PART 3
By
Kelleigh Nelson
June 8, 2013
NewsWithViews.com
"We've always been suspicious of Lamar. To hear him running around calling himself an "activist conservative" and mentioning Ronald Reagan's name every 30 seconds is just amazing! He never did anything for Reagan; in fact, those of us with Reagan were just about written out of the [Tennessee Republican] party. He was an anti-conservative who never supported a conservative in a Republican primary." —Lloyd Daugherty, chairman of the Tennessee Conservative Union
Alexander and Common Core
The development of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) (see “The Curriculum Reformation”) i.e., national education standards, dates back to the first Bush administration, when Secretary of Education, Lamar Alexander, called for voluntary national standards and testing. After the Clinton administration’s attempt failed in the mid-1990s, efforts to implement national standards lay dormant until the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation decided to make them a top priority. Beginning in 2007, the foundation funded the development of national English and math standards. It also supported organizations like Achieve, the National Governors Association (NGA), (basically a Rockefeller Association), the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) which under the auspices of the School to Work Opportunities Act moved to implement comprehensive "reform" and the best "international lessons" for the global work force, and the Fordham Institute, (who believes conservatives should support CC) all of which advocated for national standards. [Link]
The NGA and CCSSO are D.C. trade associations, neither of which had a grant of legislative authority from the states to write national school standards. Both of them along with Achieve have accepted $27 million from Gates Foundation. Bill Ayers' political connections, (with both Obama and his Education Czar, Arne Duncan, through the Annenberg Challenge), has been instrumental in promoting Common Core. [Link]
Ze’ev Wurman—a Silicon Valley high-tech executive and former federal education official who played a central role in developing California’s standards—says that the Gates Foundation’s total investment in the national standards reached $100 million last year. The Foundation has plans to spend another $150 million.
Senator Lamar Alexander published an op-ed in which he claimed that the Obama Administration has allowed increased state choice in schools:
“My colleagues and I agree with the Obama administration that after a decade of federal rules, more responsibility needs to go back to the states. No Child Left Behind has made one thing clear: when it comes to education reform, the states are both highly capable and highly motivated. Since 2002, 44 states and territories have adopted common core academic standards, two groups of states are developing common tests for those standards and 44 states are collaborating on common principles for holding schools accountable for student achievement.”
Senator Alexander fully agrees with Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Obama on Common Core, including what students will be reading under the Common Core Standards. (Check out this video) Most are politically correct topics such as Invasive Plant Inventory,” by the California Invasive Plant Council, invasive plant species in California, “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management,” by the U.S. General Services Administration, “Recommended Levels of Insulation,” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and “Fed Views,” by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. This report from 2009, explains that the federal stimulus helped to stabilize the economy and asserts that there is no link between deficit spending and inflation. Yeah, right! This isn't even scratching the surface of PC topics!
Can you imagine your children reading and grasping any of this? Just the topics alone are enough to alleviate insomnia. To top it all off they are PC subjects, instrumental in brainwashing our children with socialist propaganda.
Common Core undermines 10th amendment authority of the states over education. Parents have no recourse to influence content standards because content is controlled by unaccountable (unelected) outsiders. Common Core and the aligned assessments (tests) actually violate three federal statutes. These laws prohibit the federal government from directing or supervising K-12 curriculum or instructional materials. Common core actually narrows the curricula selection and forces students early in high school to choose a career path (School to work for the global work force. Remember they are pushing your children to choose the career by 5th to 7th grade).
National standard computerized tests are developed by Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) (which received $176 million in stimulus funds to develop testing under Common Core). The computer based assessment system Partnership for Assessments of Readiness for College and Careers, also known as PARCC, received the balance of the $360 million, the end cost of which will increase all local real estate taxes. This means the cost of testing all students multiple times every year will result in skyrocketing cost increases, i.e. taxes. The DOE gave these two consortia $360 million to create these tests, but once the monies run out, the states will have to assume these costs. The PARCC tests are designed by progressive reformers. The Smarter Balanced test design is influenced mainly by Linda Darling Hammond. She is a radical Stanford professor and has partnered in the past with former colleague Bill Ayers on some of his education projects. [Link]
Under Hammond's direction, these tests will most likely lower the bar on student academic expectations and instead focus on "subjective performance based outcomes." SBAC recently released 16 sample test questions. They reveal that the “transformation” of American education that Darling-Hammond had eagerly anticipated will be fulfilled—toward making students into global citizens, devoid of a sense of cultural heritage, and content with performing quick tasks that require little concentration. Common Core phases Western Culture totally out of education. In other words, these Skinner/Pavlovian, dog trained, dumbed down, robotic children will be perfect for the global work force. This is limited learning for lifelong labor!
These reformers through Common Core are just continuing the federally-funded programs since the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) when performance-based teaching (Skinner) became the teaching and learning method for the future. This Pavlovian/Skinnerian animal training method will be used on all children in all subjects since it is required for workforce training.
This abusive and non-academic Pavlovian/Skinnerian method has paraded under the following labels: Direct Instruction, Mastery Learning, Outcomes Based Education, Performance Based Education, Results-Based Education, Standards-Based Education, and Effective Teaching. It is training, not academic teaching. Effective Schooling practices/teaching = goal based education = outcome based education.
Mr. Donald Thomas, superintendent of schools in Salt Lake City, Utah, originally on the board of directors of The Effective School Report, and executive director of the Network for Effective Schools is a well known change agent. Thomas traveled to Russia under the auspices of U.S. Secretary of Education, Lamar Alexander, to work with Russia on implementing international education restructuring. [Link, p.199]
The Governors' Report on Education was presented to the 1986 National Governors' Association annual meeting in Wichita, Kansas. Then Governor of Tennessee, Lamar Alexander, chaired the meeting and outlined a plan to restructure schools in America. There was a heavy emphasis on retraining of teachers in Skinnerian practices, merit pay/incentives/rewards, etc. [Link, p.239]
The use of the Skinnerian/Pavlovian method 1965-2013 was necessary for the restructuring of the traditional American public school from K-12, and the A,B,C,D,F grading system, to an individualized, non-competitive system using charter schools with their unelected councils. This revamping of our nation's previously highly successful academic education system was necessary for global workforce training. This is basis of Common Core!
Privacy Eliminated
Privacy of the family and student are eliminated through the Student Tracking System which collects personally identifiable data, including disciplinary records, health history, family income range, religious affiliations, and the parents political persuasions. This system will guide us into a Soviet "planned economy" and away from our free enterprise system. This is what we are supposed to give up, and pay for, so our children can compete in a global economy. These CC standards have been adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia.
This all came to fruition through the 2009 Obama Stimulus bill, which gave a $4.3 billion earmark to the Department of Education (DOE). The DOE created the Race to the Top competition, and to successfully compete for RTTT grants, states agreed to adopt Common Core and the national tests aligned with the Core, sight unseen. This was before the standards were even completed! The legislatures of most states were not in session between November, 2009 when the states were given applications for RTTT, and January 2010 when the applications were due. Thus, state officials had to decide, without their legislators, whether to commit to Common Core. It was the governors and school superintendents who had to decide quickly whether to commit or not. (Realize that many of the superintendents as well as the governors are in full agreement with education reform and restructuring, whether they be Democrat or Republican.) It was perfect timing in the grave recession and the states wanted and needed the monies from the feds. Remember, local school boards cannot change the common core documents.
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) enters into this as well, because the feds decided that adoption of Common Core by the states, would enable the states to receive a waiver from the horrid NCLB. This is what the State of Tennessee has done. This is a complete federal power grab with an agenda in line with the educational aims of Bill Ayers. The last refuge of conservatives for education, homeschooling and private schools, will effectively be eliminated under Common Core.
In a missive to fellow researchers, Charlotte Iserbyt, former Senior Policy advisor in Reagan's Education Department, and author of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, states,
"I want to warn all the wonderful people fighting Communist Core that should they win this battle, their victory may be hollow, since these evil people always have not just one, but many substitute options up their sleeves to offer us, clearly disguised as something they know we will accept. They know that CC is exactly what they have been doing to our children since the seventies at least. The only difference is, they have decided to be open about it now. They have the technology to implement both the curriculum, assessment, and the ability to share data worldwide, to health care agencies, juvenile programs, corporations, etc. All the components have finally merged for the institutionalization of lifelong learning, under the umbrella of the unelected school board. This is most dangerous! The focus on Marxist curriculum, its standards, outcomes, goals, objectives, behaviors, dispositions, psychological Marxist assessment, etc. all have been with us for many years.
And the Skinner method, in conjunction with the computer, upon which ALL depends, and which is deadly as far as the manipulation of/destruction of the human soul is concerned, has been with us for years as well, especially its use/experimentation on minority children to teach reading (direct instruction, DISTAR, ECRI, etc.)"
NOTE: The 120-page teacher pre-service training manual from Exemplary Center for Reading Instructions (ECRI) was devoted to the training of teachers in stimulus-response, stimulus/operant conditioning techniques (Skinner).
"How to Teach Animals" by B.F. Skinner and "How to Teach Animals: A Rat, A Pigeon, A Dog" by Kathleen and Shauna Reid are both listed as teacher and resource materials. The ECRI Teacher Training Manual cites the work of Siegfried Engelmann, the developer of DISTAR (Direct Instruction System for Teaching and Remediation) Reading Mastery, and Direct Instruction in instructing teachers how to use operant conditioning, stimulus-response stimulus to get desired behaviors from our children.
"Again, I urge our people to continue their work on CC, but to perhaps keep in mind and focus on something far more important, the tax-supported school choice issue. This issue is very important right now in the State of Maine, and I gather elsewhere as well. Our so-called conservative Governor LePage not only supports school-to-work over academics, and charter schools with their unelected boards, he has come out and called for tax-funding of RELIGIOUS schools! THAT HAS GOT TO TELL US SOMETHING.
If, and when, we Americans have accepted the idea that it is safe to let the federal, state, or local governments fund private education of any sort, we will have NO choice. We will have to conform everything related to private education (curriculum, assessment, politically-correct student enrollment standards i.e., any student, no matter his lifestyle, religion, etc. must be accepted.) And, don't forget, those private schools: religious, secular, and home schools, which receive tax funding, will not have traditional school boards elected by the taxpayers of the community. They will be exactly like charter schools with their unelected boards (TOTALLY CONTROLLED). So, in effect, they will be operating for the benefit of the public, but without representation by the public. Taxation without representation! The plan, in the works for over 50 years at least, is to put all services under the unelected superintendent of schools, LIFELONG.
I may be wrong, but I suspect those in power, the Jeb Bushes, Gates, Pearson, Carnegie, National Governors Association, CCSSO and all the other snakes, see the Communist Core issue as a wonderful diversion from what they want in the long run which is to "privatize" ALL education. They will fund it with tax money, and run the show without any messy elected officials (taxpayers) overseeing their evil agenda, or whatever agenda they are dealing with, for instance, UN Agenda 21!! "They" may not have planned it that way (to divert us with CC), but you can be sure they are not unhappy that this issue has become the issue, overshadowing the "real" issue of taxation without representation. If allowed to happen, it is exactly what THEY need in order to implement the entire world government, UN Agenda 21. We won't be able to vote on anything, not just Common Core, but everything, abortion, gun laws, land use, whatever.
We will be just like people in ALL communist countries who have no say on anything."
| Subscribe to the NewsWithViews Daily News Alerts! |
Willard Garvey, executive director of the National Center for Privatization, and charter member of the Council for National Policy, wrote a letter, dated April 6, 1984, to President Ronald Reagan. In it he stated, "Privatization is now an idea whose time has come...The knowledge, communication and computer industry can make political representatives obsolete. Privatization might well be the theme for the 200th anniversary of the Constitution. Privatization is essential for national salvation." [Link, p.202]
Lamar Alexander is in full agreement with CC and the use of "dog training" via Skinner. Nearly all of the neo-con Trotskyite Republicans are committed to this destruction of academic teaching. In Part 4, we'll discuss Lamar Alexander's promotion of vouchers and choice.
Click here for part -----> 1, 2, 3, 4,
© 2013 Kelleigh Nelson - All Rights Reserved
Share
This Article
Kelleigh Nelson has been researching the Christian right and their connections to the left, the new age, and cults since 1975. Formerly an executive producer for three different national radio talk show hosts, she was adept at finding and scheduling a variety of wonderful guests for her radio hosts. She and her husband live in Knoxville, TN, and she has owned her own wholesale commercial bakery since 1990. Prior to moving to Tennessee, Kelleigh was marketing communications and advertising manager for a fortune 100 company in Ohio. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, she was a Goldwater girl with high school classmate, Hillary Rodham, in Park Ridge, Illinois. Kelleigh is well acquainted with Chicago politics and was working in downtown Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention riots. Kelleigh is presently the secretary for Rocky Top Freedom Campaign, a strong freedom advocate group.
Website: www.rockytopfreedom.com
E-Mail: Proverbs133@bellsouth.net
