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…
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.
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.
“[A]s on much else, Americans are divided about how best to teach and understand U.S. history. This is precisely why the new, lengthy, and detailed AP U.S. History Framework is such a bad idea…. The College Board has drastically eroded the freedom of states, school districts, teachers, and parents to choose the history they teach their children. That is why this change must not stand.”
The College Board, the private company that produces the SAT test and the various Advanced Placement (AP) exams, has kicked off a national controversy by issuing a new and unprecedentedly detailed “Framework” for its AP U.S. History exam. This Framework will effectively force American high schools to teach U.S. history from a leftist perspective. The College Board disclaims political intent, insisting that the new Framework provides a “balanced” guide that merely helps to streamline the AP U.S. History course while enhancing teacher flexibility. Not only the Framework itself, but the history of its development suggests that a balanced presentation of the American story was not the College Board’s goal.
The origins of the new AP U.S. History framework are closely tied to a movement of left-leaning historians that aims to “internationalize” the teaching of American history. The goal is to “end American history as we have known it” by substituting a more “transnational” narrative for the traditional account.
This movement’s goals are clearly political, and include the promotion of an American foreign policy that eschews the unilateral use of force. The movement to “internationalize” the U.S. History curriculum also seeks to produce a generation of Americans more amendable to working through the United Nations and various left-leaning “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) on issues like the environment and nuclear proliferation. A willingness to use foreign law to interpret the U.S. Constitution is likewise encouraged.
The College Board formed a close alliance with this movement to internationalize the teaching of American history just prior to initiating its redesign of the AP U.S. History exam. Key figures in that alliance are now in charge of the AP U.S. History redesign process, including the committee charged with writing the new AP U.S. History exam. The new AP U.S. History Framework clearly shows the imprint of the movement to de-nationalize American history. Before I trace the rise of this movement and its ties to the College Board, let’s have a closer look at its goals.
NYU historian Thomas Bender is the leading spokesman for the movement to internationalize the U.S. History curriculum at every educational level. The fullest and clearest statement of Bender’s views can be found in his 2006 book, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History. Bender is a thoroughgoing critic of American exceptionalism, the notion that America is freer and more democratic than any other nation, and for that reason, a model, vindicator, and at times the chief defender of ordered liberty and self-government in the world.
In opposition to this, Bender wants to subordinate American identity to a cosmopolitan, “transnational” sensibility. Bender urges us to see each nation, our own included, as but “a province among the provinces that make up the world.” Whereas the old U.S. history forged a shared national identity by emphasizing America’s distinctiveness, Bender hopes to encourage cosmopolitanism by “internationalizing” the American story.
Bender laments that history as taught in our schools has bred an “acceptance of the nation as the dominant form of human solidarity.” The growing focus on gender, race, and ethnicity is welcome, says Bender, but does little to transform an underlying historical narrative built around the nation. Even the rise of world history in the schools has backfired, Bender maintains, by making it appear as though American history and world history are somehow different topics.
Bender understands that his transnational twist on American history has profound political implications. He complains that while working on his book (during George W. Bush’s presidency), “a discourse of exceptionalism and policies based on it became omnipresent in American public life.” Bender promises that his transnational framing of American history “will give little comfort” to the proponents of policies based on American exceptionalism.
He worries, however, that his globalizing approach to American history might be used to defend precisely the sort of “hegemonic” American foreign-policy he abhors. To prevent this, Bender urges that American history be taught, not only from an American point of view, but from the perspective of those who are subject to American power. “Americans have always found it difficult to imagine themselves as an enemy, as a problem for other people,” says Bender. By showing us ourselves through our enemies’ eyes, Bender hopes to promote humbler and more collaborative forms of American foreign-policy.
Bender complains about George W. Bush era foreign policy, not only in respect to war, but also in the matters of, “environment, trade, nuclear, and other policies.” Clearly, he hopes that his anti-exceptionalist vision of American-history will encourage a different approach to foreign affairs. Bender also openly hopes that students exposed to a less “national” version of American history will sympathize with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s willingness to use foreign law to interpret the U.S. Constitution, rather than with Justice Antonin Scalia’s rejection of foreign law as an arbiter of American jurisprudence.
In 2006, A Nation Among Nations provoked a sharp exchange between Bender and Brooklyn College professor of history, Robert David Johnson in the journal Historically Speaking. Going on the attack, Johnson calls Bender’s “transnational” version of American history, “little more than an attempt to ensure that students think a certain way about contemporary events.” Johnson warns Bender that “establishing as an outcome for high school history classes the judicial philosophy of Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer . . . will undermine support for public education among citizens who disagree with the preferred ideology.”
Bender parries Johnson’s charges of politicization with a non-denial denial. I offer no “rules for specific actions in the world,” says Bender, nor is my book about “any specific foreign policy.” But Bender doesn’t have to write a policy brief. To achieve his preferred policy results, he merely needs to inculcate a cosmopolitan sensibility and an abiding hostility to American exceptionalism. Bender also denies Johnson’s claim that he wants to “merge” high school U.S. history with World history, yet Bender clearly wants to integrate them in a way that subordinates the American national story to the transnational, globalist perspective.
To understand the deep entanglement of the College Board in Bender’s political and intellectual project, we need to return to 2000, when a group of 78 historians under the auspices of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) issued the flagship document of the movement to “internationalize” American history, “The La Pietra Report.” Bender authored that report, and it prefigures all the themes he develops in his later writings.
The report takes its name from the Italian villa where the meetings took place, from 1997 to 2000. The La Pietra Report makes much of the fact that those meetings were held outside the United States, and that nearly a third of the scholars working to forge a new U.S. History curriculum were non-Americans. One such scholar, in fact, was Cuban.
Francesca Lopez Civeira, of the University of Havana, participated in absentia, sending a paper on American power as “an object of fear” in Cuban historiography. That fit squarely into a central theme of the La Pietra Report, which urges that American students be exposed to evidence of the “controversial power and presence” of the United States beyond our borders, to the point where “one’s native land seems foreign.”
In common with Bender’s later work, an interim report on the 1998 La Pietra conference warns that a newly internationalized American history could inadvertently create a new “…American global city on a hill, the new model for a global culture and economy. There is a danger of a triumphalism that this history could fall into, thus becoming the ideological justification for the latest phase of capitalism.” Again, the La Pietra scholars try to prevent an internationalized history from justifying America’s global economic and military reach by focusing on how America’s alleged victims and enemies feel about the use of our power.
A conclave of historians with a left-wing foreign policy agenda, a third of them from foreign countries, seems an odd inspiration for the ostensibly non-partisan College Board’s redesign of the AP U.S. History Exam. Yet that is exactly what the La Pietra conference and its report became.
In 2002, two years after the appearance of the La Pietra Report, Rethinking American History in a Global Age, a collection of representative papers from the La Pietra conference was published, with Bender as its editor. At the same moment, the Organization of American Historians, which had sponsored the La Pietra Report, moved to strengthen its collaborative relationship with the College Board’s AP U.S. History program. This led to the formation in 2003 of a Joint OAH/AP Advisory Board on Teaching the U.S. History Survey Course. This Advisory Board focused its efforts on fulfilling the goals of the La Pietra Report. So by forging an alliance with the College Board, Bender and his allies discovered a way to transform the teaching of U.S. history.
Ted Dickson, who served as Co-Chair of the AP U.S. History Curriculum Development and Assessment Committee (the body that wrote the new AP U.S. History Framework), was an original member of the joint panel seeking to advance the goals of the La Pietra Report.
In June of 2004, just as the Joint OAH/AP Advisory Board was searching for ways to reshape the teaching of U.S. history along “transnational” lines, Thomas Bender was invited to address hundreds of readers gathered to grade the essay portion of that year’s AP U.S. History Exam. Bender’s talk, still available at the AP Central website, reflects his political agenda. Speaking in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq, Bender argues that historians who offer narratives of American exceptionalism “bear some responsibility” for reinforcing “a unilateralist understanding of the United States in the world.” That attitude, says Bender, must be fought.
Offering an alternative, transnational history designed to combat American “unilateralism,” Bender says that Columbus and his successors didn’t discover America so much as they discovered “the ocean world,” a new global community united by the oceans. The oceans, in turn, made possible the slave trade and the birth of modern capitalism, which improved the lives of European, but brought exploitation and tragic injustice to the rest of the world. Bender concludes that early American history is only partially about “utopian dreams of opportunity or escape”. The beginnings of the American story, says Bender, are also deeply rooted in the birth of capitalism, and the “capture, constraint, and exploitation” this implies.
In other words, Bender wants early American history to be less about the Pilgrims, Plymouth Colony, and John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” speech, and more about the role of the plantation economy and the slave trade in the rise of an intrinsically exploitative international capitalism.
If the College Board didn’t fully understand the political agenda behind Bender’s La Pietra Report before his talk to the AP Exam readers, they had to understand it after. Yet instead of distancing themselves from this highly politicized and left-leaning approach to American history, the College Board redoubled its efforts on Bender’s behalf.
The OAH-AP Joint Advisory Board decided to publish a collection of essays that would serve as a how-to manual for adopting the recommendations of Bender’s La Pietra Report. So, for example, a scholarly essay on American “cultural imperialism” would be paired with a piece by a high school teacher explaining how the topic of American cultural imperialism could be adapted to the AP U.S. History course. Ted Dickson, future co-chair of the committee that actually wrote the new Framework, was chosen to co-edit this book, which was published in 2008 as America on the World Stage: A Global Approach to U.S. History. Thomas Bender wrote an introduction to the book explaining the philosophy behind the La Pietra Report.
A bit of the material in America on the World Stage—an essay on international responses to the Declaration of Independence, for example—could backfire on Bender by reinforcing an American exceptionalist narrative. Most of the essays in America on the World Stage, however, read like deconstructions of the American story, or catalogues of (alleged) American shame.
Consider the treatment of immigration, which was written by Florida State University historian, Suzanne Sinke, who co-chaired (with Ted Dickson) the committee that wrote the new AP U.S. History Framework. Sinke tells the tale of an early 20th Century ethnically Dutch woman who immigrated to America, merely to leave and go elsewhere. Traditional historians would not treat this woman as an American “immigrant” at all. And that’s the point. Sinke emphasizes that her goal in telling the story of a woman who merely passed through America without deciding to stay and become a citizen is to teach us “to think beyond national histories and the terms that are caught up in them.”
Ted Dickson’s companion piece on how to teach Sinke’s essay (co-authored with Louisa Bond Moffitt), suggests asking students why the term “migration” might be preferable to “immigration.” The answer is that “immigration” implies a specific and permanent national destination, whereas “migration” is simply about the movement of people across borders, without any reference to adopting a national identity. The political subtext is clear: national interest and national identity take second place to the interests of individual “migrants,” whose loyalties are ultimately “transnational.”
So just before they became co-chairs of the committee that redesigned the AP U.S. History Framework, Suzanne Sinke and Ted Dickson worked closely together on a project whose goal was to reshape the U.S. History Survey Course along the lines recommended by Thomas Bender and the La Pietra Report.
Lawrence Charap, the College Board’s AP Curriculum and Content Development Director, is in overall charge of the AP U.S. History redesign process. Presumably, Sinke and Dickson answer to him. So it is of interest that Charap wrote the companion piece in America on the World Stage to the scholarly article on American cultural imperialism. This scholarly treatment of American cultural imperialism, penned by left-leaning University of Michigan historian Penny Von Eschen, is relentlessly critical of America’s economic and military presence in the world. Eschen, for example, touts the Marxist tract, How to Read Donald Duck, by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelhart, as the classic treatment of American cultural imperialism. How to Read Donald Duck explores the subtle and sinister ways in which Disney cartoons advocate “adherence to the U.S. economic system and capitalist values and work ethic,” as if this was a very bad thing.
Charap’s essay highlights America’s commercial advertisements and anti-Soviet propaganda efforts in the Middle East during the Cold War. Charap seeks out off-putting examples of American propaganda and then suggests that students to put themselves in the places of people in the Soviet block or developing world as they respond to the American presence. This, indeed, is teaching students to see their country through the eyes of its alleged “victims” and enemies.
So the three people most immediately responsible for the writing of the new AP U.S. History Framework were intimately involved in the College Board’s effort to transform the teaching of American history along the lines of Bender’s La Pietra Report. What’s more, the AP U.S. History redesign process began in August of 2006, just about the time America on the World Stage was taking shape. Dickson, a co-editor of that book, was on the original redesign committee as well as the later one that actually wrote the new AP U.S. History Framework. Dickson himself notes that his work with the OAH (which largely focused on advancing the goals of the La Pietra Report) was a key factor in the College Board’s decision to appoint him to the AP U.S. History Redesign Commission. How can American conservatives, moderates, and even traditional liberals trust an AP U.S. History redesign effort led by figures who were so deeply enmeshed in a leftist attempt to reshape the American history curriculum?
A detailed analysis of the new AP U.S. History Framework is for another time. Suffice it to say that in its downplaying of America’s traditional national story and emphasis instead on material causation and exploitation within the context of a transnational Atlantic World, the new AP U.S. History Framework is a huge step in the direction of precisely the sort of de-nationalized American history advocated by Thomas Bender and the La Pietra Report.
It is also important to emphasize that the concept of American exceptionalism, which is systematically excised from, and contradicted by, the redesigned Framework, is an integral part of several state curriculum guides, including the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). That raises serious legal questions about the compatibility of the redesigned Framework with state standards.
This is not to say that Bender, the La Pietra Report, and the attack on American exceptionalism are the only important ideological influences on the redesigned AP U.S. History Framework. Several other important streams of political and intellectual influence have shaped the new Framework, and I will be detailing these in future reports.
It is true, of course, that as on much else, Americans are divided about how best to teach and understand U.S. history. This is precisely why the new, lengthy, and detailed AP U.S. History Framework is such a bad idea. The brief five-page conceptual guideline the Framework replaced allowed sufficient flexibility for teachers to approach U.S. History from a wide variety of perspectives. Liberals, conservatives, and anyone in-between could teach U.S. history their way, and still see their students do well on the AP Test. The College Board’s new and vastly more detailed guidelines can only be interpreted as an attempt to hijack the teaching of U.S. history on behalf of a leftist political and ideological perspective. The College Board has drastically eroded the freedom of states, school districts, teachers, and parents to choose the history they teach their children. That is why this change must not stand.
— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and can be reached at comments.kurtz@nationalreview.com. This article is reposted with permission from the author.
I love to watch my favorite thinkers from the left and the right wing agree that “college- and career- ready standards” or Common Core– aka ObamaCore –along with its CEDS data-grabbing plot in cahoots with the CCSSO — is utterly unacceptable and has got to go.
Today I read Stanley Kurtz (conservative writer) who praised Diane Ravitch (liberal writer) for her public call for Congressional hearingson Common Core.
Both are must-read articles.
They explain why in recent cases of states dropping Common Core, leading events appear to be bipartisan efforts. Nobody likes to be micromanaged. And the Constitution protects us all.
Look at a few highlights of the Stop Common Core fight:
Last year, in February, liberal educator/historian Diane Ravitch announced that she could not support Common Core. In April, eight Republican senators wrote an open letter decrying Common Core. The same month, the national GOP met to discuss (and then passed) the anti-Common Core resolution. In August, Dr. Joseph Rella, a superintendent of Comsewogue District in New York, led 1,500 parents in a rally against Common Core. In October, Democratic Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey penned an open letter to Secretary Arne Duncan, also attacking federal-corporate education “reforms” in student data collection. The next month, 132 Catholic scholars wrote a letter to U.S. Bishops, voicing their concerns about Common Core. Following several governors who wrote executive orders” against Common Core, a group of Florida parents launched a parental national executive order against Common Core and student data mining. And the teachers! Look at heroic progressive Democrat teacher Paul Horton alongside conservative Republican teacher David Cox — two examples of thousands from both political camps, equally opposed to Common Core.
“The misguided notion of social justice that stands behind the Common Core excuses in the minds of its advocates… silly little things like the consent of the governed… Congress is obligated to investigate.”
Ravitch wrote: “The story about Bill Gates’ swift and silent takeover of American education is startling. His role and the role of the U.S. Department of Education in drafting and imposing the Common Core standards on almost every state should be investigated by Congress.
“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.
“The close involvement of Arne Duncan raises questions about whether the law was broken.
“Thanks to the story in the Washington Post and to diligent bloggers, we now know that one very rich man bought the enthusiastic support of interest groups on the left and right to campaign for the Common Core.
“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?”
——————
Ravitch and Kurtz make me proud to be an American. This is what freedom of speech, freedom of political choice and the national tradition of lively debate can do.
According to Stanley Kurtz, whose Fox News editorial is excerpted below, one of Obama’s biggest plans to create socialism in America comes in the form of Common Core education. His book on the subject is in stores now: “Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities.”
Kurtz says that Obama is quietly promoting a dumbed-down national curriculum (called “rigorous”) that is designed to artificially suppress achievement gaps between urban and suburban students. Kurtz says that although the right way to help poorly performing students is not to gut standards but to raise achievement, still Obama is committed to defining performance down. What a way to equalize college readiness.
Kurtz concludes that Obama’s ultimate goal is to erase the differences between local school districts with a massive redistribution of suburban education spending to the cities.
What if President Obama’s most ambitious attempt to transform American society was also his quietest plan? You wouldn’t vote against the president on account of a program you’d never heard about, of course. That, I’d wager, is why President Obama has told the American public next-to-nothing about his plans to undercut the political and financial independence of America’s suburban school districts.
Obama is quietly busy making an end-run around our constitutional system, which forbids federal control of what your children learn in school. Step one, already well under way, is a dumbed-down national curriculum designed to artificially suppress achievement gaps between urban and suburban students. The right way to help poorly performing students is not to gut standards but to raise achievement, yet Obama is committed to defining performance down. That’s why the president’s ultimate goal is to erase the differences between local school districts with a massive redistribution of suburban education spending to the cities.
The 2008 controversy over Obama’s years of education work with that famously unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers has faded from view. For a moment, it seemed as though Ayers’ radical education legacy would carry forward into Obama’s presidency. That’s because Linda Darling-Hammond, Ayers’ favorite education expert and head of Obama’s education transition team, was on a fast track to appointment as secretary of education until her leftism alienated even many Democrats.
(LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND)
When Arne Duncan, who ostensibly backs demanding standards and tests, became education secretary instead, it looked as though Obama had tacked center. He hadn’t, and appearances to the contrary, neither had Darling-Hammond left the scene.
(BILL AYERS)
The core of the hard-left’s education agenda – a program shared by Obama, Ayers, and Darling-Hammond alike – has three parts: 1) a politicized curriculum that promotes leftist notions of “social justice,” 2) reducing “disparate outcomes” between students in different districts by undercutting standards, and 3) a redistribution of suburban education funding to less-well-off urban schools. Achieving these goals… requires the federal government to usurp local control of K-12 schooling.
(ARNE DUNCAN)
Obama is half-way there.
How did he do it? Instead of submitting his controversial education proposals to Congress and kicking off a vigorous national debate, Obama quietly marked $4.35 billion of federal stimulus spending for his Race to the Top education initiative. Since the stimulus bill was rushed through Congress with barely any debate on economic policy, much less education, Obama never had to go public with his plans.
By coordinating with outside groups not accountable to the voters, like the deep-pocketed Gates Foundation, the White House then orchestrated the creation of a national Common Core of education standards, with an accompanying curriculum and tests.
Supposedly, these standards have been voluntarily adopted by more than 40 states. In fact, by effectively conditioning eligibility for Race to the Top grants on participation in the Common Core, the Obama administration has forced economically pinched states to surrender control of their school curricula to the federal government. Cleverly, states have been pressed to sign on to the Common Core before the actual standards, curricula, and tests are revealed in a second Obama term. The entire scheme is arguably both illegal and unconstitutional. Yet it is moving forward, and the public knows virtually nothing about it.
A few conservatives have been fooled by the seemingly traditionalist call for national “standards.” Yet most conservative education experts understand that the new national standards will be low, not high. With so many pressing economic issues on the table, however, nobody’s listening. Too bad, because the ultimate outcome of Obama’s education scheme will actually be economic: a sweeping redistribution of suburban education funding to the cities. Far from having departing the scene, Obama’s former adviser, Linda Darling-Hammond, is at the center of this plan. She works with the Smarter-Balanced Assessment Consortium, selected by the administration to create the testing system for the new Common Core. Darling-Hammond has gone out of her way to downplay her role with the Smarter-Balanced Consortium, but the group’s own publications make it clear that she is effectively running the show. So, although Darling-Hammond is the top national opponent of standardized tests, she is now effectively in charge of designing a new K-12 testing system for much of the nation. The result will be politically correct questions, and standards that aren’t really standards at all.
That’s only part one of the plan. President Obama’s Department of Education has established an Equity and Excellence Commission, charged with finding “ways to restructure school finance systems to achieve equity in the distribution of educational resources and further student achievement and attainment.” Conveniently, the commission’s recommendations will emerge only during a possible second Obama term. Darling-Hammond is a member of that commission, and if past experience is a guide will have outsize influence on its recommendations.
Darling-Hammond has already made her intentions clear. She is pushing a plan to add common “resource standards” to the new Common Core’s curricular standards. That is, Darling-Hammond hopes to condition federal education aid on the equalization of school funding across municipal lines. She has also proposed allowing students to transfer across school district lines, with transportation provided at government expense. The target here is the suburbs. Obama and Darling-Hammond are both longtime supporters of the little-known “regional equity” movement, which aims to undercut the political independence of America’s suburbs so as to redistribute suburban wealth to the cities. Obama is too sharp politically to advertise this part of his program, yet he is aggressively pressing it forward.
The right to educate your children as you see fit has traditionally stood at the very center of the American vision of self-government and personal liberty… Agree or disagree, shouldn’t President Obama clearly explain his ambitious redistributive plans for K-12 education – and America’s suburbs – so that they can be discussed and debated during this epochal national election?
According to Stanley Kurtz, whose Fox News editorial is excerpted below, one of Obama’s biggest plans to create socialism in America comes in the form of Common Core education. His book on the subject is in stores now: “Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities.”
COMMON CORE 