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
- Building data systems…”
From promoting school-collected data for the “School Climate” program, to the twenty three pages of links to articles about data collection, Education44 seems to focus on data collection, in order to administer these Obama-approved programs.
What does it all mean?
We can only guess. No citizen is allowed, no reporter is allowed, to visit secret meetings of self appointed shadow governments, such as Obama’s new Education44. No citizen has ever been able to attend any of the closed-door meetings: of the Council of Chief State School Officers, of the National Governors Association, of the partnership meetings between the U.S. Department of Education and EIMAC; nor of the partnership meetings between Microsoft and Pearson, Bill Gates and the Department of Education, nor of the Global Silicon Valley and Obama’s darling Quazzo… These meetings, though, function as shadow governments to education, because the unelected are running the education shows –and are using education tax dollars to function.
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.
If you think I am just opining that there’s an actual, evil agenda to really remove local control from Americans, please think again; the ed tech conference of the year, to be held here in Utah in a few weeks, is founded on the GSV’s core principals –which do include GSV’s stated goal of “Eliminating Elected School Boards”.) And Marc Tucker (of the Obama-approved Center for American Progress) has been spouting for years about the goal of removing what he calls the beloved American emblem: local control.
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.
I wish more legislators would put on their big-boy pants and take back the reins of control, as Rep. Massie, Rep. Chaffetz, Rep. Jones, Rep. Biggs, Rep. Amash, Rep. Hice, Rep. Labrador, and Rep. Gaetz are aiming to do with H.R. 899.
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.
COMMON CORE 