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Additional Titles

ABOLISHING REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT THROUGH EDUCATION: COMMON CORE, CHOICE & CHARTER SCHOOLS
PART 1 of 4

 

By Anita Hoge
January 13, 2014
NewsWithViews.com

Transforming America One City at a Time

Is this country at a tipping point? How do you transform our Republic? There are four main issues I will discuss in this article:

• Governance—removing locally elected school officials;
• Funding—ushering in federal choice and vouchers under the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) which will change our system of taxing and financing schools to one where the funding will follow the child (this is also a means to control private schools and expand charter schools);
• Charter schools—replacing your local neighborhood school with a zealous for-profit agenda so that there will no longer be parent or voter input, or elected school boards, specifically with an aim to kill public education.
• Common Core Standards—ushering in a system of individualized, psychotherapeutic learning; the standardization of teaching, testing, and technology in all 50 states; nationalizing education ; and changing traditional education based on academics to a workforce training model.

The combination of all four points above puts this scenario together. It demonstrates that this is the plan for the destruction of our country. The following stories tell the tale.

New Orleans. New York. Chicago. Detroit. Philadelphia. Washington DC, and countless other cities are casting a glimpse in how this nation is being transformed. If these large cities can be transformed, what chance do small cities and towns have to sidestep government takeover? There are both Democrat and Republican fingerprints all over this agenda. Based on a crisis such as a natural disaster, financial bankruptcy, corruption, or some other incident, there is an agenda to take control of a city’s schools by transferring all authority to the mayor or the governor. In 2006, an action guide for mayors was published by the United States Conference for Mayors and funded by the Gates Foundation called, "Mayoral Leadership and Involvement in Education, An Action Guide for Success." It detailed a step-by-step process to gain control over a city, particularly its schools. Similarly, in 2008, the National Governor's Association wrote a report, "State Support for High Performing Charter School Expansion," which was a plan for state governors to expand charter schools. Is this the bigger plan?

What unique circumstances must be in place to force the closing of publicly-run schools by reorganizing them to become privatized charter schools? Dissolving all elected school board members and replacing them with appointed councils? Firing all the teachers and thereby breaking the back of the unions? [Leave aside for now the debate of benefit versus harm of the teachers unions, ed.] Replacing experienced teachers with fledgling ‘Teach For America’ or ‘Education Pioneer’ newbies who have had just a few weeks of training? Firing teachers through based on subjective evaluations and “high stakes” testing of students that measures and molds their personalities? Designing a tax system that moves the tax base away from the local community? Forcing local neighborhood schools to close? Dislocating students from their neighborhood surroundings? Co-locating charter schools within a public school? Destroying both your parental voice and your representative vote so that there is no longer any local school district accountability?

Many of us over the past few decades have been watching elected officials be thrown out of their rightful positions. We have watched as parents and educators at meetings and rallies begging for their schools not to close. Do American citizens truly understand the overall effects of these increasingly common local events to the entire country? Is there more to this story? Yes!

Common Core and Its Agenda

This report explains the reality that America is facing right now. The foundation of the [unconstitutional] individual mandate in Obamacare is the same authority creating an individual mandate in education with the implementation of Common Core Standards. Both represent an individual mandate that forces individuals to comply with regulations that erase individual rights, local control, and states’ rights. This foundation has already been laid in several of the largest cities in America, and those people have felt the pangs of freedom being stripped away from them. The smaller cities are wriggling, dangling bait waiting to be snatched up into this frenzy of privatization and crony-dealt deals. This agenda will be full-speed ahead when the reauthorization of ESEA legislation goes to conference and is passed, and it may also be hastened during another crisis, such as when the economy dips again.

President Barack Obama and both the Democratic and Republican policymakers have embraced the agenda. HR 5 and SB 1094 (the ESEA federal “choice” legislation where the money follows a child) will crush our Republic and usher the final blow. It will strangle budget-strapped cities and feed the privatized charter school spillover that will occur. Investors, especially those who will profit from this coming crisis, have been loitering on the sidelines, keeping their eyes on Washington policies and politics. And, we should do the same.

The Agenda of Common Core, Choice and Charter Schools

HR 5 and SB 1094, the reauthorization of the ESEA will ultimately destroy both public and private education, especially through nationalizing education in the United States through so-called "choice" and charter schools. Charter schools are not private schools; they are publicly financed and regulated “choice” and the money follows the child.

It is important to realize that the finger pointing at each "side" by both Republican and Democrat was planned and intentional. Both sides want to get this job done even though it will end up crashing our economic system and our system of government.

Let's set up the agenda: Common Core standards are already well established in almost all 50 states creating a de-facto national curriculum. Common Core is personalized education, requiring individualized remediation for both students and teachers. Common Core standardizes the national education system via testing data that will be collected, thereby assessing/measuring every child, teacher, digital curriculum, every principal, every school, every district, and every state through longitudinal monitoring instruments. Common Core changes our system of education to a business model. Basic functional literacy and workforce skills will replace the teaching of academic subject matter.

National testing through separate state consortiums (PARCC and Smarter Balanced and the testing contractor ACT) has formed the model research base and the foundation for a national test that measures Common Core (now College Career Citizenship Readiness Standards). A national diploma is being established: "Achieve, America's Diploma Project" and "ACT National Career Readiness Project."

Teachers will be evaluated, not on how well they teach academic content, but how well their students perform on assessment tests. With digital online curriculum and cyberschools replacing teacher functions in the daily school program, computers will reduce the need for teachers. This is all data-driven. Only the compliant will survive. Reuters reported on August 2, 2012, in an article titled “Private firms eyeing profits from U.S. public schools, that:

So, how do we get rid of all those teachers? Union-busting mayors are taking over the schools, firing teachers, and launching charter schools where leniency in experience (such as “Teach for America” candidates) and certification varies.

Any state can easily opt out of the Memorandum of Understanding with the Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association plans to implement Common Core, but they are already ingrained into your school system when your state accepted “Race to the Top” grants and applied for ESEA flexibility waivers mandating standards, testing, curriculum, and teacher training. Common Core is not federal law, but your state has agreed to Common Core Standards, like it or not. It is cemented into your school system. Your state legislators must rescind Common Core and a standards-based system by law in order to return to an academic curriculum. This is a states’ rights and local control issue since the federal government cannot legally direct or supervise curriculum. It can be done. But, the real pulling-the-rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick will be performed by the Obama/Duncan agenda. It will complete the feat of nationalizing education through the federal reauthorization of ESEA by implementing “choice.” This agenda was designed with both Democrat and Republican approval in both houses of Congress. ESEA, (Title I) and Special Education (IDEA) will accomplish this goal.

In June of 2013, the Democrat-held Senate Education Committee released SB 1094, ESEA reauthorization, out of committee. On July 19, 2013, the Republican-held House of Representatives passed HR 5, with “choice” amendments in ESEA reauthorization bills that will change our system of government via a huge push toward charter schools. On July 24, 2013, Capital Roundtable, which provides information for the alternative asset industries, sponsored a private venue conference for middle market private equity investors in New York to learn where to invest in for-profit education companies; i.e. “choice.” Coincidental? I don't think so. The private business sector is offering numerous opportunities to ride this wave. Follow the money trail.

Charter schools provide the greatest opportunity to collect a cut of your property taxes and destroy your local representative government by using public taxpayer funds. Charter schools do not have elected school boards nor any direct taxpayer accountability. They are designed to create an exodus of students from public schools into their federally-controlled “choice.” Take a glimpse at the models in major cities that have been over-run with charter schools through extreme measures from mayors and governors. This phony “choice” agenda is just the beginning to control the public education system and change how our government functions locally.

How Does the Reauthorization of ESEA Feed Into Charter Schools?

The combination of HR 5 and SB 1094 will permit “choice” funds to follow an individual student, and those “choice” monies will be able to go into any private, public, religious, or charter school, thus diminishing the local tax base. Your neighborhood school will struggle and may eventually have to close. This is because officials must fund other private and charter school children who are no longer in their district, or even across state lines. As local school attendance dwindles, so does funding to pay for salaries, extra programming, facility upkeep, Obamacare, and benefit pension costs. If a city or district continues closing smaller neighborhood schools to keep up with their debt, more and more services are cut back, teachers are furloughed, severely hurting the function of the school and feeding the explosive exodus of students leaving the district. Neighborhood schools will crash financially. Cities are going bankrupt.

In both Chicago and New York charter schools have utilized a creative business model to restructure education by forcing public schools and charters to compete against each other for scarce resources. By introducing "choice" initiatives parents and students think they are private consumers of educational services, while in reality “choice” is stealing their voice in representative government. School closings by the mayors in these two cities have created a war in neighborhoods where parents and teachers are fighting the system to keep their schools open. Shuttering of these schools has created chaos, while charters schools continue to be expanded and given funding to continue to expand. Most parents did not realize there was a bigger plan yanking their neighborhood school out from under them. They have lost their elected representatives, their children are paying the price, and they have nowhere left to go to change the system.

The Lessons of the Chicago Charter Schools

The pre-planned Obama/Duncan education agenda modeled in Chicago is designed to have all public schools become charter schools, and this privatization agenda has been promoted as education reform. As CEO of Chicago Public Schools in 2001, Duncan shut down 60 failing schools in the poorest areas and replaced them with 100 new charter schools. Over the course of his tenure, Duncan employed a series of measures including the complete shuttering of schools, the replacement of failing neighborhood schools with a charter-run school, and/or the total replacement of a school’s teaching staff. He used the test-driven, market-based policies [TQM, total quality management, a business model, ed.] built on the foundation of “Race to the Top.” Student test scores would be tied to teacher evaluations creating an almost impossible high-stakes feat for teachers. All students with varying abilities must be “proficient,” as it is defined by these assessments. Note: students are being traumatized and have even become physically ill under the pressures of this constant testing bandwagon. Creative, bright children are refusing to go to school. Frustrated teachers and frustrated students do not make an environment for good learning.

Training and retraining of teachers has become a huge factor for the new Common Core reform evaluation agenda. "Teach to the test" is the survival tactic of educators. Teachers, public schools, and charters are all being evaluated by high stakes testing and the improvement brought about through “Race to the Top” federal grants. All this creates a lot of finger pointing. Pennsylvania's ESEA flexibility waiver grant used federal monies, plus a Gates Foundation grant of $800,000 [Bill Gates has been funding pilot projects of all this reform, ed.], to establish the Charlotte Danielson Framework For Teaching as a model to prepare teachers, principles, and superintendents for standards-based instruction. It states, "Our flexibility grant is all about teachers performing and being evaluated on how they teach the standards." Note: the standards are not under any local control; they are nationalized. Therefore, teaching the standards means teaching to the test. In fact, some charter schools do nothing but prime their students to take the test.

Controversy and charter schools are synonymous. There is an incessant juggling of test scores, picking and choosing their students, weeding out autistic kids, or those whose first language isn’t English, moving the line of proficiency so more students will fare better on testing. Some charter schools simply remove children who test poorly, thus artificially raising test scores. Charters get their funding through attendance levels and even that has been controversial as there are attrition numbers when students leave. Some Charter schools have lotteries, some do not accept special ed students. Some charters select students by grade point average which is easier to manipulate to improve scores. Unfair comparisons have been made between charter schools with an attendance number of only 75 and a public school that has an attendance number of over 500.

One of the biggest controversies sprang from Washington D.C.'s past Chancellor, Michelle Rhee, who has been under attack for erasing school test scores. The documentary, Waiting For Superman, sings praises about charter schools and highlights Chancellor, Michelle Rhee. However, her tenure in D.C. has been marred with controversy.

The focus of this insidious agenda is to break the back of your neighborhood public school by using under-achievement as a crisis to close public schools, and then, conveniently, offering funding and setting up charter schools as the answer. “Choice” will finish the job of crushing the old system. It doesn't seem to matter to Obama, nor his Republican and Democratic cohorts, that this education plan is hurting minorities and the most desperate poor in this gentrification of communities and the remaking of public schools into charter schools. Families are being forced to move away or go to schools across the city. Objections from parents and teachers alike have fallen on deaf ears. Chicago, New York, New Orleans, and Philadelphia have felt the hard nudge of socialism, but not without protest, complaints, challenges and disapproval. However, parents and local communities seem to have no power to stop the changes once a mayor or governor takes control of their neighborhood schools. Make no mistake about it: Obama is using the "poor" to change our system of government.

The Per-Pupil Funding Agenda—"Following the Child"

Arne Duncan explained it in the Chicago District budget book that "funding is not tied to positions, which gives these schools much more flexibility in deciding how to spend their budget dollars." Chicago's business model attached dollars to students and let parents vote with their feet by choosing schools for their children. Chicago's funding is attached to kids with their name on it. Funding would follow the child and not fund programs, staff, or certain types of schools. Uniform-base funding or per-pupil funding (i.e., equalization and equity in funding) would replace how schools finance their budgets. There has been experimentation with a pilot weighted student formula-type program under Arne Duncan's seven-year tenure in Chicago where the money follows the child.

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Will the United Sates 'rethink' how to finance public schools? It will be interesting to see the change toward the federal 'per pupil funding' (i.e., equalization and equity in funding) using "poverty" as a means for funding each individual student, and how that will work across the United States. Property taxes have been the norm, with local taxing authorities and local government in Plain Town America having control of the purse strings. What will happen to property values for homeowners? So, what will happen to those schools with Zip Codes in wealthier school districts, where parents want "better" schools, when the change for a uniform base funding scheme happens at the state level? Many states already have filed suit against the unconstitutionality of property taxes funding schools under "equality." It is called” leveling the playing field” for a socialist America. We can only guess at the impact of how this change might take place. Older Americans may bite the bait, believing that they will not have to pay for schools through property taxes. On the other hand, state taxes on purchases as well as transfer taxes of property may skyrocket. This part of the scheme remains to be unknown. For part two click below.

Click here for part -----> 1, 2, 3, 4,

Source Material for this article included:

1- Mayor Action Guide,
2- National Governor's Association Push for Charter School Expansion,
3- Investing in Education,
4- Bridgeport, Conn Board files suit to keep elected positions, and this
5- Arne Duncan on " white suburban moms.
6- Michelle Rhee Controversy with test erasures,
7- DC Public Schools Flagged For Erasures,
8- Chicago Mayor Daley's Renaisance 2010,
9- Chicago spends $17 million On Safe Passage,
10- Chicago Safe Passage Routes-Unsafe,
11- Chicago School Closings,
12- New York Parents Lawsuit, and this, and this
13- The Village Voice, Eva Moskowitz, the Invasion of Charter Schools,
14- Credit Enhancement for Charter Facilities,
15- Charter School Gravy Train,
16- Capital Roundtable For Profit Education Conference-Private Equity Investing in For-Profit Education Companies ENCORE ROUNDTABLE, January, 2013, and July 25,2013,
17- Charter Schools Pose Greatest Credit Challenge,
18- Troubled US Local Gov't,
19- New York, Goldman Sachs Partners with LISC and Charter Schools:
20- “Goldman to lend $25M for charter schools,
21- Minnesota- State Charter Schools Out of Control:
22- Charter Schools Fail Bondholders Get Bailout.
23- Detroit named Ground Zero by Duncan:
24- Chicago Reform that Duncan Left Behind:
25- Chicago Charter Schools Equitable Funding:
26- Chicago and Philadelphia Closing Schools and Funding Charters:
27- Obama's Betrayal of Public Education.
28- The Inconvenient Truth About 'Waiting a for Superman'-rebuttal video against charters.
29- PARCC Grant Document-LESSONS LEARNED page 22.
30- Documents used in this article are used for research and educational purposes. Fair Use in Copyrighted Materials for Educational and Research Materials Section 107 of Title 17 of the US Code.

� 2014 Anita Hoge - All Rights Reserved

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