Charlotte Iserbyt -- Charter School Trap, Part 1

CHARTER SCHOOL TRAP
PART 1 of 2

By Charlotte Iserbyt

February 22, 2011

NewsWithViews.com

School Choice: No Choice (Limited Learning for Lifelong Labor)

“What is so mind boggling is that all of this is being financed by the American people themselves through their own taxes. In other words, the American people are underwriting the destruction of their own freedom and way of life by lavishly financing through federal grants the very social scientists who are undermining our national sovereignty and preparing our children to become the dumbed-down vassals of the new world order. It reminds one of how the Nazis charged their victims train fare to their own doom.” – Samuel L. Blumenfeld [1]

The significance of the charter school/school choice issue is NOT related strictly to educational choice. It is related to acceptance of a communist system of governance where decisions are made by appointed, not elected officials. Appointed officials cannot be removed from office by voters/taxpayers.

Widespread acceptance of this aspect of communist governance -- as it relates to education (U.S.A. has 17,817 operational school districts [2] that could well come under this non-elective system) -- will make it easier to usher in the unelected system across the board at the local level to the county, to the state, to the Congress, to the White House level. That will spell the end of elected representation and our freedoms established under the Constitution of the United States of America. We will be a totalitarian state.

The trashing of the schools as centers of academic learning has been planned since Carnegie Corporation in 1934 published its Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies.[3] The report called for moving the United States from a free market system to a planned economy (socialism) necessary for U.S. participation in the “new world” (p.11-12), and “new order” (p.35, 36).

With our schools and our children successfully dumbed-down, “they” (identified later in this article) can count on public outcry for “change” in how schools are operated, as well as parental acceptance of charter schools. Parents will accept any solution to the tragic situation facing their children today -- including charter schools with unelected representation. But how many realize that the purpose of charter schools is not academic, but to establish a replacement structure that will focus on training for the workforce (or more simply put: limited learning for lifelong labor)? [4]

Changing governance

“Mr. Dodd, all of us who have a hand in the making of policies here have had experience operating under directives, the substance of which is that we shall use our grant-making power so to alter life in the United States that it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.” – Norman Dodd (in a meeting with Rowan Gaither, President of the Ford Foundation, during Congressional Hearings to Investigate the Tax-Exempt Foundations, 1953)

What we are looking at is the carrying out of what Gaither explained to Dodd. Our constitutional elective representative form of government is being replaced with a communist/regional/unelective/appointive system of government.

In a speech to the Soviet Central Committee on November 2, 1987 (published by Novosti Press Agency Publishing House), Mikhail Gorbachev, then General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, said:

“We are moving toward a new world, the world of communism. We shall never turn off that road.”

What more evidence do we need of the global slide into communism than the remark made by Mikhail Gorbachev in London, England on March 23, 2000 [5] that referred to the European Union (EU) as "the New European Soviet.”[6] If Gorbachev views the EU in that way, it only stands to reason that the North American Union (NAU) -- modeled on the EU, and being implemented as I write – would be the “New American Soviet.”

In order to understand what is happening in the United States, think of our Constitution, Bill of Rights, and way of life as a three-legged stool. All three legs are being removed from this stool in order to complete the “merger of the United States with the Soviet Union” (now known as global governance, regionalism, international socialism, sustainable development, New World Order, etc.)

The three legs of the stool can be described as follows.

Traditional United States Constitutional Form of Government as it relates to education (Taxation WITH Representation):

First leg: Under unhindered, old-fashioned Free Market Capitalism all children have access to a K-12 academic public school education -- overseen by elected school board members whose decisions represent the wishes of the taxpayers who elected them. K-12 education is followed by vocational training or higher education, if desired. This classical academic education has nothing to do with school-to-work training. It allows students to become literate in the so-called ABCs and exposes them to history, art, music, sports, literature, and the world around them.

Second leg: All government (taxpayer-supported) entities including those at local, county, state, and federal levels are managed by elected, repeat elected, not appointed boards, officials. If enough voters are unhappy with elected officials’ decisions, they can vote them out of office to be replaced by citizens who hopefully will represent their wishes.

(On the other hand, the regional appointive system of governance is being used with charter schools. The appointive system does not allow voters -- who pay the taxes that support public-funded charter schools -- to remove persons whose decisions do not represent the majority of voters. Charter schools are “taxation without representation” and the concept should undergo a constitutional challenge in the courts.)

Third leg: Classical Education allows for free will. Your children, with the help of teachers, are allowed to think creatively and figure things out for themselves. Students are not subjected to the behavior modification techniques used in totalitarian societies.

Communist (Regional) Governance

First leg: Communist Pavlovian workforce training education in which government/corporation partnerships determine how many welders, doctors, ballet dancers, etc. are required for the planned economy. In addition to President Reagan signing the U.S.-Soviet cultural, educational, and scientific exchanges agreement [7] with Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev during the 1985 Geneva Summit [8] (which began to merge the two educational systems), the Reagan administration also initiated the public/private partnership concept (which commenced the school-to-work agenda) by establishing the White House Task Force on Private Sector Initiatives. I served as a liaison from the U.S. Department of Education to the White House Task Force. I asked if this new arrangement was not “corporate fascism?” The response was: “Well, I guess nobody has looked at it that way.”

Under this partnership arrangement between schools and business, occupations are determined by around the seventh grade, and in some cases during elementary school. Students are “trained” for particular jobs or career paths, as well as attitudes and values necessary for life in the “brave new world of communism”. These schools are gradeless (no K-12) and non-competitive (no A, B, C, D, E, F grading system), and use Pavlovian-Skinnerian Outcomes/Performance/Results-based education in conjunction with the computer and its values-changing software to train, not educate.

The aforementioned restructured system is being implemented right now in the United States. This type of education/training is promoted by The Reinventing Schools Coalition (RISC) -- "a nonprofit foundation established to transform education systems around the world” – using the “RISC Approach to Schooling.”[9]

Second leg: Out with the old and highly successful representative (elective) form of government; in with the failed unelected communist/regional form of government. Implement “charter schools” (with their unelected/appointed boards) on a massive scale (17,817 school districts!). Thirty-nine states plus the District of Columbia have passed charter school legislation. There are eleven holdouts. God bless them. With charter schools there is NO accountability to taxpayer! You have NO say in how your money is spent.

Don’t forget: regionalism, which does away with elected boards, is communism. In his 1975 article “Planning is Socialism’s Trademark,” Morris Zeitlin, a communist writer for The Daily World (newspaper of the Communist Party USA), wrote how well regionalism has worked in the Soviet Union! [10]

Once citizens are accustomed to schools being managed in this way -- in order to change from academics to workforce training -- citizens will not be concerned when ALL entities/agencies at the town, city, county, state and federal levels of government are run by appointed councils (soviets). Start with the schools nationwide and then spread the communist regional, unelected council (soviet) form of governance into every area of our lives.

How long will it be before we have an unelected commissar in the White House?

Much of the regional governance system is already in place and has been operating on a second track, parallel to our Constitutional track, for at least 50 years. The internationalist termites, in and out of Congress, have been waiting to push the button for the regional system to jump track and to replace the constitutional system. This latest neocon/Obama-supported charter school move is probably the pushing of that button to move our whole country into the unelected board system. It may well be the final blow to our constitutional form of government for which millions of Americans have fought and died for during the history of the United States.

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(Major communist change agent, the late Paul Mort, New York City, said in the late sixties that it takes 50 years to bring about major change.” He certainly was on target.)

Third leg: Citizens are considered human resources (animals to be trained from birth to death: UNESCO’s lifelong education under the umbrella of the unelected community commissar) using Skinnerian/Pavlovian operant conditioning. Bells and whistles used in the classroom and rewards and punishments for use in classroom and community are the wave of the future. Such manipulation has already been inflicted on my town where the Community Oriented Police System (COPS) has the local police handing out medals to citizens who do good deeds! The police determine if the deed merits a medal. Since the schools will use computers to teach and train, our children will be captive to what B.F. Skinner referred to as his “box” and totally conditioned as robots to serve the international state. For part two click below.

Click here for part -----> 2,

Endnotes:

1- From the Foreword of the deliberate dumbing down of america by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, 3rd printing, 2001, p. xi.
2- The number is the 2007-2008 figure for “operational school districts” in the United States, according to IES/National Center for Education Statistics (accessed 1/13/11).
3- Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies can be downloaded from American Deception. Type “conclusions and recommendations” into the website’s search window.
4- See documents at American Deception. Type “charter schools” into the website’s search window.
5- By the year 2000, Mikhail Gorbachev formerly served as president of the Soviet Union, having resigned from the presidency on December 25, 1991.
6- Also, see the video “The EU – the new Soviet?” -- Vladimir Bukovsky describes the parallels between the governance of the European Union and the former Soviet Union. WorldNews website.
7- The General Agreement Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Contacts, Exchanges and Cooperation in Scientific, Technical, Educational, Cultural and Other Fields (1985) may be downloaded from American Deception. See “Education” category.
8- The 1985 signing revived “the agreement that was to have been renewed in 1980” according to The Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, No. 478, Jan. 9, 1986.
9- See the “RISC Approach to Schooling” at The Reinventing Schools Coalition (RISC) website.
10- See the deliberate dumbing down of america, p.134, for excerpts from Morris Zeitlin’s “Planning is Socialism’s Trademark” (The Daily World, Nov. 8, 1975) which states in part: “In socialist countries, metropolitan regions enjoy metropolitan regional government and comprehensive planning. Of the many regions on the vast territory of the Soviet Union, the Moscow Region commands special attention, for it has been, since the 1917 Revolution, the country’s economic and political center.”

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.