed by the state legislature in 1993—a statute that was never criticized as incoherent). Nor has there been any word from the Attorney General’s office.
By preventing the voters from having their say, the Massachusetts court did a disservice not only to our public schools – which were better off under Massachusetts’ own rigorous academic standards — but even more to the institution of democracy itself.
Sandra Stotsky, former Senior Associate Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Education, is Professor of Education emerita at the University of Arkansas. Read her past columns here.
Even though the fight for freedom in education is fought by freedom-loving people of many different religions, I share this great news, which comes from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, hoping it will inspire other people and other churches as it has inspired me.
In February 2016, in an all-employee meeting at Brigham Young University’s Idaho campus, the Commissioner of Education of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Elder Kim B. Clark, gave an address, “CES: The Lord’s Educational System for His Church”.
Elder Clark announced that the church is launching a new initiative in fall 2016 that will eventually offer secular and religious education courses, from Master’s degrees down to high school, to people wherever the church is organized.
Elder Clark began by saying, “Whatever level of spirituality we now enjoy in our lives, whatever degree of faith in Jesus Christ we have, whatever strength of commitment or consecration we have, whatever degree of obedience or hope or charity is ours, whatever level of professional skill or ability we may have obtained, it will not be sufficient for the work that lies ahead. Brothers and sisters, you and I need to be much better than we are now, in every aspect of our lives. The scriptures teach us that the world is now, and will be, in commotion and we can see it all around us. Wickedness and darkness will increase. It seems hard to imagine, but it will. Yet in that darkening world, there’ll be increased light, divine light. The Lord Jesus Christ has a great work for us to do with the rising generation. It’s a greater work than we’ve ever done before… The Lord is working in power to strengthen teaching and learning in his true and living church. He’s hastening his work.” (minute 2-3)
He said that last October, the presidents of the Church’s universities counseled together and then proposed a new initiative that was soon approved by the church leaders. (minute 13-14)
It is this: “The Church Educational System (CES) will seek to provide opportunities for education to the members of the church wherever the church is organized.”
The church has long operated universities, seminaries, institutes, education weeks, high school classes through its universities and through its churches. But now, the Church will be rolling out a new program that will use all its resources to increasingly provide both secular and religious education to all its members, wherever the church exists. Elder Clark speaks of Master’s degrees down through high school classes being offered, both online and inside church buildings; I hope, and guess, that in the future, junior high and elementary classes will also be offered.
At minute 16:37, we learn that the first principle for the church’s new initiative is:
“Education is a spiritual experience”. It explains, “Education– the struggle for perfection– is a spiritual experience and is essential for building the Kingdom of God and establishing Zion. Religious instruction, gathering experiences and a spiritual focus to online learning will be essential.”
The second principle is: “The initiative will be a collaborative, system-wide effort involving all CES institutions. We will also partner with Self Reliance Services (SRS) and other Church departments as appropriate and will build as much as possible on resources, courses and programs that already exist”.
The third principle is: “Instruction will be delivered online and in local gathering activities at Institutes and chapels. Study at local schools, combined with religious education at an Institute, is an important part of this initiative.”
The fourth principle is: “Students will access programs through their local Church units, guided by priesthood leaders, supported by CES and Self Reliance Services.” Elder Clark emphasized the fact that these classes are to be held under the direction of local priesthood leaders; he added: “We felt really strongly about this.”
Even though Elder Clark said, “We’re talking about a global audience that numbers in the hundreds of thousands,” (minute 44) he felt it was important to make this educational program locally driven by local leaders.
In closing, Elder Clark reminded us that Ephesians 6:12 states: “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” He asked those in attendance to rise to the challenge, to repent daily, and to meet the great opportunities and responsibilities before us by receiving greater spiritual power from Christ.
He said, “The rising generation in this marvelous worldwide church needs education, including the plain and simple truths of the gospel…. the rising generation will learn deeply and they will rise up. We know this will happen.”
State School Board candidate Dr. Gary Thompson’s tooth-and-nail fight against the Utah State Office of Education, a fight for ethical student testing and protection of student data –a years-long, ongoing fight– was completely omitted in the Salt Lake Tribune’s report yesterday about Dr. Thompson.
The Tribune stated that school board candidate Dr. Gary Thompson refused to participate in this week’s debate because “the one-minute-or-less response time… lent itself more to sound bites than productive dialogue”. The Tribune failed to note that Dr. Thompson has fiercely, publicly debated education ethics for years: look here for video of his recent campaign speech which called out incumbent Crandall; here for his campaign site, here for his blog, here for his famous offer to give $10,000 for evidence of actual validity for Utah’s Common Core SAGE/AIR test; here for his television appearance on The Blaze.
Last week, Dr. Thompson was infuriated when state assessment director Jo Ellen Schaeffer told legislators that UCLA had validated Utah’s SAGE testing, at the June 14th interim education session, stating that this showed SAGE to be a valid test.
While it is true that CRESST has an office on a UCLA campus, CRESST is not UCLA. CRESST is not a university; it’s a government-funded “research” group partnered with AIR (remember: AIR is Utah’s SAGE testmaking contractor). That’s a far cry from independent validity testing; it’s more like asking the the chef’s business partners to write his restaurant’s review.
That blurring by Schaeffer is no small thing. It seems impossible that Schaeffer would not know what independent validity testing is, as state assessment director. Thus, she must be unconcerned with the ethics of saying that a test was independently validated, when it never was.
Representative Snow followed up, asking for evidence of validity testing. The USOE returned a memo, not a validity report. The memo stated that Achieve, Inc., Education Next, UCLA and Florida had given evidence of the validity of SAGE. But it wasn’t true.
Dr. Thompson pointed out that alignment with NAEP testing is not independent validity testing on the SAGE test; the SAGE has never been validated.
He said: “Both the Utah State Board of Education and the Utah State Office of Education have a long, well documented history of providing lawmakers and parents in Utah with responses to inquiries laced with ‘lies of omission’. This deceptive practice places public school children in Utah at high risk for continued psychometric experimentation, and profit-motivated exploitation via the hands of SAGE test designer, AIR, Inc.”
Most people read whatever the USOE posts online about “validity” (without validity report links or any footnotes, of course) and just swallow it as truth. But Dr. Thompson and others are holding the USOE’s feet to the fire, saying that children deserve better than to be experimentation subjects for profit-motivated corporations and the power-tripping federal government.
Will enough people wake up and vote differently, or at least call or email the state school board, to make a difference? Phone: 801-538-7500 Address: 250 East 500 South PO Box 144200 SLC UT Email: stateboard@schools.utah.gov
Dr. Thompson’s response to the USOE’s response is here:
Dear Ms. Sullivan [Parent who contacted Representative Snow],
I have read the Utah State Board of Education’s memo in response to Representative Lowry Snow’s inquiry, on your behalf, about his concerns regarding the validity of the Utah SAGE test. Here is a partial summary statement from the Board’s response informing Representative Snow, that the SAGE is indeed a valid test:
“The validity of Utah’s Student Assessments of Growth and Excellence (SAGE) has been confirmed through a number of independent sources. The most recent studies include: (1) The National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, UCLA (CRESST), (2) Education Next, (3) Achieve.org, (4) Independent Verification of the Psychometric Validity for the Florida Standards Assessment. Each study substantiates both the high rigor of Utah’s standards and the validity and reliability of the assessments that measures those standards.”
As cited evidence of SAGE validity, the Board references “Education Next”, and “Achieve”. org”. Per the Board’s own memo, this cited evidence discusses “high standards and state proficiency levels” when compared to the NAEP test. This is not related to specific inquires regarding the validity of the Utah SAGE test. As such, a response from me will not be forth coming.
I also will not respond to the Board’s reference to the State of Florida’s Validity study. Several months ago, the Board used this same document to substantiate Utah’s SAGE test validity. I sent a written response to the Board, and the general public, factually rebutting this dangerously irresponsible, and inaccurate claim.
As you and thousands of Utah parents are aware, I am still waiting for a response. The letter sent to Board Vice Chairman, Dave Thomas, in response to his spurious claims, was referenced and published by Utahan’s Against Common Core’s Christel Swasey. Here is the link: http://www.utahnsagainstcommoncore.com/sage-validity-part-2-dr-thompson-responds/
Thus, the only item left to rebut from the Utah State Board of Education memo, is its unexplainable reliance on a yet to be published AIR-SAGE validity study, produced by the federally funded, quasi governmental, UCLA campus-based research group, CRESST.
I am going to keep this short and sweet:
Here are five (5) questions that you, Representative Snow, the media, and voters in Utah may wish to ask Board of Education Chairman Dave Crandall during his “debate” appearance this Wednesday, June 22 at Summit Academy:
2. Utah paid $40,000,000 to AIR, Inc. (American Institute of Research) to design the SAGE test. Were you aware that the research group CRESST, which produced the “validity study”, is supported financially by, and lists AIR as “Partners” on its own website? (http://cresst.org/partners/) Does the Board leadership consider this to be an “independent”, and unbiased relationship?
3. Since 2012, were the Board and the State Office of Education aware that the current Director of CRESST, Li Cai, received multiple millions of dollars of personal research grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, and (you can’t make this stuff up) Utah’s SAGE test designer, AIR? (http://cresst.org/wp-content/uploads/LiAbridge.pdf ) How can a Director of a research organization produce an objective and unbiased validity study on the very group that has given him substantial amounts of money for independent research?
4. Why did the State Board of Education fail to inform parents that their children were taking a yet to be validated test for the past three years? Is not such omission a complete and blatant violation of trust?
5. Are you aware that Board placed hundreds’ of thousands of Utah children at risk of harm, and exploitation, at the hands of a behavioral research corporation (AIR), by allowing them to experiment on children without the informed, written consent of their parents? Are you aware that this unethical practice is also against Utah law? (https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title53A/Chapter13/53A-13-S302.html) “Activities prohibited without prior written consent”
When the Utah State Board of Education and State Office of Education produce an independent validity study, I would be delighted to devote professional time to review it at your request.
In the meantime, the current memo submitted to Representative Snow in support of SAGE “validity” is clearly a deliberate attempt to deceive an esteemed member of the Utah Interim Education Committee, and only serves to highlight the unethical, unconstitutional, incestuous relationship between the State of Utah, and the U.S. Federal Government.
Both the Utah State Board of Education and the Utah State Office of Education have a long, well documented history of providing lawmakers and parents in Utah with responses to inquiries laced with “lies of omission.” This deceptive practice places public school children in Utah at high risk for continued psychometric experimentation, and profit- motivated exploitation via the hands of SAGE test designer, AIR, Inc. I have no desire to debate current Board Chairman Dave Crandall in a public setting, until this serious matter of continued experimentation and exploitation of our children is answered in a clear, ethical, fact based manner.
In summary, given the clear and present danger this poses to 650,000 vulnerable Utah children, it is my professional opinion that you consider asking Representative Snow to seek an independent inquiry regarding this matter via Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes. It is my strong, evidence based, professional opinion that Utah’s education leaders at the Board of Education and State Office of Education, are more committed to adhering to the educational political “flavors of the day”, as opposed to providing Utah’s children with objective, science based solutions to serious education problems in our State.
Please let me know if I can be of more assistance to you in the future. Feel free to distribute this response to the general public as you deem to be appropriate under the circumstances.
Best regards;
Gary Thompson, Psy.D.
District 10 Candidate For Utah State Board of Education
My friends and neighbors are receiving mailers this week that look like this.
When my husband saw this, he said, “So what? What’s so bad about Education First?”
Glad he asked.
Here’s the short version: Education First = Common Core.
If you love Common Core and federal-corporate takeover of local control, vote for Herbert, Haynie and Hemmert. That’s what they and their funders, Education First, stand for, and will be pressured to vote for. Past legislative sessions have shown this to be the case, in the very own words of the co-chairs of Education First.
If you love local control of education, with local children (not monied lobbyists) being put first, vote for Johnson, Greene, Voeks and Philpot.
These are in my area; ask any Utah candidates if they’ve accepted money from Education First.
If they have, they are either ignorant and thus incompetent to see through the maze of deceptions they’ll encounter as legislators, or they really believe in the idealogy of the Common Core.
Please vote for candidates Jonathan Johnson (Governor), Brian Greene (UT Rep), Casey Voeks (UT County Commissioner) and Morgan Philpot (State Senate) –each of whom refused Education First money– instead of candidates Herbert, Haynie and Hemmert (who are all paid campaign babies of Education First).
Here’s the longer explanation:
In 2012, Education First sent out a letter to every legislator in the state of Utah. A legislator showed me his letter, and I posted much of it.
The letter told legislators that Education First had, and would continue, to “champion Common Core implementation” with “consensus support for Utah’s utilization of Common Core“.
It also explained that Education First had partnered with Governor Herbert’s “Prosperity 2020” movement –which is modeled after Obama’s 2020 movement– to put business-governmental financial partnerships first– but they call this, instead, putting “education first”.
The Education First letter said, “Prosperity and Education First comprise the largest business-led education movement in state history.”
There’s a big problem with Education First “leading” and promoting workforce alignment to K-12, especially in “partnership” with the government.
If Susie Q. wants to be an entrepreneur or a ballerina, Big Business has no business pushing her into truck driving or computer coding –even if, during Susie Q’s high school years, the business sector says it needs more truck drivers or coders.
That’s central planning, and it’s un-American.
Big business, in partnership with big government, wants to make pathways for children based on “robust assessment”. Ugh! Can you say China?
Why should free, American children be pressured and funneled into career paths determined by central planners (governmental-business forecasts)? Since when is the American Dream to be determined by others, and not by individual Americans? That’s the “citizens are grains of rice and the collective consumes the rice bowl” mentality.
What can we expect from Herbert, Haynie, Hemmert, and others who have taken large sums of money from the Education First lobby?
Let’s look at the evidence.
The co-chairs of Education First co-wrote a Salt Lake Tribune opinion editorial this March, praising the legislature for funding many of the bills for which Education First had lobbied, including bills for: workforce development (which is China-styled central planning) early childhood education (which competes with free enterprise/private preschools), personalized learning (which is a euphemism for digital everything; impersonal, privacy-killing “learning”) and community schools (which is Obama’s socialistic vision that integrates healthcare with academics and socio-political movements “using government schools as a hub”). Is that what you want? Not me!
The Salt Lake Tribune reported in 2014 that Governor Herbert (whose baby is Prosperity 2020, the partner of Education First) had appointed Rich Kendall (the co-chair of Education First) to assess the pros and cons of the Common Core in 2014. So no one should have been surprised to find out that Kendall’s committee found the Common Core to be “sound, legal and rigorous”. Were Kendall’s and Herbert’s Common Core committee’s findings correct?
There is a big problem with Education First loving and promoting Common Core as if it were good for everyone, as if it weren’t suffocating innovation for localities and teachers, as if the Utah GOP wasn’t officially opposed to it. There’s also a big problem with Education First trying to lead education, marginalizing local citizens because their “leadership” means siphoning off most education dollars from teachers and students toward big ed tech sales companies, while setting up data mining programs approved by federal (unconstitutional) initiatives (not approved by moms and dads.)
Since Education First gives huge marketing dollars to newbie candidates like Dan Hemmert and Xanie Haynie and to incumbents like Gary Herbert, we naturally see their billboards EVERYWHERE, and far fewer billboards for the stalwart, unbought candidates: Morgan Philpot, Brian Greene, Casey Voeks and Jonathan Johnson.
Education First invests huge money in the candidates that they foresee being able to control when they are in the legislature, so that later, Education First can make more big money, all at our expense and at the expense of our children.
See through this, please.
I have personally spoken, face to face, with the Education First-funded candidates. They are nice people; this is NOT a personal attack. I would be happy to be their neighbors or co-workers or dog-walkers. But I am totally unwilling to let them put their hands on the levers of real power –when I can see that they either don’t understand, or lack a healthy fear, of what Education First lobbies and promotes.
Lisa Cummins (see her campaign site here) is running for District 11 (Herriman area) for Utah’s State School Board. Her speech below was given at the June 11, 2016 rally at the State Capitol, where citizens gathered to focus on “Elevating Education: Common No More”.
At Saturday’s rally at the State Capitol, “Elevating Education: Common No More,” Michelle Boulter spoke as a candidate for Utah State School Board in District 15 (St. George area).
Geologist Frank Strickland is running for State School Board; he’s definitely my pick for district 7. See his campaign site here. If you live in Park City or Salt Lake City, please vote for Frank.
On Saturday, he gave the following speech at the “Elevating Education: Common No More” rally at the state capitol building. Enjoy and share!
Alisa Ellis spoke at the “Elevating Education: Common No More” rally on Saturday at the State Capitol. She’s running against Dixie Allen and Jim Moss in the huge Heber-Duschesne-Lindon area known as Utah’s District 12.
Her speech was introduced by radio host Rod Arquette, who said:
“Alisa is one of the moms who gained national attention in their fight against Common Core… I look out and I see Christel and I see Renee and up on the stage, I see Alisa. One of my favorite movies is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; I absolutely love that movie… it’s a movie about two scoundrels running across the Western U.S., being chased by a group of guys who don’t like them robbing trains and banks. Paul Newman, who plays Butch Cassidy in the movie, keeps on asking himself as he looks at those guys coming after him, ‘Who are those guys?’ Well, I think when they heard about the Utah moms against common core around the country, people were asking, ‘Who are those guys?’ Well, they gained national attention and they were one of the early pioneers in the fight against Common Core.”
Alisa’s full speech is posted below the video. My favorite part of her oratory was this:
“As the Utah Constitution states, it is my primary responsibility to educate my children. The state’s role is secondary. Too often this responsibility is seen as the state’s job. We even have presidential candidate Hillary Clinton who said that parents have “no role” in education! …When it came to discussing meaningful education policy with my superintendent, I was told that ‘we have no local control’. He even went so far as to tell Renee and I that our local school board no longer represented us. He told me that he was tired, that he’d been fighting the fight for local control for a long time. I told him that day that if he wasn’t willing to do it, that I would pick up the fight to restore local control in education.”
Elect Alisa Ellis to represent District 12 in the Utah State School Board!
Alisa’s got a four-year track record which her opponents cannot touch.
As the mother of seven children –some of whom are home schooled and some of whom are public-schooled– Alisa effectively lobbied the legislature for the past four years, and has spoken across the state and outside the state, in cottage meetings and on radio shows, calling for increased parental control, student data privacy, real science standards, and for the hearing of the voices of teachers and localities in the fight against Big Ed (Fed Ed and Corporate Ed) –which is the fight against Common Core and nationalization of education.
Her opponents, including the incumbent, cannot hold a candle to her track record of effective, courageous action.
Her campaign site is here: https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1343457342383929
Full rally speech:
“Some may ask what qualifies me to run for state school board. I don’t have a fancy resume. I don’t lots of letters behind my name but I do have 7 children that no one but God knows and loves better than me. No one knows how to reach them quite like I do. No one knows their fears, insecurities, strengths and numerous other accolades quite like I do. It is my responsibility to see that they receive the best education possible. As the UT constitution states it is my primary responsibility to educate my children. The state’s role is secondary. Too often this responsibility is seen as the state’s job. We even have Presidential candidate Hilary Clinton saying parents have no place in education. This is wrong.
It’s time to put the lead of education back into the hands of parents as the founders originally intended and as our state’s constitution says.
I’m running for state school board because when it came to discussing meaningful education policy concerns with my Superintendent I was told WE HAVE NO local CONTROL. We have to do what the state tells us to do. He even went so far as to say the local school board did not represent me. He told me he was tired of the fight and that he’d been fighting a long time. I promised him that I would take up the fight for local control.
So what is local control? The local control I envision, involves much more than merely stating teachers have the freedom to choose textbooks. The local control I envision means that as a parent I have freedom to find a classroom in the public school that can teach the type of math, English, Science, History, Art etc. that I deem valuable not what a conglomerate of states finds valuable. I’m not trying to take away your right to have your children taught with ‘common standard’ but don’t take away my right either.
Imagine a system where parents can choose the type of education they value. Even with all the choices out there today there is still a centralization of control and power that is strangling the free market in education.
Imagine a system where teachers are given the freedom to truly teach.
There are too many regulations placed on the backs of teachers; too many mandates to meet; too many test to oversee and not enough time to teach. We need to allow teachers the courtesy we give other professionals and let them use their professional judgment to decide what methods work best in their classroom. In turn, we need to give parents the power to find the methods that best match their children’s needs. One size doesn’t fit all and one teaching method doesn’t teach all.
It is often stated that we have full control over our education. This is true. We do. But we aren’t exercising that right. We are continually, voluntarily following the carrot dangled before us either out of fear of falling behind, gaining or losing money or many other unknowns. Historically, this pattern has given us things like the unconstitutional Federal Department of Ed which in turn has given us a tongue twister of acronyms to manage: NCLB, ESEA, SLDS, SFSF, FERPA, AYP, ESSA, CCSS, RTT, RTTA, RTTD, GRIT, and countless other programs. I’ve spent the last 5 years in in depth study of these acronyms and the freedoms they take away from this district.
Recently, we had the opportunity to push back against ALL federal intrusion in to education but instead we codified into law President Obama’s blueprint of education reform in a grandiose bipartisan effort [ESSA] that will give the Department of Ed full Veto power over our state’s education plan and call for Family Engagement Plans. This is NOT local control.
We have come to a cross roads. It is no longer acceptable to go along to get along. We need leaders that are willing to stand up to the bullying that is coming from the federal Department of Ed. It seems that every candidate says they’re against Common Core but it has become an empty promise by most and I am here to tell you that it is not an empty promise with me. If elected I will do everything in my power to stop this trend toward nationalizing and corporatizing education.
Hugh B. Brown said,’One of the most important things in the world is freedom of the mind; from this all other freedoms spring. Such freedom is necessarily dangerous, for one cannot think right without running the risk of thinking wrong… We live in an age when freedom of the mind is suppressed over much of the world. We must preserve this freedom…and resist all efforts of earnest men to suppress it, for when it is suppressed, we might lose the liberties vouchsafed in the Constitution of the United States.’
I pledge to push back on the micromanaging come down from the Feds and state to the local districts. I would love to see local districts have more autonomy. I would love to see teachers be able to teach without having to jump through hoops. I’m tired of bad policy being blamed on poor implementation.
It’s time to bring meaningful decision making power back as close to the family and the community as we can. I’m Alisa Ellis and I ask for your support.
Thank You.”
In case you missed the rally speeches and missed the Fox News report, here begins a series of posts featuring the speakers at this week’s rally at the state capitol, where Utah voters had the opportunity to hear from candidates for Utah State School Board.
The rally was entitled “Elevating Education: Common No More”.
Radio host Rod Arquette introduced each school board candidate speaker and the gubernatorial candidate Johnathan Johnson. Each speaker declared that Utah can elevate education beyond the Common Core.
The first video shows Dr. Gary Thompson‘s speech; below is the text version of that speech. (Other candidates’ speeches will be posted soon.)
Text of Dr. Thompson’s speech:
Communities are judged by how well they treat the most vulnerable children amongst them.
If given the honor of representing parents and teachers as a State Board Member, I will only ask four questions regarding any policies placed in front of me regarding our children and students:
1. Does the policy conform to industry standard ethical practices?
2. Does the policy allow ground level parental control and teacher choice?
3. Are stealth psychological evaluations and data collection being performed on children without your knowledge and informed consent?
4. Is the policy based on “Voodoo-Pseudo Science”, or independent, peer reviewed research?
Our School Board’s failure to view education policy via these four principles has resulted in 12 dangerous realities in place in Utah public schools:
I call them the “Dirty Dozen”:
1. Lawmakers recently deemed the SAGE test invalid for teacher evaluations, yet did nothing to protect our most vulnerable children from the same flawed test.
2. Many Utah Standards are developmentally inappropriate for our younger children.
3. Not one independent developmental psychologist was active in writing Utah K-3 Educational Standards.
4. The test used to measure knowledge of Utah Standards, the SAGE test, has never been independently validated to measure academic performance.
5. Without parental knowledge and informed written consent, Utah schools are collecting our children’s most intimate cognitive, behavioral, emotional, and sociological information.
6. Utah’s test vendor, AIR, is currently using Utah public school children as “experimental lab rats”, as part of the largest, non consensual, unethical, experimentation ever performed on Utah soil.
7. Performing unethical, experimentation on Utah’s children place many of them at risk for serious emotional, behavioral and cognitive damage.
8. Common Core special education practices are harmful, not based on sound science, and put our divergent learning students at risk for suicide. Utah has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the Country.
9. The Utah State Board of Education does not have effective policies in place requiring technology vendors to follow ethical and privacy guidelines, designed to protect parents and children from exploitation and harm.
10. Student data security and privacy is a myth.
11. Utah’s Preschool and Kindergarten programs are not supported by independent, peer-reviewed research.
12. Utah’s adoption of the Common Core Federal mandate to have ALL Kindergartners reading, as opposed to emphasizing play, is abusive, and flies in the face of 75 years of child developmental research.
Since the advent of Common Core, the Board of Education, and the Utah State Office of Education, have dismissed “The Dirty Dozen” as “dangerous misinformation”, and have accuse parents like me of spreading fear into the community.
Today I draw a line in the sand, and for the sake of my children and Community, I ask State School Board Chairman Dave Crandall to do the same.
The contrasts between us could not be more evident.
One of us will protect your children….
One of us is dangerously wrong.
As such, if Chairman Crandall produces independent, peer-reviewed verification that ANY of the “Dirty Dozen” are factually false or “misinformed”, I will apologize to the community and resign from the race.
In Exchange, I challenge Chairman Crandall to publicly acknowledge the existence of “The Dirty Dozen”, as THE most pressing, dangerous assault on parental rights, teacher autonomy, and child safety present in Utah Public Schools.
If Chairman Crandall ignores this, and ignores this challenge, I believe he is not fit to serve another term representing our children, and I respectfully request for him to immediately drop out of the election.
I ask the next Governor of this State, sitting on this stage; I ask Governor Johnson to place the destiny of the next generation of children into the hands of local parents and our talented ground level teachers, as opposed to catering to technology special interest groups, who now own many Utah lawmakers.
I ask parents to demand that our education leaders base their decisions on ethics, and the rule of constitutional law, as opposed to agenda based, harmful mandates being forced upon our children via the U.S. Office of Education, and adopted without question by the Utah State Office of Education, and the State Board of Education.
I close from a quote from an American who was buried yesterday in Kentucky, Muhammad Ali. His example and courage inspired my father to pursue a dream of becoming one of America’s first generation of black medical doctors in modern history:
“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given, than to explore the power they have to change it.
Impossible is not a fact…. It’s an opinion.
Impossible is not a declaration…. It’s a dare.
Impossible is potential…Impossible is temporary….Impossible is nothing.”
Thank you for your time and consideration. May God bless this great, and truly exceptional Nation.”
————-
Dr. Thompson’s campaign website link is here: http://www.vote4drgary.com/#!Dr-Thompsons-Utah-CapitolTown-Hall-Speech/b8v6m/575b6c780cf24c9615a7f130
Early voting begins tomorrow, and voting ends June 28th. Please vote wisely. No elected position in this state affects your children and your family more than the state school board position.
State School Board elections are coming up fast. If you don’t know which district is your state school board voting district, click here. If you want to learn who’s running and what each stands for, check out Sutherland Institute’s page, posted for all state school board candidates to introduce themselves to voters. Each candidate who responded answered 13 education policy questions and some also uploaded introductory videos.
State School Board Candidate Debates begin tonight:
District 15: June 7th at 6:30 p.m. at George Washington Academy in St. George.
District 4: June 8th at 6:30 p.m at North Davis Preparatory Academy in Layton.
District 7: June 15th at 6:30 p.m. at Salt Lake Arts Academy.
District 8: June 16th at 6:30 p.m. at American International School of Utah in Murray.
District 11: June 18th at 9:30 a.m. at Early Light Academy in South Jordan.
District 10: June 22nd at 6:30 p.m. at Channing Hall in Draper.
District 12: June 23rd at 6:30 p.m. at Noah Webster Academy in Orem.
On Saturday, June 11th at 10:00 in the Hall of Governors at the State Capitol in Salt Lake City, there will be gathering that will star the six liberty-minded candidates.
Vote for those who know that “parents are, and must always be, the resident experts of their own children”. Don’t allow the lobbyists to determine this vital election of our new state school board. Let it be the most liberty-minded candidates who win. This week, on June 11th, please come to the capitol, meet the friends you haven’t met yet, and gather to ask these candidates some questions.
Can’t wait to see you there!
Radio Interviews
On Wednesday, June 8th from 10:00 – 12:00, K-TALK radio AM 630 will interview six liberty-minded candidates for Utah State School Board, including:
If you click on the six candidates’ names above, you will reach their candidacy sites, Facebook pages or news articles. Please leave a testimonial for them if they have a spot for you to do so, and share these with friends and family in each of the voting districts. I have also posted a campaign speech video and a Band of Mothers video from candidate Alisa Ellis, below. If you have additional videos for additional liberty-minded candidates, please post them in the comments section.
Update:
Tomorrow’s rally is really important. There are so many terrible candidates running for state school board. There are only a handful of conservatives, and they could turn the years-long tide of federal overreach and loss of parental control if they could get elected. I hope many can come, even though political rallies might not be as much fun as a million other June Saturday morning activities.
Of particular concern and interest to me is District 7, the Salt Lake City/Park City race. I don’t live in that district, but it seems incredibly important to me. The incumbent, Leslie Castle, is probably the #1 worst state school board member, to some of us at Utahns Against Common Core. She was crazy about losing Utah’s freedom in education under the Common Core, and was vicious (and dishonest) toward those who confronted her about it. See my four year old posts on Leslie Castle here.
She recently told Frank Strickland, her opponent (the one I support) this, which he posted on his campaign Facebook page:
“Last week the incumbent I am running against [Leslie Castle] amazingly said: ‘I represent the education system of the State- not the parents or children.’ Another quote: “The education system does not belong to parents, its does not belong to the students, it belongs to the commonwealth of Utah’. Of course my stance is that the control of education resides with the parents, and it is primarily for the good of the students. In doing so I agree with the Constitution of the State of Utah. I will be a voice for the common person at the board, and my door will always be open to hear from you, the voter, first. We already have enough members listening to the special interests.”
I wrote to Lear in 2012, asking her in good faith to help clarify why we had joined the Common Core bandwagon, when there seemed to be no amendment process for the states governed by it. Lear responded, “Why would there need to be an amendment process? The whole point is to be common.” She saw no virtue in the freedom to disagree, she said. That tells you exactly how concerned she wasn’t, or isn’t, about local and state autonomy over educational decision-making.
Vote Frank Strickland if you are in Park City or Salt Lake City’s District 7.
In other districts, please vote for Alisa Ellis, Dr. Gary Thompson, Lisa Cummins, and Michelle Boulter.
Please come if you can tomorrow, at 10:00 a.m. to the Hall of Governors at the State Capitol, to support these wonderful candidates and their cause, which is the cause of freedom and family and real education.
Governor Herbert surprised a lot of people this week, including me.
After spending the past six years promoting, marketing, and providing workforce alignment strategies to serve Common Core, and after rising to the throne of Common Core’s organization, National Governors Association, to become its chair, and after going out of his way to have the Utah Attorney General provide “proof” that Common Core supposedly represented local control– after all of this, Herbert has now turned his back on the Common Core and has written a letter to the State School Board, asking it to move away from Common Core.
Regardless of the Governor’s motives in this election year, regardless of the possibility that Utah might just endure a wasteful rebranding effort that could redeliver Common Core under a new name (as many other states, have done and done and done) –I still see this letter from Governor Herbert as a home run for the freedom team.
Read it. The letteradmitsthat Common Core is not an example of local control, that it is the federal will, and that it damages local control –of testing, data collection, curriculum and instruction.
The letter asks the board to keep these principles in mind while it moves away from Common Core: 1) maintain high academic standards; 2) keep the federal government out of educational decisions in Utah; and 3) preserve local control of curriculum, testing, data collection and instruction.
It also says, “Just as important as the actual educational standards is the process by which we arrive at those standards. This should be a Utah process with public comment and discourse.” It continues, “…[W]e all understand the shortcomings of a one-size-fits-all approach. It is imperative that any new standards are flexible enough to allow a wide variety of curricular decisions by individual school districts …I believe that our teachers need more freedom to be creative in the classroom.”
Well, those words are a surprise, and a miracle, to me.
Some people are suspicious because the governor’s in the middle of his re-election campaign, while his challenger, has been extremely successful with voting delegates because of his staunchly anti-Common Core stand. I was there when the governor got booed by a crowd over well over 1,000 delegates at the Utah County GOP Convention last month, when he spoke about Common Core; I know he is under campaign pressure, but he didn’t have to do this! He knew it would make him look like a fair-weather politician. He knew that most of those who are already voting for the more-conservative Johnson won’t change their minds and that those who already support Herbert won’t likely change their minds. So why did he really do it?
Maybe a key to why the governor wrote this letter is in its closing paragraph. His own children and grandchildren do not like the Common Core. The letter says, “I have eleven grandchildren in Utah public schools. I have seen firsthand the frustration they and their parents have had…”
What grandfather can stand up to his own grandchildren’s lobbying efforts against the Common Core? So he caved, in a good way. He’s publically admitted that Common Core is academically miserable and politically for socialists.
I cannot see this letter as anything but great news.
So what’s next? What will the Utah State School Board do?
I don’t think it can get away with yet another meaningless rebranding job. The now-somewhat-savvy Utah public won’t stand for that, knowing what so recently happened to Utah’s previously-good science standards, or knowing what happened when Oklahoma, Arizona, New Jersey, Tennessee, Indiana, and other states passed Common Core repeal laws that resulted in nothing better, but common core 2.0 (under new names). To the dismay of those who actually wanted freedom and autonomy beyond the federal 15% no-change alignment “suggestion”, better standards didn’t actually mean, better standards. But we have the advantage of other states’ errors to learn from today.
The letter didn’t spell out every problem with education reform. For example, it didn’t say, “Let’s finally permit parents to opt children out of the federal/state data data monitoring system SLDS“.
One of my happiest thoughts, after seeing this letter, has been thinking about the countless Utah teachers and administrators who have previously not felt free to speak their minds about Common Core. The governor’s letter, in many ways (and unintentionally, perhaps) helps to reclaim freedom of speech to Utah educators. While educators opposed to Common Core have mostly remained quiet or anonymous, some of those who have not, have been bypassed, mistreated or branded as “insubordinate” for speaking out– for refusing to pretend to like Common Core –either academically or politically. Some have even been pushed to resign.
But now, if even the reigning governor is saying he’s not happy about the Common Core –academically nor in terms of lost local control– then finally, perhaps, any teacher or principal can pipe up, too.
My husband often says, “Truth is truth, whether people believe it or not.”
Here’s the truth that even the Common Core’s lead architect, David Coleman, and its main funder, Bill Gates openly admitted in the videos below:
The Common Core was never state led. If it had been, it would have been constitutionally legitimate. It would have represented voters’ informed consent and desires. It would have a built-in a states’ amending process. It would have represented and standardized something vetted, not this untested theory, this not parentally authorized, not teacher-authorized, not voter-authorized, experiment on, and tracking of, children.
The Common Core is greed-led. It was not an educator but a businessman, David Coleman, who wrote his ideas on a napkin, and brought them to the second richest man on earth, Bill Gates. Gates saw the potential: using standardized data systems, educational standards and tests (and tax dollars) they’d forge what he called, in the video below, a “uniform base of customers” nationally. While Coleman pitched the idea to a partial club of governors and a partial club of state superintendents ( who bought it, and claimed it, and copyrighted it after hiring Coleman’s company, Achieve Inc., to produce it). Gates paid anyone who would take his millions, to promote it.
To this day, the private trade groups NGA and CCSSO claim that they are the “state” originators of the Common Core. That defies common sense and the structure of U.S. government. We have legislatures to represent voters; NGA and CCSSO are not legislative bodies.
I believe in capitalism and I cheer for entrepreneurs who make money legitimately; but Common Core is not legitimate business. It took over political processes. It represents the takeover of voters’ rights. It is collusion: between businessmen who have no authority to determine educational processes, and the federal government. Think that’s just some wacky theory?
Look at this link from the CCSSO’s website. It’s clear evidence of the collusion which went behind constitutional rights of states and which destroyed checks and balances, by setting education policy centrally. Only the feds, married to these nonlegislative and private organizations, call the shots here:
The Common Education Data Standards Initiative is a joint effort by CCSSO and the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) in partnership with the United States Department of Education.
So the same superintendents’ club (CCSSO) that partnered with the partial governors’ club (NGA) to copyright a Common Core for math and English, also partnered with the feds to standardize a common data mining program with CEDS standards, nationally.
Video One: Bill Gates
Bill Gates telling legislators to “unleash” the forces of a “uniform customer base” by using Common Core
Video Two: David Coleman
Businessman David Coleman explaining that he personally persuaded governors to sign on to Common Core, a business idea he plotted on a napkin
Despite the fact that the #StopFedEd / Stop Common Core movement has become politically huge, and that many people know the truth about Common Core, many people still believe that it’s a harmless initiative, and that the Common Core was “state-led”.
Who could blame them for believing so? The promoted “talking points” said so. These were marketed by power-wielders: Bill Gates, the U.S. Dept. of Education, the paid-off National P.T.A., and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce –and were passed along by state boards of education and local boards of education to teachers and parents who trusted those lines. Few fact-checked. The lie got passed along and believed.
Common Core is not primarily an academic argument; it’s a takeover of local authority.
A good friend recently asked, “What’s so bad about the federal government controlling local education?”
If you know socialist/communist countries’ educational malpractices and propaganda machines; their lack of creativity, lack of joy, condemnation of faith, and lack of truth, you will not ask this question.
If you know that there is zero constitutional authority for the federal government to make decisions about education for American schools, you will not ask this question.
But if you don’t know or believe that, just think about your own desires for your children and grandchildren.
If you desire to have an ongoing voice of authority in your child’s education, his/her testing, and his/her data privacy, you cannot support federal education nor Common Core.
The Common Core allows nobody but its copyrighters to amend it. Its tests are held secret, even after the tests are over. The SLDS databases collect data on your child according to federal designs, and it is only a matter of time before this aggregated data will be legalized in disaggregated form. These are questions of personal power and personal conscience. Over time, it is ultimately a question of religious liberty, because the freedoms of conscience and of action are freedom of religion.
Who has God-given authority over what goes into your child’s open mind? Business sectors and federal government? –Or parents, with the consented-to assistance of teachers and perhaps a local school board?
If programs (such as Common Core and Common Educational Data Standards) do not allow for user amendability, for personal conscience to input change, then they are on day one, already corrupt. They are, or will be, tyrannical.
Remember the founders’ words: “consent by the governed“.
This is why the chairman of the National Governors’ Association (NGA), Utah Governor Gary Herbert, failed to secure the nomination in last week’s state GOP convention. This is why that same governor was so loudly booed at the Utah County GOP convention by most of the 1,500 delegates in the audience, every time he said that Utah had control of education standards locally. They knew the truth.
The governor/NGA chair either didn’t know it, or didn’t believe it.
Suggestion: Don’t call Common Core “state-led” anymore, because millions of Americans realize that –even though well-meaning people were duped and then promoted it in good faith– Common Core has always been a solely greed-led collusion between the business sector and the federal government.
WHAT COMMON CORE REALLY DOES TO EDUCATION
Let me share my recent experience with you.
While I teach 10th grade English, part time, at a non-common core, classical, traditional, private school called Freedom Project Academy (FPA) I also tutor, for free, neighbors and friends.
The comparison between my private, not-common core school, and the local public school, in English Language Arts, is stunning.
Background: FPA is an online school that recognizes no governmentally-set educational standards. It recognizes time-tested books as standards: the Bible, the classic works of literature, and the classic works of math, etc. It does not promote “informational text” articles, as Common Core does. FPA tenth graders read the following works of literature cover to cover, and wrote about them this year: The Old Man and the Sea; Romeo and Juliet; Murder on the Orient Express; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Scarlet Letter. Fantastic!
Meanwhile, local public school teenagers who have come for help with their essays let me know that they were assigned “mostly articles” and very few books. Their essay assignments were based on articles about “gender-based toys” and “green cars of the future” –clearly, these young people were being fed the progressive agenda under the banner of “English Language Arts”.
I told them that they are being robbed of real education, and that they should get some real books, especially classics, on their own, and read all that they can.
How can students who are being made to read “informational articles” ever gain the depth of perspective, the insight and humanity found in the rich characters and stories of Hawthorne and Shakespeare and Hemingway?
Common Core apologists are quick to point out that there’s no prohibition against Hawthorne, Shakespeare and Hemingway in Common Core. But Common Core businessmen have made curriculum that is sold and bought nationwide, which is “informational article” heavy, not classics-heavy. The businesses are thus driving what goes on in the classroom, as imagined by noneducator David Coleman, who openly mocks the teaching of traditional, narrative writing. This is not representative governing of education policy!
Talk to your local public high school students. Ask to see what they are being asked to read and write about. I would love to know if my town is an isolated case of losing classic literature.
Video Three: Here’s Coleman, mocking traditional narrative writing, in an effort to promote his notion of reading and writing mostly informational text in English classrooms.
Lastly– NATIONAL COMPREHENSIVE SEXUALITY STANDARDS – aka “Amorality for All”
The centralization/nationalization is not just about English and Math. It is clear in the push for national science standards (Next-Generation Science Standards) which Utah has tragically now accepted. It is clear in the common alignment of tests and data mining to the illegitimate Common Core and CEDS– whether tests are the Utah SAGE, other states’ PARCC, the College Board’s SAT and AP, or other tests.
Centralization of power away from localities is clear, and most dangerous, in the push for national sexality (amoral) standards, CSE, Comprehensive Sexuality Standards (which Utah considered and rejected for now). The video below explains why it is not true that Comprehensive Sexuality Standards are simply about “medically accurate information” but are instead teaching children amorality, which is so important to the progressives’ anti-family, anti-God agenda.
Don’t watch it with children in the room.
Video Four: The War on Children– The Comprehensive Sexuality National Standards:
We are not a communist country. Why are we acting like one, in centralizing so many matters of children’s education? There is nothing secretive about what’s going on; no conspiracy theory here, but conspiracy fact: progressives proclaim that government, not family, owns the children and defines for children what is true, good, moral, healthy, or allowed.
Video Five: Progressives’ announcement that government, not parents, own children:
We need the fire of Patrick Henry to wake America.
Many today seem to fear taking a stand for parental control, state control, local school board control. Do not fear the pretentious monster! It has no constitutional, no authoritative, legitimacy. Our rights, given by God and protected by the Constitution, are legitimate. Your authority over your own children is legitimate. Own it. Act like it. It is only when each person stands in his or her place, firmly, against encroachment, that a free country remains free.
Patrick Henry’s words apply today to the takeover of authority, which is Common Core and Common Data Mining, which is in the process of stealing our God-ordained duty to determine what our children will be taught:
“[W]e are not weak, if we make a proper use of the means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us.
…There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election [choice]. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat, but in submission and slavery.”
Here’s a must-read, new article at Townhall.com (here) by Emmett McGroarty and Jane Robbins, “Why Does Your Congressman Want to Psychologically Profile Your Children?”
The article begins:
“If the GOP-led Congress had not done enough damage to public education by passing the statist Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), it’s poised to make things even worse. The new threat is theStrengthening Education Through Research Act (SETRA). If SETRA passes in its current form, the federal government will be empowered to expand psychological profiling of our children. Parents must understand this threat so they can mobilize to stop it.”
It also states: “Section 132 of SETRA expands authorized research to include ‘research on social and emotional learning [SEL] . . . .’
“SEL is defined as ‘the process through which children . . . acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.’ SEL is all the rage in public education…”
“…SETRA would authorize the federal government to sponsor research on these social and emotional attributes. This means the government may analyze a child’s psychological makeup…”
Another important point:
“…even if there were real, measurable educational value in analyzing every child’s psyche, do members of Congress really believe government has any business doing this?… SETRA also allows the approved bureaucracy to ‘establish . . . cooperative education statistics systems for the purpose of producing and maintaining . . . data on early childhood education, elementary and secondary education, postsecondary education, adult education…‘”
The article concludes: “SETRA passed the Senate on a voice vote and now awaits action in the House. House members, take note: A vote for SETRA in its current form is a vote for psychological profiling of innocent children. It’s bad enough that so-called conservatives in Congress voted for ESSA; it will be unforgivable if they vote for SETRA.”
Student privacy rights are improving in Utah! Utah HB 358 passed and was funded this legislative session.
This is very happy news for many who have been extremely concerned about the lack of proper privacy protections in our state and country. Although the bill does not provide any opt-out ability for any student from the State Longitudinal Database System, which we’ve been asking for, for four years straight, it it does take important steps in the right direction.
The bill imposes some important restrictions on how information collected by school/government systems about a student can be stored, shared, and used. It also makes the Utah law much more protective than federal FERPA (which, as you know, was deliberately damaged by the USDOE in 2009 so that it is not protective of student privacy as it had been when first written by Congress decades ago.)
In HB 358, line 472, the new law defines who owns the data. The student.
472 (1) (a) A student owns the student’s personally identifiable student data.
(Not the “village”.)
The bill also defines three types of personally identifiable data: necessary, optional, and prohibited.
For example, under “necessary” data, the bill names:
316 (a) name;
317 (b) date of birth;
318 (c) sex;
319 (d) parent contact information;
320 (e) custodial parent information;
321 (f) contact information;
322 (g) a student identification number;
323 (h) local, state, and national assessment results or an exception from taking a local, 324 state, or national assessment;
325 (i) courses taken and completed, credits earned, and other transcript information;
326 (j) course grades and grade point average;
327 (k) grade level and expected graduation date or graduation cohort;
328 (l) degree, diploma, credential attainment, and other school exit information;
329 (m) attendance and mobility;
330 (n) drop-out data;
331 (o) immunization record or an exception from an immunization record;
332 (p) race;
333 (q) ethnicity;
334 (r) tribal affiliation;
335 (s) remediation efforts;
336 (t) an exception from a vision screening required under Section 53A-11-203 or
337 information collected from a vision screening required under Section 53A-11-203;
Under “Prohibited data” which schools and third parties may not collect, the bill name:
806 …administration to a student of any psychological or psychiatric 807 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… concerning the student’s or any family member’s:
811 (a) political affiliations or, except as provided under Section 53A-13-101.1 or rules of
812 the State Board of Education, political philosophies;
813 (b) mental or psychological problems;
814 (c) sexual behavior, orientation, or attitudes;
815 (d) illegal, anti-social, self-incriminating, or demeaning behavior;
816 (e) critical appraisals of individuals with whom the student or family member has close
817 family relationships;
818 (f) religious affiliations or beliefs;
819 (g) legally recognized privileged and analogous relationships, such as those with
820 lawyers, medical personnel, or ministers…
Ed. Note: … State delegates have received no less than five communications in the past week from Governor Herbert related to Common Core … Just today we received a robocall from the Lt. Governor, in which he states Governor Herbert has “fought against federal control of education including Common Core”…
What follows below is a rebuttal by Alyson Williams about the letter delegates received from Governor Herbert.
In a letter to State delegates dated April 7, 2016, Governor Herbert listed seven points, concluding with a personal note, to clarify his position on Common Core in Utah. A fact check against other sources follows each excerpted point below:
1) I have called for the elimination of the federal Department of Education.
TRUE (but don’t miss the fine print): While the topic didn’t come up in his remarks to Congress, he did say there should not be a federal Department of Education on his Facebook page:
In short, the Governor outlines how instead of the Federal Department of Education controlling nationwide policies for education, Governors should collude to set nationwide policy for education. Calling for the elimination of the Department of Ed while advocating for an extragovernmental process to accomplish a different centralization of power is not a principle of constitutional federalism. It is a Constitution work around.
2) I signed into law SB287 – a bill that makes it illegal for the federal government to have any control.
FALSE: No law in our state makes it “illegal” for the federal government to have “any control.” 2012 SB287 (http://le.utah.gov/~2012/bills/static/SB0287.html) began as a list of conditions under which Utah “shall exit” any federal education agreement. However, by the time it reached the Governor’s pen, it said, “may exit.” The degree to which Utah avoids federal parameters over local education policy is dependent on the people we elect to various positions of authority and whether they will take action not because they “shall” but because they “may” do so. Governor Herbert has taken great pains to emphasize Utah’s legal authority to take an alternative path to Common Core and yet he has not advocated doing it. As the chair of the National Governor’s Association, a key stakeholder in the Common Core State Standards Initiative, he accepted a nationally prominent role in promoting these reforms.
3) I called for Attorney General Sean Reyes to conduct an exhaustive investigation to determine whether or not the state of Utah had ceded authority over our education system to the federal government on Common Core or any other standards. He concluded that Utah has not. We control our standards, our curriculum, our textbooks and our testing.
FALSE: Herbert did ask AG Sean Reyes to conduct an investigation but within carefully selected parameters, not an “exhaustive” one. The report provided legal justification for whether Utah could join or exit Common Core while avoiding a conversation Utahans can’t seem to have with this Governor about whether Utah should have joined or would exit Common Core.
As far as ceding authority to the federal government, the AG report acknowledges “the USDOE, by imposing those waiver conditions, has infringed upon state and local authority over public education. States have consented to the infringement, through federal coercion…”
4) I commissioned Utah Valley University President Matt Holland and a group of experts to review our education standards. With over 7,000 public comments, this committee recommended improvements to standards and the state board has implemented many of these proposed changes.
UNDISCLOSED BIAS: Throughout his campaign, Governor Herbert has referred to his Common Core review commission using only Matt Holland’s recognizable name, leaving out that the original chair, Rich Kendell (eventual co-chair with Holland), was an advisor for Prosperity 2020 and Education First. Prosperity 2020 Chair Allan Hall was also on the commission as was Rob Brems, a member of the Utah Data Alliance Executive Board. (Common standards are an invaluable asset for data collection.) All are highly qualified people, who, it must be noted, publicly favored these reforms before this commission was assembled. There was just one k12 teacher on the commission, from a private school, and she did not concur with the report but her reasons for dissent are not specifically listed.
In another example of this one-sided approach, the report references two experts who came to Utah to testify about the quality of the Standards but does not disclose their previous connection to the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Timothy Shanahan from the University of Chicago was on the writing committee for the standards, and David Pearson from UC Berkeley was on the Common Core Standards validation committee. Both have published works and give seminars to help teachers implement Common Core around the country. The concerns of the dissenting members of the Common Core validation committee who have also submitted testimony in Utah were never mentioned.
LIMITATIONS ON PUBLIC COMMENT: Public comment was limited to making suggestions standard by standard and not on the overall scope and sequence of the framework, or on things that are absent from the standards.
NO MEANINGFUL REVISIONS: As far as proposed changes coming from the report, there is a list of changes to the standards, but they are all corrections of typographical errors or clarifications of the wording. (p. 33) Other less specific recommendations are scattered throughout, but are seemingly limited to organizational considerations like better cross-referencing between the standards and supporting materials with no substantive revisions.
Perhaps the most illuminating aspect of the report is this statement that is repeated several times regarding the natural limitation to making meaningful changes to standards that are intended, as a priority, to be common across the U.S.:
“The Utah Core Standards can be revised and improved over time in accordance with Utah students’ needs and based on sound research, while staying similar enough to other states to assist transferability at grade level.”
RISKS FOR REMEDIATION UNCHANGED: Another conclusion of note was whether Common Core would reduce college remediation (starts pg 27): “Students who master Secondary Math I, II, and III standards will be very well prepared for postsecondary education and training programs.” In other words, in this report that ironically emphasizes the need to teach more “critical thinking,” we see an example of circular reasoning: students who master the content (or, who do not need remediation) will not need remediation… just like students who mastered content in previous math programs in Utah.
UNKNOWN OUTCOMES: This is immediately followed by the observation that we won’t truly know how college readiness will be impacted until we see how the kids who have been through Common Core get to college – underlining one of the biggest concerns of parents, that this is a statewide (nationwide) experiment on a scale that will reduce alternatives and inhibit the innovation driven by competing ideas. This experiment will affect an entire generation of Utah students but we can only hypothesize about the outcome: “Research on students who complete all of the grade levels of the mathematics standards will be required to verify that the standards (and their effective implementation) make a difference.” (p.28)
5) I, and others, successfully lobbied Congress to repeal the No Child Left Behind Act and return education authority to the states. This policy change was heralded by the Wall Street Journal as the “largest devolution of federal control to the states in a quarter-century.”
FALSE: ESSA didn’t repeal “No Child Left Behind,” it reauthorized it. NCLB is just a nickname for one of the previous reauthorizations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that has been due for reauthorization since 2007. This reauthorization was dubbed the “Every Student Succeeds Act.” It was revised to eliminate one of the most unpopular aspects of NCLB, the penalties for not meeting targets for AYP, but put nearly everything that had been pushed in the federal grants and waivers under Obama’s Department of Education into federal statute. Obama’s Secretary of Education said everything his administration had “promoted and proposed forever” is embedded in ESSA: http://truthinamericaneducation.com/elementary-and-secondary-education-act/arne-duncan-essa-embodies-the-core-of-our-agenda/
Every member of Utah’s Congressional delegation, with the exception of Senator Hatch, voted against ESSA.
6) Assessing the progress of our students is important, but we want to maximize the time they spend learning, not the time they spend taking tests. This session, I worked with the Legislature and signed two bills into law that reduce high-stakes testing in our schools (SAGE testing).
TRUE-ish: Governor Herbert did sign the bill removing the high stakes for SAGE assessments from teacher evaluations and another bill that makes the SAGE test optional for 11th graders (who would likely be taking a different standardized test for college application purposes.) It is not clear how either of those reduce testing unless, in the first case, it is assumed that teachers will require less test practice if their evaluation isn’t directly impacted. In the second case, it’s likely just making room for a different high-stakes test.
7) Every budgetary proposal and policy decision I make is to give more authority and discretion to local school districts and local schools. I have continually advocated for increases to funding that gets to the classroom and can be tailored for local needs.
FALSE: Not every policy proposal. Much of the Governor’s Excellence in Education plan dating back to 2010 and the associated calls for additional funding have been in the context of his Education 2020 plan to expand state educational policy to include early childhood education (preschool, all day kindergarten), workforce alignment initiatives, data collection, and school and teacher accountability which is money for bureaucracy and additional programs, not an increase for the average classroom. He did call for additional $ to go into the WPU in his 2017 budget.
On a personal note, I have eleven grandchildren in Utah public schools. I’ve seen the frustration they and their parents have had over math assignments they didn’t understand and teachers struggled to teach. I have expressed my dissatisfaction with the flawed implementation of new standards, especially in math…
NOTE: It seems too common that when a top-down program fails it is blamed on the “implementation.” This is a key reason for true local control and for programs to be initiated at the level where the expertise, resources and student needs are best understood. Teachers should not be scapegoats for programs chosen by politicians.
Please vote for Johnathan Johnson for Governor of Utah. Gary Herbert’s pretend-a-thon about Common Core has been growing increasingly desperate and despicable. Johnson doesn’t pretend that the nationalization and standardization of all things educational is acceptable, or that it’s not happening.
I actually keep the campaign mailers that Governor Herbert sends out, rather than sending them to the bird cage, because I see them as evidence in a crime scene.
“LOCAL CONTROL OF EDUCATION,” crows one flier, “Governor Herbert played a key role in supporting Congress passing a law to prohibit federally mandated education standards– including Common Core”.
(I ran around my kitchen and shrieked and burned the pancakes the first time I read this mailer.)
ESSA, a fed ed monster bill that Herbert championed, certainly did claim that it would end fed ed in its talking points, but– since no one actually was allowed time to read it– Congress found out after the vote, in reading the over-a-thousand-pages-long language, that it did no such thing. Those of us who had been studying its predecessors knew what was in the crock pot.
Federal ESSA passed into law last Christmastime, when nobody had time to read or debate the 1,000+ page bill. (To make doubly sure no one would have time to read or debate the bill, the writers gave it to the voters in Congress TWO DAYS before the vote). Senator Lee protested loudly while Herbert promoted ESSA– just as he had so long openly promoted Common Core.
Despite what Governor Herbert or the Wall Street Journal may have said, ESSA didn’t end fed ed. It cemented the entire Common Core / common data standards / common tests / federally aligned preschool system. It just deleted the term “Common Core” so that millions who despised that term might be fooled. All the federal and corporate strings were still there.
Even Federal Education Arne Duncan admitted that.
Duncan, who gloated over the deception of so many Republicans, said, “[I]f you look at the substance of what is there . . . embedded in the law [ESSA] are the values that we’ve promoted and proposed forever. The core of our agenda from Day One, that’s all in there – early childhood, high standards [i.e., Common Core]… For the first time in our nation’s history, that’s the letter of the law.”
In that interview with Politico Pro, posted by Pulse2016, Duncan said, “I’m stunned at how much better it ended up than either [House or Senate] bill going into conference. I had a Democratic congressman say to me that it’s a miracle — he’s literally never seen anything like it.”
Duncan also said:
We had many, many conversations behind the scenes . . . . And I said for us to support [ESSA] they’d have to shed their far, far right [constituents who support the Constitution] . . . . I honestly didn’t know if they’d have the political courage to do that. But they both said they would and they did. I give them tremendous credit for that.
Duncan described an intentional betrayal by silence about the real agenda of ESSA:
We were intentionally quiet on the bill – they asked us specifically not to praise it – and to let it get through. And so we went into radio silence and then talked about it after the fact. . . . Our goal was to get this bill passed – intentionally silent on the many, many good aspects of the bill . . . [W]e were very strategically quiet on good stuff . . .
With such praise for ESSA coming from Duncan (and from Herbert) and with such condemnation of ESSA coming from Lee, Chaffetz, Love, Bishop, and Stewart, one can easily see who’s aligned with progressive, Obama Administration ideology.
Utah’s Congressional delegation very correctly cited local control beingtaken away as the reason for voting against ESSA. Senator Mike Lee was very clear on why ESSA should never pass. The governor must have heard the ear candy of the bill’s prominent promoters, notably LaMar Alexander and Paul Ryan– but did he dismiss the words of Senator Mike Lee about ESSA?
Did Governor Herbert believe that he alone recognized ESSA as cutting fed ed, while the famously conservative Lee, Stewart, Bishop, Love and Chaffetz saw it as growing fed ed? Did these Utah Congressmen vote against local control, and for federal control? Of course not; that’s why Herbert was vague on the mailer and did not actually use the term “ESSA”.
Herbert’s mailer also brags about Herbert being top dog at the National Governors Association (NGA). True, he is its chair, but that is not something to impress an actual conservative.
The NGA is not a constitutional congress of governors. It’s a trade group. Not all governors want to be in NGA. Some governors boldly criticize it. NGA is a closed-door, private club, not subject to sunshine laws, so no voter can influence (or even listen in on) what happens there. –And what does happen there? A lot of grant-taking from the likes of Bill Gates to push Common Core on the states, for one thing; copyrighting and attempting to sell America on the Common Core, for another. One non-NGA governor, LePage of Maine, said, “I get no value out of those [NGA] meetings. They are too politically correct and everybody is lovey-dovey.”
If NGA Chair Governor Herbert wasn’t flabbily playing both sides of the campaign fence, appearing to be pro-Common Core to D.C. and to the ed sales lobby, while appearing to be anti-common core in his mailer to conservative delegates like me, he might come out with a clear and unmistakable statement, like Governor LePage’s of Maine, who said, in addition to the quote above: “I don’t believe in Common Core. I believe in raising standards in education.”
But that wouldn’t fly with the Governor’s friends in his favorite, unconstitutionally recognized, high places: NGA, CCSSO, Prosperity 2020, the Education First lobby, and the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce.
Parents and teachers in Utah have endured intense, years-long frustration as we have listened to the charade led by the governor, echoed by those friends in unconstitutionally recognized, high places. Herbert once said he aimed to “get to the truth” about Common Core. But the narrow, controlled “conversation” that Governor Herbert then led about Common Core, was light years away from the spirit of the scripture that the governor quoted at his public meeting about Common Core: “Come and let us reason together.” There was no listening happening. Yes, he got his attorney general to say that Common Core was a locally controlled initiative, but that report was easily, factually rebutted.
Lastly: there’s more to object to than just Herbert’s federal rubber-stamping of nationalized education standards and tests and data gathering without consent. Look at other issues, just as important as education:
Why did Herbert veto Constitutional Carry? Aren’t gun rights on the top of conservatives’ priority lists?
Why did Herbert support the expansion of Obama’s ideas for “healthcare” here in Utah? Aren’t conservatives supposed to stand for fiscal realism and self-reliance and charity (as opposed to forcery –not a misspelling–)?
I will never forget that day, four years ago, in the governor’s office: it was just the governor, his bodyguard, and we three teachers and moms: my friends, Alisa Ellis and Renee Braddy, and me.
Although we explained our documented research about Common Core and common data collection (CEDS/SLDS) and gave Governor Herbert a thick binder that documented our research and our alarms; although we begged him to recognize the error and to steer away from these federally-promoted systems; although we pointed out that the State Office of Education was using zero documentation to support their pro-common core ear candy– the governor didn’t hear us.
He didn’t keep his promise to have us back in one month, after he and his legal staff had reviewed the issues, either.
He stayed his Common Core-promoting course and entrenched Utah further, using Prosperity 2020 and Education First as financial and political vehicles.
To see the real contest between Ted and Trump, compare something other than what the news outlets permit you to see. Start with the Cruz and Trump official websites. Note the way that they speak about (or if they even mention at all) education, family, the Constitution, and religious liberty. Compare the clarity and substance of their points. Compare their histories of real action versus talk.
To me, there is no real contest after you do this.
The only thing I sincerely like about Trump is his slogan: “Make America Great Again”.
I wonder: how, precisely, would Trump do that –without having outlined steps to actively uphold religious freedom, educational freedom, the First Amendment, religious liberty, and the family as the central unit of society, traditionally defined? On these issues –my issues– Trump seems stumped.
Cruz has real, defined solutions based on foundational principles, but Trump has not. What Trump has is hot air, angry bravado, a memorable slogan, and a nifty hat.
In researching which candidate upholds my priorities, I first took a look at Cruz’s and Trump’s official websites:
On Trump’s site, you see a lot of stuff for sale and you see narcissistic campaign articles about the Trump movement itself. You don’t learn anything substantive. There’s no mention of my priorities on his site. That scares me. Trump’s “issues” page only lists:
The Cruz website focuses on principles and gives information about how Cruz has taken action on those principles, such as the vital detail of why religious freedom is so important. The site says:
“America was founded on a revolutionary idea. Our rights do not come from government. They come from God.
Ted has spent his career defending religious liberty. He has fought to protect our First Amendment rights in a number of Supreme Court cases, and as U.S. Senator, he has been a tireless fighter for the right to freely live according to our faith.
As a presidential candidate, Ted Cruz has hosted two national religious liberties rallies and has brought together Christians who have been persecuted for their beliefs so that people across the country can listen to their stories and stand united for our first freedom.
On day one, a President Cruz will instruct the Department of Justice, the IRS, and every other federal agency that the persecution of religious liberty ends today.”
Aside from the websites, think about their histories. I especially like the story of Cruz, as Texas Solicitor General in 2005, who stood up to and beat the combined forces of murderer-rapist Jose Medellin plus the U.S. federal government plus the U.N. “International Court”. The U.S. and U.N. courts attempted to side with Medellin, who had raped and killed two Texas teenagers as part of a gang initiation. The U.S./U.N. courts argued that although Medellin was guilty, Medellin should not be tried by Texas, but by Mexico. Cruz won the case for Texas. The murderer-rapist, Medellin, was executed.
Trump has what history? He has made money, despite a lot of bankruptcies, and he had a reality show that a lot of people watched. And?
This is not a high school popularity contest. Choosing the wrong candidate can have devastating, even deadly, consequences.
As Mitt Romney pointed out this week, “Trump’s bombast is already alarming our allies and fueling the enmity of our enemies… What he said on “60 Minutes,” about Syria and ISIS, has to go down as the most ridiculous and dangerous idea of the campaign season… This is recklessness in the extreme. Donald Trump lacks the temperament to be president. …[He] mocked a disabled reporter… attributed a reporter’s questions to her menstrual cycle… mocked a brilliant rival who happened to be a woman, due to her appearance… bragged about his marital affairs, and who laces his public speeches with vulgarity…. Mr. Trump is directing our anger for less than noble purposes… He calls for the use of torture and for killing the innocent children and family members of terrorists. He cheers assaults on protesters. He applauds the prospect of twisting the Constitution to limit first amendment freedom of the press. This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.”
The anger that Trump displays, which so many Americans feel, does not suddenly translate into a reversal of those things that make us mad. Anger is not enough. We need a president with substantive, defined plans; with honest, noble character; with a proven track record of dedication to honorable and Constitutional principles. That is not Donald Trump, nor Hillary Clinton, nor Bernie Sanders. The best available embodiment of noble aims and history is Ted Cruz.
Finally, what about Common Core?
Ted Cruz has a simple, excellent plan that moves us in the right direction, called Five for Freedom. It calls for elimination of unconstitutional agencies, including eliminating the federal Department of Education. Trump, on the other hand, makes no mention of education on his website.
It was a year ago that Ted Cruz tweeted: “Federal government has no business sticking its nose in education. We need to repeal every word of Common Core.”
Nowadays, all the Republican candidates are suddently posturing as if they are opposed to Common Core. How convenient for them, now that Common Core has become a byword.
About five minutes ago, when Trump seemed to realize that millions of grassroots Americans won’t vote for anyone who admits they’re working with, or cashing in on, the common core/common data alignment monopoly, he started making statements like “We’re cutting Common Core!” That statement elicits cheers. But Trump does not demonstrate understanding of how deep and penetrating the unwanted, common alignment of all things educational has grown, nor how sobering and difficult a task it will be to untangle it and retrieve freedom.
When Senator Mike Lee endorsed Ted Cruz, he explained in a New York Times interview why Trump was not his pick: “Mr. Lee… said he worried about [Trump’s] policy positions and views on presidential power. ‘I’m still waiting to hear more detail from Donald Trump on where he stands on a whole host of issues,’ Mr. Lee said.”
We are all waiting for that. Where does Trump stand on common, aligned education standards when they alter their names? What about the common, aligned data standards? Where does Trump stand on privacy rights? Where does he stand on family rights? The right to life? Marriage or adoption of children by homosexuals? The restoration of the Constitution? Where does he stand on the Federal Reserve? Where does he stand on religious freedom? His silence is deafening on vital issues, yet he rants like a drunken sailor about making America great again. That is not meaningful to me.
Cruz is not perfect. He has said things that I don’t competely agree with. But I don’t completely agree with my own dear husband, all of the time. And that is okay. Cruz is not a danger to our nation; Trump is. So are (of course) Hillary and Bernie.
Trump seems almost a typecast for a dictatorship, a drunken one. I can’t resist sharing a video that uses Trump audio clips with a lip-synching actor; you’ll either laugh or want to cry. I know it’s immature, but it’s so darn poignant.
Please recall that last summer, a report card posted by Pulse 2016 and American Principles Project graded presidential candidates on their actions in getting rid of Common Core.
The only person who had an “A” then, who is still in the campaign, is Ted Cruz. Take a look at the grades and the criteria. It’s very telling.
Although I have a Cruz bumper sticker on my minivan and although I cheerlead for Ted Cruz on Facebook, I hadn’t, until recently, felt that making a specific Ted Cruz blog endorsement would be valuable. It felt like it would be preaching to the choir. I guess I’m naiive enough to have believed that people would see what I have seen, in comparing Trump and Cruz. I thought that the “pro-freedom-in-education” gang all agreed that it’s only been Ted Cruz who has consistently, and with more than a five-minute history, been outspoken against Common Core and the top-down suffocation of local control in every aspect of education.
It seemed like the most obvious thing in the world, to me, that Cruz was the best choice. But I was wrong about the obvious part. Some of my friends and family members are “yuge” Trump fans. They say that he’s strong. They say that he’s refreshingly blunt and politically incorrect. They say that he’s so rich that he doesn’t have to be beholden to lobbyists, the way all the other candidates on both left and right supposedly must. They say that he’ll intimidate our enemies. Tempting thoughts, all.
But I agree with what Gina Dalfonzo wrote, in an article for First Things entitled “Nikabrik’s Candidate” –that there’s a desperation, similar to the oppressed people in C.S. Lewis’ Prince Caspian– in the desperation of Trump supporters. Dalfonzo wrote:
“How could… the good guys in this story become corrupt enough to seek help from someone whose greed, brutality, and lust for power were legendary?
“…Nikabrik’s fears are legitimate. His enemies are real and powerful… He is right to recognize the need for help. He is wrong to decide that help must come from a force equally merciless—wrong when he tells Caspian, ‘I’ll believe in anyone or anything . . . that’ll batter these cursed Telmarine barbarians to pieces or drive them out of Narnia. Anyone or anything, Aslan or the White Witch, do you understand?’
“This is how good people with strong, ingrained values—people who have invested time and money in the sanctity of life, religious liberty, and similarly noble causes— …end up flocking to a reality-show star who spends his days on Twitter calling people ‘dumb’ and ‘loser.’ This is how some who have professed faith in Jesus Christ are lured by a man who openly puts all his faith in power and money, the very things Christ warned us against prizing too highly. As one wag on Twitter pointed out, “If elected, Donald Trump will be the first US president to own a strip club,” and yet he has the support of Christians who fervently believe that this country needs to clean up its morals.
“…Tired of waiting for Aslan—who may be nearer than we think—we turn elsewhere. It doesn’t matter if our candidate hates, bullies, and exploits other people, the reasoning goes… Hatred is a perfectly acceptable weapon, as long as it’s ‘on our side.’”
Are Trump supporters like Nikabrik in Prince Caspian, desperate for anything and anyone to defend them, even if that defender is evil? Have Americans forsaken the principles that really did make America great? Do Americans want Trump– regardless of his character, and regardless of the intended or unintended results that will come from unfettered rage and mannerlessness? Is something as transitory as anger the prerequisite to good leadership? Does blunt anger “trump” all other qualities? What lasting good can come from following such a man?
My church teaches that “honest men and wise men should be sought for diligently, and good men and wise men ye should observe to uphold” because “when the wicked rule the people mourn”; also, that we must “befriend” the “constitutional law of the land”(Doctrine and Covenants 98: 6-10). It doesn’t say to seek or uphold perfect candidates; there aren’t any. It says to find the most honest, the most good, the one most seeming to befriend the Constitution.
Update 3/10/16: Utah’s legislative session has passed, but HB 358, the student privacy bill, has not been funded. And so we are stuck, at least for another year, without proper protections for our children. (If you don’t know why that’s bad, begin by reading a recent article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, by Jane Robbins, on why Georgia is considering a student privacy bill):
Robbins explains, “…parents have heard glowing claims that ‘digital’ or ‘personalized’ learning will transform education, but they may not understand exactly what this means…[I]nteractive programs, marketed by private ventors, frequently use sophisticated software that collects massive amounts of highly personal information about the student’s behaviors, mindsets and attitudes”. She mentions the fact that the U.S. Department of Education is gung-ho on slurping up that personal, psychological information about beliefs and attitudes, as evidenced in its own published draft reports. (Must-reads!) Robbins makes the real point when she writes, “The issue here goes far beyond data security. It is whether the government and private companies have any right to collect this highly sensitive data in the first place.”
Not passing/funding the Utah HB 358 privacy bill, while passing and funding HB 277, the digital education bill, was crazy. It was the worst mistake of this entire legislative year.
Does the legislature not know that data is the new gold rush, and that education vendors are behaving as if this is the old wild west, without solid laws to govern student data sharing and partnering and selling? Does the legislature not know that to the federal government, also, data is the new gold rush as well, and that our own Congressman Jason Chaffetz held recent hearings against the Department of Education for its data insecure practices– and gave the Dept. an “F”?
Think of it this way: legislators just barely bought the children and teachers of Utah the trendiest, shiniest $15 million vehicle (HB 277) while saying, “We are unable –or unwilling — to pay for seat belts and air bags” –though the safety features would have cost a tiny, tiny fraction (one-sixteenth) of what the vehicle cost.
Where are their brains?
That digital vehicle, HB277 is worthless, at least to this mom, without the seat belts for the kids. I, for one, will not allow my own children to get into that wild, glittering ride.
If it does not pass (and get funded) tomorrow, the Utah legislature is silently informing us that privacy protections for children’s data do not really matter, and that citizens should not have rights to personal ownership over their personal data.
Even though HB 358 is scheduled for a hearing today at the Capitol: Tuesday, March 8th, at 5:00 p.m., the bill is in trouble because the executive appropriations committee did not fund it. That’s almost the same thing as killing the bill. (The appropriations committee needs to hear from MANY of us, as fast as possible. See below for contact information.)
I have been head-bangingly furious about the lack of proper privacy protections for my children since 2012, when I found out that there was such a thing as a State Longitudinal Database System (SLDS)– here and in every other state–and when I then asked to opt out of SLDS tracking, I just received the State School Board’s official “no” letter.
In America, land of the free! In Utah, land of family-friendly liberty. Here, I was told that I was not allowed to opt my child out of SLDS, so that being tagged, tracked, and longitudinally stalked, from day one in school until my child was a working adult and beyond, was a mandate.
I also found out that:
1- Although it starts with the word “State,” the SLDS is federally paid-for and is aligned to federal data standardsand is federally interoperable;
2. Those who house Utah’s SLDS have zero legislative oversight. Incredibly, when SLDS began in 2009, there was zero vote-taking; SLDS came because of a grant application filled out by a clerk at the state office of education simply asking for a federal SLDS grant, and then it was implemented without voter approval. Yet SLDS is 100% applied to all school children, non-consensually.
4. FERPA (federal privacy law) was altered in 2009 by the Department of Education to become almost meaningless. Despite a huge law suit, FERPA stayed in its altered, privacy-harming state. So: in-state or beyond, proper privacy protections do not exist. (For more on that, see the recent hearings of Rep. Jason Chaffetz against the U.S. Dept. of Education)
5. SLDS interfaces with many other state agencies in the Utah Data Alliance, so there is no guarantee that a student’s private data, collected by a school, won’t end up in the data silo of another agency totally unrelated to education. SLDS has the ability, if state policy allows, to also interface with federal agencies’ data, other states’ and even other nations’ data collections.
This situation has literally kept me up at night, many nights, including tonight.
Along with countless other moms and dads, lawyers, think tanks, and legislators, I’ve done a lot of research and writing and speaking and pleading on this subject. See some of what I learned and shared in the past four years, here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here.
I tell you all this in case you are new to this issue so that you’ll understand how INCREDIBLY important passing HB 358 is.
House Bill 358 ought to be treated as one of the very most, if not the most, important bill at the Capitol this year. But the legislature is saying that there isn’t enough money to pass the privacy bill, which has an implementation price tag of $800,000. Oddly, the legislature has agreed to fund the FIFTEEN MILLION DOLLAR technology grant program, HB 277, but that technology bill is meaningless without privacy protections for students’ data.
Is the “no funding for HB 358” decision truly a budgeting pinch decision, or is it a matter of the legislators not caring enough about the rights of students to have privacy?
Here are a few of the lines in the bill that I really appreciate:
Line 463 says: “A student owns the student’s personally identifiable student data”.
Lines 494-503 say that schools have to give disclosure statements to parents, promising not to share certain types of data with out a data authorization.
Lines 775-792 prohibit psychiatric or psychological tests or analysis without prior written consent of parents, and specifically protect data collection about sexual orientation and behavior, mental problems, religious beliefs, self-incriminating behavior, appraisals of individuals with whom the student has a close family relationship; income, etc, and that written consent is required in all grades, kindergarten through 12th.
The bill designates three different types of data that schools may collect: necessary, optional, and prohibited.
Even though the “necessary” list seems too long, at least it limits data collection. It will collect data “required by state statute or federal law to conduct the regular activities of an education entity” such as name, date of birth, sex, parent contact information, student i.d., test results or exceptions from taking tests, transcript information, immunization record or exception from an immunization record, drop out data, race, etc.
Line 346-351 The “optional” list includes IEP information, biometric information, and information that is required for a student to participate in federal data gathering programs.
Lines 356 – 376 The bill also defines “personally identifiable student data” as data that cannot be legally disaggregated (identified by a particular student) (See lines 224-227 for disaggregation language):
356 (i) a student’s first and last name;
357 (ii) the name of a student’s family member;
358 (iii) a student’s or a student’s family’s home or physical address;
359 (iv) a student’s email address or online contact information;
360 (v) a student’s telephone number;
361 (vi) a student’s social security number;
362 (vii) a student’s biometric identifier;
363 (viii) a student’s health or disability data;
364 (ix) a student’s education entity student identification number;
365 (x) a student’s social media login or alias;
366 (xi) a student’s persistent identifier, if the identifier is associated with personally
367 identifiable student data, including:
368 (A) a customer number held in a cookie; or
369 (B) a processor serial number;
370 (xii) a combination of a student’s last name or photograph with other information that 371 together permits a person to contact the student online;
372 (xiii) information about a student or a student’s family that a person collects online and
373 combines with other personally identifiable student data to identify the student; and
374 (xiv) other information that, alone or in combination, is linked or linkable to a specific
375 student that would allow a reasonable person in the school community, who does not have
376 first-hand knowledge of the student, to identify the student with reasonable certainty.
We need to protect our kids! This bill NEEDS to pass!
If you’ve ever read 1984 and remember Big Brother; if good old-fashioned history books have taught you that tyranny has been far more dominant than liberty throughout world history (with the exception of a freedom experienced in the U.S. under the Constitution for a few 200+ years) –or if you’ve been paying attention to the recent struggle between big-data and individual rights– then you know: allowing any person or government –unfettered– to track individuals without their consent, for virtually the duration of their entire lives, is a very bad idea.
We need as many emails and phone calls or texts as we can muster before 5:00 p.m. tomorrow, Tuesday, March 8, to the following representatives, and especially to Speaker of the House Greg Hughes and President Niederhauser:
Senator (President) Niederhauser wniederhauser@le.utah.gov
Senator Sanpei dsanpei@le.utah.gov
Senator Hillyard lhillyard@le.utah.gov
Senator Dunnigan jdunnigan@le.utah.gov
Senator Adams jsadams@le.utah.gov
Representative Gibson fgibson@le.utah.gov
Senator Okerlund rokerlund@le.utah.gov
Here they are, ready to cut and paste into your email: dsanpei@le.utah.gov lhillyard@le.utah.gov jdunnigan@le.utah.gov jsadams@le.utah.gov fgibson@le.utah.gov rokerlund@le.utah.gov greghughes@le.utah.gov wniederhauser@le.utah.gov
“It’s not people outside the party that have thrown the conservative, grassroots base under the bus. It’s the people who have paid lip service to limited government while gorging on it. It wasn’t any outside candidate that is not a part of our movement… it was not outsiders, who are not familiar with our movement, who conspired with the establishment on Common Core. That was Republicans– who threw us under the bus. That was Republicans who are con men. And it was the heart and soul of conservative, grassroots activists, mostly everyday, ordinary moms, who shamed the Republican Party elites into backing away.
“And now what are they doing? The same thing that they always do when grassroots conservatives call them out: they smear the people who fought against them and who call them out. They sneer at them as hysterical. They sneer at them as just “fringe movements” on the Internet. And then they go and campaign on our side, knowing that they’ve stabbed us. My job is not to tell people what they want to hear, but what they need to hear.
“We just had Governor John Kasich, a nice guy, by all means, who last night, during the debate, pretended that he was on the side of local control. Ohio grassroots activists and moms know better. This is a man who smeared home schoolers and teachers for their opposition to Common Core. I am telling you the truth. I am asking you to do your homework. I am asking you to follow the money. I know it isn’t what you want to hear. But do you want to hear the same Republicans promise you, as they have been, since 1981, that they’re going to abolish the Federal Department of Education? It’s an empty talking point. And those empty talking points need to be punctured like helium balloons.”
“There are three reasons why Jeb Bush failed: his last name, his support for Amnesty, and his cheerleading and cashing in on Common Core.”
Thank you for speaking the truth, Michelle Malkin.
The short version and the good news must come first: HB 164 (a bill about no more opting out of SAGE tests) did not pass. HB 264 (a bill about common sex ed) did not pass.
Yesterday at the Capitol, the legislative education hearing was cram-packed with standing room only, and an overflow room was available for attendees. I’m so glad that so many came.
One of the first bills, HB201 –that would remove the Common Core SAGE test from being tied to teacher evaluations, a common sense bill– was clearly popular. Three “Teachers of the Year” spoke in favor of it. They said that it’s not fair to punish a teacher if a student rebels against a test and doesn’t do his/her best work. Some said that the test itself was not valid.
When the committee chair asked if anyone in the audience wanted to speak against it, parent Jared Carman volunteered, saying that while he definitely agrees with the idea behind the bill, he disagrees with the bigger picture. Carman pointed out that since, later in this same meeting, this committee would discuss whether to tie student passing or failing of a course to Common Core SAGE testing, the logic was flawed. If it’s unfair to base a teacher’s grade on this unreliable and unvalidated test, why is it not unfair to base a child’s grade on it?
Amen, Mr. Carman.
Next up was HB 164, the opt out-or-no-opt-out bill. Sponsor Kraig Powell summarized the three versions of the bill– not in the way I would have– but he did say that there were three different doors and that the committee could choose which door to open. True. They were each different, but each called 164. Someone on the committee pointed out that this is not a game show!
Someone else pointed out that the third substitute bill was only posted online a few minutes before the hearing, making it unfair to expect a vote on it, without a reading and without giving notice for people to know about it and to come to the hearing to speak to its (very different) issues.
Still, Representative Powell hoped to pass the bill anyway, saying (amid wild, enthusiastic cheers from the audience) that it’s high time we get rid of the SAGE test altogether. For your information, he has always fought the pro-liberty, anti-common core crowd, so it was very, very odd to hear him say those words.
And I wasn’t cheering.
I asked to be allowed to give public comment on substitute 3, since I had read it while sitting in the hearing. (I had noticed that it was utterly, completely different from substitutes one and two. It was about “backpack” digital data on every child; it was about labeling schools as “turnaround” schools; it was about getting rid of SAGE testing while relying on embedded, curricular [stealth] assessment.) I didn’t get the opportunity to speak because the committee wisely decided not to hear testimony and not to vote on it, since there had been no time for reading and analysis by the committee.
So why wasn’t I cheering that we’d get rid of SAGE? Why would I want to testify against the bill that supposedly spelled the end of SAGE/Common Core testing? Simply this: substitute 3 of HB164 gets rid of SAGE, but it also gets rid of any possibility for a parent to opt a child out of testing. And it totally relies on common core and common, SLDS/CEDS, data.
HB 164 sub 3 relies on a digital “backpack,” which is like an ever deepening, longitudinal fingerprint, to assess children constantly. The child would provide an I.V. drip of continuous data to the State Longitudinal Database System, via stealth assessment, which has been set up to happen by several previous bills, including this one.
See lines 590-591: “Every school district and public school shall develop and integrate programs integrating technology into the curriculum, instruction, and student assessment.”
That matches, perfectly, ed committee member Marie Poulson’s task force and resolution of last year, which aimed to minimize the negative effects of excessive testing. It sounds so good.
Yet, there is something even more sinister than excessive testing, using experimental standards and psychometric analysis of student responses. That is: stealth assessment; that means, using continuous assessment that is embedded in the curriculum so that no parent can opt a child out of the test– BECAUSE THE TEST NEVER ENDS.
I am not against integrating technology into learning. There is nothing wrong with technology; it’s a blessing! But there is something wrong with not applying basic principles of liberty and consent to the technology being used by children. There is something wrong with forcing students to be monitored all of the time, in all of their assignments, and then to be judged thereby.
Dr. Gary Thompson has been warning us for years that the trendy notion of stealth, or embedded, assessment, would show up here; it has. Jakell Sullivan has been warning us for years that SAGE was a red herring, or not the real point; the real point was controlling the data via the SLDS longitudinal database system; that’s in HB 164 sub 3, too.
The question at the core of this issue is: Which is worse– saving children from the wasteful, stressful, data-robbing SAGE tests now, while making their tests stealthy and continuous, with no parental opt out available, or: sticking with statewide SAGE, where at least those who are aware and informed, can opt out?
Both are bad, but one is clearly worse, in terms of parental judgment, control and liberty. But embedded assessment is what Poulson and Powell and the whole educational establishment appear to be favoring. Embedded tests certainly get rid of whiny parents and rebellious kids aiming to wreck their test scores with careless bubbling in of answers. But at what cost?!
(Please contact your legislators and tell them that you are opposed to stealth assessment and digital “backpacks” on children. This will show up in many bills, now and next year.)
The third bill from yesterday’s hearing that I want to review is Rep. King’s Comprehensive Sexuality Bill, HB 264. The committee allowed public comment, but only a very few people were given time. One of the first commenters arguing against passing the bill said that Rep. King’s opening line was false. (King had said that there was “misinformation” on the internet that said that this bill had something to do with Common Core.) The commenter said that Rep. King might not be aware of the national, common standards for sexuality education, but the promoters of the common standards sure are aware of Rep. King; just today, SIECUS had posted an article about Rep. King’s Utah bill promoting their standards.
I looked at that article. It was far more revealing about what the bill aimed to do than its testifiers seemed to be: “House Minority leader Rep. Brian S. King (D-Salt Lake City) is leading efforts to change Utah’s sex ed law… Utah’s current law, passed in 1988, mandates medically-accurate sex education classes in schools but requires the stressing of abstinence-only instruction. The law stipulates that health education teachers cannot discuss intercourse nor positively discuss homosexuality…. This bill removes the instruction prohibitions on homosexuality, sexual intercourse and contraceptive devices”.
Most of the testifiers for the bill who stood to speak overtly appeared to be LGTB, a point that stood out to me. It was not mentioned by the newspapers today, of course. But think about it. If the bill was just about giving additional, medically accurate knowledge, and not about altering “values, attitudes and beliefs” as the national sexuality standards movement requires; if there was no LGTB agenda being pushed on the children through HB 246, why were all the LGTB activists there to testify for it? Since when do they go out of their way to testify in hearings for the cause of “medically accurate knowledge”?
I am not hostile toward gays. Live and let live. But I am opposed to the LGTB agenda being pushed in public arenas as if it were the new, national religion. I am opposed to the minimizing of truth about what that lifestyles’ consequences are. The national common sexuality standards do push that lifestyle and political agenda on children, while calling it education. Altering beliefs is not what reproductive health classes are supposed to be for. Altering beliefs and attitudes is the job of the family and the church.
HB 264 did not pass.
The last update that I want to share is about HB 91, Hillyard and Eliason’s bill to change the power levers of the state school board. I am concerned about the apparent power grab that the state school board is taking in this bill:
“The board may delegate the board’s statutory duties and responsibilities to board employees.”
This is bad because we, the people, cannot elect or fire employees as we can elect and fire the board.
85 (ii) temporarily or permanently withhold state funds from the education entity;
86 (iii) require the education entity to pay a penalty;
This is bad because it overreaches into the localities, pushing the state board’s will onto the local boards, which is not in harmony with the constitution.
There are also audits of localities, new rules about how a local entity interacts with a third party, and other seeming power grabs that need attention from local boards and liberty-minded representatives. We don’t want to recreate the nightmare of the beastly federal Department of Education within our state, by allowing the State Department of Education to micromanage the localities, using money and unfire-ability as leverage.
Please continue to email, text, call or write to your representatives.
They need to hear what your thoughts and feelings are. Silence is acquiescence.
With my stomach in knots at two sickening bills that are poised to be slammed through today, I will go (hopefully alongside very many other moms and dads and teachers like me, along with our children) to make the drive, find the impossible parking, and attend the hearings today at 4:00 at the House Building in our State Capitol building.
POWELL – THE SPONSOR OF THE COMMON CORE-
BASED, FORCED YEARLONG TESTING BILL
We’ll hear legislative discussion and, if we’re lucky, will hear strong citizen testimony, on both HB 164 (that’s the “Let’s force SAGE/Common Core yearlong assessment on all kids without parental consent” bill) –now a very slightly altered version of what got voted down a few days ago, which has been unfortunately resurrected by the desperate Representatives Powell/Milner, likely egged on by equally desperate Governor Herbert and his USOE.
See lines 82-85: “providing that scores on the tests and assessments… may[not] be considered in determining:
84 (i) a student’s academic grade for the appropriate course; or
85 (ii) whether a student may advance to the next grade level.”
By taking out “not” they have made it so that kids opting out of common core year-round tests may not pass the class or the grade, if this passes. That breaks many other laws that place parents as primary authority, schools as supporting authority, in a child’s education. How can parents truly have a say if the law says otherwise? Even more importantly, a yes vote on this bill is a yes vote for the common core itself, since it assumes that the tests based on those standards are valid. VOTE NO.
Also:
KING – SPONSOR OF HB264, THE ALIGNING UTAH WITH
COMMON SEX STANDARDS BILL
We’ll hear discussion on HB 264, the bill that alters Utah’s current sex education program, which is, or was, reasonably, actually about the medically correct facts about reproduction, sexually transmitted diseases, and the fact that abstinence and fidelity are great tools to avoid trouble — but now, under HB 264, is to be replaced by the “common core” national standards for sex ed, which are code named “comprehensive sexuality education,” all about altering “values, beliefs and attitudes” about sex and gender identity, with no moral judgment of any kind allowed to be taught, and no such thing as deviant or perverted behaviors to be mentioned; such seem not to exist, under the common national sex standards, separately from healthy and moral sexual behavior.
As Wendy Hart, Alpine School Board member, pointed out: “We will be told [HB 264] is about knowledge. Here’s some evidence. CDC ranks Utah 47th for STDs compared to all of the other 50 states. According to the Guttmacher Institute Utah is rated 45th for teen pregnancy and 49th for teen abortions. States such as California and New York that teach comprehensive sex education are ranked in the top 10 states for all these teenage sexual activities. So, should Utah continue with its successful abstinence-based education program resulting in Utah students ranking an average of 47th out of all 50 states for teenage sexual activity or should we change to a failed comprehensive sex education program that has produced teen sexual activity rates in the top 10 of all states?”
—————————————————————————
With permission, I am posting the open email and letter now, from Dr. Gary Thompson, an African-American doctor of clinical psychology (who is also currently a candidate for District 10 in the battle for State School Board seats).
This letter was sent yesterday to the legislators, who will vote on HB164 today.
Subject: Memo To House/Press Release RE: Objection to HR 164-2
Dear Honorable Members of the Utah House of Representatives Education Committee:
Please find attached, my formal objection to HR 164-2, which if passed, will mandate that all Utah students be subjected to a experimental, non validated test, regardless of parental, medical doctor or psychological doctor objections. I believe that this test is not only a experimentation on Utah’s children’s without informed written consent from parents, it is by its very design, discriminatory against African American, Latino, Gifted, Autistic, and Special Education Students in Utah public schools.
It is my understanding that this Bill will be up for a (re) vote sometime early this week. Feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions, or need volumes of peer reviewed research which backs the contents of my letter.
I have been flooded with email and social media requests to address this issue from my perspective as a doctor of psychology, and father of five divergent learning, African American children.
I appreciate your civic service performed on behalf of the children in the State of Utah. Thank you very much for your attention.
Best regards;
Gary Thompson, Psy.D.
Accompanying letter:
February 21, 2016
Re: Objection to HB 164-2
Early Life Child Psychology & Education Center, Inc.
Dr. Gary T. Thompson
Utah State House of Representatives House Education Committee
Dear House Education Committee:
I am writing in regards to HB 164-2 on behalf of my five African-American children, as well as the hundreds of mothers who have graced the halls of the pediatric clinical/education child psychology clinic that I co-founded with my wife. This Bill will require all public school children in the State of Utah to take the SAGE assessment test, eliminate the option of parents to opt their children out of taking the test, and will mandate the usage of SAGE as a primary determinate for advancement in early elementary school grades, as well as graduation from Utah public high schools. The passage of this Bill will have far-reaching negative academic, psychological, ethical, economic, and legal consequences that will haunt our State for generations.
I have devoted my life to the research, study and ethical clinical usage of emotional, cognitive and academic achievement tests to assist parents, schools, and courts with making life-altering decisions for children. During my Doctoral Internship and Residency, I gained a intimate working knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the incredible technology and psychometric qualities embedded in the algorithms of the computer adaptive tests that are now the foundational basis of the SAGE test at issue of this Bill.
The psychometric algorithms imbedded inside the SAGE test are remarkable, cutting edge, and unlike anything our generation has seen or experienced in our lifetime. As a local clinical community scientist, I have spent many hours enthusiastically reading peer reviewed studies from my colleagues over the past 8 years in anticipation of utilizing computer adaptive assessment of this nature for children in my community, as well as my own children.
I am a strong advocate for the ethical and prudent usage and inclusion of technology in efforts to assist ground level teachers with serving the academic needs of children in educational settings. The next 4 years will see innovations in this area that will be awe inspiring, as well as ground breaking in nature.
Despite my scientific enthusiasm and support for the inclusion and integration of psychometric tools, such as the SAGE test, in the academic lives of my children, and the children of my neighbors in my community, I beg you both as father, and a Doctor of Clinical Psychology, to never let this Bill see the light of day. My strong objection is not based on personal politics, and obviously has no basis in a “fear of technology”.
This Bill must not pass for one reason, and one reason only: It is still in its developmental/experimental phase, and has yet to be validated independently for its intended purpose. Without a shadow of a doubt, the corporation that the Utah State Office of Education chose as the vendor for the SAGE test (American Institute of Research), has launched the most expansive, massive, unethical experimentation on public school children ever witnessed in the history of Utah. Clinical psychology is replete with tragic, historical examples of the dire consequences associated with experimentation without the informed, written consent of its human participants. To pass a law which takes away the right of parents of protect their psychologically vulnerable children from the adverse, and well documented effects of high stakes, experimental assessment of any nature, is irresponsible, unethical, and dangerous.
One needs to look no further than the State of Florida to see the chaos, harm and damage associated with the AIR produced Common Core test currently being utilized for purposes of grade advancement, and teacher evaluations. In closing, on behalf of the parents of African American, Latino, Divergent Learning, Special Education, Gifted, Anxious, Depressed, Suicidal, ADHD, Autistic, and emotionally vulnerable children in the State of Utah, I respectfully request that the House not only allow parents to opt out of the SAGE test, but encourage them to withdraw their children when they witness excessive signs of distress associated with experimental, high stakes testing. In addition, I ask that no high stakes, experimental test produced by a corporate vendor, validated or not, ever be given the “respect” of being tied to grade advancement or high school graduation.
Using our kids as experimental laboratory rats, without the informed written consent of parents, to achieve “career and college readiness” is unethical by any professional standard, and is a direct affront to our God given and Constitutionally protected right as parents to protect, raise and nurture our children without invasive governmental interventions. Please vote “NO” on HB 164-2. “Parents are, and must always be, the resident experts of their own children.”
Respectfully Submitted;
Gary Thompson, Psy.D.
Retired Father of Five Divergent Learning Children
2016 Candidate-Utah State Board of Education-District 10
Early Life – 10757 So. Riverfront Parkway Ste. #275 South Jordan, UT 84095
I was just going to the Utahns Against Common Core Facebook Page to share my “Thank You” letter with my friends. (I’d written a letter to thank the representatives who had voted no on HB164, the bill that would cause any child to fail a class whose parents opted him/her out of the SAGE/AIR (invalidated, common core, federally aligned tests).
But when I got to that Facebook page, my friend Wendell had posted a link to a new version of HB164.
The monster is back.
I don’t understand how!
I don’t understand how an ugly, evil, unconstitutional bill like HB164, after having attracted a packed room of angry parents last week, and after having been voted down by a vote of the legislative committee, can now be back for another vote.
I pray those nay-voting legislators will see lines 76-79 and will say, “No. I still do not like Green Eggs And Ham!”
But who knows?
Who’s being manipulated, threatened, or bribed at the legislative level– and by whom?
Who knows? There’s no investigative reporting being done in Utah by any newspaper on the subject of education industry corruption, or the education industry’s machinations at the Utah State Office of Education.
There should be. The education sales industry is one of the biggest, most money-making industries in the world. And Utahns are probably the most trusting, gullible, and least fact-checking groups of people on earth.
The facts are stacked against the trusting little guy.
The governor of Utah is the president of the National Governors’ Association, the group that co-created and copyrighted the Common Core and co-promoted the Common Educational Data Standards movement. To deliver that product, Utah’s Governor Herbert himself created Prosperity 2020, a movement that aligned Utah businesses and chambers of commerce with the common core and common data mining projects now in pre-K-12 and higher ed.
From Governor Herbert’s point of view– and especially in an election year, when his opponent, Jonathan Johnson of Overstock, is openly fighting Common Core and common data mining projects– while Gov. Herbert’s supporters, the Chambers of Commerce, etc., are making so much money on this monstrosity (at the expense of real, good education and student privacy, of course)– from that point of view, HB164 HAS TO PASS.
It has to pass, for the monster to live.
If it doesn’t pass, then that lynchpin of power and control doesn’t get settled in to take over; if people can opt out of the data collection tests, then the data isn’t usable, and the whole monster feeds on data, data, and more data. Nonconsensually gathered, private, individually-custom built, student longitudinal data. The State Longitudinal Database System is the mechanism. Schools feed it every day.
If the testing opt-out movement seriously catches on fire here in our state, then SO MANY ENTITIES LOSE MONEY AND POWER. Governor Herbert is one. The Chambers of Commerce are another. School Improvement Network is another.
Even the federal government will be hit hard, if enough parents and students opt out, since federal ESSA, passed last December, calls for 95% of all students taking the same federally aligned tests and giving up that student data for “user profiling” of all citizens.
The same God who put children first in His heart and in his kingdom said that you cannot serve God and mammon. In this state, a supposedly religious state, it is sad to say that there is a tremendous amount of top-level USOE and Chamber of Commerce hypocrisy going on.
Children are being put last. Money is being put first.
Ironically, and evilly, the money is being made under the banner of making children’s lives better. That’s all Prosperity 2020 ever talks about– the future of the economy, for the children.
But tell me this: how does any of this bless a child, when a child is, under HB164, forced to take a test and is forced to expose his or her private data in a user profile that in no way blesses him or her, but benefits the central planners?
Is it right? Children, forced to take a test, despite parental reservations. Forced to take a test, despite the fact that the test has never been validated. Forced to take a test, despite the fact that the standards upon which the test rests, are experimental and are far from the time-tested, classic standards for real education that their parents knew.
Forced. Forced. Forced.
Think about this.
If HB164 passes, when that now-much-smaller group of non-test takers actually fails classes, when the first group of normally A+ children fail full grades in school –because their parents stood up, using their consciences and Constitutional freedoms, against this monstrosity, because that will happen—how will Governor Herbert look into our eyes and shake our hands at the local Rodeo?
Currently in the Utah legislature, poised to become law, is HB 0246.
I read, in the Tribune, that Representative Brian King felt that the bill was important because, “Knowledge is power,” and “I don’t believe in keeping our kids ignorant.”
They certainly won’t be ignorant– nor innocent; not a chance.
With this bill, we meet its parent: the Common Sexuality Education Standards movement. Slightly more twisted than the other sets of common standards, it has hit Utah through HB 0246, Rep. Brian King’s bill– oddly titled “Reproductive Health Amendments”.
Now, along with CCSS (Common Core for English/Math) and along with NGSS (common science standards) and along with AP US History (common un-history standards) –here are common, national, sexuality education standards. Like the “common standards” predecessors, this set is twisted ethically, is “progressive” politically, and is anti-local-control.
Be clear, because I wasn’t until today: “Sexuality Education,” which this bill offers us, is not the same thing as “Sex Education”. At all. Old fashioned sex ed can be compared to a civics class that teaches kids that there is such a thing as voting, while “Sexuality Ed” is like a civics class that teaches kids which political party to join. National Sexuality Standards are here to change beliefs and values about sex, not to teach the biology or the consequences of sex.
“Sexuality education is a lifelong process of acquiring information and forming attitudes, beliefs, and values.”
Sex ed was about the science of reproduction; legitimate, academically. Sexuality education is actually a new religion– it forms beliefs and values.
This bill gives Utah “comprehensive sexuality education” starting with children about nine years old.
Before we read what’s in the bill– first, let’s look at what was taken out of Utah’s previous sex education law.
You see a lot of crossed out words. These used to be in the law and won’t be, if HB0246 passes. Read them.
Why were these struck out?
[(A) the importance of abstinence from all sexual activity before marriage, and fidelity
106 after marriage, as methods for preventing certain communicable diseases; and]
107 [(B) personal skills that encourage individual choice of abstinence and fidelity.]
108 [(ii) (A) At no time may instruction be provided, including responses to spontaneous
109 questions raised by students, regarding any means or methods that facilitate or encourage the
110 violation of any state or federal criminal law by a minor or an adult.]
Am I reading this correctly? Will Utah teachers be forbidden from teaching fidelity and abstinence as viable methods for preventing communicable diseases? And, are Utah teachers no longer forbidden from providing instruction that might encourage violation of laws?
What illegal acts will we be teaching, then? Are these words referring to abortion-related laws, or pedophilia, or what? There was some reason why were these lines were removed, and the law altered. I want to know what that was.
Here’s more that got removed from Utah’s previous standard:
[emphasizing
156 abstinence before marriage and fidelity after marriage, and prohibiting instruction in:];
157 [(I) the intricacies of intercourse, sexual stimulation, or erotic behavior;]
158 [(II) the advocacy of homosexuality;]
159 [(III) the advocacy or encouragement of the use of contraceptive methods or devices;
160 or]
161 [(IV) the advocacy of sexual activity outside of marriage;]
It appears that Utah teachers are no longer prohibited from teaching students the “intricacies of intercourse, sexual stimulation, or erotic behavior; the advocacy of homosexuality; the advocacy or encouragement of the use of contraceptive methods or devices; or the advocacy of sexual activity outside of marriage“. They can “teach” all of it, if the bill passes; nothing says they can’t.
I have to say, with a grain of gratitude, that this bill does look slightly less horrific than the National Sexuality Standards in full, in one way: the Utah bill delays comprehensive sexuality classes until after third grade. The National Sex Standards begin several years earlier, in kindergarten.
Otherwise, they are in synch. The language and intent matches, and the Utah bill is patterned after the national sex standards, as part of the Future of Sex Education Initiative (FoSE). –For example, if you click on the FoSE link, as with the SIECUS link, it uses and defines “comprehensive sexuality education,” the term that the Utah bill also uses 12 times.
3rd-5th graders
The Utah bill plans to start sex ed after grade three, so know this: the National Sexuality Education Standards for grades 3-5 include: being able to describe male and female reproductive anatomy and functions; being able to describe the changes of puberty; and being able to “define sexual orientation as the romantic attraction of an individual to someone of the same gender or a different gender.”
Do you feel fine about forcing –on children as young as nine years old– “lessons” on genital anatomy, reproduction, puberty and both hetero- and homosexuality? At what point is this not science, not biology, not decent? At what young age do sexual education lessons cross the line, becoming something other than teaching truth?
At what point would any statement about sex be declared by decent people to be improper, perverted, deviant, and emotionally abusive? For me, that time is right now.
A term I see getting flashed around a lot in FoSE and HB0246 is “age-appropriate”. Age-appropriate– by whose definition? By whose values? ( Before you answer, before you research the people behind the national initiative, let me stop you: Laughably, the Utah bill prohibits political doctrine –as well as religious or other) from being taught. See lines 67, 205. So none of these lessons or standards are, in any way, political, we are to convince ourselves.)
Reading the bill and reading the national sex standards initiative’s documents, I think: never have I understood more clearly the idea that there are no such thing as age appropriate standards. Every child is different. Every developmental stage is different. What one child asks about, and is ready to learn at an early age, another child is horrified to speak of until a decade later. Being insensitive to that fact, by promoting one-sized set of national standards, top-down, on a topic as sensitive and potentially damaging to a child as personal morality and sexuality, is child abuse.
6th-8th graders
By 6th-8th grade, the national sex standards have children defining sexual intercourse; differentiating between gender identity, sexual expression, and gender expression; explaining “the range of gender roles”; and defining sexual abstinence only as it relates to pregnancy prevention.
In the Utah bill, “abstinence” is explained using words that I find to be pornographic, especially in the context of having a sixth grader (eleven year old) read it. See line 95-96.
95 (f) “Sexual abstinence” means not engaging in oral, vaginal, or anal intercourse or
96 genital skin-to-skin contact.
WHAT?
There should be a whole bill written prohibiting the exposure of an innocent mind to that sentence. That’s not the curriculum or the test; that’s just the legislation about it. And it seems at cross-purposes to define the term that is no longer to be part of the message. (Abstinence is out, they said.)
9th-12th graders
The National Sex Standards have high school students analyzing the influences that impact when and whether they engage in sexual behaviors; differentiating between biological sex and sexual orientation; demonstrating ways to communicate about when and whether to engage in sexual behaviors; oddly, at this point there is little to no scientific or reproductive aspect of sex education– it’s about activity and engagement.
Notice, in HB 0246, that students will be:
129 reducing the number of sexual partners
The bill also pushes “day-after” contraception/abortion:
138 (ix) provide instruction about the health benefits and potential side effects of using
139 contraceptives and barrier methods to prevent pregnancy, including instruction regarding
140 emergency contraception and the availability of contraceptive methods.
That’s all I’m going to say about the bill itself. Read it, and tell your legislators what you think about it.
Some people are afraid of being labeled as conservatives, as believers in God, or as morally strict. Please don’t let the promoters of this bill intimidate you by calling you a backwoodsy, out of touch, prudish, fearful, religious, whatever. This bill, and these standards, are way beyond anything academically or ethically reasonable.
This fight in front of us, Utahns, is about protecting our children, unmuddied by SIECUS’s extreme political agenda.
It is an agenda of zero morality.
Pretending that sexuality education can be taught without reference to conscience, modesty, or morality, is a lie. There is such a thing as human conscience, and right and wrong, especially where sexuality is concerned.
(I keep thinking about the lesson from last Sunday, in church: “The Body is a Temple“. The body is so much more than an object for pleasure. Every body is holy, housing a spirit child of God. Procreation is how God’s millions of beautiful children form physical families. That matters– how it happens, when and with whom it happens, all matters– almost more than anything else that the body can do. Yes, human sexuality is good and right, but steering it is not a free-for-all. It is not without a governing morality.)
That’s where the national sex standards, and HB 0246, are wrong. They pretend that human beings are without morality, without a sense of right and wrong, and that there is no unhappy consequence beyond disease or unplanned pregnancy that could result from acting out sexually, in any way, and at any age. Those are lies.
I’m not suggesting that Utah–or any state– should teach denominational religious doctrine in public schools. Of course not.
I am saying that it is wrong to promote and teach a prescribed, “new” morality (in my mind, the same, old fashioned, immorality). It is so wrong to teach little ones, nine years old, heterosexuality and homosexuality, in a school setting. It is wrong to teach that there is no such thing as perversion, nor anything wrong with sex obsession, or gender reversals. It is wrong to include so many teachings about deviant and degrading sexual behaviors as if they were normal and good, while excluding fidelity and chastity from the conversation.
(For future reference, some organizations, listed as promoting the National Sexuality Education Standards, are: the National Education Association, the American School Health Association, the American Association of Health Education, the Society of State Leaders of Health and Physical Education, the Future of Sex Education Initiative, The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS) and Advocates for Youth. Consultants listed include: Planned Parenthood; the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Netword (GLSEN) and many more. Utah’s standardized test provider, American Institutes for Research, (AIR) is openly on board with the National Sexuality Education Standards and its values, too.)
HB164 is the bill that takes out the protective word “not” from the sentence that previously said that nationalized (Common Core/SAGE/AIR) test scores “may NOT be considered in determining” student advancement to the next grade, or student grade in the course. (line 80-81)
This means that if you exercise your conscience and opt out of the tests to protect your child, your child can fail the class and the grade– if HB 164 passes.
HB 164 will have a hearing tomorrow. If you can possibly rearrange your schedule, please come (and bring your kids) to the Capitol tomorrow. Location: HOUSE BUILDING ROOM 30.
When nobody shows up to hearing, the promoters of bills give out smooth talking points and nobody really gets to the heart of what the intended or unintended consequences are, if the bills become laws.
I wrote to the co-author of HB164. I asked him to explain why he was doing this. (He used to be my rep, and sort of a family friend, when I lived in Heber.) Representative Powell did not respond. Here’s a picture of the other author, Ann Millner, in case you see her when you’re there and want to ask her, too, why the state should be more powerful than the parent, in this state once famous for being so family-friendly.
Wendy Hart, a member of Utah’s largest school district’s school board, (Alpine District) has put out an alarm, asking all parents who get the message to show up at the hearing.
(Please think about this, if you love Common Core and SAGE testing– it’s your prerogative to participate in it, but please agree to respect the rights of those who don’t want to participate, because the next law might be the one where you wish you had help maintaining parental rights to decide what is best for a child. We need to keep the right to opt children out –without penalty for parent or student.)
Wendy Hart is asking people to “pack the House Education Committee meeting on TUESDAY Feb 16th to show our OPPOSITION to HB164!!! We must stand up for students and protect our right to opt out!” She continued:
“If we can stop this bill in committee, we can kill the bill! Why is this bill so bad?
*It allows SAGE Summative test scores to determine student grades and student grade advancement (lines 80-83).
*It removes parents’ right to opt out of SAGE Interim & SAGE Formative (because they are not “end-of-grade-level” tests), and any other software programs provided by the State (line 169-170) (the law will no longer protect our ability to opt out of any current or future formative testing).
*It allows for incentives/rewards to be given to students who take the test, which means students whose parents have opted them out will be excluded. How will children feel when their peers are receiving treats and they are not? Who will be the “bad guy” in this situation? The parents. (lines 180-181)
If you can rearrange your schedule to come to the Captiol at 1:30 PM (to allow for parking, etc.) we need all the people there we can get! They need to see our faces so they know how much we care about this. (Meeting will be held in the House Building Room 30)
Please write the committee members if you are not able to attend the meeting (see below for e-mail addresses). When writing, please be brief and most importantly be respectful.”
Compare a typical public school history textbook today –or a geography textbook, or a social studies textbook– to one from a generation ago. Which contains more truth, and more real history?
For that matter, what is real history? It is just anyone’s relative perspective of what constitutes a proper list of important names, dates and places? No.
Real history isthe story of humans’ struggle for freedom: for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is also the horrific backside; the story of the “bad guys”–who have worked, for various reasons, to take away others’ life, liberty, or pursuits of happiness. It’s as simple as that, to me.
Since real history chronicles freedom’s fight, real history recognizes that the history of America is exceptional in world history’s fight over the principle of freedom. Never –before America– had any group of people successfully, unitedly, harnessed human nature’s tendency to oppress.
Real history acknowledges this miracle that was America’s founding –a founding built on self-government and equality under God; built on divided, checked and balanced, law-based, representational power; built on the golden rule, and not built on tyrannical, top-down control that might assume power above the law. This was new. This was a dream that the world had never seen realized. This was, and is, cutting edge innovation. “Progressing” away from this American miracle is the furthest thing from actual progress. That’s why “progressivism” is such a lie. Yet, it’s being taught increasingly in common-standards schools.
By real history’s definition as the definition of freedom, we are losing U.S. history in schools. But we can still pass down the freedom-cherishing gene, one by one, in our homes and our churches and in those few classrooms where real history is taught, unmaligned and not marginalized as being “unprogressive”.
To detect agenda-laced “history” lessons, look for messages posing as history that do not acknowledgethe central role of freedom. Almost anything is more important than the concept of freedom, in such lessons. The books or messages may use terms like “collective” or “sustainable” or “safe” or “human capital” or “every and all” or “stakeholder decision-making” to corral people away from independence and sovereignty, toward globalist relinquishment of inalienable rights– no more talk of life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness; instead, you’ll find talk about global sustainability and global citizenship and endless lists of American errors. Individual worth and power decreases. The global collective increases. Freedom’s preservation becomes anything but centrally important.
Progressive-agenda-laced literature is increasingly the only kind of social studies/history/science/geography that is available in most public (and some private) schools. This is probably because school systems are influenced heavily by the College Board/AP US History which is taking an increasingly “progressive” view. (Remember: progressive = progressing away from local control under the Constitution, toward big, global government philosophy, where “safe” trumps “free,” every time.) Unless you are lucky enough to happen to have a patriot for a teacher, who happens to go beyond the common standards to teach real history, you have to step up and do this. Why?
Because when public school systems rob students of the freedom philosophy, of real history, it neuters them of the power to maintain freedom.
You can give that power back to your children. It is as simple as telling a story.
Two of my living heroes are my current teachers; I’m taking a free class right now from LibertyMoms Laureen Simper and Stacie Thornton, which we set up at my local library. These two moms have studied the Constitution, founding documents, and history. They teach the principles of liberty so that we are armed to apply the principles to current events. Kids are welcome in their classes, and my kids are there each week.
(The photo above was taken yesterday outside my local library, where Liberty Moms are teaching.)
Liberty Moms teach, for free, their 1-hour, 6-week classes, to anyone willing to set up a venue within driving distance of their home in Salt Lake City. If you are not near Liberty Moms, here’s another idea: consider taking free, online classes about the Constitution (and other topics) from Hillsdale College. Read audio books of freedom’s heroes. Find kid-friendly books about freedom’s story. Talk to aged veterans in your home town, about freedom.
Your children will thank you someday for every effort you make to teach them to know and love America and the principles of freedom. I thank my dad now –for every history book he’s ever given me (and there have been many) –for every speech he’s ever given, usually teary-eyed, over an Independence Day barbeque, or at the dinner table, or on a drive somewhere. I thank him, not a history teacher, for my having acquired his freedom gene. By the words and actions of my father, I got it.
I don’t think it gets passed on in many other ways.
Buried deep in a 2012 report on “Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics,” the US Department of Education states that one of the key applications of educational data mining is “user profiling” (page 25).
The paragraph says: “These application areas are (1) modeling of user knowledge, user behavior, and user experience; (2) user profiling; (3) modeling of key concepts in a domain and modeling a domain’s knowledge components, (4) and trend analysis.”
Later on, in Exhibit 1, we see a flow chart. It shows “student learning data” flowing into the “predictive model,” the “intervention engine” and then into the “adaptation engine.” Clearly, the goal is government-directed behavior modification following student psychological profiling.
This is sad, because “users” now include even babies, since the Department of Education has successfully pushed ESSA into law, with its “early childhood education” programs that are included in the citizen data mining venture.
The Educational Data Mining report of 2012 is not the only such report from the U.S. Department of Education. Related is its 2013 report, “Promoting Grit, Tenacity and Perseverance” which contained more of the same psychological data gathering goals.
The “Promoting Grit” report included pictures of biometric sensory devices: pressure mouse sensors, posture analysis seats, facial expression cameras, and wireless skin conductance sensors, which would mine student psychological elements, including “grit,” “tenacity,” “perseverance” and more.
In SETRA (the Strengthening Education Through Research Act, currently in the US House of Representatives, having somehow passed the Senate) we find that the federal research programs will be strengthened and enlarged so that more data, including “social and emotional learning” will be gathered for federal use.
Philosophical and constitutional questions need to be hotly debated by the House of Representatives. More importantly, these need discussion at the dinner table, by moms and dads and teachers and principals and school board members:
Will American children grow up free– as self-governing, free agents, with intellectual and moral privacy and the accompanying power to soar outside any box, as well as the power to fail? How, if even their thoughts and beliefs are monitored and subjected to “intervention”?
Do Americans want students to be profiled, centrally managed, and nudged in a predetermined, government-and-workforce approved direction –constantly monitored and told what to do? If so, what qualifies central planners to trump individuals’ and families’ desires?
Does widespread societal faith in “experts” relegate personal privacy and real autonomy to historical artifact? Should personal data be studied and behavior “intervened” by unsupervised central planners? Will this really keep us “safe,” as cogs in a centrally managed, economy-focused collective? Do we want to be a government-branded herd, or free, individual, human beings?
Here come the practical questions for how all this profiling may pan out.
If we allow government to keep psychological profiles (not just on students– since the P-20 Workforce Pipeline means preschool through workforce citizens get tagged) –then, what happens if a thirty year-old wants to buy a gun, and his background check comes back negatively because when he was in 5th grade, his data was interpreted to mean future depressed individual? And what if his 5th grade data was incorrect?
What if “at-risk academically” is redefined and applied to a student for attending a private, religious, or home school?
What if “mentally unstable” is applied to anyone who does not agree with what is being taught in school?
What if “socially deviant” is applied to anyone who disagrees, or is bored with, collectivist groupthink and group work? –The “what if” list could be endless.
We don’t want to see any “what if”s come to pass. We can put proper protections in place. Legislators, write bills and voters, actively push to get them passed –laws that will deny researchers, school systems and governments access to psychologically profiling, via tests, curricula, and standards without informed, written consent.
The fact that “profiling’s already here” is no excuse. We can begin where we are, and take a stand today. It is true that our students are already being psychologically profiled, to some degree, by the government and schools, already: look at the math standard for Common Core that requires a student to be tagged for presence or absence of “perseverance”. That’s not about math; that’s about psychology and character.
The perseverance tag and others like it will certainly be on the SAGE (Common Core, CEDSaligned) tests; notably in Utah and Florida, which use tests created and scored by the behavioral research company AIR (American Institutes for Research).
For additional evidence of current psychological profiling, look at Utah’s “Student Strengths Inventory,” which gathers nonacademic data on high schoolers.
But none of that is any excuse.
If rain is leaking through a hole in the kitchen, that does not mean we can innocently stand by while someone pokes holes in our living room roof and the bedroom ceiling, and makes plans for the removal of the roof.
The Father of the Constitution, James Madison, said that if men were angels, no government would be necessary. To that I add, if governments and corporations were angels, no privacy protections would be necessary; student data would be consensually collected, analyzed, and used to bless the lives and enlarge the opportunities of every student. But men, governments, and corporations are not angels. That’s why We, the People, need to stop invasive bills like federal SETRA; it’s why we need to write and pass good, protective laws locally.
Take action today.
Write a letter. Make a phone call. Meet with a legislator. Pray with great faith; miracles of knowledge and understanding and miracles within political workings are needed, to awaken an asleep populace and to build up protections for our children’s minds, hearts, and freedoms.
At the #AboutTheChild conference in Houston last week, B&L Network speakers said that even in the middle of a struggle we might seem to be losing, we have great power and great hope.
Although America is seeing dangerous shifts in who can and who cannot amend tests, in who controls (and does not protect) children’s data; in who gets to redefine even babies’ “educations” as a collective-economy-purposed thing; while we see corporate and federal “central planners” ram initiatives without a vote to assume “stakeholder” rights over our little ones– even in this awful situation, we can defend children’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happy education; that is, time-tested, soul-enlarging, non-Common Core education.
I cannot do the conference justice briefly, yet I want to try. A few moments that stood out came from these speeches:
1 Troy Towns, an Alabama minister and political activist, spoke about the numbers of people who should be actively involved in the fight against Common Core and other false reforms. He retold the story of Gideon in the Old Testament. Not only did it not bother the Lord that Gideon was vastly outnumbered; the Lord told Gideon to reduce his numbers, by sending away all warriors who were fearful. Then the Lord instructed Gideon further, to send away all those who were not alert to the enemy while drinking at the stream. Reduced to 300 people, surrounded by countless armies, the Lord then led Gideon’s group to victory… It’s not about numbers. It’s not about who appears to be winning in the moment. It is about who is on the side of true and honorable principles.
2. Daisy Whisenant, Texas advisor in the Christian Educators Association International, a Christian teacher’s union, implored listeners to let teachers and students know the truth about “separation between Church and State”. That idea is designed to prevent governments from promoting one religion above another, while upholding all religions’ freedom of speech. It is not designed to shut down religious discussions. A teacher is a government employee, but a child is not. Nongovernmental citizens (students of all ages) may speak and write freely about their religious beliefs. For more information, visit CEAI.
3. Jason Hoyt, Florida radio personality and author, discussed what “Consent of the Governed” means. The concept is also the title of his book. (Click here to find the book Consent of the Governed. ) I read it on my trip home. It teaches the history of local, state, and federal grand juries, and outlines the disintegration of that constitutional authority, which serves –or should serve– as a fourth branch and a check on the other three branches. The book shows that if “We the People” reclaim proper controls of our grand juries, we can reclaim vital, lost political power –more effectively than if we rely only on elections as the means to enforce fair government.
4. Angelique Clark, a Las Vegas high school student, spoke about the stand she took and the fight that ensued as she founded a pro-life group for teen activists. When her application for a high school pro-life club was denied, Angelique fought for her First Amendment rights inside a school, with a lawsuit to the school district that finally allowed her to form the pro-life club. She won. Her story has been seen on Fox & Friends, On the Record with Greta, Fox, Bill O’Reilly, and elsewhere.
5. Dr. Karen Effrem, a pediatrician, author and researcher, a leader of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, of the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition and of Education Liberty Watch, spoke about the amount of data being collected on every public school student in the nation without parental knowledge or consent; about the psychological and belief data-gathering goals outlined in the US Department of Education’s “Developing Grit, Tenacity and Persistance” Report; about the unfortunate, newly passed, Every Student Succeeds Act; and about the monster on the horizon, the “Strengthening Education Through Research Act“. Her presentation should be seen by every member of the U.S. Congress.
6. Dr. Peg Luksik, a former reform evaluator for the U.S. Department of Education, a lifelong teacher, speaker, and honoree by multiple U.S. Presidents, spoke about the idea of common standards. She asked the audience if there was such a thing as good standards, and answered her question: no. There is no such thing as a good set of standards because every child is so different. She has a child who is a math genius, who cannot do ballet. She has a daughter who is a ballet genius, who cannot do math. She asked: where would the proper, common standard be for those two children? The idea of top-down decision making for teachers and students is ridiculous. She said that years ago, “Outcome Based Education” was pushed on the nation, and was defeated by a handful of level-headed patriots. Common Core and its related initiatives are the same thing, repackaged. Those who would be central planners of all children’s lives must be defeated again.
7. Dr. Duke Pesta, an energetic literature professor and administrator at Freedom Project Academy, spoke about the devious history of the Common Core Initiative, up to its promoters’ most recent coup against liberty, the Every Student Succeeds Act. He emphasized the words of Arne Duncan about the Every Student Succeeds Act, and pointed out that even trusted Republican leadership betrayed liberty with ESSA. We must be smarter and faster in overturning the deceptions of this fight. (FYI, Utahns: rumor has it that Dr. Pesta will be speaking in Utah this April.)
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day. (Read the whole speech.)
9. Joan Landes, a Utah therapist, crystallized the issue when she said that the problem with government initiatives like Common Core and its web of tests and controls is that it hurts human relationships. Her presentation about reversing Saul Alinsky’s evil tactics, and her idea of asking every concerned citizen to spend five minutes or five dollars as often as they can, were truly remarkable.
I spoke, too. The heart of my speech, “Reclaiming Parental Power” came from a realization I had a few nights before the conference, as I thought about the awful situation that is U.S. Education Reform today. As I wondered how we can keep going in the face of losing, losing, and losing (Common Core is still here; Common Education Standards and Longitudinal Databases are still here; the ESSA federal law makes things so much less free; and SETRA may soon make them even worse) –I had a clear thought: HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO TRADE PLACES WITH A MOM IN CHINA– or a mom in any socialist/communist nation, for that matter? You would have no freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom to publish, freedom to work to repeal bad laws. You hardly have freedom to think, in China. A lover of freedom living in China, loving her children, would give her arms or legs to have the opportunity to face the problems that we face. Arms and legs.
The glass will always be half full– never half empty– as long as there is a person left in America who remembers the words and the spirit of the U.S. Constitution.
Freedom is always worth the fight.
Children will always be the reason.
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This blog post is a partial, inadequate sampling that has not included many additional, wonderful speakers at the conference. Every speaker (see biographies and speaker list here) –was moving.
If you missed the conference and the livestream, you can still watch it as part of a package deal with B&L* Network by purchasing a B&L year membership here. I’m advertising it because:
The conference speakers were an inspiration, and their words need to be heard far and wide, as do the messages from United States Parents In Education (USPIE) which held a press conference as part of this conference, rolling out a campaign to #StopFedEd. Also, importantly, consider this: the conference organizer was Alabama homemaker and radio show host Diana Crews, who, with her sweet husband, a professional trucker, went into debt to make this conference happen. If nobody watches, she stays in debt. This was her sacrifice because she believes in making this issue About The Child. It’s not about the “global economy” or the “school to workforce pipeline” or about “human capital”. It is about the child.
To support B&L, click here.
* (If you want to know what B & L stands for– and I asked, and was so glad I did– it’s Bears and Lord; as in, Mama & Papa Bears and their Lord).
Joan Landes of Utah has launched ActionforToday.Wordpress.Com, a site where you can spend five minutes or five dollars to make a difference. If you become aware of a pressing need that could use some grassroots awareness, post it in the comments section and the site administrator will read and post it.
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2016 UACC BILL TRACKER
LAUNCHED
The Utah legislature meets for its yearly session now. The session is only a few weeks long. Bills will pass or not pass, right now.
On the Utahns Against Common Core (UACC) website, there is now a bill tracker built in. UACC is asking you, your neighbor, your teacher friends, your grandparents– anyone who cares about saving local control and liberty and high quality, honorable education –to please help review and file education bill reports so we can see at a glance which bills are a problem. You will be helping legislators, who cannot possibly analyze the number of bills that they are asked to analyze in the time given.
Oak Norton, UACC email director, has sent out emails about it. If you’re not on the email list, go to the UACC site and sign the petition. You will then receive all future e-mailings.
Sign up for a bill here: https://docs.google.com/…/1h_eB3A9Ghqfa6-sdEwjRGSkaLb…/edit…
In a series of press conferences held this week in various states, US Parents Involved in Education (USPIE) launched its campaign to stop federal intrusion into local education, and launched a membership drive for parents to join, as well as a pledge for legislators to sign, if they stand for true local control of education, as well.
Please join with those across the nation who realize that it’s time to reassert authority over education, over privacy rights, over testing and curriculum; and over stewardship of children by their own families.
Moms Alyson Williams, Jenni White, Alisa Ellis and Christel Swasey, of Utah and Oklahoma, chat in a Google Hangout about their concerns and experiences with government data mining children without parental consent.
About 250 delegates agreed (while only 3 did not). The vote resolves to refuse federal education money and its mandates.
Thanks to the hundreds of delegates who voted for it today and thanks to the courageous Utah legislators who aim to build this resolution into law, as has been reported by Utahns Against Common Core.
The resolution, which Utah citizens may sign here, points out that the federal taxes Utah receives for education are only about 7% of what Utah spends on education. Why should Utah pay 93% of its own bill, and have no say (in what is our constitutional right and duty, to direct education locally) while the federal government pays only 7% but mandates 100% of Utah’s education decisions?
Furthermore, the bill notes, and documents: Utah clearly has enough money to pay our own educational bills and can easily become free of the federal money and its obligations. The resolution also points out that the time to act is now, because the brand new federal law ESSA does harm to family and private school autonomy.
There’s no reason to continue to be strangled by the increasing federal grasp over our children and countless reasons to be free.
Here’s the resolution, which, very likely, may evolve quickly into a Utah bill and into Utah law:
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Resolution to Remove Utah From Federal Education Control
WHEREAS, After decades of growing federal intrusion into our state education system, President Obama has signed into law The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) which gives the federal government even more sweeping power over state education (1), regulates education in private schools (2) and implements policies and programs reaching into the home (3); and,
WHEREAS our platform states that “Parents have the right to choose whether a child is educated in private, public or home schools and government should not infringe on that right… We favor local accountability and control in all aspects of the education system.”; and,
WHEREAS federal taxpayers provide only 7.4% of our total education budget (4), but by accepting that 7.4% we give the federal government 100% control over the education of our children; and,
WHEREAS, the Governor has announced that Utah now has new ongoing revenue, due to state growth of $380 million (5), more than enough to replace federal funds and regain control over the education of our children; and,
WHEREAS, the only way to avoid the overbearing requirements of ESSA is to opt out of federal funds. (6)
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT the Utah County Republican Party declares that we cannot continue to stand by while our educational freedoms are usurped, and this increasing federal intrusion must end now; and,
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT Utah should use its ongoing budget surplus to replace all federal taxpayer money in education, freeing Utah from federal intrusion; and,
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT Utah County GOP leadership shall provide information on this issue to public officials and voters, as may be appropriate through email, website, and physical distribution, and request a legislative audit of federal programs put into place through the 2009 Stimulus Package including data systems (7), alignment to federal regulations, statues, and grants so that Utah schools can truly be freed from federal intrusion; and,
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT the Utah County Republican Party commends Representatives Chaffetz, Bishop, Stewart, and Love, and Senator Lee, who voted against this invasive law, and we call upon all state legislators and officers to act now to stand for our state’s rights in education.
Oak Norton, Highland 7, Precinct Chair
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Footnotes
(1) Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) (https://www.congress.gov/114/bills/s1177/BILLS-114s1177enr.pdf):
The secretary maintains control over state education plans (P4b, pg. 306)
The secretary shall ‘‘(vi) have the authority to disapprove a State plan.” (P4b, pg.21)
(2) ‘‘(B) OMBUDSMAN.—To help ensure such equity for such private school children, teachers, and other educational personnel, the State educational agency involved shall designate an ombudsman to monitor and enforce the requirements of this part.’’ (pg. 71) https://www.congress.gov/114/bills/s1177/BILLS-114s1177enr.pdf
(3) Dept. of HHS/USDOEd Draft Policy Implementation Statement on Family Engagement: https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/ecd/draft_hhs_ed_family_engagement.pdf
“Implement[s] a vision for family engagement that begins prenatally and continues across settings and throughout a child’s developmental and educational experiences” (Page 5)
See “parenting interventions” (IBID pg. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16)
ESSA allows states to use funds to “support programs that reach parents and family members at home [and] in the community.” (https://www.congress.gov/114/bills/s1177/BILLS-114s1177enr.pdf, Pg. 69)
States shall “become active participants in the development, implementation, and review of school-parent compacts, family engagement in education policies, and school planning and improvement;” (IBID, pg. 218)
Provides grants to turn elementary and secondary schools into “Full-Service Community Schools” with “Pipeline Services” that provide “a continuum of coordinated supports, services, and opportunities for children from birth through… career attainment”, including family health services. (IBID pg. 222, 223, 229)
(4) http://www.schools.utah.gov/data/Fingertip-Facts/2015.aspx
2013-14 is an inaccurate estimate. USOE’s document has a typo on gross revenue showing $1.3B more than expenses. This estimated revenue figure is in line with expenses which are assumed to be accurate as they are in line with the trend. We have 5 straight years of declining federal funds but no declining federal requirements. Unfunded mandates rule our state education system.
I know there are five hundred things you could be doing. But this will take awhile.
SETRA, or “Strengthening Education Through Research Act,” a federal bill that passed the U.S. Senate on December 17th has not yet passed the House of Representatives, and must not.
(Call 202-224-3121 to speak to your representative in Congress.)
There is a lot to explain about SETRA, and I won’t even hit it all tonight.
SETRA was written “to strengthen the federal education research system”. That’s sentence number one. It begs this question: where does the U.S. Constitution permit federal education or federal education research?
Is this communist China, where nationalized education is normal? Did I dream that the Constitution gives zero power to the federal government to dictate even a crumb about education?
Why are we even considering a bill that starts out with that sentence? Furthermore, when did a single parent in this entire country give informed consent for a single child to be used as an unpaid, unwitting guinea pig for federal research? How dare the government research the thoughts and beliefs of my child and yours, using our tax dollars, without our consent?
In section 132 of SETRA, the government aims to collect, from your child and mine, “research on social and emotional learning”. –How so? Sensitive surveys are forbidden by PPRA, right?
Education Liberty Watch notes that PPRA (a federal law that is supposed to prohibit collection of psychological, sexual, or religious mindsets) only applies to student surveys– not to curriculum! It’s a loophole. Check out Cornell law school’s information on PPRA.
So what SETRA aims to do, in gathering sensitive “social and emotional” data, it can do, because of that loophold. SETRA’s aims are not prohibited. The data miners simply have to hide their psychological stalking inside the curriculum. And this is easier and more common than most of us realize.
Psychological or belief data can be mined without openly labeling the effort a psychological, religious, or emotional survey– and even without the knowledge of teachers or school administrators. For example:
Education Liberty Watch points out that an English Language Arts curriculum that is being used in over 40 Florida school districts and several California districts, a curriculum published by the College Board, called SpringBoard, contains many psychosocial, or belief-based, questions such as this:
Activity 4.9 Justice and Moral Reasoning
I should pay all my taxes because-
I could go to jail if I do not
people will think of me as a good citizen
my taxes along with those of others will help to pay for services used by all
Students are then made to rate themselves, based on having mostly “a” or “b” or “c” responses, as “pre-conventional,” “conventional” or “post-conventional” based on psychological, moral levels and stages of reasoning. This is a psychological test, yet parents are not given notice nor asked for their consent.
It’s not a bad idea to teach math students to persevere. It is immoral, though, to pretend that a math test is testing only math, when it is also testing the psychological attribute of perseverance or another nonacademic attribute or belief– without the informed consent of a parent.
And if politicians and corporate giants get their way, it won’t be possible for a student or parent to avoid this type of psychological data mining by opting out of the high stakes tests, because stealth testing is here to take high-stakes testing’s place.
Hiding the test from the student (and from the teacher and from the parent) by embedding it in the curriculum does solve many of the problems of high-pressure testing. But it makes the problem of nonconsensual data mining worse. And it would make opting out of the governmental inventorying of human beings impossible. Thanks to “integration of testing into an aligned curriculum, the aims of SERTA can still mine your student’s data– with or without high-stakes testing.
Some people still don’t believe that federal and state governments really aim to gather data about the mind, heart and soul of each child. In the bureaucrats’ own words, read it.
The Department of Education wrote that 21st century “competencies” would include “noncognitive” (nonacademic) factors. Read that report, entitled “Promoting Grit, Tenacity and Perserverance,” if you can find it; recently, the White House has removed its prior link to the published report.
Similar language about schools needing to gather belief-based, or social/emotional data, is found in countless other places.
See, for example, Utah’s own 2009 federal SLDS (State Longitudinal Database System) grant application language, which promised the state would gather noncognitive student data from Utah’s children, about “resiliency” and “social comfort and integration” via “psychometric census.” (Utah did “win” that federal grant, twice, and so we do have the federally designed SLDS system, as does every single United State.)
Ask your congressman: where is the language in SERTA that would prohibit state SLDS systems from feeding personally identifiable information to the federal agencies?
Where is the language in SERTA that would penalize governmental and private entities who shared or sold student information?
Where is the prohibition on sharing personal student information with international entities, such as PISA, TIMSS, or SIF?
Where are the enforcement remedies when student information is mishandled?
Where is any actual prohibition on a national database, while SERTA encourages states to share and feed out data, ironically calling it “voluntary” sharing –though neither students nor parents ever gave consent to gather or use SLDS-nested information?
There’s more that really needs to be pointed out about SERTA.
Nonduplication?
The thrifty seeming concept of nonduplication, or not overlapping and wasting energy, is used falsely, repeatedly, in SERTA, to justify the data grab.
The idea that database meshing is needful “in order to reduce burden and cost” (page 4) is supposedly justified so that the federal Secretary of Education shall “use information and data that are available from existing federal, state and local sources”. On page 12, it extends the database meshing to private entities, too: “such research and activities carried out by public and private entities to avoid duplicative or overlapping efforts”. Where are the rights of the people being data-mined?
Will state, local, and private sources just idiotically hand this student data over to the federal agencies, buying the absurd notion that privacy rights pale in comparison to the opportunity of unburdening the federal workday or bank account?
Not Just Children’s Data; Adults’ Data, Too?
It is discouraging to note that SERTA strikes the “children” from the previous bill to replace it with the word “students,” repeatedly (page 77, page 117). This replacement may broaden the reach of the data mining capability of the federal system to include not only children in public schools, but anyone in any environment that can be called a learning environment– I’m guessing: workplaces, libraries, universities, public housing facilities, rehabilitation facilities, hospital learning centers, refugee camps? Adults are repeatedly mentioned in SERTA, in addition to being included in the more generic term “students.” And SERTA says that “adult education” and “adult education and literacy activities” are used as they are defined in section 203 of the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act, which is part of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998. The federal link to that bill is currently broken, so I have not read that definition yet. But I think it’s safe to say that SERTA is not just about “improving research” for kids. It feels as if it’s all about Big Brothering every single citizen.
Cementing the SLDS (de facto federal) Database Systems?
In fact, on page 109, SERTA mandates that a year after it passes, and every three years thereafter, the federal Secretary of Education will prepare a report about each state’s “progress” and “use of statewide longitudinal data systems”.
Fact: SLDS databases are, by federal mandate, designed with interoperability frameworks that mean they create one big, connect-able database of fifty matching state databases. Utah’s grant application reveals, “the current School Interoperability Framework (SIF) v2 standard fulfills the needs of LEA to LEA, LEA to postsecondary, LEA to USOE, and USOE to EDFacts data exchanges.” In plain talk, that means that schools, universities, the state office of education, and the federal EDFacts data exchange use the same interoperabilities so they can share any data that their policies will allow them to share. These groups will say that “it’s just grouped data, not personally identifiable, that is shared.” But the personally identifiable data is housed and CAN be shared, if and when policy allows. Proper protections are not in place. Even federal FERPA privacy laws, upon which SERTA relies, and which SERTA mentions –was shredded by the Dept. of Education in the same year or two that it pushed Common Core tests, common SLDS systems, and Common Core Standards, on all the states. FERPA no longer requires parental consent for the sharing of personal student data. That’s a “best practice,” now, and not a requirement, and government failing to get any consent carries no punishment.
Yet SERTA relies on FERPA each time it (repeatedly) says something like “adhering to federal privacy laws and protections” (for example, see page 111).
When SERTA says potentially reassuring things, such as the idea that “cooperative education statistics partnerships” are not to be confused with a national database system (page 44) or that “no student data shall be collected by the partnerships… nor shall such partnerships establish a national student data system,” I do roll my eyes.
National student data systems are ready to plug in, like fifty separate puzzle pieces in a fifty piece puzzle; there are fifty SLDS systems– one per state. So the federal plan has already been established with state SLDS databases. The hole is dug; the concrete is poured. Now, with SETRA, they are asking for a permit to build. Congress can say no!
They must. Privacy matters. It is a basic freedom.
Do not believe the people who say that it does not matter, or that it’s already gone– because of Facebook or NSA or Social Security numbers being used as national I.D.s. It’s not yet true. Privacy is still far from “all gone,” and it is worth fighting for!
The autonomy of your child, free from Big Brother in his or her future, is worth fighting for.
Remember the Declaration of Independence. It says that governments derive their just powers from the CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED.
Without consent, government actions are unjust. The SLDS systems are nonconsensual systems.
They came via federal bribe, aka federal grant when unelected, unthinking, nonrepresentative bureaucrats in each state office of education applied for the federal money in exchange for the federally designed and nationally interoperable SLDS systems; no citizen nor representative voted.
These monstrous State Longitudinal Database Systems use schools and other entities to create even huge “data alliances;” this is the basis for SERTA’s potentially frightening, increased powers. Any language in SERTA implying that there is no plan for any national database is deception.
Don’t give the feds the authority to build that glary-eyed, Big Brother skyscraper on top of us, just because they already dug a foundation and poured concrete under us while we weren’t all paying attention.
“Education reformists” (corporate, federal, and state) use this pattern repeatedly. This is how they get fat with power and money at the expense of freedom and good policy.
They:
1) Write a bill (this time, SETRA) that does not do the same thing that its talking points claim it will do, so that when busy congressmen rely on its talking points, and not on the text itself, they’ll vote for it.
2) They make sure to keep it so quiet that nobody talks about it: not the mainstream media, not the Department of Education.
(Remember last month, when Secretary Duncan said, “We were intentionally quiet on the bill – they asked us specifically not to praise it – and to let it get through. And so we went into radio silence and then talked about it after the fact. . . . Our goal was to get this bill passed – intentionally silent…”)
“So from the surface, it will still look like the conference process is happening the way it’s supposed to. But beneath the surface we know that all of this has already been pre-arranged, pre-cooked, pre-determined… by a select few members of Congress, working behind closed doors, free from scrutiny. And we know that this vote was scheduled on extremely short notice, so that it would be difficult – if not impossible – for the rest of us to influence the substance of the conference”.
We can stop them. Ask your Representative to Stop SETRA. Ask him or her to call for a recorded vote on SETRA. Call 202-224-3121. Call repeatedly.
SETRA has passed the US Senate already.
In an article at Pulse2016, Karen Effrem, MD, explained that SETRA appears to prohibit a national database on children, but lacking any enforcement mechanism, will do the opposite. In fact, she points out:
“SETRA seeks to expand federal psychological profiling of our children. Section 132 of the bill (page 28, line 16-21) inserts the following: ‘and which may include research on social and emotional learning, and the acquisition of competencies and skills…’ ”
Reading Dr. Effrem’s article and sharing it with members of the House of Representatives feels especially imperative considering the recent policy draft, a joint action by the Department of Education with the Department of Health and Human Services, that says that it will:
Implement a vision for family engagement that begins PRENATALLY and continues across settings and throughout a child’s developmental and educational experiences.
Develop and integrate family engagement indicators into existing data systems
Local schools and programs should track progress on family engagement goals, as detailed in family engagement plans.
Want family autonomy to continue? Stop SETRA. Without the authority to data mine children and families, they cannot expand the SLDS systems. SERTA will increase the stalking already taking place on each public school attending child and family. SETRA is the data mining assistant of ESSA.
On Facebook today, a friend said that fighting SETRA didn’t matter; that data mining was already a done deal, so why fight it?
It’s true that each state already has a federally designed, federally funded, federally interoperable database called a State Longitudinal Database System, but thus far, the SLDS are, at least theoretically, limited to collecting academic data. The SETRA bill spells out that the government will authorize psychological, belief based data (aka social, emotional data). We don’t want this to be national law.
About The Child, a grassroots coalition of parents, educators, doctors, psychologists, pastors, authors, and more, has announced an educational conference to be held January 29-31 in Houston, Texas.
The conference will feature speakers from across the country, including Paul Reynolds, Stephanie Bell, Dr. Karen Effrem, Dr. Peg Luksik, Dr. Duke Pesta, Dr. Sherry Furlow, John Eidsmoe, Linda Murphy, Luca Bocci, Alice Linahan, Troy Towns, Angelique Clark, Joan Landes, Christel Swasey, Jason Hoyt, and Neil Mammen. Read speaker bios here.
I’m so happy to be going to Houston.
I can’t wait to hear from so many remarkable individuals, and to have the opportunity to speak about the importance of waking up to defend our families, our Constitutional rights, and our children’s opportunities to have a happy, classical education– all things which current “education reforms” have harmed or seek to harm.
The conference will be live streamed on January 29-30, 2016. The registration link for virtual or actual conference attendance is here.
A press conference hosted by U.S. Parents Involved in Education (USPIE) will take place at the #AboutTheChild Conference, where a panel from USPIE will roll out its campaign to #StopFedEd.
A Twitter rally is scheduled to promote the issues that the conference will address.
Join the Twitter rally tonight: Sunday, January 10– in support of Houston’s upcoming #AboutTheChild Conference and everything that it’s about.
While Utah Senator Mike Lee warned that the ESSA/ESEA bill is dangerously bad (both in policy and in its corrupt passing process) the Deseret News, Lee’s home newspaper, published a loudly pro-ESSA editorial.
While Reps Mia Love, Jason Chaffetz, Rob Bishop and Chris Stewart– all four of Utah’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives– rightly voted “no” on the bill just a few days ago, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, who still has to vote, is aggressively pushing pro-ESSA talking points on his twitter feed.
Obama’s got his Secretary of Education pushing ESSA. In agreement with Obama and Duncan is Utah’s Governor Herbert, and the countless ed-alignment moneymakers, and so is the Utah PTA. Check out their shared talking points; then look at the actual bill. Disconnected. Are they deliberately lying or do they just not read bills, preferring talking points? Either way, they are promoting the wrong thing.
#2 WHO HAS READ IT AND WARNS THAT IT IS BAD? To name a few that come to mind:
Guinta
Harper
Harris
Hice, Jody B.
Holding
Huelskamp
Johnson, Sam
Jones
Jordan
Kelly (MS)
King (IA)
Labrador
Lamborn
Loudermilk
Love
Lummis
Marchant
Massie
Meadows
Miller (FL)
Mooney (WV)
Mulvaney
Palazzo
Palmer
Perry
Poe (TX)
Ratcliffe
Rogers (AL)
Rohrabacher
Rothfus
Salmon
Sanford
Schweikert
Smith (MO)
Smith (NE)
Stewart
Stutzman
Walker
Weber (TX)
Wenstrup
Yoder
Yoho
Two hundred grassroots organizations – led by the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition; each signed a letter to the Senate, asking them to wait and study the bill before passing it under the rule-smashing Obama Administration.
It is not better; it is worse than No Child Left Behind.
Not only is it over 1000 pages long; it was hidden from public view until two days before the House of Representatives voted on it.
If it’s so good, why hide it?
(The pretenses of Governor Herbert, Senator Hatch, Secretary Duncan, President Obama, Bill Gates, the National PTA and the Chamber of Commerce, about the supposed goodness of education reforms as cemented by this ESSA, are on very thin ice. So are any senators who will vote yes.)
#4 WHEN’S THE VOTE?
This is voting eve.
The US Senate is going to vote on it tomorrow. Look for the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) — a rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) also known as No Child Left Behind, aka the Frankenstein ugly bill.
May truth somehow prevail in the U.S. Senate tomorrow.
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If you haven’t yet, please call senators at 202-224-3121 (switchboard) or look for their numbers here.
Thank you to all who have been reading. I still have a lot of compiling to do and your feedback is still coming in. I’ve promised to publish and share it when it is done, but this timeline for the House vote is just not possible even with all of our combined sacrifices. We have more time before the Senate vote and I will keep working on it. Here is what I summed up in a rushed letter to our representatives today:
Dear Representative:
Over the past day and a half, 50 local parents and a number of our friends from other state have pulled themselves away from all our daily responsibilities to divide up and read every page of this monstrosity of a bill, ESSA, that will be voted on today. There isn’t a person alive who can read and fairly understand that much legal language with all the cross-references in such a short period of time and we are very upset about it. This represents the worst of the corruption we’ve come to expect from Congress and are especially disappointed that it is coming at the hands of a conservative leadership and a newly appointed Speaker of the House who spoke so eloquently against this very thing just weeks ago. This is not what self-government looks like.
As a justification for the outrageous timeline, I’ve been reminded that the language in this bill has been available for months in the form of the House and Senate versions that went into the conference, except that it is missing some of the very amendments that were used as justification of your vote back then. I think this is like saying that I saw the recipe book, so I should be happy to eat whatever ends up or doesn’t end up on my plate in some unrecognizable blob.
A yes vote also can’t be justified with arguments about the urgency to incrementally improve the status quo. No Child Left Behind has sat, technically expired since 2007. Why the rush now, less than a year before we have a chance to elect a more conservative President? I know it is because there are many things in this bill that don’t match up with the marketing being used to sell it, and that it cannot stand up to scrutiny.
I have been compiling the notes and concerns of all the parents who have been reading sections of the bill, and the feedback is still coming in. In spite of all this effort, we are out of time, so allow me to summarize just a few of the concerns here.
First, we are being told that this bill gives the Secretary of Education “unprecedented” restrictions and yet every version of ESEA has contained the restriction against the very things specified in this version. Here’s just one example:
ESEA 1965
“Nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize an officer or employee of the Federal Government to mandate, direct, or control a State, local educational agency, or school’s curriculum, program of instruction, or allocation of State and local resources, or mandate a State or any subdivision thereof to spend any funds or incur any costs not paid for under this Act.”
Am I to believe that just because this specifically uses the title of Secretary, instead of “officer or employee of the Federal Government” that this is unprecedented? The truth is, the restrictions have always been there, but have not been enforced. This bill repeats a few of these same kinds of historically unenforced restrictions using new language, but then goes on with pages and pages of allowing the Secretary great discretion to use funding to approve or deny State programs to his satisfaction. The power of the purse, is just that, powerful. That is why it was vested in Congress and not in the Executive branch.
Most of the parents who’ve worked together this week met each other in our activism to oppose Common Core. We’ve been told that this bill pushes back against Common Core. But that claim is also misleading. Starting on page 7, line 18 of the current version for example, we see the termination of “certain” waivers. This section is very specific and blocks or phases out very specific programs for which all the damage has already been done. But, it’s worse than that. Who needs grant competitions to motivate reform when you can put the same reforms you were trying to incentivize into the law itself?
For example, one of the reasons parents oppose Common Core and its linked reforms is because it accelerates the transformation of public education into a workforce planning pipeline complete with government managed data profiles. This bill codifies that, and it extends this pipeline down to toddlers in preschool.
Historically, the purpose of American education was to nurture the development of self-governing citizens, with work being incidental to that development. Our Founding Fathers and other great thinkers were who they were because they studied the great works, not work itself. This nation has uniquely thrived according to the principle that a free market with good people works better than attempts at planned markets with efficiently trained workers. The latter is a socialist concept.
This bill includes one of the latest profiteering scams for well-connected cronies as well, called a social impact bond, in the Pay for Success Initiative on page 797. I did a lot of research on this a few years ago when they were trying to get a new state funded preschool program started in Utah using this. The legislators liked it because of the promise that they would only pay for results, but the specific terms were defined privately, outside the legislation (a benefit to public private partnerships to those who profit from them) as impossible to fail and then be paid the cost of the program, plus interest. It misdiagnosed a problem (equivocation of socioeconomic status with special ed services) created a new government entitlement to supposedly fix it, expanded the collection of data and subjected tiny kids to more assessments in order to justify “results.” It was basically a way to grease the passage of and divert funding to a program that may not exist in the first place if it had to be justified and paid for up front. Buy now, pay later. Goldman seems to have discovered that legislatively guaranteed percentage returns on the backs of the taxpayer are more reliable than the stock market. http://www.nytimes.com/…/d…/did-goldman-make-the-grade.html…
We’ve been told that this bill returns authority to the states over teacher accountability, but it requires that States set accountability with certain characteristics, like teacher pay tied to assessments. This is not a true shift of control but a shift of enforcement and masks the Federal government’s continuing and expanding role. I’ve read the talking points being handed out to the teachers from their unions and believe they are, once again, being misled on how this will affect their careers.
The truth is as parents we want to support our children’s teachers. We hated the Common Core assessments (I was one of the 15 parents on the Utah parent panel that got to see the actual assessment items) and we worked to get a new law passed in Utah to protect the teachers and schools from the State level impact when we exercised our parental right to refuse these poorly designed tests. We could not affect the federal requirements in the same way and we do want to see that addressed. This bill, however fails as an effective remedy. It does mention on page 76 that these state laws on opting out will be honored, but the bill still requires a 95% participation rate with consequences for Title 1 funding. This puts the teachers in an impossible position between honoring the parent’s stewardship and the pressure to test the kids for accountability and funding purposes. In other words, the bill says that USED honors parents’ and states’ rights, then enables them to hold the teacher and school funding hostage to get the conformity they need.
We are concerned about the school based health centers and services, especially the vague language that provides funding for and grants access to our children in school to “community health centers” and “non-profit health care agencies.” We’re concerned about language encouraging all kinds of assessments that go beyond academic measures. The vague language seems to grant access to groups like Planned Parenthood or mental health assessments and interventions without parental consent or the same ethical restrictions enforced for private medical practice: http://insider.foxnews.com/…/11-year-old-girls-can-get-iuds… and http://truthinamericaneducation.com/…/a-mental-health-prof…/
We are concerned about all the data being collected by government about our kids, data collection practices that are expanded and encouraged in this bill. It’s not very reassuring to read about how student privacy will be protected under a section heading “Sense of Congress” (page 859), which I learned after looking it up, means it’s like a nonbinding resolution or suggestion. In light of the recent information security review of the Department of Education, in which Representative Chaffetz participated, it is knowingly irresponsible in this environment to fund, encourage, or expand student data collection practices: https://whatiscommoncore.wordpress.com/…/utah-rep-jason-ch…/
I think Representative Chaffetz can understand from his own experience why parents might not be thrilled with the idea of state or federal government amassing life-long data profiles of all the successes and failures, aptitudes and weaknesses of the academic, health, socioeconomic and subjective behavioral assessments of our children. http://www.washingtontimes.com/…/jason-chaffetzs-file-lea…/…
We can’t see these profiles or verify their accuracy. We can’t limit their use or the information being shared with a seemingly endless list of stakeholders, and we can’t opt out. When did this become a government of the data, by the data and for the data?
There’s so much more I would like to say if I had the time. (Can you imagine how fun it is to miss sleep and appointments to try to make sense of something that will impact your child’s life so seriously and while digging through hundreds of pages come across stuff like a posthumous pardon of a wronged boxer (page 914)? What a joke! I literally laughed at that through tears of frustration.
The bottom line is this is not an improvement over the last terrible version of the bill. One mom summed it like this, “incredible federal overreach; hands-on, in the classroom micromanagement; hazy definitions of terms; blatantly contradictory policies; and lots of ambiguities. It is the perfect recipe for a complete removal of local (teacher/parent) control.”
To read and expose the inevitable underbelly of the latest 1061-page fed-ed bill in the time between yesterday, when the bill slimed its way out of the dark, until tomorrow, when the bill is set up for its Congressional vote (without debate, without reading) is, of course, an impossible task. We have done impossible tasks before, but I have never read 1,061 pages and analyzed it, overnight.
I’m going to post as much as I have energy for tonight. In the morning, I’ll add what my smarty pants reader friends have found, as well. So come back and scroll down. 🙂 If you are reading the bill, please make comments and point out page numbers below. (FYI I am comparing this bill to its predecessors and you can do the same if you like.)
Only Senator Lee has stood up to this procedural injustice. Only he is a clear “NO” vote, that I know of. Other Utahns: Senator Hatch, Representative Chaffetz and Representative Love, for example, are reading the bill today before they commit to a yes or a no vote this week, say their staffers.
This lack of commitment is something that I cannot understand.
Why wouldn’t Congressmen’s default vote be a “no,” based on the fact that the process has veered far from honest and proper procedural protocol? Why not fight for the right to take a reasonable approach to actually study and debate the bill openly?
Congress is on the verge of passing this bill dishonorably while the only ones very excited about the bill (besides the Secretary of Education) are the bling-bling bipartisan lobbyists working for gold-rushing tech companies wishing to drain tax dollars into their pockets. These tech companies and ed sales corporations advise or partner up with the feds, saying smooth sounding stuff that poses as education — but education, the word itself, has been hijacked.
Corporate-partnered fed ed, served by this bill, is a top-down, one-sized, freedom-constricting, teacher-controlling, student data-stalking Frankenstein. I don’t care if it’s left or right wing spawned. It is wrong.
It is not education.
Any Representative or Senator who votes to pass this nation-binding law in such blind circumstances better prepare. There will be political careers lost– that will trace their demise back to this moment. This is the moment, Congress.
Hold Congress accountable. Call and tweet. Call 202-224-3121 to tell Congress: vote no. We, the people, are watching this vote.
I’ll post the page number or section, the direct quote from the bill, and why it’s a concern. (There is no way this will be thoroughly done in so little time. Not a chance. But it will give you the gist of the bill. And you will understand why pushers have gotten into the habit of putting out lying talking points –“reduce the federal footprint”; “restore power to states”– to get the darn bills passed.)
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“EVERY STUDENT SUCCEEDS ACT OF 2015” aka ESEA link here)
My friend Karen Bracken, a patriot warrior mom, wrote, “Even the title concerns me. How do you ensure that Every Student Will Succeed? The only way you can do that is by dumbing-down education to the point in which even a cat could graduate.” Does that make you laugh or cry?
If you read the title and the table of contents, you will see the micromanagement right away. But let’s start with section 1003. It deals with money and how states will be micromanaged if they want to see any of it. The bill calls it “School Improvement.” I’ve renamed it “How States Can Beg for A Piece of Their Own Tax Dollars Back“.
Here, the feds dictate (page 24) what percentage of funds the state will use and for what purpose. (7 percent for this, not less than 95 percent for that, 3 percent for this… on and on through page 32).
The feds dictate that the states then must turn around and inflict fed-like micromanagement on localities; they must be “monitoring and evaluating the use of funds by local education agencies” (page 26) and must give out monies to localities only if they “demonstrate the strongest commitment to using funds…[as feds see fit] and states must “align other Federal, State and local resources“.
(There’s that word “align” that we have read ten billion times in the past four years as we read official documents implementing Common Core and Common Data Standards. The word pops up again on page 33: “coursework that is aligned with the challenging State academic standards“. They’ve now dropped references to Common Core State Standards as well as any reference to College and Career Ready Standards. But the word “aligned” they have not dropped. It’s in the document 72 times, and, notably, the word “standards” is in the document 269 times and “challenging state academic standards” is repeated 24 times; just not “Common Core” labeled anymore. To me, “align” in ed reform now means to superglue to a global sameness; it means forget about scholastic creativity or imagination; it means forget about originality or home-grown ideas and powers. It means that you are not represented; you are assimilated. But I am off on a tangent.)
Pages 34 and 35 repeat the mantra that funds must be prioritized to low-achievers. (First of all, how dare you tell a state how to prioritize its funds? Secondly, how are the feds so sure that mid and high achievers won’t mind losing funding for their misdeed of having achieved? Are mid or high achievers’ needs not all that important, anyway?) Harrison Bergeron comes to mind; this is the Handicapper General at work.
Page 36 promises “a sufficient number of options to provide a meaningful choice for parents” which is a lie, of course; think about it. Federal laws and conditional monies mean using federally approved standards and tests and CURRICULUM in every school receiving federal funds. This is far from meaningful and it represents an extremely narrowed and controlled set of choices. Meaningful does not happen in an atmosphere of standardized everything, just as wonderous meals do not bloom in the kitchens of McDonald’s.
Page 37 dictates that American tax dollars may only “provide instruction and content that is secular“. This is old news. But it is not old news that federal funds are increasingly being offered to private schools. Does this mean that the feds are softening and will share taxpayers’ dollars with those who choose to attend private religious schools? No. It means that private schools are being coerced to secularize their core curricula and services so that they may receive federal money.
Page 38 is Section 1111: STATE PLANS.
We’ll rename this one “Mother May I?” (Thanks, Wendy Hart.)
States say: “Mother, May I adopt these standards?” Secretary of Education or his appointees say “no”. Rinse and repeat until states eventually ask to adopt what the Secretary has already settled upon. Here’s how it works:
Page 38: “…State educational agency shall file will the Secretary a plan” which must meet, among other things, “Secretarial Approval” (page 39 line 23) and must be approved by a review team appointed by the federal Secretary of Education. (page 39-40) That team (page 42) will have the authority to disapprove a state plan. The state may revise its plan, appeal for a hearing (page 43) but ultimately, the process will “promote effective implementation of the challenging State academic standards [aka Common Core]” (page 43).
If ANYONE tries to tell you that this bill gives power to the States, point to these pages. With such huge veto-wielding power, and review team appointing power, the Secretary becomes king over anything any state wants to do. This is not good. You can stop here. That’s enough ammo. VOTE NO.
I have to point out some sickening hypocrisy on page 44. The review team must provide “objective feedback to the States” with “respect for State and local judgments with the goal of supporting State and local-led innovation“. If your goal is to support State innovation, why not return to the Constitution which gives exactly ZERO authority to the feds in anything relating to education, tests, standards, or teachers!?
More hypocrisy on the same page: “Neither the Secretary nor the political appointees of the Department may attempt to participate in or influence the peer review process”.
On page 45: “If a state makes significant changes to its plan at any time, such as the adoption of new challenging State academic standards or new academic assessments or changes to its accountability system… such information shall be submitted to the Secretary…”
Same page: “If a State fails to meet any of the requirements of this section, the Secretary may withhold funds…” MICROMANAGEMENT HEAVEN.
A bit of a toothless joke on page 47: “The State, in the plan it files… shall provide an assurance that public comments were taken into account”.
Page 47 also gives us this sobering mouthful: “Each state, in the plan it files… shall provide an assurance that the State has adopted challenging academic content standards and aligned academic achievement standards (referred to in this Act as ‘challenging State academic standards’), which achievement standards shall include not less than 3 levels of achievement…” If you have studied how children are assessed, tracked and predestined to relegated top, middle, or bottom schools and careers in nations shackled by communism and socialism, this will make you very unhappy.
Page 48 says the state MUST align its standards to colleges and to tech-ed schools.
Page 49 says that only a small percentage of special education students– those with “the most significant cognitive disabilities” may be excused, and may use alternate standards, and only then if those alternate standards are “aligned with the challenging State academic content standards”. On page 50 it adds that that severely disabled person must be “on track to pursue postsecondary education or employment” whether they want to or not. The feds are not kind to special education students. And they won’t let states determine these matters anymore. Sadly, we already knew all of this was coming.
Page 51 offers us another blistering contradiction: “The Secretary shall not have the authority to mandate, direct, control, coerce, or exercise any direction or supervision over any of the challenging State academic standards…” Tell me how that works with page 45. He can withhold funds and disapprove plans if the state files a plan that he doesn’t like for a slew of reasons that could include using curriculum, tests or standards that aren’t aligned to his vision of fed ed and he can mandate that the state has to use the exact same standards in every one of its schools (page 52 line 21) — but he in no way supervises the State’s standards?
Page 52 deals with “Academic Assessments”. Feds dictate to states that the tests shall be the same in every school in the state (line 23) and that they will be “administered to all public elementary and secondary school students in the State” (page 53). Does this end –or aim to end– the parental right to opt out of testing? (See page 76 below)
Page 53 is an admission. The bill says that the tests may not be used to “publically disclose personally identifiable information”. They can’t disclose it publicly, but they can sure store it indefinitely.
Subtly, page 53 forces Common Educational Data Standards because the feds dictate that state tests must be: “consistent with relevant, nationally recognized professional and technical testing standards”.
Next, the dictators tell states when and how much to test children:
page 54: in grades 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 (every year) for math and language arts
in grades 9, 10, 11, 12 (at least once)
in grades 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 for science (at least three times in those years)
On page 55, the dictators bring down the hammer: “the participation in such assessments of all students”. ALL.
On page 58 we see the racism and other -isms of the Department of Education: States are told that they must disaggregate test data by ethnicity, race, economics, disability, English proficiency, gender, and migrant status.
On page 59 we see the toxic term “universal design for learning“. Tests are to be developed using IMS Global education standards. This means not just state or national, but global sameness and tracking. Is that a good idea or a bad one? Is that something that we ought to have Congress think about for more than one day prior to a vote?
On page 61 the feds are dictating to states that no more than one percent of students may be considered so disabled that they may take alternate-standards-based tests. “The total number of students assessed… using alternate assessments does not exceed 1 percent of the total number of all students in the State”. Later, on page 65, the bill says that there is no cap; but that schools must submit information “justifying the need to exceed such a cap”. It also notes that the State shall provide “oversight” of any school required to submit justifying information. In other words, States must show that they are monitoring schools’ decision making.
How would the federal government ever know whether a state happened to have fewer, or a greater number of students who needed and deserved something other than what the highest achieving students can and should do? On what basis does it dictate one percent? What if my child is severely disabled and is forced to take the common tests and to be taught to common standards inappropriate for him or her, because of the high number of students with disabilties? How does that bless my child?
On page 62 they’re dictating “universal design for learning” again; this time, for severely disabled special education testing.
Page 66 is literally jaw-dropping to me. It says that if the state “provides evidence which is satisfactory to the Secretary that neither the State Educational Agency nor any other State government official… has sufficient authority under State law to adopt challenging State academic standards and academic assessments aligned with such standards [aka Common Core standards and tests] which will be applicable to all students enrolled in the State’s public elementary schools and secondary schools, then the State educational agency may meet the requirements…” by aligning unofficially anyway, by meeting “all of the criteria…and any regulations… that the Secretary may publish”. (page 67) If your state law doesn’t allow for one size fits all, then adopt and implement policies that ensure that you are aligned anyway, or lose funding. Talk about kicking Constitutional rights in the teeth. This is dictatorship.
On page 69, states are told to dictate to schools again. They must filter tests through the filter of “already been approved” (line 18) or they must “conduct a review of the assessment to determine if such assessment meets or exceeds the technical criteria” that has to be “established” (line 9) by the state. This sounds to me like more herding of everybody into IMS Global’s universal design for learning.
On page 73, it almost sounds good until you finish the sentence. It begins, “a State retains the right to develop and administer computer adaptive assessments, provided that….” and then we lose all the rights again, because they have to be aligned, aligned, aligned.
On page 76, it says that States can still decide whether or not to allow parents to opt out of testing but limits that concept to one paragraph: “nothing in this paragraph shall be construed as preempting State” law. So, in the rest of the over-1000-page bill, something might. This is not making me feel better.
How many dictatorial mandates, contradictions, hypocrises, manipulations and usurpations of local control have I related in this first tiny section of this bill?
Now, it is 1:30 a.m. I have to go to sleep.
There are 985 pages that I (and probably my congressional reps) are leaving unread.
–In a few short hours, Congress votes anyway. Watch it here.
In case there were not enough fires to put out for those who value academic freedom and local control of education, this week there’s another situation for Utah patriots to address that’s as important to me as the huge ESEA debacle.
This week, the Utah State School Board will vote to pass or not to pass (but by all indications, they will pass) a disaster akin to the day they adopted the Common Core and the day they accepted the student stalking database known as State Longitudinal Database System. It’s called an update to Utah’s Science Standards, but it’s truly the same as the Next Generation Science Standards (which are the common core for science because NGSS standards, like Common Core, are federally approved, federal-test aligned, and are controlled by a little elite group far away who will centrally manage its “truth” without representation from us.) And some “expert” Utahns think they’re dandy.
You are invited to the public meeting. Here are details: http://www.schools.utah.gov/board/Meetings/Agenda.aspx
Sadly, the Utah State Office of Education created a stifling, manipulative “public comment” survey which many called into question (and asked for an audit) — but that survey’s results have not even been given to the Board, according to one board member. That survey’s problems (and the attitude of USOE in general) included these:
Nowhere did the survey allow a member of the public to state opposition to the fact that these standards are IDENTICAL to the NGSS common, national standards.
Nowhere did the survey allow a member of the public to state opposition to the fact that these standards are exactly ALIGNED with federally-approved standardized testing. (This is probably why USOE pushed these narrowed standards so hard; federal cash follows federally-aligned standards for embedded CEDStags.)
Nowhere did the survey allow a member of the public to state opposition to narrowing the science survey to only 6th through 8th grades.
Nowhere did the survey allow a member of the public to state opposition to the politically slanted nature of a new, extreme interest in environmentalism, materialism, and “climate change”; the survey pretends that the science standards are only about science.
Nowhere did the survey allow space for true freedom of expression.
If you truly want input, you will have to contact the Board members one by one. (The USOE, too.)
Vince Newmeyer, who has been valiantly opposing Utah’s move toward NGSS, has composed a letter to the board, one that he hoped could serve as a template for others’ letters. Here it is.
A report that was presented at the conclusion of the 90 day public review of the April 2015 draft. Though a number of aspects were reported on by the USOE, one part of the public input was conspicuously missing. Emails from the public were not reported on by USOE.9The fact that emails were received was mentioned but no measure was given as to the overall public sentiment. Now at the conclusion of the October draft we see no report at all made available to the public that indicates what the results were on the 30 day public review of the October draft. Where is the USOE accountability to the public in this process?
It is argued by some, even some professors of our Utah campuses, that there is a consensus in science; that Global Warming10 is primarily man caused and Darwinian Evolution (the concept that you, a fish, and a turnip are all distant cousins, separated only by time and chance chemical reactions) are essentially scientific fact11. As such they claim that man caused Global Warming and Darwinian evolution should be taught in our public schools without considering scientific evidence that speaks against such notions.12 It is alleged that true scientist don’t doubt Darwin but such assertions are not supported by the data.13 Science, they say, is reserved for that which is demonstrated14 and not for teaching beliefs, yet we find that Utah university and public school science classrooms and are filled with the teachings of belief. These proposed standards invite much more, the turning of the science classroom into a mechanism to manipulate future societal thoughts and behaviors.15
None-the-less, here in Utah we like to think that our Utah science teachers and professors only teach actual science. Unfounded myths or beliefs about, for example, our origins, are reserved for places of faith. But even now, such is not the case.16 Also, studies have shown overwhelming support that “teachers and students should have the academic freedom to discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of evolution as a scientific theory.” According to polls, 80% of likely voters are in support of such education.17
Furthermore, even with the recent “clarifications” added to the October “SEEd” draft18, the clarity is no where near the clarity of the existing standards19. This is abundantly clear to those who have taken the time to read the proposed draft and then compare it to the current standards. Yes, modeling, etc. are useful learning tools and good teachers already to do that, and other teachers can be taught about such skills.
Another point: the slight20 positive adjustments that have been made to these standards from the Utah April 2015 word-for-word copy of the NGSS performance standards, will be essentially lost as school districts and teachers select textbooks, sample lesson plans, etc, from the array of “NGSS compatible materials” bringing our classroom education right in line with the materialistic perspective of the NGSS.
You sit on the Board of Education to represent us, the Parents of Utah, and not the elitist educational thinking that is politically popular today.
Again, please reject these standards.
Sincerely,
Concerned Citizens of Utah
Visit http://www.sciencefreedom.org/articles.html for access to resources and research that will help one understand the details and issues related to these proposed standards.
The survey conducted by the USOE on the October 2015 draft, did not give one an opportunity to express an overall thumbs down to reject the whole of the proposal. What they are saying is that you are going to get this NGSS based set of standards regardless of if you like it or not, although they will allow you to provide input for possible minor modifications.
Action Item: To show our discontent we should now make comments to Board members and the State Superintendent as input to these people should be available as the vote on the standards will not be held until the 5th of December (see below for contact info)
Contacts:
The entire Utah State Board of Education Members may be reached via
Brad C. Smith
State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Utah State Office of Education
250 East 500 South
P.O. Box 144200
Salt Lake City, UT 84114-4200
3This admission from USOE was found on page 7 of the front material given to board members to introduce the October draft of the science standards. This is also documented in the footnote on the introductory page of each of the grade levels on the October draft of the standards. See http://www.sciencefreedom.org
11Example: Professor Tolman in the Science Standards Parent Review Committee stated that “Evolution theory is just as solidly supported by data as gravitational theory or relativity theory.” email in authors position.
15Not only is the unquestioned faith of materialism taught in our public schools, but with these proposed standards, based on the NGSS, there is a wide adoption of politicized content in environmentalism in addition to the evolutionary doctrine. The best examples is NGSS itself. One instance is: http://nextgenscience.org/ms-ess3-5-earth-and-human-activity . Though some will claim that a radical environmentalist temperament has been removed, really it still exist. More to the point, though there has been some minor relief in this area, the FULL NGSS will again be enthroned in our science classrooms as district curriculum specialist and teachers adopt or incorporate sample lesson plans and support material that are NGSS compliant.
Over a thousand pages long, the ESEA bill is now online for all to see. [UPDATE: another new version was re-released on Tuesday, a day after the first version, a day before the vote.]
You can divide it up among your friends and read it. [Newest version here] Or you can call Congress (202-224-3121) and tell them that this is a familiar (Obamacare) recipe for disaster: A thousand pages. No debate. Vote in two days. Strike that; vote in one day.
Did you know that the average reader can read nontechnical information at about two minutes per page? (This bill is highly technical, legalistic, ed reform language) So it will take a genius reader at least 2118 minutes (over 35 hours) to read the bill.
That’s without stopping for a meal or a potty break, without having his or her mind wander from the sheer absurdity of the reading marathon– reading this breathtaking page-turner straight for about nine hours. That’s without stopping to define terms, research context, look at background on policies and initiatives and programs that a reader will come across.
Next, that genius Congressman or woman who will read the ESEA bill without pause, without proper sleep or food, in 48 hours, will have analyzed it thoroughly, from Constitutional, pedagogical, technological, logistical, financial and moral angles; not missing any key clause that could alter the meaning of a section; and then collect constituent (teacher) input, while finding time to discuss this with fellow members of Congress– which will at best happen at Burger King or on the phone, because there’s no time being put aside for a real debate on the actual floor of the House. Simultanesously, he or she is responsible for other issues and other bills.
Ridiculous is not a strong enough word.
And valiant is not a strong enough word for the Indiana moms who, on their own dime, have flown to Washington D.C. this week to plead for sanity from Congressmen in this ESEA reauthorization process. God bless them.
Something is rotten in the state of the Republican party when such disgraceful processes and policies are presented as good and right.
Call their bluff. Let them know that we are onto them.
Michelle Malkin’s #STOPESEA video is available on her public Facebook page; click here to view. It was posted 18 hours ago and already has over 120,000 views. I hope each viewer called D.C. (202-224-3121) or tweeted to Congress @repjohnkline @SpeakerRyan or will do so now.
Michelle Malkin said in the video that even though many have not heard of the hashtag #STOPESEA, it is one of the most important issues on the table in Washington D.C. today.
She called out the media for not covering “bread and butter” education issues like this one and praised “firebreathing moms and dads” from across the political spectrum who “have been ever vigilant on all of the issues involving federal encroachment into education”.
Minute 3:
She noted that “so much of this process is taking place behind closed doors out of view of the public with back door and back room negotiations and no sunlight and no input from the people who are most affected. That’s you and your kids and your grandkids.”
Minute 4:15
“You’ve got a vote coming up in just a couple of days on this massive piece of legislation which isn’t accessible to the public yet [wasn’t as of last night; link just added] that many of these politicians on Capitol Hill will, of course, never read, and will have two days for their staffs to digest before they cast votes on it. It is supposed to be released November 30 with the first vote on December 2nd….Same-o Same-o, business as usual in Washington, D.C., don’t you think?”
Minute 5:
“What good is it to elect new GOP leaders who promise transparency and pay lip service –the same way that Barack Obama did– and then sabotage that very process? So much for Constitutional Conservatives.”
“Not only does the process stink, but as many of these vigilant parents have been warning about, it’s the actual policy itself that stinks, too.”
” One of the few heroes out there who’s been warming about this Senator Mike Lee from Utah, who during a floor speech on November 18th warned that voting for this ESEA/NCLB reauthorization will be tantamount to doubling down or tripling down on all of the awful Common Core concepts that have taken so long for so many so-called Constitutional Conservatives on Capitol Hill to finally acknowledge. It’s the expansion of the federal role in education and the meddling in the classroom; the cementing of grant money to all sorts of crony educational special interests; along with that of course is the continued federalization of curriculum, the cementing again of contracts and special arrangements between the federal government and a lot of tech companies in the business of leveraging the power and the money that they’re making on these boondoggles on everything from textbooks to testing to technology. And that data mining aspect, of course, is something that people across the political and ideological spectrum should be objecting to and warning other parents about, and opposing.”
Minute 7:00
“Of course, it’s hard to digest all that’s in these hundreds and hundreds of still unseen pages in just a matter of days. It’s an absolute disgrace. So Monday morning, tomorrow morning, I hope those of you who have been active in any manner in opposing Common Core will see the connection here…call your congress people: 202-224-3121. ”
She emphasizes that (see minute 8:47) for those in every type of schooling system, those in “public schools, private schools, private schools, charter schools, home schools, Christian schools, secular schools— there is no safe space from fed ed. That’s one of the most important messages I want to get across tonight.”
She adds, “There are all of these strategists in Washington, D.C., who are always puzzling and pulling their chins on, ‘how do they reach out to nontraditional consitituencies” and you have to watch out because when they start talking out loud you have to watch out… that they are about to pander, pander, pander, pander, pander and move to the left on everything… how do we reach out to nontraditional constituencies? What it really means is throwing all their conservative principles and conservative constituencies under the bus in some desperate attempt to cow-tow to nontraditional constituencies. What they should be doing is looking at issues where they can find agreement with people across the political spectrum, without compromising their principles … and yes, that includes Common Core and this massive expansion of the testing racket that has usurped so much of the already limited time that there is in the classroom? Guess what? It’s not just us right-wing, fire-breathing Mammas and Pappas who care about that.”
Minute 25:
“…Issues include all of the money that is being poured into overtly political organizations that are using our kids as political and ideological and pedagogical guinea pigs. And I can’t tell you how many parents and educators who span the political spectrum who I’ve talked to over the years since I’ve started learning about this, who tell me, “I don’t agree with practically anything else you say, but you are right on this.”
“It’s finding those issues and actually listening to the people who are affected, that is going to have the most promise for Republicans who are looking to win over people who otherwise wouldn’t vote for them. Education is one of those issues.”
Former U.S. Department of Education Senior Policy Advisor Charlotte Iserbyt, patriot, whistleblower, and author of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, has written an open letter to Senator Mike Lee of Utah, which is posted with her permission below. She asks him to follow up on his speech about the mishandling of the ESEA bill, by working to postpone further votes until an investigation is made into the House and Senate’s failure to adhere to Congressional Procedural Laws in regards to this bill.
Please read and share this letter, especially with the most freedom-friendly members of the House of Representatives, whose twitter handles are here.
———————————————————————————
Dear Senator Lee,
You, Senator Lee, appear to be a friend of parents, teachers and plain grassroots Americans who have serious concerns related to the Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA/NCLB).
A significant number of parents and teachers wonder if the most effective way to stop the Reauthorization of ESEA might be for you to request a delay in the House vote Wednesday, December 2, due not to the controversial nature of the bill, but to the circumvention of procedural requirements in passage of all legislation by the Congress.
Concerned parents, teachers and others who have been following the history of this legislation believe there have been important and disturbing irregularities in the normal procedure related to enactment of legislation.
What has transpired since Janary when HR5 was first being considered is itself interesting.
Our first concern was when, in February, Rep. John Kline postponed the House Education Committee vote on HR5 (Student Success Act) knowing he didn’t have enough Republican votes for passage. His excuse was that an urgent Homeland Security vote took precedence.
We know that Sen. Alexander wanted to move very fast with his version of the Reauthorization of ESEA. All of us kept wondering when he would get his Senate bill in shape for a Committee vote. It took Alexander from January to July to feel comfortable in moving ahead, only after Rep. Kline managed to get a five vote majority on HR5 (Student Success Act) in July. Those of us who watched the House vote on C-SPAN can attest to Kline’s HR5 initially losing by a substantial number of votes. Suddenly, after the Congressional clock stopped ticking, the necessary five votes for passage came in. Shouldn’t that be investigated?
We parents and teachers, and other groups opposed to this legislation, ask you to speak out (formally) regarding the Senate and House Education Committee’s not following the procedural rules required for passage of legislation.
You certainly recognized that what happened in the Conference Committee’s handling of the last stages of passage of this bill was illegal, and we thank you so much for making a public statement in that regard.
“So, from the surface it will still look like the conference process is happening, is unfolding in the manner in which it is supposed to, but beneath the surface we know that all of this has already been prearranged, precooked, predetermined by a select few Members of Congress working behind closed doors free from scrutiny, and we know this vote was scheduled on extremely short notice so it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the rest of us to influence the substance of the conference report through motions to instruct.”
Could you, Senator Lee, request a postponement of any further votes by the House or Senate until an investigation is made into the House and Senate’s strict adherence to Congressional Procedural Laws in regard to the Reauthorization of ESEA?
Such a postponement would allow for not only Congress to have more time and input into the legislation, but for grassroots Americans (not the usual lobbyists who attend all hearings) to have more time to express our opposition to what we consider legislation which will end forever many of the freedoms enshrined in the United States Constitution.
Thank you very much for whatever consideration you can give to this Open Letter.
Use the hashtag #STOPESEA in every tweet. Even if you have zero followers, you can still tweet to anyone with an account. You just say “at” someone to tag them. For example, tag Speaker of the House Rep. Paul Ryan by writing @PRyan or @RepPaulRyanVP.
If you upload a video version of your #STOPESEA message to YouTube or a blog, it may be even better. I love each of the #STOPESEA videos that are circulating right now, but this one is especially effective because it is directed specifically at those who will vote in a few days on ESEA.
In the video, Utah mom Laureen Simper says to her D.C. representatives:
“UtahRepresentatives, should you be asked to vote for any legislation which you haven’t read? Your default setting should be no. As our representatives, representing us, these bills affect the lives of people, real people– real children, real families. You have no business voting for something that you haven’t had a chance to read. The purpose of law is not to abolish or to restrain freedom but to enlarge and preserve it… You have no business voting on something that you haven’t read, that hasn’t been open to public scrutiny, and you certainly have no business impacting our lives by voting yes to something that has been rushed through with an air and a shroud of secrecy….Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and instead of preparing dinner for the sixteen people I have coming, I am trying to figure out to post a video of myself, to take time to plead with my representatives… Please stop listening to the so-called experts and listen to the families who you represent.”
#STOPESEA VIDEOS – More have been added each day, and more will be added as they are made.
If you have made, or are willing to make, a #STOPESEA video, please post a link to it in the comments section below so I can repost it, or you can post it to the YouTube playlist linked here with the hashtag #STOPESEA.
Thank you to all those who are beginning to post their #STOPESEA videos. I know that there will be more.
My husband, a computer guy, used one of his programming metaphors on me when I was remarking to him that I wish I was pro, that I wish I had at least had the time to practice.
He said, “It’s better to make bridge just two lanes wide that actually goes all the way across than an eight lane bridge that only goes a quarter of the way.” In other words, I (and all of you) are right to post our message before we’ve polished the presentation.
You now have to wait on hold as often as not when you call the D.C. capital switchboard to leave a message for your Congressional reps (202-224-3121) and I’m hopeful, so I think that many of those calls are about #STOPESEA.
My rep Senator Chaffetz’ voice mailbox is full and cannot accept any more messages.
I’m not calling Sen. Lee (except to thank him) since I know where he stands on ESEA– with unclouded dedication to principles of liberty, proper representation and due process.
(I like to leave messages for other Congressmen that are out of my state, both the ones I like (Amash) and the ones I half mistrust (Ryan).)
And more people are making #STOPESEA videos. This means that not only is there a greater possibility that we might impact this vote by pushing this bill out of its secretive, speed-without-debate path (what one videomaker, Jenny Hatch, called adding “the sunshine, the absolute disinfectant of debate“) that this bill so desperately lacks– but it also means that all of our friends are learning why we do what we do, and why they might want to join us. Think about it: Every day, big corporations and wealthy factions pay full time lobbyists big bucks to make sure politicians see these bills their way. We, on the other hand, have nothing. We are mothers. We are teachers. We do not have time or money or connections like the monied lobbies do.
But we have two things they don’t have, things more powerful by far. One is the mother (or father) bear instinct. The parental passion is unstoppable. We love our kids.
The other is dedication that springs from the love we have for American liberty. That dedication comes from appreciating the freedoms that we, as Year 2015 Americans, can still enjoy– freedoms that millennia of humans through history have not experienced because they were subject to the whims of kings, and not the rule of law like the incomparable U.S. Constitution, which acknowledges God, which acknowledges that we human beings do tend to control, dominate, bully and rob from one another, but by separating the powers of government, by providing representation and rule of law, by using due process of thoughtful debate, and checks and balances– in this way, we leash that dangerous tendency and that is why America has created unparalleled prosperity and peace in this freedom under God.
ESEA, a huge bill about data and federal roles in local education, is being rammed through in the dark. The vote is in a week and there’s no access to the final bill yet. Senator Lee is right. This process is wrong.
Don’t let a handful of people decide for the entire elected Congress and the entire population of the US what education, testing, standards, and data privacy should be, without debate, and without reading the bill. The political careers of those who are ramming through this anti-freedom legislation in the dark without debate are going to be over once America wakes up and figures out what they have done to us.
I sat down and wrote out what I wanted to say this blog-video. It’s posted here, for those who don’t want to sit through twenty minutes of talking. Sorry that I had to read much of it rather than making eye contact all of the time. I just needed to get it said right.)
VIDEO CONTENT:
Happy Thanksgiving Week!
My name is Christel Swasey, and I am a teacher and a mother living in Pleasant Grove, Utah. Today is November 24, 2015. In less than one week a handful of secretive congressmen are expecting to pass a bill called ESEA, or the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, without our informed consent or the informed consent of our elected representatives.
The final bill has not even been released yet but the vote is in a week. It won’t be read by turkey-gobbling Congressmen when it is released in a few days. But they’ll be forced to vote on Tuesday, uninformed or misinformed because all they’ll read is a sheet of talking points put out by the bill’s lobbyists. This will have a disasterous, long term effect on liberty in America.
I am asking you to help #STOPESEA by calling Congress at 202-224-3121. Tell Congress to vote NO on ESEA based on what’s slated to be in it, and maybe more importantly, based on the corrupt, un-American process of passing it without giving time to read and debate about it.
I’m a big fan of a phrase in the Declaration of Independence: THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED”.
The Declaration explains that to secure our God-given rights, we the people instituted government: “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
So government has no just powers outside of consent by the governed, and so my life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, and yours, are not secure when government is operating outside the informed consent of the governed. I am telling you that it is happening right now.
My own Senator, Mike Lee, has been an inspiration this week as he’s spoken out about this corrupt process and explained how it’s operating. He said that how the conference process is supposed to work is not how is has been conducted. Quote: “from the surface it will still look like the conference process is happening the way it’s supposed to, but beneath the surface, we know that all of this has already been prearranged, precooked, predetermined by a select few members of Congress working behind closed doors, free from scrutiny. And we know that this vote was scheduled on extremely short notice, so that it would be difficult if not impossible for the rest of us to influence the substance of the conference report through motions to instruct.” Senator Lee said, “Because process influences policy… the process expedites the passage of policies that we know don’t work—policies to which the American people are strongly opposed.” Then Senator Lee named a few of those bad policies, such as “the discredited common core approach” and the centrally planned, failed model of federal preschool which the bill will use $250 million to promote. There are many more terrible policies that ESEA will cement. I will list more later on in this video.
My own representative, Jason Chaffetz, has also been in the Congressional spotlight this week, shedding light on what the federal government, via the Dept. of Education, is doing to American privacy. I watched him in a video leading a congressional hearing on the improper practices of the Dept of Education in its student data collection and data mining programs. The hearing revealed that the federal Dept of Education has somewhere between one and two hundred ways that it collects data about your child and mine, but the Department only admits to having three because it contracts out the rest of the systems. As if that’s better. The hearing revealed that the Dept of Education received negative scores across every category of data security, and Rep Chaffetz gave the Dept. an “F”—calling it “a monster, an absolute monster”.
This is the same federal Dept of Education that is pushing, through the current ESEA bill, additional methods of mining student data.
But the things that Sen. Lee and Rep. Chaffetz oppose are not the only things that the ESEA bill will foist on us. I predict that the final version of the ESEA bill will contain many more grants to promote more “voluntary” data mining in addition to the compulsory data collection that’s already taking place; more federal preschools, more psychological profiling of teachers, students and families inside and outside of public schools under the banner of the kindly nanny state’s data-driven decision making, more career tracking, more longitudinal citizen stalking via college student and graduate reporting, more assessments or more deeply embedded forms of stealth assessments, and a subtle undermining of parental authority, teacher creativity and student autonomy from the community-centric, workforce-focused, data-focused initiatives in this bill. (We’ll see this week, won’t we?)
A group of over two hundred grassroots organizations representing most of the states in the United States signed an open letter to Congress opposing this ESEA bill. The letter outlines four things that are strong reasons to oppose ESEA. I’m summarizing. The first is–
COMMON CORE – the letter calls common core “academically inferior, developmentally inappropriate, psychologically manipulative and privately copyrighted Common Core Standards…” End quote. Now, in my opinion, the talking points that will be used to promote the bill will likely say that it’s common-core free, or at least, the bill will avoid using the phrases “common core” or “common data standards”. The bill will rely very deceptively on the fact that most people don’t know that there is an official federal definition of common core. That other phrase that the bill WILL include, repeatedly, is: “career and college ready standards” or “career and college readiness”. Do an internet search for the federal definition of “college and career ready”. You’ll find that the phrase is officially defined by the federal Dept. of Education as “standards common to a significant number of states” which can only be the common core.
The second reason that the grassroots letter asks Congress to oppose ESEA is its push for:
ASSESSMENTS THAT PROFILE CITIZENS – the letter calls an over-reliance on tests never independently validated, high-stakes standardized tests supervised by the federal government , tests that are psychologically profiling our children more than assessing their academic knowledge…a problem. The third reason to oppose ESEA is:
SLDS – State Longitudinal Database Systems (stalking of kids by the government) and the massive increase in state and federal gathering of private family, education and psychological data … without consent. The fourth reason:
CAREER TRACKING – Career tracking, which undermines self-determination by means of unconstitutional profiling…”
Some people don’t understand why it’s a bad thing for the government to centrally manage and guide (or control) citizens into different career tracks; some think that’s helpful for the individual and good for the collective economy.
But I think of a quote from my favorite Disney movie, “Prince of Egypt” where Moses says, “No kingdom should be made on the backs of slaves”.
Since student self-determination is undermined by the dictates of the government’s workforce needs, even if it is data-driven dictatorship, and since a student’s interests won’t be judged as equally important to a student’s capabilities when the collective workforce or the government is the main determiner of what that student’s career path should be, we are creating a system for our children where they are not free. Maybe it is an exaggeration to say that education reforms are aiming to build a global kingdom on the backs of children without their consent; but I think, in the long run, maybe not.
Either you believe that parents are the God-given authority over a child, or you believe that children’s lives should be managed by the government and its “data driven decision making,” for the building up of the government’s economy– in the style of countries without freedom, like China.
Either you support the continued tracking and nonconsensual stalking of your child and family, using local schools as the data collection pawns in a federal system that tracks children and families for life, –or you believe in freedom, self-determination and privacy.
Either you believe that individuals should control their own lives despite the risks that freedom allows, or you believe that the government should control the lives of the people, because of the risks that freedom allows. If you are getting sucked into believing the latter, please remember this: we the people created government. We own it; it did not create us and it does not own us. It cannot boss us without our consent. Anytime government does a thing without the full, informed consent of the governed, it is unjust and it is dangerous.
But government can and does get away with bossing and bullying –when we let go of our own power. I am asking you to use your power to call and stop ESEA this week.
Because Congress isn’t being given time to read or debate the bill prior to a vote, the bill’s promoters will pass out a sheet of biased talking points for the rest of Congress to read before they vote (this is how they got the Student Success Act passed) –and these talking points will sound so good. But they will be full of lies.
I know this because I saw the last set of talking points when they passed the house and senate versions of this monster bill. They had things that successfully deceived almost all of our elected conservatives, such as: “this bill will reduce the federal footprint” and “this bill restores power to the states and localities”—these things weren’t true.
Rather than restoring power to the localities, the bill assigned enforcement of federal priorities to the localities. Think about that: there’s a big difference between assigning federal priority enforcement and implementation to states, and actually restoring freedom to states. The new bill will likely use many phrases conservatives love while it also intrudes on basic rights and institutions, for example, on private schools and home schools by offering them attractive grants or services –in exchange for student, teacher and family data. It’s all about data—it’s all about reducing citizen privacy, because information is power.
And the bill won’t be written in clear language that is accessible to the average person. You will have to really study it and find out what its words and phrases mean in definitions outside the bill itself, to understand what is being traded.
The bill and its talking points will likely use language to appeal to the compassionate person, but it will force the federal concept — a parent-replacing definition– of government compassion. It will promote parent-neutralizing, nanny-state enabling concepts and programs, including increased data mining –to identify (quote) ”academic, physical, social, emotional, health, mental health and other needs of students, families, and community residents.” The last bill promoted “Full Service Community Schools” and “student needs” and “wraparound services” and extended learning time that make school, not family or church, the central hub of a child’s life.
202-224-3121. Memorize that number or put it in your speed dial. Ask Congress to vote NO on ESEA.
It is wrong for you and I to sit by while the partnership of federal and corporate forces take away our authority by changing who gets to define and enforce what learning means and what will be learned –taking this authority from the parent and teacher; and reassigning it to the government;
It is wrong for you and I to sit by while the federal government narrows academic freedom by dicating a communistic, workforce-centered vision of what academic success is for;
It is wrong for you and I to sit by while the federal government cements into federal law the common core standards.
It is wrong for you and I to sit by while the federal government cements processes built on student-stalking common data standards and interoperable state databases that report to the federal edfacts data exchange, tracking children’s academic and psychological data, without consent;
It is wrong for you and I to allow any kind of assessments to be mandated upon us by federal forces, whether in the form of formal, standardized tests or stealthy, embedded tests that are quietly woven into the daily curriculum and assignments of students. These tests lock us into a federal definition of what academic excellence looks like and will narrow academic creativity in classrooms that are built on one standard and one set of data tags and tests. They certainly make things more efficient, but at the expense of a teacher’s professional judgment and her curricular liberty.
It is wrong for you and I to sit by while a few members of Congress ram a bill through, mostly in the dark, without allowing any space for analysis or debate. It is truly a dark and un-American process.
Fight for freedom with your telephone.
These freedoms, once lost, won’t come back easily: the freedom to define with our own conscience and intellect what education should look like; the freedom from invasion of privacy; the freedom from being centrally managed and tracked without consent. These are not small things.
I’m asking you to call 202-224-3121 and tell Congress to vote NO on ESEA.
Even if you had time to read the final version of the new ESEA bill which will get released days from now –which you won’t, because you’ll be eating turkey– and even if you agreed with every word (which I’m betting you won’t, because Senator Alexander’s view of ed reform is sick and wrong) –but even if you liked it– shouldn’t you, on principle, still oppose its passage, based on the devious process being used, a pushing of laws into their cemented form without representative debate– very fast, and mostly in the dark?
Senator Mike Lee’s fight against this now-brewing, corrupt, “new” No Child Left Behind, inspires me. His backbone in standing up to the corruptos in Congress that are pushing ESEA is a rare treasure in politics. Do you realize that he’s fighting for the actual freedom of our children and grandchildren? This is real. Listen to him.
Senator Lee’s railed against some of the corruption; for example, its $250 million plan to hurt good preschools by pushing loser-federal preschools on all; its cementing of Common Core standards, etc. There’s more brewing that he hasn’t taken time to denounce yet, such as its creepy, parent-ditching “community school” program that puts government ahead of families, churches or anyone else in influencing kids and eating up too much of kids’ time; and its cementing of common, kid-stalking data tags (CEDS) –but you can study all of that.
(I keep calling the other members of the Utah delegation to leave messages asking them to join his fight. Please do, too.)
This process that Senator Lee speaks of is so corrupt.
It is un-American to make Congress vote on something so fast that it hasn’t been vetted or understood by voters. It is un-American to skip debate and to ditch input. We all know that this law will weigh heavily on everyone who will be ruled by it afterward. Shouldn’t voters have a real opportunity to look at the bill from all angles and then take the vote?
Senator Lee has pointed out that the process creates the policy. This is how ESEA/NCLB is to be rammed down the throat of Congress (and all of us) next week.
Step one: right now, a tiny handful of pro-reauthorization members of Congress, behind closed doors, are cooking up the poison pill.
Step 2: They’ll speed it to a vote so fast that the rest of Congress has no time to think before swallowing, no chance to offer what they are supposed to be allowed to offer: “motions to instruct the conferees” (input).
Step 3: They’ll market it under the banner of good-sounding lies and slanted press releases and news stories that will successfully deceive Americans (including our politicians) into believing that control has been returned to the localities. It won’t be true. But we’ll figure it out too late to easily reverse it. Because nobody’s going to really read the bill before they vote yes.
The draft was released a few day ago.The bill won’t be released until next week, the same week that the vote will be taken: December 2.
This hurried method is a sick pattern used by the Obama administration. We saw Secretary Duncan push states with the monetary lure of “Race to the Top” millions to adopt Common Core and its tests and SLDS systems for a chance in that race. Before that, there was the ARRA funding that was tied, among other things, to governors agreeing to get federally-approved student data collection systems and standards.
Now, the speed of ESEA will similarly maim freedom, pushing these controversial programs into nation-binding law.
I’m reposting Senator Lee’s entire speech below.
After you read it, please call. This monster will affect all Americans for years to come.
Ask for any senator and representative in D.C. at 202-224-3121. Say, “VOTE NO ON ESEA.” Done? Thank you!! Please call again. Then call for your neighbor who isn’t taking the time to call. Skip the gym or the crochet project and call some who aren’t your direct reps, too. Leave them messages — ask them to call you to account for how they plan to vote on December 2.
Politicians need constituents’ support to get re-elected. Tell them that this is a make or break issue; you won’t vote for them again if they vote yes on ESEA. Your voice and vote are leverage.
At some point today the Senate will vote on the motion to appoint conferees – or what’s often called the motion to go to conference – for a bill that reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or the ESEA, which is the legislation governing our federal K-12 education policy.
Because most Americans have probably never heard of this obscure parliamentary procedure – the motion to appoint conferees – I’d like to take a moment to explain how it works… or at least, how it’s supposed to work.
When the House and the Senate each pass separate, but similar, bills, the two chambers convene what’s called “a conference.”
A conference is essentially a meeting where delegates from each chamber come together to iron out the differences between their respective bills, and put together what’s called “a conference report” – which is a single piece of legislation that reconciles any disparities between the House-passed bill and the Senate-passed bill.
Once the delegates to the conference – the conferees – agree on a conference report, they bring it back to their respective chambers, to the House and to the Senate, for a final vote.
It’s important to note here that, once the conference report is sent to the House and the Senate for a final vote, there’s no opportunity to amend the legislation. It’s an up-or-down vote: each chamber can either approve or reject the conference report in its entirety.
If each chamber votes to approve the conference report, it’s then sent to the president, who can either sign it into law or veto it.
So what we’re doing today is voting on the motion to appoint conferees for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Earlier this year, both the House and the Senate passed their own ESEA reauthorizations. And now, we’re voting to proceed to the conference process and to appoint certain senators to participate in that process as conferees.
Historically, and according to the way the conference process is supposed to work, this vote is not that big of a deal. Voting on the motion to appoint conferees is usually, and mostly, a matter of routine.
But it’s not a vote that should be rushed through on a moment’s notice, because it is the last opportunity for senators and representatives who are not conferees – such as myself – to influence the outcome of the conference process.
We can do that by offering what are called “motions to instruct the conferees.”
For example, let’s say I was not chosen to be a conferee to a particular bill, but there was an issue related to the bill that was important to me and to the people I represent – in that case, I could ask the Senate to vote on a set of instructions that would be sent to the conference to inform their deliberations and influence the substance of the conference report.
Mr. President, this is how the conference process is supposed to work.
But it is not how the conference process has been conducted with respect to this bill, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization.
Sure, we’re still voting to appoint conferees.
And those conferees will still convene a conference.
And that conference will still produce a conference report.
So from the surface, it will still look like the conference process is happening the way it’s supposed to.
But beneath the surface we know that all of this has already been pre-arranged, pre-cooked, pre-determined… by a select few members of Congress, working behind closed doors, free from scrutiny.
And we know that this vote was scheduled on extremely short notice, so that it would be difficult – if not impossible – for the rest of us to influence the substance of the conference report through motions to instruct.
Now, why does this matter?
We know the American people care deeply about K-12 education policy. But why should they care about this obscure parliamentary procedure in the Senate?
They should care – and Mr./Madam President, we know that they do care – because the process influences the policy.
In this case, the process expedites the passage of policies that we know don’t work – policies to which the American people are strongly opposed.
For instance, it’s my understanding that this pre-agreement may authorize $250 million in new spending on federal pre-K programs – what amounts to a down-payment on the kind of universal, federally-run pre-K programs advocated by President Obama.
This would be a disaster not only for American children and families, but for our 21st-century economy that increasingly requires investments in human capital.
We know that a good education starting at a young age is an essential ingredient for upward economic mobility later in life. A mountain of recent social science research proves what experience and intuition have been teaching mankind for millennia: that a child’s first few years of life are critical in their cognitive and emotional development.
Yet we also know that too many of America’s public schools, especially those in low-income and disadvantaged neighborhoods, fail to prepare their students to succeed.
Nowhere has the top-down, centrally planned model of public education failed more emphatically than in our nation’s public pre-K programs. The epitome of federal preschool programs is Head Start, which has consistently failed to improve the lives and educational achievements of the children it ostensibly serves.
According to a 2012 study by President Obama’s own Department of Health and Human Services, whatever benefits children gain from the program disappear by the time they reach the third grade.
But because bureaucracies invariably measure success in terms of inputs, instead of outcomes, Head Start and its $8 billion annual budget is the model for Democrats as they seek to expand federal control over child care programs in communities all across the country.
This bill also doubles down on the discredited common-core approach to elementary and secondary education that the American people have roundly, and consistently, rejected.
Mr. President, parents and teachers across America are frustrated by Washington, D.C.’s heavy-handed, overly prescriptive approach to education policy.
I’ve heard from countless moms and dads in Utah who feel as though anonymous government officials living and working 2,000 miles away have a greater say in the education of their children than they do.
The only way to improve our K-12 education system in America is to empower parents, educators, and local policymakers to meet the unique needs of their communities and serve the low-income families the status quo is leaving behind.
With early childhood education, we could start block granting the Head Start budget to the states.
This would allow those closest to the children and families being served to design their own programs – rather than spending all their time complying with onerous, one-size-fits-all federal mandates – and designate eligible public and private pre-schools to receive grants.
We know this works because many states are already doing it. In my home state of Utah, for instance, United Way of Salt Lake has partnered with two private financial institutions, Goldman Sachs and J.B. Pritzker, to provide first rate early education programs to thousands of Utah children.
They call it a “pay-for-success” loan.
With no upfront cost or risk to the taxpayers, private capital is invested in the Utah High Quality Preschool Program, which is implemented and overseen by United Way.
If, as expected, the preschool program results in increased school readiness and improved academic performance, the state of Utah repays the private investors with the public funds it would have spent on remedial services that the children would have needed between kindergarten and the twelfth grade, had they not participated in the program.
Washington policymakers should not look at Utah’s pay-for-success initiatives – and other local success stories like them – as potential federal programs, but as a testament to the power of local control.
Mr. President, we shouldn’t expand Washington’s control over America’s schools and pre-K programs. Instead, Congress must advance reforms that empower parents – with flexibility and choice – to do what’s in the best interest of their children.
The policies in this bill move in the opposite direction.
Parents and Educators Against Common Core Standards posted the following incredibly important video of this week’s “Information Security Review” of the US Department of Education which was led by Utah Representative Jason Chaffetz.
Please watch it.
Chaffetz opens the discussion (minutes 1-9) showing slides of the US Department of Education getting an “F” in protecting student data –with negative scores across every category. The students’ vulnerability, Rep Chaffetz says, is huge, not only students but for their parents, because of data collected, for example, in the National Student Loan Database which collects data that families fill out and submit together.
(He doesn’t mention this, but each state’s SLDS system gathers and feeds data from your child’s schoolwork to the state to the feds, too; for example, via the EdFacts Data Exchange.)
Next, Chaffetz says that the Dept. of Education is responsible for 4 billion dollars in improper payments (minute 8:30) which will be discussed in the next hearing in detail (not during this one).
After summarizing the mismanagement of funds and data, Chaffetz summarizes the gargantuan harms of the Department of Education: “It has become a monster, an absolute monster. We don’t know who’s in there; we don’t know what they’re doing.”
Then, the hearing begins.
Listen at minute 43 to minute 47. Those four minutes blew my mind. The US Dept. of Education’s representative, Dr. Harris, nervously skirts having to directly answer the question, at first, of how many databases it holds. It admits to three. The chairman says that it has at least 123, but if you count all of the data contractors, there are countless more. The only way that the Dept. of Education can say it only has three is by pretending that it is not responsible for, or does not subcontract out, the service, the questioner points out. And those high numbers of organizations collecting data for the US Dept. of Education mean a high probability that data will be compromised.
Meanwhile, most people believe that student data remains with the teacher and principal; those who do know that there’s a state/federal database believe that it’s a good thing; and they tell me that my opposition to permitting databases to stalk our kids is baseless, that the Utah State Office of Education does not release individual students’ information and that nonconsensual student data mining could never have a down side.
Legendary US Dept of Education whistleblower Charlotte Iserbyt has pointed out at her blog, ABCs of Dumbdown, that some members of Congress are deliberately concealing machinations of No Child Left Behind/ESEA and are planning a rushed vote so that no time is allotted for public scrutiny nor for full Congressional analysis of the huge federal law. She also points out that others, like Utah Senator Mike Lee, aren’t falling for the ruse.
“So from the surface it will still look like the conference process is happening, is unfolding in the manner in which it is supposed to, butbeneath the surface we know that all of this has already been prearranged, precooked, predetermined by a select few Members of Congress working behind closed doors free from scrutiny, and we know this vote was scheduled on extremely short notice so it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the rest of us to influence the substance of the conference report through motions to instruct.”
Senator Lee also stated that the new ESEA/NCLB aims to spend $250 million on federal preschool, even though:
“Nowhere has the top-down, centrally planned model of public education failed more emphatically than in our nation’s public pre-K programs. The epitome of federal preschool programs is Headstart, which has consistently failed.”
Senator Lee noted that the bill must be stopped because it cements Common Core:
“The bill also doubles down on the discredited common core approach to elementary and secondary education the American people have roundly and consistently rejected. Parents and teachers across America are frustrated by the heavy-handed, overly prescriptive approach to education policy by Washington, D.C. I have heard from countless moms and dads in Utah who feel as though anonymous government officials living and working 2,000 miles away have a greater say in the education of their own children than they do.”
Please call the US Capital in D.C. to ask your senators and representatives to VOTE NO on ESEA/NCLB reauthorization. 202-224-3121.
For additional information and details on who is fighting with us and why we must stop the bill,click here.
Call 202-224-3121 to be connected to your Representatives and Senators in D.C. today.
They are about to vote to pass No Child Left Behind/ESEA in a new form that is Constitutionally unacceptable.
It promotes accountability, backwards. Instead of the creation (government school system) being accountable to its creator (We, the individual People) this NCLB/ESEA proposed law wants We, the People accountable to the creation itself via data tagging and an increase of laws to bind us.
You can also just read the official US Dept. of Education blog to see the at-first-glance-seemingly-innocuous words from Secretary Duncan:
“…the nation is at a crossroads with two different paths for an new ESEA — a choice with moral and economic consequences“. That is true. Then he says, “ESEA should be replaced with a law that ensures opportunity for every child in this country; strengthens our nation economically; and expands… accountability.”
Do you see any dangerous false premises behind those words?
It’s based on the premise that the new version of ESEA is a better law, which is false. ESEA cements big government controls over citizens, assumes that the federal government knows best how to define and how to turn around struggling schools; increases the workforce-not-academic mindset of schools; pushes toddlers into the government influence with early childhood education fund promotion, and builds its whole monstrous mess on federally structured, interoperable, common longitudinal databases (SLDS), and common educational data standards— data tags that are nonconsensual citizen tracking for most of the person’s life. That alone should give Congress a second thought.
It assumes that the federal government Constitutionally does, or morally should, hold the power to influence “every child in this country”. But the Constitution says otherwise. So does the Bible.
It assumes that economic fulfillment, defined by government, is a proper role of a school system. That’s communism, folks. In America, we go to school to learn truth– not to be minimally trained in order to serve the government’s definition of what the economy needs.*
It assumes that accountability should be from students, teachers and schools to Big Government. False. That’s almost exactly backwards. Accountability should be from public servants (teachers, state officials, and elected officials, to the clients of public ed: that is, voters, student familes, and taxpayers. We the People created government. We created the school system. The creation cannot demand accountability from its creator. The creation cannot boss its creator –unless We the People who created it, are sweet-talked and bribed by Duncan and others into allowing it. We the People must hold on to the reins of power and not become sheep to our own creation. But ESEA is threatening us.
*The Business Roundtable has written a letter to Congress that says, “A prepared workforce is essential for U.S. employers of all sizes. This is how we guarantee a brighter future for our workers and their families. We ask you to encourage the conferees to strengthen ESEA’s accountability provisions. Schools should be required to implement support strategies in cases where students are not meeting state-defined achievement goals…”
What? Corporations want Congress to pass ESEA so that schools will be forced to move toward a workforce-based, rather than a liberty and individual-based, achievement plan. That sounds no different that the thinking of the communist countries’ systems. Decision making for children should never be based on the judgment of the government machine’s economic dictates –but on what the student, with guidance from the parent, and trusted teachers, choose.
Please don’t be fooled by the cronies’ talk. This is America. We want academic and creative and computer freedom, not a top-down system run by the coupling of government to corporation, which bypasses the will of the voters and the individuals that must abide by it.
Call today. Tell your Senator and Representative in DC to vote NO on ESEA reauthorization. 202-224-3121.
1) First, I’m sharing an open letter of fellow Utah mom, Rhonda Hair, to the State Board, protesting Utah’s move toward inept common national science standards;
2) Second, I’m sharing a link to a review of the “science” in these standards by top biology professor Stan Metzenberg, published by Pioneer Institute;
3) Third, I’m republishing Alpine District board member Wendy Hart’s video alerting the public to the error of Utah adopting NGSS (also known as Utah’s New Science Standards or Massachusetts’ “new” draft science standards.
Dear Utah State School Superintendent Brad Smith, State Science Specialist Ricky Scott, and State School Board Members:
I filled out the survey and would like to let you know a few things.
First, I am frustrated with the survey: it reads like a scholarly paper and is inaccessible to so many parents who intuitively know what is good but are intimidated by its complexity and minutiae. As a consequence, only parents who have obtained high-level education are going to feel confident about filling out such a survey. Are they the only parents who matter? I’ve been told you keep hearing from professors that these standards are great. Of course they think that. Your survey and standards draft are aimed at people at that level, and they live in a fairly insulated world of theory and numbers, not regular, real-world jobs.
Last time you offered a survey to parents, it was of a similar nature. I attended the board meeting when the results were reported. My survey was not counted; though I did give feedback, it didn’t fit your data set structure. If I remember correctly, only about 70 surveys had been filled out the way demanded. That is because what you are asking about is not what the parents are concerned about. You are asking about the cabins and furniture on a ship that has been hijacked.
While I do object to some specifics in the standards, what is most crucial in my opinion is the overruling of parental control that the Utah Board and Office of Education have done, with the legislature’s blessing. I don’t need to spend considerable time reviewing the standards (though I did) to know you are on the wrong track. These things should be decided at the very local level, where parents and teachers can work together to address the needs, wants, talents, and values of the families and individuals. The state Constitution specifies the Board is to have “general control” of education, which means what can apply to everyone, not “detailed control”. Your predecessors overstepped the intended bounds.
Please help remedy the situation by dropping these standards, rejecting federal strings and intervention, dropping state educational core curriculum, and allow the resulting vacuum to be filled naturally by the districts, schools, and families.
Sincerely,
Rhonda Hair
Parent of Utah public-ed students and homeschool students, B.S. in Elementary Education
“Astonishing” gaps in science content too large to be resolved editorially
BOSTON – Massachusetts’ draft pre-K through introductory high school Science and Technology/Engineering standards contain such startling gaps in science that they should be withdrawn from consideration, according to a new Policy Brief published by Pioneer Institute.
“The proposed science standards have significant, unacceptable gaps in science content,” says Dr. Stan Metzenberg, a professor of biology at California State University and author of “A Critical Review of the Massachusetts Next Generation Science and Technology/Engineering Standards.” “For example, they are stunningly devoid of Mendelian genetics and large parts of cellular biology. This is an astonishing oversight for a state that has notable institutions of higher education and a thriving biotechnology industry.”
At the high school level, the draft standards almost completely exclude Mendelian genetics. These concepts are not easily absorbed before high school, and their exclusion means students won’t be exposed to ideas that revolutionized biology at the beginning of the 20th century.
Their exclusion also makes it impossible to understand modern evolutionary theory and for students to grasp their own risk of carrying inherited disease. Massachusetts’ current science and technology/engineering curriculum frameworks include three Mendelian genetics standards.
The draft standards also exclude large parts of cellular biology, failing to teach high school students about the nucleus, mitochondria or chloroplasts.
Massachusetts currently has a curriculum framework for each of the body’s seven major systems (digestive, circulatory/excretory, respiratory, nervous, muscular/skeletal, reproductive and endocrine). But the draft would include these systems in a single composite standard, reducing students’ understanding and lessening their ability to talk to and understand their own physician and make healthy choices.
The draft standards never mention the name “Charles Darwin” and don’t adequately develop the basis for concepts of natural selection, making it exceedingly difficult to address Darwin’s theory of evolution in later grades.
Finally, the way the draft standards are written is overly complex, using sometimes ambiguous or grammatically incorrect language that fails to clearly communicate what students should know and be able to do. This ambiguity causes difficulty in the later grades.
About the Author
Dr. Stan Metzenberg is Professor of Biology at California State University, Northridge. He has 20 years’ experience teaching biological science at the university level. He was a senior science consultant for the Academic Standards Commission in California (1998) and a state Board of Education appointee to the California Science Project (1999-2003), the California Curriculum Development and Supplemental Materials Commission (2003- 2006) and a content review panelist for development of the California Standards Tests (1999-2010). He has recently assisted the ministries of education of Saudi Arabia (2010) and Qatar (2015) in training teacher leaders to use newly adopted science instructional materials.
About Pioneer
Pioneer Institute is an independent, non-partisan, privately funded research organization that seeks to improve the quality of life in Massachusetts through civic discourse and intellectually rigorous, data-driven public policy solutions based on free market principles, individual liberty and responsibility, and the ideal of effective, limited and accountable government.
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3. From Wendy Hart, board member of Alpine School Board, Utah’s largest public school district:
Thank you, Rhonda Hair, Professor Metzenberg, and Wendy Hart.
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And now, a few closing thoughts of my own:
ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM
The entire nation of scientists do not agree on a common core of science. Why should kids be forced to do so? Science is a quest. Academic freedom to question with a fully open mind, matters. NGSS ends that for schools. NGSS’s vision of truth, including political underpinnings of “green” science, is the only correct science.
While some members of the USOE have pretended that the anti-NGSS people (like me) are anti-science people who would force God and intelligent design on all students, and that we would have public schools teaching nothing but the Old Testament as science school, that is not true. It is the pro-NGSS people who want to limit truth. They want the one-sided, politically charged version of science, slanted toward controversial “facts” being accepted by students as unquestionable scientific standards of truth; they want kids to believe that global warming and climate change is a fact, for example– even though in the real world of real scientists, that is a hotly debated and far from settled scientific issue. They want kids to believe that Darwinian evolution is flawlessly true. But that’s not what real scientists agree upon. Academic freedom demands the continuation of these huge questions in the classroom. That won’t happen with NGSS and the associated tests and curriculum defining scientific truth from a slanted perspective.
ON MISSING OUT ON MORE THAN JUST A FEW STRANDS OF SCIENCE
Beyond academic holes such as missing Mendelian genetics and missing math in NGSS, beyond the blind acceptance of Darwin and an overabundance of green-slanted “science” –there is an even bigger issue. In adopting NGSS, we are losing the freedom to set our own standards in the future because NGSS alignment stifles and shackles us with common, aligned tests and common educational data standards that tag our students’ daily work.
ON THE LOSS OF CONTROL OF STANDARDS, TESTING AND PRIVATE STUDENT DATA
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of preserving the right and power of our local teachers, principals, parents, scientists, and board members to influence what is to be taught as truth under the banner of science.
Adopting NGSS, which are not being called NGSS standards by the USOE, but which are, in fact, NGSS standards, (see the side by side comparison of NGSS to Utah’s “new” standards ) is more than adopting academically debatable, “new” but not “improved” standards.
It’s a decision to shackle our students and teachers to a nationalized, common content that NGSS is promoting, and to shackle them to the testing and data mining of student attitudes about this politicized science. This move makes it efficient and easy for centralized power-holders (NGSS, federal government, state government, CEDS-aligned researchers) who have no business doing so, to not only dictate what truth in science looks like, but what student “achievement” in science will be. Why give them that power?
Opting out of standardized testing will not get around these problems, by the way, since “embedded assessment” (aka stealth testing) will make every student using technology in any form, a data-mining gold mine, daily.
Please, wake up, friends!
We are, right now, putting Utah on the conveyor belt of politically loaded, pre-packaged “true science” defined only by NGSS, with matching SAGE tests (or the upcoming, embedded tests) to monitor whether our kids are buying their version of “true science”.
This grave error comes with long lasting consequences. It will be as immovable as any long-lasting, formative decision. Long ago, we decided to build I-15. Theoretically, we can put it somewhere else now. But that is not very likely when the traffic (as NGSS-aligned technologies, codes, curricula, tests, teacher professional development, textbook purchasing and more) begins to barrel down that imperious boulevard.
ON THE WORD “NEXT GENERATION”
Big wigs have verbally crowned their crime against academic freedom with the glittering term “next-generation science.” Some people fall for the term; it must be the next great thing with such a title; but NGSS buy-in is an investment in long-term political and academic snake oil. There is nothing modern and magical about this slippery snake oil except the very big marketing dollars behind it.
Inform your representatives and board members that you say “No” to NGSS. (State board email: board@Utah.schools.gov)
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Update: 11/13/15
Vince Newmeyer reported that:
“Board members have been told that the October draft is the existing standards updated with just the good stuff from the NGSS. To support their claim then produced a spreadsheet called the USEO standards crosswalk… I have taken their crosswalk and researched it further. The results are:
One new standard was written (6.3.4). Two standards originating from the current Utah Standards were added (7.2.4 & 8.1.2). Some existing NGSS standards went through a thesaurus translation but generally without change in character. Some NGSS standards remain word-for-word. Six standards were formed by combining two or more of the previous NGSS standards. Most of the previously duplicated standards were removed. Only one NGSS standard (MS-LS1-8) is not found. see also http://www.sciencefreedom.org/Issues-With-Oct-SEEd-Draft.html http://www.sciencefreedom.org/Oct-Utah-NGSS-Side-By-Side.html
USOE Admits that they Seek to generally adopt the National Next Generation Science Standard
USOE now admits in the materials distributed to the board members related to the October draft of the (UT SEEd) Standards October for their October 8-9, 2015 meeting that “Most SEEd standards remain based on the Next Generation Science Standards.” A similar statement is found in the foot notes of the introduction pages to each grade level of the standards released for the 30-day public review. (http://www.schools.utah.gov/CURR/science/Revision/SEEdStandardsDraft.aspx ) As we have seen in this text that “most” means that essentially all of the NGSS standard concepts are found in the October draft of the “Utah SEEd” with little added. More details are at my ScienceFreedom.org webpage under articles.”
After everything scientist and patriot Vince Newmeyer has written, after everything that people in other states have said and done (and sued about) concerning the INSANE error of adopting national, common science standards; after all the parental uproar here in Utah, still, the USOE is still moving ahead with its bullheaded determination to strip Utah of any local control and align everything we do to federal standards. I am convinced that this is simply because of USOE’s passionate devotion to money –not to children, teachers or education– but to continued federal grant eligibilty. There is no other logical explanation.
NGSS standards are beloved of the Obama administration (Obama launched a global warming education initiative recently). NGSS are politicized and controversial, which Utah’s previous standards were not. NGSS have been called the anti-science science standards because they minimize the scientific habit of actually questioning settled science, while maximizing “climate change” evangelism as presented by the left wing.
If Utah teachers and parents really wanted common NGSS standards, I would have to put a sock in my mouth and go away. But the Utah Office of Education (USOE) has underhandedly presented these standards, refusing to admit that they are NGSS (by changing one word here or there) and by calling them “Utah Science Standards”.
The public comment site is RIDICULOUS. I encourage you to go there tonight and spout off, but beware; they’ve made it hard. They have almost made it impossible.
Hence my letter today, sent to the auditing department, asking them to sock it to USOE for their dishonesty and sellout of our schools and kids and real science. Here’s the board’s email address if you feel so inclined to take a stand next to me on this issue. board@schools.utah.gov
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Dear Audit Department of USOE and State Board,
I am writing to ask you to audit the USOE’s public comment survey about the new NGSS/Utah Science standards.
These “standards” are being called “Utah Science Standards” but they are in reality the same as the NGSS, common national science standards. This fact has been concealed by USOE in its presentations to the public, unfortunately, but it is true.
Today is the last day that the public is invited to comment.
I am certain that very, very few people have commented. It severely restricts and frames comments. The micromanaging nature of the survey, which is a narrow, opinion-managing effort, does not allow for true public comment on the entire scope, process, nature and academic quality of the proposed standards.
It limits commenters to specific strands of specific grades and even limits the space for commenting itself! What if I was a science teacher who wanted to explain in scientific, pedagogic detail, why it’s so wrong to take out most of what we used to teach kids about electricity, for example? That has happened. But there’s no space for it on the survey.
But there is more.
Nowhere does the survey allow a member of the public to state opposition to the fact that these standards are IDENTICAL to the NGSS common, national standards.
Nowhere does the survey allow a member of the public to state opposition to the fact that these standards are exactly ALIGNED with federally-approved standardized testing. (This is probably why USOE pushed these narrowed standards so hard; federal cash follows federally-aligned standards for embedded CEDS tags.)
Nowhere does the survey allow a member of the public to state opposition to narrowing the science survey to only 6th through 8th grades.
Nowhere does the survey allow a member of the public to state opposition to the politically slanted nature of a new, extreme interest in environmentalism, materialism, and “climate change”; the survey pretends that the science standards are only about science.
Nowhere does the survey allow space for true freedom of expression.
I could go on.
It feels as if this survey was deliberately written to constrain the public to NOT say what they may want to say; as if the survey-data-tally officers wanted to be able to throw out any comments that did brought up the controversies that the creators didn’t want to discuss.
This is certainly an auditing issue.
Millions of dollars will be spent by USOE and the school system to replace Utah’s previous science curricula. Millions will go to “trainings” for teachers to alter our traditional, time-tested science pedagogy to make it match the new, NGSS, national-federal standards.
Money will be spent (wasted) not just in an excited, misguided grab for the latest and the best, but in a sickeningly politicized, even anti-God, materialism-belief-based, green-evangelized “science” that the USOE pretends is not NGSS.
The dishonest presentation of the 6th to 8th grade science standards to the public as if they were not NGSS is an issue for an audit. Does honesty matter, or not?
The money that will be spent bases in part on this very survey, will be taken from taxpayers to put Utah on the federally aligned (unconstitutional) curriculum for politicized science, which is an issue for an audit.
For almost four years, many of us (including teachers, like me) have been carefully, sadly following the activities of the USOE as it has, time and time again, sold out what’s best for Utah’s children, teachers, and future autonomy, for money. For grant upon grant upon federal grant.
It is sickening. NGSS alignment is more of the same.
Please audit this public comment survey and let’s insist that USOE be honest. Have a public comment survey that actually invites full commentary on all aspects of this transformation of our schools.
Audit this survey, and strike it. Have an honest look at NGSS and ask the public about moving to national standards for science.
Ask the public to evaluate NGSS, and call it what it really is. Audit whether it is even legitimate science. It redefines the concept by dropping the classic scientific model of questioning, basing itself and its unquestionable “facts” on controversial issues with heavy political underpinnings, not on real, actual, open-minded science.
Here’s the powerful open letter, signed by individuals and organizations from all over the country including several Utah grassroots organizations, asking Congress to stop the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind.
Wendy Hart, a member of the school board in Alpine School District, Utah’s largest district, has taken a public stand against the Utah State Office of Education’s adoption of NGSS national “Science” standards. You can, too.
Please watch her video and share it. When we don’t tell legislators or other elected officials how we feel, the USOE feels justified in assuming it’s fine with us.
What does “Orwellian” mean, and how does it relate to education –and to our current president’s latest softening commentary about high stakes testing?
George Orwell showed, in his books 1984 and Animal Farm, how tyranny looks, works, stomps on the individual and suffocates freedom. He could have been describing Obama’s CEDS/SLDS/EdFacts data exchange in its final form.
(If you haven’t, read 1984. Just read the first half and skip the nightmarish ending (my advice) –that way, you’ll see why privacy matters so very, very much, why the freedom to choose the path of your own conscience matters, and why big government control of data is deadly.)
Some see Obama’s new testing attitude as sincere enlightenment; others think it’s a move to regain popularity among teacher’s unions and angry parents; but the reason I am sure that Obama’s softening his stance on high-stakes testing is that he does not need it in his Orwellian-style, centrally managed, Constitution-be-damned kingdom.
He does not need the tests to control the people nor to get data about them, now that he has:
Student data collected in daily, continual SIS updates that is no longer protected by what used to be, pre-2009, FERPA’s consent-only privacy protections.
School systems functioning as data donors to Obama’s SLDS systems via the SLDS and the EdFacts Data Exchange
Compulsory education, so that unless parents somehow can provide private school tuitions or devote their lives to home schooling, every child is collected in the big net.
“I keep getting texts, phone messages and emails telling me how happy folks are that Obama is now listening to us – and that Opt Out has been heard. This is heartbreaking for me – because this tells me that mainstream media has done a stellar job of co-opting Opt Out…
Thenext wave involves the U.S. Dept. of Ed’s recommendations for testing reduction which also comes with funds to support states in getting there. And the scariest part is this – the GROUNDWORK IS COMPLETE. The feds/corporations did exactly what they came to do – they dangled carrots. They got high stakes testing systems in place with longitudinal data bases to carry the seamless productivity of the data. They loosened privacy regulations. They got common standards out there which are essential for easy data tagging. They pushed and pushed and pushed to support charters and alternative teacher certification. They set the groundwork for the STATES to now lead the way – and they (feds/corporations) have their people in place on school boards, schools of education, depts. of ed…
And now, they simply have commiserated with the masses and said weneed to reduce testing and make sure the testing that occurs is meaningful and does not take away from classroom instruction. This is accomplished so easily. It’s called online daily computer based testing. Followed by online daily computer based instruction. Call it mastery testing. Competency based testing. Proficiency testing. Whatever you like. It will begin to fall in place very quickly as states move away from the hated interim testing and massive amounts of end of year testing. There will be less need for these large tests with quick, tidy, END OF DAY testing TIED TO STUDENT GRADES and STUDENT PROMOTION to the next grade/digital badge – whatever it may be – and of course testing which tells the teacher what the next day’s online instruction must be. It’s already happening. And now the federal gov’t. is simply nudging it into the states’ hands with a resounding message of support, an apology for overstepping their boundaries and a few bucks along the way…”
The worst part about seeing federal (Obama) or local (Senator Stephenson, Representative Poulsen) officials suddenly seeing the Opt Out light, and suddenly pooh-pooh-ing high stakes testing– is the replacement, the “new” and bigger river of data to fulfill their stated goal of “data-driven” central decision making: it’s stealth assessment, also known as embedded assessment.
Stealth assessment is nonconsensual assessment, unannounced assessment and data gathering. (Hello, consent of the governed.)
It’s testing that happens while students are simply using their technological devices for any school assignment. And it’s being discussed right now in our Utah legislature as the solution for the ills of high-stakes testing.
What are they discussing? Which is worse, SAGE or stealth?
Let’s make a little pros and cons list together. (Also, see my top ten reasons to opt out if you want more detail on why SAGE opt-outs are so vital.)
CONS: For High Stakes Standardized Testing (SAGE/PARCC/SBAC/AIR tests)
The tests rob students of real learning by pressuring teachers to teach to the test.
They rob teachers of professional judgment by punishing and rewarding them based on test scores.
Utah’s SAGE is secretive, closed to teachers and parents.
The tests are un-valid (never having been tested).
The standards, upon which the tests are based, are un-valid (never having been tested).
The untested tests are using our children as guinea pigs without our consent.
The tests do not meet basic values for codes of ethics.
PROS: For High Stakes Standardized Testing (SAGE/PARCC/SBAC/AIR tests)
We can opt out of the tests.
That’s it.
We can opt out of the tests; we can’t opt out of stealth testing, aka curriculum-embedded assessment.
Do you see? The move away from standardized tests is also a move away from the parental or individual ability to opt out of the data mining assault on privacy.
Taking Utah as an example: if Representative Marie Poulson’s committee— that was formed after her stealth assessment (anti-high stakes testing) resolution passed— decides to kick SAGE testing to the curb, the Utah legislature will follow the federal trend of pushing all the data mining further underground by using embedded assessment (stealth testing) as its replacement.
Don’t let this happen. Talk to your representatives. Say no to stealth/embedded testing.
The following letter is reposted with permission from Libertas Institute, a Utah-based conservative think-tank. It was given to members of the Utah legislature two weeks ago.
Each SLDS runs according to federal specs and is interoperable. Thus, the fifty SLDS systems function together as a “de facto” federal stalking system on children, college students, and the members of the U.S. workforce. Every state’s “voluntary” SLDS feeds its data about citizens to the federal EdFacts data exchange.
Libertas Institute points out that SLDS was created and is being used without voter approval or representation; there was no legislative knowledge or debate, and there has been no effort to promote parental knowledge or to acquire parental/student consent for this massive, lifelong data mining project.
Action step: after you read this letter, please contact your legislators (here is contact info for Utah legislators, the governor and D.C. legislators) to put them on the task of creating, at the very least, an immediate, definite, parental-opt-out bill.
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September 28, 2015
To: Members of the Administrative Rules Review Committee
Senators and Representatives,
The Utah State Office of Education (USOE) will be in your meeting tomorrow, among other
things, to explain the Statewide Longitudinal Data System (SLDS)—a large database that
stores a lengthy list of data points on each child in Utah’s public schools. We are concerned
with how this database was set up and how it’s being used; as we are unable to attend the
meeting, we wish to briefly outline key concerns for your consideration.
We allege that USOE created, and now operates, this database without any legislative
authorization or oversight. Further, the federal funding USOE has obtained in order to build
and operate the database has required them to make certain policy commitments, as you’ll
see below, that exceed their authority and circumvented any public discussion on the matter.
This letter outlines three actions of which you should be aware:
1. The “Four Assurances” promised by Governor Huntsman
2. A grant received by USOE to build the federally compliant SLDS
3. The 2015 grant announced just last week to further develop and utilize the SLDS
The “Four Assurances” promised by Governor Huntsman
On April 15, 2009, Governor Jon Huntsman signed an Application for Initial Funding under
the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund Program, submitted to the U.S. Department of Education.
The purpose of this application was to obtain federal “stimulus” dollars; here is the
explanation from the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE):
The State Fiscal Stabilization Fund (SFSF) program is a new one-time appropriation of $53.6 billion under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). Of the amount appropriated, the U. S. Department of Education will award governors approximately $48.6 billion by formula under the SFSF program in exchange for a commitment to advance essential education reforms…
Without legislative authorization or guarantee, the Governor made four assurances to the
USDOE—a required step in order to receive any many. Those assurances were as follows:
1. The State of Utah will take actions to “improve teacher effectiveness” and “address
inequities in the distribution of highly qualified teachers between high- and low-poverty
schools”
2. The State of Utah will “establish a longitudinal data system”
3. The State will –
1. Enhance the quality of the academic assessments it administers…
2. Comply with the requirements… related to the inclusion of children with
disabilities and limited English proficient students in State assessments, the
development of valid and reliable assessments for those students, and the
provision of accommodations that enable their participation in State assessments;
(Inclusion Assurance) and
3. Take steps to improve State academic content standards and student academic
achievement standards consistent with section 6401(e)(1)(A)(ii) of the America
COMPETES Act. (Improving Standards Assurance)
4. The State will ensure compliance with the requirements of section 1116(b)(7)(C)(iv) and
section 1116(b)(8)(B) of the ESEA with respect to schools identified under these sections.
(Supporting Struggling Schools Assurance)
Thus, without any legislation to back it up, the federal government was promised significant
policy reforms in the state: common education standards (“Common Core”), new
assessments, teacher evaluations, school grading, and a comprehensive data collection system.
All of this was done in pursuit of money; less than a year later, U.S. Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan announced that Utah had been showered with $741,979,396 through the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Utah lawmakers—and thus the public at large—were left out of the loop.
A grant received by USOE to build the federally compliant SLDS
Florida, which bought and uses Utah’s SAGE/AIR test, has taken the phenomenally reasonable step of assessing its assessment: testing the standardized test– something that Utah has not done.
Florida hired Alpine Testing and EdCount to assess its (and Utah’s) assessment instrument –to see if the SAGE measures what it claims to measure. The simple question was: Is the test valid?
The answer that came back was “NO.” The independent company, Alpine Testing and EdCount, who testified at length to the Florida legislature, said that SAGE is not measuring what it claims to measure. (See that legislative testimony here.)
Now, two members of Utah’s largest school district (Alpine) have published a letter summarizing Florida’s findings on SAGE. Brian Halladay and Wendy Hart wrote:
“What Alpine Testing said in their comments to Florida is astounding. I have outlined some key points from the video:
At 44:50- Many items found in the test didn’t align with the standard that was being tested.
At 47:70: Test scores should only be used at an aggregate level.
At 48:15 – They recommend AGAINST using test scores for individual student decisions.
At 1:01:00 – They admit that “test scores should not be used as a sole determinant in decisions such as the prevention of advancement to the next grade, graduation eligibility, or placement in a remedial course.”
At 1:20:00 – “There is data than can be looked at that shows that the use of these test scores would not be appropriate”.
Alpine Testing was the only company that applied to perform the validity study for Florida. Once awarded the contract, they teamed with EdCount, the founder of which had previously worked for AIR.
So, what we have is a questionably independent group stating that this test should not be used for individual students, but it’s ok for the aggregate data to be used for schools and teacher evaluations. If this sounds absurd, it’s because it is. If it’s been shown that this test isn’t good for students, why would we be comfortable using it for the grading or funding of our schools and teachers? The sum of individual bad data can’t give us good data. Nor should we expect it to.
What more evidence is needed by our State Board, Legislature or Governor to determine that our students shouldn’t be taking the SAGE test? This test is a failure. How much longer will our children and our state (and numerous other states) spend countless time and resources in support of a failed test, or teaching to a failed test?…” (Read the whole letter here.)
Why is this so important?
Any test– a pregnancy test, a drug test, a breathalizer test– should probably actually measure what it claims to measure. People should be able to solidly trust a test that’s used as a foundation for labeling, rewarding and punishing students, teachers and schools.
If there’s no validity test, SAGE is nothing more than a gamble with children’s, teacher’s, and taxpayer’s time, money and futures. Without validity, we’ve just conscripted every public school student in the state to be unpaid, uninformed, academic and psychological lab rats.)
Fact: Utah stubbornly refused to do a validity test on SAGE, despite pleading, prodding, and even a $100,000 reward offer for proof of validity testing –yet, as it turns out, that’s okay now. Since Florida uses Utah’s SAGE test, Florida’s research on SAGE directly, unquestionably, reflects on Utah’s test. So we finally have a Utah validity test. And SAGE failed its test.
Kurtz’ review of Drilling Through the Core says: “It’s all here, from the most basic explanation of what Common Core is, to the history, the major arguments for and against, and so much more. The controversies over both the English and math standards are explained; the major players in the public battle are identified; the battle over Gates Foundation’s role is anatomized; the roles of the tests and the testing consortia are reviewed; concerns over data-mining and privacy are laid out; the dumbing-down effect on the college curriculum is explained; as is the role of the Obama administration and the teachers unions. I found the sections on “big data” particularly helpful. I confess that despite my considerable interest in Common Core, I hadn’t much followed the data-mining issue. Boy was that a mistake. It strikes me that the potential for abuse of personal data is substantially greater in the case of Common Core than in the matter of national security surveillance. With Common Core we are talking about databases capable of tracking every American individual from kindergarten through adulthood, and tremendous potential for the sharing of data with not only government but private groups…
The federal government has absolutely no constitutional right to control curriculum, but they’re doing it anyway. In a 2011 video for the Whitehouse’s Learning Registry, Steve Midgley, the Deputy Director of Education Technology for the US Department of Education, says that the Learning Registry “makes federal learning resources easier to find, easier to access and easier to integrate into learning environments wherever they are stored.” He also admits that the Federal Communications Commission changed broadband internet regulations to get federally-sanctioned curriculum items into every child’s classroom.
Say what? Yes. You heard it right. The Whitehouse is picking winners and losers in curriculum providers. They have created an effective oligarchy over online learning and testing resources in order to make sure that the curriculum coming through your child’s school-issued iPad or computer contains the right worldview.
They funded the creation of Common Education Data Standards (CEDS), gave states federal grants to expand their state longitudinal data system (see Utah’s here and here), got 300 (and counting) online learning and testing groups to create interoperable curriculum and computer-adaptive tests, and created a one-stop-shop called the Learning Registry where every child’s learning data will be tracked. This is information control, folks. And, it’s not just for K-12.
George Washington University, among many other institutions of higher ed, has jumped on the Learning Registry’s bandwagon. They are helping the federal administration (perhaps unwittingly) succeed at redefining student competencies around student behaviors, as opposed to academics.
When Utahns think of competency-based education, we think of a student mastering something factual and proving competency. That’s not what the federal Learning Registry seeks. It defines competencies around values, attitudes and beliefs.
In other words, the more a student can think in moral relativist terms, the more “skilled” they are. Students who think “all truth is relative” will be easily malleable workers for a globally managed economy—widgets for crony business leaders.
So, how will the Whitehouse’s Learning Registry work? It will:
Filter the curriculum content that reaches teachers and students
Collect data on how a child thinks and what they believe
Use that data to personalize online learning curriculum and adaptive testing systems (compare this to political campaigns changing the way voters vote by collecting data to create personalized marketing)
Viola! A child will see America in terms of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality—and advocate for big government solutions.
When John Marini talked about the famous movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington written by Frank Capra, he said, “Frank Capra did not see America as many Americans do today, in terms of personal categories of identity…he understood America in terms of its political principles.”
If we want our children to be champions of liberty, including religious liberty, we need to engage our local education leaders in a discussion about who is defining “competency.” And, we cannot be naïve in thinking that we will implement competency-based education differently than the federal administration desires. If we put our plug (technology systems) into their electrical outlet (Learning Registry), we will be giving them all-power over what our children learn—and, we’ve already started plugging in. As one tech-savvy mom recently noted, “Parents need to understand that a unique student ID# will act like a social security number on steroids.”
George Washington University says that they are helping the Whitehouse “create a beta version of a credentialing registry on the existing Learning Registry.” This means that the Feds are positioned, not only to control curriculum, but how colleges rate student credentials—also called “digital badges.” If this sounds like German-style education, that’s because it is.
We can’t allow the federal administration to use personally identifiable data to “personalize” learning resources for our children. It’s time for Congressional hearings into the Whitehouse’s Learning Registry—and it’s international data standards-setting partners, IMS Global and the SIF Association.
It’s also time for our local boards of education to take back what it means to have locally controlled education. Local boards should stand with parents by making sure that their district’s online curriculum and test items do not conform to federally-funded data standards.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
For more information on how the federal administration is aligning state and district policies to internationalist goals for competency-based education, see:
Even though I don’t like bumper stickers, I proudly slapped a U.S. Senator Mike Lee bumper sticker on my car because he’s that rare legislator who honors in actions as well as in talk, that priceless treasure, our freedom-friendly U.S. Constitution. And this week, I waited on the phone for a long time to ask him a question during his virtual town hall meeting this week.
I never got my chance, and that’s understandable because I heard the announcer say that 15,000 Utahns were attending, so… I’ll ask it now.
How weighty does the list of grievances need to be for Congress to convene a hearing on the Department of Education?
It seems like any one of the grievances that I’ll list next, would deserve action. Taken together, these assaults on Constitutional rights of individuals is almost unbelievable.
What are your thoughts on this list: as a legislator, as a parent, as a teacher (especially if you are a special ed teacher) as a student, as a taxpayer, as a citizen with Constitutionally protected rights? When should Congress hold the Department of Education accountable for:
ADMITTING IT FORCED STATE ALIGNMENT TO COMMON CORE – Department of Education official Joanne Weiss has just now not only confessed, but boasted, that the federal government deliberately “forced alignment” and “deployed tools” to push states into Race to the Top/Common Core, in this recent report. ( See the Pulse2016 article.) Important note: Weiss’ confession starkly contrasts with countless claims in the past three years from the Department, that Common Core was “state-led” and that any other view was “nonsense”. Duncan then said:
“… a new set of standards—rigorous, high-quality learning standards, developed and led by a group of governors and state education chiefs—are under attack as a federal takeover of the schools. And your role in sorting out truth from nonsense is really important.” – 2013 speech by Sec. Duncan.
4. DELETING PRIVACY LAWS – The Department of Education altered previously protective federal FERPA laws, altering policy that changed the definition of what IS personally identifiable information (PII). PII can now include biological and behavioral data (biometric data) about children or about any citizen who once was in a publically funded school. The Department also reduced to just a “best practice” –a.k.a. “optional”– the previously protective FERPA rule that parental consent had to be received prior to any sharing of student PII. The Department was sued by the Electronic Privacy Information Center for doing this. Read details at that site.
5. STANDARDIZING THE P-20 DATA MINE – The Department of Education partnered with a private, closed-door group called CCSSO (the co-creators, by the way, of Common Core) to co-produce common data standards, called CEDS, which further standardizes the data mining ability of the federal government over American citizens from early childhood through the workforce, in an initiative known as P-20 (or P-20W).
6. TEACHING AND IMPLEMENTING SOCIALISM, ALMOST AS A NATIONAL RELIGION – The Department of Education’s official blog, as well as Secretary Duncan’s speeches themselves, have unilaterally redefined education– as the teaching of socialism, aka social justice. Who passed a law that social justice would be the foundation for student learning? Who was authorized to take the entire population of U.S. school children down that path? In “Education is Social Justice” and other official articles and speeches, we learn that no longer will our education dollars teach our children to cherish Constitutional ideals like individual rights, property rights, separation of powers, or religious; instead schools will teach social justice, which is, unfortunately, not justice. It is theft. It allows the Department of Education (or others) to steal teachers, money, or data from one group to redistribute to another, without consent. Duncan can’t seem to give a single speech without spreading “social justice” and his Equity and Education Commission‘s publications reveal that the Department is promoting not just the teaching, but the implementation of socialism and forced redistribution, nationally. Shouldn’t there at least have been a vote?
7. SUBMITTING TO GATES – The Department of Education worked closely with, and accepted money from, the worlds’ second richest man and implemented nationwide policies based not on voter intent but on Gates’ intent. As Diane Ravitch wrote:“The idea that the richest man in America can purchase and — working closely with the U.S. Department of Education — impose new and untested academic standards on the nation’s public schools is a national scandal. A congressional investigation is warranted.”
In conclusion:
“When the story of the Common Core is finally told, it’s going to be ugly. It’s going to show how the sponsors of the Common Core made a mockery of the Constitution and the democratic process. It’s going to show how the Obama administration pressed a completely untested reform on the states, evading public debate at both the federal and state levels. It’s going to show how a deliberative process that ought to have taken years was compressed into a matter of months. It’s going to show how legitimate philanthropic funding for an experimental education reform morphed into a gross abuse of democracy. It’s going to show how the Obama Education Department intentionally obscured the full extent of its pressure on the states, even as it effectively federalized the nation’s education system. It’s going to show how Common Core is turning the choice of private — especially Catholic — education into no choice at all.”
That quote comes from Stanley Kurtz’s article for “The Ethics and Policy Center”entitled “Time for Congressional Hearings on Common Core”.
So maybe it’s good that I didn’t get to ask this question on the phone with my senator this week. I can mail it to him now. Maybe others will, too.
The US Department of Education created a “Final Rule” under the new No Child Left Behind to take away constitutional local control; this time, control of special education tests and standards. It said:
The Secretary amends the regulations governing title I, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as amended (ESEA) (the “Title I regulations”), to no longer authorize a State to define modified academic achievement standards and develop alternate assessments based on those modified academic achievement standards…
(Please share “Primum Non Nocere,” or this introduction to it with legislators and school board members, and especially with US Congressmen who voted FOR the NCLB reauthorization –under the premise that it would not harm parental nor local control but was supposed to “reduce the federal footprint” Orrin Hatch and virtually the entire US Congress bought that talking point.)
Dr. Thompson was furious that the Final Rule of NCLB, which takes effect September 15, 2015, forces special education students to take the same tests and to use the same curriculum that all other students take, based on cited research studies of the U.S. Dept. of Education –studies that are ludicrously far from being valid. (More on that, below.) He was even more infuriated when he discovered that the research studies were unapplicable, or fake.
In a follow-up post to the “Primum Non Nocere” analysis, Dr. Thompson made all of this fake research much easier to wrap our brains around with this analogy: Imagine that a parent takes a very sick child to the doctor’s office and the doctor prescribes eating “Froot Loops” three times each day while watching SouthPark episodes. The doctor cites research to support this course of action, taken from the journal of gynecology, and expects the parent to comply.
1. All learning-disabled students can become grade level scholars with no differentiated learning– they just need great teaching and great supports.
2. The new testing (Common Core/SAGE) is valid for ALL students with ALL learning disabilities.
3. These new tests are so good that we don’t need alternative or modified tests.
4. The ONLY thing reading and math disabled students need, to become grade level scholars, are good teachers.
5. These new tests are so perfect that they were designed specifically to perfectly measure academic achievement in ALL learning-disabled children.
6. States and ground-level teachers have denied proper instruction for divergent-learning students; therefore, we no longer need individual states to make special tests, because now special education students will be saved by the new Common Core Standards.
In “Primum Non Nocere,” Dr. Thompson read through each of these USDOE decrees, went to the cited research journal itself, and dug around.
He pointed out that in every case, the research was either directly paid for by the USDOE and its partners, or it did not qualify as research because it had never been peer reviewed, or it tested one age or ability grouping of children but applied the findings to a different age or ability grouping; or the decree/claim was not even linked to any research study whatsoever.
I hope this seems important enough to study more closely and to share with your senators and representatives; Dr. Thompson is calling for a Congressional hearing on this, the US Department of Education’s obviously false use of research, which it used to fraudulently justify taking away local authority over our special education children.
I hope that our nation is not so numb to morality that we no longer care to prosecute deceit and fraud– especially even when it concerns innocent, disabled children.
That research didn’t include kindergarteners through fifth graders– no elementary school aged children were studied! Most of the students were in eighth grade. –Yet the Department is applying their conclusion to all students.
The “study” was paid for by the US Department of Education.
Math and reading weren’t included. The studies used science, social studies, and English; and, only 10% of those studies actually reported on English at all. –Yet the Department includes math and reading in its approved Common tests, to be applied to all, now including special education students.
Most of the students included in the meta-analysis were of average I.Q. Yet the Department is applying their conclusion to special education.
Virtually none of the students were behaviorally or emotionally disturbed (only 4%) Yet the Department is applying their conclusion to special education students who are behaviorally or emotionally disturbed.
It was not an original research study. It was a holistic, literary study of other studies.
Demographics were lacking, so nobody knows how these studies impact children who come from groups who historically test very poorly.
US Department of Education Fraudulent Conclusion – Number Two:
To support the Department of Education’s decree that special education students will benefit from taking Common Core/SAGE tests, it claimed that “new assessments have been designed to facilitate the valid, reliable, and fair assessment of most students, including students with disabilities who previously took an alternate assessment”.
Guess what Dr. Thompson found?
There was no research study cited.
There was no evidence given.
The claim that these new tests have been designed to be fair and valid and reliable for special education students, is utterly baseless.
Not one of the Common Core testing consortia, funded by grants from the U.S. Department of Education the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (such as SBAC, PARCC, and AIR which designs Utah’s SAGE test) have published independently reviewed validity data on special education students (or any students for that matter).
US Department of Education Fraudulent Conclusion – Number Three:
To support the Department’s decree that “alternate assessments based on modified academic achievement standards are no longer needed,” the Department cited a study that (surprise) was also paid for by the US Department of Education– in partnership with the CCSSO, the group that co-created Common Core. This study was never peer-reviewed, and thus qualifies as propaganda rather than real scientific research.
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Other studies, that were also used as references by the USDOE, openly urged “caution in interpretation of our findings given the small number of participants,” and warned: “no instructional method, even those validated using randomized control studies, works for all students” — serious cautions that the USDOE clearly did not heed.
Dr. Thompson has called for a congressional hearing:
If the U.S. Department of Education’s force feeding of “Fruit Loops”to our public school children (especially with our vulnerable divergent learning and minority children & teens, all justified via the use of “gynecology” research,) does not justify an immediate Congressional Hearing, I honestly don’t know what the hell else would justify that action. My four, soon to be five children, are more important, and deserve more attention, than Benghazi, or Hillary Clinton’s alleged misuse of government email servers.
I urge you to read all of the findings of USDOE fraudulent use of citations, as discovered in “rimum Non Nocere“. These were only three highlights of many sobering points.
Primum non nocere in Latin means “first, do no harm.” One of the elemental precepts of ethics, taught across disciplines and throughout the world, this ancient principle holds that given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or to do nothing, than to risk causing more harm than good. It reminds the doctor, the psychologist and the educator that he or she must consider possible damage that any intervention might do and to invoke Primum non nocere when considering use of any intervention that carries a less- than-certain chance of benefit.
As objective, local clinical community scientists, we at Early Life Child Psychology and Education Center have had no previous interest or involvement in education public policy or in politics. Our involvement now stems from observations as professionals, is founded on ethics, and must increase as we see that as a consequence of changes in education policy, many children’s lives are being fractured.
We are not a special interest group: within the walls of our Education Psychology Clinic are professionals from diverse cultural, political, ethnic and religious backgrounds, united under one cause: the ethical and safe practice of administering psychological assessment, therapy, and educational interventions to “divergent learning” children who reside in our respective communities in Southern California, and Salt Lake City, Utah. We are African Americans, Caucasians, Latinos, Asians, progressives, tea party activists, socialists, LGBT, traditionally married and single parents, agnostics and conservative Christians.
The harmony we share as a diverse group of clinicians-educators, dedicated to serving the needs of children, has not been duplicated by the diverse group of political and corporate public policy makers who have been entrusted with decision-making power. We here note: that agenda-laden political and corporate partnerships, entrusted with power, have made life-altering decisions regarding education policies for children in public schools, placing their interests above the direct needs of children, resulting in ground-level chaos we have heretofore never seen.
This paper is written not only because of our professional observations of increased numbers of suffering public school children whom our clinic serves; it is also written in response to recent public policy changes, initiated by U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan under the 2015 reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, regarding assessment practices and states’ loss of authority over the education of our nation’s “special education” children. Those new policies and the cited research, upon which they claim to be based, are herein examined.
Under the light and concept of ethics, using ethical application of peer-reviewed science toward the subject matter of testing and mental health, this paper examines the influence of each on education policies. It will be clear to objective readers that Secretary Duncan’s policies do not share the ethical professionals’ commitment to the standards set by the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Code of Ethics. The US Department of Education’s interpretation of cited “studies” used to justify policy changes have been dangerously manipulated and are utilized to achieve political goals at the expense of millions of public school children.
We strongly encourage politicians, policy makers, and state education leaders to examine education policies under the light and scope of ethics, as opposed to catering to the requests of corporate and political special interests. Failure to do so will result in harm to our nation’s vulnerable divergent learning children, including African American, Latino, autistic, dyslexic, gifted, mentally ill, poverty-stricken, and “learning disabled” children.
Parents, not governments, are and must always be the resident experts of their own children. May readers be endowed with discernment and wisdom as they ponder the effects of policy in the service of children.
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Acknowledgements:
Wendy Hart & Brian Halladay:
Alpine District school board members whose intellect and courage, in the face of much ridicule and derision, have been an inspiration to thousands of parents nationwide.
Colorado public school teacher Peggy Robertson:
Ms. Robertson’s courageous stance against high stakes, experimental achievement testing on behalf of poverty stricken African American and Latino youth in America, set the tone nationwide for public school teachers to find their voices.
2016 Utah Gubernatorial Candidate Jonathan Johnson & Staff:
For challenging the current incumbent so that ground level parents and teachers can best meet the needs of students, as opposed to serving corporate and political interests.
Parents, educators and advocates in the States of New York & Florida: Positive proof that opposition to increased high stakes testing is a culturally and politically diverse endeavor.
Licensed Clinical Psychologist Dr. Francis Thompson:
Her creative and ethical service to children in our community, as well as her own large contingent of children/teens in her own home, has been inspirational.
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Media Inquiries:
Please direct all inquiries for media requests, interviews, or commentary to Mr. Brook Wardle, Chief Operations Officer/Spokesperson for Early Life Psychology, via email ONLY: bwardle@earlylifepsych.com
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Guide to Content:
Eight direct statements were examined from the U.S. Department of Education’s August 2015 Rule titled: “Improving the Academic Achievement of the Disadvantaged: Assistance to States for the Education of Children With Disabilities.”
Every factual statement written by the USDOE that was referenced and cited to peer reviewed research as support for the policy changes was examined separately under the heading of “USDOE STATEMENT OF FACT #.”
All eight “USDOE STATEMENT OF FACTS” were directly copied and pasted from the “Rule” to this review document. The statement of fact will be quickly and concisely reviewed and evaluated under the following subheadings:
Research cited to support USDOE’s factual statement:A direct citation of the research cited by USOE is provided.
Scope & Limitations of USDOE Cited Research: The size and conceptual scope of the research, and cautionary limitations of the cited research, often quoted directly by authors.
Summary & Conclusion: A straightforward, brief summary analysis to determine if the research cited by the U.S.D.O.E. was relevant and supporting of the factual statement.
This review will close with a concluding message to all stakeholders in public school education, and a reference to several applicable American Psychological Association (APA) statements of ethics.
“Improving the Academic Achievement of the Disadvantaged; Assistance to States for the Education of Children With Disabilities”
AGENCY:
Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services
ACTION:
Final regulations.
USDOE’s SUMMARY:
The Secretary amends the regulations governing title I, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as amended (ESEA) (the “Title I regulations”), to no longer authorize a State to define modified academic achievement standards and develop alternate assessments based on those modified academic achievement standards for eligible students with disabilities.
In order to make conforming changes to ensure coordinated administration of programs under title I of the ESEA and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the Secretary is also amending the regulations for Part B of the IDEA.
DATES:
These regulations are effective September 21, 2015.
Background:
In 2007, the Department amended the Title I regulations to permit States to define modified academic achievement standards for eligible students with disabilities and to assess those students with alternate assessments based on those modified academic achievement standards. The Department promulgated those regulations based on the understanding that (1) there was a small group of students whose disabilities precluded them from achieving grade-level proficiency and whose progress was such that they would not reach grade-level achievement standards in the same time frame as other students, and (2) the regular State assessment would be too difficult for this group of students and the assessment based on alternate academic achievement standards would be too easy for them. 72 FR 17748 (Apr. 9, 2007). In addition, at that time, the Department acknowledged that measuring the academic achievement of students with disabilities, particularly those eligible to be assessed based on modified academic standards was an area “in which there is much to learn and improve” and indicated that “[a]s data and research on assessments for students with disabilities improve, the Department may decide to issue additional regulations or guidance.” 72 FR 17748, 17763 (Apr. 9, 2007).
BRIEF OUTLINE OF USDOE’S CHANGES TO EXISTING ASSESSMENT RULES:
States may no longer define modified achievement standards for the vast majority of divergent learning students in public schools.
States may no longer develop alternative assessments based on modified achievement standards (with the exception of a small percentage of children ill- defined and labeled “severely cognitively impaired”).
Prior April 2007 modifications allowed such action under the premise that students with disabilities would not reach grade level achievement standards in the same time frame as other students.
Prior April 2007 modifications allowed testing modifications under the premise that students with disabilities would find the regular State Assessments too difficult.
Prior April 2007 modifications stated that “as addition data and research was obtained in the future on tests for students with disabilities, the Department “may decide to issue additional regulations for guidance”. (72 FR 17748, 17763 (Apr. 9, 2007).
Summary:
The Department of Education now requires that states can no longer modify academic standards for students with disabilities (with the noted “exception” of the most cognitively impaired special education students), nor can states develop alternative assessments for those modified assessments.he Department of Education justified these new rule modifications from the prior 2007 rules based on new research that it claims supports the idea that all students with disabilities can perform on the same grade level as traditional students, and that students with disabilities can be tested fairly on the same test used by traditional students. An examination of the claims of the USDOE, and its research, which the Department says supports these claims, are outlined in the next section.
FACTUAL STATEMENT ANALYSIS OF USDOE’S SUPPORTING RESEARCH
USDOE FINDING OF FACT #1:
“Since these regulations went into effect, additional research has demonstrated that students with disabilities who struggle in reading and mathematics can successfully learn grade-level content and make significant academic progress when appropriate instruction, services, and supports are provided.”
Research Cited To Support the USDOE’s Factual Finding#1:
Scruggs, T., Mastropieri, M., Berkeley, S., & Graetz, J. (2010). Do Special Education Interventions Improve Learning of Secondary Content? A Meta- Analysis. Remedial and Special Education, 31(6), 437-449.
Scope& Limitations of USDOE Cited Research:
Meta Analysis of existing research; not an original research study:
(“To address these issues, we conducted a comprehensive literature search and synthesis”) P.437
Criterion for inclusion in this study did not include elementary students from Kindergarten to grade 5:
(“Included in this meta-analysis were original content area intervention studies that included data on secondary aged students with disabilities for which standardized mean difference effect sizes could be computed. Students were considered secondary if they were identified as attending classes in middle schools, junior high schools, or high schools.”) (P. 438).
Content areas examined for this study were limited to only science, social studies, and English. Math and reading were not included in this meta-analysis:
(“Content area interventions included content relevant to any area within science (e.g., chemistry, biology), social studies (e.g., history, geography), or English.). P.438
The mean grade level of participants reviewed was 8th grade:
(“Of the 67 studies (95.7%) that provided grade-level information, students were enrolled at a mean grade level of 8.3 (SD = 1.5). p. 439
The mean I.Q. level of reported participants was “Average”:
(The 42 (60.0%) studies that included IQ information reported a mean sample
IQ of 91.2 (SD = 7.2).) P.439
Only 4.3% of the students examined in the Meta analysis were categorized as emotionally/behaviorally disturbed:
“(Including students with emotional/behavioral dis- abilities (4.3%).). P. 439
7.). Only 50% of the studies examined reported data on race/ethnicity. The studies that reported data on race and ethnicity were not sufficient in number to warrant substantive conclusions:
(“These proportions overrepresented Caucasian students (61.7%) and underrepresented African American (20.5%), Hispanic (14.6%), and Asian/Pacific Islander (1.9%) students (USDOE, 2005)”.). P. 440
Only 10% of the studies examined reported subject matter data on English:
(“More studies were conducted in the area of science (40.0%), followed by social studies (34.3%), English(10.0%) ). P. 440
Researcher’s state that “unfortunate” limitations of this study are the lack of demographic variables:
(“It was unfortunate to note that not all studies reported important demographic variables, such as gender and race/ ethnicity. Such information can provide information regarding whether research samples are representative of the students placed in special education today.) P. 445
The study was paid for by the USDOE:
(“Research for this article was supported in part from grants from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, numbers H325D020020, H325D070008, and H324C020085.)
Summary & Conclusion:
This peer-reviewed study cited by the USDOE, as “evidence” that all special education students “struggling in reading and mathematics” can “successfully learn grade level content,” is a claim that is clearly not supported. Specifically, the subject of math was not examined, no Kindergarten through Grade 5 students were part of this meta-analysis, and an extremely limited number of emotionally disabled, African American, Latino, or Pacific Islanders were examined. The study was funded by the U.S. Department of Education.
USDOE FINDING OF FACT #2:
“In addition, nearly all States have developed new college- and career-ready standards and new assessments aligned with those standards. These new assessments have been designed to facilitate the valid, reliable, and fair assessment of most students, including students with disabilities who previously took an alternate assessment based on modified academic achievement standards.”
Research Cited To Support the USDOE’s Factual Finding#2:
NONE
Scope& Limitations of Cited Research:
NOT APPLICABLE. NO INDEPENDENT RESEARCH CITED.
Summary & Conclusion:
Not one of the Common Core testing consortia funded by grants from the U.S. Department of Education, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (SBAC, PARCC, AIR) who designed these new Common Core assessments, has published independently reviewed validity data on special education students (or any students for that matter).
“Validity”, simply put, is the process of providing empirical evidence that a designed test performs as it’s stated purpose.
In the absence of such documentation, it is reasonable to conclude that the USDOE of educations statement in this regard, has no basis in truth, and to change policies based on this assertion is a potentially dangerous and far-reaching violation of ethics in the fields of psychology and psychometrics.
1 The Florida Department of Education (FLDOE), under pressure from lawmakers and activists, paid $600,000.00 to a private psychometric research group, Alpine Testing, to perform a validity test on their high stakes, experimental Common Core achievement test. The non-peer reviewed results of their study were published September 1, 2015. The scope, depth, and subject matter of inquiry of the test review deviated radically from traditional psychological methods of scientific assessment validity inquiry. We elected to not provide legitimacy to FLDOE”s politically driven “validity” project by providing extensive commentary to a report that does not place the legitimate science of psychometric validity in a true and accurate light.
USDOEFINDING OF FACT #3:
“Therefore, we believe that alternate assessments based on modified academic achievement standards are no longer needed and, with high-quality instruction and appropriate accommodations, students with disabilities who took an alternate assessment based on modified academic achievement standards will be able to demonstrate their knowledge and skills by participating in the new general assessments.”
Research Cited To Support the USDOE’s Factual Finding#3:
Thurlow, M. L., Lazarus, S. S., & Bechard, S. (Eds.). (2013). Lessons learned in federally funded projects that can improve the instruction and assessment of low performing students with disabilities. (Note: This research was not peer reviewed, and was prepared by a “think tank” funded in full by the USDOE).
Scope& Limitations of Cited Research:
Research was not peer reviewed, was funded by the USDOE and was written in collaboration with the USDOE-partnered education reform group, CCSSO.
The compilation of multiple articles submitted by multiple State Offices of Education did not address specific special education populations.
Every separate article placed in this document cited the need for furtherresearch, and mostly relied on “surveys” of education teachers as the source of their data.
Summary and Conclusions:
Not one sentence, or article submitted in this compilation of papers by various state education agencies, supported (or even mentioned) the USDOE’s premise that alternative assessments should be eliminated for any population of public school students. In fact, multiple articles cited herein, suggested the need for further research on how to implement better alternative assessments for special education children in their respective states.
USDOE FINDING OF FACT #4:
“The assessments being developed by States based on college- and career-ready standards, including those developed by PARCC and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, do not eliminate the authority or need for States to administer alternate assessments based on alternate academic achievement standards for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities.”
Research Cited To Support the USDOE’s Factual Finding#4:
NONE
Scope& Limitations of Cited Research:
NOT APPLICABLE. NO INDEPENDENT RESEARCH CITED.
Summary & Conclusion:
The USDOE has not issued eligibility criteria of what constitutes a special education student having “significant cognitive disabilities.” USDOE has stated within this document that these students will compromise approximately 10% of all disabled students in a given population. This narrow and arbitrary definition excludes minority groups who have traditionally not performed well in high stakes testing arenas (e.g., African American, Latino students, etc.) and also takes away local States’ choices so that they cannot create and implement alternative assessments for children with dyslexia, severe emotional disturbances and disabilities, and children who have been diagnosed as being along the autistic spectrum.
To date, no peer reviewed publication in the world has opined that the education or clinical psychology community has ever designed a high stakes achievement test that has achieved a high level of validity for the aforementioned groups of children and teens in public school systems. USDOE is thus dictating the use, application, and interpretation of a test not validated for these specific purposes or interpretations.
USDOE FINDING OF FACT #5:
“Research demonstrates that low-achieving students with disabilities who struggle in reading[6] and low-achieving students with disabilities who struggle in mathematics[7] can successfully learn grade-level content when they have access to high-quality instruction.”
Research Cited To Support the USDOE’s Factual Finding#5 (Reading):
Allor, J. H., Mathes, P. G., Roberts, J. K., Cheatham, J.P., & Champlin, T. M. (2010). Comprehensive reading instruction for students with intellectual disabilities. Psychology in the Schools, 47, 445- 466
Scope& Limitations of Cited Research:
Extremely small sample size of study participants. Only three students were used: (“Three students were selected based on teacher recommendation and difficulty in transferring skills on progress monitoring measures. The participants were Jus- tin, Grace, and Kristen. Justin was an 8-year-old Hispanic male with an IQ of 52. Grace was a 10-year-old Hispanic female with an IQ of 59. Kristen was a 12-year-old African American female with an IQ of 45.”) P.348
(“Clearly, we urge caution in interpretation of our findings given the small number of participants.”) P.354
No independent investigation was taken to verify the accuracy and efficacy of the I.Q. scores of the participants located in their school records files. Regardless, by all indication, all three participant’s scores indicate “mental retardation” on a severe level.
The psychometric instrument to measure “reading” performance in this study was the DIBELS. No validity measures were provided for this instrument. No commonly used measures of reading that have decades of peer reviewed validity studies attributed to them were utilized for this study:
(“Progress monitoring scores, specifically Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS; Good & Kaminski, 2002), phoneme segmentation fluency (PSF), nonsense word fluency (NWF), and first-grade ORF subtests were used to identify students who showed limited growth despite some progress during the daily instructional sessions.”). P. 349
The study does not conclude that the end result of the interventions provided, resulted in these children learning how to read. (“In summary, these preliminary results provide promising evidence that even students who initially do not respond to systematic instruction can learn to improve their ability to sound out and unitize words.”) P. 355
The study did not, on any level, conclude (or even examine) whether the three participants were ever able to read at grade level.
Study funded by the “Institute of Education Science,” an arm of the USDOE.
Summary & Conclusion:
Given the small sample size, as well as the other serious limitations in this study provided above, an attempt by the USDOE to utilize such psychometrically weak and/or non existent evidence to support broad claims that all students with disabilities can read at grade level with proper instruction, is fanciful at best, and deliberately deceitful at worst.
(The two other articles cited to support the USDOE statement specifically dealt with ADHD, and “interventions” to improve reading. Neither study provides any support for the USDOE’s broad claims, and were not worthy of this reviewer’s additional time to write up the deficiencies of the studies, as such related to the USDOE claims. For those who wish to review them; they are cited in the USDOE references under #7).
Research Cited To Support the USDOE’s Factual Finding#5: (Math):
Fuchs, L. S. & Fuchs, D., Powell, S. R., Seethaler, P. M., Cirino, P. T., & Fletcher, J. M. (2008). Intensive intervention for students with mathematics disabilities: Seven principles of effective practice.
Scope & Limitations of Cited Research:
This was the first independent, peer-reviewed article cited by the USDOE that was not funded by the Department of Education. It was very well written.
The authors listed “Seven Principles in Designing Effective Intensive Interventions” for student with math disabilities. One intervention, “Ongoing Progress Monitoring” was formed under the premise that “no instructional method, even those validated using randomized control studies, works for all students”. P.86
Individually tailored programs of intervention are needed. (“We also emphasized that the last principle, ongoing progress monitoring to quantify response and formulate individually tailored programs, may be the most essential principle of intensive intervention.”) P. 86
The focus of this research was limited to only 3rdgrade students.
Summary & Conclusion:
This was the most complete, independent, interesting and well-researched article thus far cited by the USDOE, yet does not support the overreaching conclusions
of the Department’s rule change in any aspect of its scholarly work. (In fact, this article may lend itself to the notion of even more diverse methods of intervention, teaching, and testing of children who suffer from math disabilities than what may be on the current “curriculum menu” in many public schools.)
Nevertheless, a well written and crafted study limited to just 3rd grade students, does not support USDOE premise that every learning disabled child in America can, and will benefit from current interventions developed and implemented in public schools.
(The last article cited by the USDOE as evidence of efficacy for the 5th “finding of fact”, was written directly and published by the USDOE and will not be reviewed. The subject matter is based on “Response to Intervention”, and it is general knowledge amongst educational and neuropsychologist in the field that this practice, although effective amongst some student populations, has no peer- reviewed backing that suggests that it can be used on allreading “disabled” students successfully in the entire country.)
USDOE FINDING OF FACT #6:
“the developers of the new generation of assessments considered the needs of students with disabilities to ensure that the assessments are designed to allow those students to demonstrate their knowledge. [9]
Research Cited To Support the USDOE’s Factual Finding#6:
Disturbingly, test developer cited by the USDOE (PARCC) to support this bold premise, no longer has the link listed above on its corporate site. (“The requested URL /sites/parcc/files/parcc-accessibility- features-accommodations-manual-11-14_final.pdf. was not found on this server.”)
Summary & Conclusion:
There are no independent studies (or even grant-supported studies from the USDOE) in existence, which indicates that Common Core test developers (PARCC, AIR, SBAC) have published validity documents indicating that they:
“considered the needs of students with disabilities to ensure that the assessments are designed to allow those students to demonstrate their knowledge.” More than likely, these high stakes, Common Core developed tests are still in the experimental phase of development while they are being currently used on special education students, as well as every other child in public schools in the nation.
Evidence strongly suggests that the above-named testing consortia and developers, supported by tax payers’ dollars, may in fact be in the midst of the largest, most comprehensive experimentation –as defined by the Ethics Code of the American Psychological Association– on American public school children, in our nation’s history.
If, in fact, independent investigations confirm this well-grounded theory, the U.S. Department of Education, and Secretary Arne Duncan, are in violation of multiple APA (American Psychological Association) assessment and experimentation ethics codes. (See APA Ethics Codes 8.02 “Informed Consent to Research” & 8.07 “Deception in Research” & 9.03 “Informed Consent In Assessments” http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/principles.pdf)
The basic foundational purpose of conforming assessment and research practices to ethics codes is to ensure that vulnerable populations, such a special education students, are not exploited and/or harmed.
USDOE FINDING OF FACT #7:
“We learned through States that received funding from the Department through the GSEG and EAG programs that some students with disabilities who might be candidates for an alternate assessment based on modified academic achievement standards may not have had an opportunity to learn grade-level content, and more effort was needed to support teachers in ensuring students have meaningful opportunities to learn grade-level content….. Six of the projects found that students who might be candidates for an alternate assessment based on modified academic achievement standards had difficulty…”
Research Cited To Support the USDOE’s Factual Finding#7:
Thurlow, M. L., Lazarus, S. S., & Bechard, S. (Eds.). (2013). Lessons learned in federally funded projects that can improve the instruction and assessment of low performing students with disabilities. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, National Center on Educational Outcomes.
Scope& Limitations of Cited Research:
(Note: This same compilation of research “studies” was cited above in Findings of Facts #3. The “limitations” noted in #3 are applicable and repeated below).
Research is not peer-reviewed and is funded by the USDOE. It was written in collaboration with the Council of Chief State School Officers, a group long partnered with USDOE (for example, USDOE and CCSSO partnered in the creation of national common educational data standards, called CEDS.)
The compilation of multiple articles submitted by multiple State Offices of Education did not address specific special education populations.
Every article placed in this document cited the need for further research, and mostly relied on “surveys” to education teachers.
Summary and Conclusions:
A statement of belief by the USDOE that “more effort was needed to support teachers in ensuring students have meaningful opportunities to learn grade- level content” is not justification to limit local and states’ judgment and creativity with regard to modifying assessments and curriculum for special education students.
Not one sentence or article submitted in this compilation of papers by various state education agencies, supported (or even mentioned) the USDOE’s premise that alternative assessments should be eliminated. In fact, multiple articles cited herein the need for further research on how to implement better alternative assessments for special education children in their respective states.
USDOE FINDING OF FACT #8:
“Parents and teachers have the right and need to know how much progress all students, including students with disabilities, are making each year toward college and career readiness. That means all students, including students with disabilities, need to take annual Statewide assessments.”
Research Cited To Support the USDOE’s Factual Finding#8:
NONE
Scope& Limitations of Cited Research:
NOT APPLICABLE. NO INDEPENDENT RESEARCH CITED.
Summary & Conclusion:
It would be reasonable and proper to assume that parents and education stakeholders would “have the right and need to know” how much progress their divergent learning students were making academically.
The USDOE, however, insists that parents and teachers need to know about students’ “career and college readiness.” What exactly is “career- and college readiness” and how does such a confusing and undefined standard apply to children and teens with diagnosed learning disabilities?
What evidence does the USDOE have to show that all students wish to have a career, and if so, are at a developmental or life-experience level to start to think along those lines?
What evidence does the USDOE have to show that it is responsible, or even possible, to assess for “college readiness” for divergent-learning students?
What evidence does the USDOE have to make the unilateral decision, on behalf
of every student and scientist living in the country, without regard to the judgment or wishes of individual students, parents, teachers, doctors, or states, that all students, including students with disabilities, “must take annual statewide assessments?”
How ethical is it to require every public school student in the country to take an experimental test, without their informed written consent; a test that has yet to undergo independent validity reviews by any organization free of contractual ties to either the U.S. Department of Education or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?
FINAL CONCLUSION AND SUMMARY OPINIONS:
We need to know much more than we now know about the actual consequences of implementing large-scale, high-stakes assessment and accountability systems.
It is assumed that holding schools responsible for improved outcomes for students with disabilities, will lead to increased instructional effort, improved instruction, and better outcomes. A government education agency, making policy changes based on assumptions, is engaging in experimentation– unethical experimentation on our nation’s most vulnerable children.
Educators do not yet have the science to know how to teach most of these standards to students with moderate and severe developmental disabilities. At the present time little is known about how much academic content students with moderate and severe learning and emotional disabilities can learn in traditional public school settings.
Common sense, as well as decades of peer-reviewed research in the areas of cognitive and developmental psychology, indicates strongly that restricting students to curricula beyond their cognitive capacities substantially lowers their achievement.
Test publishers often have not conducted adequate research on how accommodations affect test validity. It is unfair and discriminatory to penalize a student with a disability, any disability, for using a needed accommodation on an assessment, simply because the test publisher has not conducted the necessary research about the effect of the particular accommodation on the test.
In fact it is unfair, discriminatory and unethical to require any student to take a test that, by all accounts, is an experimental design that has yet to undergo extensive, independent validity reviews. There should be candor not only about what is known about these high stakes, computer adaptive assessments, but also about what is unknown. (LORAN Commission, 1988, p. 27) (LORAN Commission. (1988). Report of the LORAN Commission to the Harvard Community Health Plan: Harvard Community Health Plan, Boston, MA.)
Assessment technology, like medical technology, is not perfect; there are potentially harmful side effects associated with treatments determined to be generally safe and efficacious. We certainly are not suggesting to throw the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. (We utilize the same, if not similar, innovative assessment technologies as the education system). However, like physicians and clinical psychologists, educators should know the nature and extent of research documented harmful side effects on vulnerable groups of children, before adopting any high- stakes testing program. Always, there must be informed, written consent from parents.
Failure to do so places special education students in positions of being subjected to frustrations that may exacerbate known, as well as unknown, potential comorbid emotional disorders that many of these students may possess.
We encourage public school districts across the nation to disprove our well- researched and disturbing hypothesis, that not one district website in the entire nation has notified parents of the experimental nature of Common Core high- stakes testing, nor has a single one of the government-funded test makers ever completed independent, peer reviewed validity studies on these assessments.
These “lies of omission,” perpetuated and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education under the leadership of Secretary Duncan, will continue to have dangerous consequences for traditionally “test vulnerable” African American, Latino, Pacific Islander, autistic, dyslexic, dual-exceptional, poverty-stricken, and emotionally disturbed children who are enrolled in public and charter schools across the country.
It is the ultimate height of hypocrisy for an Education Department Secretary to insist on “evidence” based conformity to unilateral rule changes, and then make massive special education rule changes based on cited references which appear to have been pulled blindly out of the magician’s hat.
Under Secretary Arne Duncan’s tenure, public schools and special education teachers are not getting the support they need to meet IDEA requirements anywhere in the country, despite special education ballooning class sizes and despite massive layoffs of teachers and support staff all over the country.
Secretary Duncan’s prescription of education reform has resulted thus far in feeding those frenzied financial interests that are aligned with corporate testing corporations, as well as alienating masses across the country, and not just conservative-leaning “white suburban moms” as Secretary Duncan blustered.
We are not politicians or public policy experts. We do not purport to have the answers to perplexing issues facing our nations children in public schools. What we DO know is that parents are, and must always be, the resident experts of their own children.
A shift from the dictatorial-like control now emanating from the Department of Education, and supported by Big Testing’s financial corporate interests– back to states, local school districts, and ground level teachers and parents– is the foundation from which all hope and change in our nation’s education system must start.
Respectfully submitted by:
Gary Thompson, Psy.D.
Early Life Child Psychology & Education Center
USDOE SUPPORTING REFERENCES & COMMENTARY
COPIED VERBATIM:
See discussion of this research in Assessing Students with Disabilities Based on a State’s Academic Achievement Standards.
See Scruggs, T., Mastropieri, M., Berkeley, S., & Graetz, (2010). Do Special Education Interventions Improve Learning of Secondary Content? A Meta-Analysis. Remedial and Special Education, 31(6), 437-449.
ESEA flexibility refers to the Department’s initiative to give a State flexibility regarding specific requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 in exchange for developing a rigorous and comprehensive plan designed to improve educational outcomes for all students, close achievement gaps, increase equity, and improve the quality of instruction.
For more information, see: Thurlow, M. L., Lazarus, S. S., & Bechard, S. (). (2013). Lessons learned in federally funded projects that can improve the instruction and assessment of low performing students with disabilities. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, National Center on Educational Outcomes.
The IDEA prescribes certain requirements for IEPs for students who take alternate assessments aligned to alternate academic achievement standards. 34 CFR 300.160(c)(2)(iii), 300.320(a)(2)(ii), and 300.320(a)(6) (ii). This approach addresses the educational and assessment needs of a relatively small percentage of students with the most significant cognitive disabilities, estimated at approximately 1% of all students in a State (approximately 10% of students with disabilities), who cannot be held to the same academic achievement standards as students without the most significant cognitive disabilities.
For example, see: Allor, H., Mathes, P. G., Roberts, J. K., Cheatham, J.P., & Champlin, T. M. (2010). Comprehensive reading instruction for students with intellectual disabilities. Psychology in the Schools, 47, 445- 466; Kamps, D., Abbott, M., Greenwood, C., Wills, H., Veerkamp, M., & Kaufman, J. (2008); Mautone, J. A., DuPaul, G. J., Jitendra, A. K., Tresco, K. E., Junod, R. V., & Volpe, R. J. (2009). The relationship between treatment integrity and acceptability of reading interventions for children with attention- deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Psychology in the Schools, 46, 919-931; and Scammacca, N., Vaughn, S., Roberts, G., Wanzek, J., & Torgesen, J. K. (2007). Extensive reading interventions in grades K-3: From research to practice. Portsmouth, N.H.: RMC Research Corporation, Center on Instruction; and Vaughn, S., Denton, C. A., & Fletcher, J. M. (2010).
Why intensive interventions are necessary for students with severe reading difficulties. Psychology in the Schools, 47, 32-444; Wanzek, J. & Vaughn, S. (2010). Tier 3 interventions for students with significant reading problems. Theory Into Practice, 49, 305-314.
For example, see: Fuchs, L. S. & Fuchs, D., Powell, S. R., Seethaler, P. M., Cirino, P. T., & Fletcher, J. M. (2008). Intensive intervention for students with mathematics disabilities: Seven principles of effective practice. Learning Disabilities Quarterly, 31, 79-92; and Gersten, R., Beckmann, S., Clarke, B., Foegen, A., Marsh, L., Star, J. R., & Witzel, B. (2009).
Assisting students struggling with mathematics: Response to Intervention (RtI) for elementary and middle schools (NCEE 2009-4060). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved November 1, 2010 from http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/publications/practiceguides/.
For example, see Archamboult, I., Janosz, M., & Chouindard, R. (2012). Teacher beliefs as predictors of adolescent cognitive engagement and achievement in mathematics. The Journal of Educational Research, 105, 319-328;
Hinnant, J., O’Brien, M., & Ghazarian, S. (2009). The longitudinal relations of teacher expectations to achievement in the early school years. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101 (3), 662-670; and Hornstra, L., Denessen, E., Bakker, J., von den Bergh, L., & Voeten, M. (2010). Teacher attitudes toward dyslexia: Effects on teacher expectations and the academic achievement of students with dyslexia. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 43 (6), 515-529.
For additional information on assessment accommodations, see: PARCC Accessibility Features and Accommodations Manual (Nov.2014) at http://www.parcconline.org/sites/parcc/files/parcc- accessibility- features-accommodations-manual-11-14_final.pdf.
For more information, see: Thurlow, M. L., Lazarus, S. S., & Bechard, S. (). (2013). Lessons learned in federally funded projects that can improve the instruction and assessment of low performing students with disabilities. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, National Center on Educational Outcomes.
Achieve. (2012). The Future of the U.S. Workforce: Middle Skills Jobs and the Growing Importance of Post Secondary Education. American Diploma Project, achieve.org
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RELEVANT APA ETHICS CODES:
Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct
Adopted August 21, 2002 Effective June 1, 2003
With the 2010 Amendments Adopted February 20, 2010
Effective June 1, 2010
INTRODUCTION AND APPLICABILITY (In Part)
Areas covered include but are not limited to the clinical, counseling, and school practice of psychology; research; teaching; supervision of trainees; public service; policy development; social intervention; development of assessment instruments; conducting assessments; educational counseling; organizational consulting; forensic activities; program design and evaluation; and administration.
PREAMBLE (In Part)
Psychologists respect and protect civil and human rights and the central importance of freedom of inquiry and expression in research, teaching, and publication. They strive to help the public in developing informed judgments and choices concerning human behavior. In doing so, they perform many roles, such as researcher, educator, diagnostician, therapist, supervisor, consultant, administrator, social interventionist, and expert witness.
ETHICAL STANDARDS (In Part)
3.04 Avoiding Harm
Psychologists take reasonable steps to avoid harming their clients/patients, students, supervisees, research participants, organizational clients, and others with whom they work, and to minimize harm where it is foreseeable and un- avoidable.
8.02 Informed Consent to Research
(a) When obtaining informed consent as required in Standard 3.10, Informed Consent, psychologists inform participants about (1) the purpose of the research, expected
duration, and procedures; (2) their right to decline to participate and to withdraw from the research once participation has begun; (3) the foreseeable consequences of declining or withdrawing; (4) reasonably foreseeable factors that may be expected to influence their willingness to participate such as potential risks, discomfort, or adverse effects; (5) any prospective research benefits; (6) limits of confidentiality; (7) incentives for participation; and (8) whom to contact for questions about the research and research participants’ rights. They provide opportunity for the prospective participants to ask questions and receive answers.
9.01 Bases for Assessments
(b) Psychologists use assessment instruments whose validity and reliability have been established for use with members of the population tested. When such validity or re- liability has not been established, psychologists describe the strengths and limitations of test results and interpretation.
9.05 Test Construction
Psychologists who develop tests and other assessment techniques use appropriate psychometric procedures and current scientific or professional knowledge for test design, standardization, validation, reduction or elimination of bias, and recommendations for use.
This article is written by Alpine School Board member Brian Halladay for parents in the Alpine School District. It is published here with his permission.
The Reality Behind Your Child’s Test
By Brian Halladay, Board Member, Alpine School District, Utah
Sage test results were recently released that showed less than half of Utah’s students were proficient in math, English, and language arts. Taken at face value, this means that more than half our students are “not proficient.” So, what does this mean? Absolutely nothing.
The SAGE test is an unreliable, unverified test that our children from 3rd-11th grade are taking not just once, but up to three times a year. These tests aren’t scored by their teachers, but rather by the American Institutes for Research (AIR). This company is the one of the world’s largest social and behavioral research organizations. Your child’s proficiency is being scored by a bunch of behavioral researchers.
No teacher is scoring, or has the ability to score, an individual child’s SAGE test.
Your child is taking a test for 8 hours (4 hours for math and 4 hours for English) that their teacher can’t see the questions to. This test is designed to have your child fail. Gone are the days when a student could feel a sense of achievement for getting 100% on a test. This test is touted to be “rigorous. If your child gets a correct answer the test will continue to ask harder and harder questions until he or she gets it wrong (who knows if what is tested was actually taught in the classroom?) Put simply, this means that your child likely will come home grumpy, anxious, or depressed after taking this test. With over 50% non-proficiency, this will affect more than half of the students that take it.
The teacher is almost as much of a test victim as the child. Having no idea of the test questions, teachers are still starting to be evaluated —on a test they can’t see. I believe we’re starting to see this leading to more experienced teachers leaving, and an increase in teachers with little to no experience not knowing the pre-SAGE environment.
Points to consider:
When did we allow testing to become more important than education?
Your child’s data is subject to being shared with people and organizations without your consent. There is nothing that prohibits AIR or any its multiple organizations from accessing your child’s data. As long as AIR doesn’t make a profit from the data without the USOE’s consent, they can use it for anything they want.
This test has no contractual provisions that prevent it from collecting BEHAVIORAL data. AIR has a long history of collecting behavioral data, and seeing they’re a behavioral research organization, don’t you think they will? (Just look up Project Talent).
Last year, two fellow board members and I wrote a letter to our State Superintendent asking him to address our concerns, for which we’ve had no response.
If your parental instinct is kicking in, I would ask that you at least consider opting your child out of taking this test. State law allows any parent to opt their child out. Even if you don’t decide to opt out, talk with your teacher, know when your child is taking this test, and make sure your decision is in the child’s best interest.
The following is authored by former US Congressman Bob Schaffer and is posted with his permission. In light of the fact that Marc Tucker has been invited to advise the Utah legislature on education at this week’s two day education conference, it seemed important to remember the history behind the changes that are culminating now, which Tucker and Hillary Clinton detailed in motion in the 1990s. Thanks to Bob Schaffer for his timely update.
I am grateful for your inquiry and certainly wish you well in your patriotic efforts in Utah. Incidentally, your readers can find PDF files of each page of Marc Tucker’s “Dear Hillary” letter in the 1998 Congressional Record through these links:1234567.
The “Dear Hillary” letter is as relevant today as it was in 1992. Though I doubt anyone in the halls of government much remembers the letter itself, it is the concise, clear, and intentional nature of the letter that is instructive to those of us who still find value in the idea of a constitutional republic self-governed by free and intelligent citizens. Tucker’s sweeping 1992 blueprint for nationalizing the American public-education system is especially pertinent now because, at least since the day it was penned, it has been brilliantly executed with virtually no deviation.
It is instructive to note Tucker’s blueprint does not stop at nationalizing primary public education. It entails merging nationalized primary-education goals with a nationalized higher-education system and a nationalized labor-administrative function. Think of the 1990s doublespeak “School-to-Work” and you get an accurate picture. School-to-Work, as you know, was the apt title of the Clinton-era initiative setting the Tucker letter into actual national public policy. More practically, think of the “Prussian-German, education-labor model” because it is the same thing. Tucker actually says so in the letter itself: “We propose that (President-elect) Bill take a leaf out of the German book.”
Truly, Tucker’s ideas are not new. They were formalized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, refined by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, embedded by Hegel in the German university structure, then exported throughout the world including to virtually every “teachers college” in America. Specific to the perpetual, anti-intellectual quest to undermine the traditions of “classical” education, Rousseau’s “social-contract” ideas (wherein individuals are understood as subordinate to state interests and royal continuity) were perfected for European classrooms by heralded social engineers such as Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel. These ideas were most powerfully applied to American classrooms by John Dewey. Despite being deeply embedded in the curriculum of modern American teacher’s colleges, these collectivist ideals and progressive-romantic philosophies have been held in marginal abeyance by the brilliant American design of decentralized, independent, sovereign states each in charge of its own public-education system.
Accordingly, this is where Tucker’s “Dear Hillary” letter earns its notorious repute. An acolyte of the worn Rousseau-Dewey, progressive-romantic line of thinking, Tucker eloquently maps in his 1992 letter to the new First Lady a sharp and detailed political plan for mutating American primary education, secondary education, and labor policy in ways that can breach the pesky firewalls of the Tenth Amendment if not the core revolutionary ideal of federalism itself. Hegel would have been elated. Dewey’s, Pestalozzi’s, and Froebel’s names are already painted on the ceiling of the Library of Congress – main floor, at that.
Though eight years of the Clinton administration have come and gone (maybe), the tactics of the “Dear Hillary” letter roll onward. Not a single manifestation of “Dear Hillary” policies was curtailed during the Bush presidency. In fact, many were accelerated through “No Child Left Behind.” The Obama administration has effectuated “Dear Hillary” objectives to nearly complete fruition.
As to your curiosity about why I petitioned the House of Representatives in 1998 to allow me to preserve the Tucker letter as I did, my best explanation follows.
After discovering, studying and digesting the transformational implications of the “Dear Hillary” letter, and concluding it carried credible political heft, I thought it important to enshrine the missive via The Congressional Record perhaps as a self-explanatory and incontrovertible marker as to whom, when, where and how the United States of America finally and completely disconnected itself from the proven ideals of classical education – the kind of education the country’s Founders received. As a youngish, backbench first-term Member of Congress in 1998, I thought someday maybe someone working on a Master’s thesis would like to pinpoint the moment our former republic opted instead for the amply disproven, constrained and anti-intellectual objectives of formalized “training.” Maybe my Congressional-Record entry would be of good use to an aspiring scholar or two.
Indeed, history is replete with examples of classical education leading to strong, powerful individuals; and formalized training leading to a strong, powerful state. I regarded this letter as a signal of an epic American turning point. I actually did imagine the letter would one day be regarded as an important historic document worthy of being singled out and remembered. I maintain that belief even now, and am delighted you are among those who recognize its significance.
It seemed to me at the time, the “Dear Hillary” letter was the most concise, honest and transparent political document of its kind. It reminded me of the moment Gen. George McClelland at Sharpsburg came into possession of Gen. Robert Lee’s plans for an offensive at Antietam Creek. Here in these plans, one actually reads a credible battle strategy for overcoming American federalism. Tucker’s war cannons were fully charged and tightly packed with progressive-romantic canister, aimed directly upon the Founder’s revolutionary idea of republican, self-government and our traditions of states’ rights.
I had anticipated my colleagues in the Congress and various state-education leaders would benefit from knowing, in advance, of Tucker’s offensive strategy especially as his battle plan was specifically addressed to, and received by, the occupants of the White House. The last thing I ever imagined at the time (and I am heartbroken to realize it now), is how political leaders in the several states have stood indolently for it. Never did I picture the baleful scene we are witnessing today – state leaders themselves dutifully lowering Tucker’s linstock to the touch hole of statism.
At least for the past couple of decades, the vast majority of elected leaders in both political parties have clearly – if not enthusiastically – worked to outdo one another in applying Rousseau-Hegel-Dewey ideas to public education. They offer little, if any, impressive resistance to policies, laws, rules, and mandates relegating American education to a job-training enterprise despite the prescient warnings of Albert Jay Nock, E.D. Hirsch, Tracy Lee Simmons and others who have underscored the crucial difference between classical education and anti-intellectual training. As such, Tucker’s letter and goals, though overtly political, cannot be fairly regarded as a partisan. No, the epic transformation of American culture and national character is being achieved rather quickly due to an overwhelming advantage of spectacular bipartisan cooperation.
Henceforward, when intelligent people scratch their heads and wonder how it was that the citizens of the United State of America inexplicably stood by and unwittingly participated in the systematic demise of their blessed republic, at least they’ll find one comprehensive and compelling explanation, assuming it survives the censors’ notice, in The Congressional Record on September 25, 1998.
Thank you for finding me, reaching out to me, and granting me an opportunity to underscore the perilous certainties of the country’s education system.
Very truly yours,
Bob Schaffer
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On a related note, I invite the officials who will be participating in so-called “guided” discussions at this week’s conference to truly arm themselves against the manipulative “delphi technique” that is used to force consensus, as outlined by Jenny Hatch here.
God, Science, & The Utah State Office of Education’s Puzzling Stance Regarding High Stakes, Common Core Testing of Special Education Students.
By Dr. Gary Thompson
“Interesting enough, Utah’s most respected representative of the school of empirically based educational thought (USOE), has formed a basis for adopted policies associated with the SAGE Common Core test, that appear to be almost religious in nature..”
Dear Parents & Community Members:
During the next several weeks, between now and September 15, 2015, parents, activists, board members and politicians will be engaging in a very intense “disagreement” concerning the Common Core based SAGE test, and how its use and implementation in Utah is affected by recent administrative law changes implemented by the U.S. Department of Education, as such entail the use of the Common Core SAGE test on Utah’s population of divergent (“special education”) students. (http://www.noticeandcomment.com/Improving-the-Academic-Achievement-of-the-Disadvantaged-Assistance-to-States-for-the-Education-of-Children-fn-292468.aspx)
One side will definitely state that such changes will have absolutely no effects, ill or otherwise, on Utah’s current policies associated with the Common Core SAGE test (e.g., “Utah State Office of Education Administrators”)….
The independent medical and psychology experts will state that the changes in the policy may serious adversely affect the cognitive and mental health of potentially tens of thousands of divergent learning students in Utah, due to USOE’s dangerous, and almost mystical faith-based belief, that the SAGE test can be given to ALL divergent learning students, with zero adverse emotional and/or cognitive consequences. (In addition to the claim that the SAGE test will determine if ALL divergent students are “career and college ready”.)
Regardless of where one stands today on the issue, it is reasonable to state that there is no middle ground between the two parties. Both parties will submit “evidence” and state their respective positions to State Board Members, lawmakers, and parents of divergent learning children throughout the State of Utah. Both parties will hope that their evidentiary “proof” will hold sway over the general public, as well as mainstream media entities.
Before this “war” for the hearts and minds of the Utah populous begins, I just wanted to share a few interesting observations about “empirical evidence”, and “faith”, from two vantage points:
1. From the objective viewpoint of a doctoral level, “local clinical community scientist” in the field of clinical psychology.
2. From the faith-based viewpoint as a devout Christian, and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
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A common discourse and theme among many (certainly not all) members of the Christian faith, is that the current education system does not welcome inquiry in public school settings regarding concepts of “faith”, as such may be related to the existence of a higher being (God). (The legal reality of “separation of Church and State” is well established). The argument often made is that teachings of God, faith and creationism have no place in our education system because there is no empirical evidence to support them. I have no intention of “solving” this debate, my sole intent is to point out the obvious differences between the two schools of thought.
Interesting enough, Utah’s most respected representative of the school of empirically based educational thought (USOE), has formed a basis for policies associated with the SAGE Common Core test, that seems to be almost religious in nature. In other words, the Utah State Office of Education, the self appointed gate keeper between the illicit mixing of “pure” empirical science, and the subject of God in public schools, is demanding that parents in our community subject their children to a high stakes SAGE test entirely on the basis of….well….’faith’.
Here is what we do know, and what no person or organization in the country has yet to refute on any objective, empirical level:
The SAGE test is unscientific because it violate the basic rule of social science/academic achievement science. The assessment is not verifiable, because the SAGE test is not permitted to be subject to independent scientific evaluation. Its validity cannot be proven nor disproven. Under the guise of “test security” Utah’s $39,000,000.00 testing vendor, American Institute of Research (AIR), uses copyright laws so extreme that they prevent true scientific evaluation of the validity of these tests, by scientists with expertise in the fields of Education, Psychology, and related fields.
The main reason this practice of ignoring validity is scientifically reprehensible, is that U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and the USOE, has ignored this most accepted scholarship in the field of “testing”. The concept of Validity, or simply put, PROOF that a test performs as “advertised”, is used to halt the dangerous myth of “certainty” that permeates in the field of educational testing. The Utah State Office of Education, is asking our community of parents to accept that the SAGE test can measure academic constructs in special education students (other than the highest “1% of the most cognitively impaired students”) accurately, with no adverse emotional or psychological harm, on the basis of “faith”. In reality and practice, USOE and Secretary Duncan, expects this community to subject its most cognitively and emotionally vulnerable students to the admittedly experimental in nature SAGE test, simply because they said so.
“Just trust me.”
As one parent expressed to me last night in a social media exchange, “so what? Suppose the SAGE test is an invalid, unnecessary experimentation on the children in Utah…what’s the harm?” Here was my reply:
“Students (and many parents) “internalize” what SAGE scores mean, and since the majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m a Top SAGE Proficient student” is almost as harmful as “I’m a Bottom Non Proficient SAGE student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of Utah. Simply put, he who writes, administers and controls the test, literally controls the psycho-social structure of an entire community. Kids become in their minds, what the test says they are. If an education entity unleashes this powerful force on an entire community, they sure as hell better ensure that it works as advertised.”
One does not have to be a mental health professional to know the mental health ramifications associated with a child or teen who believes that he or she is “stupid” when compared to his peer siblings and/or peers on campus. Anxiety, depression, self-mutilation (cutting), drug abuse, and a well documented increase in youth suicidal ideation, are just a few of the consequences associated clinically with the high stakes academic testing game.
I make a living off of the art and science of academic, cognitive and emotional assessment. I understand, and believe in the benefits associated with tests and measurement. Our challenge to the Utah State Office of Education will be to simply verify their claims, as such pertain to the validity of the SAGE test, and its use and application with psychologically vulnerable populations of divergent learning and special education students….who are NOT categorized with the confusing and general label as the “1% of the most cognitively impaired.”
As professionals in the field of clinical psychology, we will rely entirely on independently produced, peer-reviewed research from this nations most prestigious universities, as well as established ethics as published by the American Psychological Association (APA Ethics Code), and the American Medical Association (AMA Ethics Code) , to present our case to the community.
Given the serious nature of the pending conflict, we will demand that the Utah State Office of Education use the same criteria of scholarship, ethics and communication with the public, as well as the Utah State Board of Education, as opposed to their current reliance on “faith”, as their basis of justification for accepting the changes to well established, local/state level Utah practices associated with divergent learning students in Utah. The misleading, disingenuous, omission laden guidance given to our elected State Board members from an administrator from USOE, regarding this serious unilateral rule change initiated by the Federal Government, would be comical if it were not for the fact that her propaganda, if accepted as a “matter of faith”, may result in the needless suffering of divergent learning students in the State of Utah. https://whatiscommoncore.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/usoe-letter-tells-state-board-all-is-well-all-is-well-in-special-ed/
At the bequest of my own four divergent learning children (who do not fit into the U.S.D.O.E.’s criteria of “severely cognitive impaired“, as well as the hundreds of similarly situated diverse African American, Latino, Autistic, Suicidal, Dual Exceptional, Cognitively Gifted, Learning “Disabled”, Schizophrenic and otherwise emotionally disturbed children and teens in the State of Utah that my talented staff of Doctor and therapist have valiantly served, I humbly request that the Utah State Board of Education suspend their “faith”, as such apply to the USOE’s agenda laden claims, and protect our most vulnerable assets in our community: Our children.
Yours in service;
Dr. Gary Thompson
Early Life Child Psychology & Education Center
“Parents are, and must always be, the resident experts of their own (divergent learning) children.”
I’m surely sprouting new gray hairs at 80 miles per hour.
If there was doubt about whether something was truly rotten in the state of education governance here in sweet, naiive Utah, this news should end that doubt: of all the possible gurus, this is who our legislators, USOE and state school board have invited as the out-of-town centerpiece for a joint education conference taking place this Wednesday and Thursday.
The United States will have to largely abandon the beloved emblem of American education: local control. If the goal is to greatly increase the capacity and authority of the state education agencies, much of the new authority will have to come at the expense of local control.
Marc Tucker also despises what is –or was– real education, in favor of the robotic efficiency of cradle-to-grave federal micromanagement of systems. He wrote the unbelievable NCEE report that advocates for the removal of Algebra II –and any math beyond it from high schools, that also labeled classic literature and student personal writing “less relevant” and dismissable. If this sounds like impossible, deliberate dumbing down, you have not read Tucker’s reasoning, which envisions a socialist’s factory view of school: a place to create economy-centered worker bees, to generate a collective; not a place to “waste” resources for soaring and free thinkers. He’s all about efficiency at the expense of individual freedom.
–If he were invited to the university for a two-sided debate, fine!
–If his visit was a University lecture, some attempt by the dean to expose students to radical ideas from extreme ends of a spectrum, fine!
But this is not a university lecture.
It’s a joint legislative – school board – USOE meeting, which just happens to be taking place at SUU. It could have been at any venue.
No one is slated to debate him.
Marc “end-local-control” Tucker is the only out of town speaker coming to this conference to address the Utah legislature and the Utah State Office and School Board. He was hand selected for the at-taxpayer-expense conference –as someone to look to for advice.
That decision says more about the state of education politics in Utah than anything more I could write tonight.
Pray that our politicians and superintendents are interested enough, and honest enough, to see through the Department of Ed, and kick to the curb its lies and false reassignments of authority that hurt our children and our Constitutional power.
Jakell Sullivan, a beautiful Utah mom who happens to be one of the most dedicated researchers on education reform and data privacy breaches that I know, has pointed out that this week, U.S. Secretary of Education Duncan posted a “final rule” on the No Child Left Behind reauthorization.
(Thank you, Jakell.)
The final rule will move us from the “phasing out” phase to the “no more state authority at all” phase of the federalization of state education over “disadvantaged” children, which is defined ever more loosely, and can almost mean “any child”.
Some may dismiss this “final rule” from Secretary Duncan as not affecting them, as only harming those who have a handicapped or otherwise disadvantaged child. But think twice. Because in the new, upside down, 2+2=5 world of Common Core, children who don’t score high on Common Core tests, may now be considered “disadvantaged”. I imagine that in the future, even children who opt out of testing may be labeled as disadvantaged by failing to achieve high scores on these tests. (To clarify: opting out of testing is still a great choice, and still should be thoughtfully considered by every parent. Utah State Superintendent Smith recently said: “The most important legal policy…. by constitution, and by what I consider to be natural rights, parents have the right to opt out of anything! They don’t need permission. They don’t need to fill out a form. They don’t need to seek someone else’s response.”)
Because so many children showed awful performance on the rammed-down-our-throats, ready or not, Common Core assessments, many children are labeled as low scorers, or as “special needs”. But for those children who actually are “special needs” and did not take the test, because there was an alternate test, those happy days are over. The Dept. of Ed mandates that now, even handicapped people, take the same test. No mercy, no wiggle room, no local judgment by caring professionals or parents. (Except for the option to opt out.)
The final rule summary from Secretary Duncan is found here (and the Dept. invites comments). It says:
The Secretary amends the regulations governing title I… (ESEA) … to no longer authorize a State to definemodified academic achievement standards and develop alternate assessments… effective September 21, 2015.
Less than a year ago, Secretary Duncan told us he was aiming to “phase out state authority” over these special needs assessments. At that time, we still had time to fight this. At that time, there was still a chance that Congress would refuse to reauthorize No Child Left Behind (aka ESEA). Now, children have been taking (and generally bombing) Common Core tests. Meanwhile, Congress gave Duncan the power he craved when it passed ESEA’s reauthorization –and other education bills that shouldn’t have passed– this summer.
Jakell Sullivan said, “Parents, be warned. Most kids will soon fall into the “disadvantaged” category because it now means not meeting Common Core benchmarks. This is how they’ll make most schools Title 1 schools–federalization complete.”
She explained that this will affect all states (both the states that did and states that didn’t offer alternative assessments for special needs students) because, “The assessments for “disadvantaged” children will now be Common Core assessments… whether it’s the federalized NAEP, or something else the Feds require… and the formative online assessments will also be required to help teachers change their instruction practices to “help” these children.”
Another Utah mom, Morgan Olsen, speaking to the fact that these electronic assessments are a main source of psychological and academic data mining about individual students, said: “I find this particularly concerning because all data collected by schools is legally classified as education data and doesn’t have the same protections as health data collected by a private doctor. And because the USOE discussed using the State Data System to collect and store this type of information in its guidance counselor’s guide a few years back.” (Links added).
To summarize the reason for this “final ruling,” Sullivan said:
“Think about it like this: it sets the framework for all the schools to be turned into Arne’s much-desired community centers. The Feds already have the full-service community center bill in Congress, SB1787. This regulation change helps them force more schools quickly into transformation phase once that [bill S1787] passes (or even if it doesn’t). [Links added.]
She said:
“Think of the federal objectives this way:
“1. Get every child into federalized assessments (no State can determine an alternate path now)
2. Liberalize what it means to be “disadvantaged”,( ie; they’ll make it so anything they want can meet their disadvantaged criteria, and schools will fall for the federal money)
3. Hold teachers and schools accountable to “make” every child college-and-career ready, (ie; “meeting 21st Century Skills”)
4. When teachers and schools fail, require teacher instructional changes and require that the school becomes a full-service community center with wrap-around services for mental health, medical, etc.”
Utah, we need to stop holding hands with the Department of Education and recognize it as an enemy– an enemy to autonomy, to parental control, to teacher judgment, to the U.S. Constitution’s protections, to individual privacy, and to true education.
Please, if you are reading this, call someone. Write something. Email or tweet or get an appointment with your Governor or your State Superintendent. Small ripples can cross large bodies of water.
Sometimes we “Nice” people must shake off our Hobbit-like niceness to detect and expose real and dangerous lies, worrying less about whether we may be perceived as “Nice” and more about how fast the power to direct the lives of our own children is being robbed by the thieves and enemies of Constitutional freedom.
I am standing here, calling the U.S. Department of Education a granddaddy of lies and unconstitutional actions.
That they are lies is indisputable. Check the links. Read your U.S. Constitution.
A SHORT LIST OF (RECENT) LIES FROM THE U.S. DEPT OF EDUCATION– BASED ON DUNCAN’S “FINAL RULE” FROM ESEA REAUTHORIZATION AND ON S1787, A BILL NOW SITTING IN CONGRESS:
–That federalizing education (“phasing out the authority of states”)– so that states will lack authority to define who is and who isn’t “special needs” or disadvantaged– is good, and is constitutionally legitimate;
–That states have lost their constitutional authority to give alternative tests to special needs children;
–That Duncan, making a state-and-school-authority-robbing “final rule,” is a constitutionally legitimate act, in harmony with common sense and parental/voter will.
Dr. Gene V. Glass, the award-winning psychometrician who invented the term meta-analysis, made recent news when he announced that he is no longer comfortable in his field. In a Washington Post column, Dr. Glass summarized the failure of psychometrics (educational measurement using big data) to give accurate information: “Both talent and tasks were too complex to yield to this simple plan.”
This failure of psychometrics to win “the wars on poverty and ignorance” do not stop psychometric testing companies from lobbying politicians to alter American education for financial gain, he said. Glass writes: “test company lobbyists convince politicians that grading teachers and schools is as easy as grading cuts of meat. A huge publishing company from the United Kingdom has spent $8 million in the past decade lobbying Congress.”
Glass laments the false belief of politicians who are convinced by articulate, monied lobbyists to buy, and then act on, the idea “that testing must be the cornerstone of any education policy”.
The results? “Parents see the stress placed on their children and report them sick on test day. Educators, under pressure they see as illegitimate, break the rules imposed on them by governments. Many teachers put their best judgment and best lessons aside… And too many of the best teachers exit the profession.” A result Glass did not mention, but which is also notable, is that some politicians are beginning to be swayed by the idea of stealth testing.
The resignation from the field of psychometrics by Dr. Glass came to my attention because of Utah-based child psychologist Dr. Gary Thompson, who published the article with the following warning directed at Utahns who are complicit in the use of Utah’s nonconsensual student data mining web.
A Warning To Educational Data Worshipers:
We can’t paint a meta data picture of creations we still know so little of. The arrogance of the “career and college ready crowd” along these lines, is astounding to me both as a father, and as a doctoral level local clinical community scientist.
Apparently the scientist, who I studied in graduate school…and who pioneered the process of mass educational meta data analysis, feels the same way that I do.
Mankind (e.g., “Bill Gates, Secretary Duncan, AIR, USOE, or Superintendent Smith, etc) will never create a form of data analysis more accurate and informative than what can be garnered from the combination of a mother, a well trained local teacher and principal, and valid, personalized, private, assessment tools interpreted by a professional, with one, and only one motive in mind:
To lift the academic, emotional, and spiritual foundation of a child for the sake of the joy of enrichment.
Assessments, as well as the associated meta-data generated by our current Common Core-based educational system, will never be able to be used as a valid measure of teachers, schools, or as a tool to achieve the mythical political term of “career & college ready”….or to support the political desires of our current Governor and Utah’s Chamber of Commerce.
Parents are, and must always be the resident experts of their own children.
The testing/data pseudo-science spewing from the lips of the educational/political bureaucracy, can’t change this very law of nature and the universe.
Dr. Sandra Stotsky’s new book, An Empty Curriculum, discusses the trouble that has arisen from weak teacher licensing expectations, easy teacher tests, and the recruiting of teacher candidates from the lowest third of graduating classes. She points to South Korea, Finland, and Singapore which recruit teachers from the top third of their classes; America does the opposite.
Stotsky notes that states must have the fortitude to let under-qualified candidates fail. She calls on everyone involved in the education of children to model academic excellence.
In his review of the book, Michael Poliakoff explains: “Dr. Stotsky explodes the convenient and comforting belief that state regulations are a reliable assurance that teachers are academically competent to teach the subjects they were legally licensed to teach. These tests often set a standard well below reasonable expectations for a college student, much less a college senior or college graduate” (pp. 105–107).
Read the rest of the review here. Buy the book here.
An anti-family bill, a communist’s dream bill, is sitting in the U.S. Senate right now. It’s called S1787, The Full Service Community Schools Act (bill’s full text is here; promoters’ talking points, here.)
This bill sounds friendly, but it is not friendly. Any initiative that shifts the center of a child’s universe away from home, church and family to snatch family authority and personal privacy while it strengthens government’s authority over almost every aspect of a life, is communism. History and religion have repeatedly warned us against communism. But here it is, posing as “social justice” and “community schools”.
S1787 will grant the wish that US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan dreamed would come true. Years ago, Duncan wished to see schools as the center of a child’s life and society, with 14 hour school days and 7 day per week schedules. Watch this 44 second clip.
So what’s the tyrrany of S1787? It creates micromanagement of students and intrudes into families. Powerfully fueled by data mining, including many government agencies outside school agencies, it will dangle grant money carrots in front of communities in exchange for greater federal power over the local community. It seeks to take over the local community agenda (not just the school community– the entire community’s agenda) and to absorb family time.
How? Community schools can control (“assist”) individuals because they are astronomically empowered to know everything about a child, by nonconsensual data collecting and by the wide open data-mashing that has been happening –between state and federal lines (Study the State Longitudinal Database Systems, the Common Core of Data, the SIF interoperability frameworks) –and across state and private lines (Study the private CCSSO’s partnership with the US Department of Education and with State Higher Ed in promoting Common Educational Data Standards and the Data Quality Campaign).
With a society increasingly forgetting the protections of the Constitution and increasingly buying into the nanny-knows-best philosophy of government, few people are standing against the nonconsensual collection of personally identifiable data. Ignorance or tolerance by the people is making individuals’ data-life-takeover possible.
Recall that this communistic, centrally-managed direction is the one in which our US Secretary of Education has been pushing us, unconstitutionally, for years.
“…We have pursued a cradle-to-career agenda, from early childhood programs through postsecondary graduation… [the] final core element in our strategy is promoting a career-to-cradle agenda.”
He also said: “we have to learn to think very, very differently about time. I think our school day is too short. I think our school week is too short. I think our school year is too short.”
Community schools are “social justice” (and communism) in action. There is no representation of individuals. There is no privacy. Nobody gets to opt out. Personal data of a medical, academic, mental, familial, or any other type, belongs to the nanny government. In fact, individuals owe themselves as human capital to the government. It’s in the language of the bill. In community schools, HIPPA (medical privacy rights) protections do not exist because FERPA (school privacy nonrights) usurps them. Your child has fewer privacy rights than ever in a community school.
Please don’t think it’s only academic scores that are being collected. Remember that Comrade Duncan also altered the term “personally identifiable information,” which now includes biometric data —meaning psychological and biological data: “a record of one or more measurable biological or behavioral characteristics that can be used for automated recognition of an individual. Examples include fingerprints; retina and iris patterns; voiceprints; DNA sequence; facial characteristics; and handwriting.”
So how could a student retain private records of a medical, mental health, academic, or family nature, under S1787? The whole purpose of the community school is to mesh and mash records and services.
Lest there be any confusion or name calling (“conspiracy wacko!”) remember that neither the data grab nor the push toward communism is theoretical or hidden. It is promoted by notable congressmen and the US Secretary of Education. Just study the words of Secretary Duncan and Congressman Fattah (PA) and Congressman Honda (CA) who were were the architects of the education redistribution program known as The Equity and Excellence Commission. Congressman Fattah explained: “The Equity and Excellence Commission…that has been established by Secretary Arne Duncan will begin to close the gap in resource distribution between rich and poor…”
Duncan prefers the term “social justice” over the term “communism.” But he fights for it! At a University of Virginia speech, Duncan said: “Great teaching is about so much more than education; it is a daily fight for social justice.” At an IES research conference, he said: “The fight for quality education is about so much more than education. It’s a fight for social justice.”
The truth is that social justice is the opposite of justice. It is forced financial equality; it means wealth and property theft and redistribution, Animal Farm style. It is communism. And there’s only one way to enforce it: top down, heavy-handed government force.
S1787 means to reassign authority (from families to governments) to crush independent businesses and churches (in favor of government-partnered ones) and to redistribute money and resources –without the consent of the people who owned and earned them.
I’m sure by now you want to see if this is really true. Time to look at the language of the bill. I’ll pose questions before each bill citation to help clarify.
Does the bill turn students into government resources rather than free agents? Yes.
“engage students as resources to their communities” -Section 5701, Purposes.
“Students are contributing to their communities.” – Section 5703
Does the bill dramatically increase the role of the government school in society? Yes.
“provides access to such services to students, families, and the community, such as access during the school year (including before- and after-school hours and weekends), as well as during the summer.” – Section 5702
Does the bill mesh and other socialist programs, such as ObamaCare, into schools? Yes.
” …to coordinate and integrate educational, developmental, family, health, and other comprehensive services”-Section 5702
“Access to health care and treatment of illnesses demonstrated to impact academic achievement.”
Does the bill integrate families into its programs without their informed consent? Yes.
” …to coordinate and integrate educational, developmental, family, health, and other comprehensive services”-Section 5702
“Participation rates by parents and family members in school-sanctioned activities” – Section 5703
Does the bill aim to influence or control children’s psychological or behavioral development under government authority?
” …to coordinate and integrate educational, developmental, family, health, and other comprehensive services”-Section 5702
Is the federal government to bribe schools to give away data about the students, families, and other residents of the community? Yes.
To get a financial grant, communities must hand over “A needs assessment that identifies the academic, physical, social, emotional, health, mental health, and other needs of students, families, and community residents.” -Section 5703
Also, to get and keep federal money, communities must show that “Families are supportive and engaged in their children’s education.” (Section 5703) How does a community measure that metric? And, if I am an opponent (nonsupporter) of Common Core or other school-adopted programs, am I to be labeled “not supportive and engaged in my child’s education”? What’s the consequence to me?
Does the bill discourage data collection opt-outs by families, by requiring multiple test measure, including inviting stealth (hidden) assessment of students? Yes.
“Multiple objective measures of student achievement, including assessments, classroom grades, and other means of assessing student performance.” – 5703
Does the bill encourage state workers to inspect families in their homes? Yes.
“Nurse home visitation services” and “Teacher home visiting” and “Programs that promote parental involvement” are “qualified services” under this bill.
Remember, a “service” is not necessarily optional in the world of big government (think: compulsory education, nonconsensual data collection).
What non-academic or after-academic programs are included?
“expanded learning time,” “summer” learning experiences, “after school” experiences, “early childhood education,” “remedial education activities,” “expanded learning time,” “programs under the Head Start Act,” “Programs that promote parental involvement,” “mentoring and other youth development programs,” “conflict mediation,” “Parent leadership development activities,” “Parenting education activities,” “Child care services” “Community service and service-learning opportunities,” “nurse home visitation services” and “teacher home visiting” and “programs that promote parental involvement” “physical education,” “Programs that provide assistance to students who have been truant, suspended, or expelled” (so you can’t get kicked out/freed no matter what you do), “Job training, internship opportunities, and career counseling services,” “Nutrition services,” “Primary health and dental care,” “Mental health counseling services,” “Adult education,” “Juvenile crime prevention and rehabilitation programs,” “Specialized instructional support services,” “Homeless prevention services,” “Other services.”
(Does this sound like a gigantic community prison to anyone? If American schools become these community schools, and all communities become sucked into this web of “services,” there will be nowhere to run. If parents aren’t “supportive and engaged” in this paradigm, they will be reeducated in “parenting education activities” or “parent leadership development activities”. A person can’t even escape by expulsion from school, because rehab and community service hours take place on campus, too. Nor can anyone escape by running away because they have “homeless prevention services.”)
Is there any local control in these schools? No.
There is no representation by those governed under the community schools act. The rulers are to be a five member, unelected, un-repealable advisory committee, federally appointed, that will call the shots for community schools. It will include: “The Secretary of Education (or the Secretary’s delegate) The Attorney General of the United States (or the Attorney General’s delegate) The Secretary of Agriculture (or the Secretary’s delegate) The Secretary of Health and Human Services (or the Secretary’s delegate) The Secretary of Labor”. – Section 5705
We are living in an upside down, black-is-white, bad-is-good, liars’ world of ed reform.
Unlike true benevolence or community care, these ed reform initiatives carry the weight of compliance and are not based in free will or personal agency. Forcing, even out of care, is still forcing. And robbing, even if the purpose is to share, is still robbing.
In S1787, proponents have again concocted a fiction that their Full Services Community Schools Act will empower parents, bless children, and benefit communities. Few things could be further from the truth.
Some people think that unless you have large wads of cash for insanely expensive private schools, you are limited to two choices: public school, or home school at the kitchen table. Today I’m going to describe a handful of alternatives and there are probably many, many more. (Add links in the comment section if you know of some.)
But first: DO NOT FEAR. Whatever you choose can work. If your family’s circumstances mean that you have to send your child to public school, still do not fear.
As I teach my children, they can pretty easily discern the p.c. indoctrination at school and do come home reporting the silly propaganda.
You and your child can and will roll your eyes together, after you’ve taught him/her:
That your child is a child of God, not just “human capital” meant to serve the collective economy and compete in a global economy.
That there’s a world of difference between voluntary sharing (God’s way) and forced sharing (social justice or socialism.)
That your child is an American (or Canadian or Swedish or Bolivian) citizen, not a global citizen– because global citizenship does not guarantee sacred, sacred American rights.
How to use traditional math tools (algorithms, multiplication tables, formulas) if all he/she’s getting in school is fuzzy math and silly ways of wasting time to find solutions.
How to read and write in cursive, even if it looks like chicken scratch.
To love imagination and reading and learning –by having really, really interesting books on your home library shelf. Really, really great books.
To be anchored in truth. Read at the very least one verse of scripture at the breakfast table as he/she gets ready for school. Talk about why it matters.
To politely refuse school surveys and standardized testing unless the school has parental, written consent. Teach them to excuse themselves and call you if they ever feel “not okay” about something even if they can’t explain why to the school.
That you, the parent, are the resident expert on your child and nobody but God can claim to be a “stakeholder” over a child –ever.
Here are the schooling alternatives that I have found and have liked:
Aspire Scholar Academy – This is a remarkable face to face home school co-op that caters to teenagers, located in Orem, Utah. No one under age 12 may attend. In addition to traditional classes based on classic principles of education and morality, this school offers a speech and debate program with teams that compete statewide against public school debate teams. They also offer a “socializing only” option, where your student can attend many social events without attending classes at Aspire. (The classes have filled up for this year, but the social-only option is still available.)
Freedom Project Education (FPE) – This private, online, Common Core-free school is free of any government influence — so there’s no standardized testing, no U.N. or “sustainability” worship, no anti-American or anti-religious agenda hiding in the assignments, no “human capital” here.
I’m excited that I’ll be joining FPE this year, teaching three filmed and live sections of tenth grade English at this wonderful school. We’re learning how to write clearly. We’re reading imaginative literature: Mark Twain, Agatha Christie, Ernest Hemingway, William Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne… Details below. There are still openings if you know a tenth grader in need of an online English class and an enthusiastic teacher. They have classes for every age. And for a private school, it’s inexpensive.
George Mueller Academy – This remarkable school is in person, not online. It’s in Lehi, Utah, and I’m sharing it here because it’s a great model for those in other places who are aiming to build something that goes way beyond a home schooling co-op and becomes much like a traditional private school (but cheaper) with a physical building, face-to-face classes, specialists in advanced subjects, field trips and parties. There is no state oversight of this school, either, so like FPE above, there’s no political agenda and no standardized testing required. It’s called the George Mueller Academy Center for Educational Liberty. See the incredible list of classes– biology, coding, martial arts, U.S. history, logic, languages– with prices set by individual teachers and varying greatly.
I’m teaching an English class at GMA for twelve-and-up (year olds) that meets for two hours, once a week. It’s called “I Love My English Class”. I’m also co-teaching a kindergarten-first grade class that meets for two hours, twice a week, for four hours total per week, called “Little Red School House.”
My Tech High – This is both an online school for students in any location, and a Utah-specific program that can reimburse homeschoolers who take classes outside the home with certain conditions (the class can’t be religious, must be offered to a group of students, etc.)
Home School Support Group – For those pursuing hybrid schools or home schools, Marlene Fletcher offers a home school support group both on Facebook and in mini conferences where people can learn about the myriad of ways that parents and co-ops are creating the kind of education they want for their children.
On Data Mining:
The schools I’ve listed above are data-mining free! Your child won’t be hooked into the Big Brother SLDS at all, with one partial exception: MyTechHigh is connected to the data collection system of the government, but data mining there is minimal there since students can choose the “custom built” class option, thus attending classes that do not report to the government SLDS databases. My Tech High does require students to report periodically about what they are accomplishing in their classes, but SAGE opt outs are available and there is no daily SIS data upload about your child there (which you will find in all public and charter schools, including most online charter schools.)
Senator Hatch’s offices better fasten their seatbelts. They are in for a bumpy ride after messing with family rights in education. Sen. Hatch voted against Senator Lee’s “Parental Notification and Opt Out Amendment” to the Every Child Achieves Act, S1177 yesterday.
If you call Senator Orrin Hatch’s D.C. offices, or his Salt Lake City offices, you will get an answering machine. It happens to me every time. Please call and leave a message anyway. Ask his staff to call back to account for why Hatch voted against Sen. Lee’s common sense amendment. Call 801-625-5672 and 801-524-4380.
If Sen. Lee’s “Parental Notification and Opt Out Amendment” would have passed, we would have upheld the parental right to opt out of federally mandated standardized testing (aka Common Core/SAGE/AIR/SBAC/PARCC testing.) This would have required schools to notify parents when such testing takes place, effectively killing the creepy new nationwide education trend called embedded curriculum testing, or stealth testing, which erases parental opt out-ability. But Hatch said no.
I will call his offices every day until I get a response.
Please share the precise bill language in S1177 with all US senators everywhere as they prepare to vote for or against this monster reauthorization of No Child Left Behind today. Please tell Senators that you expect them to VOTE NO on S1177.
Rep. Justin Amash explained, after he wisely voted NO on the twin bill to S1177, House Bill, HR5 “The Student Success Act” (which passed this week) :
“Here are the facts you should know about H.R. 5 and the current status of NCLB: The funding authorization for No Child Left Behind expired more than seven years ago. Contrary to some statements and press reports, H.R. 5 does not repeal NCLB; it reauthorizes NCLB with modifications. If H.R. 5 becomes law, NCLB will be authorized for the first time since FY 2008.
Why do states and schools continue to act as though No Child Left Behind is current law? Because Congress has continued to appropriate money for NCLB as though the funding authorization never expired! In other words, the program is legally dead, yet Congress continues to send federal funding to schools, with strings attached, as though the law remains in effect.
How should Congress deal with No Child Left Behind? Simply stop funding it.There’s no current authorization for the funding, so the funding needs to stop.
Don’t we need this new bill to stop Common Core? No, we don’t. H.R. 5 reauthorizes No Child Left Behind, which provides federal funding for education. The bill says none of that money may be used (or withheld) to push Common Core. But voting no on H.R. 5 means voting no on the funding authorization that the federal government uses to compel states to adopt Common Core. So, either way, Common Core loses.
Doesn’t this new bill include an amendment to allow parents to opt out of standardized testing? Yes, but it’s H.R. 5 that authorizes federally mandated standardized testing in the first place. Voting no on H.R. 5 means voting no on such standardized testing.
Was there an amendment to allow states to opt out of No Child Left Behind even if H.R. 5 becomes law? Yes. I voted yes on the Walker amendment, but remarkably it failed 195-235 in a Republican-led House of Representatives.”
“I’ve heard from countless moms and dads in Utah who feel as though anonymous government officials living and working 2,000 miles away have a greater say in the education of their children than they do.
One of the most frustrating issues for parents is the amount of standardized tests their children are required to take, particularly the tests that are designed and mandated by the federal government. And it’s not just the frequency of these tests that is frustrating. Too often parents don’t know when these federally-required assessments are going take place, and they don’t find out until after the fact.
…The notion that parents should not be expected to forfeit all of their rights to the government just because they enroll their children in the public school system is not a Democratic idea or a Republican idea. It’s simply an American idea.
That’s why several states – including states as distinct as California and Utah – have passed laws that allow parents to opt out of federally-required tests.
But there’s a problem. Under current law, states with opt-out laws risk losing federal education dollars if a certain proportion of parents decide opting-out is best for their children, because schools are required to assess 95 percent of their students in order to receive federal funds. I introduced an amendment to protect states from losing federal funding if over 5 percent of parents choose to opt out of federally-required tests. Unfortunately, the Senate failed to pass my amendment.”
How I wish we had dozens of Representative Amashes and Senator Mike Lees in Congress. Congressmen who understand and apply the Constitution are becoming rare, rare treasures.
———————–
Update: I did hear back from a staffer at Senator Hatch’s office. I was given talking points and more talking points. What I want is an actual written conversation using the language of the bill in all its contradictions and oppressions, citing page and section numbers and not avoiding the issues that are uncomfortable, controlling the conversation. This is what saps constituents of substantive faith in their elected reps: cut and paste talking points (which sadly, even my own Rep. Jason Chaffetz is handing out on HR5.) These do not, not impress.
What does it mean that HR5, the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, passed? What does it mean for children, teachers, parents? Who benefits? Why was it so strongly promoted?
Attorney and author Emmett McGroarty reported this week at The Pulse 2016 how “House Republicans Betray Common Core Moms” with the passage of HR5. He explained that the bill serves the testing industry, not the people:
“By failing to eliminate or even curb the federal testing mandates, the bill instead serves the testing industry rather than the people. Under NCLB, that industry has grown to a $2 billion per year enterprise.”
McGroarty’s article explains that HR5 promotes psychological profiling of students: HR5 “removes protection against socio-emotional profiling in the statewide assessments (eliminating NCLB’s prohibition against including assessment items that “evaluate or assess personal or family beliefs and attitudes”). Not only does it fail to protect against psychological data-gathering, it actually dictates the type of Brave New World assessments that operate by compiling and analyzing psychological profiles on children. Unlike NCLB, H.R. 5 also requires assessment on behavioral/skills-based standards rather than solely academic standards.”
These and other, equally disturbing items in HR5, can not explain why the Republican House of Representatives passed this 800-page bill. And why was there virtually no transparency on the language of the bill in town hall meetings and media outreach?
McGroarty points out that the bill is “one of the most far-reaching pieces of domestic legislation” yet was passed “without holding many, if any, town hall meetings. Certainly, the effort that leadership spent arm-twisting its membership would have been better spent encouraging its members to meet with their constituents and giving them time in which to do so.”
“On Wednesday, I was honored to stand up for parental rights by voting no on #HR5, the bill to reauthorize #NoChildLeftBehind. The bill increases federal control of education. Here are the facts you should know about H.R. 5 and the current status of NCLB:
The funding authorization for No Child Left Behind expired more than seven years ago. Contrary to some statements and press reports, H.R. 5 does not repeal NCLB; it reauthorizes NCLB with modifications. If H.R. 5 becomes law, NCLB will be authorized for the first time since FY 2008.
Why do states and schools continue to act as though No Child Left Behind is current law? Because Congress has continued to appropriate money for NCLB as though the funding authorization never expired! In other words, the program is legally dead, yet Congress continues to send federal funding to schools, with strings attached, as though the law remains in effect.
How should Congress deal with No Child Left Behind? Simply stop funding it. There’s no current authorization for the funding, so the funding needs to stop.
Don’t we need this new bill to stop Common Core? No, we don’t. H.R. 5 reauthorizes No Child Left Behind, which provides federal funding for education. The bill says none of that money may be used (or withheld) to push Common Core. But voting no on H.R. 5 means voting no on the funding authorization that the federal government uses to compel states to adopt Common Core. So, either way, Common Core loses.
Doesn’t this new bill include an amendment to allow parents to opt out of standardized testing? Yes, but it’s H.R. 5 that authorizes federally mandated standardized testing in the first place. Voting no on H.R. 5 means voting no on such standardized testing.
Was there an amendment to allow states to opt out of No Child Left Behind even if H.R. 5 becomes law? Yes. I voted yes on the Walker amendment, but remarkably it failed 195-235 in a Republican-led House of Representatives.”
Meanwhile, my own representative, Representative Jason Chaffetz, disagrees with McGroarty and Amash. He voted for HR5.
Chaffetz put out a press release saying that he voted for HR5 because it “Reduces the federal role in education”. That phrase is honey to many Utahns’ ears but the phrase doesn’t match the language of the bill.
I’m so disappointed that Rep. Chaffetz, who I’ve until now appreciated– for his willngness to fight Hillary Clinton and search for justice and documentation in the Benghazi murders. But his press release on HR5 includes no documentation: no bill language with references, nothing to reassure people like me that he did more than blindly adopt the bill’s talking points and cut & paste them to his press release. Did he study that bill? If so, I’d like to see Rep. Chaffetz intelligently debate Rep. Amash on HR5. I’d like to have seen a town hall on the subject PRIOR to its passing. I’ve heard Chaffetz say, multiple times, with roaring applause, that he would like to see the Dept. of Education disbanded. But his vote doesn’t match that sentiment.
He voted FOR this bill that cemented the unconsitutional master-servant relationship of feds over states:
“For any State desiring to receive a grant under this subpart, the State educational agency file with the Secretary a plan,” “Each State plan shall demonstrate [to the federal agents]” – 1111(a)1 –
“If a State fails to meet any of the requirements of this section then the Secretary shall withhold funds”– 1111(g)
“The Secretary [federal] shall have the authority to disapprove a State plan” – 1111(e)2 D
“If a State makes significant changes to its State plan, such as the adoption of new State academic standards or new academic assessments, or adopts a new State accountability system, such information shall be submitted to the Secretary under subsection (e)(2) for approval.” – 1111 (f)
“If a State fails to meet any of the requirements of this section then the Secretary shall withhold funds”– 1111(g)
He voted for a bill that has zero privacy protections because it relies on the shot-full-of-holes FERPA: “Information collected under this section shall be collected and disseminated in a manner that protects the privacy of individuals consistent with section 444 of the General Education Provisions Act and this Act.” – 1111(i) (For more on FERPA’s deliberate loosening (destruction) by the Dept. of Ed, see the E.P.I.C. lawsuit.)
He voted FOR a bill that creates unelected committees that have real power over state citizens who did not elect them. (And that uses the unelected groups to eliminate policies that don’t match federal policies)
“State rules, regulations, and policies… conform to… the committee of practitioners”
“Each State educational agency that receives funds under this title shall create a State committee of practitioners”
“Eliminate the rules and regulations that are duplicative of Federal requirements… identify any duplicative or contrasting requirements between the State and Federal rules or regulations; report any conflicting requirements to the Secretary… (1403)
He voted FOR a bill that extends federal tentacles and data collection to preschoolers.
“perform child-find screening services for the preschool-aged children of the tribe” – 5133 a
“assessment of family-based, early childhood, and preschool programs for Native Hawaiians” – 5304 (c) 2
“evaluate the aggregate short- and long-term effects and cost efficiencies across Federal programs… under this Act and related Federal preschool, elementary, and secondary programs” – 6601
“improve the identification of homeless children (including preschool-aged homeless children and youths) ” – 702
“Coordinator for Education of Homeless Children and Youths established in each State shall— gather and make publically available… comprehensive information on— the number of homeless children and youths identified… the nature and extent of the problems homeless children and youths have in gaining access to public preschool programs” – 702
“collect data for and transmit to the Secretary, at such time and in such manner as the Secretary may require, a report containing information necessary to assess the educational needs of homeless children and youths within the State, including data necessary for the Secretary to fulfill the responsibilities… including teachers, special education personnel, administrators, and child development and preschool program personnel – 702
“Plans required: … how the local educational agency will use funds under this subpart to support preschool programs” – 1112
He voted FOR a bill that dictates uniformity and promote psychological profiling and federally-controlled test standards:
“Academic assessments… shall… provide coherent and timely information about student attainment of such standards… be consistent with… nationally recognized… technical standards… be administered in each of grades 3 through 8 and at least once in grades 9 through 12… in the case of science, be administered not less than one time during—grades 3 through 5; grades 6 through 9; and in the case of any other subject chosen by the State, be administered at the discretion of the State; measure individual student academic proficiency and, at the State’s discretion, growth… be administered through multiple assessments during the course of the academic year that result in a single summative score that provides valid, reliable, and transparent information on student achievement … enable results to be disaggregated… be administered to not less than 95 percent of all students, and not less than 95 percent of each subgroup of students described in paragraph (3)(B)(ii)(II); and be the same academic assessments used to measure the academic achievement of all public school students… provide for— the participation in such assessments of all students… produce individual student interpretive, descriptive, and diagnostic reports regarding achievement on such assessments in … uniform format…” –1111
Yesterday, the House unfortunately voted to pass HR5, the “Student Success Act” which is a No Child Left Behind rewrite with horns. More on that here.
Although HR5 did pass with some nice amendments aimed to 1) give parental opt-out rights more power, and 2) give states’ Common Core-opt-out-ability more likelihood, it seems to me that these amendments are little optimistic corks stuffed hopefully into the side of the Titanic.
Some say that HR5’s section 6521 can protect us against all the other language that contradicts it in the bill. Section 6521 has a “Prohibition against Federal mandates, direction, or control.”
It sounds magnificent: “No officer or employee of the Federal Government shall, directly or indirectly, through grants, contracts, or other cooperative agreements, mandate, direct, incentivize, or control a State, local educational agency, or school’s specific instructional content, academic standards and assessments, curricula, or program of instruction, (including any requirement, direction, incentive, or mandate to adopt the Common Core State Standards developed under the Common Core State Standards Initiative or any other academic standards common to a significant number of States), nor shall anything in this Act be construed to authorize such officer or employee to do so.”
But, sadly, bills that are hundreds of pages long are designed to deceive well meaning people– and they do. That prohibition section is a very thin burger, and the oversized buns have taken over that sandwich: there is SO much language in the bill that contradicts that one sentence! Not only in the bill: the whole structure of ed reform dwarfs that little, good sentence. The whole Race to the Top set up a federal power structure over testing and standards that one sentence cannot now overcome.
Using the precedent of the Obama administration and its pure robbery of liberty, educational autonomy and student privacy rights– and the shrugging off of that fact, or lack of knowledge of it, by most members of our current Congress, we can predict that the feds will use whatever “authority” they can bluff up to do whatever they want with ed policy. The Supreme Court clearly is not going to protect us from ambiguous or contradictory language. If HR5 and Congress really wanted something, it had to say so in this bill, in uncontradictory, uncertain terms, and not allow the mass of the bill to dictate master-and-servant style rules, where the feds are the master and the states are the servant, while one sentence prohibits it. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
Contradiction and soft language begs for federal and corporate overreach, which Congress has sadly shown it lacks the interest to rebuff.
So, HR5 passed the house. See how your representative voted. Call and ask him/her why.
HR5 could still get vetoed. I’m crossing my fingers.
Meanwhile, its twin bill, S1177, sits in the Senate!
Please share these as you call and write to your Senators. And find more! As you do word searches and spend time in this bill, you will find awfulness. When you do, please share those language bites in the comments section here and with your senators in D.C.
Pretending to protect states and parents from federal overreach using redundant, nonhelpful (and contradictory) language:
First the bill raises our hopes; the talking points sound good; maybe this won’t be a federal sledgehammer to parents and states. The bill’s sections 5001-5010 (a large chunk of the very large bill) even go under the title “Empowering Parents and Expanding Opportunity Through Innovation”. Sounds good.
But deep inside, the S1177 (almost) conceals ugly and unconstitutional words like this:
“State plan disapproval: The Secretary shall have the authority to disapprove a State plan” –1004
“If the Secretary determines that a State plan does not meet the requirements of this subsection or subsection (b) or (c), the Secretary shall, prior to declining to approve the State plan immediately notify the State of such determination… offer the State an opportunity to revise” –1111
“A State educational agency may use not more than 5 percent of the amount made available to the State… for the following activities…”
“Closing student achievement gaps, and preparing more students to be college and career ready” -2501(4) (Making everyone common does tend to close the achievement gaps, by slowing those who would otherwise soar ahead of the mediocre and the slow.)
Cementing the unconstitutional Fed-Master/State-Servant relationship:
“State plan disapproval: The Secretary shall have the authority to disapprove a State plan” –1004
“For any State desiring to receive a grant under this part, the State educational agency shall submit to the Secretary a plan…” – 1111
Retaining federal testing and standards mandates:
“Same standards: … standards required by subparagraph (A) shall be the same standards that the State applies to all public schools and public school students” –1111 (Do you want to give the feds the authority to dictate uniformity to us? What if a state wants to be innovative and diverse and various? That won’t be allowed by this federal law.)
“Alignment: Each State shall demonstrate that the challenging State academic standards are aligned with entrance requirements, without the need for academic remediation, for the system of public higher education in the State; relevant State career and technical education standards; and relevant State early learning guidelines” –1111
“Measures the annual progress of not less than 95 percent of all students, and students in each of the categories of students” -1204
“Measure the annual progress of not less than 95 percent of all students and students in each of the categories of students” – 1205
Adding to the list of programs States must consult, and aligning with workforce socialism program:
“(aa) student readiness to enter postsecondary education or the workforce” -1111 (repeated many times)
“an application … shall include the following: A description of… assets, identified by the State… which shall include— an analysis of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education quality and outcomes in the State… labor market information regarding the industry and business workforce needs within the State….” –2504
Dictating types of testing– including using nonacademic, interpretive, and diagnostic student reports:
“produce individual student interpretive, descriptive, and diagnostic reports… include information regarding achievement on academic assessments aligned with challenging State academic achievement standards… in uniform format” –1111(b) (2) (B) (vi) (xiii)
“(vi) involve multiple up-to-date measures of student academic achievement, including measures that assess higher-order thinking skills and understanding, which may include measures of student academic growth and may be partially delivered in the form of portfolios, projects, or extended performance tasks” –1111 (b) (2) (B) (vi)
Assessments must “be administered through a single summative assessment; or be administered through multiple statewide assessments during the course of the year if the State can demonstrate that the results of these multiple assessments, taken in their totality, provide a summative score” – 1111 (b) (2) (B) (viii)
“(xiii) be developed, to the extent practicable, using the principles of universal design for learning.” – 1111 (b) (2) (B) (xiii)
Forcing out the parental opt-out movement; also, booting family out and putting government in to the center of the universe:
Crushing opt outs, each state test must “Measures the annual progress of not less than 95 percent of all students, and students in each of the categories of students” -1204
Same: “Measure the annual progress of not less than 95 percent of all students and students in each of the categories of students” – 1205
Schools to be far, far more than places to learn numeracy and literacy: “21st Century Learning Centers… an array of additional services, programs, and activities, such as youth development activities, service learning, nutrition and health education, drug and violence prevention programs, counseling programs, art, music, physical fitness and wellness programs, technology education programs, financial literacy programs, math, science, career and technical programs, internship or apprenticeship programs, and other ties to an in-demand industry sector” – 4201
“address family instability, school climate, trauma, safety, and nonacademic learning.” -7304
You can’t stick corks into the side of the Titanic to save the people on the ship, and you can’t stick amendments into evil bills and then in good conscience vote yes on them. We are building and voting for our own children’s cages in the belly of a sinking ship.
Read the current ed reform bill amendments here; some are dancing about the Zeldin amendment because it “allows” states to opt out of Common Core. STATES ALREADY CAN do that. The point is that the feds bribe states not to, and states don’t. Then the feds push out data systems that nobody is smart enough to not build.
If I sound a little bit angry, that’s because I am typing. If you were here in the room you would want earplugs. I am very angry, very disappointed. Very loud inside my own little furious head and home.
I know I’m not smarter than my senators and representatives. I can read, and so can they. So why, why, why are they NOT telling we, the people, who call their offices that they are unequivocally voting NO on these bad twin ed reform bills, HR5 and S1177? I have to assume that the represenatives are not studying these 300, 600, 800 page monsters; that they are relying on the talking points of the bill’s authors. If so, the reps are revealing dangerous incompetence– carelessness with our precious liberty and our precious children.
I do realize that our representatives are busy. But these are dire circumstances that affect children so negatively. We elected and pay these friends. We entrust them with the futures of our public school children. Yet, I don’t know if I believe they are reading the bills. Orrin Hatch is promoting S1177. But I’m concerned about the entire Utah delegation of senators and representatives -and many others outside Utah.
In what universe is it okay for a senator or a representative to vote yes on a bill that does what HR 5 does?** It:
Cements the unconstutitional Fed Master- State Servant relationship
Attacks parental opt out movement – kills parental opt out rights
Hacks off religious freedom and autonomy for any private schools that receive federal dollars for any of their programs
Pretends that federal FERPA hasn’t been shot full of holes and depends on FERPA for privacy rights (what privacy rights?)
Fails to require parental consent for state data mining of children’s personally identifiable data
Creates unelected committees that have real power over state citizens who did not elect them
Fails to provide enforcement for autonomy which means there won’t be any state autonomy
Extends federal tentacles and data collection to preschoolers
Reinforces socialist alignment of schools to workforce, putting economy first without regard for students
Retains federal testing mandates
Promotes psychological profiling of students
**Below, I am posting section numbers for the reference of those who want to see the language with their own eyes.
In what universe is it okay for a senator or a representative to vote yes on a bill that does what S1177 does?***
Pretends to protect us from federal overreach with redundant, nonhelpful language
Aligns us to “college and career ready” standard which ARE Common Core, federally defined elsewhere
Cements the unconstutitional Fed Master- State Servant relationship
Mandates that States answer to the Feds even on altering state standards
Retains federal testing mandates
Adds to the list of programs a state must consult and aligns with workforce (socialism) program
Dictates types of testing
Forces out the parental opt out movement
Narrows the definition of “mental health” and “school climate” that reduces student religious and political expression
Probes into psychological data collection on children without parental consent
Fails to require parental consent for state data mining of children’s personally identifiable data
Extends federal tentacles and data collection to preschool
***Below, I am posting section numbers for the reference of those who want to see the language with their own eyes.
The list could go on and on and on.
I don’t get it. I really do not understand these politicians. I really do not.
Our children deserve better. So much better!
I’ll be wasting spending time and breath all day today, again, calling 202-224-3121 to get my senators’ and reps’ attention. Feel free to join me. Even though it feels like we are sticking corks into the side of the Titanic. May God help us.
—————————-
“THE STUDENT SUCCESS ACT”
**HR5 section numbers for reference:
Master and Servant unconstitutional relationship in cement:
“For any State desiring to receive a grant under this subpart, the State educational agency file with the Secretary a plan,” “Each State plan shall demonstrate [to the federal agents]” – 1111(a)1 –
“Approval: The Secretary shall approve a State plan within 120 days of its submission; disapprove of the State plan only if the Secretary demonstrates how the State plan fails” – 1111(e)1B
“The Secretary [federal] shall have the authority to disapprove a State plan” – 1111(e)2 D
“If a State makes significant changes to its State plan, such as the adoption of new State academic standards or new academic assessments, or adopts a new State accountability system, such information shall be submitted to the Secretary under subsection (e)(2) for approval.” – 1111 (f)
“If a State fails to meet any of the requirements of this section then the Secretary shall withhold funds” – 1111(g)
Attack on parental rights via stopping opt out movement:
“Assessments shall… be administered to not less than 95 percent of all students, and not less than 95 percent of each subgroup of students”- 1111(b)(2)(B)(xiii)
Hacking off religious freedom and autonomy for any private school receiving any federal dollars for programs:
“The control of funds provided under this subpart, and title to materials, equipment, and property purchased with such funds, shall be in a public agency, and a public agency shall administer such funds, materials, equipment, and property… independent of such private school and of any religious organization.” 1120(d)(2)(B)
Pretending that federal FERPA hasn’t been shot full of holes and depending on FERPA for privacy rights (what privacy rights?)
Failing to require parental consent for state data mining of children’s personally identifable information
Nada. Do a word search for “SLDS” or “State Longitudinal Database Systems” or “SIF” or “CEDS” and you will find nothing. There is no protection. There is no informed consent. There is no parental-consent requirement– not here and not in FERPA.
Creating unelected committees that have real power over state citizens who did not elect them. (And using these unelected groups to eliminate policies that don’t match federal policies)
“State rules, regulations, and policies… conform to… the committee of practitioners”
“Each State educational agency that receives funds under this title shall create a State committee of practitioners”
“Eliminate the rules and regulations that are duplicative of Federal requirements… identify any duplicative or contrasting requirements between the State and Federal rules or regulations; report any conflicting requirements to the Secretary… (1403)
Failing to provide enforcement for autonomy which means there won’t be any state autonomy from the feds.
State autonomy is in no way enforceable by HR5. It’s not in there. That is the problem. It’s just talking points about state’s rights, with no support.
Extending federal tentacles and data collection to preschoolers.
“perform child-find screening services for the preschool-aged children of the tribe” – 5133 a
“assessment of family-based, early childhood, and preschool programs for Native Hawaiians” – 5304 (c) 2
“evaluate the aggregate short- and long-term effects and cost efficiencies across Federal programs… under this Act and related Federal preschool, elementary, and secondary programs” – 6601
“improve the identification of homeless children (including preschool-aged homeless children and youths) ” – 702
“Coordinator for Education of Homeless Children and Youths established in each State shall— gather and make publically available… comprehensive information on— the number of homeless children and youths identified… the nature and extent of the problems homeless children and youths have in gaining access to public preschool programs” – 702
“collect data for and transmit to the Secretary, at such time and in such manner as the Secretary may require, a report containing information necessary to assess the educational needs of homeless children and youths within the State, including data necessary for the Secretary to fulfill the responsibilities… including teachers, special education personnel, administrators, and child development and preschool program personnel – 702
“Plans required: … how the local educational agency will use funds under this subpart to support preschool programs” – 1112
Reinforcing socialist alignment of schools to workforce, putting economy first without regard for students
“Each State plan shall demonstrate [to the feds] that the State has developed and is implementing a single, statewide accountability system to ensure that all public school students graduate from high school prepared for postsecondary education or the workforce” -1111 (This is repeated and repeated. A word search for “workforce” turns up 22 times in this bill.)
Retaining federal testing mandates
“Academic assessments… shall— be used in determining the performance of each local educational agency and public school… be aligned with the State’s academic standards and provide coherent and timely information about student attainment of such standards… be consistent with… nationally recognized… technical standards… be administered in each of grades 3 through 8 and at least once in grades 9 through 12… in the case of science, be administered not less than one time during—grades 3 through 5; grades 6 through 9; and in the case of any other subject chosen by the State, be administered at the discretion of the State; measure individual student academic proficiency and, at the State’s discretion, growth… be administered through multiple assessments during the course of the academic year that result in a single summative score that provides valid, reliable, and transparent information on student achievement … enable results to be disaggregated… be administered to not less than 95 percent of all students, and not less than 95 percent of each subgroup of students described in paragraph (3)(B)(ii)(II); and be the same academic assessments used to measure the academic achievement of all public school students… provide for— the participation in such assessments of all students… produce individual student interpretive, descriptive, and diagnostic reports regarding achievement on such assessments in … uniform format…” –1111
Promoting psychological profiling of students
“Assessments … (xi) “produce individual student interpretive, descriptive, and diagnostic reports regarding achievement on such assessments” -1111
Pretending to protect states and parents from federal overreach using redundant, nonhelpful (and contradictory) language
First the bill raises our hopes; the talking points sound good; maybe this won’t be a federal sledgehammer to parents and states. The bill’s sections 5001-5010 (a large chunk of the very large bill) even go under the title “Empowering Parents and Expanding Opportunity Through Innovation”. Sounds nice. But deep inside, the bill almost conceals ugly and unconstitutional words like this:
“State plan disapproval: The Secretary shall have the authority to disapprove a State plan” –1004
“If the Secretary determines that a State plan does not meet the requirements of this subsection or subsection (b) or (c), the Secretary shall, prior to declining to approve the State plan immediately notify the State of such determination… offer the State an opportunity to revise” –1111
“A State educational agency may use not more than 5 percent of the amount made available to the State… for the following activities…”
“Closing student achievement gaps, and preparing more students to be college and career ready” -2501(4) (Making everyone common does tend to close the achievement gaps, by slowing those who would otherwise soar ahead of the mediocre and the slow.)
Cementing the unconstitutional Fed-Master/State-Servant relationship
“State plan disapproval: The Secretary shall have the authority to disapprove a State plan” –1004
“For any State desiring to receive a grant under this part, the State educational agency shall submit to the Secretary a plan…” – 1111
Retaining federal testing and standards mandates
“Same standards: … standards required by subparagraph (A) shall be the same standards that the State applies to all public schools and public school students” –1111 (Do you want to give the feds the authority to dictate uniformity to us? What if a state wants to be innovative and diverse and various? That won’t be allowed by this federal law.)
“Alignment: Each State shall demonstrate that the challenging State academic standards are aligned with entrance requirements, without the need for academic remediation, for the system of public higher education in the State; relevant State career and technical education standards; and relevant State early learning guidelines” –1111
“Measures the annual progress of not less than 95 percent of all students, and students in each of the categories of students” -1204
“Measure the annual progress of not less than 95 percent of all students and students in each of the categories of students” – 1205
Adding to the list of programs States must consult, and aligning with workforce socialism program
“(aa) student readiness to enter postsecondary education or the workforce” -1111 (repeated many times)
“an application … shall include the following: A description of… assets, identified by the State… which shall include— an analysis of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education quality and outcomes in the State… labor market information regarding the industry and business workforce needs within the State….” –2504
Dictating types of testing– including using nonacademic, interpretive, and diagnostic student reports
“produce individual student interpretive, descriptive, and diagnostic reports… include information regarding achievement on academic assessments aligned with challenging State academic achievement standards… in uniform format” –1111(b) (2) (B) (vi) (xiii)
“(vi) involve multiple up-to-date measures of student academic achievement, including measures that assess higher-order thinking skills and understanding, which may include measures of student academic growth and may be partially delivered in the form of portfolios, projects, or extended performance tasks” – 1111 (b) (2) (B) (vi)
Assessments must “be administered through a single summative assessment; or be administered through multiple statewide assessments during the course of the year if the State can demonstrate that the results of these multiple assessments, taken in their totality, provide a summative score” – 1111 (b) (2) (B) (viii)
“(xiii) be developed, to the extent practicable, using the principles of universal design for learning.” – 1111 (b) (2) (B) (xiii)
Forcing out the parental opt-out movement; also, booting family out and putting government in to the center of the universe.
Crushing opt outs, each state test must “Measures the annual progress of not less than 95 percent of all students, and students in each of the categories of students” -1204
Same: “Measure the annual progress of not less than 95 percent of all students and students in each of the categories of students” – 1205
Schools to be far, far more than places to learn numeracy and literacy: “21st Century Learning Centers… an array of additional services, programs, and activities, such as youth development activities, service learning, nutrition and health education, drug and violence prevention programs, counseling programs, art, music, physical fitness and wellness programs, technology education programs, financial literacy programs, math, science, career and technical programs, internship or apprenticeship programs, and other ties to an in-demand industry sector” – 4201
“address family instability, school climate, trauma, safety, and nonacademic learning.” -7304
Protecting our children from increasing oppressions and loss of freedoms will require not allowing federal S.1177 to pass.
The name of S.1177, which now sits in the Senate on Capitol Hill, is also: “The Every Child Achieves Act of 2015,” “No Child Left Behind – rewritten,” “Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” and is virtually the same as House Bill HR5, “The Student Success Act” which passed the House yesterday.
I decided to skim the near-800 page bill using American Principles Project’s 21 items as my guide. The hide and seek that readers must wield with the real purposes and powers of this bill is ridiculous. Clearly, the authors of S.1177 aim to obscure its true purposes, which I now see only serve the Obama-UN agenda for education.
The media’s calling S.1177 “a bipartisan compromise” but that’s far from true. It’s all part of the Common Core bipartisan profiteering scheme that aligns federal tests and standards, but elbows out parents and voters. Many in Congress are fooled, but don’t you be fooled by the word “bipartisan” –nor by the bill’s misleading talking points.
The power struggle is no longer between the Republicans and the Democrats. Bipartisan means almost nothing. The fight is between voting families– We the People, whether Democratic, Republican or other– versus the clique of profiteering businessmen and politicians. Those who profit in money or with the power that increased data mining provides, each profit from the standardization and nationalization of testing, data standards, education standards, accountability measures, and aligned curriculum.
Killing this bill ought to be easy because nobody likes No Child Left Behind, that ugly federal law, and this is its big brother. Ask any teacher, any principal, any politician in any party. NCLB blessed no child and was a bureaucratic quagmire. Why did its reauthorization successfully pass the Senate committee– unanimously— in April after being stopped in its tracks in March? And why is S.1177 onstage again? The answer is simple: because the states have become addicted to federal money and many are selling souls to get it.
Passing S.1177 based on money-fear is pure stupidity. More school funding comes from local sources, by FAR, than from federal funds, and ugly strings are attached to the federal money– strings that take away freedom, privacy rights, a say over our own schools. If we’d be courageous and fiscally responsible, and fire most of the outrageous salary-consumers at state offices of education and the entire federal Dept of Ed, we’d have abundant cash for legitimate school needs. Plenty. We should be retaining local dollars, rather than sending them to D.C. to be redistributed back to some of us, conditionally. It’s common sense.
So here is my little list.
Six Things That I Find Evil, Hidden in S.1177
1. The bill aims to kill parental rights in the parental opt-out movement.
Taking away a parent’s authority over his or her own child is a crime that the Fed Ed is willing to try to get away with. This bill says that states must not only give federally aligned common core tests (they use the code term “college and career ready” which is Common Core) but must collect data from 95 percent of the students. That aims to kill our huge, growing parents’ opt out movement. The bill says, “Measures the annual progress of not less than 95 percent of all students, and students in each of the categories of students”. (1111)
2. The bill’s master-servant relationship between Fed Ed and State Ed is unconstitutional.
I don’t like the master-servant relationship between the Fed Ed agencies and the State agencies. It’s clearly, clearly unconstitutional. States are supposed to be in charge of their own educational systems. But in this bill, read: “The state shall submit,” and “The Secretary [Fed Ed] shall have power to disapprove a state plan” (Sec. 1111) “If a State makes significant changes to its plan at any time… such information shall be submitted to the Secretary”. That just gives the Fed Ed Secretary power to disapprove a state’s decision to drop Common Core. (Sec. 1111)
Cementing Common Core is not what the authors of S.1177 said were the goals of the bill, yet there it is. Putting parents last, and making states do the dirty work for the false authorities at the Department of Education, is a deceptive way of getting people to think that there’s less federal involvement, a misleading attempt to get conservative people to pass this bill.
3. The bill will suppress student expression of religious and political values.
I don’t like the bill’s repeated use of the concept and term “school climate” –for example, in conditional “formula grants”. These give the federal government power to model citizenship, to influence what is a federally appropriate world-view, and to pressure schools to suppress student expression of religious values, using each state as enforcer. (Sec. 4103-4104). The bill says that money will be conditionally given and that data gathered by the school will determine whether a student holds appropriate beliefs in the “school climate”. This will allow absolute federal indoctrination in local schools. If family values don’t match Fed Ed values, there will be federally-directed school-based re-education.
Here’s the very wordy sentence that unsuccessfully aims to hides its true aim, asking for collection of “school-level data on indicators or measures of school quality, climate and safety, and discipline, including those described in section 1111(d)(1)(C)(v); and risk factors in the community, school, family, or peer-individual domains that are known, through prospective, longitudinal research efforts, to be predictive of drug use, violent behavior, harassment, disciplinary issues, and having an effect on the physical and mental health and well-being of youth in the school and community.”
The bill says: “may include, among other programs and activities— drug and violence prevention activities and programs, including professional development and training for school and specialized instructional support personnel and interested community members in prevention, education, early identification, and intervention mentoring, and, where appropriate, rehabilitation referral, as related to drug and violence prevention… extended learning opportunities, including before and after school programs and activities, programs during summer recess periods, and expanded learning time… school-based mental health services, including early identification of mental-health symptoms… and appropriate referrals to direct individual or group counseling services” (4105)
4. The bill sees government, not families, at the center of the universe– for younger and younger people, for more and more of the time.
I don’t like the way federal schools are creeping into the community life via this bill. It allots money to fulfill Sec. Duncan’s “21st –century community learning centers” (Sec. 4201) I don’t like that this bill consumes more family time, giving so much time to government schools. The “community creep” of Fed Ed schools expands in multiple ways if S.1177 passes. The Fed Ed Secretary will pay “programs that support extended learning opportunities, including before and after school programs and activities, programs during summer recess periods, and expanded learning time; in accordance with subsections (c) and (d), school-based mental health services, including early identification of mental-health symptoms” — which means more government surveillance of belief and behavior, via more time spent with Fed Ed, and less time spent with Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa.
The bill’s long, long, long, long sentences hide a lot, probably on purpose. So I’ve cut phrases to highlight what I see under the wordiness. Let me know what you think. Am I reading this wrong?
“The local educational agency or consortium… shall take into account… school-level data on… family… predictive of … mental health and well-being of youth in the school and community.” (See 4104)
I don’t like that the bill puts it hands on preschoolers. It bullies preschools, too, by mandating federal preschool standards to be enforced by states, as it encourages states to take over toddler time from moms and dads. I don’t like the time-away-from-family aim nor the data mining aim (without consent of parents, of course). Preschool babies are to be psychologically profiled by the state. The bill does not state this plainly. You have to connect the dots: the word “preschool” shows up 43 times in the bill. Statewide preschool standards align with federal standards, creating nationalization of measurement of citizen babies; federal standards are heavily socio-emotional; it all results in the compilation of psychological data on very young children. We already had the Dept. of Ed and its partners co-creating Common Educational Data Standards (CEDS) the better to align everyone with, without voter input, and these folks wave banners with their motto (fourth principle) : “Continued Commitment to Disaggregation“ of students’ personal data. Your specific, individual child is wanted in their clutches. That’s what disaggregation means: not in a clump; individual.
I happen to have a toddler, who will never attend government preschool. Since my toddler has been watching VeggieTales for too long I’m going to quit right here and right now and take off to the park. I will be speed dialing senators with one hand while pushing the swing with the other, and hope you do the same.
To read the whole, near-800 page monster bill, CLICK HERE, and insist that your senators and school boards read the bill. They are paid by our tax dollars to read bills and to speak intelligently about them. Pressure is on. No one can afford to trust talking points; verify claims in the bill’s language.
Look at more actual language found in S.1177 “THE EVERY CHILD ACHIEVES ACT” (duplicated on my other post here.)
Pretending to protect states and parents from federal overreach using redundant, nonhelpful (and contradictory) language:
First the bill raises our hopes; the talking points sound good; maybe this won’t be a federal sledgehammer to parents and states. The bill’s sections 5001-5010 (a large chunk of the very large bill) even go under the title “Empowering Parents and Expanding Opportunity Through Innovation”. Sounds nice. But deep inside, the bill almost conceals ugly and unconstitutional words like this:
“State plan disapproval: The Secretary shall have the authority to disapprove a State plan” –1004
“If the Secretary determines that a State plan does not meet the requirements of this subsection or subsection (b) or (c), the Secretary shall, prior to declining to approve the State plan immediately notify the State of such determination… offer the State an opportunity to revise” –1111
“A State educational agency may use not more than 5 percent of the amount made available to the State… for the following activities…”
“Closing student achievement gaps, and preparing more students to be college and career ready” -2501(4) (Making everyone common does tend to close the achievement gaps, by slowing those who would otherwise soar ahead of the mediocre and the slow.)
Cementing the unconstitutional Fed-Master/State-Servant relationship:
“State plan disapproval: The Secretary shall have the authority to disapprove a State plan” –1004
“For any State desiring to receive a grant under this part, the State educational agency shall submit to the Secretary a plan…” – 1111
Retaining federal testing and standards mandates:
“Same standards: … standards required by subparagraph (A) shall be the same standards that the State applies to all public schools and public school students” –1111 (Do you want to give the feds the authority to dictate uniformity to us? What if a state wants to be innovative and diverse and various? That won’t be allowed by this federal law.)
“Alignment: Each State shall demonstrate that the challenging State academic standards are aligned with entrance requirements, without the need for academic remediation, for the system of public higher education in the State; relevant State career and technical education standards; and relevant State early learning guidelines” –1111
“Measures the annual progress of not less than 95 percent of all students, and students in each of the categories of students” -1204
“Measure the annual progress of not less than 95 percent of all students and students in each of the categories of students” – 1205
Adding to the list of programs States must consult, and aligning with workforce socialism program:
“(aa) student readiness to enter postsecondary education or the workforce” -1111 (repeated many times)
“an application … shall include the following: A description of… assets, identified by the State… which shall include— an analysis of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education quality and outcomes in the State… labor market information regarding the industry and business workforce needs within the State….” –2504
Dictating types of testing– including using nonacademic, interpretive, and diagnostic student reports:
“produce individual student interpretive, descriptive, and diagnostic reports… include information regarding achievement on academic assessments aligned with challenging State academic achievement standards… in uniform format” –1111(b) (2) (B) (vi) (xiii)
“(vi) involve multiple up-to-date measures of student academic achievement, including measures that assess higher-order thinking skills and understanding, which may include measures of student academic growth and may be partially delivered in the form of portfolios, projects, or extended performance tasks” – 1111 (b) (2) (B) (vi)
Assessments must “be administered through a single summative assessment; or be administered through multiple statewide assessments during the course of the year if the State can demonstrate that the results of these multiple assessments, taken in their totality, provide a summative score” – 1111 (b) (2) (B) (viii)
“(xiii) be developed, to the extent practicable, using the principles of universal design for learning.” – 1111 (b) (2) (B) (xiii)
Forcing out the parental opt-out movement; also, booting family out and putting government in to the center of the universe:
Crushing opt outs, each state test must “Measures the annual progress of not less than 95 percent of all students, and students in each of the categories of students” -1204
Same: “Measure the annual progress of not less than 95 percent of all students and students in each of the categories of students” – 1205
Schools to be far, far more than places to learn numeracy and literacy: “21st Century Learning Centers… an array of additional services, programs, and activities, such as youth development activities, service learning, nutrition and health education, drug and violence prevention programs, counseling programs, art, music, physical fitness and wellness programs, technology education programs, financial literacy programs, math, science, career and technical programs, internship or apprenticeship programs, and other ties to an in-demand industry sector” – 4201
“address family instability, school climate, trauma, safety, and nonacademic learning.” -7304
This video, which comes from parents in Massachusetts and Dr. Sandra Stotsky, is important.
Its message is:
Please call 202-224-3121 –the number to call all senators in Washington, D.C. Ask that your senators stop the reauthorization of ESEA also known as No Child Left Behind. Passing this bill violates civil procedure. Ask to speak your national Senators (both of them) –or just ask for Sen. LaMar Alexander of TN and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington State, who are the bipartisan sponsors of the ESEA reauthorization.
Why?
“No Child Left Behind” is ESEA. It should NOT have been reauthorized! The reauthorization of this awful, 800 page bill (that hardly anyone has read; ask your senators if they’ve read it!) –is a gross violation of civic procedure: there been no public hearings for the parents of U.S. children, those who will be affected most. There should have been many opportunities for parents to read and testify for or against this bill.
People are being fooled by the bill’s talking points, saying that it takes power away from the federal government –but this bill does not do what it says it will do. It puts power into the hands of state commissioners, giving parents even less power than they now have.
Know this: the power struggle is no longer between the Republicans and the Democrats. It is between the Democratic and Republican voters who love children, value academic freedom, cherish time-tested classical education and liberty versus those Democrats and Republican businessmen and politicians who profit (with money and with the power that data mining provides) by the standardization of all testing, data standards, education standards, accountability measures, and aligned curriculum.
Don’t be fooled by the word “bipartisan.”
Please call. Defend the constitutional right to have a REAL voice and vote in education. This is for the children, the future citizens of this nation.
I’m posting today to draw attention to Cogs in the Machine, an important white paper published last year by Pioneer Institute, written by Jane Robbins, Joy Pullman and Emmett McGroarty. It’s about public-system-assisted big data collection –and how Americans can protect their kids. The paper includes specific, effective action points for parents, schools, state- and nationally-elected representatives. The length of the white paper, though, makes me think few will read down to find these treasures, so I’m posting just the final recommendations here. Please read (and share) the whole white paper when you can. If you click here and scroll down to the end, you can read the whole paper, and much more easily. Pasting from the pdf is causing tight spacing that I don’t know how to fix.
The white paper’s policy recommendations for parents, schools, state and national lawmakers:
“This report has discussed dangers that unchecked data-collection poses to individuals and the United States as a whole.
What are some ways to check these dangers?
PARENTS:
• If your child has any sort of computer login or participates in any computer program (say, a computer vocabulary game or computerized tests) as part of school, his or her data is being automatically logged and compiled through these devices. If this concerns you, ask your school to explain how they will protect your child’s privacy. If these protections are not satisfactory, ask the school to modify its contract with the technology provider to guarantee it will not sell or indefnitely compile your child’s information.
• If your child’s school is implementing digital-learning platforms, insist on an explanation of what kinds of information will be compiled through those platforms. Will the software record data about your child’s behaviors and attitudes ratherthan just his academic knowledge? If so,and if you object to this data-collection, opt out.
• If you child is using a vendor’s education apps, verify that the vendor is not mining your child’s data to use for marketing or other purposes.
• As always, be vigilant about what happens in your child’s classroom. Read all notices schools hand out about data-and information-sharing, and don’t sign off on anything you don’t understand. Choose not to provide information when the reasons someone wants it are not explained to your satisfaction.
• When your child takes a standardized test, demand to know what data the assessment will collect and to whom it will be disclosed. Find out if the test measures non-cognitive attributes such as self-control, home environment, etc. If any answers are unacceptable to you, opt out.
• Be especially wary of having healthcare services provided to your children at school. These are not subject to thetighter privacy protections required of non-school healthcare providers.
• You are entitled to know what information your school has already collected about your child, and to correct any errors in that record. All you have to do is ask someone in charge at your child’s school.
• Demand that state lawmakers pass strong legislation protecting your child’s information.
SCHOOLS:
When you sign contracts with technology providers, include clauses that require the vendor to erase student-level information after the contract term has ended, forbid the vendor from selling or sharing student information with any other entity unless mandated by law, and as far as possible provide for student anonymity by using ID numbers and random logins rather than personal identifiers such as names, email addresses, and especially Social Security numbers.
STATE POLICYMAKERS:
• Introduce and vote for legislation to correct the relaxation of FERPA. The legislation should include penalties that will make it not worth a company or nonprofit or agency’s while to disobey the law. It is also essential for states to pass student-privacy laws because, even if FERPA is restored or strengthened, the more bulwarks against excessive data-collection, the better. Further, laws made closer to the people who must follow them offer better protection to citizens and the ability to tailor laws to the needs of each state.
• Require state departments of education, local school systems, and schools to include tight privacy protections in all contracts with vendors, contractors, cloud computing services, and so forth.
• Limit the information the state demands that schools collect to the least data required to comply with federal mandates in exchange for federal funds.
• Prohibit state departments of education from accepting federal grants that include any data-collection mandates without prior review and public approval by the legislature.
• Be wary of investing in and implementing any digital-learning platforms without understanding exactly what capabilities they have for compiling data on students, such as measuring psychological resources and other affective assessments. No such platforms should be used without full explanation of their data-collection capabilities to, and consent by, parents.
• Amend any state laws that require parents to opt out of automatic data-collection and require them instead to opt in. Also amend state laws that penalize parents or children for choosing to opt out of state tests.
• Hold town hall meetings on private and government data-collection.
• Pass comprehensive laws to address the state’s authority to collect, whether directly or through private sources, personal data and its authority to pass that data on to others, including the federal government and private entities.
NATIONAL LAWMAKERS:
• Immediately reaffirm the original privacy protections of FERPA and seek to strengthen that law with one fit for the digital age, which affirms individuals’ ownership of their own private information.
• Prohibit federal agencies from demanding or accepting student-level data from, or disclosing such data to, any private entity or any health, labor,workforce, social services, education, or other agency.
• Replace demands for data in exchange for federal education funds with federal laws that block grant such funds to states with freedom to spend their education dollars as they see fit. This is the model of the A-PLUS Act, a good step toward sending unproductive and intrusive federal education mandates at all levels.
• Pass legislation that recognizes the right of the individual to exploit (i.e., prohibit the exploitation of) his or her personal information. Such legislation would, ofcourse, have to specify at what point such a right of action vests in the individual (at what point of data collection and manipulation may an individual take action).”
People might think it could not possibly matter one way or another. But think about it.
We didn’t elect NGA’s huge membership or staff. We can’t fire anyone at NGA. NGA is not a representative Congress. NGA is not a public institution– it’s a private trade group that happens to have an official-sounding name. That name confuses people.
So, as a private club, it’s not subject to transparency laws. It doesn’t even have to allow investigators or media in to the closed-door meetings. No citizen can vote to change what NGA does. Governors can not even vote to change NGA, if they aren’t NGA members, which some very smart governors choose not to be. Last time I checked, the governors of South Carolina, Texas, Maine, Alabama, and Indiana were staunchly determined never to join the NGA, or had joined and quit. Yet NGA aims to make binding national policies without due process of representation — and it has already done so, in the case of Common Core, for example.
NGA is free to exist, as a private group, just like anyone. But as a national governing body, no. That’s unconstitutional.
Ask yourself: will the Governor be representing Utah’s interests to the NGA, or the NGA’s interests to Utah? In all the years he’s been a member of NGA, he’s always chosen to do what NGA asks of him. What does that mean to us? What happens when the goals and hopes of so many Utahns– for greater educational liberty and local autonomy— stand in direct conflict with the history and goals of the National Governors Association? Where is any recourse? Where’s citizen access to NGA?
And that’s not all. Yesterday, we saw our governor fighting to expand his job description here in Utah, too. As the Deseret News and Salt Lake Tribune each discussed or reported yesterday, the Governor’s plan was (thankfully) rejected by the Utah State Board of Education after the Governor’s invited the board to join him in his call for FEDERAL legislation identifying the governor as a “key” partner in education. Thank you, State Board, for having a spine and saying no.
The Utah Constitution says that the elected school board should hold the reins, but the NGA wants to change that situation– here and in every state– so that the NGA can assume a role as a national governing body over education. This is bad. This is serious.
Just as bad: Utah Representative Curt Bramble, this year, becomes president of the National Council of State Legislatures (NCSL) another unaccountable-to-voters private club that, like NGA, we can accurately describe as another “aiming-to-sit-in-the-Congressional-driver’s-seat” club. In fact, Bramble admitted that his private NCSL group aims to take over the role of Congress:
“Congress has been totally ineffective. They can’t seem to find agreements on both sides of the aisle to do anything, from budget to deficit reduction, immigration, marketplace fairness. You can look down a litany of issues where the states, the 50 laboratories of democracy, are finding ways to come forward with strong, bipartisan support for various polices.”
These organizations distort voters’ rights in our Constitutionally-built nation. The Constitution gives individual states the right to govern education. It also gives a few Utahns, elected to represent us in D.C., strong federal roles; so voters can have real influence at both the state and national decision-making levels, if we maintain the roles of the Constitution. This new blurring trend, pushing Governors or state legislators into pseudo-federal roles, robs us of true representation and has no business in America.
Two of my favorite ed reform analysts, Diane Ravitch and Emmett McGroarty come from opposite sides of the political aisle, yet each has called on America to sit up, take notice, and take action against the Common Core movement.
Is Congress too busy, or too conflicted, to pay attention?
Diane Ravitch has long been calling for a Congressional investigation into “Bill Gates’ swift and silent takeover of American education.” She rightly called Gates’ unelected, leviathan influence an unauthorized coup worthy of Congressional investigation and wrote, “the idea that the richest man in America can purchase and — working closely with the U.S. Department of Education — impose new and untested academic standards on the nation’s public schools is a national scandal.”
Ravitch’s congressional investigation needs to happen fast, though, because– once again, we and our children are under the gun.
Emmett McGroarty, pointed out this week, at Townhall.com that the “No Child Left Behind” horror is being refried and re-offered to American school children as a worse, sweatier mess of Gates-inspired, CEDS and Datapalooza -aligned Common Core cement, now being called “The Every Child Achieves Act” (ECAA).
Think of the new ECAA bill as the 2.0 –but not from No Child Left Behind only; also from an earlier version of itself just two months ago. Remember that this “Every Child Achieves Act” bill went down in flames — thanks to actual grassroots moms and dads and teachers screaming NO earlier this year. But it’s risen from the ashes, more sly this time, like a recurring nightmare.
McGroarty writes that the ECAA targets the [parental freedom to say no to high stakes testing] Opt-Out movement. He and co-author Lisa Hudson explain:
“It [ECAA] keeps the testing requirements. A state must still have an “accountability system” that includes as a “substantial” factor student performance on standardized tests. It does try to lessen the teach-to-the-test pressures by allowing the state to determine “the weight” of the tests… But this will not alleviate such pressures. It’s like saying, ‘We’re going to beat you with a wooden bat, not a metal one.’ … each state must demonstrate that it will measure ‘annual progress of not less than 95 percent of all students’ …Now is the time for all the senators and representatives who support local control of education and all those who support federalism to stand up and get rid of the federal dictates on how often and in what subjects our children are tested.”
So, if Congress is debating passage of ECAA, and if many in Congress are pushing the bill, will Congress simultaneously investigate Common Core, and its own governmental and business allies?
Keep in mind Diane Ravitch’s call for congressional investigation of Gates and his federal allies:
“The close involvement of Arne Duncan raises questions about whether the law was broken” knowing that Gates, “one very rich man bought the enthusiastic support of interest groups on the left and right to campaign for the Common Core…”
Ravitch’s call needs to be echoed and re-echoed throughout our nation. She asks:
“Who knew that American education was for sale? Who knew that federalism could so easily be dismissed as a relic of history? Who knew that Gates and Duncan, working as partners, could dismantle and destroy state and local control of education?
“The revelation that education policy was shaped by one unelected man, underwriting dozens of groups. and allied with the Secretary of Education, whose staff was laced with Gates’ allies, is ample reason for Congressional hearings.
“…I could not support the Common Core standards because they were developed and imposed without regard to democratic process. The writers of the standards included no early childhood educators, no educators of children with disabilities, no experienced classroom teachers; indeed, the largest contingent of the drafting committee were representatives of the testing industry.
“No attempt was made to have pilot testing of the standards in real classrooms with real teachers and students. The standards do not permit any means to challenge, correct, or revise them.
…The high-handed manner in which these standards were written and imposed in record time makes them unacceptable. These standards not only undermine state and local control of education, but the manner in which they were written and adopted was authoritarian. No one knows how they will work, yet dozens of groups have been paid millions of dollars by the Gates Foundation to claim that they are absolutely vital for our economic future, based on no evidence whatever…. Local boards are best equipped to handle local problems. States set state policy, in keeping with the concept that states are “laboratories of democracy,” where new ideas can evolve and prove themselves… Do we need to compare the academic performance of students in different states? We already have the means to do so with the federally funded National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)… Will national standards improve test scores? There is no reason to believe so. Brookings scholar Tom Loveless predicted two years ago that the Common Core standards would make little or no difference. The biggest test-score gaps, he wrote, are within the same state, not between states… the most reliable predictors of test scores are family income and family education.
“… at a time when many schools have fiscal problems and are laying off teachers, nurses, and counselors, and eliminating arts programs, the nation’s schools will be forced to spend billions of dollars on Common Core materials, testing, hardware, and software.
“Microsoft, Pearson, and other entrepreneurs will reap the rewards of this new marketplace. Our nation’s children will not.
“Who decided to monetize the public schools? Who determined that the federal government should promote privatization and neglect public education? … Who decided that schools should invest in Common Core instead of smaller classes and school nurses?
“These are questions that should be asked at Congressional hearings.”
Please, please share these thoughts with your Congressional representatives. Stop the current Every Child Achieves Act. Don’t let Congressmen tell you that they can’t get involved because education is a states’ issue. It is! But because it is a constitutionally designated states’ issue, Congress must get involved and get the feds and the privateers out of our schools.
If you didn’t attend the remarkable “Empowering Parents” Symposium held last month at Utah Valley University, hosted by Utahns Against Common Core and friends, featuring Band of Mothers’ keynote speaker Joy Pullman as well as Senator Al Jackson and his family, Rod Arquette of KNRS radio, Josh Daniels of Libertas Institute, Big Ocean Women, Constitution Moms, Vince Newmeyer and more— well, here’s your opportunity to catch up.
These wonderful speakers sacrificed their time, energy and other duties to be there, teaching and inspiring parents about how to reclaim the needed power over their children’s educational lives and data privacy. We thank them sincerely. It was wonderful.
Enjoy!
Josh Daniels of Libertas Institute:
Rod Arquette of KNRS Radio:
Joy Pullman of Band of Mothers:
Michelle Boulter of Big Ocean Women
Vince Newmeyer of Utahns Against “Next-Generation” Common Science Standards
Jenny Baker of Utahns Against Common Core
Additional videos still to come: Constitution Moms Laureen Simper and Stacie Thornton; Senator Al Jackson and family; Mom Heather Gardner; Five Strings Band; Evening event parents’ panel, and more.
Before I post Dr. Sandra Stotsky’s most recent testimony, I will tell you why I am a devoted fan of Dr. Stotsky and why I’m a tomato-thrower at the Common Core version of English Language Arts.
Despite its charming claims, Common Core deforms –not reforms– the English classroom.
It also closes what used to be a wide door to the treasure trove of the classics– now the trove is shut, to only a crack. By their senior year in virtually every high school across this land, American students are only allowed to have 30% of their readings be imaginative or classical readings; 70% is “informational text” under Common Core. It’s frankly stupid. But why?
Why the change in focus?
Here’s a clue. Common Core standards were drawn up primarily by a businessman, David Coleman, at Achieve Incorporated. This workforce and business-eye’s-view explains why Common Core standards focus on language as business, not as heritage. It may explain why Common Core’s centerpiece is imagination-less, with a focus on teaching impersonal, non-narrative, (aka boring) writing skills. It may explain why tests aligned to Coleman’s standards invite students to write only from narrow selections of pre-cut opinion samples.
Of course, getting a job is one facet of education; but the Common Core’s dogged focus on that alone, on making individuals into state-inventoried human capital whose purpose is to get skills and get to work, comes at high cost. One of the costs is literature.
Common Core’s ravishing of proper English education, and its focus on utilitarian, workforce-centric skills above actual literary knowledge, has been amply expressed in white papers, scholarly articles, interviews, books and more, by top literature professors across the United States. (Please study these professors’ wise words. I won’t take the space now.) Dr. Stotsky’s friend, Dr. Anthony Esolen, nutshelled it this way:
“It is rotten because its whole approach to education is wrong; it is based upon a wrong understanding of the human person. That is why it has no real place for the humanities, reducing them to occasions for scrambling up “skills,” rather than for opportunities to grow wise, to learn how to behold and cherish what is beautiful, and to build up the intellectual / moral virtues…”
Cheer as Dr. Stotsky stands in the ring, gloves off, representing me, you, and countless teachers and professors, whose dedicated scholarship and love are sunshine and water to sprouting, thriving student minds! Know that Dr. Stotsky is not someone that America can easily ignore or dismiss: she served on the original validation committee for Common Core ELA standards– and after studying them, she refused to sign them off as being adequate or valid standards; for years thereafter, she has spoken and published on this subject, fighting for the free exercise of academic thought, access to good and proper English education, and meaningful, reasonable school tests.
As a lifelong author of and professor of curricular standards, as editor of a premier research journal on English teaching, as one who truly understands why legitimate English education is a treasure worth defending, she can right the toppled applecart –if enough people hear what she’s saying.
Please share.
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Why Massachusetts Should Abandon the PARCC tests and
the 2011 Coleman et al English Language Arts Standards
on which the MCAS Tests are Based
Sandra Stotsky
June 10, 2015
Acknowledgments: I want to thank Chairman Paul Sagan of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education for his invitation to testify at the public hearing at Bridgewater State University on whether the Board should abandon the MCAS tests and adopt the PARCC tests.
Overview of my Testimony: I first describe my qualifications, as well as the lack of relevant qualifications in Common Core’s standards writers and in most of the members of Common Core’s Validation Committee, on which I served in 2009-2010. I then detail some of the many problems in the 2011 Massachusetts English language arts (ELA) standards, written by David Coleman, Susan Pimentel, James Patterson, and Susan Wheltle (so the document indicates), in the tests based on Common Core’s standards (PARCC), and in the two external reports—one issued in February 2015, the other yet to be completed—comparing the PARCC tests with MCAS tests. I offer several recommendations for parents who want civically sound and academically rigorous standards and tests written and reviewed by English teachers and who want a form of accountability that doesn’t penalize their children’s teachers for results of tests based on either the Coleman et al standards or Common Core’s standards.
I. My Qualifications: I am professor emerita at the University of Arkansas, where I held the 21st Century Chair in Teacher Quality until retiring in 2012. I was Senior Associate Commissioner in the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) from 1999-2003, in charge of developing or revising the state’s K-12 standards, teacher licensure tests, and teacher and administrator licensure regulations. I served on the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) from 2006-2010, on the National Mathematics Advisory Panel from 2006-2008, and on the Common Core Validation Committee from 2009-2010. I was one of the five members of the Validation Committee who did not sign off on the standards as being rigorous, internationally competitive, or research-based.
I was also editor of the premier research journal, Research in the Teaching of English, published by the National Council of Teachers of English, from 1991 to 1997. I have published extensively in professional journals and written several books. In recent years, I have testified before many state legislative committees and boards on the flaws in Common Core’s standards.
II. Lack of Relevant Qualifications in Common Core’s Standards Writers
The absence of relevant professional credentials in the two standards-writing teams helps to explain the flaws in Common Core’s standards. The two “lead” writers for the ELA standards, David Coleman and Susan Pimentel, have never taught reading or English in K-12 or at the college level. Neither has a doctorate in English or reading. Neither has ever published serious work on K-12 curriculum and instruction. Neither has a reputation for literary scholarship or research in education. At the time they were appointed, they were virtually unknown to English and reading educators and the public at large. They now earn large fees for Student Achievement Partners (their business) consulting to school systems trying to implement their ELA standards.
The three lead standards writers in mathematics were as unknown to K-12 educators as were the lead ELA standards writers. None of the three mathematics standards writers (Phil Daro, William McCallum, and Jason Zimba) had ever developed K-12 mathematics standards that had been used—or used effectively. The only member of this three-person standards-writing team with K-12 teaching experience had majored in English as an undergraduate (although Phil Daro had taught mathematics at the middle school level for two years).
Who recommended these people as standards writers and why, we still do not know. No one in the media commented on their lack of credentials for the task they had been assigned. Indeed, no one in the media showed the slightest interest in their qualifications for standards writing.
III. Lack of Academic Qualifications in Most Members of the Validation Committee
The federal government did not fund an independent group of experts to evaluate the rigor of the standards, even though it expected the states to adopt them. Instead, the private organizations in charge of the project created their own Validation Committee (VC) in 2009. The VC contained almost no academic experts in any area; most were education professors or associated with testing companies, from here and abroad. There was only one mathematician on the VC—R. James Milgram—although there were many people with graduate degrees in mathematics education or with appointments in an education school, and/or who worked chiefly in teacher education. I was the only nationally recognized expert on English language arts standards by virtue of my work in Massachusetts and for Achieve, Inc.’s American Diploma Project.
Professor Milgram and I did not sign off on the standards because they were not internationally competitive, rigorous, or research-based. Despite our repeated requests, we did not get the names of high-achieving countries whose standards could be compared with Common Core’s standards. (We received no “cross-walks.”) Nor did the standards writers themselves offer any research evidence or rationale to defend their omission of the high school mathematics standards needed for STEM careers, their emphasis on writing not reading, their experimental approach to teaching Euclidean geometry, their deferral of the completion of Algebra I to grade 9 or 10, or their claim that informational reading instruction in the English class leads to college readiness. They also did not offer evidence that Common Core’s standards meet entrance requirements for most colleges and universities in this country or elsewhere.
IV. Flaws in the 2011 Massachusetts ELA Standards (the document lists David Coleman, Susan Pimentel, James Patterson, and Susan Wheltle as the four lead writers)
A. Most Coleman et al standards are content-free skills, not “content” standards. They do not address specific literary knowledge, specific literary history, or specific reading levels, i.e., they omit significant literary/historical content. E.g., there is no standard on the history of the English language, on British authors or texts, or on authors or texts from the ancient or classical world.
Examples of Coleman et al literature standards in grades 11/12:
Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.
Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.
Examples of authentic ELA literature standards
*In California’s pre-2010 standards for 11/12:
3.7 Analyze recognized works of world literature from a variety of authors:
a. Contrast the major literary forms, techniques, and characteristics of the major
literary periods (e.g., Homeric Greece, medieval, romantic, neoclassic, modern).
b. Relate literary works and authors to the major themes and issues of their eras.
*In Massaschusetts’ pre-2010 standards for grades 9/10:
16.11: Analyze the characters, structure, and themes of classical Greek drama and
epic poetry.
B. The 2011 Coleman et al standards expect English teachers to spend at least half of their reading instructional time at every grade level on informational texts. They contain 10 reading standards for informational texts and 9 for literary texts at every grade level, reducing literary study in the English class to about 50%. Pre-2011 Massachusetts English classes spent about 20% of reading instructional time on nonfiction (which included informational material). No research studies support increasing the study of nonfiction in English classes to improve college readiness.
C. The 2011 Coleman et al standards reduce opportunities for students to develop analytical thinking. Analytical thinking is developed when teachers teach students how to read between the lines of complex works. As noted in a 2006 ACT report titled Reading Between the Lines: “complexity is laden with literary features.” According to ACT, it involves “literary devices,” “tone,” “ambiguity,” “elaborate” structure, “intricate language,” and unclear intentions. Thus, reducing complex literary study in the English class in order to increase informational reading, in effect, retards college readiness.
D. The 2011 Coleman et al standards discourage “critical” thinking. Critical thinking is based on independent thinking. Independent thinking comes from a range of observations, experiences, and undirected reading. The Coleman et al document contains no standards for writing a research paper like those spelled out in the pre-2011 Massachusetts ELA standards.
V. Why the MBAE and Fordham Studies Cannot Tell Us Much
As noted by the Commissioner of Education in his announcement of the five public hearings on MCAS vs. PARCC, the Board would review studies conducted by “outside organizations.”
The first outside study, commissioned by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE), was released in February 2015. It recommended abandoning MCAS, yet it did not indicate that current MCAS tests are based on the Coleman et al standards, while the PARCC tests are based on Common Core’s. Do the contents of the test items differ? We don’t know. Nor do we know what test items were examined in this study. Nor does the study give us a single clue to the contents of the test items in either set of tests at any grade level.
A second outside study is being undertaken by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The MBAE study had earlier indicated that “the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Human Resources Research Organization will conduct a full-scale evaluation of how well aligned PARCC, MCAS, and other national assessments are to the Common Core State Standards and the extent to which they meet the criteria for high-quality assessments established by the Council of Chief State School Officers.” It is not clear why CCSSO is qualified to establish criteria for high-quality assessments. All we know at present is that the Fordham Institute decided to use a portion of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funds it regularly receives to compare MCAS and PARCC test items and to let BESE know what it would recommend as an organization dedicated to the Common Core project. Its report will be issued in time for BESE’s official vote to adopt PARCC in fall, 2015.
Nevertheless, we face the same problems in learning anything from the Fordham report that we face with the MBAE report. The test items for both the 2015 MCAS ELA tests and the 2015 PARCC ELA tests are test-secure and can’t be discussed in a public report. I have twice asked directors of both assessments for permission to examine under secure conditions all their ELA test items for 2015 but have not been given permission to do so. I have also asked DESE for a copy of all proposals or requests to DESE for permission to examine non-released MCAS test items, but DESE has not sent me a copy of this public information.
The public CAN examine “sample” and “practice” test items that PARCC has made available online (which I have done). The public CAN examine all released test items for all MCAS tests from 1998 to 2007 (which I have done—see Appendix A for URLs to these test items). And parents and teachers CAN testify about what students say about the test items they have responded to on their computers or in their test booklets. But researchers cannot present either an evaluation of the grade appropriateness of PARCC test items or a comparison of the contents of MCAS and PARCC test items, two of the sub-topics that testifiers were asked to address at the Bridgewater hearing, because they are not allowed to say anything about the actual contents of the test items if indeed they examined them.
Until all the test items used by PARCC and MCAS in ELA in 2015 are available to BESE and all parents, legislators, and other citizens for inspection under secure conditions, BESE has no legitimate information on which to base an official decision. In fact, the entire process leading to a decision on which set of tests to use appears to be a sham, beginning with the fact that the Commissioner of Education chairs the Governing Board of PARCC, yet is to make the final recommendation to BESE, and ending with the fact that all local superintendents were told in 2014 that the decision had already been made (according to a letter from Superintendent William Lupini to the Brookline School Committee in June 2014, in Appendix B). The public, including the media, have been abused by a fake process. Only a post hoc, pro forma vote for PARCC remains to be taken.
Yet there are significant differences between PARCC and MCAS for ELA tests that can be brought to public attention. These differences have their source in the criteria established by English teachers in Massachusetts in 1997, as explained above, and in other sources.
VI. Problems with PARCC in 2014-15, based on the examples/test items given
* The overall reading level of PARCC sample test items in most grades seems to be lower than the overall reading level of test items in MCAS ELA tests based on the pre-Coleman et al standards—sometimes by more than one reading grade level. E.g., an excerpt from The Red Badge of Courage is an example in the 2015 grades 10 and 11 PARCC. But an excerpt from this novel was assessed in a pre-2011 grade 8 MCAS. E.g., an excerpt from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is an example in the 2015 grade 11 PARCC but appears in a 2010 grade 10 MCAS.
* PARCC doesn’t tell us who determines the cut (pass/fail) score, where it will be, and who changes it, and when. Cut scores on MCAS tests are set by Massachusetts citizens.
* PARCC test specifications do not indicate from what authors or kinds of text the literary passages are to be drawn, and how they are to be balanced. English teachers in Massachusetts have had higher expectations for MCAS than do test-developers at PARCC, it seems.
* PARCC 2015 grade 11 test samples are not aligned with Common Core’s standards; there are no passages from founding political documents.
* PARCC offers too many tests at each grade and across grades.
* PARCC requires extensive keyboarding skills and too much time for test preparation.
* PARCC plans to provide only a few released test items for teachers to use, it seems.
* The change to a grade 11 PARCC for fulfilling the requirement for a high school diploma hurts low-achieving students, who often need two years for remediation and retests before graduation.
* The PARCC tests are very long (see the chart in Superintendent Lupini’s June 2014 letter to the Brookline School Committee), even though they have been recently shortened.
* The writing prompts in PARCC in 2015 do not elicit “deeper thinking” because students are not given a provocative question about a reading assignment and encouraged to make and justify their own interpretation of an author’s ideas based on a range of sources, some self-chosen. They are almost always given the sources to use, beginning in grade 3: e.g., “Write an essay comparing and contrasting the key details presented in the two articles about how endangered animals can be helped. Use specific details and examples from both articles to support your ideas.”
* The two-part multiple-choice format in PARCC (and in SBAC) often requires students to engage in a textual scavenger hunt for the specific words, phrases, or sentences that led to their own thinking when answering the previous question. This two-part multiple-choice format is especially taxing and problematic in the early grades. E.g., in grade 3: “Part B: Which sentence from the story supports the answer to Part A?” “Which detail supports the answer to Part A?” “Which detail from X shows another example of the answer to Part A?” “Which detail from paragraph 14 best supports the answer to Part A?” “What phrase from paragraph 14 helps the reader to understand the meaning of thriving?” “Which section in X introduces how the scientists made wolves feel comfortable in the park?” In sum, the questions are poorly worded, confusing, tedious, unfriendly to children, and cumbersome.
VII. Criteria for MCAS ELA Selections Developed in 1997 by the State’s English Teachers
About 60% of the selections should be literary.
At least half of the literary selections should come from authors in a list of suggested authors or works reflecting our common literary and cultural heritage
About half of the literary selections could come from authors in a second list of suggested contemporary authors from the United States, as well as past and present authors from other countries and cultures.
These criteria were enforced in two ways for MCAS ELA tests: by the Guiding Principle on literary study in the introduction to the ELA standards and by the use of texts by authors in the two lists. The Guiding Principle itself (“An effective English language arts curriculum draws on literature from many genres, time periods, and cultures, featuring works that reflect our common literary heritage.”) indicated that a “comprehensive literature curriculum contains works from both [lists].” The two lists of recommended authors served as guides to choosing MCAS passages at all grades. MCAS ELA tests from 1998 on were dominated by literary selections because of these criteria, the Guiding Principle on literary study, and the two lists.
BESE voted to add the Guiding Principles and the two lists in the 2001 Massachusetts ELA curriculum framework to the Common Core standards adopted in 2011. But DESE altered the wording of the Guiding Principle on literary study to read “An effective English language arts and literacy curriculum draws on literature in order to develop students’ understanding of their literary heritage” so that it no longer expected the school curriculum or literary passages on MCAS to feature works reflecting “our common literary heritage.”
VIII. Recommendations for Massachusetts:
Fewer grades tested (just 4, 8, and 10), as in the 1993 MERA and 1994 authorization of ESEA
Paper and pencil tests; no computer-based tests
All or most test items released every year, as MERA requires
Retention of grade 10 competency determination for a high school diploma, required in MERA, for the benefit of low-achieving students
Tests requiring less time for preparing for and teaching to the tests
Test passages and questions chosen and reviewed by Massachusetts English teachers
A Massachusetts-determined cut score
Appendix A. URLs for locating all MCAS ELA test items from 1998 to 2007, plus some URLs for later items
Appendix B: Letter from Superintendent William Lupini to the Brookline School Committee in June 2014
THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF BROOKLINE
333 WASHINGTON STREET BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS 02445
TEL: 617-730-2401
FAX: 617-730-2601
Office of the Superintendent of Schools
William H. Lupini, Ed.D.
June 3, 2014
To: Members of the Brookline School Committee
From: William H. Lupini, Ed. D. Superintendent of Schools
Re: State Assessment for 2015
On May 22, 2014, I recommended that the Public Schools of Brookline administer the PARCC Assessment for grades 3-9 and 11 for the 2014-2015 school year. This recommendation was based on the following considerations:
• Our experience with the recent PARCC field test allowed our team to gain a deep understanding of all that is required to administer this assessment to support students’ success. Our learning was detailed in my presentation to the School Committee at our last meeting.
• The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) will “hold harmless” the accountability status of Districts choosing to administer PARCC in 2015. Specifically, a school’s level will either stay the same or improve but cannot decline due to PARCC test results.
• MCAS will be phased out in favor of either PARCC or another new “next generation” assessment after the 2015 test administration.
• Administering PARCC in 2015 will allow all students tested the opportunity to get comfortable with the new expectations and testing environment, and will give us the opportunity to fine-tune its administration, which may reduce the risk of disruption in future years.
• The high school did not participate in the 2014 pilot. Administering PARCC in grades 9 and 11 in 2015 offers BHS a year to pilot the new assessment. Also, a score of 4 or 5 on the PARCC Assessment would allow an 11th grader to skip remedial courses at Massachusetts state colleges. MCAS will still be administered to all 10th grade students through the class of 2018 for competency determinations.
• In addition to being “held harmless,” DESE has mitigated other risks for districts that choose to administer PARCC in 2015, including:
-Pencil and paper tests will be an option for a number of years in order to allow districts to adequately prepare their technology to meet the needs of the online test; and,
-Student Growth Percentiles (SGP) will be calculated continuously; therefore, there will be no interruption in utilizing SGP in the educator evaluation system.
The purpose of this Memorandum is to provide you with additional information about PARCC testing, our revised recommendation for your consideration during the June 5th Public Hearing and your June 19th vote, and the reasoning for these revisions to our thinking. Additional Information One of the main areas of discussion during our May 22nd presentation involved the number of PARCC testing sessions at each grade level.
Following is a chart detailing the grade-by-grade and subject area testing sessions for both PARCC and MCAS (grades 3-8):
Grade Level PARCC & Science MCAS Difference
3rd 9 5 +4
(5 ELA; 4 Math) (3 ELA; 2 Math)
4th 9 7 +2
(5 ELA; 4 Math) (5 ELA; 2 Math)
5th 11 7 +4
(5 ELA; 4 Math) (3 ELA; 2 Math)
(2 MCAS Science) (2 MCAS Science)
6th 9 5 +4
(5 ELA; 4 Math) (3 ELA; 2 Math)
7th 9 7 +2
(5 ELA; 4 Math) (5 ELA; 2 Math)
8th 11 7 +4
(5 ELA; 4 Math) (3 ELA; 2 Math)
(2 MCAS Science) (2 MCAS Science)
These differences are somewhat governed by the addition of end-of- year (EOY) testing in PARCC, along with the inclusion of a writing composition component for grades beyond the fourth and seventh grade currently tested in MCAS.
The amount of time to be spent in testing is a much more complicated analysis. Students are permitted 50% additional time beyond what is recommended in PARCC, while MCAS is an untimed assessment. Below is a comparison of the “expected” times for both grade 3-8 scenarios described above:
These numbers are somewhat misleading in that the PARCC timing is probably much closer to actual for most students, given the “timed” nature of the assessment. Furthermore, given that factor, it would be possible to schedule multiple testing sessions in one day with PARCC, while this is not possible in our current MCAS assessment configuration.
The high school analysis is even more difficult, given the following factors:
• As noted earlier, current MCAS assessment occurs only in 9th grade with a Science test, 10th grade with the English Language Arts and Mathematics exams, and again beyond 10th grade for those students who did not initially meet the competency determination standards.
• The PARCC assessment system is designed to provide 11th grade students who score of 4 or 5 on the PARCC Assessment to skip remedial courses at Massachusetts state colleges.
• MCAS will still be administered to all 10th grade students through the class of 2018 for competency determinations.
• PARCC high school math assessments are based on courses aligned to the Common Core State Standards, not grade levels.
Assessments are available for Algebra I, Geometry, Mathematics I, Mathematics II, Algebra II and Mathematics III.
Given these factors, it is more difficult to provide a comparison of numbers of testing sessions and total time devoted to assessment for PARCC v. MCAS. However, it is very safe to conclude that students would experience a greater volume of testing under the PARCC plan than is currently the case.
Revised Recommendation
After considering input from the Headmaster and her administrative team, as well as issues raised by School Committee members at our May 22nd meeting, we are now recommending that the Public Schools of Brookline participate in the PARCC operational test for grades 3-8 only during the 2014- 2015 school year.
High School testing would be limited to those MCAS tests required for the competency determination in 9th and 10th grades.
Reasoning
We do not come to any of these recommendations lightly. This new assessment will consume more valuable teaching time than the current program. The timed nature of the assessment for students who do not have an IEP is not in the best interest of any of our students and represents a significant change in beliefs for the Commonwealth. The PARCC assessment is still in development and, as such, will continue to represent a learning opportunity for all of us, even while students are receiving scores for their performance on the exams. Finally, we are not at present prepared to move to an on-line testing environment as a school system, meaning that some of our students will participate in a paper and pencil assessment and, therefore, we will have students being tested on somewhat different competencies and skills across our schools.
However, much of our rationale for this recommendation is, in our view, compelling and remains the same as discussed in May. We cannot recommend staying with MCAS for another year if this assessment is to be phased out in favor of either PARCC or another new “next generation” assessment. We believe that students should be given the opportunity to experience “next generation” expectations and testing environments, and that we need the chance to work with the administration of these assessments. Finally, we need to take advantage of having school accountability status held “harmless” while we work to support student, teacher and school success within this new testing situation.
While this same logic exists with respect to high school testing, we simply do not believe that it outweighs the issues for our students. As was discussed on May 22nd, eleventh grade students would be taking a PARCC assessment after most of them had already met the competency determination in their sophomore year, without the benefit of knowing up front that this was to be the case. Ninth grade students would be participating in a “next generation” pilot program, only to revert to MCAS as a competency determination exam. Therefore, we do not believe that the benefits of PARCC testing outweigh these concerns for our high school students in 2014-2015.
I am looking forward to continuing our discussion of this recommendation with you at our meeting on Thursday, June 5, 2014.
CONCERNED CITIZENS OF SOUTHERN NEW JERSEY – AKA “THE COMMON CORE FOUR”
In the photo: Jan Lenox, Lynne Shirk, Deb Yoa and Michelle Mellon, four unstoppable grandmothers of New Jersey who spearhead a group called Concerned Citizens of Southern New Jersey
Jan Lenox wrote a letter that was published this week at the Cape May County Herald in New Jersey.
To the Editor:
Concerned Citizens of South N.J. made the two hour+ trip to Trenton April 28 to deliver our petitions on Common Core/PARCC to the governor.
We attended the Senate budget hearing on education with Commissioner David Hespe’s testimony. It was just one more dog and pony show in a long list of same old, same old educratical nonsense. The only glimmer of light was brought from Senator Jeff Van Drew when he asked a few pointed questions about the never-voted-on legislation, presented last year.
After three long hours of waiting for a reason to be there, we decided to leave the chamber and continue on to what we came to Trenton to do. We were met by a state police officer when we entered the governor’s ante-office; we were told we couldn’t enter. We explained that we wanted to present our petition to Governor Christie. We then were sent to the security office, checked in and waited for the governor’s aide-de-camp to greet us there. Kia, the aide, a very young woman and her even younger assistant came through the door and stood before us.
“What do you want,” she asked without introducing herself. I asked, “Who are you?” She answered, “I am the governor’s aide and this is my assistant.”
I introduced our group by name and stated that we came to deliver our petition. I stated to her that we had previously sent formal requests to the governor’s scheduler and followed with emails, and were denied a meeting. I continued to explain that we had carried these signatures with us for over two years and attached to the package was a personal letter signed by our group.
Her response was less than polite or professional. To paraphrase her response: “I cannot guarantee he will get these. He gets thousands of letters. I am not his scheduler.”
Then she went on to say that the governor’s schedule was full until June 30. She told us to attend his upcoming town hall meetings that were being planned throughout the state. We heard that if you attend six town halls, you can request a meeting with the governor. This is ludicrous at best. She was very curt and annoyed that we came to bother her. Kia offered no information to help us.
She took our package and said she would deliver it to his office without any other information or response. According to Kia, Governor Christie was very well aware of people’s angst over the Common Core and PARCC.
Well then, why won’t he meet with concerned citizens and alleviate our angst?
At the very least, we should have been met with a smile and a courteous attitude.
It was a very long day. We left the State House and started our journey home. Thank God, we have copies and thank Him for keeping our tempers in check. After all, we had two state troopers right behind us.
Did I mention that we’re all grandmothers?
The petition letter, which was stapled to many pages of signatures from the citizens of New Jersey:
Dear Governor Christie,
We are here today on behalf of the citizens of the state of New Jersey. On March 23, 2013 a letter was sent to you regarding our urgent request for information and support regarding the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Forty letters were sent to representatives of our state, Commissioner Cerf, county superintendents and local school principals. Our requests were never answered.
For over 25 months, Concerned Citizens of Southern New Jersey has partnered with many other groups north, south, east and west, and have shared our message. Parents, grandparents, guardians, as well as teachers and many legislators believe as we do, that Common Core is an unjust, unnecessary and unwanted commodity. New Jersey had good standards. We want them back!
Dr. Sandra Stotsky, Professor Emerita of the University of Arkansas, and one of only two experts on the original CCSS validation committee, said that the standards were inferior and refused to sign off on them. She has since offered to write new standards, at no cost to the US DOE, however, that most generous offer was flatly negated.
Your office has twice denied CCSNJ a scheduled visit with you to explain our position; however, our children’s educational future hangs in the balance. So, we are here to present you with our petitions to end this agenda now. We hope you will stand with the voters, parents and most importantly the children of our great state and repeal Common Core.
God bless you and may He guide your course going forward.
Respectfully submitted,
Janice Lenox__________________________ Carolyn B. Shirk___________________________
It is remarkable that this scenario is replaying itself in state after state across this great nation. Citizens who stand up and speak up for their rights and their children’s best interests in education and are being ignored, maligned, or threatened by the new ruling elite. The new education elite is comprised of the members of the private trade organizations with the presumptuous sounding names like “National Governors’ Association,” or the equally unelected and equally presumptuous State Superintendents’ Club, the “Council of Chief State School Officers,” hand in hand with the federal Department of Education, the corporations such as the British-owned education sales conglomerate Pearson Inc., and the philanthropists whose heavy handed generosity sets policy that governs millions, notably the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Call me crazy but I like liberty and self-government; I like the style of Americanism that the founders envisioned and set into the Declaration and the Constitution. This new education-by-elite ain’t that.
Ever since that dark day three years ago when I received a written response from the State Office of Education saying that the answer to my question was “No,” –NO to the question of whether a student could attend school to simply learn (as opposed to being tracked at school, as “human capital” by the state and federal SLDS and P-20w data mining systems, without parental consent or knowledge) –ever since that day, I’ve been on a quest to reclaim our basic constitutional freedom of privacy, the right to NOT be inventoried like merchandise of the state.
A lot of other people agree that privacy and freedom matter. But not all. The big money in big data is so big; data is the Gold Rush of our age, not to mention to big control issue “datapalooza movement” of our age, making it difficult to overpower the big data lobbyists and their giant piles of fat money that work very effectively against moms and dads and non-monied lobbyists and activists like you and me.
Twice, for example, a Utah state legislator has tried to run a privacy protection bill for Utah kids. Two years in a row it hasn’t even gotten close to getting off the ground in the Utah legislature. Seems that money and power talk more persuasively than children’s or family’s rights, even in Utah.
But today many organizations nationwide are joining to support and to push forward Louisiana Senator David Vitter’s congressional bill that returns control of education records to parents on the federal level. It’s big news. See Breitbart, The Hill, Truth in American Education.
The bill implements new, more robust guidelines, in order to protect student privacy, for schools and educational agencies to release education records to third parties, even in cases of recordkeeping.
These entities will be required to gain prior consent from students or parents and implement measures to ensure records remain private. Further, educational agencies, schools, and third parties will be held liable for violations of the law through monetary fines.
Extending Privacy Protections to Home School Students
FERPA does not currently apply to students who do not attend a traditional education institution, such as students who are homeschooled, despite some states requiring homeschoolers to file information with their school district.
This bill extends FERPA’s protections to ensure records of homeschooled students are treated equally.
Limits Appending Data and Collection of Additional Information
The bill prohibits educational agencies, schools, and the Secretary of Education from including personally identifiable information obtained from Federal or State agencies through data matches in student data.
Please contact your state legislators, board members and congressional representatives in support of this bill.
Board@schools.utah.gov is the email for all the members of the state school board. Find congressional legislators and state legislators here: http://www.utah.gov/government/contactgov.html
P.S. I often get asked why this matters. Last week, for example, at the Salt Lake County Republican Organizing convention, people came up to the booth where I was answering questions and asked, “What information is being collected about my child?” My response? Rather than to point them to the National Data Collection Model data points that are being requested, I simply say this truth: there are NO proper privacy protections in place; federal FERPA law was destroyed by the Dept. of Education, and we have no idea what information is being collected locally; we do know there is a database that we aren’t allowed to opt out of; we do know that there are no prohibitions on the schools/state/federal government/corporations collecting as much as they can get away with.
We know that the National Data Collection Model invites and encourages schools and states to collect over 400 data points. And we know that no laws currently prevent schools/states from doing so. It is only good intentions and individual/district policy that is preventing an Orwellian data collection reality today.
We need to establish proper, real protections. We need strong laws that establish that students and families, not the state/corporate/federal education forces, own the data and control the data. We need opt out laws from participation in the database systems too. We need to talk about this issue often and openly. And the ball is in the parents’ court. The boards aren’t fighting for data privacy. The lobbyists are actively fighting against data privacy. And no legislator will fight for your child until you demand that he does.
Ask your legislator to support Senator Vitters’ bill, and to write state laws that enforce these protections too.
“Bald Piano Guy” is a New York teacher who sings “Opting Out” to the tune of Billy Joel’s “Moving Out,” and sings “Seen Them Opting Out on Broadway” to the tune of “Seen the Lights go out on Broadway”. He sings “The Arrogant Man” dedicated to NY Governor Cuomo, to the tune of “Angry Young Man”. He has many more YouTube performances but I’ll share just a few here.
As I’ve said before, please be wise and very careful about what happens in each of our states as a replacement for high stakes testing. The controlistas love to take a crisis and turn it to their own advantage.
The Band of Mothers Tour proudly presents the “Empowering Parents Symposium,” convening to present freedom’s true fight for children this Wednesday, May 13th, at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.
Here’s the outline. Starting at 9:00 a.m., attendees will choose from nine available workshops held in classrooms at the UVU Sorenson Center (see below – detailed workshop information follows).
Following the workshops, attendees will enjoy an elegant luncheon while hearing from KNRS star Rod Arquette. In the evening, the symposium reconvenes at the UVU Ragan Theater 6:00 with entertainment and discussion starting with the Five Strings Band, followed by keynote speakers Senator Al Jackson, Analyst Joy Pullman and Child Rescuer Tim Ballard. The evening’s finale will be “The Abolitionist,” the documentary movie, introduced by its star, Tim Ballard, founder of the truly amazing rescue force, Operation Underground Railroad.
If you haven’t registered yet, please click here. Donations are appreciated and needed, but all the evening events are free and the morning workshops only cost $5 apiece. You can register at UACC or just show up. Remember: all events are first-come, first-served, with registered attendees having priority. (If you happen to own filming equipment, please bring it and film the workshops that you attend.)
If you want to hear Rod Arquette’s power-packed talk at mid-day and haven’t registered for the catered lunch, you have now missed the deadline for the order, but you can brown-bag it or come listen without eating.
To see “The Abolitionist” documentary, come very early because the seats will be filled up in the Ragan Theater by those who are there for the earlier events that begin at 6:00.
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Here’s the morning workshop schedule. (Descriptions and teacher bios further below.)
9:00 to 9:55 a.m. – Choose from:
1. Common Core 101 by Jenny Baker – room 206 a
2. The Next Frontiers: Data Collection from Birth to Death by Joy Pullman – room 206 b
3. Principles of the Constitution by Stacie Thornton and Laureen Simper – room 206 c
10:00 to 10:55 – Choose from:
1. Data – by Big Ocean Women – room 206 a
2. The Difference Between Progressive and Effective Education – by Joy Pullman – room 206 b
3. Parental Rights – by Heather Gardner – room 206 c
11:00 to 11:55 – Choose from:
1. It is Utah Science Standards or National Science Standards? – by Vince Newmeyer – room 206 a
2. SAGE/Common Core Testing – Should I Opt Out? – by Wendy Hart – room 206 b
3. Getting Involved and Making a Difference – by Jared Carman – room 206 c
The word “Education” has been redefined. Education used to evoke images of children and youth engaged in the learning process as they discover their own endless potential. With recent educational changes, “Education” brings an image of frustration, canned answers and testing. What is the purpose of this new form of “Education”? What can you do about it?
Jenny Baker is the founder of Return to Parental Rights and The Gathering Families Project. She has just returned from the United Nations as part of the Big Ocean Women delegation which hopes to raise awareness of the anti-family ideas that affect our world. Jenny lives in St. George, Utah and is married to Blake Baker. She is the mother of five daughters.
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2. The Next Frontiers: Data Collection from Birth to Death by Joy Pullman – room 206 b
Technology has opened Pandora’s Box by giving government and private organizations the power to collect very private information about people and create unerasable dossiers that can follow them for life. What is possible now– how can we benefit from technology while controlling it, and what are ways people can reclaim their personal property from the institutions taking it without consent?
Joy Pullman comes to Utah for this event from Indiana. She is a research fellow on education policy for The Heartland Institute and is managing editor of The Federalist, a web magazine on politics, policy and culture. She is also a former managing editor of School Reform News.
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3. Principles of the Constitution by Stacie Thornton and Laureen Simper – room 206 c
This class is an introduction to the principles of liberty embedded in the Constitution. It explains the Founders’ “success formula” based on their thorough study and knowledge of history, past civilizations and human nature. Learn the principles behind what George Washington called “the science of government” which, when applied, yields results that can be predicted and replicated.
Watching the news can leave us feeling helpless and hopeless. Studying eternal principles of agency will leave you feeling empowered, joyful and hopeful!
Laureen Simper taught junior high English and reading before raising her two children. She has run a private Suzuki piano studio for much of 31 years.
Stacie Thornton was the financial administrator for the U.S. District Court in Utah before marrying and raising five children. She began homeschooling nearly 20 years ago, and continues now with her two youngest children.
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10:00 to 10:55
1. Data – by Big Ocean Women – room 206 a
Learn about international organizations and their motivations behind data collection. Come unite in standing in defense of our families: find out what you can do and what we can do together.
Carolina S. Allen is the founder and president of Big Ocean Women which is an international grassroots “maternal feminist” movement taking the world by storn. Recently representing at the United Nations this past march, their message is picking up steam internationally. Big Ocean Women are uniting in behalf of faith, family and healing the world in their own way, on their own terms. Carolina is the happy homeschool mother of five.
Michelle Boulter is a mother of three boys. She recently attended the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in New York. She currently serves on the board of Big Ocean Women over politics and policy. She is co-founder of Return to Parental Rights and Gathering Families. Her passion is to empower other families to be primary educators in the lives of their children.
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2. The Difference Between Progressive and Effective Education – by Joy Pullman – room 206 b
This class is a short history lesson explaining why and how American education shifted from supporting self-government through individual and local action into a massive national conglomerate where no one is responsible but everyone is cheated.
Joy Pullman comes to Utah for this event from Indiana. She is a research fellow on education policy for The Heartland Institute and is managing editor of The Federalist, a web magazine on politics, policy and culture. She is also a former managing editor of School Reform News.
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3. Parental Rights – by Heather Gardner – room 206 c
Heather Gardner will speak about the parental rights laws that are in place –and the laws that are lacking– for the protection of children and the rights of parents in determining what they will be taught and who can access data collected on individual children. Know the law and know your rights.
Heather Gardner is a former state school board candidate and is currently a middle school teacher at Liberty Hills Academy, a private school in Bountiful, Utah. She was appointed by Senator Niederhauser to the standards review committee for Fine Arts in Utah. She has been actively involved in supporting parental rights via media interviews and grassroots efforts during legislative sessions. She and her husband are the parents of five children. Heather is an advocate for students, special needs children, teachers and parents.
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11:00 to 11:55
1. It is Utah Science Standards or National Science Standards? – by Vince Newmeyer – room 206 a
Utah is in the process of adopting new science standards. Contrary to public pronouncements from officials of the State Office of Education, on multiple occasions and before a variety of legislative bodies, that Utah would not adopt common national standards, there is now an admission that this is precisely what is happening. Just what is in these standards that would be troubling for most Utah parents– and what can we do about it?
Vince Newmeyer has had a lifelong love of science. He attended BYU studying engineering, and has dabbled with experiments and inventions. Vince ran his own computer consulting company, designed and built solar power installations, and engaged in electronic technical work. Vince took an intense interest in evolutionary thought in 1998 and has studied it deeply since that time. As an amateur geologist and science buff, he has done extensive research on topics in geology, biology, physics, astronomy and earth sciences. He speaks about data which fundamentally challenges current popular views on our origins.
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2. SAGE/Common Core Testing – Should I Opt Out? – by Wendy Hart – room 206 b
Should you opt your children out? Come learn about SAGE testing and why thousands of parents are choosing to opt their children out.
Wendy Hart: “First and foremost, I am a mom. I have three kids and a wonderful husband. The responsibility I have for my children’s well being motivates me to ensure that they have the best education possible. I currently have the honor of representing Alpine, Cedar Hills, and Highland residents on the Alpine School Board.
I started my own data migration and programming business 14 years ago. Before establishing my own business, I worked for various local companies doing database migration and analysis, as well as project management. I graduated from BYU cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and a French minor. I served a mission for my church in Northern France and Brussels, Belgium. Raised in Cupertino, CA (home of Apple Computers) I am the oldest of five girls. I play the piano and harp, and I like to sing.”
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3. Getting Involved and Making a Difference – by Jared Carman – room 206 c
Centrally managed education policy is weaking Utah family rights, responsibilities and relationships. We need to “run, not walk” to turn this around. What could we accomplish with 1,000 active, local groups of families in Utah who know each other, meet regularly, set and achieve specific goals, and synchronize efforts with other groups? Come learn how to:
Organize and nurture a local group
Conduct effective, action-oriented meetings
Coordinate with other group leaders to support education policies that “put family first”.
Jared Carmen is a husband, dad, citizen lobbyist on education issues, member of the Utah Instructional Materials Commission, and advisory board member for a K-8 private school in Salt Lake City. He holds an MS in Instructional Technology from Utah State University and is the founder/owner of two online learning companies. He serves his precinct as a state delegate.
YOU ARE INVITED TO AN AMAZING EVENT. REGISTER TODAY.
What: A day-long symposium dedicated to learning how to preserve freedom for children. You can –for free or almost for free– attend workshops, hear speakers, enjoy live music; have lunch while being taught by famous freedom fighters; watch the Operation Underground Railroad movie “The Abolitionists,” and mingle all day long with local, national, and international warriors in the battle for freedom for children. This event is brought to you by a joint coalition of organizations concerned for children and family freedom, including: Family First Utah, Big Ocean Women, Operation Underground Railroad, Constitution Mothers, Utahns Against Common Core, Utah Opt Out of Sage Testing, Eagle Forum, Locally Directed Education, and countless individuals who truly care about freedom for children.
Why: Because children’s freedom is at risk, both locally and abroad
When: Wednesday, May 13th, 2015, from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Where: Workshops will be held at Sorenson Student Center, Utah Valley University, Orem, UT (park by student center.) Evening events start at 6:30 at Ragan Theater at Utah Valley University.
Entertainment: “The Abolitionists” – a documentary film about Operation Underground Railroad’s ongoing rescue operation that saved over 300 trafficked child sex slaves last year, in its first year of operation. Free at this special event.
Also: Five Strings Musical Group – a Southern Utah-based family of incredible musicians. –Free at this special event.
Cost: Free events include the evening speakers, music, and film; morning workshops: $5 for the whole bundle; bring-your-own-lunch training costs $5; eating the catered lunch with training included costs $15.
Space limited: Workshops are held in classrooms and will be closed as soon as they are filled up on the day of the event. First come, first served. Ragan Theater evening events are held in a 400-person capacity setting; first come, first served.
PLEASE PRE-REGISTER. Please pre-register even if you are only attending the free events by clicking here: http://www.utahnsagainstcommoncore.com/symposium. Below are photos of some of the people and presentations you’ll encounter.
You can’t just watch this; you have to act: email your legislators and school board members and members of the media.
One dog barking does not wake up a town. Ten thousand barking dogs will.
This short, seven minute video is a powerful documentation that uses the actual voices from recorded audio and video from legislative meetings and school board retreats that show the trail of promises broken and the belittling and bullying happening to our legislators, parents, and teachers by the Utah State Office of Education.
You will hear the USOE curriculum director promising an elected school board that Utah will never adopt national common science standards.
You will hear the USOE superintendent promising the Utah legislature that Utah will never adopt national common science standards.
You will hear the USOE representative justifying the adoption of the common science standards and their hiding of the true science standards, giving parents a watered down, fake version –even during the time that USOE has an official “public comment” period happening— with the excuse that parents would find the standards “overwhelming”.
Alisa Ellis, parent member of Utah’s Science Standards Review Committee, is calling for an immediate stop to:
1- the USOE’s public comment survey –because USOE has only allowed the public and the parent review committee to see a sterilized, watered down version, rather than a true, full version of the common science standards and appendices that teachers will be using– yet USOE is asking the public to comment in this blind manner;
2- the USOE’s statewide tour, aimed to give parents the impression that they have been given full disclosure of the new science standards. Since the science standards that the public is being shown, upon which the public has been asked to comment, are not the same as the standards that teachers are to be using, nor the same as the standards upon which the parent review committee was asked to work, this tour to present the standards is at best, partially truthful and at worst, a deliberate deception.)
Here’s Alisa’s letter to the state school board:
Board Members,
The public comment period of the proposed science standards needs to stop immediately and be restarted with the correct document. Mr. Scott admitted on Tuesday night that the teachers will not be presented with the draft of standards that the public is being asked to review but with the full version from Achieve’s Next Generation Science Standards. I don’t believe this review falls within the provisions of the law. The law does not say, “present the public with the watered down version because it would be “too overwhelming” for them to see the full version”. This is what was suggested was the reason for not presenting the public with the full version.
The NGSS have many things included besides simply the performance expectations. The full version has clarification statements, assessment boundaries; the full NRC framework with all the cross-walking to the Common Core standards and appendices. It is my right as a parent and citizen to be shown exactly what will be taught to my children.. This is both according to federal law and state law.
Therefore it is my recommendation that the public review period ceases immediately. It is apparent that the power structure is willing to do whatever it takes to push forth their agenda so I would also recommend starting fresh with a new writing and lead team.
Also, board member Dixie Allen claimed at the meeting in Vernal that the standards committee knew all along that the Next Generation Science Standards were being used. Mr. Scott also claimed that the draft given to the parent review committee, of which I am a member, was presented with a draft that cited the NGSS and NRC framework. This is not accurate. I have the copy in front of me and there is no mention of the NGSS standards. In fact, Sarah Young, at our first meeting proudly talked of all the hard work the writing team was putting into writing these “UT science standards” when in fact they were simply reorganizing the format and order of the national science standards.
This board has the desire to improve public relations, but with the deceptive and dishonest way things are presented I worry the gap in public trust is growing wider and wider. Also, as the state office of ed is currently facing a lawsuit for the lack of parental involvement surrounding the adoption of Common Core it would behoove the board to put a stop to the deceptive manner information is fed to the public.
Also, in the Vernal meeting Mr. Scott revealed that the writing team which he renamed the “organizing team” was given 6 sets of standards to pick from.
I am formally requesting the names and titles of the individuals that chose the sets of standards the committee was allowed to choose from.
I am requesting the six sets of standards offered the committee
I am requesting the names and titles of every member of the writing/organizing team (I asked for this last fall)
I am requesting all correspondence between the above requested individuals with staff and board members.
I also became aware today of an implementation guide published by ACHIEVE for the 6-8 grade standards. Here is an excerpt:
Therefore, I am also formally requesting all minutes from meetings and discussions, both with board members and without, surrounding the revision of science standards.
There were cameras present at the December review committee meeting held at the State Capitol. I am requesting a copy of all raw video.
As these requests will benefit the public at large, I am requesting all fees be waived and the process be expedited. I understand that correspondence between individuals will take longer than some of the other requests, I would like to see the committee names and standards immediately while the other information is being gathered.
Further, there was an attempt at the meeting this week to prevent recording of the meeting which would be in direct violation of open meeting laws. There was also an attempt to suggest committee members identities were to be kept private, which is also a direct violation of open meeting laws. Please do everything in your power to stop this practice.
Thank you,
Alisa Ellis
This 7 minute video explains the deception using audio from legislative meetings and board retreats.
This video from the Vernal USOE science standards meeting below shows Mr. Ricky Scott of the USOE with Alisa Ellis asking questions about why the board refused to show the real standards to parents, citing “not overwhelming” parents as a reason for the lack of transparency.
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Please support Alisa’s call for honesty and integrity in the process of setting Utah’s academic standards. Contact the state school board members today, asking for a full disclosure of the actual science standards to the public and an immediate ceasing of the tour and public comment survey as it stands. Include a copy of your letter to your local school board and to your elected representatives in the legislature. Find your senator or representative here.
The Vernal and St. George science standards meetings have passed, but you can still attend the Provo, North Logan, and Salt Lake City meetings. The Utah State Office of Education (USOE) has set them up for parents and teachers to give input or to question the adoption of common, national standards for science for Utah.
Here are the remaining dates and addresses. Please come! You don’t have to be a scientist. You just have to care about defending principles of academic honesty, academic freedom, and preserving our students’ right to debate and discover truth, unfettered to a politically slanted set of science standards.
Wednesday, May 6 Provo School District Office
Location: Professional Development Center
280 West 940 North Provo, Utah 84604
Wednesday, May 13
Cache County School District Office
Location: Professional Development Center
2063 North 1200 East North Logan, Utah 84341
Tuesday, May 19
Salt Lake Center for Science Education (SLCSE)
Location: The Media Center
1400 Goodwin Avenue Salt Lake City, Utah 84116
For a long time, the USOE was pretending that the revisions of Utah’s science standards were not the national, common science standards, (Next-Generation Science Standards or NGSS) and were saying that these new standards were just a revision. Now USOE admits this is actually NGSS, which is created by the same businessmen (at Achieve, Inc.) that wrote Common Core standards for English and math. USOE is defending the upcoming adoption, a facade-dropping that might have something to do with the fact that at least two parents who served on the committee to review Utah’s science standards, Alisa Ellis and Vincent Newberg, have spoken out and have exposed Utah’s adoption of NGSS.
This week, Alisa Ellis posted the following chart, showing that Utah’s “new, revised” science core is the exact same thing as the NGSS standards, word for word, but with renumbering. Vincent has pointed out that the NGSS standards are extremely biased and politically slanted, with “climate change” being presented over fifty times while electricity is mentioned once; with Darwinism presented as if it were settled science while life sciences like in-depth cell structure study, the human respiratory system, and other basic biology concepts being pushed aside in favor of the politicized environmental agenda.
If nobody shows up, speaks up, or posts comments at the USOE’s public comment site (only good for 90 days) then they’ll push forward with this agenda. Please show up and speak up.
After you leave your comments at the USOE’s survey monkey, please copy and paste your comments into an email for the local and state school boards. State email: Board@schools.utah.gov
Alisa Ellis also gave me permission to post her letter here, which went to the state school board. I appreciate her insistence that Mr. Scott, the USOE and the State Board cease censoring public comment. This censorship of the public happened when the public was asked to give comment about the English and math common standards by the Governor last year (two and a half years after Utah had adopted Common Core).
Only standards-specific comments were admitted! This ridiculous censoring practice pretends there are no problems with national standards outside their content. But there are two huge prongs to the pitchfork: content, and control. Trying to limit public comment to content-only issues just ignores the big problem of loss of local control and academic liberty.
Letter from Alisa Ellis:
State Board Members,
I’m writing to encourage you all to attend one of the 4 remaining science meetings that are being held around the state. I was very disappointed to hear that not one elected official was at the meeting in St. George last week. After one mom in attendance wrote to her local school board expressing her disappointment that they weren’t in attendance, a board member told her that they had no idea the meeting was taking place. This is the same story we’re finding across the state.
While it is your job to set the standards, the local boards will have to implement them. Notice should be sent to each local board in the state inviting them to these meetings. I already covered Uintah, Daggett and Duchesne for you.
After enduring years of pushback by citizens that are in-part frustrated by the lack of discussion with parents prior to adoption of Common Core, I expected to see these meetings advertised far and wide to get as many people there as possible. Each district has systems capable of calling or email every parent in the district. Why aren’t these systems being utilized? I sit in disbelief that I, a parent, have to ask friends to help me advertise, email local boards, get on the radio, etc to draw attendance to these meetings. It’s unbelievable. Please stop doing the bare minimum in advertising these events. It doesn’t have to cost money to get the word out.
It is also reprehensible the first meeting was only announced 2 days before.
According to the UT constitution it is the board’s job not the staff of the USOE to set standards. That means the responsibility lies on your heads. I’m tired of the the staff being the ones that shield the elected officials from those that elect them. By not attending these meetings and only listening to Ricky Scott’s report, you will be getting a sanitized/ censored version of public feedback.
Mr. Scott informed attendees that he would only be taking specific criticism and when given specific feedback he didn’t agree with, the citizens felt ignored. I understand the desire by the staff to keep the discussion focused on specific problems with the standards, but that is not the only complaint the public has. As elected officials you don’t get to tell us what we’re allowed to be concerned about. While important, it leaves no room for philosophical complaints. For instance, I see many, many problems with the specific standards but I also 100% do not agree with using a national standard, whether federal or private industry; it is not in line with my vision of education. Children should not be standardized.
Please take some initiative and stop the censoring of comments, unless they disparage individuals by name, or use foul language, etc.
Alisa Ellis
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Fordham Institute rated Utah’s science standards as being higher than the NGSS. So why is the USOE pushing so hard to adopt NGSS?
The biggest and ugliest answer may be that although Utah’s SAGE test, written by American Institutes for Research, already aligns to common core math and English, it doesn’t align with common science standards yet. Since Utah’s AIR/SAGE test is not (for science) yet aligned to the federally synchronized SBAC and PARCC tests, student scores cannot be understood by the overlords in their federal, common Edfacts Data Exchange lens. So the feds are most likely pressuring the USOE to align.
The question is, will parents and teachers just be too busy; will they just roll over; will they let someone else worry about it? Or will they stand up and say no?
Once lost, these freedoms don’t come back.
This video documents the deception history of the USOE and its false promises to legislators to NOT adopt nationalized science standards:
The Utah State School Board —despite last year’s pushback, despite serious concerns of some of the state school board members– is now moving to adopt national, common standards for science. Watch this video to see the documented false promises by the USOE to legislators and local school board members, that Utah would never adopt nationalized science standards; this string of broken promises needs to be exposed and those breaking the promises need to be held accountable by our legislature and governor.
You are invited to the USOE’s public meetings on the subject, to be held statewide for a few weeks, starting TOMORROW.
NGSS are common Science Standards created by businessmen and politicians at Achieve, Inc., aimed to make all students use (and be tested on) the same set of science-related standards nationwide. Achieve, Inc., is the same group that pushed Common Core math and English into being. (So if you didn’t love Common Core, heads up.)
As with Common Core math and English standards, states lose control when they adopt NGSS. Achieve Inc., is private, so it’s not subject to sunshine laws– no transparency. So right or wrong, good or bad, we’ll have no way to even know which scientific theories are being accepted or rejected, or what kind of lobbying monies are determining priorities for learning. We will not be able to affect in any appeal to local boards, what our children will be taught or tested. That power will have gone to the standards copyright holders and corporate test creators. We have no method of un-electing those controllers, no way for our scientists to affect any amendments made in the ever-changing and politically charged future of science.
It is also tragically true that Fordham Institute rated NGSS as inferior to many states’ science standards. Still, many states, including Utah, are adopting NGSS anyway– a sad reminder of recent history, when certain states with prior standards higher than Common Core dropped their standards to be in Common Core. It’s also a sad proof that the claim that “the standards are higher and better for all” was nothing more than a marketing lie, then for English and math, and now for science.
Then come to the meeting. The USOE is calling the new standards “a revision” rather than a wholesale adoption of NGSS standards, in what appears to be an attempt to deceive the people. Parent committee members opposed to the change, including scientist Vincent Newberger, have pointed out that one word– one– was altered from NGSS standards in Utah’s “revision of its own standards” and some NGSS standards were only renumbered, so that the proponents could feel truthful about calling these standards a “revision” of Utah’s prior science standards rather than an adoption of national standards. The USOE’s open meetings are not, supposedly, to promote NGSS but are to promote what USOE calls a “revision of middle school science standards” only.
Parents need to take control of this conversation.
Ask yourself: 1) Is this revision actually an adoption of NGSS? 2) Do I want national science standards in Utah?
Answer one: If you read what parent committee members are testifying, you will conclude that this revision IS an adoption of NGSS.
Answer two: As with Common Core, we must push back against national science standards for two reasons: control of standards (liberty) and content of standards (academics).
CONTROL
Although parent committee members on Utah’s “revision” team testify that the content is global warming-centric, and electricity-dismissive, and testify that the standards present as facts, controversial theories only accepted by certain groups; to me, the enduring issue is control, local power.
If we adopt standards written by an unrepresentative, nonelected, central committee– standards that don’t come with an amendment process for future alterations as scientific theories and studies grow– we give away our personal power.
Even if these standards were unbiased and excellent, we should never, even for one second, consider adopting national/federally promoted standards– because science is ever-changing and ever politically charged. We are foolish to hand away our right to judge, to debate, to control, what we will be teaching our children, and to let unelected, unknown others decide which science topics will be marginalized while others are highlighted in the centrally controlled standards. Would we allow a nontransparent, unelected, distant group to rewrite the U.S. Constitution? Never. Then, why is representation and power concerning laws and policies affecting our children’s knowledge, beliefs and skills any less important?
Representation is nonexistent in NGSS standards adoption, despite the token cherrypicked teacher or professor who gets to contribute ideas to the new standards. Unless there is a written constitution for altering our standards so that we retain true control of what is taught, no federal or national standards should ever, ever be accepted. Adopting centralized standards is giving away the key to the local castle.
Are these just harmless, minimal standards without any teeth or enforcer? Hardly; the enforcement of the science standards is embedded in the nationally aligned tests, tests which carry such intense pressure for schools and students (school grading/shutdown; teacher evaluation/firing) that they have become the bullies of the educational system.
CONTENT
Know this: NGSS are neither neutral nor objective. This explains why pushback against NGSS is so strong in some states, even to the point of lawsuits against state school boards over NGSS. NGSS standards are slanted.
It may come as a surprise that religious freedom is a key complaint against these standards. This was pointed out by plaintiffs in the Kansas lawsuit, which alleged that implementation “will cause the state to infringe on the religious rights of parents, students and taxpayers under the Establishment, Free Exercise, Speech and Equal Protection clauses of the U.S. Constitution.”
The legal complaint stated that “the principal tool of indoctrination is the concealed use of an Orthodoxy known asmethodological naturalism or scientific materialism. It holds that explanations of the cause and nature of natural phenomena may only use natural, material or mechanistic causes, and must assume that supernatural and teleological or design conceptions of nature are invalid. The Orthodoxy is an atheistic faith-based doctrine that has been candidly explained by Richard Lewontin, a prominent geneticist and evolutionary biologist, as follows:
“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, thatwe are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” [Richard Lewontin, Billions and Billions of Demons, 44 N.Y. Rev. of Books 31 (Jan. 9, 1997) (emphasis added)]
So, under NGSS, you can’t teach, as some scientists do, that evolution can exist alongside creationism. Under scientific materialism/methodological naturalism, any “design conception” is invalid.
Below is a list of the upcoming science meetings in Utah, where any citizen may come and ask questions and make comments.
Friends, we need to show up and bring neighbors. If too few Utahns find out and push back, the NGSS standards will slide right in like Common Core for math and English did. Please cancel your other plans. Bring your video cameras if you come. It’s an open, public meeting so recording seems proper and fair. Recording USOE official replies to questions from parents can only encourage accountability from the USOE to the citizens. If you can’t attend one of the meetings in the next weeks, please comment (and ask others to comment) on the USOE’s 90 day public comment survey link.
Before I list the meeting times and dates and cities, I want to share portions of an email sent out from a Washington County, Utah citizen to other citizens of Washington county. I don’t know who wrote this email:
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Washington County Email:
“Washington County was settled by wise men and women who worked hard to make our red desert bloom. They have passed down a wonderful heritage of hard work and love for the land to all who have followed them. We are now reaping the fruits of the careful planning and preservation that has become a way of life to all who make Washington County their home. We desire to pass this heritage along to our children so that the generations to come will continue to be wise stewards of this land that we love.
It is hard to understand why anyone from Washington County would allow their children to be taught a science curriculum that does not align with our value system. Imagine how powerful it would be to teach our children the science behind why our soil is red, how ancient volcanos came to pepper our back yards with basalt rock, what made our sand dunes petrify, why dinosaur footprints can be found in farm land and what makes our sunsets so spectacular. As our children learn the unique science of the environment around them, they will have greater knowledge and appreciation of the diverse environments around the world. They will also come to appreciate the importance of being wise stewards wherever their paths may lead them.
We now have an opportunity to protect our right to teach our children. The Federal Government has incentivized groups to develop the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and those groups have worked tirelessly to get them implemented in Utah, and all states. Please come and learn more about the NGSS from Vincent Newmeyer, a member of the NGSS review committee. We will be meeting on Thursday, April 23rd at 6:00 P.M. at the St. George Downtown Library (88 W. 100 S. St. George). Mr. Newmeyer is one of the review committee members who have great concerns about the NGSS. These members are generously giving their time to visit communities to warn them about these new federal standards.
Directly following the meeting with Mr. Newmeyer, there will be a public meeting with the State and Local School Boards to discuss these federal standards tied to high-stakes testing onThursday, April 23rd at 7:00 P.M. at the Washington School District Office Board Room at 121 Tabernacle Street in St. George.”
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USOE Public Feedback Meetings
All Meetings are 7 p.m. – 8 p.m.
Thursday, April 23
Washington School District Office
Location: Board Room
121 Tabernacle Street St George, Utah 84770
Note: The main doors will be locked. Access through the front side doors.
Tuesday, April 28
Uintah School District Office
Location: Board Room (Upstairs)
635 West 200 South Vernal, Utah 84078
Wednesday, May 6 Provo School District Office
Location: Professional Development Center
280 West 940 North Provo, Utah 84604
Wednesday, May 13
Cache County School District Office
Location: Professional Development Center
2063 North 1200 East North Logan, Utah 84341
Tuesday, May 19
Salt Lake Center for Science Education (SLCSE)
Location: The Media Center
1400 Goodwin Avenue Salt Lake City, Utah 84116
1.THE TESTS HAVE NEVER BEEN VALIDATED. It is out of the norm for tests to be given to children that never have been validated in a formal, scientific, peer-reviewed way. Professor Tienken of Seton Hall University calls this “dataless decision making“. What does it mean to a mom or dad to hear that no validity report has ever been issued for the SAGE/Common Core tests? It means that the test is as likely to harm as to help any child.
We would not give our children unpiloted, experimental medicine; why would we give them unpiloted, experimental education? –And, did you know that Florida bought/rented the SAGE test from Utah, and now Florida points to Utah students as its guinea pigs? Where was Utah’s parental consent? Is it okay that the youngest, most helpless citizens are compulsory research subjects without the knowledge or consent of their parents?
2. THE STANDARDS (upon which the test is based) HAVE NEVER BEEN VALIDATED. Building a test on the sandy foundation of unvalidated standards –hoping but not having actual evidence on which to base that hope– that the standards are unquestionably legitimate, means that not only the test but the teaching that leads up to it, is experimental, not time-tested. The SAGE evaluates teachers and even grades schools (and will close them) based on test scores from this flawed-upon-flawed (not to mention unrepresentative/unconstitutional) system. Dr. Tienken reminds us that that making policy decisions in this baseless way is “educational malpractice.”
4. THE TESTS ARE SECRETIVE. Parents and teachers may not see test questions, not even years after the test is over. Last year’s leaked screen shots of the test, taken by a student with her cell phone to show her mother, revealed an unpleasing agenda that asked students to question the value of reading (versus playing video games). The student who took the photos was told that she was a cheater, was threatened with expulsion; and the teacher who didn’t notice (or stop) the cell phone photography was threatened with job loss. Members of Utah’s 15-parent SAGE review committee have expressed grave concerns about the quality and content of SAGE, citing “grammar, typos, content, wrong answers, glitches, etc.,” but were never shown whether corrections were made to SAGE, prior to its hasty rollout.
5. TEST ITEM CREATION IS QUESTIONABLE. SAGE questions were written by two groups: a few hand picked Utah educators, and the psychometricians at the testing company, American Institutes for Research (AIR) which is not an academic organization but a behavioral research group. We don’t know why psychometricians were entrusted to write math and English questions. And we don’t know what the percentages are– how many SAGE questions come from educators, and how many from AIR’s psychometricians?
6.THE TEST DISREGARDS ETHICS CODES FOR BEHAVIORAL RESEARCH TESTING. As Dr. Gary Thompson has pointed out, behavioral tests are normally governed by strict codes of ethics and test-giving psychologists lose their licenses to practice if they veer from the codes of ethics.
The Utah State Office of Education claims tests do not collect psychological information, but it seems unreasonable to believe the claim.
Consider:
“Behavioral Indicators” is a phrase that’s been in Utah laws concerning student testing for years. It’s old news. Happily, last month, Sen. Aaron Osmond wrote a bill to remove that language. (Thank you, Senator Osmond.) Time will tell if the new law is respected or enforced.
“Psychometric census” of Utah students was part of the agreement Utah made with the federal government when it applied for and received a grant to build a longitudinal database to federal specifications, (including federal and international interoperability specifications.) Utah promised in that grant contract to use its Student Strengths Inventory to collect noncognitive data.
The test company, AIR, is a behavioral research company that creates behavioral assessments as its primary mission and focus.
U.S. Dept of Education reports such as “Promoting Grit, Tenacity and Perserverance” promote collection of students’ psychological and belief-based data via tests, encouraging schools to use biometric data collection devices. I have not seen any of these devices being used in Utah schools, but neither have I seen any evidence that the legislature or our State School Board stand opposed to the Dept. of Education’s report or the advice it gives.
The NCES, a federal agency, has a National Data Collection Model which it invites states to follow. Since Utah has no proper legal privacy protections in place, there is nothing stopping us from accepting the invitation to comply with the Model’s suggestions, which include hundreds of data points including intimate and even belief-based points: religious affiliation, nickname, voting status, bus stop times, birthdate, nonschool activities, etc.
7. UTAH’S NEW SCHOOL TURNAROUND LAW WILL SHUT DOWN SCHOOLS OR TAKE THEM OVER –USING SAGE AS JUSTIFICATION. The bell curve of school-grading uses SAGE as its school-measuring stick; when a certain number of schools (regardless of quality) are inevitably labeled “failing” because of their position on that bell curve, they will be turned over to the state, turned into a charter school, or closed. These events will alter lives, because of Utah’s belief in and reliance on the illegitimate SAGE test scores.
8.SAGE TESTS ARE GIVEN ALL YEAR LONG. These are not just end-of-year tests anymore. SAGE tests are summative, formative, interim, and practice (assignment based) tests. The summative (ending) test is given so early in the year that content has not been taught yet. But it gets tested anyway, and teachers/students/schools get negatively judged, anyway.
9. OPTING OUT IS ONE WAY TO PROTEST DATA MINING AND TO MINIMIZE IT. The State Longitudinal Database System (SLDS) collects daily data on every school child without ever asking for parental consent. SLDS collects much more than test-gathered data. The government of Utah will not allow an SLDS opt out. And since SLDS does not have an opt out provision (while SAGE does) it makes sense to minimize the amount of data mining that’s being done on your child by not taking these tests.
10.OPTING OUT OF SAGE FIGHTS EDUCATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION. The lack of transparency, of fairness, of any shared amendment process or true representation under Common Core and its testing system defies “consent of the governed,” a principle we learned in the Declaration of Independence. “It is the right [and responsibility] of the people to alter or abolish” governments [or educational programs] destructive of life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness –or those that govern without the knowledge of, or consent of, the governed.
I believe that parents now have the right and responsibility to abolish SAGE testing, by refusing to participate.
If you haven’t yet realized that the Utah State Office of Education acts as an unaccountable bully to both the State School Board and to parents/teachers/legislators, please watch this; it is yet more reason to not allow your child to take the SAGE/AIR test, which is a science test as well as English and math:
Beware of Stealth Assessment as SAGE replacement
Please beware, however: The testing opt out movement has grown so huge (outside Utah) that some Utah legislators have decided to hop on the anti-testing bandwagon with an eye toward replacing SAGE with something from which public school parents can never, ever opt out (unless they home school or use private school). That’s called embedded testing, or stealth assessment.
Opt out of SAGE this year; fight Stealth Assessment next year.
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National News Update on Test Opt-Out Movement
provided by Fairtest.org
We’ve pulled together this special edition of our usually-weekly newsclips because of three huge stories that broke in the past several days.
– In New York, more than 173,000 students opted out of the first wave of state testing, at least tripling last year’s boycott level.
– In five states (Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada and North Dakota) computerized Common Core testing systems collapsed in a replay of the widespread technical problems which plagued Florida exams earlier this spring.
Both major developments further undermine the credibility of judgements about students, teachers and schools made on the basis of standardized exam results.
— And, in Washington DC, the U.S. Senate education committee responded to grassroots pressure for assessment reform by endorsing an overhaul of “No Child Left Behind,” which eliminates most federal sanctions for test scores. The bill does not go far enough to reversing test misuse and overuse, but it is a step in the right direction
Remember that these updates are posted online at: http://fairtest.org/news/other for your reference and for use in Facebook posts, Tweets, weblinks, etc.
Utah’s State Office of Education appears to be, once again, quite secretively rubber-stamping controversial and politically loaded national standards and calling them Utah’s own standards– this time, for science.
The English and math deception happened a few years ago when the USOE did the same thing with the adoption of Common Core’s math and English national standards, calling them “Utah Core Standards”.
This week, when the Utah State School Board meets, it will discuss statewide changes to science standards. They do not openly admit that in fact the Utah draft mirrors the controversial NGSS standards. In fact, the official statement from the State Office of Education states nothing about Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) but the new “Utah” science standards drafts have now been exposed as the very same as the NGSS Standards– by multiple parents who serve on the Utah parent committee for science standards.
Vincent Newmeyer, one of the parents who serves on the parent committee, has given permission to share his response to the revised standards. He says that he is alarmed at the errors and unfitness of these standards for Utah students as well as the deceptiveness of the rewriting committee.
He explains that the Utah rewriting committee appears to be attempting to hide, by renumbering or rearranging, the truth that the new Utah standards are just NGSS standards. He notes:
“Utah’s science standards rewriting committee has removed all but the performance expectations [from national NGSS] and renumbered them. A few performance expectation sequences have been rearranged and one new NGSS standard was inserted. The Performance Expectations are essentially identical to what they were in the previous draft. Again, in the introductory material it is still claimed to be Utah grown standards, perhaps because Brett Moulding from Utah is the chair of the NGSS writing committee. These performance expectations as prepared are only one word different from the published NGSS Performance Expectations –yet again there is no attribution to NGSS.”
He points to the NGSS national science standards guidelines which state: “States… that have adopted or are in the process of adopting the NGSS in whole shall be exempt from this Attribution and Copyright notice provision of this license.” Newmeyer points out that Utah is either in the process of adopting national science standards in whole, or are infringing on copyright. –So, which is it?
Newmeyer goes on: “Though we are just looking at grades 6-8, it is inconceivable that our state would adopt 6-8 (even if slightly modified) and then settle on a totally different standard for other grades, especially when you consider the desire to have a cohesive and progressively building program. So in fact we are not just looking at grades 6-8. We are laying a precedent for the adoption of NGSS for all grades with additional material not even considered.”
Why must we as parents, teachers and scientists, oppose it?
1. Control. Our state loses local control of teaching students what we accept as scientifically important and true, when we adopt NGSS standards rather than using standards we have researched and studied and compiled on our own. We further lose control when we then test students using these national science standards that are aligned to the philosophies (and data mining structures) of the federal agenda.
2. Content. Vincent Newmeyer explains that some of the standards are based on recognized fallacies, and others on controversial assumptions. Failing to properly research and vet these standards publically is unethical and unscientific.
For example, Newmeyer asks us to look at “the newly renumbered but present all along standard number 7.2.2 : “Analyze displays of pictorial data to compare patterns of similarities in the embryological development across multiple species to identify relationships not evident in the fully formed anatomy.” This leads students to favor the Darwinian Evolutionary view –which has solid counterpoints arguing precisely the opposite view. Newmeyer explains that although it is true that we can find similarities in embryos, still “if studied in detail we find differences that completely undermine the whole premise of why they inserted this performance expectation. In the standard they are not looking at the differences.”
Even those who actively defend the Darwinian view of common ancestry who have looked at the data see the weakness of the argument, says Newmeyer. He questions why we want to teach it in Utah as if it were settled science. There are also standards that promote the controversial global warming paradigm, and there are other content problems in the NGSS standards.
Utah’s already using the standardized test developed by American Institutes for Research (SAGE) which includes science, English and math standards aligned to the nationally pushed agenda. So the USOE is not going to want to go in another direction. But it must. If enough parents, teachers and scientists pelter the Utah State School Board and Utah State Office of Education and legislature with firm “NO to NGSS” emails, phone calls and personal visits, they can’t get away with this like they did with Common Core.
A few months ago, a concerned Utah State School Board member contacted every single one of the science teachers who were in her constituency district, asking them how they felt about NGSS. She reported that every single one of them said that they wanted to keep Utah’s current science standards and they rejected NGSS. Every last teacher.
There will be a 90-day comment period. You can also attend and speak up (2 min max) at the state school board meetings if you request time in advance. Please participate.
Also, please share your passion with your legislators. Find your representatives here or click here for the state school board’s email address and all of the Utah senators and representatives.
You can’t blame people– even Congressmen themselves– for not wanting to get involved in the current rewrite of ESEA/NCLB. The hundreds of pages of bill language and amendments are intimidating –and boring.
But boring and intimidating or not, if we believe in “consent by the governed” then, as the governed, we must pay attention. If we ignore what D.C. –mostly without constituent knowledge or input –are rewriting for the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law also known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)– we may regret it.
ESEA/NCLB is such a mangled mess. HR5, this year’s earlier rewrite of NCLB/ESEA, was remarkably stopped in its tracks. But now I’m worried that the new rewrite may not be better. Here’s why.
1.) The U.S. Constitution never gives any authority to the federal government to boss states around in educational matters. Congress does not seem to remember this at all.
The premise of creating or altering a federal education law, in a country governed by the Constitution, is a hopelessly flawed premise. Each state is supposed to be each doing its own separate –not standardized, nor nationalized– education dance. Freedom thrives on distinction and variety and on spreading out the decision making power– not on top-down, heavy handed, one-law-fits-all sameness. So felt the Constitution writers.
Now, the distraction of a debate over NCLB/ESEA manipulates today’s debaters into forgetting that there shouldn’t even be a NCLB/ESEA.
For example, when my toddler doesn’t want to go to bed, I enforce my mandate by distracting his focus: I ask him for input on my mandate: “Do you want to read three stories or four?” “Should we read our bedtime stories in your room or my room?” “Which pajamas do you like the best?” Our family constitution says that parents know best. —Not so in the case of ESEA/NCLB. States are not toddlers and the federal government is not a nanny or a parent –unless we are states united under federal dictatorship rather than a constitutional republic of United States.
Should we actually stoop to discuss their questions such as this one? “Should Title I dollars follow low-income children to schools of their choice, or should they go to poor schools?” The taking and redistributing of state taxpayers’ money to education in the first place is unconstitutional, to me. Discussion about it seems wrong-headed since it’s falsely appropriated money. It’s unconstitutionally appropriated money. It’s “legalized” plunder by the government, at the people.
If you happen to approve of that– if there’s a socialist within you that can go along with it– know this: Obama’s blueprint for education reform shows his intent in a 2011 press release: “Under President Obama’s Blueprint for Reform of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act [ESEA], the Title I comparability provision would be revised to ensure that state and local funding levels are distributed equitablybetween Title I and non-Title I schools.” (Obama doesn’t seem to be the “charitable socialist” helping the poor but a noncharitable socialist bent on forcing the states to force equality, instead.) Please comment below if you see this differently.
Failure to remember and honor the rights and rules of the Constitution is one very serious problem. The second reason for the manged mess is also very sobering– it’s dishonesty (by some) and failure to detect and call out that dishonesty (by others).
2.) Dishonesty and deliberate lengthiness makes bill discussion difficult.
During this year’s first rewrite and push of NCLB/ESEA, called HR5, which failed recently, we saw honest-to-goodness grassroots conservatives, arms linked with grassroots liberals, saying NO to Congress’ HR5 and crying out: “The talking points aren’t true.”
Sadly, it seems that legislators really don’t make time for reading bills. True, bills and their amendments are as long as Dostoevsky novels minus the interesting dramas, yet legislators pass them (or not) only depending on other legislators or on lists of bill-talking-points to decide how they’ll vote. A misleading or outright dishonest set of talking points can get a bill passed. This madness must stop. It’s like taking a pill when even the pharmacists and doctors haven’t read the ingredient list.
Congressmen should be defending us with deep research –and with the knowledge that standing on the Constitution, they have power.
I want NCLB/ESEA to be repealed entirely. But if it’s not repealed, then I want a SERIOUS rewrite.
I want to see and hear my Utah representatives, Mike Lee, Mia Love, Orrin Hatch, Rob Bishop and Jason Chaffetz, standing in ESEA discussion meetings in D.C. saying:
“We just remembered that our nation’s supreme law for education is the U.S. Constitution and we’re sticking with that. So taxes for education will be staying inside the state. Utah won’t be complying with rules about, nor asking for, Title I monies –because our state taxpayers will be keeping the taxes locally, not sending them to D.C. and we’ll be deciding locally where our own tax dollars go.”
I want to hear them saying:
“If we allow the writing of any federal education law at all, it will be only to reinforce Constitutional rights, to reclaim individual rights and to stop big government encroachment. “
I want to hear them saying:
“Individual privacy matters. So we won’t allow the collective State Longitudinal Database System (created by all fifty states’ individuals SLDS’s) to be used by corporations partnered with the government, nor by the federal government itself in its Edfacts Data Exchange. We won’t allow national Common Educational Data Standards (CEDS) nor SLDS systems to bind student privacy rights. We won’t use a national Common Core of standards nor data mining tags.”
I want to hear them saying:
“Teachers are professionals. Government should keep its snoopy unwanted nose out of the business of professionals who are accountable to the parents and principals whom they serve, and to the local taxpayers who support them– not to Big Government.”
I want to hear them saying:
“Under no condition will private schools, their standards or their data ever, ever be “accountable” to anyone other than the parents who pay for them and the teachers who work there. Period, end of story.”
I want to hear them saying:
“Regional Educational Laboratories and Centers for School Turnaround, as branches of the federal network of an unconstitutional management of education, will no longer be funded by American tax dollars nor supported by federal government policy.”
I want to hear them saying:
“Children and their parents are the most important core of society. They are not “human capital” to be inventoried, surveyed, tested, guided, used and controlled by a government nor its corporate partners. Every family has the right to opt out of government’s databases.”
Please contact your local and D.C. representatives. Tell them what you want in the ESEA/NCLB rewrite. Make your influence strong. Because we frankly outnumber them.
This week in Florida, senators are speaking up against the Common Core testing and “accountability” systems.
In the video below, Florida’s Senator Lee’s states:
“I’m done with the testing program in the state of Florida; I’m done with the “accountability” system. Whoever those people are out there from whatever foundation they may be from, whatever testing groups they may be supporting: I’m over you. You’ve lost my confidence… You’re so married to this system, you don’t have a shred of common sense left…. As this has progressed, it has become a behemoth… We are now complicit in this problem… I hear the people supporting this system telling me that it’s so important to them that we maintain the bureaucracy that we hold this system up as so sacrosanct and so inflexible…
I just want to send a message… go find somebody else to talk to ’cause I’m done with you.
And I hope the folks over at the Dept. of Education understand that it takes a good long while to get me fed up, but I’m there. “
Senator Alan Hayes also stood up and spoke against the ed reform machine that’s hurting children. Senator Hayes’ admission here is that he realizes that he has been part of the problem, and now he regrets the mess that’s been made. He said that the intentions of ed reforms were honorable but the results are not good.
I want to give context so that you can fully appreciate the letter’s significance.
Darling-Hammond, of Stanford University, is on the list of “Top Ten Scariest People in Education Reform” for good reasons. She works for private organizations that crush Constitutional control of education; she promotes and writes books about socialist redistribution of wealth, and she plays key roles in the Obama administration’s fed ed goals. She’s been an advisor and/or board member for:
Dr. Thompson pointed out to his Facebook friends that Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond has been very busily publishing this month.
Her sudden articles in the Huffington Post, The Hill, Stanford University, NEA, ECE and elsewhere show that now, while Congress heatedly debates the ESEA/No Child Left Behind disaster, she’s desperate to persuade Congress to use Common Core and its tests as “an engine to drive better educational practice.”
Darling-Hammond paints a pretty, distracting frame around her ugly baby, the Common Core. She pretends that the whole reason parents are pushing back is only high stakes testing and she mentions nothing else that parents are screeching about. Apparently to her, the Constitution has nothing to do with it; experimentation on children has nothing to do with it; data mining has nothing to do with it; unpiloted and shaky standards have nothing to do with it; validity-report-lacking tests have nothing to do with it. She keeps the “conversation” on the clearly obvious: that basing teachers’ entire value on a test students take is stupid; that stressing those test results rather than a child’s whole education is even more stupid. (Yes, the sky is blue and the grass is green.)
But what she’s really pushing for is NOT what parents want. In “The Hill” blog post, she pressed for federal enforcement of Common Core tests: “urge the federal government to make sure districts provide annual assessments of student progress, while allowing states to develop systems of assessment”. She added, “The Feds should continue to require states to flag districts that require improvement” and “the Feds need to treat accountability as an ongoing process…”
Her article in HuffPo praises California for allocating $1.25 BILLION for Common Core and for eliminating “all the old tests while bringing in new and better Common Core assessments” and concludes: “the Common Core standards in California are an engine to drive better educational practice“.
Her strategy seems to be to get readers to start nodding with her about the high stakes tests, and then forget to stop nodding when she crosses the line and promotes a unicorn: a gentler, kinder version of the same darn Common Core tests. She uses the term “we agreed” seven times to make her point in one article, as she claims that reformers from a wide spectrum of political camps agree with her. Dr. Darling-Hammond, please know the wide spectrum of political camps is loaded with those who disagree with you. Case in point: Dr. Thompson (an Obama voter in the last election) and me (long ago lovingly and correctly labeled a “right wing nut case” –by Dr. Thompson.)
Dr. Thompson put it this way to his Facebook friends tonight:
“Advocacy should never be used as a means to effect change in ethics,” –but because Darling-Hammond is doing so– “it makes it real easy for small-town Utah doctors like myself who do not hold positions of import at Stanford University to effectively ‘slam’ the Dr. Hammonds of the world… Not once did she mention the words ‘valid testing‘. Parents are, and always must be, the resident experts of their own children. I will always challenge those in positions of power who use pseudo science to back their claims. It is an affront to my profession.”
Then he posted his pointed letter to Dr. Darling-Hammond.
May his letter go far and wide. May Darling-Hammond enjoy the mountains of money she’s made $erving the institution$ that aim to $tandardize education and data so that they can control citizens more effectively. –And may Congress see right through her words.
Congress just might.
This month we saw Senator Vitter’s Local Control of Education Act pass the U.S. Senate. (Read it here.) It doesn’t end Common Core, but it spanks the Department of Education for ramming it down our throats, and prevents conditional-on-common-standards-grants.
We also saw key members of the Senate and the House sign powerful letters (here’s the other) that demand an end to the funding and pushing of Common Core.
Tonight, Utah’s Governor Gary Herbert will take questions on KBYU TV. The public may submit questions via Twitter, Facebook, phone or email. askeleven@byu.edu is the email address. Click here for additional ways to submit questions.
Feel free to use my questions in your own words if you like.
1. Will you veto SB 235 the school turnaround bill now that you’ve received so much input, including official open letters asking you to do so from the unanimous boards of some Utah school districts, from the UEA and from Utahns Against Common Core? Why or why not?
2. We know that your initiative, Prosperity 2020 is aimed at improving the economy of Utah. Can you explain how it differs from China’s economic centralization of schools linked with the economy?
3. Why are you supporting the ban on citizens being allowed to burn wood in the their homes?
4. What influence do Utah citizens have in the National Governor’s Association; in other words, how does the Governor’s membership in NGA benefit Utah citizens’ constitutional rights to local autonomy?
5. Last year, you led a study of the new national standards used in Utah known as Common Core; critics said your study failed to address the governance and local control of the standards. Would you be willing to revisit this issue in more depth? Why or why not?
6. What is Utah’s State Longitudinal Database System, and how does it benefit individuals and families?
7. Some parents are calling for an opt out for the State Longitudinal Database System. Would you support giving parents this liberty? Why or why not?
8. Would you consider following the example of many other states in eliminating the income tax? Why or why not?
A few days ago, fifth grader Aaron Bencomo spoke to the Arizona Senate, explaining in his own words, using his own experience to express how bad the Common Core is. He quoted the Declaration of Independence. He talked about the pursuit of happiness. He described the “one size does not fit all,” boring, wasteful reviews of last year’s math in this year’s math. He talked about not every child being the same, but being treated as if they were the same, under Common Core. His speech was a beautiful example of how even a little child can be an agent for freedom and truth. Watch from minute 1:20 to 4:05.
Children do have great power.
Aaron is not the first child to speak out powerfully against the Common Core agenda’s destruction of individual freedoms. Teenager Patrick Richardson of Arkansas spoke out. Ethan Young of Tennessee spoke out. Sydney Lane of Connecticut spoke out. Please watch and share these videos if you haven’t already!
Freedom of speech is, of course, closely tied to freedom of religion; both are versions of free exercise of conscience and of free thought.
Inspired by Dallin Oaks’ article in this month’s Ensign Magazine, I reminded my children this week that they are not government employees living under rules that constrain religious speech in a school setting. In other words, children may say, write, report, and share their faith in God freely, including in a public school if they want to.
Elder Dallin Oaks reminded us that freedom of religion is not limited to the inside of a church. He wrote: “…oppose government officials and public policy advocates who suggest that the free exercise of religion is limited to “freedom of worship.” In the United States, for example, the guarantee of “free exercise” protects the right to come out of our private settings, including churches, synagogues, and mosques, to act upon our beliefs, subject only to the legitimate government powers necessary to protect public health, safety, and welfare. Free exercise surely protects religious citizens in acting upon their beliefs in public policy debates...“
I also reminded my children of a well-loved story in the Book of Mormon about the “Army of Helaman.” In the story, adults with histories of evil had made promises not to take up their swords to kill again, but their innocent children were under no such obligation; when attacked by an enemy, the boys took up their swords and defended their own lives and the lives of their families. God preserved those young men, and helped their families, through them. (See Alma 56-58)
I tell my children never to assume they are under the same obligation as their public school teachers are. Children can speak positively about their religion. Children have great freedom of speech. If they feel they want to, they should speak and write about their beliefs, including belief in Constitutional liberty, and belief in God, wherever they are.
He was right when he said that it’s educational malpractice to use a beta-test to judge students and teachers and schools.
He was right in saying that it’s unethical to test students in January and February on content that hasn’t even been introduced for that school year yet.
But why was there no mention of privacy –or of parental rights to informed consent? Why is that not part of his stop-SAGE argument? Why is the senator pushing back against SAGE/Common Core tests now, when he never has done so before? He could have helped pass Rep. Anderegg’s student data privacy bill, two years in a row. He could have done so much to protect our children. He did not. The student data privacy bill is, once again, two years in a row, utterly dead in the water.
I do suspect, because of Stephenson’s infatuation with all things technological, that Stephenson is using the anti-SAGE argument to lead listeners toward acceptance of something just as sinister or worse: curriculum-integrated tests, also known as “stealth assessments”.
That’s what’s coming next. And stealth will hurt, not help, the fight for parental rights and student privacy rights.
A resolution just passed the Utah House of Representatives along these stealth assessment lines, called HCR7. The visible intentions of HCR7 are great: to reduce the amount of time wasted on testing and reducing test anxiety; to expand the amount of time spent teaching and learning instead of test-prepping. Its sponsor, Rep. Poulson, explained in a KSL quote: “my family were small farmers and cattlemen, and I know just from that experience that if you spend all of your time weighing and measuring, and not feeding, it causes problems.”
Agreed! Education for a child’s benefit should be its own end, not just a stepping stone toward the Capital T Tests.
But, but, but.
See line 66. It wants to “maximize the integration of testing into an aligned curriculum“. How?
The school system just hides the factthat a test is happening from its students.
The techno-curriculum can suck out a constant stream of personal data from the student’s technology use. Assignments, projects, and even games can constantly upload academic and nonacademic data about the child, all day every day, into the State Longitudinal Database Systems —and into the hands of third-party technology vendors.
As Dr. Thompson has pointed out, stealth can be honorable and valuable in a private, parentally consented-to, setting: when a parent asks a trained child psychologist to help heal a hurt child, he/she can analyze a child’s drawings, how a child plays with toys, or how he organizes objects, etc.
The difference is informed consent.
The governmental-corporate machine is suggesting that legislatures force schools to adopt compulsory testing embedded in school curriculum and activities, allowing student data collection to be pulled without informed consent.
Do we want our students to be tested and analyzed and tracked like guinea pigs all day, year after year— not by teachers, but by third party vendors and the government?
Stealth testing, or “integrated testing” removes the possibility for parental opt-outs. I’m not for that. Are you?
Why doesn’t anyone seem to care? I repeat: two years in a row Rep. Jake Anderegg’s student data protection bill has gone unpassed. I cannot understand the legislature’s apathy about privacy rights and the lack of valiant protection of children’s privacy in this data-binging day and age.
I don’t get it. Someone, tell me why this is not important in a supposedly child-friendly state. It is known all over the planet that private data is the new gold, the new oil. Knowledge about individuals is power over them. When someone knows extremely detailed information about individuals, they can can persuade them, influence them, guide them, help them –and control them. Children’s privacy, their data, is gold to corporations and governments. Yet they are notbeing protected. Our legislators don’t think it’s important enough. We can pass bills about every petty thing you can imagine, but we can’t protect our kids from having their gold robbed every single day. I can’t believe it’s just neglect and busy-ness. I think it’s greed-based.
Don’t believe it? Study what the feds have done in recent years to destroy student privacy. Search Utah code for any mention of students having rights to their own data, or ownership of it; search in vain for any punishment when data is collected without parental consent by schools or third party vendors. See corporations salivating over taken student data –collected without parental consent by every state’s “State Longitudinal Database System”.
Watch the Datapalooza event where the same type of talk is going on– absolutely no discussion of parental rights, of privacy rights, of the morality of picking up academic and nonacademic personal information about another person without his/her consent nor parental consent: https://youtu.be/Lr7Z7ysDluQ
Our elected representatives, from Governor Herbert through Howard Stephenson through Marie Poulson through our state school board, are not demonstrating any respect for parental consent. By their inaction, they are violating our children’s data privacy.
Utah is volunteering to give away our gold, our children’s private data– out of naiivete, greed, or tragically misplaced “trust”.
There is only one solution that I can see: parents, we are the only ones who really care. WE CAN SPEAK UP.
We can protect our children by pressuring our elected representatives at the senate, house and state school board. We can tell elected representatives that our children need and deserve proper data privacy protection. Tell them that FERPA is broken and we need local protection. Tell them we will not tolerate embedded tests in the daily curriculum and technologies that our children use.
Demand the dignity of privacy for your child. Say NO to “integrated curriculum and testing”– stealth assessment. Put these words in your elected representatives’ inboxes and messaging systems and twitter feeds and ears. Don’t let it rest. Be a pest. Silence is acquiescence.
Children and their private data are not “stakeholder” owned inventory. Children are not “human capital” to be tracked and directed by the government. My child is mine. He/she has a mission unrelated to fattening up the workforce or serving Prosperity 2020. I do not think the legislature comprehends that fact.
Maybe I am not barking loudly enough. Maybe a hundred thousand parents need to be barking.
I’ll repaste the elected representatives’ email information here.
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Write to the Utah State School Board: Board@schools.utah.gov
Last year, on behalf of Early Life Child Psychology and Education Center, Dr. Gary Thompson offered $100,000.00 to the Utah State Office of Education (USOE) for validity reports for Utah’s SAGE Common Core test.
He made the offer after Associate Superintendent Judy Park made a public statement regarding the validity of SAGE which Dr. Thompson knew to be false. He knew that test makers such as American Institutes for Research (AIR) or Pearson routinely provide validity reports to psychologists in the private sector, because by law and ethics, they know the tests can’t be used otherwise.
Dr. Thompson gave the USOE a 24-hour deadline to forward to his clinic some certified copies of industry-standard validity reports prepared by AIR. Such reports would show the test’s construct validity, criterion validity, content validity, concurrent validity, and predictive validity.
In exchange for copies of the reports, Early Life Corp would donate $50,000.00 to a public school of USOE’s choice, plus an additional $50,000.00 to the 2014-15 Utah Public School Teacher of the Year. He sent the offer directly to Dr. Judy Park and to some of the Utah State School Board members; he also posted the offer on his personal Facebook page, the clinic’s Facebook page, and on the Utahns Against Common Core Facebook page.
The offer was quickly big news among those who follow the Common Core Initiative’s unfolding saga nationwide. Six clinicians and partners of Early Life, including the CEO who happens to be Dr. Thompson’s wife, were not happy about the offer. That night was a sleepless one for them and Dr. Thompson was consigned to the couch for the night by the CEO. Still, Dr. Thompson slept like a baby. Why?
Here’s a little bit of history:
Right after his appearance on the Glenn Beck TV show, where Dr. Thompson had exposed the Common Core/SAGE test’s assault on student privacy and its unanswered validity questions, Dr. Thompson had been summoned to the offices of then-Superintendent Dr. Martell Menlove and Associate Superintendent Brenda Hales. He accepted the invitation, bringing along his clinic’s lawyer and his best friend, Edward D. Flint.
During the two and a half hour meeting, Dr. Thompson and Ed Flint first sat and listened to “Brenda Hales’ hour-long lecture about ‘the Standards'”. Dr. Thompson finally explained, when she was finished speaking, that academic standards were not Thompson/Flint’s area of expertise and that the subject was of no interest to them on any level.
Next, Menlove/Hales listened to Thompson/Flint. The doctor and the lawyer explained the fundamentals of test validity issues and data gathering, and expressed their concerns about privacy and testing issues, laying out a careful analysis of how easily potential violations could occur under Common Core’s tests.
Menlove/Hales dismissed their concerns as “conspiracy theories” and requested that Thompson/Flint “stop bringing fear into our community via social media”. Thompson and Flint promised to cease speaking of their concerns if Menlove and Hales would agree to contact AIR to provide documentation that the concerns were unwarranted.
Dr. Menlove agreed.
Weeks later, still having seen no validity reports, Dr. Thompson finally received a phone call –from a parent, who had noticed an AIR letter posted on the USOE webpage. The letter was directed to Dr. Menlove from AIR Vice President Jon Cohen; it purported to address the concerns of Mr. Flint and Dr. Thompson, using their names.
AIR Vice President Jon Cohen failed to actually respond to the pointed, specific concerns that had been submitted in writing to Dr. Menlove. (Read those here.)
What he did do is attempt to give AIR a pat on the back by sharing a link to what was meant to go to a national nonprofit disabilities organization, one that would vouch for the test verbally (not with any validity studies or reports). Yet –incredibly– when one click’s on the AIR Vice President’s link, one is linked to a vacation spot on Catalina Island.
It’s been two years since AIR’s defense of validity letter was posted on the USOE website, and still no correction has been made.
Why haven’t the newspapers reported that the validity of Utah’s SAGE test is proved with a link to a Catalina Island website? This singular error (I’m assuming, hoping it was an error) and it’s now two-year uncorrected status speaks tragic volumes about the lack of professionalism of the SAGE, the USOE and the AIR Corporation. (AIR has received at least $39 million so far for its testing service, from Utah taxpayers.)
Dr. Thompson was not amused by AIR’s error. He shared this story in multiple, filmed presentations in four different states. Audiences and parents were stunned.
This is news. Why is it not in the papers? When AIR had the perfect opportunity to silence “misinformed” critics by putting the issue to rest with actual validity tests, the company produced no reports of any tests, just a short letter that said nothing.
Multiple calls to Dr. Menlove’s office and to his personal cell phone were never returned. Months later both Dr. Menlove and Brenda Hales abruptly resigned with no explanations given.
It had become clear to Dr. Thompson that the SAGE test was designed to assess both academic and psychological constructs. Dr. Thompson knew from his direct doctoral residency experience and from his academic training in assessment that no test of this kind had ever been devised in the history of clinical psychology. With knowledge of the extreme experimental nature of the test it was his logical assumption that AIR’s efforts were devoted to the construction of the test and could not have concurrently designed an entirely new method of measuring validity; providing validity reports is a time-consuming and extremely expensive task. (He notes that AIR and other Common Core test makers must have been thrilled to oblige when “client” Secretary Arne Duncan gave them the opportunity to devise a huge test without requiring the normally expensive and very time-consuming validity tests.)
It’s common knowledge, thanks to the USOE, that AIR was the only company that was federally approved; thus, the only company Utah could have chosen once it dumped its SBAC membership. The USOE has explained, “AIR is currently the only vendor who produces a summative adaptive assessment that has received federal approval.”
No one really knows– outside of the few AIR psychometricians and V.P. Jon Cohen– exactly what the Utah SAGE test (which is now also used outside Utah) measures. After two years of studying the issue, Dr. Thompson surmises that AIR has devised one of the most complex, accurate measures of personality characteristics ever made. Dr. Thompson believes that behavioral testing was AIR’s contractual goal and that SAGE reached that goal.
Support for Dr. Thompson’s conclusion is easy to find. As one example, scan the federal report entitled “Promoting Grit, Tenacity and Perserverance“. It openly promotes schools’ collection of students’ psychological and belief-based data via behavioral assessment. (See page 44 to view biometric data collection device photos: student mood meters, posture analysis seats, wireless skin conductance sensors, etc.) Utah’s own documents, such as the grant application for the State Longitudinal Database System, reveal that noncognitive assessment, including psychometric census-taking of Utah students, were part of the state’s agreement with the federal government even before the Common Core Initiative had come to our state.
As for the SAGE test’s academics, Dr. Thompson points out that barring independent, peer-reviewed documentation, it is not possible to honestly claim that SAGE measures what it claims to measure– academics– in a valid manner. Dr. Thompson puts it this way: “There is no way in hell that the AIR-produced SAGE/Common Core test measures academic achievement in a valid manner, and quite probably, does not measure academics at all.”
Dr. Gary Thompson and his family
Postscript: For more opt-out-of-SAGE-tests motivation please read the testimonies of parents who served on Utah’s SAGE “validation committee”. They read the SAGE questions last year and are now speaking out.
The State School Board of Utah meets tomorrow and will discuss SB 235 (bad bill) and HB 360 (great bill). They apparently want the good one vetoed. Too much liberty for teachers; too much distance between Utah and Common Core. It’s an open meeting; come and see.
The board doesn’t like this freedom-saving bill. But the Utah legislature did like it; HB 360 passed both houses and should be signed into law by the governor next week. Unless he vetoes, swayed by the school board…
Please email them: Board@schools.utah.gov
Dear State School Board,
I want to give input on two bills that you will be recommending for veto or signing to our governor.
HB 360 is a good bill for teachers’ autonomy, parental input and local control. Please do not ask for a veto. This is a good, constitutional bill. Parents and teachers want autonomy and this bill creates space for it. I see no reason to veto this bill. If this board does recommend a veto, I would like to know why each board member voted as he/she did on the issue.
SB 235, on the other hand, is a terrible bill that punishes schools with unvalid labels of “failing” based on the controversial SAGE tests and on an unfair bell curve, so that some are forced to failregardless; it punishes schools with high parental opt-out ratesand falsely labels them “failing” and then it forces these “failing” schools to take an “expert” to create “turnaround” that will likely be based on the Obama/Gates Turnaround Model.
For detailed, annotated research on SB 235, see two articles:
Please write or call! This is still America and not every legislator is bought by lobby money. Some actually do listen to constituents.We should act –even if we act alone. If we each act on conscience, rather than failing to act, for fear of failure, we might be winning many more battles.
A war over children’s lives and schooling and privacy rights is being waged, far under the radar of most people’s daily lives– but even those who know it’s going on, often fail to act. Keep acting, even if it appears there is no hope. Please join me if you can.
–And by the way, there is real hope!
The powerful Utah Educators’ Association (UEA) was also opposed to SB 235. So were key Utah Democrats. Some of the conservatives who actually voted for SB 235 now regret it.
Many people have written to the governor on this issue, pleading for a veto.
HB 360 already successfully PASSED both legislative houses, so it has the support of our elected reps. There’s no reason anyone would want it vetoed, that I can see, except if they are being paid (in money or in power) by “the machine”.
I sometimes think that we would be better off if we had an obvious wolf for a Governor.
If we had an obvious wolf, people would be paying very close attention to what he was doing. But Governor Herbert uses conservative language while he passes rascally progressive bills and initiatives and blocks conservative ones.
Most of Utah pays no real attention. Many assume that the conservative-sounding speech they heard him make on the campaign trail matches his actions today.
But this is not the case. He’s a key member of the Common Core creation team at NGA/CCSSO and he’s a proud promoter of Prosperity 2020, the cradle-to-workforce program that puts the economy first (not children) and puts businesses, not moms, dads and teachers, in positions of power over schools. He is not about to fight his own machine. The only thing he might fear is losing re-election. This is why I have a little bit of faith that letters asking him to veto SB 235 and asking him to pass HB 360, might, in great numbers, have influence on him –only for his re-election hopes. If he does just the opposite of what we are asking, and passes SB 235 and vetoes HB 360, let’s at least not let him do it too quietly and without pushback. We still have about a week until it’s too late to veto or to pass these bills into law.
The Salt Lake Tribune reported that tonight, Utah lawmakers passed a bill that “will assign rewards and consequences to Utah schools based on the state’s controversial school grading system. Schools who improve their grades will get funding and salary bonuses, while struggling schools will have the option of getting mentoring from school turnaround experts.”
Am I the only one reading this as: Utah adopted Obama’s School Turnaround model?
There is in fact an Obama-led, federal school turnaround model. There’s the federal “Office of School Turnaround” where states are assigned program officers. There’s a blue team and a green team.
In the chart where Utah’s listed for turnaround (see below) the Utah program officer is not yet named. It says, “To Be Determined.” The feds hadn’t assigned us a program officer before today.
They surely will now.
There’s also a federal Center on School Turnaround (CST) that’s so much more than an office in D.C. It’s a whole ” federal network of 22 Comprehensive Centers” that boasts ” 15 Regional Comprehensive Centers… and 7 national Content Centers.” The federal CST condescends to report that states are allowed to play a role in their own school turnaround. But not the leading role; that’s for the feds and the Comprehensive Centers. In a report titled “The State Role in School Turnaround” we learn that some of CST’s goals are to change states’ laws and to micromanage turnaround efforts. In their words:
“The Center on School Turnaround’s four objectives:
Create a Pro-Turnaround Statutory and Regulatory Environment
Administer and Manage Turnaround Efforts Effectively”
The passage of SB 235 is just one example of this ongoing series of terrible mistakes that cement our actions in line with the federal will.
The new Utah law calls for “turnaround experts” to improve low labeled schools using one driving method: tests. Schools will be labeled by student performance on Common Core/SAGE tests as low- or high-performing. Then some will be assigned a “turnaround expert” to raise Common Core test scores.
That famous turnaround group, the Center for American Progress, brazenly “disagrees that school improvement should be left entirely to states” and the Center has written that: “the United States will have to largely abandon the beloved emblem of American education: local control… new authority will have to come at the expense of local control… local control is the source of many of the nation’s problems related to education.”
I am not screaming out loud because I’m saving my screams until this next paragraph:
This week, the Tribune reported that longtime Utah State School Board member Leslie Castle “expressed frustration with the political rhetoric that pits states’ rights against the federal government. She… urged her colleagues to refrain from statements critical of federal overreach.
‘I am not going to be voting in favor of anything that plays to this nonsense that somehow our relationship with the federal government is crazy and something we’re trying to get out of,’ she said.” -Read the rest here.
In the Utah turnaround law, the phrase “credible track record” is used to establish the person who will “fix” Utah’s low-labeled schools. “Credible track record” is an odd choice of words because in the post-2010 altered education world of Common Core, there has been no track record required of education reformers. There were exactly zero validity studies and no empirical evidence to accompany the Common Core standards and tests. If you didn’t know that validity and piloting were missing, read what academics and scientists have been shouting from the rooftops about the nonvalid, utterly empty track record of Common Core tests and standards: Dr. Christopher Tienken‘s and Dr. Sandra Stotsky’s and Dr. Gary Thompson‘s and Dr. Yong Zhao’s writings are good places to start.
Utah’s new law on school turnaround says that the experts who will turn around low-labeled schools must be: “experts identified by the board under Section 53A-1-1206“. They must “have a credible track record of improving student academic achievement…as measured by statewide assessments;(b) have experience designing, implementing, and evaluating data-driven instructional systems… have experience coaching public school administrators and teachers on designingdata-driven school improvement plans…”
Original source documents arm honest people who want to know the truth about Common Core to take back the reins of control.
This is important because proponents are increasing false advertisements about Common Core. They’re also hiding the Common Core Inititative under different names, such as “Utah Core” or “Indiana Core“. Unfortunately, well intentioned people whom we trust to tell us the truth often simply don’t know the whole story. It is up to us to find out for ourselves.
Please go go directly to source documents to fact-check claims being made by proponents of Common Core.
(This slightly updated syllabus was shared in a previous post.It is republished today because Alisa, Renee and I are speaking in Vernal tonight and we want to point our Vernal friends to solid information. If anyone wants to come to the meeting tonight, you are welcome. There is, of course, no charge and the event begins at 7:00.)
Link to tonight’s Vernal, Utah, meeting: 204 E 100 N, Vernal, UT 84078 (435) 789-0091
A Source-Focused Analysis of the Common Core Initiative
The General Educational Provisions Act – This law prohibits the federal government from directing or supervising education: “No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system…” The Dept. of Education, by forming multipleofficial partnerships with corporate America, has gotten away with breaking this law.
U.S. Constitution – Amendment 10 – “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” The disregard by the Dept. of Education for the authority and diversity of individual states’ educational pathways must be stopped.
The No Child Left Behind Waiver– This shows the 15% cap the federal government put on top of the copyrighted, unamendable (by states) common standards. So states are allowed to add frosting and sprinkles to state standards, but they have no say in what goes into the cake itself.
The lawsuit against the Department of Education– The Electronic Privacy Information Center has sued the DOE for destroying the previously data-privacy protective federal FERPA. The lawsuit explains that parental consent is a best practice, not a mandate, prior to data sharing; it shows that terms were redefined, that personally identifiable information, including biometrics, can be shared, and that agencies have legal access to private data of students.
The copyright on Common Core held by CCSSO/NGA – The fact that there are “terms of use” and a copyright shows that we have no real control over the standards which are written behind closed doors in D.C. Notice that no one outside CCSSO/NGA may claim to have helped write the standards.
The report entitled “For Each And Every Child” from the Equity and Excellence Commission – This report was commissioned by Obama. It reveals that forced redistribution of wealth is a main reason for the national education system.
The Cooperative Agreement between the Dept. of Education and the testing consortia – Even though Utah escaped the SBAC and is not bound by the Cooperative Agreement directly, Utah’s current testing group, A.I.R., is partnered with SBAC. This document shows clearly the mandates for synchronizing tests and sharing student data to mesh testing companies with federal aims and agents. Its only claim to binding authority is money.
The speeches of Secretary Arne Duncan on education – He states that Common Standards were Obama’s idea and that the federal government is moving to play a larger role in education. Also, the speeches of President Obama on education – Obama’s top 4 education goals: control data, common standards, teachers, and to take over low-performing schools.
The speeches of the CEA of Pearson Ed, Sir Michael Barber – Barber wants every school on the globe to have the exact same academic standards and to underpin every standard with environmental propaganda. He also pushes for global data and stresses the term “sustainable reform” which he calls “irreversible reform”.
The speeches and actions of the main funder of Common Core, Bill Gates – He’s funded Common Core almost completely on his own; he’s partnered with Pearson; he says “we won’t know it works until all the tests and curriculum aligns with the standards” and he’s writing curriculum for his “uniform customer base” –all children and all schools.
The speeches of David Coleman, a noneducator, the architect of the Common Core ELA standards and now promoted to College Board President -He mocks narrative writing, he’s diminished the percentage of classic literature that’s allowable in the standards. He’s not been elected, he’s never taught school, yet he’s almost singlehandedly altered the quality and liberty of classrooms. As he’s now the College Board President, he’s aligning the SAT to his version of standards.
The Dept. of Ed report: Promoting Grit, Tenacity and Perserverance– behavioral indicators are sought by the federal government. They may include monitoring children using cameras, posture chairs, and bracelets. (see graphic, mid-report.)
Federal data collection websites such as the EdFacts Exchange, the Common Education Data Standards, the National Data Collection Model, and the Data Quality Campaign, sites because three of these four ask us to give personally identifiable information on students, from our state database. -The first link shows what we already give to the federal government; the others show what the federal government is requesting that we share, which includes intimate, personally identifiable information. See Common Core creators’ data management branch, EIMAC of CCSSO, with its stated mission to disaggregate student data. The EIMAC/CCSSO link also shows the official partnership of the federal government with corporate Common Core.
The Official Common Core Standards – English and Math standards. Here you will see Common Core calling itself a “living work” meaning that what Common Core is today, will not remain. There is no amendment process for states to have a voice in altering the commonly held standards because they’re under private copyright. See a recommended reading list in Appendix B that includes “The Bluest Eye,” a pornographic novel.
See academic testimonies of the official Common Core validation committee members who refused to sign off on the legitimacy of the standards; other professors have also testified that Common Core hurts legitimate college readiness. See in contrast the motive of Common Core promoters such as Marc Tucker of the Center for American Progress who report that “the United States will have to largely abandon the beloved emblem of American education: local control. …[N]ew authority will have to come at the expense of local control.”
Common Educational Data Standards – The same private groups (NGA/CCSSO) that created Common Core have also created Common Educational Data Standards, so that student data mining and citizen tracking is interoperable and easy. Coupled with the breakdown of family privacy law (federal FERPA, altered by the Dept. of Education) we see that children’s data lacks proper protections, and that students are being used as compulsory, unpaid research objects.
Follow the money trails – Study what advocacy and development of common standards Bill Gates has paid for; see how his unelected philanthropy affects education and its governance, and see how his partnerships with Pearson, with the United Nations and others monopolize the U.S. and global education markets, excluding voters as public-private partnerships make decisions, instead of voters or elected representatives such as school boards or legislators making decisions.
Last week bipartisan grassroots Americans saw a miracle.
That wolf in sheep’s clothing, the (supposed) shoo-in bill called federal HR5 or The Student Success Act, which was to reauthorize No Child Left Behind/ESEA, wasthrown aside by Congress instead of becoming law. Thanks to a bipartisan effort by grassroots citizens and vigilant Congressmen who studied the language inside the bill’s 600+ pages –not just buying Speaker Boehner’s gilded talking points— the dangers of HR5 surfaced into Congressional consciousness.
A whirlwind of amendment-writing began on both sides of the aisle. By the time Congress gave up on trying to pass HR5 last week, there were so many amendments from both Democratic and Republican members of Congress that everybody seemed to dislike the bill and Obama was threatening to veto.
That was a very unexpected turn of events. –But proper! Emmett McGroarty of American Principles in Action summarized the problems of NCLB and HR5: “HR5 demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of the Constitution and our constitutional structure. Although it relieves the states from some NCLB burdens, it then adds others and overall sets the stage for an expanded federal footprint in our lives.”
Additionally, a powerful open letter from a bipartisan group ofover 2,000 educational researchers (See letter here) last month informed Congress that “testing should not be driving reform.”
The 2000 educational researchers who signed last month’s letter saw as harmful the federal aim “to use students’ test scores as a lever to drive educational improvement.” They explained: “This use of testing is ill-advised because… it has demonstrably failed to achieve its intended goal and has potent negative, unintended consequences.” Under No Child Left Behind/ESEA, they said, the federal government had trusted “an unproven but ambitious belief that if we test children and hold educators responsible for improving test scores we would have almost everyone scoring as “proficient” by 2014.” The researchers said: “there is no evidence that any test score increases represent the broader learning increases… While testing advocates proclaim that testing drives student learning, they resist evidence-based explanations for why, after two decades of test-driven accountability, these reforms have yielded such unimpressive results.”
For many, the bottom line problem with both ESEA and HR5 was the ongoing, evidence-less promotion of student high-stakes testing as the solution for education problems. For others, the bottom line problem (in HR5) was language implying conditionality of parental rights, possible waiving of states’ rights, and federal/state intrusion into private schools, particularly into private schools’ free exercise of religious freedom.
With so many heavy, bipartisan issues rolled into ESEA, we can expect that the upcoming bipartisan version of the bill will be plagued with the same struggles we saw in last week’s HR5. These must be identified and fought:
#1 Clarity problems: deliberately lengthy language that scatters definitions across hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages and convoluted language that confuses most readers;
#2 A continued push for testing and data mining that pushes away from local (school or district) accountability toward centralized power; multi-state alignment (de facto national) high stakes testing and data collection that enriches corporations partnered with or funded by Bill Gates/Microsoft and Pearson.
#3 A push for centralization of power –with the elites comprised of corporate and governmental partnerships to exclude voters, teachers, parents and duly elected representatives;
#4 No privacy protections beyond the lame and wilted FERPA for our children; instead, increased data collecting powers to corporate-governmental partnerships;
#5 A continued push for more unelected boards to have increased control of greater numbers of schools via charter school expansions;
#6 A continued push for federal-corporate intrusion into private schools;
#7 A continued bartering for parental and states’ rights in trade for federal money;
#8 An assumption of federal-corporate “research” authority –devoid of parental consent and devoid of evidence-based, peer-reviewed validity;
#9 Expansion of centralized authority over specified groups, such as “migratory students” or “Alaskan Natives”; in sum:
#10 A continued disregard for Constitutional rights.
Please watch not only the ESEA/NCLB reauthorization, but also the S.227 SETRA bill. They go hand in hand.
Federal SETRA hurts student data privacy, allows emotional testing in increased student data mining, and reassigns grant-making (funding) control to REL regions, not states. Read SETRA bill text here.
It appeared to me that HR5 got away with its marketing (saying it was restoring local control) because it transmitted federally-desired, test-driven reforms and other expansions to state authority and to state enforcement, perhaps to appease local control activists. But this was just passing the abuse baton. I imagine the corporate-regional power grabbers singing the “Na-nee-na-nee-boo-boo” song: “You don’t get the steering wheel. Constitution Constasmooshen. Who’s got your taxes?”
(Important note: in the coming SETRA bill, fund-approving power is siphoned past the states to REL regional authorities, making Constitutional state-rights less and less relevant.)
These power-reassignments are not appealing to those who want true local control.
Pray that our Congressmen find time, energy and wisdom to see through it all and that they will have the courage to protect children’s rights, teacher’s rights, voters’ rights, and parent’s rights.
How will President Obama’s multiple initiatives increase federal control over American technology and data mining –and how will these initiatives affect children?
There are several new initiatives to consider.
I. NET NEUTRALITY
Yesterday the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed the Obama-approved definition of “Internet Neutrality.” Proponents made it sound as if “neutrality” meant openness and freedom for individuals, but the ruling increases federal power over the internet.
The notion that fairness and neutrality should be government-defined and government-enforced makes me roll my eyes. The term “net neutrality” sounds just like Harrison Bergeron, with the FCC playing the part of the Handicapper General to enforce equality by handicapping achievers and punishing success.
So now that the federal government has increased power to define and enforce its one definition of neutrality, how will this advance the goals of Obama’s ConnectED initiative? Will “neutrality” aim, like ConnectEd aims, to strap tax dollars and children’s destinies in education to Bill Gates’ philosophies and coffers? I ask this in light of Microsoft’s alignment with the FCC’s ruling, Microsoft’s celebrated discounting of common core-aligned ed tech products and Microsoft’s promotion of ConnectED. Add to that question this fact: Microsoft’s owner, Gates, funded the Role of Federal Policy report, which found (surprise, surprise) that the power of federal groups, to “research” children/education without restraint, should be increased using ESRA reauthorization. More on that below.
How does all of this work with the SETRA bill’s student data collection goals?
II. CONNECT-ED
First, a quick ConnectEd review: Obama is bringing the now-neutralized internet to all schools while behaving very non-neutrally himself: he’s officially favoring and partnering with Microsoft/Bill Gates/Common Core so the uniform customer base (children) will only receive the One Correctly Aligned Education Product (and likely will thank Gates for what they see as kindness, deep discounts). Microsoft’s website explains: “Partnering with the White House’s ConnectED Initiative, we’re helping provide technology for education, at a fraction of the cost.” Pearson, Inc. is doing the same thing here and here and here to lay those near-irreversible foundations for the future.
What Microsoft, Pearson and ConnectEd are doing could be compared to offering free or discounted train tracks to your city. They’re fancy tracks, but customized to fit one sort of train only. By accepting the offer, you are automatically limited to using only the kinds of trains made to run on your new tracks.
States and schools ought to be saying “no, thanks” to Gates and Pearson if we want to have the freedom to later use education and ed technology that might be Common Core-free.
(As an important aside: one of the stated aims of Obama’s ConnectEd is to catch up to South Korea where “all schools are connected to the internet… all teachers are trained in digital learning, and printed textbooks will be phased out by 2016.” I’ll never join the chorus of “Let die traditional, print books”. But ConnectED has. )
The Internet has been, until now, unregulated by the federal government. It’s been free. The controllistas think of free as “unfair,” however.
“The main excuse for implementing the new invasions is the statists’ favorite complaint: Internet service providers ‘discriminate’ …[F]acilitators seeking to benefit from less competition, such as Facebook, Google, and Netflix, ought to be beige in color, have identical horsepower, the same number of doors, and get the same gas mileage no matter how far or fast they may be driven” (from Bob Adelman, New American Magazine).
In the FCC’s ruling, Bob Adelmann pointed out, there’s been dramatic change without transparent vetting. Adelmann wrote, three days ago: “On Thursday consumers will finally be able to see and read the FCC’s (Federal Communications Commission) planned new rules to regulate the Internet. Deliberately hidden from public view, the 332-page document … [was] demanded by President Obama… he told FCC … to adopt the “strongest possible rules” in regulating the Internet.”
WHY?
Why was Obama bent on getting the “strongest possible rules” to control the Internet– and why did he confuse people by calling this move one toward openness and freedom? I don’t know why.
The “why” is not so important.
What matters most now is that Americans recognize that he is, in fact, aiming for ever increasing control at the expense of our freedoms, and that he’s partnered with private corporations who share his aims. History teaches that many people seek to control other people; whether for kindly intentioned or malicious intentioned reasons, they always have and always will. That’s why our Constitution is so sacred. It protects individuals from others’ controlling tendencies by decentralizing power.
Government-imposed equality, or “neutrality,” is a theme Obama has promoted in many ways prior to yesterday’s “Net Neutrality” punch.
Match that to the speeches of Bill Gates about building the uniform customer base of students using Common Core.
In each of the Obama-promoted, standardizing measures, no one may soar. No one is allowed to meander into creative or superior or innovative paths because of that devoted mindset: no failure– not allowing anyone freedom, if that includes the freedom for some to fail. This commonizing of the masses under the banner of “fair and equal” once upon a time used to be called communism, but that’s not a politically correct term anymore. You can’t even call it socialism. Instead, the p.c. terms are “social justice” or “playing fair.” I call it theft. Legalized plunder.
And it’s never actually fair: There is nothing fair about elites centralizing power to take freedom from individuals. Also, for those who decide that they are above the law there are exceptions; the ruling elite still get to choose.
When I say, “elites centralize power to take freedom from individuals,” I don’t mean metaphorically or theoretically. It’s real. It’s no theory. The micromanagement of schools, children, teachers to minimize parental “interference” and parental “opportunity” is a large and extremely well oiled machine.
On its federal hand, there’s the Obama Administration’s “National Education Technology Plan“. On its private, corporate hand, there’s the Bill-Gates-led “Evolving Role of Federal Policy in Education Research,” explained out a report written by Aspen Institute and funded by the Gates Foundation. It says, “there is a broad consensus that federal investment in education research, development, and dissemination is vital” and “the pending reauthorization of ESRA creates new opportunities to better harness the tremendous research capacity we have in America to turn broad consensus into broad benefit,” and even: “the Obama Administration has proposed to create a new unit of ED, called ARPA-ED, that would be analogous to the high-profile Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the Department of Defense. ”
We need to study the “pending reauthorization of ESRA” that hopes to “harness” students’ data. The SETRA bill now on-deck, bill S227, is the data collection bill that American Principles Project warned America about in a press release. SETRA is a direct answer to what the both the Evolving Role of Federal Policy in Education Research and the National Education Technology Plan had requested: more power to the federal government over student data.
The history of educational data collection by federal/private forces is very boring. I only bring this up because we need to see them for what they are: public-private-partnerships, with unclear dividing lines between federal and private controls. That means that we can’t easily un-elect them or influence the power that they wield. It’s data collection without representation. That’s not only unconstitutional; it’s also very creepy.
The boring but important history of these public-private-partnerships is detailed in the Evolving Role of Federal Policy in Education Research report, as well as on websites from the REL/WestED groups. WestED, a now-nonprofit, explains: “The roots of WestEd go back to 1966, when Congress funded regional laboratories across the country to find practical ways to improve the education of our nation’s children. Charged with “bridging the gap between research and practice,” a number of the original Regional Educational Laboratories grew beyond their initial charge and developed into successful organizations. Two in particular—the Southwest Regional Educational Laboratory (SWRL) and the Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development (FWL)—evolved beyond their laboratory roots, eventually merging in 1995 to form WestEd.”
Why it matters? Ask yourself this: How does a parent protect his/her child from data leaks, privacy breaches and unwanted government intrusion or “guidance” when the data collection machines are not run by elected representatives, and they are paid to run well by the unstoppable force of taxes?
How does a parent protect his/her child when federal FERPA (Family Ed Rights and Privacy Act) has been altered so that it’s no longer protective of parental rights and student privacy?
How does a parent protect his/her child when the new SETRA bill allows power to go to regional commissioners, rather than residing in local schools, districts, or even states? Regions take precedence over states under SETRA.
But the public does not know this because proponents of SETRA reveal what they want to reveal in their “pro-SETRA” talking points.
Proponents fail to reveal the details of the bill that alarm opponents of SETRA. I’ll share a few.
Psychological Profiling
For example, page 28, section 132 reveals that data to be collected on students may: “include research on social and emotional learning“. Social and emotional learning means psychological testing! This is promoting the same creepy biometric data mining methods that the Dept. of Education was pushing two years ago in its “Promoting Grit, Tenacity and Perserverance” report of 2013 (see report pdf page 44).
This SETRA bill’s language empowers the government to create a profile on your child, psychologically (emotional learning) and politically (social learning).
I do not support allowing the government to keep psychological/political dossiers on children.
Reliance on a wet-noodle FERPA for privacy protection
Likewise, in Utah, there’s no protection for student data. The state longitudinal database system (SLDS) gathers data about each child from the moment he/she registers for kindergarten or preschool without parental consent.
Utah’s legislature and school board continues to allow the SLDS to run wild, unaccountable to parents or to anyone. Students’ data in Utah is unprotected by law. If the board or an administrator tells you differently, ask them to show you the law that provides protection in Utah. Then send it to me.
In fact, the Utah Data Alliance promotes the sharing of data between agencies such as schools, higher ed, workforce services, and other agencies. If the board or an administrator tells you differently, ask them to show you the law that provides protection in Utah. Then please send it to me.
Parental Rights Dismissed
Soon, if federal SETRA passes, student data will be even more unprotected. Zero parental rights over student academic data (thanks to shredded federal FERPA protections and wrongheaded Utah policies) will be joined by zero parental rights over student psychological data (thanks to power-hungry SETRA).
In section 208 (see page 107) the SETRA bill reauthorizes the federal government “to align statewide, longitudinal data systems [SLDS] from early education through postsecondary education (including pre-service preparation programs), and the workforce, consistent with privacy protections under section 183;’’
“Privacy protections under section 183,” as we discussed above, equals no privacy at all. Why? There used to be confidentiality standards, such as those seen in the 2002 data privacy code. But all of that changed. Now, confidentiality and parental consent have been reduced to “best practice” status, and parental consent prior to sharing data is not required by federal FERPA.
REGIONAL EDUCATION LABS MAY SUPERCEDE STATE AGENCIES IN POWER
Under SETRA section 174, “REGIONAL EDUCATIONAL LABORATORIES FOR RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT, DISSEMINATION, AND EVALUATION” the power of the regional educational laboratories is expanded. This whole section is worth reading, but it’s hard to read because of the many interruptions where the bill alters definitions and phrases from the original ESRA bill. Try it.
I have to say that in this section, the repeated use of the term “laboratories,” in the context of “regional educational laboratories” gives me the creeps. Am I the only one? Our children as guinea pigs in laboratories of educational and now psychological experimentation –organized by region and not by state? No, thank you.
When Regions Rule, States Lose Constitutional Strength
Another important thought: how can states’ rights over education ever be defended and protected when education is being restructured to function in regional, not by states, divisions? Is this why the regional laboratories of educational research are growing to become more powerful than state boards?)
On page 57 of the pdf the R.E.L. Commissioner is given a lot of power. “Each eligible applicant desiring a contract grant, contract, or cooperative agreement under this section shall submit an application at such time, in such manner, and containing such information as the Evaluation and Regional Assistance Commissioner may reasonably require.” The Commissioner can deny funds, or give funds, to people who “shall seek input from State educational agencies and local educational agencies in the region that the award will serve”. Hmm. I see. People may seek input from state agencies, but the regional laboratory commissioner is The Man.
The Regions aim for that power.
I’m not finished with my SETRA analysis. I’m just sick of it right now.
The issue is one of power. Should the Governor hold the power over who gets to sit on the state school board, or should Utah’s voters get to decide? This is such a foundational measure. If the people themselves cannot possibly get decision makers elected who think differently from the powerful elites who marry corporate and federal aims and remove local control, then we have no hope of ever getting free of things like Common Core or the forced use on children of the State Longitudinal Database System.
There are competing bills right now that push for more or less voter control of decision making; either the Governor gets even more power than he already has, in appointing the board; or else, voters get increased power because voting will be totally transparent, partisan, and run just like the elections for other elected representatives in our state.
Please sign the petition now. The opposition is circulating a petition to bring to the Capitol tomorrow as well.
It is so a no-brainer to those of us who believe in representative government and the voice of the people. But it’s not a sure thing at all.
Although it seems almost unthinkable that there are so many people in our supposedly conservative state who want the Governor to be able to appoint people rather than to have open, transparent, partisan elections, that is what is happening.
Even if you happen to like the current governor’s line of thinking, what happens years from now when you don’t?
Decision making power over our schools and our children’s lives should not be concentrated in one man. It’s unAmerican, dangerous, and stupid to allow the centralization of power. We have a greater likelihood of not corrupting our state when we allow the people to choose, and to debate, and to vote transparently.
For those who didn’t know– our current process for getting new state school board members is not okay. It is centralized and corrupt, already. But the opposition wants to make it more easily controlled by the elites.
This is how it currently works: a governor-appointed committee interviews candidates for state school board, giving them, among other things, a questionnaire that is biased to the governor’s aims. (It asks, among other things, if the candidate supports the Utah Core/Common Core). So people who think independently will never even make it to the interview. Then the committee interviews a narrowed group, further narrows it to three people; the governor chooses two of them, and passes those two names on to voters. Utah voters never get any transparency, and only get choice a or b. (This reminds me of the old Ford ads: You can have any color, as long as it’s black.)
We, the undersigned, support SB 104, Education Elections and Reporting Amendments, which uses partisan elections to vet candidates and allow locally elected delegates to narrow the voting field of candidates who appear on the ballot. Partisan elections are used with great success in all other major elections in Utah and it makes perfect sense to allow the same process to function in large scale elections for school board members. The Salt Lake Tribune editorial of 10-30-2014 stated that there is no reason to come up with a new method of electing school board members. They stated:
“Actually, they don’t need to invent a thing. All they have to do use the same system we use to choose other state office holders. The process that is good enough to elect governors, attorneys general and members of the Legislature… People who want to be on the state school board should go through the same process as people who want to serve in the Legislature… It’s good enough for legislators. It should be good enough for school board members.”
The current system is broken. It guarantees that a single political party comprised of the UEA, USBA, and other educator organizations, dominate the election of the people on school boards.
Other facts
Locally elected delegates vet candidates most effectively
Increased transparency by highly effective caucus delegates
Lower cost to run for office
More people engaged in the issues important to education
Board members still represent all the people, just like you represent all your constituents
Partisan elections are constitutional
Party affiliation just lets you know where their core principles stand
State GOP Resolution strongly requested the legislature pass partisan elections
Utah County GOP Resolution strongly requested the legislature pass partisan elections
Not passing SB 104 would be hypocritical since it is the same system used to elect you
I further request that no bill be passed that involves empowering the governor to appoint board members. The 15 state school board members have control of half of the state’s budget. Empowering them to be appointed by the governor instead of through the caucus system that has produced the “best managed state” in the union would be folly and give too much power to one individual.
Using stealth rather than SAGE tests, states can cater to federal and corporate funders seeking metadata on children while appeasing parental and teachers’ uproar against the time wasting and anxiety of high stakes testing. Stealth (hidden) assessments perma-test, but imperceptibly, with assignments and activities recording data beyond the control of teachers and without supervision by parents.
Is this what Utah really wants?
Utah mom Jakell Sullivan’s deep, documented research reveals why Utah’s SAGE/Common Core test (as well as other states’ tests) are on their way out. Parents who value their rights will want to read and share this article.
Thank you, Jakell.
SAGE Tests Are a Red Herring
by Jakell Sullivan
Utah’s Common Core Tests Entering the Next Federal Phase: Stealth, Embedded Assessment
What every parent should know RIGHT NOW about why we should Opt-Out of Common Core Tests AND aligned-online learning programs
While Opt-Out of Common Core Testing campaigns are underway all around the country (and ought to be broadly supported by parents in a free society), Common Core’s testing “pilot” is coming to a close. The Federal objective was to use the pilot period of their Race to the Top Assessments Program to gather data on children, schools and districts and to train states on new technology systems—and set them up (and, yes, it was a real set-up) for what’s to come.
Now, Utah is ready to embrace the Next Generation of Assessments. Utah’s legislature is set to pass a bill this session to create a task force to get Utah out of SAGE testing, and a resolution to move us toward the fruition of the federal end-game.
What’s the federal end-game? It’s to get all states—and most importantly, all children in PK-12—using stealth, embedded assessments. These assessments are seamlessly woven into the fabric of the learning environment and are invisible to the user. Gaming companies have been using stealth assessment for quite some time, but they are relatively new to the PK-12 arena, and are now being federally funded.
Parents might ask, “What’s wrong with getting rid of high-stakes tests and using stealth embedded assessments that won’t stress my children out?”
The problem is that the federal government has colluded with global organizations who now have the power to, not only track untold amounts of data (personal information) on your children, but to use that data to control what and how your children learn through “personalized” learning platforms. And, the Feds want to assess much more than “did Johnny know how to add 2+2.” They want to measure what they call 21st Century competencies created by major multinational information technology corporations. These competencies include things like: environmental literacy (ie; does your child have the skills to understand that humans are causing climate change and that we need to solve this “real world” problem through population control?) and global citizenship (ie; does your child have the skills necessary to embrace global citizenship?). If you think this is a stretch, you haven’t gone to the Gates Foundation website lately, or heard him saying this to Germany’s largest newspaper last month, “We need a world government.”
So, what is the Federal Government doing with Bill Gates?
On May 12, 2012, IMS Global Learning Consortium and the SIF Association (the two leading organizations that create industry standards for technology) answered the U.S. Department of Education’s call to support the federal Race to the Top Assessment Program. The two organizations issued a Press Release which announced that they had created the “First Version of the Assessment Interoperabiity Framework” to expand U.S. collaboration in interoperable assessments—globally.
IMS Global announced, “IMS is very pleased that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is supporting acceleration of the open architecture for educational innovation that over 270 IMS member organizations around the world have made viable,” said Dr. Rob Abel, Chief Executive of IMS Global. “Achieving 1-click, data-rich connectivity of educational tools, content and apps with institutional systems is a game-changer that is now closer to reality via this grant and the anticipated ongoing collaboration with the [Gates] Foundation.”
When IMS Global says they are working with Gates to achieve “1-click, data-rich connectivity”, it means that they are about to use your child’s student ID like a social security number on steroids. As one friend who’s studied the data-gathering propensities of the federal government put it, “Imagine if anytime you used the internet you could be tracked by a number that not only was linked to your personal identity, but 100s of data points about you. And that most of that information was available to any website that agreed to use the same development standards.”
As mentioned above, 270 IMS member organizations around the world have already agreed to use the federal industry standards, and that number is quickly growing. What tech group, or nation, wants to be left out of the “new economy” being created by Bill Gates?
And, Utah wanted in on the action so much that they were part of the industry standard pilot! IMS Global announced, “To develop an industry standard for accessibility and interoperability of test items, [the] U.S. Department of Education helped fund the “Accessible Portable Item Profile” project. The Minnesota Department of Education led the effort, which included the states: New Hampshire, Vermont, Utah, Montana, Florida, South Carolina, and Maryland as participants and Michigan, Massachusetts, and North Carolina as observers.” APIP “allows for the transfer of assessment content between vendors.”
Question: Do parents have the fundamental right to know where their children’s curriculum and test questions are coming from? Do parents have the fundamental right to know that Utah is ready to help the federal government track our children into workforce tracks like socialized countries? Think the idea of workforce tracks being used in America is ludicrous?…see the Federal/Gates Learning Registries information below in the “more” section.
In May 2012, IMS Global and the SIF Association said that, as they had helped the federally funded SBAC and PARCC fulfill their federal interoperability requirements, they were helping to move states away from outmoded assessments and stood ready to “personalize instruction and leverage centralized professional development resources.”
From information I obtained, the Utah State Office of Education and other stakeholders were invited on a conference call with the Reform Support Network (a U.S. Department of Education network created to “help” states support all the reforms associated with Common Core standards) on Feb. 3, 2015 to aid Utah in the transition to stealth assessment. On the call, they were going to: “identify and eliminate assessments that are redundant or that do not contribute to teaching and learning” and to “identify the quality of assessments and move toward a better balance of question types.”
So, just three years after IMS and SIF’s said they were centralizing things, we see that our State Office of Education is coordinating with the Feds in the process of centralization. Learn more about the federal Assessment Interoperability Framework using Common Education Data Standards here.
What this means is that third parties, along with the federal government, can now control everything happening at the local school level as it pertains to learning—children’s learning and teachers’ learning. And, use that control to enforce almost any other federal reform or learning “intervention” required for children to be college and career ready.
Question: “Why do school districts, schools, teachers and parents, in a free society, willingly allow third parties to collect information about them and then tell them how to behave in order to meet federal mandates?” Doesn’t it appear that we are selling our children into a life of servitude and bondage all because we are unwilling to be self-reliant?
There is MUCH MORE to this article. For those that want to read it, see below. But, for now, suffice it to say, that the Feds have us right where they want us.
Utah parents DO NOT WANT SAGE, and we DO NOT WANT big-data-gathering-tech-companies, being funded by Bill Gates and the Feds, to replace (or morph) SAGE with real-time, adaptable assessments in learning technology. In order to preserve parental rights, parents should demand that our children’s tests be designed and controlled at the school and district level, so that tests are fully transparent to parents. After all, aren’t WE the consumers of educational services in this country? Aren’t we the sole stewards of our children? And, are we accountable to Government or to God in fulfillment of that stewardship?
STOP Utah’s legislature from creating a Task Force to further grow K-12 stealth assessments. (Contact your legislators and Task Force Sponsor Senator Howard Stephenson in DROVES and tell them “WE DO NOT WANT THIS FEDERALLY-MOTIVATED TASK FORCE IN UTAH!”
STOP Utah’s legislature from supporting a resolution to use K-12 stealth assessments. (Contact Utah’s House members and Resolution Sponsor Rep. Marie Poulson in DROVES and tell them “WE DO NOT WANT stealth assessments in Utah’s K-12 ed system without parental disclosure and opt-in requirements!”
HERE’S “MORE” INFORMATION AND RESOURCES, INCLUDING IMS GLOBAL GRAPHICS, FOR THOSE THAT WANT IT:
Stealth learning platforms and assessments (platforms and assessments that operate in real-time within the technology without a child knowing it) foster an education system where parents will have very little control over what our children learn and what they are tested on. Meta-data can be tracked through every key stroke, as well as facial expressions and behaviors through computer cameras, etc. And, the data collected from our children’s learning platforms will be used to control what and how their teachers teach, as well as what federal mandates will be placed on teachers and schools in order to make individual children “college and career ready.” (I used the word “make” because that’s exactly what the Feds are trying to do….force outcomes). The federal mandates will require “Response to Intervention” as well as redistribution of taxes and resources to aid centralization of our education system—and to profit the crony capitalists in bed with big government. (American Institutes for Research (AIR) controls Utah’s SAGE tests and is also in charge of the US Department of Education’s “Response to Intervention” program. So, whether SAGE exists or not, the data AIR collects through learning and assessment platforms will control what schools and teachers have to do to comply with federal mandates.
Here’s some background:
The US Department of Education, with funding funneled through the Education Testing Service, created the Gordon Commission to develop policy guidelines to help state legislatures change their education technology policies to align with Common Core Standards Metadata Requirements’—and to push states toward using stealth assessments.
(see Graphic #1 below)
Two key members of the Gordon Commission are President Obama’s former education policy advisor Linda Darling-Hammond, who was originally responsible for creating content specs for Common Core tests, and former governor Bob Wise. Bob Wise helped found Digital Learning Now with former Governor, and GOP Presidential candidate Jeb Bush. Digital Learning Now is profiting off of federal and state tech reform policies and Utah’s legislature is leading the charge in implementing all 10 of their digital learning policies.
The Gordon Commission published a report that said, “The Common Core Standards, and the rethinking of assessments that they are fostering, provide an opportunity to challenge [the] deeply held belief in local control.” Translation: “Parental rights mean nothing to us. We want to control what your children learn through stealth assessment and we are going to use your tax dollars to do it. Local boards will operate as subsidiaries of the Federal administration and eventually be regionalized so that we can further erode your local tax systems.”
The federal government funded the ConnectEd Initiative to replace textbooks within 5 years and simultaneously, the US Department of Education joined forces with IMS Global Learning Consortium and Bill Gates to fund open-coding specs for technology and learning companies. They used the Race to the Top Assessments program to get most tech and software companies to adopt open-free license coding specs that are interoperable across platforms—some nations have already adopted the specs.
IMS Global’s goal is to “Advance Learning Impact by Enabling the Open Foundation for Seamless, Agile and Information-Rich Educational Technology Integration.” Pearson wrote a Request for Information Response for the US Department of Education regarding which assessment programs the Feds should fund via Race to the Top Assessments (RTTA) to support this “seamless integration.” Their report states, “The RTTA program and state consortia adopting the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have identified interoperability as essential in helping to maintain the feasibility and affordability of next-generation assessments.” It should be noted that Pearson plans to take over the United Nation’s PISA tests (tests that compare nations to each other) in 2018.
It should also be noted that the groups over Utah’s testing—American Institutes for Research and Bill Gates’ MeasuredProgress—have both adopted IMS Global’s interoperability specs, see member affiliate list here. (The USOE signed a contract with Bill Gates’ MeasuredProgress in 2009.)
IMS Global talks about a single student login like this:
“Achieving single sign-on and an overall seamless experience for students and teachers is a key foundational step for interoperable assessments across formative and summative environments….The open IMS platform of standards features the Learning Information Services (LIS) standard and Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard, both of which work in tandem with these federated identity solutions to enable single sign-on and reporting relative to specific individuals as required LIS and LTI focus on the data and service exchanges among cooperating learning related systems, such as assessment systems, learning management platforms, student systems, and learning tools.”
Page 37 of IMS Global’s report to the U.S. Department of Education entitled, “IMS Response to Assessment Standards RFI”, shows that they need Common Core standards to facilitate meta-data collection.
IMS Global is piloting an educational GPS system that operates just like the GPS on our phones and in our cars. It’s called EPS (yes, it’s meant to sound like GPS), or Educational Positioning System. IMS Global describes it like this, “As with a GPS system, there must be a way to compare the current position (student progress) with a starting point (past academic accomplishments) and destination (future educational goal).”
They published an online call to tech companies and encouraged them to become part of regional data clusters to begin pooling the data they collect so that it can be further centralized. In the call, they explain that “this EPS concept was put forth by StudentAlignment.com. President Obama released an Executive Letter from the Whitehouse which is posted on StudentAlignment or “EPS” Website. The President’s letter is entitled, “Unlocking the Power of Education Data For All Americans” and can be found here. Here is a student review of the EPS System and how it can create a student’s Learning Registry. President Obama’s letter highlights progress being made with the Learning Registry.
What’s the Learning Registry?
IMS Global’s website states, “the IMS Instructional Innovation through Interoperability Leadership Council (I3LC) of school districts and states has recently published a position paper that attempts to put some of the myriad projects and investments made in the last few years in the U.S. by the Gates Foundation into perspective. These initiatives include the Learning Registry (initially funded by the U.S. government, later by Gates), LRMI (Learning Resource Metadata Initiative) and SLC (Shared Learning Collaborative), now InBloom. These projects all share the notion that learning objects or progress can be referenced back to a common set of educational standards, and are generally complimentary, and perhaps even dependent upon success of the Common Core.” [note to reader: Although inBloom is defunct, IMS Global touts what they’ve done right and what inBloom did wrong].
So, lucky Utah, our Governor still thinks Common Core Standards have nothing to do with federal reforms, meanwhile, President Obama and internationalists are clearly using them to create Learning Registries on our children so that they will know what our children are learning and thinking at every step of the way through their education and beyond. Sounds exactly like the system needed to get our children into socialist-style workforce tracks. Ask yourselves again, “Why do Bill Gates’ kids attend a private school that does not use Common Core standards or aligned-assessments?” It seems obvious that we are creating a class system: some families will be workers and their tax dollars will be used to fund the companies of the elites who receive non-standardized educations.
Here’s a graphic from IMS Global about the US government/Gates Learning Registries. LOOK AT ALL THE DATA POINTS THAT CAN BE TIED TOGETHER FROM BIRTH TO WORKFORCE. It creates quite a profile on children and their families.
As mentioned above, Utah is an IMS Global APIP (e-assessment interoperability standard) Leader state:
“APIP: States & Suppliers Collaborating to Revolutionize Assessment”
“APIP has been under evaluation by both SBAC and PARCC since December 2010. The recent SBAC architectural analysis has indicated a key role for APIP. PARCC is currently performing its architectural analysis. The U.S. Department of Education performed an extensive analysis of interoperability standards for assessment in early 2011 that highlighted APIP as a good fit for the needs of RTTA.”
“Q. What efforts have been under taken to build accessibility standards for assessment content? Recent technological advances and the growing importance of—and unique demands inherent in— assessment drove efforts to increase the accessibility of test content for all students, illustrated for example by the requirements for the U.S. Federal Department of Education’s (USED) Race to the Top Assessment Program. To develop an industry standard for accessibility and interoperability of test items, USED funded the Accessible Portable Item Protocol (APIP) project. The Minnesota Department of Education led the effort, which included the states: New Hampshire, Vermont, Utah, Montana, Florida, South Carolina, and Maryland as participants and Michigan, Massachusetts, and North Carolina as observers. National interoperability and accessibility experts provided technical support. In December 2010 the team released the first version of the APIP standard, intended to make assessment content portable between systems and accessible to a wide range of students.”
Page 11 and 12 of IMS Global’s Report to the US Department of Education reads:
“The conformance matrix shown at the above URL is also significant because it relates to the critical issue of supporting assessment interoperability throughout an “integrated system of instruction and assessment” which is required to support the balanced assessment requirements of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and achieve the potential of Race to the Top Assessments. In order to achieve use of interoperable assessments throughout formative, summative, and intervention strategies, interoperability must go beyond item and test interoperability. Diverse digital learning content and applications must provide interoperable results reporting that enables a diagnostic student record created from data that comes from a wide range of formative and summative tools. And, interventions must adapt based on the same interoperable data.
The range of interoperability requirements to support the Common Core and the Race to the Top Assessments projects are depicted in the following series of three figures.”
Here are the graphics from Page 11 and 12. It’s clear that there are a myriad of ways that embedded assessments can collect data on our children.
Conclusion:
Everything at the local school level will be controlled by third parties and international organizations using stealth assessments to centralize and synthesize data collection (I’ll leave the reader to surmise who).
These global organizations will:
Track your children’s metadata through learning and assessment programs
Build data profiles on your children from preK-career (and into the workforce)
Send real-time feedback to teachers to control what learning “interventions” your child will undergo (making sure those interventions will pad the pockets of those crony companies in bed with the federal government)
Make it impossible for parents or local schools to understand who’s controlling the data that parents, teachers and local schools must comply with, and what kind of data is being collected
Potentially, and most-likely, push our children towards a globalist mindset where families, parents and individual rights are undermined so that children will support collectivist strategies for solving “real world” problems, ie; global government
IMS Global Announces Inspiring Action to Transform Education:
“Digital Assessment Transformation: Get the latest on the rapid transition to digital assessment for both summative and formative purposes and theintegration of assessment systems and data with learning platforms. ”
Technical working group members of the “Learning Resource Metadata Initiative” (LRMI) include Microsoft, Gates Foundation, IMS Global, and of course, Creative Commons.
2015 Leadership Opportunities in IMS Global Learning Consortium:
Here are a few quotes:
” 1-click integration of educational apps. ”
“…syncing student information between SIS systems and learning systems,”
“…better support for assistive technology and serving as an actual rendering format (versus just an interoperability format – which is what QTI is) for the range of devices supported via the web. They are calling this aQTI. Some long time contributors, such as Educational Testing Service, along with some newer IMS Global member organizations, like Dutch Exam Board, Cito, TAO, NWEA and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium are leading the way on all of this.” (So, Stealth assessment was the plan all along)
“…get to the next generation educational content interoperability. In less than one year we went from an exploratory meeting (hosted by Pearson) to an impleme
in bed with the federal government)
Make it impossible for parents or local schools to understand who’s controlling the data that parents, teachers and local schools must comply with, and what kind of data is being collected
Potentially, and most-likely, push our children towards a globalist mindset where families, parents and individual rights are undermined so that children will support collectivist strategies for solving “real world” problems, ie; global government
IMS Global Announces Inspiring Action to Transform Education:
“Digital Assessment Transformation: Get the latest on the rapid transition to digital assessment for both summative and formative purposes and theintegration of assessment systems and data with learning platforms. ”
Technical working group members of the “Learning Resource Metadata Initiative” (LRMI) include Microsoft, Gates Foundation, IMS Global, and of course, Creative Commons.
2015 Leadership Opportunities in IMS Global Learning Consortium:
Here are a few quotes:
” 1-click integration of educational apps. ”
“…syncing student information between SIS systems and learning systems,”
“…better support for assistive technology and serving as an actual rendering format (versus just an interoperability format – which is what QTI is) for the range of devices supported via the web. They are calling this aQTI. Some long time contributors, such as Educational Testing Service, along with some newer IMS Global member organizations, like Dutch Exam Board, Cito, TAO, NWEA and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium are leading the way on all of this.” (So, Stealth assessment was the plan all along)
“…get to the next generation educational content interoperability. In less than one year we went from an exploratory meeting (hosted by Pearson) to an implementable draft specification”
“…defining and authorizing a more robust set of outcomes or achievements beyond grades”
Please contact Utah’s legislators to support the bill that would set aside $30M of Utah’s taxes to allow Utah to say “no” to federal mandates with federal money attached.
We have to have money to run our schools. But federal money is weighed down with federal mandates that hurt our teachers, students, and parental rights. We need Utah’s own money to reclaim Utah’s freedom over education.
To make this simple: Think of Utah as a prisoner in a tall tower without a ladder. The act of setting aside $30M is like the prisoner saving pieces of string to build the rope ladder that can make the escape. The money is the escape ladder.
Last Friday, my children and I were on an educational field trip to see Governor Herbert address the state school board in Salt Lake City. We were learning how to use civic rights to free speech and expression. I had hoped to influence the establishment to not renew the federal waiver (NCLB/ESEA) and hoped to influence them to consider withdrawing from Common Core and all its data-and-teacher-control-tentacles. We also wanted to spread the good news: that Mia Love’s H.R. 524, if it passed, might help enforce states’ constitutional rights to control education locally.
There we stood holding signs outside the door of the state school board meeting, my children and I: “Vote No on NCLB Waiver” and “We Support Mia Love’s H.R. 524“ (the anti-common core bill).
We couldn’t go inside the meeting because 1) one of my children is very young and noisy, and 2) there was no room.
We had even been discouraged by USOE officials and by the governor’s bodyguard (!) from standing in that hall outside the board meeting; they said the handful of us posed a fire hazard.
Yet we were standing there when Governor Herbert made his exit alongside Tami Pyfer. The Governor read our signs and he said, “I support Mia Love’s H.R. 524.”
I immediately felt the same sick way I’d felt when President Obama came out with his student data review saying he was concerned about privacy, after his administration had done everything in its power to destroy student privacy: from decreasing privacy rights in federal FERPA, to paying each state to build matching, interoperable SLDS databases, to hosting “Datapalooza” and pushing inter-agency “data-mashing.”
Obama (and Herbert) get away with blatant hypocrisy because most of us are, sadly, low-information voters. People don’t know. And they don’t know who to trust.
I prefer it when everyone gives each other plates of warm cookies instead of headaches. I don’t like thinking of –or labeling– my country’s president or my state’s governor as hypocrites.
The governor has only asked Utah to comment about the standards, not the governance of them, and he never asked for comments about the data mining nor testing nor lack of parental and teacher freedom. Although months agoGovernor Herbert said, “we will not cede that responsibility [of local education] to anyone else,” we know that Utah had already given that responsibility away years ago (control of tests, data sharing and of standards-amending). That power left when Utah adopted standards from private groups NGA/CCSSO who created and copyrighted Common Core, groups in which Governor Herbert holds top leadership positions. Governor Herbert’s words about standing up to federal encroachment are either feigned or very, very fractional.
We all heard the Governor quoting the Old Testament prophet Isaiah in his speech to the board that day, “Come now, and let us reason together.” (Isaiah 1:18) But there is no “reasoning together” happening! Where is the real discussion, the real debate? I see a top-down dispensing of “politically correct” marketing lines about Common Core, a one-sided “conversation”. Under the public radar– in emails and blogs and social media, discussion percolates, sans Governor.
We don’t see our Governor (nor Common Core financier Bill Gates nor Common Core architect David Coleman nor Common Core test grant-giver Arne Duncan) ever participating in debates on this subject. These top promoters/creators of Common Core are actively hiding, as is clear from Kathleen Jasper’s Conversation ED and countless others. They don’t want to thoroughly, honestly, honorably reason. They don’t have a leg to stand on. Common Core, when you scratch beneath the surface, is utterly indefensible and unconstitutional.
The Utah public is only allowed ten minutes (divided by five citizens, with two minutes each) per month at state school board meetings. Per month! Some reasoning together! Meanwhile, the state school board is appointed via a very biased, committee-to-the-governor selection process. And yet taxpayers fund this charade, these one sided flyers, mailers and the USOE website itself, all debate-free, marketing the Common Core product without intellectual discussion of any kind.
It’s maddening to those of us who are paying close attention.
Know these facts (and fact check me, so you really actually know it for yourself.)
3. Speaking about standards-tweaking is a charade.
In Friday’s meeting, no mention was made of the fact that if Utah adds the permitted 15%, the addition will never be seen on the nationally aligned test questions. So what’s motivating the teachers to teach the addition? And it won’t be in the shared textbooks anyway.
In Friday’s meeting, no mention was made of any rebuttals to the Attorney General’s blanket statement (that Common Core in no way harms Utah autonomy over education). It was just: “Tell us which particular standard did Utahns find troubling?”
The narrow, controlled “conversation” about Common Core in our state is light years away from the spirit of the scripture that the governor quoted, “Come and let us reason together.”
I was invited to speak on the Rod Arquette show today about the results of a poll published by Utah Policy. I’ve decided to write here what I won’t have time to fully say there.
The poll’s questions narrowed the larger Common Core Agenda to a tiny fraction (just the academic standards, string free) so that it reaped the kinds of positive responses that it sought.
For example, it said: “Utah is currently participating in a coordinated effort with other states to set similar education standards in math and language. These standards outline what a student should know and be able to do at the end of each grade in K through 12 education.” This half-truth left out volumes that would have altered the poll-taker’s responses if the poll taker would have been more fully informed.
Focusing on the actual standards themselves is as foolish as focusing on rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Good or bad, the standards, like deck chairs, will soon be in an uncontrollable, different place.
If Utah Policy would have been fully honest, disclosing the fact that the standards are not coordinated by Utah and other states but by private, unelected organizations in D.C. (NGA and CCSSO) which have copyrighted the standards, answers would have been different.
If Utah Policy would have been fully honest, disclosing the fact that the standards-creators, (NGA/CCSSO) are official partners with the federal government in creating Common Educational Data Standards (CEDS) that are aligned to Common Core Academic Standards, so that CEDS can be used to track students in state (SLDS), federal (EdFacts) and corporate data banks, thanks to the recent federal alteration of FERPA, answers would have been different.
If Utah Policy would have been fully honest, disclosing the fact that the Utah Chamber of Commerce and the Governor’s Prosperity 2020 Initiative is promoting Common Core for financial gain and that special interests make millions from Utah’s education tax dollars, due to schools now being essentially forced to purchase the standardized books, test infrastructures, and technologies, answers would have been different.
If Utah Policy would have been fully honest, disclosing the fact that Common Core standards lack empirical evidence (meaning that they are unpiloted, unproven, and that they turn our children into unconsenting, unpaid guinea pigs for marketers, researchers and for the creators of Common Core) –answers would have been different.
If Utah policy would have been fully honest, disclosing the fact that Common Core may raise some specific standards spottily in some grades and in some states, but it lowers them elsewhere, dumbing down some and rigor-izing others, but making everyone common, as if one size could fit all — answers would have been different.
The poll’s article said: “Utah’s Education IS NOT controlled by the federal government, Herbert has said time and time again.” True, Herbert has said that. So has the Utah Attorney General. Yet it is false. Fact check for yourself. Truth is truth whether we believe it or not.
In fact, in Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s 2010 “Vision” speech, he said:
“Traditionally the federal government has had a limited role in education policy… the Obama Administration has sought to fundamentally shift the federal role so that the Dept. is doing much more… creating a strong cradle-to-career continuum… In March 2009 Obama called on the nation’s governors and state school chiefs to develop standards and assessments.”
Both the Republican and the Democratic parties in various states –and even the Chicago Teacher’s Union — have written resolutions condemning Common Core. Not just because of the fuzzy math. Not just because of the lessening of classic literature. It’s all about Constitutional rights.
If you like socialist-styled, distant, top-down, big government, big-corporate control of tests, teachers and standards, Common Core may be your thing. But if you believe in local control, in free and independent academic thought, and if you want parental aims met –as opposed to big-government-big-corporate aims, then Common Core is not for you.
Tomorrow morning, the Utah State School Board will vote on whether or not to renew the federal No Child Left Behind ESEA Flexibility Waiver.
Governor Herbert will address the board in person prior to this vote, at the USOE offices at 250 E 500 S in Salt Lake City.
It’s an open meeting. Many of us will be there, and you are wanted and needed there. If you can’t come, please write to the board. Here’s the board’s email address. Board@schools.utah.gov
Here’s my letter.
——————–
Dear Board,
Please vote no on the ESEA/NCLB renewal of waiver tomorrow.
No Child Left Behind was bad; but the waiver from it (meaning that we consent to continue with Common Core) is far worse, because of the suffocating strings attached. A million tiny strings took Gulliver down.
I am referring to:
1- The CCSSO-created CEDS data collection aligned to the Common Core standards.
2- Teacher handcuffing via teacher grading related to Common Core testing.
3- No amendment process for the Common Core (copyrighted) standards. (We could alter our previous Utah Core; we can’t alter ELA or Math under Common Core’s copyright.)
Bottom line: we owe no accountability to the federal government Constitutionally and it returns very little money, percentage wise, of our education budget –of which Utah wastes much on bloated administrative salaries and on the common core tech ed sales cartel, not giving much to truly benefit children or teachers.
We have constitutional rights and we are shredding them, voluntarily, by tying our school system down under Common Core and Common Data.
Your physical presence speaks volumes even if you do not say a word at this board meeting and rally.
At the last ESEA flexibility board meeting, there were many people wearing green Stop Common Core T-shirts (or other green shirts) –filling the seats, lining the walls inside the meeting and lining the halls outside the meeting. We need to do it again, this time in the presence of our Common Core-defending Governor.
Come downtown this Friday morning, February 6th, 2015, when the meeting begins at 8:00 (or whenever you can get there.)
Governor Herbert will speaking from 8:30-9:30. At 9:30 the board will discuss renewing or not renewing the ESEA waiver.
(Public comment will take place for ten minutes at 8:15. If you contact the board secretary, Lorraine, ahead of time, you can be one of the five people per month who get two minutes allotted to speak during public comment.)
While some attend and speak up at the meeting inside, others will be standing with posters outside the building.
If you will be outside, please bring posters. What to write on your poster? Here are a few ideas:
ESEA Renewal Means Zero Leverage
Our Children Are Not Your Guinea Pigs
No More Education Without True Representation
We Support H.R. 524 – Mia Love’s Stop Common Core Bill
Stop Feeding Our Tax Dollars to the Common Core Cartel
Restore Freedom to Utah Teachers and Students
Support Mia Love’s HR 524 – Restore Liberty in Education
Thank You Mia Love
SCHEDULE – Utah State School Board Meeting February 6, 2015
Opening Business 8:00 – 8:15 AM
Public Participation/Comment 8:15 – 8:25 AM (sign up ahead of time)
Consent Calendar 8:25 – 8:30 AM
Discussion with Governor Herbert 8:30 – 9:30 AM (Note: Governor announced last week that he and the Utah Attorney General would meet with the Board this week)
Action Item/ ESEA Flexibility Renewal 9:30 – 10:15 AM
This Friday, Utah’s State Board will determine if Utah will submit a request to the Dept. of Education requesting a three-year renewal for the ESEA Flexibility Waiver and the continuation of the UCAS Accountability System. (Note: This is the End Game. 3-years of a new Waiver will buy the US Dept. of Education time to close the clamps on parental sovereignty, close down or severely alter private and district schools using Title 1 money, and dismantle school districts using charter “Choice” attached to Title 1 money.)
This State Board meeting is not even truly about education. Academics are a fraction of what this vote will affect. It’s really about the gradual abolishing of our representative form of government and what that means for our children long term. Even the term “ESEA Flexibility” reveals the ongoing federal practice of rationing out parcels of flexibility according to the whims of the federal Department of Education– this doesn’t look like our constitutional inheritance of sovereignty and freedom at all.
Come downtown Friday morning. Bring a neighbor. Bring your children. Make it a field trip. Wear green. Stand shoulder to shoulder with other parents, teachers, and grandparents who realize that we have to make our influence felt for the freedom and dignity of our precious children. This is real. Please stand with us.
Senator “Let’s-Don’t-Talk-About-Common-Core” LaMar Alexander has proposed a bill to amend ESEA (No Child Left Behind Act) in order “to restore freedom”. The bill is called the “Every Child Ready for College or Career Act of 2015“.
QUESTION 1: Would LaMar’s bill restore “consent of the governed” to education and to student data mining?
Fact 2. There’s a federal testing system comprised of Common Core aligned, synchronized testing partnerships: PARCC, SBAC, and AIR. This violates Constitutional separation of powers since the federal government has no business in state-directed educational affairs such as testing.
Fact 3. There’s a corporate cartel of educational technology and text sellers (Pearson Inc, partnered with Gates/Microsoft, etc) advising the federal testing system. This violates the Constitutional principle of agency; individuals and states are coerced to use certain corporations’ products with federal approval.
QUESTION 3: Would LaMar’s bill restore a diverse exchange of academic ideas to the American textbook and technology market?
QUESTION 4: Would LaMar’s bill create fairness and freedom for non-Common Core aligned education providers?
Fact 5. Because Common Core standards are copyrighted, states (voters, teachers, you and I) don’t get to vote on them. There’s no amendment process for any state to alter Common Core Standards nor the Common Education Data System (CEDS). Federal promotion and partnershipping with those who copyrighted nonamendable standards, violates states’ rights and consent of the governed.
QUESTION 5: Would LaMar’s bill move us away from these chokehold national standards and restore individual agency?
Fact 6. Both Republican and Democratic politicians are hacking at the limbs of the Constitution openly, aiming to phase out the authority of the states and of parents regarding educational authority, privacy and other issues. Aiming to “phase out the authority of states” is blatantly unconstitutional.
QUESTION 6: Would LaMar’s bill stop the Department of Education’s agenda to “phase out state authority”?
Now, to the bill.
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I knew from page one that this was going to be a big, fat two-tongued document because the bill’s purpose statement: “to restore freedom” conflicts with its own title: “TheEvery Child Ready for College or Career Act of 2015“.
This bill by its title and throughout its text cements the Common Core Initiative into federal law without once using the term “Common Core”. How?
Did you know that the phrase College and Career Ready has been repeatedly, federally and corporationally defined in multiple places as only Common Core. (See College and Career Ready definition: the Dept. of Education defines college and career ready standards as “standards common to a significant number of states.” There is one thing that meets that definition. Anytime you see “college and career ready,” run; it equals only the Common Core.
Can a bill claim to restore freedom while it promotes the exact, synonymous term that takes freedom in education away?
On page three I found red flag #2: “Close the achievement gap between high and low performing children“. It’s another way of saying “everyone has to be the same at any cost– even at the price of slowing or dumbing down high achievers.” Posing as fairness, it’s precisely the opposite, as nonsensical as the Handicapper General in Harrison Bergeron. ( The funny, tragic short story of Harrison Bergeron is online if you haven’t read it.)
The bill explains how money must be allocated to ensure that the achievement gap-closing happens. The Harrison Bergeron-ian “fairness” will be enforced with (our) tax dollars in federally set ways.
On page 8 we learn: States will have to create a peer review board with the purpose of promoting “effective implementation of the challenging State academic standards“. A mandated review board will promote implementation of Common Core, the very thing so many hope to eradicate. Note the slickness: later on the same page, it says: “with the goal of supporting State- and local-led innovation”. It’s pleasant sounding, but it’s a lie; one can’t support local innovation while implementing centrally controlled, Common Core standards on a federally mandated review board.
I already don’t want to read the rest of the 379 pages. I’m only on page 8.
Next is a section called “State Plan Determination, Demonstration and Revision” which makes me wonder: why should states demonstrate to the federal government, when education is not in federal jurisdiction? (Calling for “accountability” without authority to make that call should always raise eyebrows. I’m envisioning Emperor Arne being fed grapes while the Constitution is being used as bird cage liner.) This gets worse when the bill says that the Secretary of Education can decline to approve a State plan (pages 8 and 9) and that the Secretary of Education would withhold funds from states who don’t comply. (page 12) This is clearly out of harmony with the bill’s stated purpose “to restore freedom” as well as being out of harmony with the U.S. Constitution.
Page 13: The same standards have to be used throughout the entire state. They have to be aligned with state college standards. (They can’t be lower, but they can’t be any higher, either, than the worst of any state college. They can’t align with any unusually high private university standards.) This control freakishness –and this obvious dumbing down, may succeed in closing that achievement gap but only by harming high achievers, it seems to me.
Page 16: In complete contradiction to pages 8 and 9, this section says that the Secretary has no authority to supervise or direct state standards.
Page 17: Here we go with the assessments. Every state must use standardized tests aligned to the college-and-career-ready standards (Common).
Page 20: Here we go with the data collecting: tests must “produce individual student interpretive, descriptive, and diagnostic reports… include information regarding achievement on assessments… provided… in an understandable and uniform format” [meaning, I am sure: Common Educational Data Standards and SIF interoperability formats, which preclude strong privacy protection].
The data collected must be disaggregated, says the bill, by state and by school using these factors: gender, economic status, race, ethnicity, English proficiency, disability, migratory status, etc., but will not be personally identifiable. (Hmm. On page 20 they just said tests must report on “individual interpretive, descriptive and diagnostic reports.” How is that not personally identifiable?)
On page 34 I’m troubled by this: “achievement gaps between each category of students described“. So they will divide and label student achievement groups by race, by gender, by ability, by economic status, etc. to further identify groups.
On page 35 the bill identifies schools that must be “turned around”.
On page 37 the state assures the federal government that it will participate in the NAEP test for 4th and 8th graders.
On page 39 the bill mandates uniform state report cards.
On page 54 the “Local Educational Agency Plan” mandates identifying students and identifying achievement gaps. The plan also funds HeadStart or other government preschools.
Page 66 tells states how they have to spend any unused money.
Page 99: Grants for Common Tests: The Secretary of Education will give grants to pay for tests and standards, if the states are working in partnership with other states.
Page 101: Summative, interim and formative tests will be developed or improved. (More Common Core testing, more frequently, and more in disguise–as practice or as assignments, rather than traditional end of the year summative tests.)
Page 111: “At risk” students will be indentified, intervened, and reported.
Page 117: If there is failure to reach consensus, the Secretary of Education is empowered to act on his own with the “alternative process” that “if Secretary determines that a negotiated rulemaking process is unnecessary...” he simply tells Congress (not asks, tells) –and then he does his own thing, allowing for public comment afterward, and then, finally, makes it an official regulation. I hope people are reading this.
Page 135: Here the states are told the conditions by which they will make subgrants to schools and to teachers.
Page 145: This fulfils Arne Duncan’s dream of replacing family with school as the centerpiece of life and community, “providing programs that…extend the school day, school week, or school year calendar.” Remember what the Secretary Duncan said in his Charlie Rose interview? This is his one minute video:
Page 153: “Secretary may waive” requirements. So this may be a Congressionally vetted law, but it’s more of a suggestion than a hard and fast law, always subject to the whims of the Secretary. This is repeated on page 224: “The Secretary may waive any statutory or regulatory requirement… with respect to charter schools.. if.. Secretary determines that granting such a waiver will promote the purposes...”
Page 163: Grant recipients must provide data to the federal Secretary of Education.
Page 226: On Charter Schools: “support the opening of… replication of… charter schools… expansion of high quality charter schools”.
Page 229: “A description of how the State will actively monitor and hold authorized public chartering agencies accountable… including… revoking the authority of an authorized chartering agency based on the performance of the charter school… in areas of student achievement… and compliance”.
Page 249: The Secretary of Education can take money out of the charter school’s reserve account if the grant wasn’t used in “carrying out the purposes” of the Secretary.
[On and on and on the bill rambles about charter school expansion and federal controls on the charter schools. Endless pages are devoted to charter schools. Why the increased interest of the federal government in supporting charter schools? Because charter schools don’t have elected school boards. The ruling bodies of charter schools are appointed, not elected. In some places, philanthropists and huge corporations are administering charter schools –with zero accountability to any parent or any voter. This is education without representation! This is why the Obama Administration is pushing to identify and “turn around” “low performing” public schools and turn them into voter-untouchable institutions of the cartels and governments who benefit from that kind of power.] I happen to have one child who attends a charter school and I know from personal experience that the board is under no obligation to listen to any parent, and no parent can vote a board member out. You’re just lucky if the board happens to be made of people with whom you share values and goals for children.]
Page 268 talks about using magnet schools to desegregate “students of different racial backgrounds”. I don’t agree with redistribution by government force of anything– not money, not teachers, not not principals, not standards, and not students of different races. But the Department of education does.
Page 276 “State Innovation and Flexibility“: think about the way that title rations liberty. What would the founding fathers say about the federal government creating a document with a section heading titled like that? States are allowed to have some innovation? Some flexibility? Those are sub-particles of a rationed freedom, not freedom at all.
Page 297: “Indian, Native Hawaiian, Alaska Native Education” – This part has me confused. Someone please comment below if you understand it. Why would the federal government spend pages and pages and pages outlining different rules for these specific minority groups? Not just a few— a LOT of pages.
Page 369: “Participation by private school children and teachers” – By definition, private school children and their teachers are to be left completely alone by the government; that’s what private means. Why is this federal law taking the effort and time to mention them? If, according to page 92, the Title One funds follow the private school child to his/her school, then the government will be taking reports, data mining, and putting out mandates as well.
The answer to each of my six questions, from the top, is “no”.
The stated purpose of the bill is “to restore freedom”. Does this happen? No.
The bill –without even using the term “Common Core” a single time, works to cement Common Core. It supports more common tests and emboldens the collectors of both academic and nonacademic personal student data (without parental consent), will intrude on private schools; and decreases representative school decision making by replacing a large number of public schools with no-elected-board, no-vote-allowed, charter schools; all under the banner of equitably meeting student needs and “closing an achievement gap.”
Please do something positive: tell your senators and reps to help push an actual freedom-granting bill in education.
I learned with gratitude today from Utah’s Mia Love that she is working with Rep. Joe Wilson on a bill “to allow states to opt out of Common Core without being penalized.” Support Mia Love. Write to her. Rep. Wilson, too. Please call other Congressmen and ask them to work with her and support her.
David Vitters’ bill, too, sounds a thousand times more honest than Alexander’s ESEA “Every Child College and Career Ready Act of 2015”.
Vitters’ bill (S73) is “A bill to prohibit the Federal Government from mandating, incentivizing, or coercing States to adopt the Common Core State Standards or any other specific academic standards, instructional content, curricula, assessments, or programs of instruction.” https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/s73 )
Dr. Evers’ article is published here with permission from the author. It was also published at Education Week this month.
THE COMMON CORE STANDARDS’ UNDEMOCRATIC PUSH
by Dr. Williamson M. Evers
“They forgot that the desire for a voice, the desire for political action, can become particularly intense when people are faced with the prospect of nowhere to exit to. They forgot that hemming in parents and teachers would create a demand for alternatives and escape routes. Alternatives to the national common-core-aligned tests have arisen.”
One of the most influential books in social science in the last 50 years is economist Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.
In this pivotal 1970 book, Hirschman discusses how individuals react when services they rely on deteriorate. The basic responses available to us are “exit” and “voice,” Hirschman points out, where exit means turning to a different provider or leaving the area, and voice means political participation.
We tend to think of these responses as stark alternatives. Hirschman, as a social scientist, wanted us to consider the interplay between them.
Exit usually has lower costs than voice for the individual. With exit, you can avoid the long slog of politics and simply turn to someone else or move somewhere else.
But there is a limiting case: Exit can have high costs when individuals are loyal to institutions—thus the third component in Hirschman’s trio of exit, voice, and loyalty.
In the 1830s, when Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States, he found Americans intensely loyal to their local schools. Americans saw schools as extensions of their families and neighborhoods. They viewed public schools as akin to voluntarily supported charities and as part of what social scientists today call civil society.
Tocqueville described township school committees that were deeply rooted in their local communities. State control of local public education took the form of an annual report sent by the township committee to the state capital. There was no national control.
Today, Americans retain much of the sentiment about local schools they had in Tocqueville’s day. But, increasingly, parents and taxpayers view the public schools as an unresponsive bureaucracy carrying out edicts from distant capitals. Today, we are dealing with a deteriorating situation in a declining institution, namely widespread ineffective instruction in the public schools.
The Common Core State Standards have come to the fore precisely at a time when civically active individuals care much more than they usually do about exit, voice, and loyalty. But the common core has denied voice and tried to block exit.
The common core’s designers have taken the existing bureaucracy and increased its centralization and uniformity. By creating the common-core content standards behind closed doors, the authors increased the alienation of the public from schools as institutions worthy of loyalty. The general public had no voice in creating or adopting the common core.
The other approach in times of a deteriorating public service is offering better exit options. But the common core’s proponents have created an almost inescapable national cartel.
There has long been a monopoly problem in public education, which was why economist Milton Friedman called for opportunity scholarships (also known as vouchers) to create a powerful exit option. But even in the absence of opportunity scholarships and charter schools, we had some exit options in the past because of competitive federalism, meaning horizontal competition among jurisdictions.
Economist Caroline Hoxby studied metropolitan areas with many school districts (like Boston) and metropolitan areas contained within one large district (like Miami or Los Angeles). She found that student performance is better in areas with competing multiple districts, where parents at the same income level can move to another locality, in search of a better education.
We have also seen competitive federalism work in education at the interstate level. Back in the 1950s, education in Mississippi and North Carolina performed at the same low level. North Carolina tried a number of educational experiments and moved ahead of Mississippi. Likewise, Massachusetts moved up over the years from mediocre to stellar.
The common core’s promoters are endeavoring to suppress competitive federalism. The common core’s rules and its curriculum guidance are the governing rules of a cartel. The common core’s promoters and their federal facilitators wanted a cartel that would override competitive federalism and shut down the curriculum alternatives that federalism would allow.
The new common-core-aligned tests, whose development was supported with federal funds, function to police the cartel. All long-lasting cartels must have a mechanism for policing and punishing those seen as shirkers and chiselers, or, in other words, those who want to escape the cartel’s strictures or who want increased flexibility so they can succeed.
The new leadership of the College Board by David Coleman, one of the common core’s chief architects, is being used to corral Catholic schools, other private schools, and home-schooling parents into the cartel. The proponents of the common core have now established a clearinghouse for authorized teaching materials to try to close off any remaining possible avenue of escaping the cartel.
What was the rationale for the common core? The name given to the Obama administration’s signature school reform effort, the Race to the Top program, promotes the idea that the federal government needs to step in and lead a race. Central to this rhetoric is the idea that state performance standards were already on a downward slide and that, without nationalization, standards would inexorably continue on a “race to the bottom.”
I would disagree. While providers of public education certainly face the temptation to do what might look like taking the easy way out by letting academic standards decline, there is also countervailing pressure in the direction of higher standards.
If state policymakers and education officials let content standards slip, low standards will damage a state’s reputation for having a trained workforce. Such a drop in standards will even damage the policymakers’ own reputations.
In 2007, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute looked empirically at state performance standards over time in a study called “The Proficiency Illusion.” The study showed that, while states had a variety of performance standards (as would be expected in a federal system), the supposed “race to the bottom” was not happening. The proponents of the common core are wrong in their claims that state performance standards were inevitably on a downward slide.
The common core, in fact, provided relief from competitive pressure from other states. Sonny Perdue, the governor of Georgia at the time that the common core was created (the initiative was launched in 2009, and the standards were released in 2010), did not like it when the low-performing students of his state were compared with students in other states with standards different from Georgia’s. He became the lead governor in bringing the National Governors Association into the national standards effort. Nationalizing standards and tests eliminated them as differentiated school reform instruments that could be used by states in competition over educational attainment among the states.
The common core undermines citizens’ exit option and competitive federalism. It was designed to do so. It likewise evades and negates the voice option. But the makers of this malign utopia have forgotten a few things.
They forgot that the desire for a voice, the desire for political action, can become particularly intense when people are faced with the prospect of nowhere to exit to. They forgot that hemming in parents and teachers would create a demand for alternatives and escape routes. Alternatives to the national common-core-aligned tests have arisen. States are dropping these national tests. States are also struggling to escape the common-core cartel itself. Parents are opting out of common-core testing.
By trying to block exit and voice, the designers and proponents of the Common Core State Standards have caused blowback: A large parent-, teacher-, and community-based movement has arisen to oppose the common core and its national tests.
Williamson M. Evers is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was an assistant U.S. secretary of education for planning, evaluation, and policy development from 2007 to 2009, during the George W. Bush administration.
This is going to be short. I’m in a rush. But I really want to share it.
John Taylor Gatto was a veteran teacher (an award-winning teacher) before he became an author and lecturer. I can’t believe I never heard of him in all my years as a teacher. But I’m reading him now.
In John Taylor Gatto’s “Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why,” he calls schools “virtual factories of childishness” –places where children are taught to be immature, passive, bored, boring and unintellectual. Gatto quotes H.L. Mencken, who said that the aim of public schools was not “to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . . Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”
“Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why” brings up important historical, controversial, philosophical issues; I wonder (rhetorically) : why didn’t anyone introduce me to the writings of Gatto when I was in my teacher education program?
Gatto cites the (mostly horrifying) writings and doings of James Bryant Conant, Alexander Inglis, and others who promoted the changes to U.S. education many, many years ago and who helped give birth to what we have today: “not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers… a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education,” –the notion that it’s in the best interests of big business as well as big government to keep the masses uniform, unintellectual, and dependent.
“Now for the good news… School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology – all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.
First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt.We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”
I am gravely concerned about the “emergency vote” that was taken by the board last month, which decreased the amount of student data privacy protections that were previously in place, in order to cater to corporate education vendors, and in order to align with unlawful federal regulatory changes to federal FERPA– which harmed parental rights and student privacy, giving third party vendors unwarranted trust and access to student data. Where were the student advocates and parent testifiers, when the corporate testifiers had their day to speak and to influence this board?
I request that the “emergency vote” be immediately dismissed as unethical and unlawful, because it aligns exactly with the unethical and unlawful alterations that the Dept. of Education has made to family privacy rights without Congressional approval. I request that a deep and probing study be taken on this weighty issue prior to a vote. Allowing vendors this easy data-access aligns with the abuses of the Department of Education, and are not in harmony with vital principles of individual rights, family rights, and freedom from essentially handing oversight of education and student records to unelected vendors.
Christel Swasey
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(I’ll keep you posted.)
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Utah Rep. Jake Anderegg
Why I wrote the letter?
I compared the student privacy protection bill that Utah Representative Jake Anderegg is running right now, with the summary of a recent public hearing –in which corporate education vendors pushed for decreased student privacy and for increased student data sharing. I realized that the fight is truly going on right now in Utah. Most people don’t know the fight is on; it doesn’t make news headlines, though it should. So few people speaking up. And the board assumes it’s okay with all of us to keep loosening and loosening student data protections.
Should students and families maintain individual rights over student data privacy or not?
Which side are you on?
Have we as an informed electorate, as neighbors, and families and friends, discussed what happens when students and families do –or do not– have data privacy protection? These are weighty matters with long term consequences.
The board’s having had a seemingly quick and one-sided “hearing” followed by an “emergency vote” seems hasty and even dangerous.
Let’s think and talk and debate thoroughly before we automatically align with corporate agendas. Let’s ask ourselves how these alignments and their possible unintended consequences may affect our children in the long term.
Both the bill and the summary report are wordy and un-reader-friendly, true. But we can’t know what side to support if we don’t study it out. So here are the links and abbreviated screenshots –of the two sides– to get started.
Anderegg’s privacy protection bill calls for increased privacy protections, particularly in reference to third party vendors:
The corporate education vendors call for decreased privacy protections. They say that the former provision that a school/district was to be the only entity authorized to collect and store school records is “overly restrictive and does not allow Third Party Ventors to collect and access records…. the rule does not reflect the actual practice”.
(If it does not reflect the actual practice, that is because federal agents have been unethically altering what Congress held the sole right to alter: Federal FERPA privacy law. Do we in Utah want to align with federal abuses, in order to cater to education vendors? Sure, the vendors testify that it’s a great idea. It makes their businesses run better. But the board ought to place the needs and rights of students and their families above corporate education vendors. Who is advocating for individual privacy rights for children at the corporate level? Nobody. The businesses want that data, and they don’t want to be inconvenienced by parental or student rights.)
Here’s the link to that report (and the first two pages, screenshots).
Here’s my “explain it to a fourth grader” summary of the situation: “When the government lets business people run the schools, the business people want to store records of what students do, so the government says OK. It is not good because the voters lose power over their rights. Voters can change the laws of government and can un-elect those we’ve elected to govern schools, but we cannot influence what business people do nor who gets to run businesses, by our vote. We have no control over them. That gives them control over us and over our records/privacy rights. We need to keep control of ourselves, our children, and our privacy rights. We should not give business people power over our schools, no matter how nice they are. “
If a parent wants psychologists, researchers, doctors or businessmen studying his/her child, and the parents gives written consent, I have no problem with that.
I do have a very big problem with researchers, businessmen, politicians and others studying children without parental consent or knowledge. That’s 1984-style creepy. That’s government believing it’s bigger and more valid than those who created it.
The NCES, also known as the National Center for Educational Statistics, a federal branch, is so hungry for data on kindergarteners (and on everyone else, for that matter, that it worries me. People aren’t aware of what NCES is aiming to do. Nobody’s fighting in a meaningful way to protect children’s and family privacy rights. Federal FERPA laws that were supposed to protect student and family rights were shredded a few years ago. Data is the new oil, the new gold, those who want the data are desperate to get it, and they are getting it.
What are they getting?
If you click on this link, you will find a pdf with 187 PAGES of data points that NCES plans to collect on our kindergarteners. That’s not 187 points of data, but 187 pages of points of data. Medical data. Home data. Racial data. Academic data. Behavioral data. Data on children’s weight, household marriages, poverty levels, cohabiations, occupations, motivation levels, game playing, number of books in the home— everything. Click on this link and see the PDF for the whole list.
Here’s a tiny sample:
190 TEACHER REPORT EXTERN PROB BEHAVIORS
194 X1 TEACHER REPORT INTERN PROB BEHAVIORS
200 X1 TEACHER REPORT ATTENTIONAL FOCUS
204 X1 TEACHER REPORT INHIBITORY CONTROL
226 X3 HEIGHT MEASUREMENT PRESENT
228 X3 WEIGHT MEASUREMENT PRESENT
230 X1 CHILD COMPOSITE BMI
302 X12 PARENT 1 EDUCATION LEVEL (IMPUTED)
305 X1 PARENT 1 EMPLOYMENT STATUS
307 X1 PARENT 1 OCCUPATION
309 X1 AVG PRESTIGE SCR FOR PAR 1 OCCUPATION (IMPUTED)
335 X1 NUMBER IN HOUSEHOLD AGED <18
338 X1 NUMBER IN HOUSEHOLD AGED 18+
345 X1 # HOURS SPENT IN NONPARENTAL CARE NOW
353 X2 INCOME CATEGORY (IMPUTED)
356 X12 POVERTY LEVEL
358 X2 ADULT’S FOOD SECURITY RAW SCORE
363 X4 ADULT’S FOOD SECURITY STATUS
368 CHILD’S FOOD SECURITY STATUS
374 X2 HOUSEHOLD FOOD SECURITY STATUS
380 X12 MOTHER MARRIED AT TIME OF BIRTH
387 X1 PUBLIC OR PRIVATE SCHOOL (How would they get this data from a private school?)
457 F1 PARENT INTERVIEW DISPOSITION CODE
473 F1 PARENT INTERVIEW WORK AREA
521 F1 SCHOOL CENSUS TRACT CODE
525P1 HOME CENSUS TRACT CODE
585 C1 ACQ025 INTERRUPTION DURING ASSESSMENT
587 C1 ACQ035 DISRUPTIONS DURING ASSESSMENT
601 C1 ACQ075 CHILD’S MOTIVATION LEVEL
602 C1 ACQ080 CHILD’S COOPERATION
603 C1 ACQ085 CHILD’S ATTENTION LEVEL
1269 P1 FSQ200 CURRENT MARITAL STATUS
1316 P1 HEQ010A HOW OFTEN YOU TELL STORIES
1317 P1 HEQ010B HOW OFTEN YOU ALL SING SONGS
1318 P1 HEQ010C HOW OFTEN YOU HELP CHD DO ART
1319 P1 HEQ010D HOW OFTEN CHILD DOES CHORES
1320 P1 HEQ010E HOW OFTEN YOU ALL PLAY GAMES
1321 P1 HEQ010F HOW OFTEN YOU TALK ABT NATURE
1329 P1 HEQ040 HOW MANY BOOKS CHILD HAS
…These types of very personal questions keep going until 1332
1333 P1 CCQ010 NOW HAS CARE FROM RELATIVE
1334 P1 CCQ015 EVER HAD CARE FROM RELATIVE
1354 P1 CCQ085 # OF DAYS/WK OF REL CARE
1355 P1 CCQ090 # OF HRS/WK OF REL CARE
1356 P1 CCQ092 CHARGE FOR RELATIVE CARE
1451 P1 CHQ085 COMPLICATIONS TO BIRTH/DELIVRY
1470P1 CHQ095 EVER HAD EAR INFECTION
1471P1 CHQ096 EVER HAD EAR ACHE
1510P1 CHQ330 SCALE OF CHILDS HEALTH
1511 P1 SSQ010J KEEP WORKING TO FINISH
1516 P1 SSQ010X CREATIVE IN WORK OR PLAY
1519 P1 MHQ025B YEAR WHEN RESP-BIOPAR MARRIED (When parents were married)
1521 P1 MHQ035A MNTH RESBIOMOM-DAD START COHAB
So many times, ugly education and data reform sites/pages “disappear” from the internet after people start pointing them out. So, in case that happens again, I have also copied and pasted (below) a list of restricted data that is now available from this link: http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/licenses.asp –and I’m going to screen shot and paste the link of the Kindergarten and First Grade data file, that led to this list, below.
The sad fact seems to be that we, as a group of people, have so much confidence in other human beings that we do not search out for ourselves what is really going on, and we do not demand that our children’s data be protected.
We are in a state of blind self-security, trusting our children’s destinies to the hands of data-hungry strangers with reckless confidence. We have to be smarter than this, more protective than this!
If you do not know why so much data sharing is a bad idea, please, for starters, read the book 1984. It’s free.
If you want to study more about what is now actually being collected via schools’ State Longitudinal Database Systems, read the linked posts I’ve written previously here and here.
No Common Core Maine‘s 2014 fall symposium about Common Core is filmed and archived on YouTube.
Friends have been emailing me clips, raving about this symposium, and I’m posting it before I’ve had a chance to watch very much of it.
One friend, who is a district school board member in Utah, wrote this about her favorite part, symposium film #4 with Dr. Peg Luksik:
“The coup de grace is at 39:15: ‘Common Core isn’t just flawed in what they teach our children; it’s flawed in how they test our children. It makes it so that the results can match what the Dept of Education wants them to match. If I can manipulate where you succeed and where you fail, I can be sure that you are going to go into the Workforce place that I have chosen for you. Common Core Assessment system allows that manipulation to occur.’ Luksik goes into all the different measures that are supposed to be involved in creating accurate assessments, but, most importantly, how they are not being used in education. She also addresses the issue of validity with NAEP and why our test scores are so low–we are making them ‘valid’ according to NAEP. She decries setting the proficiency AFTER having taken the test.”
Speakers at the Maine Symposium included Dr. Sandra Stotsky, Dr. Peg Luksik, Jamie Gass of Pioneer Institute, Mom Erin Tuttle, Maine State School Board Member Heidi Sampson, and more. Enjoy!
Not by using Common Core-based standards and tests, for sure, or anything that looks like them. As anyone can see, the English language arts and mathematics standards dumped by the Governor Patrick-appointed Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in July 2010 are nothing like Common Core’s standards. Unlike Common Core’s standards, which are not designed to prepare American high school students for authentic college coursework, the Commonwealth’s previous standards accelerated the academic achievement of minority groups in the state and did prepare our grade 10 students for authentic college coursework. Yet, Massachusetts parents, legislators, and teachers have been regularly told for five years that standards cleverly labeled “college and career ready” are better than those they replaced because the old ones didn’t prepare our students for authentic college coursework, just for a high school diploma. The facts tell otherwise.
We know that achievement on the grade 10 MCAS was related to authentic college readiness from a report relating our high school students’ performance on their grade 10 MCAS to the type of public college they enrolled in after graduation in 2005 and the extent of remedial coursework they needed.* Almost all the students at the Advanced level and about 80% of the students at the Proficient level who had enrolled in four-year public colleges and universities in the Bay State in 2005 needed no remediation in mathematics or reading. They were college-ready as well as high-school diploma-ready, whether or not they took a mathematics course in their senior year of high school (which the report doesn’t tell us). That is exactly the way the system should work.
On the other hand, about half of the 2005 high school graduating students who had enrolled in a Massachusetts community college in 2005 and had earlier been placed at the Needs Improvement level on a grade 10 MCAS test needed remediation in mathematics, reading, or both. (Again, we don’t know if they had taken a mathematics course in their senior year of high school.) Sounds completely rational.
Yet, the Patrick-appointed Board of Elementary and Secondary Education decided in July 2010 that students enrolling in a state college after graduation from high school should not be required to take any college course without college credit if they passed a grade 11 test deeming them “college ready.” In other words, no placement test or enrollment in a non-credit-bearing developmental course in reading or mathematics. Instead, students needing improvement must be given credit for the courses they take, whether or not they are academically ready for them.
Clearly, their readiness depends on the academic quality and rigor of this grade 11 “college readiness” test, about to be given in Massachusetts high schools in 2015. Yet, we know from many mathematicians (e.g., R. James Milgram of Stanford, Marina Ratner of Berkeley, Jason Zimba of Bennington) that Common Core’s mathematics standards do not prepare students for STEM careers—the jobs of the 21st century. And it is obvious to anyone who compares the reading passages used over the years on the grade 10 MCAS with the sample reading passages for the grade 11 Common Core-based reading test that the overall reading level of the passages on the latter test is not higher than the overall reading level of the passages on the grade 10 MCAS test.
So who are the chief victims of this gross public deception? Minority students, especially African-American students.** They are the students for whom Common Core’s standards and tests were created in order to label them college-ready when they aren’t. In the 2005 report, they were featured as having lower “persistence” rates than most other demographic groups, as having a lower Grade Point Average than Asian/Pacific Islanders (2.5 to 2.8), and as earning a lower number of credits on average during their first year of college than Asian/Pacific Islanders (22.7 to 27.1), even though more than 80% of all students in the 2005 school-to-college cohort remained enrolled for a second year of college in 2006.
Instead of finding commendations for their persistence and their college-going rates, readers are left to infer that they are so hopeless that the only solution to the “gaps” in demographic performance between African-American students and Asian/Pacific Islanders is to reduce the academic demands of the high school curriculum for all students. Why not restore the standards that actually turned out to help make all Massachusetts students better prepared for high school and for college? Why do Massachusetts legislators and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education want to believe what they have been told by organizations funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, when these organizations seem to be the only ones who have benefitted from states that have committed to the use of Common Core’s standards.
*Massachusetts Board of Higher Education and Massachusetts Board of Education. Massachusetts School-to-College Report: High School Class of 2005. February 2008. http://www.mass.edu/reports
Phillip Hamburger, law professor at Columbia Law School, gave a moving speech at Hillsdale College about the Constitution, also published in Imprimis this year. It laid out more clearly than I’d seen it before, exactly how the U.S. has strayed from our Constitution, and how it’s endangering us. His speech was titled, “The History and Danger of Administrative Law”.
Professor Hamburger made no allusion to education reforms, yet he wonderfully, as a bonus, happened to explain the foundational problem of the Common Core Initiative: that the governance system of Common Core is unrepresentative, unconstitutional and dangerous. Here’s how.
Hamburger explained that administrative law revives something that the Constitution barred: prerogative, or absolute power. He wrote: “Administrative law is commonly defended as a new sort of power, a product of the 19th and the 20th centuries that developed to deal with the problems of modern society in all its complexity… What I will suggest, in contrast, is that administrative power is actually very old.”
Old is right. Throughout history, countless generations suffered because others have wielded power over their lives. The whole purpose of the suffering and sacrifices of American pilgrims and pioneers was to escape unbalanced, top-down, often cruel, power. The success and freedom of the USA stemmed from the Constitution’s restraining of human power over other humans, and its strict limitation of its own government, and its checking and spreading of power, in order to avoid the cycle of oppression that the founders fled. The Constitution gives no lawmaking power to anyone but Congress.
Hamburger said, “Put simply, administrative acts are binding or constraining edicts that come, not through law, but through other mechanisms or pathways…In a way we can think of administrative law as a form of off-road driving… For those in the driver’s seat, this can be quite exhilarating. For the rest of us, it’s a little unnerving.”
Reading this, I thought about Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who drove off-road when he made regulations and policy changes to what Congress had long ago created in the privacy-protecting federal FERPA laws, so that he could meet his education data mining goals, which included (as outlined in his cooperative agreements* with state testing consortia) the sharing of “student-level data” –subject to law. Duncan had to alter that law. He shredded the previously protective FERPA when he made those regulatory changes. The Electronic Privacy Information Center sued him for it. But Duncan got away with it. Case dismissed.
I also thought of Duncan’s waving of money in front of cash-strapped states, tempting/coercing states into adopting Common standards and assessments and database systems in exchange for money. Off-road again. No basis in Constitutionality, just in cash.
I also thought about the little unauthorized onto-the-road drive taken by a little private club with a misleading name, the National Governors’ Association (NGA) which acts as if it were a legitimate voice for the people, as if it were Congress. NGA created, promoted and copyrighted these national standards, (the Common Core) as well as partnering with CCSSO in making national data collection standards (CEDS). The CCSSO and NGA hold no representational authority over education. It’s a giant bluff, and would almost be laughable, but it’s not funny, because it damages America.
I also thought about the blurring of lines of authority and power that happen with the creation of public-private-partnerships. When NGA and its sister-club, the superintendents’ club, CCSSO, partnered with the federal government and with Bill Gates to create education policy, Common Core bypassed Congress in two ways: by federal overreach plus corporate overreach –into what ought to be the states’ voters’ decision making arena.
Here’s a screenshot, evidence that the federal government has partnered with the private club that copyrighted Common Core and created Common Data Standards:
Remember our Constitution. It says that ALL legislative powers shall be vested in a Congress. Congress is supposed to make the laws. The Department of Education isn’t Congress. Neither is the National Governors’ Association, and neither is Bill Gates. Their assumption of unauthorized power over education policy, rather than having voters, via their Congressional representatives, to determine how education goes, is a clear corruption.
So what about corruption? Who cares?
Here’s why we must care. Hamburger writes that administrative law is “essentially a reemergence of the absolute power practiced by pre-modern kings. Rather than a modern necessity, it is a latterday version of a recurring threat—a threat inherent in human nature and in the temptations of power.”
He reminds us: “Early Americans were very familiar with absolute power. They feared this extra-legal, supra-legal, and consolidated power because they knew from English history that such power could evade the law and override all legal rights… Americans established the Constitution to be the source of all government power and to bar any absolute power. Nonetheless, absolute power has come back to life.”
He goes on: “ over the past 120 years, Americans have reestablished the very sort of power that the Constitution most centrally forbade. Administrative law… binds Americans not through law but through other mechanisms—not through statutes but through regulations—and not through the decisions of courts but through otheradjudications. It… requires judges to put aside their independent judgment and defer to administrative power as if it were above the law—which our judges do far more systematically than even the worst of 17th century English judges. And it is consolidated in that it combines the three powers of government—legislative, executive, and judicial—in administrative agencies.”
He concludes: “In sum, the conventional understanding of administrative law is utterly mistaken. It is wrong on the history and oblivious to the danger. That danger is absolutism: extra-legal, supra-legal, and consolidated power. And the danger matters because administrative power revives this absolutism. The Constitution carefully barred this threat, but constitutional doctrine has since legitimized this dangerous sort of power. It therefore is necessary to go back to basics… We should demand rule through law and rule under law. Even more fundamentally, we need to reclaim the vocabulary of law: Rather than speak of administrative law, we should speak of administrative power—indeed, of absolute power...”
*Today, I noticed that the Cooperative Agreement between the Department of Education and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia link says “webpage not available.” But I had typed it into another post, not in full but at length, if you are interested, here.
Once again, we are indebted to Colorado Principal Bob Schaeffer who has collected this list of national news articles about pushback concerning high-stakes tests in the U.S.
Before I post the list of news articles, I want to share a concern recently raised by Utah Dr. Gary Thompson: that perhaps the heated, national testing pushback could result in public acceptance of another nascent trend called stealth assessments. What do you think? Stealth Assessments are tests that are so deeply embedded into the curriculum and into video-game-based assignments that students do not suffer from test anxiety, not knowing they are being tested; but parents cannot easily opt children out of the tests; and in fact, teachers may be unaware that any testing/data mining is going on during stealth assessment. The tests blur the lines between assessment and curriculum. Is that to be the solution to all the test trouble? Which is worse? View Dr. Thompson’s full lecture on SAGE testing (Utah’s Common Core testing) here. See minute 35 for information on stealth assessments.
Mark Twain said that it’s easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled.
Having tried and failed for (going on three) years to persuade Governor Herbert and the State School Board of Utah to withdraw from the Common Core Initiative and its snake oil data mining programs, I agree with Twain.
And I’ve stopped trying to figure out whether people who promote or go along with Common Core are witting villains or not, remembering my dad’s saying, that it doesn’t matter much if someone is a pawn or a knave; the results of their actions or inactions are the same.
Actual villains don’t have claws and fangs to tip us off, like characters in a Disney movie; they don’t even know they’re on team villain, in most cases. Out of ignorance and arrogance, most villains sincerely believe in their paths.
Consider the case of David Coleman, who wrote the Common Core English Language Arts Standards and then snagged the gig of president of the College Board (the group that creates college entrance exams and writes the A.P. standards and tests).
Coleman’s villainy, in my opinion, really boils down to his own blinding pride. As Homeschool Defense Association President Michael Farris smartly said: “I told Mr. Coleman… Just because you have a good idea (homeschooling in my case, Common Core in his case), it doesn’t mean that it is appropriate to force everyone in the country to follow your idea. And that is my central problem with the Common Core and all forms of centralized educational planning.”
It’s strange that Coleman, a non-teacher, a businessman, believed that he held the only vision for what was best for every American child’s education, and also sincerely believed that it was a veddy, veddy good idea to impose it, by unconstitutional means if necessary, on the entire nation.
Just watch the first minute of this video.
He admitted on this film that he went around talking governors into his vision. (It wasn’t the governors who thought of Common Core; it was Coleman. Coleman didn’t realize that governors don’t have constitutional authority to represent voters in creating a national education system.)
But Coleman was so convinced of the superiority of his ideas that he successfully directed their imposition on K-12 schools throughout America, and then successfully altered college entrance exams to match his Common Core. That’s a lot of power in one guy.
That’s a lot of nerve in one guy, too. Where did he get the nerve to defy millions of teachers, years of time-tested tradition, simple logic and all due process? I don’t know.
The purpose of my post today is to share what they have said.
Tampio’s and Greene’s reviews clarify what’s wrong with Coleman’s Common Core vision: 1) Faulty, narrow assumptions in the actual standards 2) The restrictiveness; in other words, even if the standards weren’t faulty, they are one person’s vision: we’re all stuck with his One True Vision. Nobody else gets a voice.
1. Places “tight restrictions on what may be thought — or at least what may be expressed to earn teacher approval, high grades and good test scores.”
2. “Expects students to answer questions by merely stringing together key words in the text before them. This does not teach philosophy or thinking; it teaches the practice of rote procedures, conformity and obedience.”
3. Minimally discusses historical context or outside sources that may make material come alive. “For instance, he suggests that teachers ask students, “What word does Lincoln use most often in the address?” rather than, say, discuss the Civil War.”
4. “Discourages students from making connections between ideas, texts or events in the world — in a word, from thinking. Students are not encouraged to construct knowledge and understanding; they must simply be adept at repeating it.”
5. Imposes Coleman’s philosophy of education across all subjects. [Coleman]observes, “ ‘Similar work could be done for texts … in other areas such as social studies, history, science and technical subjects.’ Like a chef’s signature flavor, Coleman’s philosophy of education permeates the myriad programs that the College Board runs.”
6. Copies China’s test-centric system. “U.S. schools have educated many successful intellectuals, artists and inventors. By contrast, the Chinese model of education emphasizes rigorous standards and high-stakes tests, pre-eminently the gaokao college entrance exam. Chinese policymakers rue, however, how this education culture stifles creativity, curiosity and entrepreneurship. The Common Core will lead us to the same trap. Educators should not discard what has made the U.S. a hotbed of innovation and entrepreneurship.”
7. Disrespects student individuality. “In perhaps his most famous public statement, Coleman told a room of educators not to teach students to write personal narratives, because “as you grow up in this world, you realize that people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.” This statement expresses, albeit more crassly, the same sentiment as his essay on cultivating wonder. He demands that students do what they are told and not offer their own perspectives on things.”
Pennsylvania teacher Peter Greene is likewise more than slightly annoyed at David Coleman.
Greene notes that Coleman is a “man who has singlehandedly tried to redefine what it means to be an educated human being.”
Greene writes, “Some reformsters may pay lip service to the accumulated wisdom of the vast army of professional educators; Coleman never does.” Coleman “is not here to share some ideas and techniques teacher to teacher, but is here to give his superior insights to the nation full old lesser beings who are hopelessly lost and failing.”
In sum:
“Coleman repeatedly fails to distinguish between his own experience of the text and Universal Truth. This leads him to believe apparently that if he just figured something out about Bernardo, he must be the first person ever to see it, that his own reaction to a line is the universal one, that his path into the text is the only one, and that things that do not matter to him should not matter to anybody. Of all the reformsters, he is the one least likely to ever acknowledge contributions of any other living human being. For someone who famously said that nobody gives a shot about your thoughts and feelings, Coleman is enormously fascinated by and has great fait on his own thoughts and feelings.”
“…Coleman thinks a standardized test is really a great model of life, where there’s always just one correct answer, one correct path, one correct reading, and life is about showing that you have it (or telling other people to have it)… what David Coleman doesn’t know about literature is what David Coleman doesn’t know about being human in the world. Life is not a bubble test. There is a richness and variety in human experience that Coleman simply does not recognize nor allow for.
His view of knowledge, learning, understanding, and experience is cramped and tiny. It’s unfortunate that circumstances have allowed him such unfettered power over the very idea of what an educated person should be. It’s like making a person who sees only black and white the High Minister of National Art.”
Joy Pullman’s new must-read article at The Federalist is: “Seven Things Politicians Will Say to Make You Think They Oppose Common Core”.
Linked, documented and easy to read, this article delivers a long-needed direct punch to the gut of the hypocritical politicians (and school board candidates and others) who claim to be “for local control,” for parents’ rights, for teachers, for children—- some even claim to be against Common Core— but all the while, their left hand is undoing whatever their right hand does. Pullman’s article explains this hypocrisy so well. Her seven points are:
1. Scott Walker: Let’s Create Another Educrat Committee
2. Mike Pence: But We Can’t Lose Our NCLB Waiver
3. Mike Huckabee: It’s Not Common Core, It’s the Name
4. John Kasich: We Still Have Local Control
5. Jeb Bush: I Will Never Support a National Curriculum
6. Bobby Jindal: The Feds Ruined Common Core
7. Senators: I Can’t Do Anything Because It’s a State Issue
Pullman also exposes the still-little-known fact that Common Core is NOT just academic standards but also common data standards and databases.
She explains that the federal government is “sending states millions to create identical student databases that plug directly into Common Core K-12 testing pipelines so everyone’s personal information can be collected in a government dossier. Are these senators saying they have no power to stop things they or their predecessors (mostly) authorized? Are they saying they can’t sign onto bills that prevent federal involvement with Common Core, testing, or curriculum? That once an executive decides to run all over Congress and the laws, no one can stop him? If so, time to get someone else into their offices who thinks Congress is more than a bunch of bobble heads. At the very least, they could be honest like Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, who recently went from supporting Common Core to opposing it, and to prove his conversion has introduced a bill that would prohibit the federal government from mandating or incentivizing curriculum mandates, tests, or curriculum. It seems to be a strong bill, but here’s the problem: The U.S. Department of Education is already ignoring three laws that prohibit its Common Core-pushing. Adding another doesn’t seem likely to change its behavior. That means what really needs to happen is cutting USDOE off at the knees by slashing its budget and responsibilities.
Here’s a video that I hadn’t seen before, made last spring as Alaska legislators listened to expert testimony about Common Core. It’s long, but truly worth the time. My plan was to listen while I folded laundry but I kept throwing down the laundry to run over and replay a section, cheering for the vital testimonies being presented.
One of the jumping-and-cheering parts was Professor Anthony Esolen –on the ham-handed writing of the Common Core English standards– which starts at minute 19:00 and goes to about 27:00.
He vividly expressed how during this era of trash-literature, when it is more important than ever to bring students to great books, the Common Core fails us; it doesn’t even introduce students to their great literary heritage except in little fragments and shards; it fails to coherently teach grammar; it tragically kills any chance at kindling a deep love of reading, suffocating under information-text mandates the needed wide exposure to imaginative and classic literature.
It’s understated to say that the meeting grew a bit tense. Those gathered did not seem to agree even on whether or not Alaska’s standards are the same as Common Core standards. Key attendees appeared unmoved by the logical, passionate expressions given by testifiers, their minds likely having been made up prior to the testimonies.
At this link, watch the discussion, introduced by Representative Lora Reinbold. Testifiers include: Terrence Moore of Hillsdale College; Anthony Eselon of Providence College; Sandra Stotsky (ret.) University of Arkansas; Ze’ev Wurman, former Department of Education Official (Bush Admin.), NEA Ron Fuhrer President; Marty Van Diest, parent; Troy Carlock and Joe Alward, teachers; and Mike Hanley, Commissioner of Education.
The Governor’s new budget plan is making news this week, with most of the tax surplus money planned for Utah “education.” That’s the governor’spipeline-based definition of education, not education as most of us would define it. His “education funding” funds the state’s SLDS data-mining aligned programs made palatable to citizens and legislators under the branding of “education.”)
It’s tragic and ironic that the Governor has often said that Utah can get out of Common Core anytime we want to. The Utah Attorney General validated that statement in his report, saying that Utah’s Common Core doesn’t cede control to the federal government. (See rebuttal to the report here.)
But how would Utah free herself now of Common Core?
We’ve decided to sign away, in ink made of the sweat and blood of taxpayers who earned the hundreds of millions— any real possibility of withdrawal from the Common Core.
How would Utah ever get out of Common Core after recreating our whole education system based on the experiment of Common Core and Common Data aligned technologies and tests? (Not only that– we are now leading others along: Utah now gains millions by selling our Common Core test questions to other states, making them dependent on us for their own Common Core assessments.)
How foolish are we, to keep investing and investing— in something that was built on a sandy, utterly experimental, and unconstitutional foundation from the start?
The Governor’s even planning to hike gas taxes to support his enthusiasm for the workforce-pipeline version of “education”. The Deseret News reported that “The governor’s spending plan… puts pressure on lawmakers to look at a gas tax increase by calling for $94.2 million in sales taxes earmarked for transportation to instead be used for education.”
The Utah Board of Education praised the governor this week: “The Board of Education is very pleased that the Governor recommends such a large investment in Utah’s public education and its children. Like the Governor, the Board of Education believes the best educational policy in Utah is made in Utah by Utahns.”
Sadly, these are lies. The funding decisions aren’t set up to bless children. The programs being funded just promote centralized–not local– control.
This is far from being policy being “made in Utah by Utahns.” This is voter-unvetted policy being duplicated precisely from policies laid out by Obama, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates/Microsoft/Pearson Inc, CCSSO, Choice Solutions, Utrex, and the rest of the partnered organizations and corporations that profit deeply from Utah’s taxpayers’ gullibility and the same-ifying of Common Core (CCSS) education and Common Data (CEDS) education data systems.
Remember that Common Core/Common Ed Data financier Bill Gates said: “We’ll only know that this effort has succeeded when the currriculum and tests are aligned to these standards …The Common Core …when the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well, and it will unleash a powerful market… For the first time, there will be a large, uniform base of customers“.
That “powerful market” and its “uniform base of customers” includes Utah’s clueless taxpayers and legislature. Gates’ customer base is being funded by Governor Herbert to benefit the Utah Chamber of Commerce and the D.C. based, Gates-funded, private organizations behind Common Core.
“$500 million for the state’s public and higher education systems, bringing total state education spending to approximately $4 billion. The Governor recommends over $340 million in support of public education…Major investments include $10.7 million for the Utah Education Network(UEN) to connect schools by providing statewide technology infrastructure. [This is the SLDS database.] An additional $56 million …provides funds for buildings or technology infrastructure to small school districts… The budget recommends $1.5 million for innovative approaches and collaboration for college and careercounseling and $2.4 million for the Utah Futures website.”
These budgetary decisions do not educate. They strengthen the tracking systems, the prediction systems, the control systems.
Do you see the tragic humor in these words from the governor’s budget?
“Unlike those who want to micromanage the public education system from the state level, the Governor believes that the state should establish general policy goals and expected outcomes and allow local control in the specific methods of attaining those goals.”
The opposite is happening.
Utah’s SLDS database, which was built to federal specs, using common data standards (CEDS) and an SIF national-interoperability framework, from which no Utah school district nor parent may opt any child out, does not allow any kind of “local control”. Neither does funding “Utah Futures,” which calls itself the one-stop career and college readiness* website and which fulfils the Governor’s socialistic workforce focus that puts citizens in a cradle-to-workforce “P-20” human capital pipeline, with central planning and far less personal freedom in education– just like China.
I wish our legislature were not afraid of offending those who accuse them of not funding “the needs of the children”–who give in and fund anything calling itself education. Funding for UEN, Utah Futures, SLDS technologies and Common Core testing infrastructures is not meeting children’s needs. Shame on those who say that it is.
Shame on this foolish waste of hundreds of millions of vital tax money on the shackles of Common Core.
*Career and college readiness, college-and-career-ready standards, and any other similar sounding word, means in the redefined langugage of the Department of Education, Common Core aligned.
I already had a sense of growing nausea attached to my observations of locals’ infatuation with technology-centric schooling.
It got worse when I read the latest White House fact sheet on Obama’s ConnectEd plan. Utah’s perfectly in line with D.C. –the cool people are dumping the old fashioned notion of using books in schools to spend gobs and gobs and gobbledy-gob-gobs on technology.
I’m not against technology. I’m against foolishness.
Technology is a great, glittering servant. But it’s a terrible master. Its imperfections can be disastrous. But in Obama’s version of reality, it has no flaws and it deserves our full (tax dollar) attention.
“Our schools were designed for a different era – based on a limited school day and a seasonal calendar. This system does not take into account the constant learning opportunities of global connectivity…”
(Recall that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been saying for many years that he wants students to attend school 6-7 days per week, up to 14 hours per day, all year round. If you haven’t seen it before, watch that video clip here.)
ConnectED sounds appealing on the surface: upgraded connectivity, reaching out to rural students, exposing students and teachers to new technology. It even appears, on first reading, that ConnectEd promotes local control: “purchasing choices remain in the hands of local educational leaders,” it says.
Common Educational Data Standards (CEDS) is the unshakable shadow to Common Core State Standards (CCSS) –both of which which ConnectEd depends upon, and both CEDS and CCSS come from the same people: The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) –a private, unelected, nontransparent club of superintendents, financially backed by Gates.
CEDS common data standards ensure that all state databases (aka SLDS) match one another, and that all student and teacher information is fully labeled and compare-able. Thus, there is no room for true diversity among states/schools in this system; no true freedom of thought, no true competitive soaring, just sameness. And because CEDS are used in every state’s longitudinal database, are interoperable with the federal EdFacts Data Exchange, and are no longer protected by federal privacy law, it means also: no guarantee of student data privacy.
Fact: “A continued commitment to disaggregation” of student data is a central goal of the CCSSO Council. These facts make national school interoperability and connectivity sound a lot less peachy.
Still, the Obama and Jeb Bush clique is pushing for a one-size-fits-all national, matching technology system. We are not just to receive the good things touted, like upgraded connectivity and new technology for kids; we are also getting shackled to the CEDS/NCES data collecting system and to the Common Core testing system, and to the corporate educational products that are aligned to these systems.
Additionally, under the misleading subheading “Restoring U.S. Leadership in Vital Areas” the ConnectEd fact sheet touts the end of using actual books in schools, as a good thing.
“The United States is now falling behind… In South Korea, all schools are connected to the internet with high-speed connections, all teachers are trained in digital learning, and printed textbooks will be phased out by 2016.”
Why the hurry? Are people afraid that if they question the race to “phase out books,” they will be labeled “against progress” and out of touch? Are we backwards if we raise an eyebrow at the mad rush toward every student being hooked up to the internet? What are the unintended consequences and opportunity costs of phasing out books and tangible libraries to bring about the brave new unvetted vision of Bill Gates, Marc Tucker, Sir Michael Barber, Obama and Bush?
Remember the smell of a book and the feeling of paper. Are books suddenly worthless because they are not speedy, networked and electronic? If we don’t invest philosophically and financially in books, soon there won’t be many around.
Please wake up, American leaders and Utah leaders. We can find solutions for increased technology, free from the Obama-Bush-Gates clique’s narrow vision.
Let’s hold on to real books, real libraries, and the time-tested culture of academic freedom and student data privacy. Let’s shake off the chains of common data, common testing, and common data mining that will bind our children down.
The Daily Signal reported yesterday that Louisiana Senator David Vitter has filed a bill that would help ease the way for any state to opt out of Common Core.
Vitter’s new bill intends to enable states to more easily exit the national Common Core standards, which so many parents and educators now oppose, by voiding requirements attached to issued waivers from federal law. The Daily Signal reports: “States likely could retain their waivers from the law, called No Child Left Behind, even if they chose to pull out of Common Core.”
Breitbart News reported that Vitters explained why he changed his stance on Common Core: “After listening to literally thousands of parents, teachers, and others…I don’t believe that we can achieve that Louisiana control, buy-in, and success I’m committed to if we stay in Common Core…
“First, Common Core is controlled by national groups and interests outside Louisiana… many Louisianans legitimately fear that it will become a federal government takeover of education under President Obama and his far-left allies.
“Second, Common Core is causing deep frustration and worse in many classrooms and homes, and not because of greater rigor… “It’s preventing lots of involved parents and teachers — our most important education leaders — from being effective and helping kids learn.”
Vitter added that a third reason for his change of heart is his view that “an entrenched few in public education are trying very hard to manipulate the Common Core controversy to greatly weaken or reverse accountability measures.”
Senator Vitters proposed that his home state:
Exit the Common Core PARRC testing consortium immediately and adopt a rigorous interim test that is not aligned with Common Core.
Have the Governor, Legislature, and BESE convene a blue-ribbon panel of Louisiana parents, teachers, experts from higher education, and business leaders to develop an updated system of rigorous Louisiana standards and testing outside of Common Core/PARCC.
Require that this new system be developed, debated, and adopted in a fully inclusive, transparent, and democratic way.
Implement it in a careful, methodical manner, unlike the roll-out of Common Core.
Technically, Texas is not in Common Core. The state rejected the Common Core Initiative while most other states took the bait back in 2010. But Texas has not escaped. (see minute 12:40 to 13:25 on the linked clip.) National, Common Core standards-aligned books and software has taken over most of the United States educational sales market.
Texas parents are fighting back. They formed “The Truth in Texas Textbooks Coalition” (TTT) a textbook study coalition and studied the books their children were reading.
Then they spoke.
Lt. Col. Roy White, one of the members of TTT, has written and spoken about the big difference that TTT, the parent group, has made in restoring truth to textbooks used in Texas. White reported that the Texas State School Board did contact publishers about these errors, following parental testimonies (below) and publishers have agreed to make the requested changes.
White’s bullet point summary of textbook errors found by parents includes:
Publishers attempted to push the softer definition of “jihad” as the “struggle to become a better person.” TTT pointed to original Islamic sources, the Quran, Hadiths, and Mohammad’s biography describing jihad as a mandatory offensive war (including violence) to be waged by Muslims against all non-Muslims until all persons are followers of Allah. Attempts by publishers to re-define the term is “spin” and not based upon original Islamic sources.
“Conditions in Cuba are painted as highly beneficial for young people from a healthcare and education standpoint.” Misleading information and half-truths is how TTT characterized this description of life in Cuba with details of other reports and sources providing facts justifying TTT’s position.
“It’s easy to get depressed about Climate Change.” Telling a child what emotions to have on a topic is “agenda building.” Only one side of the issue was told. TTT urged both sides be presented on climate change, but publishers chose to pull the book as the solution.
Many publishers routinely referred to the U. S. form of government as a “democracy.” The word “democracy” is not found in the Constitution nor in any of the 50 state Constitutions. Our form of government is a constitutional republic. The Pledge of Allegiance to the flag is to the Republic for which it stands, not to the democracy for which it stands.
Publishers claimed in several instances that Muslims were the original inhabitants of the area known as Israel. TTT pointed out that Jews inhabited this area hundreds of years before Islam existed.
Multiple publishers left out the terms “Islamic jihadist” and “Muslim terrorists” even when the attackers used these terms in describing themselves. No mention was made that the Barbary pirates were Muslims and the 911 hijackers were Islamic jihadists. The word “Islamic” was absent when describing the terrorists in the 1983 Lebanon Marine Barrack attacks. If the terrorists/jihadists refer to themselves using these terms, then why won’t publishers use those same terms?
Gorbachav had more to do with the Berlin Wall falling than President Ronald Reagan according to one publisher; the deficiencies of Communism were downplayed while Western democracies were marginalized; TTT was able to get re-writes on these and many other distorted areas.
In November 2013, and again in June 2014, Idaho Superintendent Tom Luna rejected offers to participate in moderated, formal debates concerning the pros and cons of Common Core. He did participate in one panel debate, to a packed house. But Luna’s unwillingness to participate in further open debate is remarkable because, beginning in 2011, Luna was president, top dog at the organization that co-created and co-copyrighted the Common Core: Council of Chief State School Officers. Nobody should have felt more vested. This article, a response to a recent Idaho Statesman interview with Luna, comes by request. Thank you, Stephanie Zimmerman.
Is Idaho’s Common Core Battle Over– Or Just Starting?
In the Nov. 30th Statesman interview granted by Tom Luna, I was not surprised to read Luna’s responses to the following questions:
Is the battle over Idaho Core Standards over? “It is definitely over in the education arena. And my experience has been so far that it is primarily over with the vast majority of parents, but it is not over politically.”
How big were the Idaho Legislature education committee hearings on Common Core standards? “I think it was an eye-opener to a lot of legislators and even people around the state who tuned in and listened because I think you heard a lot of the concerns that were raised – that were then shown to be not true: whether it’s the data we collect, who developed the standards, who has control of the standards. I have yet to have one person who says they oppose the standards tell me which standard it is that they oppose … If we do nothing else in education over the next three or four years, but continue to teach every kid to these higher standards, then measure students with this better assessment, then that is going to have more impact on improving student achievement than anything that we can do.”
Where to begin…
Common Core is just now (in the past three months) being fully implemented in Idaho’s schools. How can Mr. Luna possibly say the battle is over –when it hasn’t even had a chance to begin?? Nowhere in the country was Common Core fully, fairly or publicly vetted or debated in legislatures, with parents, or with educators before it was quietly imposed upon us. Most educators and parents are still learning the full implications of the Common Core . More and more teachers are stepping forward with their concerns about the way children are being treated. Meg Norris, Kathleen Jasper, David Cox,Savannah Kucerak, Mercedes Schneider and Kris Nielson are just a few who have made waves nationally by speaking out against Common Core. Polls show that the more parents know about it the less they like it.
Common Core is about far more than simply singling out which standard we do or don’t like. It’s the reform package as a whole that’s the problem; the standards, assessments, data collection, tiered licensure (yes, that’s Common Core, too), and the star ratings system (which make our schools sound like a motel chain).
I wouldn’t care if these are the best standards in the world; I still wouldn’t want them in Idaho because of the federal strings and mandates that come with them.
Tom Luna is a man who was essentially defeated by Common Core. His extreme political unpopularity began with his 2011 push to pass Students Come First, a set of educational reforms for Idaho that weren’t even his or his department’s original idea but that came straight out of the national Common Core playbook , and that only got worse as more and more people realized the role this former president of the CCSSO played in selling out our children’s future.
So, this particular battle may be over for Mr. Luna – we all know he’s moved on to bigger, better things. But for those of us in the trenches, we know this is far from over. We will continue to fight for local control of our children’s education.
Unfortunately for Tom Luna, his legacy will ultimately end up as the man who sold Idaho’s children’s birthright for a mess of pottage.
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Stephanie Zimmerman, author of this post, stands second from the right in the photo below.
A judge has issued a restraining order in Missouri that says that Missouri is “restrained from making any payments in the form of membership fees to the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium… including but not limited to disbursements pursuant to “Invoice #1″ issued to the State.” The restraining order is, at least temporarily, halting [some aspects of] Common Core SBAC tests in the state.
According to the Missouri Education Watchdog, “the Solicitor General, in arguing for the state defendant, argued that if the fees were not paid, there would be no assessments available in Missouri schools this year at all. This contradicts what an SBAC spokesperson said on the phone to legal counsel for the plaintiff when she said that the membership fees are separate and distinct from the charge for using the assessments. It also seems to contradict provisions of federal regulations that require the assessments developed by the consortia to be generally available to non-member states… if other states were to withdraw their membership based on the same grounds, this would require a significant reorganization of the test supplier into a commercial venture as opposed to a testing consortia… it would weaken the federal government’s requirement that states use the consortia tests in order to comply with federal regulation or waivers, because then the federal government would be granting a monopoly to a particular private company.
This ruling is a sign that the court sees some merit in the case, that SBAC may be an illegal interstate compact and thus the state’s membership in it should be null and void.”
Update: Missouri Education Watchdog has asked to make the following clarification/correction. Here it is:
“The TRO does not stop the state from implementing the SBAC test. It simply stops the state from paying any money to SBAC in the form of membership payments. The state will continue with its plans to administer the SBAC test in spring 2015, but the recently passed HB1490prohibits the student scores from that test from being used in teacher evaluations or district accreditation determinations. They call it a “Pilot” test. The money we pay them would have to be classified as a purchase of SBAC…
We were stuck in an odd situation where the company that serviced our previous test (we called it MAP) stopped providing that test in 2014 so continuing with that for another year while we develop new standards was not even an option. The legislature went for the easier temporary fix of allowing the state to use SBAC for our NCLB accountability while the new standards are being developed. They didn’t have the guts of KY to simply say we won’t be providing test data for a year. “
Adding to the Breitbart report that many have already have seen is this report by Dr. Sandra Stotsky, who was present during this month’s Common Core promotional visit by Secretary of Education to California. The U.S. Secretary of Education ignored parent protesters but spoke about his programs for implementing Common Core, including his aim to lengthen the school day and to extend each school year to year-round school. Dr. Stotsky stands in the middle of San Diego protesters in this photo.
USDE Not Interested in Parents’ Perspective on Common Core
By Sandra Stotsky
While Professors R. James Milgram and Sandra Stotsky were on a 13-city speaking tour throughout California (joined by Ze’ev Wurman in Southern California) in November, a protest rally against Common Core by parents in San Diego took place. What exactly were they protesting? A speech by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, invited by the Council for Chief State School Officers for prime time at its 2014 Annual Policy Forum at the U.S. Grant Hotel. The advanced description of his speech suggested that his talk was to center on ways to promote implementation of Common Core, such as by lengthening the school day and extending the school year to include summer as well as fall, winter, and spring. A few protesters wondered if parents would be given visiting rights.
While marching back and forth in front of the main door to the hotel, they asked the security guards to let Duncan, CCSSO officers, and the state superintendents in the audience know they were outside. No invitation to come in and listen to Duncan’s speech was forthcoming. The protesting parents outside the hotel were completely ignored by the CCSSO, Duncan, and the state superintendents listening to him, just as parents across the country have been ignored by them for five years. Not one public meeting with upset parents in any state by a US Department of Education official, a state board of education, a state commissioner or superintendent of education, a governor, a local board of education, or a local superintendent.
This is apparently the official federal policy toward the parents of the children in our public schools on whom the states have imposed the deeply flawed educational policies associated with Common Core: Keep them at a distance.
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Thank you, Dr. Stotsky.
This is a pattern. Recently, a federal agent from the Department of Education visited Salt Lake City. Although Utahns Against Common Core organized a protest during this event to call attention to the federal visit and to support Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch’s letter of rebuke of the Department of Education and its false assumption of authority, the Salt Lake City protest was, like the San Diego protest, completely ignored by the visiting federal agent. (“Keep them at a distance.”)
Heritage Foundation hosted a panel this month to inform and update the public about Common Core. The introduction by Lindsey Burke of Heritage Foundation includes her story of New Jersey homeschoolers who are being told by the state that they must conform to Common Core, even in home school. Burke also cites the rapid decline of teacher support for the Common Core, from 76% down to only 46% according to the latest poll. Enjoy.
Panelists:
Stanley Kurtz, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center, and contributing editor, National Review Online
Ted Rebarber
CEO and Founder, AccountabilityWorks
Neal McCluskey, Ph.D.
Associate Director, Center for Educational Freedom, The Cato Institute
William Estrada
Director of Federal Relations, Home School Legal Defense Association
Williamson M. Evers Research fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University
This is the second in a series of posts to be added by members of Utah’s Common Core SAGE test’s parent review board. Parent Molly Foster spoke out previously and is joined now by fellow mom Christine Ruiz as a SAGE parent review committee member who also wishes to set the record straight and to expose the objectionable aspects of the tests.
SAGE Parent Review Committee Member Speaks Out
By Christine Ruiz
In 2013 the Utah Legislature mandated parental review of SAGE test questions and established what is now called the SAGE Parent Review Committee. It was a response to concerns that the computer adaptive tests could include biases or agendas that are objectionable to Utah family values.
Much has been written about the committee and unfortunately some of it has been misleading. Consequently many Utah parents are misinformed about the review committee and are making decisions with that ‘bad information’; decisions that affect their children.
I am one of those committee members and I’d like to correct the record.
The statute, 53A-1-603, is vague as it relates to our duties; “…a committee consisting of 15 parents of Utah public education students to review all computer adaptive test questions.” Yep, that’s it. Talk about your nutshell.
So, here’s what we did and didn’t do.
WE DID review all questions (about 1500 each).
WE DID flag questions for a variety of reasons (grammar, typos, content, wrong answers, glitches, etc.).
WE DID sign nondisclosure statements (agreeing not to discuss specific test questions and materials).
Now the important part …
WE DID NOT ‘approve’ the test. We were neither tasked to nor qualified to approve the test in any aspect.
It has been erroneously suggested that “…we all feel comfortable with the test” in an article by the Deseret News (Nov 2013). That’s a misleading quote from only one member of the committee. That statement was actually contradicted by another member later in the same article. But it’s no surprise here; we expect that from the media.
However, the Utah State Office of Education (USOE) perpetuated that myth when it plastered that same quote all over its SAGE informational brochures. We/ I expect more due diligence from USOE.
I never received a phone call to verify that I concurred and I suspect the same is true for the rest of the committee. It was either an act of deliberate deceit or jaw-dropping negligence to tell parents across the state that the Parent Review Committee gives its blanket approval of the test. Neither option comforts me in the slightest.
I shudder to think that some parents may have decided to let their children take the SAGE because ‘we’ said it’s okay. That’s on me and every other committee member that feels the same as I, and didn’t speak out sooner.
This myth and any others perpetrated in the future will no longer go unanswered by this committee member. That’s a promise.
Christine Ruiz
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state statute 53A‐1‐603
(8)
(a) The State Board of Education shall establish a committee consisting of 15 parents of Utah
public education students to review all computer adaptive test questions.
(b) The committee established in Subsection (8)(a) shall include the following parent members:
(i) five members appointed by the chair of the State Board of Education;
(ii) five members appointed by the speaker of the House of Representatives; and
(iii) five members appointed by the president of the Senate.
(c) The State Board of Education shall provide staff support to the parent committee.
(d) The term of office of each member appointed in Subsection (8)(b) is four years.
(e) The chair of the State Board of Education, the speaker of the House of Representatives, and
the president of the Senate shall adjust the length of terms to stagger the terms of committee
members so that approximately 1/2 of the committee members are appointed every two
years.
(f) No member may receive compensation or benefits for the member’s service on the committee.
With gratitude to Joy Pullman, whose long version of “Top Ten Things Parents Hate About Common Core” article, with photos and videos, is posted at The Federalist, I’m sharing this extremely condensed two-pager, which can be printed out as a one-pager, front to back, on neon colored paper.
This is the year national Common Core tests kick in. It’s also the first year most people heard of Common Core, four years after bureaucrats signed our kids onto this complete overhaul of U.S. education. Why do 62 percent of parents think it’s a bad idea?
The Senseless, Infuriating Math
Common Core deforms elementary math. Even simple addition takes inordinate amounts of time.
The Lies
Common Core’s lies and half-truths include talking points essential to selling state leaders on the project, such as that Common Core is: “internationally benchmarked,” (“well, we sorta looked at what other nations do but that didn’t change anything we did”); “evidence based” (“we know there isn’t research to undergird any standards, so we just polled some people and that’s our evidence“); “college- and career-ready” (“we meant community-college ready“); “rigorous” (as long as rigorous indicates “rigid”); and “high-performing nations nationalize education” (so do low-performing nations).
Obliterating Parent Rights
Parents are frustrated. When they go to their school boards they get disgusted looks or thumb-twiddling or worse. A New Hampshire dad was actually arrested for going over his two-minute comment limit in a local school board meeting that was packed with parents complaining about graphic-sex-filled literature assignments.
The workforce-prep mentality of Common Core focuses on the materialistic benefits of education, and is not concerned with passing down knowledge, heritage, and morals. The workforce talk certainly tickles the ears of Common Core’s corporate supporters, but why do corporations get to dictate what kids learn?
Data Collection and Populace Management
Common Core enables the theft of kids’ and teachers’ data, furthering businesses’ bottom lines and governments’ populace-control fantasies, at the expense of private property and self-determination.
Common Core tests are the key instrument of data collection.
Common Core architect David Coleman admitted special interests packaged data mining into Common Core.
Common Core classifies enormous amounts of data, like as an enormous filing system.
States that use federally funded Common tests have given control of collected data to private organizations which have promised the government access to kids’ data.
Common Core and data vacuuming are philosophically aligned—they both justify themselves as solutions to problems. The goal is to use data to “seamlessly integrate” education and economy. In other words, we learned nothing from the USSR.
Distancing Parents and Children
A recent study found that the Common Core model of education results in parents being less engaged in their kids’ education and expressing more negative attitudes about schools and government.
Making Little Kids Cry
It’s one thing to teach a child to endure life’s suffering for a higher purpose. It’s another thing to inflict suffering on children because you’ve got a society to remake. Psychologists and teachers say Common Core inflicts poorly designed, experimental instruction and testing on children.
The Arrogance
Imagine you’re a mom or dad whose child is sobbing at the table trying to add two-digit numbers. Then you hear your elected representatives talking about Common Core. And it’s not to offer relief. It’s to ridicule opposition to Common Core. Florida Senate President Don Gaetz said of Common Core: “They’re not some federal conspiracy.” Wisconsin state Sen. John Lehman (D-Racine) told an audience state hearings on the topic were “crazy”. Delaware Gov. Jack Markell (D) called opponents a “distract[ing]” “fringe movement.” Well-paid “experts” say parents don’t get what’s going on because this is above parents’ ability to understand.
The Collectivism
Common Core supporters admit that several states had better curriculum requirements than Common Core. Then they say it’s still better for those states to have lowered their expectations to Common Core’s level, because that way the US has more curricular unity.
Tech companies are uber-excited about Common Core because it facilitates a nationwide, uniform market for products. But the diversity of the unregulated private market far, far outstrips the diversity of the Common Core market. That variety is one of substance, not just branding. In other words, it’s true diversity, not fake diversity. Which would you rather have: fake freedom in education, where others choose your end goal, but “let” you decide some things; or real freedom, where you pick goals and how to achieve them, and you’re the one responsible for the results? Whoops, that’s a trick question. The overlords have already picked fake freedom for us. It’s Common Core or the door, baby.
Joy Pullmann is managing editor of The Federalist and an education research fellow at The Heartland Institute.
I sat in the Early Life Child Psychology and Education center this week, watching Dr. Gary Thompson’s presentation about Common Core testing, thinking that Dr. Thompson is the fearless kid in the tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
Dr. Thompson stands armed with honesty, science and evidence, pointing out that the Emperor of SAGE/Common Core tests is stark raving naked. All around Salt Lake City, meanwhile, people play along with the wealthy emperor, pretending that nothing’s wrong with what the whole world seems to have been paid to agree are such smashing, new –dare we call them rigorous— clothes.
What does Dr. Thompson see as he analyzes the Common Core SAGE test in its birthday suit?
He points out foremost that there is such a thing as a code of ethics for the psychological testing of children.
“Wait, wait–” says the State Office of Education– “We’re not doing psychological testing on your kids.” But this does not placate Utahns who fact check for themselves. SAGE/Common Core tests –in addition to being tests of academic subjects– are psychological tests. We know this because:
1) Utah law demands it. HB15, passed in 2012, required Utah’s public and charter schools to administer computer adaptive tests aligned with Common Core. It specified “the use of behavior indicators in assessing student performance.” Behavior indicators are not math, science or language arts data points. They are psychological data points.
2) The SAGE tests are created by Utah’s test contractor, American Institutes for Research (AIR) which is primarily “one of the world’s largest behavioral and social science research organizations.” Its stated mission is “to conduct and apply the best behavioral and social science research and evaluation.”
3) The federal Department of Education –which shouldn’t, but does, call shots for the Utah State Office of Education– openly encourages psychological profiling of students via tests, calling it “data-driven decision making,” “a data quality campaign” and other positive-sounding terms. See any of its initiatives, reports and recommendations which do depend on/openly promote psychological profiling of children by testing.
Here’s how Dr. Thompson says that SAGE violates the code of ethics for psychological testing:
Standard 9.03 from the Ethical Principles of Psychologists states that “psychologists obtain informed consent for assessments. SAGE does not do this. The ethics for informed consent include telling the client (in SAGE’s case, the student and parents) what the nature, purpose and anticipated course of services will be; using clear language; allowing the client (student and parents) to ask questions; telling them about involvement of any third parties who may have access to the information gathered via the test; disclosing whether experimentation will be used; informing the client whether the test administrator is a trainee or fully qualified to administer psychological testing; obtaining consent in advance of recording or observing; potential risks; potential limitations; and more.
Each of these codes of conduct were broken by the USOE in implementing SAGE tests on Utah schools.
Standard 9.02 states that “Psychologists use assessment instruments whose validity and reliability have been established…when such validity or reliability has not been established, psychologists describe the strengths and limitations of test results and interpretation.”
There have been no independent validity and reliability studies done on SAGE tests, whatsoever, as Dr. Thompson pointed out. Another enormous principal of all scientific forms of testing– broken.
While it is clear that SAGE tests are psychological in nature, and that the tests do not adhere to the code of ethical conduct for psychological testing, there’s even more at stake.
Dr. Thompson pointed out that the future is very close to already here: Game-based assessment, also known as Stealth Assessments, are secret tests embedded in video games for schools that are further eclipsing parental rights and knowledge about what data is being collected while children are at school. Even teachers would not know what exactly is being collected or analyzed when stealth assessments are used in classroom settings.
In a scholarly journal entitled “District Administration” Dr. Thompson read, and shared, that now, in an attempt to lessen student stress, Gates-funded groups are telling us that video games are the education of the future. “District Administration” journal writes that because “complex thinking skills can’t be measured by traditional standardized tests, educators are turning to stealth assessments hidden in video games.” The article continues, “stealth assessments are seamless, so the distinction between learning and assessment is completely blurred. Kids are playing, they are learning, and they are being assessed all at the same time.” Further: “testing companies are working on ways to integrate formative assessments into daily instruction.” Children will be tested all of the time. How does a person opt out of that?
Dr. Thompson’s presentation also touched on many other issues of great importance. He spoke about the vulnerable populations that are forced to take Common Core SAGE tests (unless parents opt them out). These include children with any of a host of learning disabilities, children with depression and anxiety, children with autism and Asberger’s, children with historically poor test taking scores due to cultural bias in testing including African-American and Latino children, children with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, children from high-stress poverty homes, children with psychotic disorders, ADHD, and dual exceptional (gifted and learning disordered) to name a few.
He shared from academic journals many ethical considerations associated with Common Core’s pushing of the very young into “rigorous” and age-inappropriate standards. He shared research he’s collected, too, about the use of children’s data for marketing purposes, (quoting from the academic journal article, “Children as Consumers.” This is relevant and troubling because the SAGE test creator, AIR, has open partnerships (and data sharing policies) with numerous corporations that have no restraint on accessing SAGE-collected student information.
Thompson further discussed harm to the brain of a child using Common Core testing practices on every type of child, and using Common Core styled math on every type of learner. He spoke of the brain’s disorganization response to Common Core-styled math pedagogy and to high-stakes tests like SAGE.
This brain-analyzing portion of the presentation must be explained in detail in a separate post. Briefly: the neurological (brain-affecting) Common Core issues raised by Dr. Thompson’s research are extremely important in light of the fact that both Bill Gates (Common Core funder) and our federal government are highly focused on studying and applying research about the neurology of children, right now. The federally approved Fattah Neuroscience Initiative, also known as the White House Neuroscience Initiative, was granted federal funds to invest in brain research and drug development, and not just to prevent Alzheimer’s. Its stated aims: “optimizing interactions between the environment and the brain across the lifespan,” “applying the brain’s information processing capabilities” and “enhancing communication among federal agencies”. Congressman Fattah wrote that he is “a major proponent of brain mapping… understand…the role of individual neurons in controlling our thoughts, movements…”. –Recall that Secretary Duncan mocked the idea that the federal government was involved in this, when it was accused of collecting student data using Common Educational Data Standards. He said, “Let’s not even get into the really wacky stuff: mind control, robots, and biometric brain mapping.” Yet that is exactly what the federal Fattah Neuroscience Initiative aims to do. Congressman Fattah has made it clear that brain mapping is the aim of the White House Neuroscience Initiative. Now, let’s use our brains. Who is the only huge, captive group of guinea pigs they have under their control upon whom they can do brain mapping research (call it education) for hours and hours every single day?
Dr. Thompson’s full presentation:
You’ll want to see the whole presentation and discuss it with your local and state representatives on the school boards in detail. Each of the issues touched on in Dr. Thompson’s presentation deserves a chapter or a book written on it.
It is the enforcer of Utah’s Common Core and the primary vehicle for massive student data collection right now. We need to get rid of it, or opt individual children –by the thousands and thousands– out of it, so that its data collectors cannot do what they aim to do, and so that Common Core experimental standards cannot take deep root in our schools, cannot dictate teacher salaries, cannot narrowly define and narrowly present what is “education” to our children.
Somebody will look out for students’ mental health, privacy, and happiness, even in this age of politically motivated high-stakes SAGE testing –and soon, in this age of stealth testing. Somebodywill look out for the parents’ rights to know about and to guide psychological treatment or analysis of children. Someonewill pound on the door of the USOE, the governor, and the legislators’ offices, demanding the end of SAGE tests in Utah schools, demanding answers to the questions that Dr. Thompson and other child psychologists, such as Joan Landes and Dr. Megan Koschnick (video below) have raised.
That someone is that person in your bathroom mirror or it’s nobody, because everybody’s so busy.
Legislators are busy. Teachers are busy. Board members are busy. Reporters are busy. Common Core technological implementers and teacher development conference producers are busy. Everyone is so busy being busy that the busy-ness that matters most of all— our children and our liberty-– have lost precious ground.
An email sent to schools by the Utah State Office of Education (USOE) this week was forwarded to me.
It’s gross evidence of a gross circumstance. The USOE decided that teacher evaluations (read: salaries) will be directly tied to Common Core/SAGE student results starting at the latest next fall (2015-2016 school year).
If teachers didn’t “teach to the Common Core test” before, they will now.
Their value as a teacher is, by USOE policy, to be determined by SGP –Student Growth Percentile, meaning: the amount of Common Core -based “improvement” that students showed on their Common Core SAGE tests.
It’s a heavy, disrespectful blow to teachers.
I have learned of some teachers who outwardly nod their heads “yes” to administrations and boards but in fact ignore the Common Core standards, continuing to teach the children in their better way, in the same way they always had, prior to Common Core.
How will independent minded teachers survive this new blow?
I don’t know.
I want to remind everyone that many times the USOE has proclaimed that teachers and schools may teach in the manner that in the local, professional judgment, the schools and teachers deem best. They say Common Core and its tests do not micromanage teachers.
How untrue that claim has been.
Actions speak louder than words. The state-level threat of teachers losing pay or status, if a particular teacher’s students don’t speed along the Common Core/SAGE test chain, is an almost insurmountable, powerful micromanagement of Utah’s teachers by its government.
Why did Utah allow the USOE to evolve this much power over us? The USOE, so monstrously staffed, so stuffed full of bureaucrats, consumes many of our precious education dollars but runs un-accountably –to anyone. And the USOE has zero authority under the Utah Constitution!
Only the State School Board holds constitutional authority of Utah’s education, checked and balanced by the legislature which hold the power of the purse. The USOE is a deformed, runaway growth, much bigger and heavier than its stem. Think about it: corrupt though the state board’s election system has been, still, the electing of State Board members has been at least theoretically representative; taxpayers can vote board members out of office.
Not so for the USOE and it’s leadership and staff. Taxpayers and teachers and parents have zero say in who gets to run our educational show at the USOE level. We can’t un-elect the writers of that letter, nor can we vote out the vast number of fat-salaried appointees who boss around the teachers, principals and students of this state.
Just as the federal U.S. Department of Education has no Constitutional validity, neither does the USOE have any state-constitutional validity.
I wish school administrators, school boards, the legislature and especially the state board would respond to the USOE with a little spit and vinegar– in defense of teachers and in non-acknowledgement of the assumed authority of the USOE and its policies, schmollisees.
Subject: [Secondary ELA] Clarification – SAGE and SGPs
Colleagues: I am forwarding this clarification from both the Assessment and the Educator Effectiveness departments at USOE so that you can disseminate it to your fellow teachers.
Dear LEAs,
This E-mail is to clarify possible misunderstandings and up-to-date information in regards to SAGE and Student Growth Percentiles (SGPs), and SLOs. The SAGE results for the 2013-14 school year that were released to the public on October 27, 2014 are valid and reliable assessment results. The results create a new baseline for student achievement. Educators and parents should seriously review these results and use the results with all of the other educational information and data to support students and assist them in improving their academic achievement.
We would like to clarify the relationship of SAGE results to Student Growth Percentiles (SGPs) and to Educator Evaluation in general. The SAGE results you have recently received may be used in all of the ways you have typically used test results to make instructional decisions, inform the school improvement process, inform professional development, and evaluate programs; however, the 2013-14 SGPs are not calculated for the purposes of educator evaluation, nor to identify schools for focus and priority status under the ESEA waiver.
Business rules for calculating SGPs for educator evaluations are currently being developed by the USOE Educator Effectiveness section in cooperation with the USOE Assessment section. District representatives including Superintendents, HR Directors, Curriculum Directors, Educator Evaluation Liaisons and other stakeholders will have an opportunity to give input to these business rules prior to their implementation in June of 2015. These business rules will be used to generate teacher-level SGPs that may be used for calculation of a portion of the educator evaluation as early as August 2015, although their use will not be required until the 2015-2016 school year.
Meanwhile, districts should continue to provide professional development and continue to build rater reliability in relation to teacher and leader observations. They should continue to implement their SLO development plans and make choices about how stakeholder input will be gathered and calculated. The Educator Effectiveness team continues to recommend that teachers of both tested and non-tested subjects learn how to develop and use SLOs to provide additional measurement information about student growth. SGPs will be available for calculating student growth for the 2014-15 school year (they are also available this year), and they will be available to apply to educator evaluation in 2015-16.
Please note Utah has a very broad public records law. Most written communication to or from our state employees regarding state business are public records available to the public and media upon request. Your email communication may be subject to public disclosure.
Dr. Sandra Stotsky, emeritus professor and member of the original Common Core validation committee
Dr. Christopher Tienken, professor at Seton Hall University
Dr. Duke Pesta of Freedom Project Education
Dr. Tom Borelli, a molecular biologist
Deneen Borelli of FreedomWorks
Dr. Vern Williams of MathReasoning
The symposium was filmed and is posted here in three segments.
One of the event organizers, Janice Lenox, wrote an op-ed in the Cape May County Herald that succinctly explains why this symposium was so needed.
After a tremendous amount of grassroots labor, the Assembly bill against Common Core was read and voted on. Lenox wrote:
“We were there for the vote and absolutely ecstatic when the vote 72-2 in our favor was called. Now, on to the Senate… the Senate president passed over the bill without posting for a vote. We were told that the governor had a meeting with the Senate president and the Teachers Union president and cut a deal. “Regulation, not Legislation” –that’s what the governor wanted. He issued an executive order… He was to assemble a Study Commission to examine the PARCC testing and alleviate the teachers’ assessments for a year… and look at the Common Core… That was July 19 of this year… As of this date, Nov. 1, no Commission of any kind has been named and no information has been forthcoming… We urge Senator Steven Sweeney to do the people’s business and post Senate bill S2154 to the floor for a vote and let the peoples’ voices be heard…. Let teachers teach and parents parent.”
If the good people of New Jersey will simply watch, learn, and share these vital messages from the symposium speakers, and then firmly let Senator Sweeney and their other elected representatives exactly how important this is, maybe this mountain will move move.
Connecticut Against Common Core hosted Seton Hall University professor Dr. Christopher Tienken last month. Start at minute 4:22 for Dr. Tienken’s speech.
Dr. Tienken talks about intended and unintended consequences of any treatment –including educational “treatment,” to children. He explains how important it is to have evidence for the need and the effectiveness of Common Core, which he refers to as “the latest round of standardization.” He defines himself not as others do, as “anti-Common Core” but more “pro-evidence”. He assesses education reforms through the lens of evidence, sourcing all of his statements and writings against Common Core, which you may read at his website and in the many academic journals in which he has been published.
He challenges the assumptions that underlie advocacy for Common Core.
For example: What if the results of the international test are not meaningful? –We might not be lagging at all in international competitiveness. None of the international tests can tell you the quality of a national education system nor can they predict the economic future. That’s not just an opinion; that’s his job, he says –reading 400 page technical manuals on international testing. Only about 6,000 kids in a country take these tests, and they may not be at all representative of the rest of the kids in that country. In China and Singapore, for example, most students aren’t in high school when the tests are administered. Only the wealthiest kids take these tests, not second language learners and others. These tests, he says, are sensitive to factors outside of school. PISA and TIMMS tests, for example, measure skills akin to the 19th century. Innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, skills that drive economies today, are not even measured.
Why do Americans think that one narrow test (not evidence based) will be the ultimate predictor of student and national economic achievement?
Dr. Tienken later breaks out the charts to show how well the United States is actually doing, showing the misguidedness of Common Core’s foundational claims.
“…The US ranks 1st in the world in Nobel Prizes in the sciences and medicine. 60% of all Nobel Laureates come from US public schools. The US ranks 1st in the world in the number of utility patents and the number of scientific papers produced.
The US ranks 2nd in the world on the Global Creativity Index, 3rd on the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index, and 5th on the Global Innovation Index.
We rank in the top 10 in the industrialized world for the percentage of high school graduates and the percentage of our population with BA degrees.
We produce the highest percentage of engineers who are qualified to work in multi-national corporations, we produce the greatest number of engineering doctorates, over 90% of which go to US born students, and the list of the accomplishments goes on.
In short, the arguments that all these standardizing reforms are both necessary and will increase competitiveness and secure a vibrant macro-economic future rest on pillars of sand.” –Dr. Christopher Tienken, Seton Hall University
That quote, from a speech and article Dr. Christopher Tienken posted recently, explains that negative myths about the terrible quality of American education abound, in part, so that corporations can make money and power grabbers can grab power. We must not believe or act on the negative myths.
Boards of education are the last defense against this corporatism, social Darwinism and neoliberalism that is combining to take control over American education, says Tienken. He encourages boards to push back. (Why don’t locals do their own fact checking, and then echo Dr. Tienken, rather than Coleman, Barber or the USOE?) Here are some facts you can share from Dr. Tienken as you explain why you are opting out and pushing back:
“To proclaim that one test and one set of curriculum standards, the Common Core, can provide meaningful data about whether a child is college and career ready, that is, ready to attend one of the over 4,400 colleges and universities in the US or pursue one of the tens of thousands of careers that exist or those that don’t but will by the time this year’s preschool class, the class or 2029 or 2030 graduates high school, is educationally bankrupt. No test, not the ACT nor SAT, or any other test can tell you that. In fact, high school GPA is a better predictor of first year college success and college completion than either the SAT or ACT. Maybe that is why there are now almost 1,000 colleges and universities that don’t require either test or make it optional.”
Moreover, he writes: “You cannot standardize creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. What is being cut from schools now, because of this misguided adherence to standardization, are the subjects and experiences that children will really need to acquire the skills necessary to compete in a global economy in 2030.”
I have no personal ill will against the Common Core pushers; I’d bake them cookies if they were my neighbors and help carpool their kids. But the fact is, nice people or not, that they are all wrong for allowing Common Core and Common Data Standards to harm our students’ academics, privacy, creativity and autonomy. The list of wrong thinkers is long.
Governor Herbert is wrong. His Prosperity 2020 and State Longitudinal Database System is wrong. His friends in the Chamber of Commerce are wrong. His education advisor is wrong. His State Office of Education is wrong. His NGA Governors’ private club is wrong. Utah companies such as Education First and the School Improvment Network are wrong. SAGE/AIR testing and its prime pusher, Asst. Supt. Judy Park, are wrong. Local school boards, principals, charter school boards and anyone who parrots what others say, are wrong. No matter how many people get on board with Common Core, it’s still wrong.
Dr. Tienken (and countless others) have assessed this situation correctly.
Word of mouth is always better than big, fat glossy marketing campaigns. Help the truth to surface. Please read Tienken’s article and pass it on to your local boards, state board, principals, legislators, local chambers of commerce, and the Governor’s office.
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COMMON CORE 
First the good news:
Check out the hundreds of comments written in response to the invitation to submit commentary to the federal CEP. You will find an overwhelming number who do not want the federal government to create federal unit tracking for individuals.
Notable pro-privacy comments came from moms and dads and teachers, from the Future of Privacy Forum, the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, the American Civil Liberties Union, United States Parents Involved in Education, The Electronic Privacy Information Center, the American Principles Project, and many others.
(There are small and big groups who proclaim that creating a federal unit tracking system is a great idea, for various (less vital) reasons. Privacy, schmivacy, they say: just overturn the student record ban. Bill Gates. The U.N. There’s one group that calls itself “The Young Invincibles” that released a Student Agenda for Postsecondary Data Reform calling for collecting data on all students directly to the federal level.)
FYI, this fight– for and against removing privacy rights– is not new. Three years ago, privacy-enders were, for various reasons, pushing for a bill (Senator Rubio’s and Senator Warner’s) that would have done exactly what the CEP is aiming to do right now. See this 2013 article on what Bill Gates’ think tanks and Rubio/Warner had planned.
Some now wonder if the federal CEP commission will try to hijack well-intentioned bills, such as Rep. Mia Love’s Know Before You Go bill, in order to achieve their privacy-ending scheme.
Here’s the bad news:
Even though there were SO many comments given to the CEP commission stating, like this classic: “Our personal information is not for your use. Keep your hands off of it. This is just plain wrong. Stop it.” –Still, public comments are only public comments. There is nothing in the law that created the CEP commission (less than a year ago, CEP was created by Paul Ryan and company) that states that the CEP has to respect the wishes of the people who send in public comments. That’s what happens when you allow appointees to run the show. The public has no actual recourse, no voting power, when it hates how this appointee-driven show is being run.
So tell your senators and reps.
They do have power.
And privacy is huge. It’s basic to American freedom. Remember that part in the fourth amendment to the Constitution about being safe from intrusion in our papers and personal effects?
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
The Fifth Amendment further protects property (and privacy):
“No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
Do something small. Write one letter. Make one phone call. Tell your representatives that you expect them to represent your will on this. We have to defend our rights; no one else cares if we don’t care.
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