By
Lynn Stuter
March 9, 2010
NewsWithViews.com
Last week, in Teachers were warned, I touched on the fact that teachers were warned that the results of the assessment of students would affect them; that if students did not demonstrate the wanted behaviors, as determined by the behaviorally oriented assessment, the teachers would suffer the consequences which could come in several forms, including mentoring, further education, decrease in salary, and probation; that if enough students failed the assessment teachers and/or administrators could be fired. This has now happened to teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island and to a principal in Longview, Washington.
On March 6, 2010, an opinion piece was published in the San Jose Mercury News by columnist Dan Waters, entitled Did governor snooker Legislature? In the article, Waters writes,
"Obama's education secretary, Arne Duncan, singled out California as he pressed states to adopt reforms that unions dislike, such as increasing charter schools and using student test data for teacher evaluations."
Duncan addressed these two items in a speech before the NEA on July 2, 2009, and in a press release dated December 10, 2009 in which he called "on state legislators to lift barriers to reform."
In his speech before the NEA, Duncan stated, among other things …
"Now, let's talk about data. I understand that word can make people nervous, but I see data first and foremost as a barometer. It tells us what is happening. Used properly, it can help teachers better understand the needs of their students. Too often, teachers don't have good data to inform instruction and help raise student achievement.
"Data can also help identify and support teachers who are struggling. And it can help evaluate them. The problem is that some states prohibit linking student achievement and teacher effectiveness.
"I understand that tests are far from perfect and that it is unfair to reduce the complex, nuanced work of teaching to a simple multiple choice exam. Test scores alone should never drive evaluation, compensation, or tenure decisions. That would never make sense. But to remove student achievement entirely from evaluation is illogical and indefensible.
Data is, at once, both the most important aspect and the greatest weakness of systems education. The gathering and analysis of data from various sources, including assessment, is crucial to keeping the system of education in balance, of determining who or what, human or system, needs to be changed to achieve the ultimate goal of systems education: to achieve and maintain the sustainable global environment of the "created future."
In this pursuit, the school seeks to become a repository of information on every child, his/her siblings and adults in his/her life. This is why parents are being pressured by schools to give out personal information that parents too often find intrusive. The SPEEDE/ExPRESS document, put out by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) outlines page after page of information sought by schools to include medical, dental and mental health information, religion, family logistics (two mommies, two daddies, single parent, significant other or married couple of the opposite sex), number of children, ages of children, ages of parents, income level of parents, education level of parents, etc. Analysis of all this information helps the school to best determine what needs to occur to bring the child to the wanted behavior.
As laid out in Teachers were warned, assessments — because they are subjective and not objective, because the same answer can be scored differently by two different scorers, because they are so easy to manipulate to assuage the political climate of the moment — are neither valid nor reliable.
Just as data is crucial to keeping the education system in balance to attain the wanted behaviors deemed necessary to achieve and maintain the sustainable global environment, a dearth of data or bad data will cause the system to be out of balance; if not corrected, causing eventual implosion. Data is used to leverage the system, or component parts of the system (i.e., the child, the teacher, the administrator) to keep the system in balance.
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The system is, above and beyond all else, the priority. In the words of one world futurist, in unpublished papers, people are but atoms in a molecule and radical atoms must be exterminated for the greater good of the collective whole. In other words, those who refuse to conform, refuse to inculcate the wanted behaviors, must be isolated or exterminated for the good of the system.
The first experiments in systems philosophy were, believe it or not, the U.S.S.R. and Nazi Germany. In both, dissidents were incarcerated or exterminated for the greater good of the collective whole. All really does mean all, and all must conform. While education reform advocates disparaged the traditional education system as "homogenous," homogenous is truly a goal of systems education.
Both the U.S.S.R. and Nazi Germany failed, theorists believe, because of the lack of data and the means to analyze it. These same theorists also believed that by the year 2000, technology would be far enough advanced and be fast enough to process large volumes of data accurately in a short period of time. The fallacy, of course, is that technology is the outreach of the fallible human mind.
A parent contacted me one time. Her daughter was having nightmares, something that had never occurred before. I suggested the mother find out what the child was being exposed to in the classroom. The mother did and was shocked to discover her daughter was being subjected to morbid, sordid, sadistic stories intended, specifically, to unfreeze, change and refreeze the child's existing belief system. When the mother confronted the teacher, the teacher's response to her was, "Well, I hope you aren't trying to force your morals, standards and values on your daughter." The teacher was the wife of a pastor. The family subsequently pulled all their children from the public schools and placed them in private schools.
Parents don't want to believe this type of thing is going on in their child's classroom but it is happening in classrooms nation-wide under systems education. Remember, the goal is homogenous children who all display the behaviors deemed necessary to achieve and maintain the sustainable global environment of the "created future."
What is this type of curriculum intended to achieve? A critical thinker. What is a critical thinker? In the words of one critical thinking guru, schools don't want a Naïve Nancy or a Selfish Sam, schools want a Fairminded Fran, someone who thinks right and wrong are situational; what is right today maybe be wrong tomorrow in a different situation; truth is always "in flux" with no absolutes. A Fairminded Fran is a dialectic thinker; someone who truly believes that perception is reality; who runs on feelings rather than cognition.
The dialectic thinker is at the opposite end of the spectrum from a didactic thinker who runs on facts, who believes in absolutes, who believes right and wrong are static, not situational. A dialectic thinker is easily manipulated while a didactic thinker is not; therefore not given to abandoning individual principles for the group principles derived by consensus.
While education reform advocates scoff at the claim that schools are brainwashing children, that is exactly what they are doing. These are the same tactics that Edward Hunter describes in his book, Brainwashing, published in 1958, about the "men who endured and defied the most diabolical red torture" at the hands of Marxists. What is happening in America has a name; it's called transformational Marxism, the quiet atrophy (as opposed to violent overthrow), via gradualism, to the Marxist state. As already apparent in the growing chaos of America, transformational Marxism is the pipe dream of dialectic thinkers.
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People wonder why we have kids taking guns to school and killing teachers and other students when, for years, guns hung on gun racks in unlocked pickups in school parking lots with no problem. When a young man walked into Frontier Junior High in Moses Lake, Washington on February 2, 1996, and shot a teacher and two students to death, and injured a third before being subdued by another teacher, I told Washington State legislators then that it was only the beginning. You cannot put children through such a heinous, mind-twisting, unnatural process without a few going off the deep end. It is of note that the Moses Lake School District was one of the schools that participated in the first round of the Schools for the 21st Century pilot project in Washington State.
In Nazi Germany and in the U.S.S.R., under systems education, the same characteristics began to appear in children that are appearing in American children today. It seems we haven't learned much from history. And the awful truth is that left to his own devices, absent God, mankind will self-destruct every time.
Why is Secretary of Education Arne Duncan promoting charters? It has been the intent, since the inception of systems education, that all schools would eventually be charter schools tied to industry. In this capacity, industry would be able to start preparing workers for their industry from the time the child entered the charter school, even before if parents worked in the industry and the child attended industry-sponsored daycare.
While many parents think charter schools are a viable alternative to what they object to in public schools, charter schools are public schools and are required to meet the same behavioral objectives as public schools. There are, however, a few key differences that are not in the best interests of parents or taxpayers. Charter schools …
1- are run by private non-profit corporations. This could be a local, state, national, or foreign corporation registered as a non-profit under the Uniform Tax Code of the United States. There is at least one foreign corporation establishing charter schools in the United States. This could also be a business or a consortium of businesses that establish an entity with non-profit status.
2- are run using taxpayer dollars. Coupled with the fact that these schools will be exempted from most state laws and regulations that govern other schools amounts to the use of tax dollars without accountability to the taxpayers. In many states, problems have already surfaced with regard to how the money the charters are receiving is being spent.
3- comingle public money with private money in a public/private partnership that is not accountable to taxpayers.
4- are run by private boards of directors. Public schools were established with an elected board of directors to make them accountable to the taxpayers. Private boards of directors are not elected and they are not accountable to the taxpayers.
5- are exempt from most state statutes and regulations that govern other public schools. This exempts them from public disclosure laws; laws and regulations that give parents control over what their child is taught in the classroom; laws that give parents access to curriculums, supplemental teaching materials and surveys that their child could be exposed to in the classroom; laws that give parents access to their child's school records; and laws that give parents access to the classroom.
Charter schools are the epitome of what Joseph C Fields envisioned when he wrote Total Quality for Schools; A Suggestion for American Education (ASQC Quality Press, 1993),
"Parents supply a resource to which educators apply a variety of processes. These processes include a thirteen-year sequence of assessment to match quality standards to develop a graduate that meets customer requirements." (p 14-15)
"Parents learn that they must provide the best ready-to-learn student possible." (p 22)
"Consider too the parent as 'vendor' of a precious resource, the child. In the internal customer concept, the parent is serving the teacher. Teachers could identify reasonable specifications for parents relative to the home learning environment and certify parents who will cooperate. Guardians and agencies would be included in the assurance of a well-prepared student to inquire, acquire, and require." (page 53)
"Citizens would no more be allowed to put obstacles in the way of public educators than to interfere with public medical, police, or fire protection personnel who are doing their duty. (page 53)
Is it any wonder that Secretary of Education Duncan is pushing charter schools?
Duncan's remarks were made in support of the "Race to the Top" agenda of the occupier of the White House, usurper of the Oval Office. That agenda, however, is not about producing well-educated, intelligent children able to reach for the star or stars of their choice; the agenda is about the deliberate dumbing down of America to the "higher standards" of third world countries.
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In order for the United States to coalesce other nations in pursuit of the sustainable global environment, the middle class must be exterminated, leaving the two classes characterizing all third world nations: the elitists who rule with a heavy hand, and the poor who live in squalor with no hope of anything better.
This is the feudal system of the Dark Ages, when ignorance and lack of education kept people repressed, when witchcraft, paganism and Gnosticism permeated the culture just as it is today.
� 2010 Lynn M. Stuter - All Rights Reserved
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Activist and researcher, Stuter has spent the last fifteen years researching systems theory and systems philosophy with a particular emphasis on education as it pertains to achieving the sustainable global environment. She home schooled two daughters. She has worked with legislators, both state and federal, on issues pertaining to systems governance, the sustainable global environment and education reform. She networks nationwide with other researchers and a growing body of citizens concerned about the transformation of our nation from a Constitutional Republic to a participatory democracy. She has traveled the United States and lived overseas.
Web site: www.learn-usa.com
E-Mail: lmstuter@learn-usa.com�
