Charlotte Iserbyt -- Charter School Trap, Part 2

CHARTER SCHOOL TRAP
PART 2 of 2

By Charlotte Iserbyt

February 22, 2011

NewsWithViews.com

Collusion Between the Right and Left

“The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.” – Dr. Carroll Quigley (former historian for the Council on Foreign Relations, and Bill Clinton’s mentor at Georgetown University), “Tragedy and Hope,” 1966, p. 1247, 1248.

This article deals with the role of the neoconservatives with help from the Obama Administration, and high up leaders of major teacher unions -- NOT REGULAR CLASSROOM TEACHERS! Organizations such as the neoconservative Heritage Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the Gates Foundation and other foundations and members of Congress) are supporting/creating charter schools, unaccountable to the taxpayers who fund them and not subject to customary public school regulations. Thus, the last nail is being pounded into the coffin of our free REPRESENTATIVE form of government.

(Why isn’t there the same uproar over tax-supported charter schools being exempted from public school regulations as there is over corporations and unions who lobbied for Obamacare applying for waivers (exempt from having to comply with the mandates of the law?)

Those pushing for charter schools know that they have to get rid of elected school boards in order to be able to change education from academics to totalitarian workforce training. Elected school board members cannot be expected to eliminate their role of overseeing the expenditure of taxpayers’ hard-earned money and/or the shift from academic education to workforce training. So, “off with their heads”, so to speak. Move to appointed boards whose role is to implement the changes.

California’s Parent Trap

California’s recently passed Parent Trigger law (which in reality is a Parent Trap) allows parents in 75% of its low performing schools (usually minority schools) to create charter schools.

(Here we go again with legislation targeting the low-performing minority students in the “grand experiment” to train for the workforce. [1] In the Foreword to my book the deliberate dumbing down of america, educator and writer Samuel Blumenfeld says the following regarding taxpayers who continue to support what is presented to them as “change,” in this case unelected charter schools for workforce training: “It reminds one of how the Nazis charged their victims train fare to their own doom.”)

For those who believe the teachers unions are opposed to charter schools, please listen: NEA leadership actively supported the 1995 Washington State push for charter schools. And the NEA (at the top) has been working with David Rockefeller, the late McGeorge Bundy, et al in changing NEA policy/agenda. [2]

How curious that the neoconservatives blame teachers’ unions for the dumbing down of our children, when the union LEADERSHIP is in bed with the neoconservatives on communist workforce training and charter schools? (Did you know Russia has charter schools, and that charter schools are international?)

Isn’t it interesting that the neoconservatives rarely call for abolishing the U.S. Department of Education which has been and is the primary culprit in deliberately dumbing down our children (wrecking the traditional American system of education -- happening right now -- so it can be replaced by Soviet workforce training? The dialectic at work big time!) Why? Because neocons are in bed with the left and the union/international corporate community which needs the U.S. Department of Education to collect and analyze data regarding workers’ attitudes and beliefs, global economic performance, and workforce needs.

Maine’s Story

The Maine Heritage Policy Center (MHPC), a state affiliate of the national Heritage Foundation, is pushing for unconstitutional charter schools in Maine. In the past, MHPC has brought speakers from abroad into our state to promote regionalism/consolidation/communism.

We in Maine recently, with the help of Maine's Tea Party, elected a Governor who we had hoped would continue Maine's successful opposition to charter schools. Our state is one of the eleven states to resist the lure of federal money in order to get charter school approval. We, true conservatives and traditional teachers, are most concerned that our new Governor is being influenced by The Maine Heritage Policy Center to support the concept of charter schools.

Meddling with state policy

The Maine Heritage Policy Center (MHPC) is one of the national Heritage Foundation clones determining socialist policy in all our states. Heritage Foundation was founded and funded by Richard Mellon Scaife (That’s Chase Mellon Bank and Rockefeller) to the tune of $900,000. Heritage Foundation supports the North American Free Trade Agreement [3] and approved of President Reagan signing the U.S.-Soviet cultural, educational, and scientific exchanges agreement (1985). [4]

On December 30, 2010, I corresponded with Stephen Bowen, an MHPC staff member. The following excerpts are from my letter and relate to the dangers of charter schools:

“After 35 years of research on public education, including serving as a school board member and as Sr. Policy Advisor in the U.S. Department of Education, I believe I have a sound view of what works and what does not work in education and, yes, you are quite correct, I do have a complete understanding of the conspiratorial forces which have resulted in our nation's children having close to the worst academic test scores in the world today. Those who reject the conspiratorial view of history do themselves and the nation a great disservice. Please tell me how it is possible for the USA to have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on education (totals over a trillion) over the past 100 years and to have seen nothing but a decline in academic test scores and an increase in immorality? Isn't there something amiss here?

“I doubt that you read my article since if you had, you would definitely see the conspiratorial role of the tax-exempt foundations, amongst others, in changing our education system from one which previously focused on academics to the corporate fascist workforce training model we are looking at today. This model, interestingly enough, has been promoted by the Carnegie Corporation from the early nineteen hundreds to the present. The U.S. Congress in the early fifties held Congressional Hearings on the role of the tax-exempt foundations role in subverting American education. You can read the entire 3000 pages of those hearings. I paid $3000 to purchase the ONLY existing copy of the transcript of those hearings. The foundations, 20 years ago, offered the person from whom I bought that copy, ‘any $ amount’ in order to get a hold of that one copy. He refused to sell it to them for any price. They quite obviously did not want the information contained in the transcript to reach the American people.

“My article has very important quotes documenting the fact that ‘yes, there has been a monumental conspiracy to dumb down our children and to change their values so they will march to the globalist drummers.’ Also, you may read my 700-page book the deliberate dumbing down of america...A Chronological Paper Trail, 1999, which is a free pdf download. The few remaining copies were sold last week.

“The history of what happened to our schools is very clearly outlined in that book.

“Charter Schools, regardless of how good they may be, are ‘taxation without representation’ and, although those promoting them decry the influence of the U.S. Department of Education on local schools, charter schools MUST administer the federal test, the NAEP, which is at least 40% attitudinal, in order to continue receiving federal funding. I have research going back to the sixties on the need for charter schools. The internationalist Aspen Institute started the whole movement, starting with recommendations for site based management, school choice, vouchers, tuition tax credits, etc.[5] Marjorie Ledell, a leading change agent educator, close to William Spady and others, said in an article in the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development’s (NEA spinoff) Educational Leadership, January 1994 entitled ‘To OBE or Not to OBE’ the following: ‘Finally, raise the real issue and depend on democracy. Don't let ‘to OBE or Not to OBE’ or ‘to implement or not implement efforts to improve student learning’ cloud the overdue national debate about whether public education should exist or be replaced with publicly funded private education.’

“Ledell is obviously looking forward to federally-funded charter schools with no accountability to the taxpayers (taxation without representation.)

“I am 100 % opposed to the use of computers to teach our children. There is massive research, from educational experts in the field of technology, who agree with me. My book contains most of that research. I support students learning ‘how to use the computer’, not the use of software to brainwash them. Dustin Heuston of the World Institute for Computer Assisted Instruction said ‘We’ve been absolutely staggered by realizing that the computer [Skinner’s ‘Box’–Ed.] has the capability to act as if it were ten of the top psychologists working with one student . . . You’ve seen the tip of the iceberg. Won’t it be wonderful when the child [‘your child, parent! ’–Ed.] in the smallest county in the most distant area or in the most confused urban setting can have the equivalent of the finest school in the world on that terminal and NO ONE CAN GET BETWEEN THAT CHILD AND THAT CURRICULUM? We have great moments coming in the history of education.’

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“Please re-read my article ‘The Death of Free Will’ a pdf here. (click on Articles). If you don't have time to read the whole article, please be sure to click on the links and to read the C.S. Lewis quotes.”

A warning to other states

Let our experience here in Maine be a warning to citizens in other states who are fighting charter school legislation. Also, consider alerting legislators that any charter school legislation will be followed by lawsuits based on the constitutionality of charter schools. Such a lawsuit is pending in Georgia which has 200 charter schools, all created under the direction of the Georgia Public Policy Association, a Heritage Foundation affiliate. For part one click below.

Click here for part -----> 1,

Endnotes:

1- Download “Experimentation with Minorities and Deliberate Dumbing Down for the Planned Economy.” July 29, 2003.
2- Click here and type in “Cardinal Principles Revisited” for proof of NEA leadership’s cooperation with globalists.
3- The Heritage Foundation’s EXECUTIVE MEMORANDUM #371 – “The North American Free Trade Agreement: Ronald Reagan's Vision Realized” -- by Michael Wilson, Nov. 23, 1993 says: “Ronald Reagan first proposed a free trade agreement between the U.S. and Mexico in his 1980 presidential campaign. Since that time, The Heritage Foundation is proud of the role it has played in articulating President Reagan's vision of free trade in Latin America and around the world. Since the mid-1980s, Heritage analysts have been stressing that a free trade agreement with Mexico not only will stimulate economic growth in the U.S., but will make Mexico a more stable and prosperous country. Heritage has published over three dozen studies stressing the benefits of free trade in North America.” The memo also says, “The NAFTA win is a great victory for free trade conservatives. It was they who first championed the notion of free trade with Mexico. And it is they who will carry the banner of free trade in the future -- a banner under which even Bill Clinton now marches.” The Heritage Foundation website (accessed 1/12/11).
4- See Backgrounder, No. 478, Jan. 9, 1986, The Heritage Foundation.
5- See entry in the deliberate dumbing down of america, p. 136, regarding: “LAWRENCE C. PIERCE DELIVERED A PAPER IN 1976 ENTITLED ‘SCHOOL SITE MANAGEMENT’ to a meeting of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies in which he referred to site-based management as an ‘intermediate structure between centralized school management and education vouchers.’”

Charlotte Iserbyt is the consummate whistleblower! Iserbyt served as Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration, where she first blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which would control curriculum in America's classrooms. Iserbyt is a former school board director in Camden, Maine and was co-founder and research analyst of Guardians of Education for Maine (GEM) from 1978 to 2000. She has also served in the American Red Cross on Guam and Japan during the Korean War, and in the United States Foreign Service in Belgium and in the Republic of South Africa.

Iserbyt is a speaker and writer, best known for her 1985 booklet Back to Basics Reform or OBE: Skinnerian International Curriculum and her 1989 pamphlet Soviets in the Classroom: America's Latest Education Fad which covered the details of the U.S.-Soviet and Carnegie-Soviet Education Agreements which remain in effect to this day. She is a freelance writer and has had articles published in Human Events, The Washington Times, The Bangor Daily News, and included in the record of Congressional hearings.