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Lord, I thought I knew you,

   but know the winds have changed.

Tossed away, will you find me?

   Can still , my heart be sustained?

Just me and you when things were new,

then the season's storms blew by.

   Did I forget to worship you?

 

Will you come, Lord Jesus to gather us- your sheep.

   For the days grow long and still,

If we watch and wait, will you hear us yet-

   Can we stand strong to do you will?

 

 The wheat has been blowing in that field,

   While the laborers are so few.

What then, now are we waiting for?

   Can hardened hearts become like new?

 

 Safely can we stay behind you,

   as we march with your trumpet sound?

Or- have we stayed and hid so long now,

   That our roots dry underground?

 

 I pray Lord that you will find me.

   I pray not to be ashamed.

I seek you when it's early Lord.

   I pray not to fall away.

 

So come Lord Jesus come quickly-

   The terrible day is at hand.

I pray we'll all be steadfast.

   So you may strengthen our spirits ,

as we stand.

 

Loree Brownfield

Entries in linda darling hammond (4)

Sunday
Mar242013

Common Core Flyer With Study Links

Here is a flyer to distribute re: Common Core to churches and friends and family in Alabama.  Information is useful for anyone that want to study common core.

Video of Georgia Press Conference as to why they are pulling out.  Common Core was not pilot-tested.  You can really say Georgia and Kentucky were the places it was pilot tested and it failed their students.  They were some of the first states to implement it and the fruits are rather ugly.  This is what happens when there is no criteria to the standards as the interview with a city school superintendent in Alabama clearly indicates.

Here are front page links (apples on top):

  • Former Tx. State Sup. of Ed. Robert Scott Testimony on video of Common Core not pilot-tested and not yet written yet he was asked to sign on to Common Core Standards.
  • Alabama education wasn't working so get Common Core (cost no matter-untested no matter etc)
  • Proficiency Exams Result for Georgia

 

Inside Page--links:

 More to study

 More contact numbers and emails for legislators

Sunday
Mar172013

Common Core Standards--Pros and Cons--Myths and Facts

 Standards of What Will Be Taught Your Child No Longer Has Parental Input--Get Informed

This is about how teaching standards--called the Common Core - is being promoted in states such as Alabama.  There is now a battle to get rid of Common Core as more states are finding the truth that these take away parental input and are untested.  Remember how parents could go to local school boards to effect change--no more.  Because Common Core is copyrighted many states are shackled with it and can only add 15% (which will not be tested).  On top of that states have added the shackles of NO Child Left Behind waiver ( and Common Core Standards is part of the requirement to get the waiver).  States like Vermont are saying no to the NCLB waiver which is proving to be more troublesome.

The truth must come out for states and parents in order to again--truly have input over what will be taught their children.  Educators promoting the common core standards have failed to realize (or are they ignoring it?) the first point most voters/parents know--that education will never get better when you take away parental input and accountability to "we the people". 

This is a Q&A session of how standards are pushed and touted in Alabama.

Here are some of the Pros and Cons and Myths and Facts to the Common Core Standards.

Proponents of Common Core says they are rigorous, tested, internationally benchmarked but contrary to that --states are finding they are a "dumbing down" . 

  • Race To The Top Applications which were the federal incentive for states to sign on to these standards (for federal grants) were given out in Nov '09 yet the applications were signed by states such as Alabama within in two months--Jan '10.  The final drafts of the standards were not written til March '10 and its publication was not 'til June '10.  Standards normally take a year to be studied before adoption according to Alabama State Superintendent yet we signed on to these before they were even written--(see video of testimony from Tx Super Robert Scott on it and why he said no). Is it any wonder that many parents believe their State Boards did not do their job?  And they also tout that these standards were tested and internationally benchmarked-- and all because-- they say so! These are the talking points or mantras you will hear over and over--tested, internationally benchmarked, rigorous as if saying it will make it so.
  • State Sup Tommy Bice calls it Alabama's --yet these standards are copyrighted and cannot be changed.  States can only add 15% but that 15% will not be tested.
  • States with Common Core Standards are committed to Common Core Assessments.  Even ACT who Alabama is choosing will be aligned to Common Core.
  • Many are concerned about "Data Mining" where information from your student will be part of a database--use and availabilty to who?
  • But in Alabama there will also be additional information gathered:  "Another component of ACT’s K-12 tests, called Engage, examines “academic behaviors.” These ask students to report whether they can manage their feelings, work well with others, and finish what they have started, for example. Teachers also rate students on these same qualities (here’s ACT’s teacher guide to rating students this way), such as “being willing to experience new things” and “listen to others’ points of view.” It’s currently for grades 6-9, but ACT is working to apply it to younger grades, too, Weeks said".  The big $$ jumpstart came from Bill Gates and all sorts of entities he has been able to influence or get to invest in this new goldmine (Common Core) for computer information,hardware and software along with the textbooks, e-books,testing, data gathering and training that will be required all under the guise of improving education.

 

  • But most troubling are the people who are planning and influencing what will be taught your children and your input will not matter other than maybe choosing which of their chosen "list of aligned textbooks" to use.  People such as terrorist Bill Ayers.   Ayers was a keynote speaker at  conference sponsored by the Renaissance Group in Oct 2009 along with Secretary of Education Duncan and U.S. Under Secretary of Education, Martha Kanter.  At this three-day conference, Mr. Nevin Brown of Achieve, Inc., made a presentation on the “Common Core State Standards” Initiative. Hence, Ayers was a major speaker at a conference that was involved in developing Common Core Standards (friends do matter).
  • Bill Ayers also close friend Linda Darling Hammond who share his philosophy on education is who is in charge of Common Core specifications as well as the controversial CSCOPE which Texas parents exposed as teaching the "allah is god curriculum".  Other  teachings  include--"those who died at WTC on 9/11 died in hands of freedom fighters" and that "Boston Tea Party was a terrorist act."

 

Important--must read excerpts:

Both Ayers and Darling-Hammond were leaders in the small schools movement. She has published in a collection edited by Ayers. Both have been advocates of ending funding disparities between urban and suburban schools, ending standardized testing, and attacking “white privilege.” She has been a board member of CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning), a group housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago, that provides studies of, and services for, Emotional Intelligence in schools—but really emotional manipulation aimed at making students global citizens.

Both also failed to improve schools or test scores. Ayers’ Annenberg Challenge failed miserably. The school created by Darling-Hammond, Stanford New Schools, which targeted low-income Hispanic and black students, had the distinction of making California’s list of the lowest-achieving five percent. Much of the reason may be her “five-dimensional grading rubric” of personal responsibility, social responsibility, communication skills, application of knowledge, and critical and creative thinking.

In the August 2009 Harvard Educational Review, Darling-Hammond gave a preview of new standards as she argued for “deep understanding” and advancing beyond “the narrow views of the last eight years” by “developing creativity, critical thinking skills, and the capacity to innovate.” New assessments would use “multiple measures of learning and performance.” These would presumably emulate “high-achieving nations” that emphasize “essay questions and open-ended responses as well as research and scientific investigations, complex real-world problems, and extensive use of technology.”

In an April 28, 2010, Education Week article, “Developing an Internationally Comparable Balanced Assessment System,” Darling-Hammond claimed that the new assessment system is “designed to go beyond recall of facts and show students’ abilities to evaluate evidence, problem solve and understand context.” Bill Ayers, throughout his writings, likens the testing for “facts” to a factory or prison system, and agrees with Darling-Hammond’s emphasis on criteria like “student growth along multiple dimensions.” Such buzzwords thinly disguise an agenda of replacing the objective measurement of knowledge and skills with teachers’ subjective appraisals of students’ attitudes and behavior.

Sounds familiar--read this complete amazing exposition.

 

You must study, pray and then act.  Apathy and lack of knowledge will not be excused when the minds of America's children lead to a darker America. 

"But if you cause one of these little ones who trusts in me to fall into sin, it would be better for you to have a large millstone tied around your neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea."  Matthew 18:6

All including homeschools and private schools will have to be aligned to Common Core unless you the parents and your churches do something uncommon --share the truth and make a stand.  Start by contacting your legislators to repeal Common Core for it is a wolf in sheep's clothing and will dumb down the children.  States can and should do better but truth must be shared for legislators to realize the dire situation and they must do their job for such a time as this.  Let them know "WE the people" do matter and our children matter very much!

More Video Resources:

Monday
Mar042013

Taking Over The Minds Of Children-One Way or Another-Linda Darling Hammond and Bill Ayers PlanningThrough Common Core or Something Like CSCOPE--Hear Interview With Donna Garner

There is a convergence of different ways to change the future.  The theme is to change it through what used to be a trusted place for our children--the classroom.  In that place are plans to affect generations.  Sad thing is most parents are unaware to make a difference.  Unknown today are programs like Common Core and CSCOPE--two large tools to manipulate the minds of our children under the guise of education.  Listen to interview with Donna Garner, foremost education expert and activist who helped expose the truth behind CSCOPE and Common Core Standards.  Her incredible insight needs to be shared with every parent as she knows the key to your children's future.  There are two philosophies of education and which your child is in will affect the adult he/she will become.  As you listen to her you will realize that knowing the difference between the two is not that difficult but getting educators to understand is something else.  Sometimes our elected officials rely on the knowledge of the crowd of educators around them--going along with what has been touted. Money and power talks--the Bill Gates and Dept of Ed propaganda is drummed in their midst at all times (never mind that Obama-Gates education foundation rests on taking away the input of parents and teachers).  There will be in essence a true parting of the waves as we see who are the true heroes that will defend the Constitution and the innocent children in their charge--the future of America.  Listen and be glad you did as getting to know CSCOPE and Common Core and the names of Linda Darling Hammond and Bill Ayers is the beginning of unraveling the plans for the mind of your child.

 

If you'd like to get more information--here are great sources:

[3.2.13 – Mary Grabar wrote a brilliant paper last fall (posted below), and much has happened  since then to validate her research.  Even Math U See which is used by many homeschoolers has recently announced that its materials are aligning with the CCS, and Saxon Math appears to be moving in that same direction also.

 

Just as the Common Core Standards (CCS) used stealth techniques to capture 45 states (including D. C.), CSCOPE has done the same thing in Texas. 

 

Even though Texas was one of several states that early-on decided not to join the Common Core Standards, CSCOPE managed to use the 20 Education Service Centers to market its leftwing product and is now in 70% to 80% of Texas’ public schools.  The footprints of Bill Ayers, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Lucy Calkins are seen throughout CSCOPE.  It is no coincidence that Common Core Standards has made overtures to purchase CSCOPE.  

 

However, Texas grassroots citizens and many Texas Legislators have joined together to uncover CSCOPE; and in a strange way, the unsavory publicity that Texas and CSCOPE have garnered has served to alert parents throughout America to the same dangers found in the Common Core Standards.  Now numerous states are pulling back from the Common Core Standards: https://www.box.com/s/0jcz6zo5otf0ojtfe3tu

 

Georgia, Indiana, Utah, Alabama, and other states are locked in legislative battles to rid themselves of the Common Core Standards.  Concerned parents all over America are joining together to inform themselves so that they can better protect their children by pressuring  state officials to back out of Common Core Standards. 

 

Congress could stop CCS dead in its tracks. All it takes is for the House to cut the appropriations for the Common Core Standards/Race to the Top, the development of the national assessments and the national database.  By law, the House holds the purse strings.  Even though Obama originally came up with the idea of sequestratian and then tried to weasel out by blaming the Republicans, it is those same House members who need to take a similar stand against the takeover of the public schools by the Obama administration.  So far Congressmen have been AWOL on the Common Core Standards and its tentacles.  

 

Mary Grabar’s article posted below is a quintessential piece that people need to take the time to read so that they are armed with the facts.  Once armed, they can do battle for the minds and souls of America’s children.  – Donna Garner] 

===================

Terrorist Professor Bill Ayers and Obama’s Federal School Curriculum

Mary Grabar  —   September 21, 2012

 

http://www.aim.org/special-report/terrorist-professor-bill-ayers-and-obamas-federal-school-curriculum/

 

 
Three years after the Department of Education announced a contest called Race-to-the-Top for $4.35 billion in stimulus funds, some parents, teachers, governors, and citizen and public policy groups are coming to an awful realization about the likely outcomes:

 

  • ·         A national curriculum called Common Core
  • ·         Regionalism, or the replacement of local governments by federally appointed bureaucrats
  • ·         A leveling of all schools to one, low national standard, and a redistribution of education funds among school districts
  • ·         An effective federal tracking of all students
  • ·         The loss of the option of avoiding the national curriculum and tests through private school and home school

Working behind the scenes, implementing these policies and writing the standards are associates from President Obama’s community organizing days. In de facto control of the education component is Linda Darling-Hammond, a radical left-wing educator and close colleague of William “Bill” Ayers, the former leader of the communist terrorist Weather Underground who became a professor of education and friend of Obama’s.

When these dangerous initiatives are implemented, there will be no escaping bad schools and a radical curriculum by moving to a good suburb, or by home schooling, or by enrolling your children in private schools.

How was it that 48 governors entered Race-to-the-Top without knowing outcomes?

It was one of the many “crises” exploited by the Obama administration. While the public was focused on a series of radical moves coming in rapid-fire succession, like the health care bill and proposed trials and imprisonment of 9/11 terrorists on domestic soil, governors, worried about keeping school doors open, signed on. Many politicians and pundits praised Obama on this singular issue, repeating the official rhetoric about raising standards.

It stands to reason, though, that education policies would be consistent with Obama’s agenda. After all, one of his most controversial associations, highlighted during the 2008 presidential campaign, was with an education professor, Bill Ayers. As a terrorist, he and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, had dedicated theirPrairie Fire Manifesto to Sirhan Sirhan, the convicted assassin of Robert F. Kennedy. It was for this reason that Kennedy’s son, Christopher Kennedy, chairman of the University of Illinois board of trustees, voted against bestowing “professor emeritus” status on Ayers after he retired. “I intend to vote against conferring the honorific title of our university whose body of work includes a book dedicated in part to the man who murdered my father, Robert F. Kennedy,” he said.

THE OBAMA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION: WHERE DID BILL AYERS GO?

Back then, the former bomber and co-founder of the communist terrorist Weather Underground organization was Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The two had worked together closely from the year Ayers hosted a political launch party for Obama, in 1995, to 2002. At the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, “the brainchild of Bill Ayers,” they funneled more that $100 million to radical groups like ACORN and Gamaliel, which used the funds to promote radical education.[i] This initiative was also promoted by Arne Duncan, now Secretary of Education. Also as board members of the Woods Fund, Ayers and Obama channeled money to ACORN and the Midwest Academy.[ii]

When initial White House visitor logs were released in 2009, the administration quickly dismissed speculations about visits by “William Ayers.” That was adifferent William Ayers Americans were told. The Obama administration is appealing an August 17 order to release the other visitor logs in response to a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch and others.[iii]

It appears, however, that “the” Obama-friendly Bill Ayers has been visiting Washington, D.C. for education-related matters.

In October 2009, the year before he retired, Ayers had an encounter with the “Backyard Conservative” blogger at Reagan National Airport. At that time, there was speculation about Ayers being the real author of Obama’s autobiography,Dreams from My Father. Ayers teased that he was indeed the real author.

Blogger and law professor, Stephen Diamond, noted that no one asked why Ayers would even be in Washington, D.C. It turns out that Ayers was one of three keynote speakers at a conference sponsored by the Renaissance Group, which,according to Diamond, was dedicated to problems of poverty, diversity, and multiculturalism—and the inability of white teachers to deal with them. The other two speakers were Secretary of Education Duncan and U.S. Under Secretary of Education, Martha Kanter.

It is not clear what Ayers spoke about at this particular conference. But my analysis of his courses and methods at the University of Illinois determined that his purpose is to radicalize future teachers—and by extension their students—for the purpose of sparking a revolution and overthrowing capitalism.

It is shocking that Obama Education Department officials would appear at a conference that also featured someone like Ayers. On the other hand, their boss, President Obama, worked with Ayers in Chicago, and this kind of collaboration is not entirely surprising. We are left, however, wondering about the precise nature of the role that Ayers is playing in the development of this federal education plan. But his participation in this conference clearly suggests he is playing a role of some kind.

At this three-day conference, Mr. Nevin Brown of Achieve, Inc., made a presentation on the “Common Core State Standards” Initiative. A recipient of the largesse of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Achieve would become a key player in revamping education under Common Core. Hence, Ayers was a major speaker at a conference that was involved in developing a new national curriculum. If Achieve has ever disavowed Ayers or his teaching methods, we could find no evidence of this on the public record.

The notion of a “Common Core” seems to recall E.D. Hirsch’s traditionalist Common Knowledge curriculum, which emphasizes the need for students to understand America’s cultural and national heritage. But Common Core is not that at all. Many have been fooled, and an estimated 80% of the public does not even know about Common Core.

Common Core is part of an effort to implement regionalism, the replacement of local governments by regional boards of federally appointed bureaucrats, who in turn are beholden to international bodies. Regionalism will eliminate the freedom parents now have in choosing neighborhoods with good schools because tax funds will be distributed equally. There will be no escape in home schooling or private schools either, because the curriculum will follow national tests. Students will be tracked through mandatory state records that will then be accessible to Washington bureaucrats. Ultimately, all students will be subject to education mandates implemented by Obama’s radical cronies.

 

NOT LETTING A CRISIS GO TO WASTE

“Race to the Top” required that states commit to yet-to-be-written Common Core standards in math and English/Language Arts (ELA). Today, Common Core has the support of Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and was included in the platform of the Democratic National Convention. It was embraced by former Republican Florida Governor, Jeb Bush, much to the consternation of Tea Party groups, who see this as an unconstitutional federal takeover of education. The Republican Party is divided.

Emmett McGroarty and Jane Robbins, in their white paper “Controlling Education from the Top: Why Common Core Is Bad for America,” describe the pressure and sleight-of-hand that led governors to sign onto a commitment that was then changed before the ink had fully dried. They reveal that rather than being a state-led reform initiative, as touted, the new standards were written by a few well-connected, but non-qualified, education entrepreneurs. The history goes back decades, but in the most recent phase, the vision for Common Core was set in 2007, by the Washington-based contractor, Achieve, Inc., in a document entitledBenchmarking for Success.

The question is: Why was Bill Ayers keynoting a conference attended by the two highest officials in the Education Department and by Achieve, essentially the project manager of the nationalized education curriculum? It may be years before we know how often Ayers visited the White House, but the Ayers educational brand or philosophy is all over Common Core.

Some states are waking up. Virginia pulled out when Governor Bob McDonnell was elected. Georgia, Indiana, Utah, South Carolina, and others have begun the effort to extricate themselves.

When South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said she would support a state legislative effort to block Common Core, which her predecessor had instituted, Education Secretary Arne Duncan dismissed her concerns about nationally imposed standards as “a conspiracy theory in search of a conspiracy.”

But it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to realize that Common Core will ultimately dictate the curriculum. Two consortia of states (SBAC and PARCC)[iv]have been given $360 million in federal funds to create national Common Core-aligned tests and “curriculum models.” Well-connected companies, such as Educational Testing Service (ETS) and the multinational textbook company Pearson, are in competition to design the test. David Coleman, a chief architect of the Common Core standards for English/Language Arts, recently was namedPresident of the College Board, which administers tests, including those designed by ETS, like the SAT.

The Education Department on August 12, 2012, announced another competitionfor $400 million in Race-to-the-Top funds for local districts to “personalize learning, close achievement gaps and take full advantage of 21st century tools.” Such a competition cleverly bypasses recalcitrant states and lures individual districts into the federal web.

The feds’ announcement echoes Common Core’s emphasis on personalized learning and leveling of achievement through technology and collaboration (the “21st century skills”). Common Core emphasizes “in-depth” reading of short passages, rather than long fictional or historical narratives. The Publisher’s Criteria reveal that a focus on short texts will equalize outcomes. Text selection guide B mandates that “all students (including those who are behind) have extensive opportunities to encounter grade-level complex text” through “supplementary opportunities.” The strategy of gathering students into groups to collaborate on short passages ensures that no one advances beyond others.[v]

In the tradition of John Dewey, multiple “perspectives” and “critical thinking” are emphasized over the accumulation of “facts.” Common Core advertises itself as promoting “skills,” rather than content. The skills, though, do not promise to make students more knowledgeable about literature or history, but to make them “critical thinkers” in the tradition of the radical curriculum writers who are selectively critical of the U.S. and the West.

BILL AYERS IN THE CLASSROOM

In 2008, attention was focused on Bill Ayers’ past as a terrorist; this, Stephen Diamond maintains, missed the real damage, which was political. Diamond, a social democrat, calls Ayers a “neo-Stalinist,” in line with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, whose country Ayers visited to make speeches about education being the “motor force of revolution.” According to Diamond, Neo-Stalinism is an “authoritarian form of politics which attempts to control and build social institutions to impose state control of the economy, politics and culture on the general population.” Ayers and his allies used the “critical policy area” of education, and through four aims: “local school councils,” small schools, social justice teaching, and payment of reparations through education spending.

Local school councils and “small schools” are efforts to escape modern schools that, in Ayers’ estimation, “are all about sorting and punishing, grading and ranking and certifying” and demanding “obedience and conformity.”[vi] Ayers’ numerous, supposedly scholarly, books and articles are filled with such hyperbole that depicts demands of the regular school day, like objective tests and class periods, as evidence of a police state.

Former Senior Policy Advisor to the Department of Education and member of the California Mathematics Framework Committee, Ze’ev Wurman, testified that the Common Core overlooks basic skills, lowers college readiness standards, and offers “verbose and imprecise guidance,”[vii] while dictating that geometry be taught by an experimental method that was tested on Soviet math prodigies in the 1950s—and failed.

In English classes, teachers will reduce the amount of time spent teaching their subject of literature to only 50 percent, and then to 30 percent in high school, a move criticized by education reform professor Sandra Stotsky. Replacing literature will be “informational texts” like  nonfiction books, computer manuals, IRS forms, and original documents, like court decisions and the Declaration of Independence. Documents, like the Declaration, however, are taught in a manner that downplays their significance. Overall, students will be losing a sense of a national and cultural heritage that is acquired through a systematic reading of classical literature and study of history.

Although the official rhetoric promoting these standards is more muted, the approach parallels Bill Ayers’ pedagogy. The replacement of traditional mathematics with “conceptual categories” lends itself to advancing a social justice agenda, as Ayers colleague Eric Gutstein does through his math education classes. The Common Core emphasis on having students simply explore original texts parallels the John Dewey-inspired approach that Ayers favors, of having students “discover” and “construct” knowledge. Not wanting to be beholden to outside, objective measurements of students’ knowledge, such teachers promote other more subjective measures, like displays of “deep” understanding, “higher-order” thinking, and ability to collaborate. By all indications, the testing being developed now will use such criteria.

 THE ROLE OF BILL AYERS “PAL” LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND

 Stanley Kurtz, in his latest book, Spreading the Wealth, maintains that a nationalized curriculum is part of an effort to replace local governments with regional boards, who would disburse local tax dollars equally among school districts. Once all schools are the same—with the same curriculum and the same funding—people will no longer have the incentive to move to good suburbs. While Obama’s community organizing mentor, Mike Kruglik, implements the regionalism advocated by the Gamaliel Foundation through Building One America, Ayers’ close associate, Linda Darling-Hammond, exercises “de facto control”[viii]through education.

Both Ayers and Darling-Hammond were leaders in the small schools movement. She has published in a collection edited by Ayers. Both have been advocates of ending funding disparities between urban and suburban schools, ending standardized testing, and attacking “white privilege.” She has been a board member of CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning), a group housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago, that provides studies of, and services for, Emotional Intelligence in schools—but really emotional manipulationaimed at making students global citizens.

Both also failed to improve schools or test scores. Ayers’ Annenberg Challenge failed miserably. The school created by Darling-Hammond, Stanford New Schools, which targeted low-income Hispanic and black students, had the distinction of making California’s list of the lowest-achieving five percent. Much of the reason may be her “five-dimensional grading rubric” of personal responsibility, social responsibility, communication skills, application of knowledge, and critical and creative thinking. Yet, Darling-Hammond served as education director on Obama’s transition team. In a January 2, 2009, Huffington Post column, Ayersargued for her nomination as Education Secretary. That summer, Darling-Hammond pushed Common Core in the Harvard Educational Review.

Darling-Hammond is in charge of content specifications at the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), which received $176 million of federal Race-to-the-Top money to develop Common Core testing. She appears frequently as a speaker and board member of other affiliated organizations. For example, she sits on the Governing Board of the Alliance for Excellent Education, Inc., recipient of a $500,000 Gates grant “to advocate for high school reform at the federal level in order to educate federal policy members about Common Core standards. . .”

In the August 2009 Harvard Educational Review, Darling-Hammond gave a preview of new standards as she argued for “deep understanding” and advancing beyond “the narrow views of the last eight years” by “developing creativity, critical thinking skills, and the capacity to innovate.” New assessments would use “multiple measures of learning and performance.” These would presumably emulate “high-achieving nations” that emphasize “essay questions and open-ended responses as well as research and scientific investigations, complex real-world problems, and extensive use of technology.”

In an April 28, 2010, Education Week article, “Developing an Internationally Comparable Balanced Assessment System,” Darling-Hammond claimed that the new assessment system is “designed to go beyond recall of facts and show students’ abilities to evaluate evidence, problem solve and understand context.” Bill Ayers, throughout his writings, likens the testing for “facts” to a factory or prison system, and agrees with Darling-Hammond’s emphasis on criteria like “student growth along multiple dimensions.” Such buzzwords thinly disguise an agenda of replacing the objective measurement of knowledge and skills with teachers’ subjective appraisals of students’ attitudes and behavior.

Former testing foes, like Columbia Teachers College professor Lucy Calkins, now advance Common Core standards. Although long an incubator of anti-testing advocates, Columbia has produced the authors of the popular Pathways to the Common Core (2012), one of them Calkins.

Pathways is maddening in its lack of specificity. Repeatedly, the authors inveigh against “skill-and-drill” and favor “deep reading” and “higher-level thinking;” but they fail to say how this will be done or even what it means. They discuss “read[ing] within the four corners of the text” and having readers get “their mental arms around a text,”[ix] but offer no specific, much less tested, strategies for improving reading comprehension. They contradict themselves when they cite studies that show that students who read fiction improve reading levels and then promote nonfiction. When examples of informational texts are given, they are most often from left-leaning publications, often on trivial subjects.

Common Core thus promises to eliminate the idea of a common core of knowledge—through the privileging of leftist “informational texts” and material presented in a scattershot manner. The national and cultural identity that is conveyed through a wide and interconnected exposure to literary works from Mother Goose to Shakespeare will be undermined.

While proponents tout a close, critical reading of short texts, or excerpts, the truth is that the approach lends itself to infinite interpretations wildly off the mark. The approach—where uninformed groups of students speculate about “original documents”—is intended to make them radically skeptical of any historical legacy.

Original documents are presented in such a manner as to actually diminish them. For example, a sample exercise about Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Addressthrew teachers into confusion when they were instructed to refrain from providing background and to read the speech without feeling. In this way, this pivotal document is stripped of its historical significance and eloquence. Nor are the religious references, so important to Lincoln’s speeches, to be mentioned. The strategy puts the Gettysburg Address on the same plane as other “informational texts,” say about frogs or snakes.

 TRASHING THE UNITED STATES AND THE FBI

Other materials have the same effect.  Stanford University’s “Reading Like a Historian”   Project, promoted in a July 30 Education Week article, offers teachers a ready-made lesson on the Cold War with four documents: excerpts from Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech, the Truman Doctrine Speech, a telegram sent by Soviet Ambassador Nikolai Novikov to the Soviet leadership in 1946, and a modified letter by Henry Wallace, shortly before he was asked to resign by President Truman. The “Guiding Questions” focus on “close reading” and “context.” But with the scant information offered, students will likely see the final question, “Who was primarily responsible for the Cold War, the United States or the Soviet Union?” as one of moral equivalence.

Another lesson on the Cold War is sold by Rutgers professor Marc Aronson, whoadvertises himself as a “Common Core consultant,” speaker, and author. He calls Common Core “a magnificent opportunity.”[x] His most recent book, Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover and America in the Age of Lies, is tailored for English teachers who need to teach “informational texts” to middle and high school students. Aronson makes it easy for them, offering them free teachers guides.

Master of Deceit mocks Hoover’s own bestselling Masters of Deceit that described and warned about communist subversion. Aronson’s book is extremely manipulative and salacious, and engages in wild speculation. While a conservative point of view is thrown in here and there, the points come off as gratuitous and obviously contradictory to the main (correct) message.  Aronson presents FBI Director Hoover as a repressed homosexual, who exploited Americans’ irrational fears about communism. Among the “original documents” that Aronson provides are photographs—of Hoover with his friend Clyde Tolson. He points out, for the benefit of eleven-year-olds, that photos of Tolson reclining on a lawn chair, and fully clothed, “might be seen as lovers’ portraits. . . but we cannot say for sure.”

In fact, we can. As Bernie Reeves, founder of the Raleigh Spy Conference, has noted, the story of Hoover’s alleged homosexuality was contrived by the KGB in the 1960s. He notes evidence that “…the Hoover rumor, fabricated by the KGB, found its way into the lexicon of our culture where it has evolved from vicious disinformation to accepted fact—a veritable success for the KGB and another example of the role of the failure of established media to serve as an honest broker in the affairs of the nation and the world.”

“Hoover provided the security Americans wanted,” writes Aronson. “Our beliefs about what was acceptable—what could be shown in public and what had to be guarded in private—shaped the secrets he could gather.”

Aronson’s parting words to the student are, “I hope Master of Deceit shows that we must always question both the heroes we favor and the enemies we hate. We must remain open-minded, even when the shadow of fear freezes our hearts.” In fact, our fear was real. Hoover led the FBI’s efforts to expose the Communist Party members and fronts that were part of the international communist movement that the editors of the Black Book of Communism had estimated were responsible for about 100 million dead.

Others advertise their services as Common Core speakers and workshop leaders, many through Edutopia, funded by movie producer George Lucas that has been promoting disturbing anti-bullying and emotional intelligence videos and workshops.

The publisher of Pathways to the Common Core, Heinemann, also publishes ready-to-go curricular material and offers workshops on Common Core by Calkins and her colleagues.

 

SELLING OBAMA CORE MATERIALS

Publishers are promoting new Core-aligned materials. The American Library Association directs educators to their Booklist, which offers classics” suggestionsfrom contemporary authors. More typical are categories like “Exploring Diversity.”

TeachingBooks.net offers lesson plans and discussion questions, reportedly, to more than a quarter of all U.S. schools. The site also features interviews and blog posts by authors about the research process on favorite topics like the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike.[xi] Publishers Random House, Scholastic, and Holiday House are re-launching their teacher and librarian sites with information about the Core.[xii]

PBS promotes the use of “public media” in the Common Core, thus updating their educational activities.

A July 18 Publishers Weekly article notes that publishers are eagerly putting out Common Core books by adapting adult nonfiction books, like Fast Food Nation, for classroom use in a new title, Chew on This. Indeed, they are following the lead of officials: One of the sample Common Core guides is for teaching The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Lerner Publishing Group is publishing biographies on stars, “such as Justin Bieber,” while carefully adhering to “Core criteria such as reading level, narrative arc, and sentence structure.” Books are sold in clusters, by topic, because “Typically, Core authors want students to think more critically about what they’re reading . . . to compare multiple sources in different formats; and to give more sourced evidence, and less personal opinion in their writing.”

Presumably, preteens would not be writing opinion essays about how “cute” Bieber is, but would rigorously be providing “sourced evidence” in their “deep” analyses.

CLASSROOM LESSONS

How is Common Core now being used in classrooms? On March 14, Education Week reported that tenth-graders in a suburb of Des Moines would be readingNickel and Dimed by far-left activist Barbara Ehrenreich. This book, along with others on “computer geeks, fast food, teenage marketing, chocolate-making, and diamond-mining,” is about the “real-world topics” (like Bieber) promoted by Common Core.

The Pearson Foundation, with a grant from the Gates Foundation, will offer a “coherent and systemic approach to teaching the Common Core State Standards.” Another big, well-connected publisher, Scholastic, is developing “Everyday Literacy,” which according to Education Week, is a “K-6 program that incorporates brochures, catalogs, menus, and other text types.”

New York City’s new “Core-Aligned Task” for eleventh- and twelfth-graders centers on “doing work ‘On Behalf of Others.’” This idea of speaking out on behalf of the oppressed is canonized as “a long and dignified tradition of documentary work” that produces records “meant to raise questions and to function as calls to action.”

Students are asked to “read” a New York Times photo essay and audio clip titled, “Joshua Febres: The Uncertain Gang Member.” This exercise in “literacy” consists of “listen[ing] carefully” and “look[ing] closely at the images that accompany the audio.”

The exercise, “Building reading comprehension,” involves “extracting and analyzing relevant information from [Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era] ‘Migrant Mother’ photos.” The teacher is to:

Place students in pairs or trios. Using all the photographs, have the students spend at least ten minutes looking closely at the sequence of images that led up to the final image, as well as that final image. Ask them to infer what was selected and what was deflected from earlier photos, when making the final photo.

After reading an informational paragraph about James Agee and writing a one-sentence summary of it, students “return to [the] images.” As a class they then read a web page “which describes the complicated history of that image.”

The class next watches a short video about the artist “JR,” who works “on behalf of others,” by doing “massive public art installations all over the world in which he posts photographs of regular people on places such as the walls of buildings, rooftops, and the sides of bridges and trains.”

The essay-writing task is a “micro-report” of 500 words “about an event you witnessed [sic] place or person you know that needs to be brought to light or told about.”

Obviously, with only a “micro-report,” evaluation cannot be based on written “literacy” alone. So the teacher is offered a handy “Speaking and Listening Standards: Observation and Comment Form.” These upper-classmen are judged on “participat[ing] in collaborative discussion” that includes “work[ing] with peers to promote civil, democratic discussions and fair decision-making.”

 HIGHER STANDARDS?

Are these higher standards or dumbing down? Will Common Core produce well-educated Americans or indoctrinated pacifist global citizens?

Huffington Post blogger and “Award-Winning Historian and Inner City Teacher” John Thompson cheers this curriculum. So does PBS, as it promotes its educational materials as Common Core compliant, while receiving federal funds and the largesse of Bill Gates.

In her Harvard Educational Review article, “President Obama and Education: The Possibility for Dramatic Improvements in Teaching and Learning,” published in the summer after Bill Ayers had urged her nomination as Secretary of Education, Linda Darling-Hammond waxed on about the Obama administration’s “opportunity to transform our nation’s schools.”  Some may remember Obama’s promise to “fundamentally transform America.” Darling-Hammond noted (or warned), “Barack Obama has outlined a set of ambitious plans to transform American education on a scale not seen since the days of the Great Society.”

APPENDIX:  THE GATES FOUNDATION

McGroarty and Robbins note that the Gates Foundation “has poured tens of millions of dollars into organizations that have an interest, financial or otherwise, in the implementation of Common Core.”[xiii] While the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gives to worthy causes like fighting malaria and HIV infection, the foundation’s 2010 IRS documents reveal funding of other, mostly leftist, causes. Gifts went to the Tides Fund, and Planned Parenthood and other “reproductive health” efforts. In education, Gates has given money to teachers unions, La Raza schools, and a school named after Caesar Chavez.

They have given a lot to school districts. After Bill Gates met with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, reporter Jaime Sarrio gushed about Gates’ generosity: a $20 million investment in “game-based learning,” technical support in Georgia’s Race to the Top application, a gift of $500,000 for teachers to meet the standards of Common Core, and $10 million for Atlanta public schools’ “Effective Teacher in Every Classroom” program.

Florida schools received a substantial portion of education funding.

In 2010, the Gates Foundation gave millions to a number of developers of “game-based learning” and “digital learning.” Gates is also helping companies that will evaluate teacher effectiveness, like Teachscape. Among Teachscape’s business partners are the testing company ETS and the National Education Association. Teachscape’s founder is on the board of Oracle, a company that advertises itself as teaching “21st century skills.” Oracle donated money to Teachscape. Another business partner of Teachscape, Leaning Forward, will hold a conference in December, sponsored by the Gates Foundation. Presenters will offer their companies’ and their schools’ advice on using technology to implement Common Core. Session topics fall into categories like “Brain-Based Learning” and “Race, Class, Culture, and Learning Differences.”

Gates also gave millions to projects on “data collection” programs that track teacher and student progress.

The Gates Foundation supported efforts to market Common Core through media “education.” The Corporation for Public Broadcasting received half a million dollars to “identify and amplify ‘teacher voice’ to help ensure teachers are in the center of the dialogue on teacher accountability” (nothing for parent or citizen voice, though). NPR received $250,000 “to support coverage of education issues.” The Education Writers Association received $603,900 “to enhance media coverage of high school and post-secondary education by offering seminars and online training for reporters building bridges between mainstream and ethnic community media,”  and $23,634 to “support media coverage of the education components of American Recovery and Reconstruction Act.”

The Gates Foundation provided a $489,453 grant to the George Soros/Obama mouthpiece, the Center for American Progress, “to help communicate the importance of education reforms and support progressive states seeking to implement them.” The same year CAP was also awarded $302,680 to “enhance degree completion for low-income young adults through the publishing of new policy papers, stakeholder engagement and media outreach.” Over $1 million was given to the Editorial Projects in Education, which publishes Education Week,which is supported by other foundations favoring Common Core. Education Weekpublished the Darling-Hammond article promoting new assessments. Stephen Diamond in an October 9, 2008, blog post complained that Education Week was “whitewashing” Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers in the Annenberg Challenge.

Universities across the country received grants to promote Common Core, as did Boards of Regents. Columbia Teachers College, Ayers’ alma mater, and place of employment for Lucy Calkins, was a major beneficiary.

Gates’ efforts are aligned with the federal government’s, of making reparations, as it were, by allocating money to low-income and minority students and making them “college-ready.”  Such allocations are quite frequent in the tax return.

But critics worry that equalization will be achieved by lowering standards. None of the education non-profits funded by Gates are dedicated to raising standards through a rigorous, traditional curriculum, or by promoting Western or American principles. As Heather Crossin and Jane Robbins point out, realistically, the idea of universal college-readiness can be met only by lowering standards. Some Common Core advocates have admitted that this is the case.

 


 

[i] Stanley Kurtz, quoted in The Corruption Chronicles: Obama’s Big Secrecy, Big Corruption, and Big Government by Tom Fitton (New York; Simon and Schuster, 2012) page 124.

[ii] Kurtz, Stanley.  Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities.  New York; Sentinel, 2012.  138.

[iii] The Judicial Watch Verdict, August 2012, Volume 18, Issue 8.  10, 12.

[iv] SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium and Partnership for Assessment Readiness of College and Careers

[v] David Coleman and Susan Pimentel, “Revised Publishers’ Criteria for the Common Core Standards.”  Revised 4/12/12.

[vi] Ayers, William.  “A Simple Justice: Thinking about Teaching and Learning, Equity, and the Fight for Small Schools,” in A Simple Justice: The Challenge of Small Schools, Ed. William Ayers, Michael Klonsky, and Gabrielle Lyon.  New York: Teachers College Press, 2000.  1-8.

[vii] Page 25.

[viii] Kurtz.  184.

[ix] Page 39.

[x] Publishers Weekly, July 18, 2012.

[xi] Springen, Karen.  “What Common Core Means for Publishers.”  Publishers Weekly, July 18, 2012.

[xii] Ibid.

[xiii] Page 15.


About the author

Mary Grabar
Mary Grabar, Ph.D., is founder of the Dissident Prof Education Project, Inc., which is committed to “resisting the re-education of America.” Sign up for “dispatches” at www.dissidentprof.com. Her other publications can be found at www.marygrabar.com and include Accuracy in MediaPJ MediaWeekly StandardMinding the Campus, and many others. She teaches English at Emory University.

 

 

Donna Garner

Wgarner1@hot.rr.com


 

Friday
Feb152013

When Money and Social Engineering Together Becomes The Goal Behind Education--The Dangerous Alignment of Bill Gates and Obama

2.12.13 – The Washington Examiner

Private funding influenced public education policy

February 12, 2013 | 5:43 pm | Modified: February 12, 2013 at 5:50 pm

 

Michal Conger

Staff Writer

The Washington Examiner

[2.13.13 – Comments from Donna Garner:  Yes, Bill Gates is to blame for using his $173 Million to market the Common Core Standards/Race to the Top federal takeover of the public schools; but we must not forget that Gates was doing it to further the Obama administration’s social justice agenda.  

Obama, Arne Duncan, Linda Darling-Hammond, Bill Ayers, and the U. S. Department of Education are the originators of the plan; and they used Bill Gates’ millions to accomplish their goals. He, of course, was only too glad to join them in their unscrupulous and unconstitutional efforts because he supports the social justice agenda himself. 

More importantly, Bill Gates and Microsoft stand to make billions from his investment because of the technological infrastructure required to implement the CCS standards, curriculum, assessments, and personally intrusive national database that states’ taxpayers will be required to fund.

The disturbing aspect is that the Republican majority in the U. S. House that controls the appropriations could have shut down the CCS/RTTT federal grants any time they had wanted to do so over these last four years as the initiative was going forward. All they had to do was to stop the flow of federal dollars to CCS/RTTT, and the entire initiative would have come crumbling down.  Where were the Republicans in the House who were supposed to stand for fiscal responsibility? They were AWOL. Is it too late for them to stop the appropriations for the national assessments?  Without the national assessments, the Common Core Standards would be dumped. -- Donna Garner]

 

 

Education watchdogs are raising concerns over the Gates Foundation’s involvement in shaping public education policy, saying the private foundation’s influence in public education policy interferes with the democratic process and local input.

The foundation, owned by Bill and Melinda Gates, is the world’s largest philanthropy and has been heavily involved in funding states’ new Common Core curriculum, the Heartland Institute reported on Monday.

Gates has spent $173 million in grants to develop Common Core standards and win support for the curriculum, according to a Heartland analysis of the Foundation’s grant database.

The Foundation’s funding amounts to a marketing campaign for Common Core, Jane Robbins, a senior fellow with American Principles Project, told The Washington Examiner.

The Gates Foundation “has determined what it thinks education policy should be” and funded efforts to put that policy into effect, Robbins said.

“It’s the way [Gates is] doing it that we think is curious,” said Scott Thomas, dean of Claremont Graduate University’s education school, according to Heartland. “It’s an intrusion into the public sphere more directly that has not been seen before. They’re jumping into the policy process itself. That’s an interesting position, for a nonprofit to be involved in things that look a lot like lobbying.”

The problem with this expensive marketing campaign is that the policies Gates helped fund were created “under the radar,” without input from stakeholders or legislators, said Robbins. Now the curriculum is taught to students across the country.

The grants were made to nonprofit organizations whose policy-making meetings were conducted behind closed doors, including the the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, according to Heartland.

“Nobody really knew what was going on,” said Robbins.

The timeline of states’ Race to the Top applications, which included a requirement for a standard core curriculum that essentially excluded programs other than Common Core, was also problematic, she said.

Applications for Race to the Top funding were released by the U.S. Department of Education in November 2009 and were due in January 2010, even though most state legislatures aren’t in session during that time. Common Core standards were not released until June 2010, when states were given two months to sign off on them, again at a time when most state legislatures are not in session.

Instead, states’ boards of education signed off on the standards, and the majority of legislatures did not give their stamp of approval to Common Core at all, Robbins said.

“There was no chance to look at these standards, or to sign off on them,” she said.

The lack of transparency and local input is the primary problem APP and other education watchdogs have with Common Core and the Gates Foundation’s funding of it.

“There’s no accountability there,” Robbins said. “That’s the threat to the democratic process.”

The Gates Foundation told The Washington Examiner it did not fund Race to the Top, but did not speak on the record for this story.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/watchdogs-private-funding-influenced-public-education-policy/article/2521340

 

 

Donna Garner

Wgarner1@hot.rr.com