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#1  WHO CARES ABOUT ESSA/ESEA?

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:

• UT Senator Mike Lee.
• 64 of the U.S. House of Representatives

Amash Babin Bishop (UT) Blackburn Brat Bridenstine Brooks (AL) Buck Chabot Chaffetz Clawson (FL) Culberson DeSantis DesJarlais Duncan (SC) Farenthold Fleming Franks (AZ) Gohmert Gosar Gowdy Graves (LA)

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

• American Principles Project.
• Heritage Foundation.
• Michelle Malkin.
• Utahns Against Common Core – we published a simple chart that compares the old bill to the new here.
• 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.
• Utah’s Heather Gardner read all 1061 pages of the bill and posted her clear, documented report today on her blog, Fire and Ice.
• Utah’s Alyson Williams, assisted by 50 Utah parents, composed a brilliant letter to the House of Representatives after they’d read the bill.
• Jane Robbins of American Principles Project published a reader-friendly article at Pulse2016 here, explaining as Michelle Malkin did, that a candidate who takes a stand against this bill will have parents crawling over broken glass to support his race.
• I wrote about the bill, too, recently (and months ago, when it was called by other names.)

There are many more,  of course.

There are enough testifiers out there now, that the Senate cannot honestly pretend not to know how bad it is.

#3 WHAT’S IN IT?

The ESSA/ESEA  bill imposes federal dictates on localities, loads many new federal programs on the nation, authorizes the feds to veto what states want to do; increases testing and data mining, cements common standards and common data (“universal principles of design”) shifts power to put the feds in charge of babies’ education, veers into private  school decision making; and  is as utterly out of harmony with the freedoms outlined in the U.S. Constitution as Obamacare, in no way blessing children’s lives.

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.

 

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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…

Dr. Gary Thompson, a Doctor of Clinical Psychology who has exposed the non-validity of the Common Core tests themselves, has now written an analysis of the federal “Final Rule” entitled “Primum Non Nocere: First Do No Harm.”

(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.

Ludicrious?

 

Dr. Thompson finds this as ludicrious, and so he has put into more readable language what the US Department of ED decreed –and remember, this decree takes effect September 15, 2015:

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.

Below are just three sample highlights from Dr. Thompson’s “Primum Non Nocere” that stood out as I read the 44-page analysis.

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.

 

THREE HIGHLIGHTS from Primum Non Nocere:

 

US Department of Education Fraudulent Conclusion – Number One:

To support the Department’s decree, that special education students don’t need special education, it cited a 2010 research journal article: “Do Special Education Interventions Improve Learning of Secondary Content? A MetaAnalysis.”  Dr. Thompson went to that research journal.

Guess what he found there?

• 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.

 

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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, was thrown 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 of over 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.

 

 

 

 

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