Transforming Education Beyond Common Core: Arne Duncan’s “Classroom of the Future”

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Last month, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan described his “vision for the classroom of the future” in what he hoped would be the first of many posts on the site called Bright (at medium.com), which is funded by the New Venture Fund, a non-profit that supports public interest projects in education, global issues, public health, and other issues.

The classroom of the future, wrote Duncan, would involve the “digital revolution,” as he presented reasons quasi-syllogistically: “In the United States, education is meant to be the great equalizer.  Technology has the potential to bridge gaps for those who have the least.  Simply put, technology can be a powerful tool for equality as well.”

Of course, many would differ with him about the major premise: that education is meant to be the great equalizer, at least in the way that Duncan and this administration think of it – as ending the achievement gap, with that duty falling to the federal government.  Other departmental missives have promoted the same goals.  Duncan has put pressure on states for “equitable funding” of school districts to overcome racial disparities, and has called for increased federal funding through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to overcome disparities of the “tax base” in communities.

Similarly, the Department recently cast the opting-out of Common Core tests as a lack of concern about “underserved populations,” recalling the comment made by Duncan in 2013 about Common Core opponents being “white suburban moms.”

The Department has been redefining education, emphasizing behavior and attitudes over academics, and even casting awareness about racial and ethnic identity as overlooked evidence of intelligence.  Education is no longer about teachers imparting knowledge to their students.  Linda Darling-Hammond, leader of Obama’s education transition team and developer of one of the two Common Core national assessments, has repeatedly disparaged traditional assessments that objectively test students’ knowledge as skill and drill.  In this she follows progressive and radical educators who see their roles as developing agents of social change, agents who do not learn in the traditional Eurocentric linear and logical way, but emotively and tactilely.

Replacing our traditional ways of learning, through reading, writing, and study—contemplative and solitary activities—are the communal and hands-on activities promoted in Common Core and now digital learning.  Both Common Core and digital learning serve to obscure a large part of the reason for the achievement gap: reading ability.  Students who are poor readers lag in other subjects.  To cover up this inability, Common Core emphasizes “speaking and listening skills,” (with points given for behavior and attitudes, such as the ability to work with “diverse” groups) and group work, where lagging students are coached along by others as they do “close readings” of short passages.  This ensures that all students have mastered the same (minimal) level of knowledge. Similarly, games offer an opportunity to hide differences in ability.  Information is delivered through images and sound, not words on a page, and at a pace that the student directs.  Duncan writes that technology is “helping teachers to use their time and talents more effectively to personalize learning for students — tailoring the pace, approach, and context of the learning experience to students’ individual needs and interests.”

Additionally, technology alters the relationship between teachers and students, leveling the relationship even further than the currently fashionable one of teacher as “facilitator.”  The student presumably gains the information on his own and applies that knowledge to “real-world” problems.  Duncan writes:

Until recently, the main function of public education has been to convey knowledge in one direction, from teachers to students. But with the growth of the Internet and mobile technology, our relationship to knowledge has fundamentally changed. To succeed in today’s world, our students need to be adept at not only recalling information, but using their knowledge to conceive, create, and employ solutions to real-world problems.

Duncan then employs the much-used strategy of reductively stereotyping traditional education, as he writes, “Students aren’t vessels to be filled with facts. And educators aren’t simply transmitters of information.”

In this schema, little attention is paid to “recalling information”—or the acquirement of knowledge. Emphasis is placed on the ability to – through the wonders of technology – find information.  (Of course with little concern about the ability to discern among the sources of information.)

In Duncan’s estimation, technology is the great liberator, unleashing children’s creativity and natural ability to solve problems.  It’s the ultimate instantiation of the progressive idea that students simply “discover” knowledge through their own creativity and curiosity – a theory which has time and again been disproven by the data, as Jeanne Chall and her student Sandra Stotsky have shown.

Aside from the logical impossibility of doing “real-world” problem-solving outside the real world, i.e., in a classroom and with children, such a focus away from objective measurements to hypothetical problems and solutions is another way to ensure equality of outcomes.

For those teachers who agree to promote such pedagogies, the Department of Education has many awards and ambassadorships to bestow.

EDITORS NOTE: The next installment will discuss the latest effort by the Department to promote digital learning, as described enthusiastically by a teacher and a U.S. Department of Education “Teaching Ambassador Fellow.”

Surveys given to children in schools across America on sexuality, suicide, drug use, criminal activity…

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Wait until you see the questions (below)!

Across Massachusetts – and across America – thousands of schoolchildren are given sexually graphic, psychologically intrusive surveys by the public schools without parents’ knowledge. These surveys also ask youth to reveal their criminal activity, personal family matters, and other intimate issues.

This is done in the public middle schools and high schools during school hours. At best, parents are told about the surveys in vague terms, but are rarely allowed read them beforehand.  The surveys are “officially” anonymous and voluntary.  But they are administered by the teacher in a classroom and (according to teachers we’ve talked to) there is often pressure for all kids to participate.

NOTE: Public hearing this WEDNESDAY, May 6, at the 10 am in the Massachusetts State House, Room A2. MassResistance has filed bill H382 in the Legislature to make all these surveys “opt-in” (not “opt out”) and force schools to let parents see them beforehand! Please join us and testify if you can!

The major survey given to kids across America is the “Youth Risk Behavior Survey” put together every two years by the national Centers for Disease Control and handed off to state and local education departments (which they can modify). And there are many similar surveys administered in various districts.

Here are questions from the actual “Youth Risk Behavior Survey” surveysgiven to children in Massachusetts schools, grades 7-12.

How old are you?

A.  12 years old or younger
B.  13 years old
C.  14 years old
D.  15 years old
E.  16 years old
F.  17 years old
G.  18 years old or older

Sexual Behavior

Which of the following best describes you?
A.  Heterosexual (straight)
B.  Gay or lesbian
C.  Bisexual
D.  Not sure

A transgender person is someone whose biological sex at birth does not match the way they think or feel about themselves. Are you transgender?

A.  No, I am not transgender
B.  Yes, I am transgender and I think of myself as really a boy or man
C.  Yes, I am transgender and I think of myself as really a girl or woman
D.  Yes, I am transgender and I think of myself in some other way
E.  I do not know if I am transgender
F.  I do not know what this question is asking

Have you ever had sexual intercourse (oral, anal, vaginal)?

A.  Yes
B.  No

How old were you when you had sexual intercourse (oral, anal, vaginal) for the first time?

A.  I have never had sexual intercourse
B.  11 years old or younger
C.  12 years old
D.  13 years old
E.  14 years old
F.  15 years old
G.  16 years old
H.  17 years old or older

During your life, with how many people have you had sexual intercourse (oral, anal, vaginal)?

A.  I have never had sexual intercourse
B.  1 person
C.  2 people
D.  3 people
E.  4 people
F.  5 people
G.  6 or more people

During the past 3 months, with how many people did you have sexual intercourse (oral, anal, vaginal)?

A.  I have never had sexual intercourse
B.  I have had sexual intercourse, but not during the past 3 months
C.  1 person
D.  2 people
E.  3 people
F.  4 people
G.  5 people
H.  6 or more people

Did you drink alcohol or use drugs before you had sexual intercourse (oral, anal, vaginal) the last time?

A.  I have never had sexual intercourse
B.  Yes
C.  No

The last time you had sexual intercourse (oral, anal, vaginal), did you or your partner use a condom?

A.  I have never had sexual intercourse
B.  Yes
C.  No

During your life, with whom have you had sexual contact?

A.  I have never had sexual contact
B.  Females
C.  Males
D.  Females and males

How many times have you been pregnant or gotten someone pregnant?

A.  0 times
B.  1 time
C.  2 or more times
D.  Not sure

Have you ever been tested for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS? (Do not count tests done if you donated blood.)

A.  Yes
B.  No
C.  Not sure

Have you ever been tested for other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) such as genital herpes, chlamydia, syphilis, or genital warts?

A.  Yes
B.  No
C.  Not sure

Family and personal life

How often does your parent/guardian(s) wear a seat belt when driving or riding in a car?

A.  Never
B.  Rarely
C.  Sometimes
D.  Most of the time
E.  Always

Do your parents text, e-mail or use any other form of social media while driving a car or other vehicle?

A.  Yes
B.  No

Can you talk with at least one of your parents or other adult family members about things that are
important to you?

A.  Yes
B.  No

My parent/guardian(s) talk to me about the dangers of alcohol and drugs?

A.  Yes
B.  No

Is there at least one teacher or other adult in this school that you can talk to if you have a problem?

A.  Yes
B.  No

During the past 12 months, how  often did you talk with your parents  or other adults in your family about  sexuality or ways to prevent HIV  infection, other sexually transmitted  diseases (STDs), or pregnancy?

A.  Not at all during the past 12  months
B.  About once during the past  12 months
C.  About once every few  months
D.  About once a month
E.  More than once a month

How long have you lived in the United States?

A.  Less than 1 year
B.  1 to 3 years
C.  4 to 6 years
D.  More than 6 years but not my whole life
E.  I have always lived in the United States

Where do you typically sleep at night?

A.  At home with my parents or guardians
B.  At a friend’s or relative’s home with my parents or  guardians
C.  At a friend’s or relative’s home without my parents or  guardians
D.  In a supervised shelter with  my parents or guardians
E.  In a supervised shelter  without my parents or  guardians
F.  In a hotel or motel, car, park, campground, or other public  place with my parents or  guardians
G.  In a hotel or motel, car, park, campground, or other public  place without my parents or guardians
H.  Somewhere else

Weapons

During the past 30 days, on how many days did you carry a weapon such as a gun, knife, or club?

A.  0 days
B.  1 day
C.  2 or 3 days
D.  4 or 5 days
E.  6 or more days

During the past 30 days, on how many days did you carry a gun?

A.  0 days
B.  1 day
C.  2 or 3 days
D.  4 or 5 days
E.  6 or more days

Suicide

During the past 12 months, did you ever seriously consider attempting suicide?

A.  Yes
B.  No

During the past 12 months, did you make a plan about how you would attempt suicide?

A.  Yes
B.  No

During the past 12 months, how many times did you actually attempt suicide?

A.  0 times
B.  1 time
C.  2 or 3 times
D.  4 or 5 times
E.  6 or more times

Tobacco, alcohol, drugs

How old were you when you smoked a whole cigarette or other tobacco/nicotine product for the first
time?

A.  I have never smoked a whole cigarette
B.  8 years old or younger
C.  9 years old
D.  10 years old
E.  11 years old
F.  12 years old
G.  13 years old or older

During the past 30 days, how did you usually get your own cigarettes, or other tobacco/nicotine product?

(Select all that apply)
A.  I did not smoke cigarettes during the past 30 days
B.  I bought them in a store such as a convenience store, supermarket, discount store, or gas station
C.  I got them on the Internet
D.  I bought them at a public event such as a concert or sporting event
E.  I gave someone else money to buy them for me
F.  A person 18 years old or older gave them to me
G.  I took them from a store
H.  I took them from a family member
I.  I took them from someone else’s home
J.  I got them some other way

During the past 30 days, what is the largest number of alcoholic drinks you had in a 4 hour period?

A.  I did not drink alcohol during the past 30 days
B.  1 or 2 drinks
C.  3 drinks
D.  4 drinks
E.  5 drinks
F.  6 or 7 drinks
G.  8 or 9 drinks
H.  10 or more drinks

During the past 30 days, how many  times did you drive a car or other vehicle when you had been  drinking alcohol?

A.  I did not drive a car or other vehicle during the past 30 days
B.  0 times
C.  1 time
D.  2 or 3 times
E.  4 or 5 times
F.  6 or more times

During the past 30 days, how many times did you use marijuana?

A.  0 times
B.  1 or 2 times
C.  3 to 9 times
D.  10 to 19 times
E.  20 to 39 times
F.  40 or more times

During your life, how many times have you used any form of cocaine, including powder, crack, or freebase?

A.  0 times
B.  1 or 2 times
C.  3 to 9 times
D.  10 to 19 times
E.  20 to 39 times
F.  40 or more times

During your life, how many times have you used heroin (also called smack, junk, or China White)?

A.  0 times
B.  1 or 2 times
C.  3 to 9 times
D.  10 to 19 times
E.  20 to 39 times
F.  40 or more times

During your life, how many times have you taken a prescription drug (such as OxyContin, Percocet, Vicodin, codeine, Adderall, Ritalin, or Xanax) without a doctor’s prescription?

A.  0 times
B.  1 or 2 times
C.  3 to 9 times
D.  10 to 19 times
E.  20 to 39 times
F.  40 or more times

The above questions are from the 2015 Youth Risk Behavior Survey given to students in Canton, Mass, (which parents there were able to get for us) and from the statewide Massachusetts 2013 Youth Risk Behavior Survey posted on the Mass Dept. of Elementary and Secondary Education (DOE) website.

Unscientific, destructive and deceitful

Parents and others who see these surveys are overwhelmingly shocked, upset, and angry. Here are just a few of the problems:

1. Psychological distortion of reality. Going through a battery of questions asking “how many times” a child has engaged in certain sex acts, drug use, illegal or unhealthy activity (or attempting suicide) will likely cause the child to believe he is abnormal if he is not doing it at all – especially since the survey comes from an authority figure.

2. Personal information. Having children to reveal personal issues about themselves and their family can have emotional consequences and from the parents’ point of view is extremely invasive.

3. Grossly unscientific.  Experts in surveys we’ve shown these to say they’re unscientific on several levels. The respondents are (officially) self-selected. The surveys include “leading questions” similar to push-polls. The questions are so outrageous that (we’ve been told by students) they provoke exaggeration and untruthful answers.

4. Results used for funding of radical groups. This is the main reason for the existence of these surveys: The surveys create misleading “statistics” that are used by radical groups from Planned Parenthood to LGBT groups to persuade politicians to give more taxpayer money these groups – and to let them into schools – to “help solve” these “huge” problems that these surveys reveal. It is a very emotional appeal, and millions of dollars are budgeted on the basis of these very questionable surveys.

How the Youth Risk surveys are done in Massachusetts

Every two years the Mass. DOE creates a new statewide version of the CDC national Youth Risk Behavior Survey and makes it available to each school district. The school districts can further modify the surveys if they wish and are given wide discretion as to how they notify parents, whether they allow the parents to see the surveys, how the surveys are administered to the students, etc.

In many districts, it’s a nightmare for parents, who rarely even know that their children were given the survey. That’s not an accident. School officials are well aware that if parents were to read these surveys beforehand, almost none of them would want their children to participate.

We telephoned the Mass. DOE to ask them questions about how schools administer the test and whether we can get a copy of the 2015 statewide survey.They were not eager to discuss it with us. We were told they were “too busy” to answer our questions over the phone and we must submit them via email. We did so, and are still waiting for a reply.

Many teachers uncomfortable with the surveys

We have spoken with teachers in Massachusetts who have told us that they are pressured by schools to present the surveys to kids as if it were a normal procedure, and to not to discourage them from taking it. But some teachers do rebel against that. A parent in Canton, Mass., told us that a two years ago a teacher in that town was disciplined for telling his students they had a constitutional right to decline the survey. In 2010 a teacher in Illinois was also reprimanded for that (which was reported in the Chicago Tribune).

Parents and others need to stop this!

It’s been our experience that the people who do this have no interest whatsoever in how this affects children or their families. From the politicians and the activists down to the school officials, it’s mostly about money, ideology, politics, and control. Even when the obvious and harmful flaws are pointed out, there is no effort to change. It will take angry parents and citizens to stop this. That’s why MassResistance filed Bill H382 in the Massachusetts Legislature which will completely empower parents. The fight begins!

NIGHTMARE ON MONROE STREET: Florida Student Assessment Tests

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Someone please wake me up from this bad dream!  Did our state and federal government just resurrect Dr. Mengele and unleash him on our kids?

This has got to be the cruelest hoax of the century.  Let me get this straight.

There is a social engineering testing company we have paid $220 million to experiment on our kids and they can, and will be, selling the data they mine from our kids to others to track and manage their future?

We are forced to give our children to them for WEEKS of time they could have spent learning, and we don’t even know what’s in the tests?  And our kids will be punished if they tell us?

These tests were supposed to help us grade the teachers and schools, but we’re not even going to use this data because we know it’s invalid but we’re still testing anyway?

And we have to pay $Billions for specialized computers, software, networking, technicians and testing facilities to corporate cronies who have spent tens of millions lobbying our legislatures just to do this testing?

And these tests must be given to all our kids in public school no matter if they have been in special ed or are sick or the federal government will not give us our own tax money back we gave them for education?

And this company, AIR, has failed so badly in Utah, where WE PAID them $5 million to test it, that Utah is throwing it out, but we went ahead anyway?

And the tests failed in Florida’s roll out so badly that testing was repeatedly shut down for days and weeks all over the state, but we’re still using the results on children to make life changing decisions about them?

Please tell me this is just a bad dream and I will wake up and hear that our public schools are safe once again; That certified teachers are trusted to teach their students without government scripts, and grade their own students based on their mastery of the subjects taught on pencil and paper tests given in their own desks that we can share with parents.

Should Taxes Fund Philosophy? The cost of subsidizing state philosophy departments is hard to justify JASON BRENNAN

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In the past few days, philosophy bloggers have been writing with concern about how more philosophy departments around the country are closing, and how various Republican state legislators are trying to pass bills that cut many philosophy faculty. Most of the bloggers I’ve read seem to assume, unreflectively, that such cuts are a bad thing.

To my surprise, philosophers rarely seem to reflect on the opportunity cost of funding philosophy departments.

Let’s say East Podunk State spends $2 million a year funding a small philosophy program, which graduates 10 majors per year. Suppose (contrary to fact) that this was funded entirely through taxes on corporate profits, with free tuition, room, and board for all philosophy majors.

Is this a good deal? To know, we’d need to do some cost-benefit analysis. The problem here is $2 million spent on philosophy is not $2 million spent on all the other things worth spending money on.

Daily Nous recently had a thread on this, and I made a similar point:

I’m not convinced studying philosophy teaches people how to think. Educational psychologists have been studying “transfer of learning,” and there’s now a lot of evidence that the assumptions upon which liberal arts education is based are false. Most students don’t apply what they learn in class outside of class. We don’t actually succeed in teaching student soft-skills. They don’t use the tools we give them for anything outside of writing essays. Etc.

Richard’s answer, that philosophy has intrinsic value, is more plausible. But then this still leaves open cost-benefit analysis questions: There are lots of intrinsically valuable things out there worth doing. Why spend tax money on this thing (philosophy) rather than on some other intrinsically valuable thing (e.g., public death metal concerts open to all)?

Further, even some things are intrinsically valuable (such as philosophy and death metal concerts), we have to ask why these things should be funded through taxes rather than left to individual choice. You don’t have to be a libertarian to think that not everything worth having or doing is permissibly done/best done by government.

I love philosophy, and I believe most people would benefit greatly from understanding it and applying it outside of its domain. But that doesn’t mean that it’s worth funding many or most philosophy departments in public universities.

After all, the evidence about transfer of learning seems to show that students usually don’t get the value out of it that we hope they would. And even if you’re a resolute statist, you’ve got to ask why it’s worth spending hundreds of millions on philosophy in public universities, when that money could have gone to funding children’s hospitals, repairing infrastructure, or Opeth in the Park.

Jason Brennan is Assistant Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University where he teaches ethics, political economy, moral psychology, entrepreneurship, and public policy. As well as writing many books, Brennan also blogs at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, where this post first appeared.

Jason Brennan
Jason Brennan is Assistant Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University. He blogs regularly at Bleeding Heart Libertarians.

“Teachers Cannot Teach What They Do Not Know”

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teacher by bes studios

PHOTO BY BES PHOTOS.

How bad is teacher education today? Consider: all states require that teachers be college graduates, but prospective teachers are passing licensure exams with skills and knowledge ranging from the seventh- to tenth-grade levels. Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us, as colleges of education draw from the bottom two-thirds of graduating classes (and for those planning to teach at the elementary levels, it’s the bottom one-third). Much time in such schools is wasted on fashionable, politically tendentious, but ineffective pedagogy. Think Bill Ayers and Paulo Freire, among the most frequently assigned authors in education courses. Think elementary-education professors specializing in such things as gender identity and post colonialism.

In her new book, An Empty Curriculum: The Need to Reform Teacher Licensing Regulations and Tests, Sandra Stotsky, professor emerita of education at the University of Arkansas, offers a tested model of teacher knowledge, explains why it’s not being used, and describes strategies for overcoming the education establishment’s resistance. Stotsky’s credentials for this task are impressive: in her role as senior associate commissioner at the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education from 1999 to 2003, she oversaw complete revisions of the state’s pre-K-12 standards as well as its teacher-licensure standards. Until these standards were replaced by the Common Core in 2010, Massachusetts ranked first among the states in educational achievement.

An entrenched education bureaucracy remains a formidable obstacle to meaningful educational reform, particularly in the area of standards. Many state education commissioners and staff “are influenced,” Stotsky says, “by the education schools they attended, teacher unions, school administrators’ needs, the interests of professional education organizations, and the pressure of political groups (especially think tanks, institutes, and policy-oriented organizations that claim expertise on educational matters).” Testing companies, educational entrepreneurs, diversity advocates, accreditation agencies, and political ideologues also have a vested interest in keeping standards low. Teacher-licensure tests, intended to protect children from incompetent teachers, set low passing requirements in order to protect teacher-preparation institutions, most of which, Stotsky points out, enjoy taxpayer funding.

Stotsky reminds readers how rigorous America’s education standards used to be. She cites a Michigan teacher-licensing exam in history from 1900, in which sample essay questions asked future grammar school teachers to, for example, “describe Ireland during the reign of Elizabeth” or “briefly state the result and effect of the Battle of Waterloo, naming the leading general.” States relaxed standards after a post-World War II teacher shortage, however, and relaxed them further after job options expanded for women, and further still after the court challenges of racial discrimination in the 1970s. Additionally, political correctness has corrupted subjects ranging from English and European languages to music and literature.

Stotsky calls on legislators and their constituents to revamp the system. To ensure teacher competency, she proposes raising college-admission standards and abolishing credits for undergraduate education coursework, replacing it with four years of academic coursework for core-subject teachers. Educationally high-achieving countries, such as Finland, South Korea, and Singapore, already take such measures. Extensive studies show that a teacher’s subject-matter knowledge is the best predictor of a student’s achievement, in line with the common-sense notion that “teachers cannot teach what they do not know,” as Stotsky puts it. Graduate-level coursework and professional-development courses should also be in the teacher’s subject areas: coursework for an M.S. or M.A. degree is far more intellectually demanding than for a M.Ed. degree. Stotsky also suggests requiring that directors, department heads, and curriculum specialists at the 5-12 grade level hold a master’s degree in their core subject and at least 18 credits of advanced graduate studies in one of the core academic subjects they supervise.

Such practical measures, however, aren’t in vogue. Much of the rhetoric surrounding the 2009 Race to the Top contest for federal stimulus funds focused on improving teacher quality, but the methods for measuring such quality can be dubious—including having students, beginning as early as kindergarten, evaluate their teachers. Georgia’s eight-year-olds assess teachers on such criteria as “my teacher cares about my learning” and “my teacher shows me how I can use what I learn at home and in the community.” The state then ties teacher bonuses to such ratings.

Stotsky’s compact and data-filled book should serve as a useful resource for pushing back against failed education policies and the bureaucrats who defend them.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the City Journal. The featured image is of a Norman Rockwell painting titled “Visit a Country School” dated 1946. Link to Sandra Stotsky’s primer for improving American educational standards: An Empty Curriculum: The Need to Reform Teacher Licensing Regulations and Tests.

Hillary Takes The Family Out of Education

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Incredibly, Hillary Clinton, while talking about education this week, stated that education is a “non-family enterprise.”

Education is a non-family enterprise? How completely out of touch can a person be to make such a bizarre statement and then expect to lead the country? Here are a couple of questions for Hillary Clinton:

  1. Has Hillary Clinton ever sat down to do a science project with her daughter as most of us have with our sons and daughters?
  2. Has Hillary Clinton ever volunteered countless hours to put together a school spelling-bee like my wife just did?
  3. Has Hillary Clinton ever spent late nights studying with her daughter for a tough math test as we have with our sons and daughters?
  4. Has Hillary Clinton ever spoken at a Career Day at her daughter’s school as many of us have for our sons and daughters?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, only Hillary does, but I find it deeply troubling that we are looking at yet another Democrat presidential candidate who openly discusses education and the economy using far-left lingo which conflicts directly with the principles that made America that shining city on the hill. It’s our families, our sense of entrepreneurialism, our local communities, our neighbors caring for one another, our allegiance to human rights and human dignity granted to all of us by The Lord, and the fact that we did “build that,” that has made us great. It’s not the “collective;” the government, the bureaucracy, or any other government official, or their bizarre sense of entitlement to our kids and our money that has made us prosperous.

It’s not the “collective;” the government, the bureaucracy, or any other government official, or their bizarre sense of entitlement to our kids and our money that has made us prosperous.

Make no mistake, the party of JFK and Truman is dying. A Hillary Clinton presidency will be an Obama third term with more government, higher taxes, more bureaucratic healthcare, more Common Core, a degradation of the family, and buckets of new regulations. Every presidential candidate running for the Republican nomination needs to highlight statements such as this from Hillary Clinton to make the case to voters that WE are the party that supports educational excellence for EVERY American, regardless of their zip code. It’s disappointing to watch the far-left stand in the way of school choice for parents and children and if there’s one issue that should have crossed the partisan Maginot Line decades ago, it should have been education.   But, tragically, that was not, and is not, the case.

I read a piece by Jason Riley in the Wall Street Journal years ago which included a statistic that, once seen, is hard to forget. Riley states that, “Just 2,000 of the nation’s 20,000 high schools produce almost half of all high-school dropouts. But nearly half of all black high-school students wind up in one of these ‘dropout factories.’ The prospects for black males who don’t graduate are not good, quite aside from lower lifetime earnings.”

One can’t un-see this tragic, heartbreaking statistic and I personally do not care an iota about how the school choice issue polls. Regardless of the polls, it is up to liberty-loving, patriotic Americans to fight for the future of every American child if you are going to represent the Republican brand in this upcoming presidential election in 2016, and school choice had better be at the top of your list.

Hillary Clinton and the organized far left will fight us tooth and nail on the school choice issue because like the economy and healthcare, it is not about education to Hillary Clinton, it’s about control. The far left views parents as an unnecessary third-party in their one-way social contract with American school children and Hillary Clinton’s “education is a non-family enterprise” is not a verbal gaffe, it’s the ideological bedrock upon which she built her political house.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the Conservative Review. The featured image is courtesy of CR. Source: Charles Neibergall/AP.

The Brownshirts Are Back — And They’re In Our Universities!

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Over at PJ Media, I ask why we must keep repeating the mistakes of history.

It is not news that virtually all American universities are decidedly leftist institutions. Few Americans, however, are aware of how inhospitable they have become to free inquiry and free discourse, and how hostile they are to anyone who stands up for Western values and against the global jihad – as some recent developments illustrate.

What is happening in American universities today has a clear historical parallel.

In his seminal history The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans explains how, in the early days of National Socialist Germany, the universities became centers of Nazi indoctrination in which students collaborated with stormtroopers (brownshirts) to terrorize dissenters:

It was above all the students who drove forward the co-ordination process in the universities. They organized campaigns against unwanted professors in the local newspapers, staged mass disruptions of their lectures and led detachments of stormtroopers in house-searches and raids.

Let’s take those one by one.

1. “It was above all the students who drove forward the co-ordination process in the universities.”

At Eastern Michigan University last Friday, two showings of the film American Sniperwere scheduled. But during the first, four Muslim students, Ahmed Abbas, Layali Alsadah, Jenna Hamed, and Sabreen Dari, climbed onto the stage and began to denounce the film, which many Islamic supremacists have complained is “Islamophobic” because it depicts Islamic jihad terrorists in a realistic manner. They were briefly arrested, but managed to get the second showing canceled.

Student Body President Desmond Miller offered some airy double talk:

“The conversation we had wanted to make sure student safety was at the forefront. We wanted to make sure whatever happens, students would be safe. The second part of it, which is actually just as important as the first part, was making sure we have a very serious dialogue about the movie and the propaganda associated with this movie.”

Sure, let’s have a “serious dialogue” about the movie while not showing the movie in question.

2. “They organized campaigns against unwanted professors in the local newspapers…”

There are precious few professors that today’s new brownshirts would care to campaign against, so they turn their fire toward campus speakers. David Horowitz spoke at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last Monday, whereupon Manzoor Cheema, “Co-founder of Muslims for Social Justice,” wrote a letter to the campus newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, saying that it was “distressing” that Horowitz had spoken, and “especially distressing in the wake of Chapel Hill tragedy where three Muslim youth were murdered.”

Did Horowitz applaud or condone the murder of those students? Of course not. Were they even murdered because they were Muslim? No.

But Cheema wasn’t going to let facts get in the way of his defamation; he added:

“Horowitz has supported work of such virulent Islamophobes as Robert Spencer, who was cited 162 times by the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik.”

Do I call for mass murder, or any kind of crime? I do not. Am I any more responsible for this psychopath’s murders than the Beatles are for the murders of Charles Manson? Even less so, for Manson claimed to have gotten his orders to kill from Beatles songs, while Breivik never says that he was inspired to kill by anything I wrote, and he wasn’t.

Cheema, however, doesn’t care to discuss these matters rationally, and doesn’t want his readers to do so, either. He just wants to sling enough mud at Horowitz that such invitations will not be extended again to those who deviate from the politically correct line.

The same day, the Daily Tar Heel ran two other letters denouncing Horowitz, and (of course) none supporting him.

3. “…staged mass disruptions of their lectures…”

Here again, it would be hard to find a professor that today’s Nazi thugs would want to silence, so they do it to campus speakers. Here (and embedded above) is video of me trying to speak at Temple University in April 2012.

Such occurrences are rare, however, because it is rare that a speaker with views that run counter to those of these glassy-eyed, indoctrinated cultists gets invited to speak at a university at all. And if one is invited, then the Leftist/Islamic supremacist machine kicks into gear to suppress the forbidden ideas. When he learned that my colleague Pamela Geller was invited to speak at Brooklyn College, Ibrahim Hooper of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) fired off an email to four Brooklyn College officials, with the subject line “Is Brooklyn College Really Hosting the Nation’s Leading Islamophobe?”

Later, with a sneer of cold command, he followed up with another…

Read the rest here.

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Alabama Muslima joins Islamic State, Hamas-linked CAIR spokesman says family “extremely traumatized”

VIDEO: Hillary Clinton Supports Common Core

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On April 14, 2015, I wrote a post about 2016 presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton’s support for the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

I maintain that Clinton is a CCSS supporter, period.

CSPAN has a 4 1/2- minute video clip of Clinton addressing CCSS in response to a question from a student, Diane, at Kirkwood College in Monticello, Iowa, during Clinton’s 2016 campaign kickoff.

I tried to embed the video but ran into difficulties. Therefore, I videoed the video and posted to Youtube so that I might embed. Though the quality of the resulting Youtube video is affected by the double-videoing, Clinton’s words– and tone– and body language– make her support for CCSS quite clear.

Original link to CSPAN excerpt: http://www.c-span.org/video/standalone/?c4534445

And here is the transcribed text of the video:

DIANE: I think we are very blessed to live where we do, where education starting very young through high school, community college…. We have all these opportunities, and we so are fortunate here.  And I worry that not all of America gets to experience this treasure we have. And I think the Common Core is a wonderful step in the right direction of improving American education, and it’s painful to see that attacked. [Hillary (nodding): Right.]  And I’m just wondering what you can do to bring that heart back to education in the United States, you know, where, what can, what can we do so that parents and communities and businesses believe in American education, and that teachers are respected, and our schools are respected, and our colleges are respected, and we offer a quality education to all Americans, you know, throughout the United States?

HILLARY CLINTON: Wow. That is a really powerful, touching comment that I embrace. You know, what I think about the really unfortunate argument that has been going on around Common Core, it’s very painful because the Common Core started off as a bipartisan effort. It was actually nonpartisan. It wasn’t politicized. It was to try to come up with a core of learning that we might expect students to achieve across our country no matter what kind of school district they were in, no matter how poor their family was, that there wouldn’t be two tiers of education. Everybody would be looking at what was to be learned and doing their best to try to achieve that.

Now, I think that part of the reason why Iowa may be more understanding of this is you’ve had the Iowa Core for four years. You’ve had a system plus the Iowa assessment test. I think I’m right saying that I took them when I was in elementary school, right? The Iowa, you know, tests. So that Iowa has had a testing system based on a core curriculum for a really long time, and you see the value of it. You understand why that helps you organize your whole education system. And a lot of states, unfortunately, haven’t had that. And so, don’t understand the value of a core in that sense, a common core. Then yes, of course, you can figure out the best way in your community to, uh, try to reach.

But your question is, really, a larger one: How do we end up at a point where we are so, ah, negative about the most important non-family enterprise in the raising of the next generation, which is how our kids are educated? There are a lot of explanations, and, there are a lot of explanations for that, I, I suppose, but whatever they are, we need to try to get back into a, Um, broad conversation where people will actually listen to each other again and try to come up with, uh, the solutions for problems because the problems here in Monticello are not the same problems you’ll find in the inner city of our biggest, you know, urban areas. That’s a given. We have to do things differently, but it should all be driven by the same commitment to try to make sure we do educate every child. That’s why, you know, I was a senator and voted for, you know, leave no child behind because I thought every child should matter, and shouldn’t be, “You are poor,” or, “You’ve got disabilities so we’re going to sweep you to the back. Don’t show up on test day because we don’t want to mess up our scores. No. Every child should have the same opportunity. And so, I think we’ve got to get back to basics, and we have to look to teachers to lead the way.

There you have it: Clinton’s words, tone, and body language.

For CCSS, and offering no apologies for No Child Left Behind, at that.

For more on Clinton’s Iowa visit, see this informative CNN take.

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Jailed in Atlanta, Walking Around Free in Miami-Dade: Different Strokes for Different Folks

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On Tuesday, three Atlanta educators were sentenced to seven years in prison, and six others given terms of 1-7 years, for their part in the massive test cheating scandal in Atlanta Public Schools, with more prison sentences expected.  Two educators out of ten took the State’s plea deal- so far, the terms have not been reported.

At an emotional hearing, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter called the case “the sickest thing that’s ever happened in this town.”

Unfortunately for them, they did not work at Miami Norland Senior High School and participate in Adobegate, for if they had, they would be walking around free amongst us like Mr. Emmanuel Fleurantin and Mrs. Brenda Muchnick.

Florida, like Georgia, has statutes relating to test cheating and racketeering:

  •  Florida Statute 1008.24, “Test Administration and Security,” makes it a misdemeanor to engage in standardized test cheating: “A person who violates this section commits a misdemeanor of the first degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082 or s. 775.083.”
  • Florida Statute 895.03, Section 1 states: “It is unlawful for any person who has with criminal intent received any proceeds derived, directly or indirectly, from a pattern of racketeering activity or through the collection of an unlawful debt to use or invest, whether directly or indirectly, any part of such proceeds, or the proceeds derived from the investment or use thereof, in the acquisition of any title to, or any right, interest, or equity in, real property or in the establishment or operation of any enterprise.”
  • Florida Statute 775.0844, “White Collar Crime Victim Protection Act,” states in Section 2: “Due to the frequency with which victims, particularly elderly victims, are deceived and cheated by criminals who commit nonviolent frauds and swindles, frequently through the use of the Internet and other electronic technology and frequently causing the loss of substantial amounts of property, it is the intent of the Legislature to enhance the sanctions imposed for nonviolent frauds and swindles, protect the public’s property, and assist in prosecuting white collar criminals.”

Adobegate was a host of white collar crimes that took place over the Internet as the tests were given online with the answers provided to the students by cheat sheets given by their teachers- Mr. Fleurantin and Mrs. Muchnick.

Though Florida, like Georgia, has the legal framework to pursue charges against those involved in Adobegate, Florida officials lack the motivation and inclination unlike Georgia, Texas, and Pennsylvania officials to prosecute them and seek justice.

Mr. Trevor Colestock, the whistle-blower, is of the opinion that other schools were involved and that Adobegate is being covered up to prevent others from speaking out and from exposing a larger and costlier fraud to Florida and federal taxpayers; is it so as to protect politically connected Miami-Dade County Public Schools officials such as Superintendent Alberto Carvalho?

Could it be that state and federal officials did not pursue Mr. Colestock’s complaints so as to avoid embarrassment and protect M-DCPS officials?

How far does Adobegate go?

What other schools and M-DCPS employees were involved and to what cost?

Only a thorough investigation will answer these questions, and the general public and Mr. Colestock, who was retaliated against for exposing Adobegate, are owed that much.

RELATED ARTICLE: Former D.C. Whistleblower Principal Adell Cothorne on the Atlanta Verdict

Hillary Clinton Thinks Common Core “A Good Idea”

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Hillary Clinton was in Iowa today, campaigning.

According to The Guardian’s live blog coverage by Tom McCarthy, Hillary Clinton is sympathetic towards “the plight of Common Core.”McCarthy reports::

Clinton bemoaned the plight of Common Core educational standards, a good idea she said had been taken hostage by the political debate.

Implicit in Clinton’s message is that Common Core would have been just fine except that it became entangled in politics.

Get a clue, Hillary: Common Core was birthed in politics.

But I think you know that.

The National Governors Association (NGA) is one of two organizations that holds the Common Core copyright. That right there is a problem for a so-called “state led” education initiative.

Then there is U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan using federal money to pay for two Common-Core-associated testing consortia– and announcing as much in 2009, before there even was a Common Core.

Never mind that the other Common Core copyright owner, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), has a CEO, Gene Wilhoit, who thought it would be a good idea to ask billionaire Bill Gates in 2008 to bankroll Common Core.

Politically-connected edupreneur David Coleman– who did business in 2002 (the early days of No Child Left Behind) with Arne Duncan during Duncan’s time as CEO of Chicago Public Schools– was with Wilhoit when he asked Gates for his money.

Then, a few years later, Wilhoit moved on from CCSSO and was replaced by former Pearson associate, Chris Minnich.

Following his CCSSO retirement, Wilhoit conveniently joined Coleman’s Common-Core-centered for-profit-gone-nonprofit, Student Achievement Partners.

And Coleman moved on to become the president of an assessment company, College Board.

So, you see, Hillary, Common Core was never “not political.”

On June 12, 2015, my book on the history, development, and promotion of Common Core, Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools?, will be released.

Clinton should read it.

But back to Iowa.

At least Hillary publicly admitted her sympathy for Common Core.

This puts her on the same side as another 2016 presidential hopeful: Republican Jeb Bush.

However, according to McCarthy’s report of Clinton’s campaign kickoff in Iowa, Clinton plans to dodge directly addressing education in her campaign:

Clinton laid out four campaign planks: 1) revitalizing economy 2) supporting families 3) getting dirty $$ out of politics 4) defending against threats seen and unseen

Surely she knows that she will be asked again and again– and again– about Common Core and its lead-balloon, federally-funded consortium tests.

Clinton will have numerous occasions to “bemoan its plight.”

RELATED ARTICLE: Common Core Ties to Libya, Qatar, Saudi Arabia [+video]

Some Details on the Senate-proposed ESEA Reauthorization

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On April 7, 2015, the Senate education committee announced the following as part of a press release:

WASHINGTON, D.C., April 7 – Senate education committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Ranking Member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) today announced a bipartisan agreement on fixing “No Child Left Behind.” They scheduled committee action on their agreement and any amendments to begin at 10 a.m. Tuesday, April 14.

The result of the Lamar-Murray collaboration on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization (the latest version of which is renamed No Child Left Behind) is this 600-page document entitled, The Every Child Achieves Act of 2015.

I read the first 136 pages of the act, which I refer to below as the Alexander-Murray reauthorization.

I am aware that when the document goes before the Senate education committee, it could well be amended. But for now, in this post, I offer my observations on key points in those first 136 pages as they appear in the draft version of Alexander’s and Murray’s draft as linked above.

The first construction I noticed was that the Alexander-Murray reauthorization document does not include the controversial name, No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) (pg. 4). Yes, the table of contents to be revised is the NCLB table of contents. (To view the complete NCLB document, click here.) However, the original name of the legislation, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, is the name that Alexander and Murray use.

I will still use NCLB for the sake of clarity.

Section 1001 of NCLB (“statement of purpose”) is lengthy and included details such as, “holding schools, local educational agencies, and States accountable for improving the academic achievement of all students, and identifying and turning around low-performing schools that have failed to provide a high-quality education to their students…” and “providing greater decision making authority and flexibility to schools and teachers in exchange for greater responsibility for student performance.”

The Alexander-Murray reauthorization “statement of purpose” is not nearly so detailed:

The purpose of this title is to ensure that all children have a fair, equitable, and significant opportunity to receive a high-quality education that prepares them for postsecondary education or the workforce, without the need for postsecondary remediation, and to close educational achievement gaps.

The Alexander-Murray reauthorization deletes NCLB Section 1003– the one about “school improvement” and which includes language such as, “the State educational agency shall allocate not less than 95 percent of that amount directly to local educational agencies for schools identified for school improvement, corrective action, and restructuring.”

The Alexander-Murray reauthorization also removes NCLB Sections 1111 through 1117, which is the federal micromanagement over states being “sure” that districts are meeting state designations of “proficiency.”

The Alexander-Murray reauthorization includes general language about states submitting “evidence-based strategies for improving student achievement” to the US secretary of education. I was initiallu concerned about the secretary’s power to possibly require states to implement certain standards and assessments, and use those assessments to grade teacher and schools, until I read the following (pgs. 23-27):

‘‘(6) LIMITATIONS.— 4 ‘‘(A) IN GENERAL.—The Secretary shall not have the authority to require a State, as a condition of approval of the State plan or revisions or amendments to the State plan, to—

‘‘(i) include in, or delete from, such plan 1 or more specific elements of the challenging State academic standards;

‘‘(ii) use specific academic assessment instruments or items;

‘‘(iii) set specific State-designed annual goals or specific timelines for such goals for all students or each of the categories of students, as defined in subsection (b)(3)(A) ;

‘‘(iv) assign any specific weight or specific significance to any measures or indicators of student academic achievement or growth within State-designed accountability systems; 

‘‘(v) include in, or delete from, such a plan any criterion that specifies, defines, or prescribes— 

            ‘‘(I) the standards or measures 2 that States or local educational agencies use to establish, implement, or improve challenging State academic standards, including the content of, or achievement levels within, such standards;

            ‘‘(II) the specific types of academic assessments or assessment items that States and local educational agencies use to meet the requirements of this part; 

            ‘‘(III) any requirement that States shall measure student growth, the specific metrics used to measure student academic growth if a State chooses to measure student growth, or the specific indicators or methods to measure student readiness to enter postsecondary education or the workforce;

          ‘‘(IV) any specific benchmarks, targets, goals, or metrics to measure non-academic measures or indicators; 

           ‘‘(V) the specific weight or specific significance of any measure or indicator of student academic achievement within State-designed accountability systems;

           ‘‘(VI) the specific annual goals States establish for student academic achievement or secondary school graduation rates, as described in clauses (i) and (ii) of subsection (b)(3)(B);

            ‘‘(VII) any aspect or parameter of a teacher, principal, or other school leader evaluation system within a State or local educational agency; or

             ‘‘(VIII) indicators or specific measures of teacher, principal, or other school leader effectiveness or quality; or

‘‘(vi) require data collection beyond data derived from existing Federal, State, and local reporting requirements and data sources. 

‘‘(B) RULE OF CONSTRUCTION.—Nothing in this paragraph shall be construed as authorizing, requiring, or allowing any additional reporting requirements, data elements, or information to be reported to the Secretary not otherwise explicitly authorized under Federal law.  [Emphasis added.]

What I envision in reading the above limits is the tying of US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s NCLB-waiver, power-wielding hands.

According to the Alexander-Murray reauthorization, once approved, a state’s plan is good for the entire 7 years of the ESEA reauthorization, unless the state changes its standards, assessments, or teacher evaluation. In such a case, the state plan would need to be revised and resubmitted to the US secretary of education for approval of the revised sections.

Also, the Alexander-Murray reauthorization steers clear of dictating or otherwise monitoring state standards:

EXISTING STANDARDS.—Nothing in this part shall prohibit a State from revising, consistent with this section, any standard adopted under this part before or after the date of enactment of the Every Child Achieves Act of 2015.

As for assessments: Yes, they are required in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school for math and English language arts/reading and also science (though not as often). The states choose their assessments, which have the following requirement (pg.36):

…involve multiple up-to-date measures of student academic achievement, including measures that assess higher-order thinking skills and understanding, which may include measures of student academic growth and may be partially delivered in the form of portfolios, projects, or extended performance tasks;

The states can administer assessments “as one single summative assessment” or “be administered through multiple statewide assessments during the course of the year if the State can demonstrate that the results of these multiple assessments, taken in their totality, provide a summative score that provides valid and reliable information on individual student achievement or growth.”

As to “closing the achievement gaps,” the Alexander-Murray reauthorization notes that states are required to submit as part of their accountability plan information “to ensure that all students graduate from high school prepared for postsecondary education or the workforce without the need for postsecondary remediation and at a minimum.” Such info needs to include details on four subgroups: “economically disadvantaged students; students from major racial and ethnic groups; 14 ‘children with disabilities; and English learner students” (pg. 47). States must frame such goals in terms of state assessment outcomes and graduation rates.

For each of the four subcategories of students above, “not less than 95 percent” of such students must be included in the state’s measuring its annual progress.

And once again, the Alexander-Murray reauthorization affirms its limits to the secretary’s power (pg. 54-56):

‘‘(5) PROHIBITION ON FEDERAL INTERFERENCE WITH STATE AND LOCAL DECISIONS.—Nothing in this subsection shall be construed to permit the Secretary to establish any criterion that specifies, defines, or prescribes—

‘‘(A) the standards or measures that States or local educational agencies use to establish, implement, or improve challenging State academic standards, including the content of, or achievement levels within, such standards;

‘‘(B) the specific types of academic assessments or assessment items that States or local educational agencies use to meet the requirements of paragraph (2)(B) or otherwise use to measure student academic achievement or student growth;

‘‘(C) the specific goals that States establish within State-designed accountability systems for all students and for each of the categories of students, as defined in paragraph (3)(A), for student academic achievement or high school graduation rates, as described in subclauses (I) and (II) of paragraph (3)(B)(i);

‘‘(D) any requirement that States shall measure student growth, the specific metrics used to measure student academic growth if a State chooses to measure student growth, or the specific indicators or methods to measure student readiness to enter postsecondary education or the workforce without the need for postsecondary remediation;

‘‘(E) setting specific benchmarks, targets, or goals, for any other measures or indicators established by a State under subclauses (III) and (IV) of paragraph (3)(B)(ii) including progress or growth on such measures or indicators;

‘‘(F) the specific weight or specific significance of any measures or indicators used to measure, identify, or differentiate schools in the State-determined accountability system, as described in clauses (ii) and (iii) of paragraph (3)(B);

‘‘(G) the terms ‘meaningfully’ or ‘substantially’ as used in this part; 

‘‘(H) the specific methods used by States and local educational agencies to identify and meaningfully differentiate among public schools;

‘‘(I) any aspect or parameter of a teacher, principal, or other school leader evaluation system within a State or local educational agency; or

‘‘(J) indicators or measures of teacher, principal, or other school leader effectiveness or quality. [Emphasis added.]

I’m liking these limits on the US secretary of education.

In the Alexander-Murray reauthorization, assessments continue to eat up a notable portion of state education budgets. However, the language allows for states to seriously reduce testing time from that which is required of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) consortium tests.

And as was true of NCLB, in the Alexander-Murray reauthorization, states must agree to allow students in grades 4 and 8 to participate in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) every two years, with the federal government paying NAEP costs.

Regarding “consortium developed” standards and assessments, the Alexander-Murray reauthorization notes the following:

‘‘(1) IN GENERAL.—Nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit a State from entering into a voluntary partnership with another State to develop and implement the academic assessments, challenging State academic standards, and accountability systems required under this section.

So, states can decide to “go consortium,” but the federal government will not require it– in any form. And just to be sure(pg. 86)

‘‘(2) PROHIBITION.—The Secretary shall be prohibited from requiring or coercing a State to enter into a voluntary partnership described in paragraph (1), including—

‘‘(A) as a condition of approval of a State 12 plan under this section;

‘‘(B) as a condition of an award of Federal funds under any grant, contract, or cooperative agreement;

‘‘(C) as a condition of approval of a waiver under section 9401 (“waiuvers of statutory or regulatory requirements”) or

‘‘(D) by providing any priority, preference, or special consideration during the application process under any grant, contract, or cooperative agreement. [Emphasis added.]

Again with a resounding NO to Duncan’s waiver-wielding.

Very nice.

For further reading on the Alexander-Murray reauthroization released on April 7, 2015, see education historian Diane Ravitch’s post, Senate Committee Reaches Agreement on New ESEA and Pennsylvania teacher/blogger Peter Greene’s, Senate Proposal Cuts Duncan Off At Knees.

CLICHÉS OF PROGRESSIVISM #51 – The Free Market Cannot Provide Public Education by SHELDON RICHMAN

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Can the free market provide public education? The short answer, of course, is: yes, look around. Right now, private enterprise and nonprofit organizations provide all manner of education  —  from comprehensive schools with classes in the traditional academic subjects, to specialized schools that teach everything from the fine arts to the martial arts, from dancing to dieting, from scuba diving to scrutinizing one’s inner self.

If we define “public education” as “what the government does now,” then it’s a trick question. Every school serves members of the public. For the sake of this discussion, we can ignore that the word “public” has been corrupted to mean “coercively financed through the tax system.”

The free market — and I include here both for-profit and nonprofit organizations — would provide even more education than it does now but for the “unfair competition” from government. Since government has a resource that private organizations lack — the taxpayers — it’s able to offer its services for “free.” They’re not really free, of course; in the government context, “free” means that everyone pays whether he wants the service or not. Clearly, as long as government can tax its citizens and then provide educational services to them at a marginal price of zero, much private education will never come into being. How ironic that government vigilantly looks for predatory pricing in the private sector when it is the major offender.

There is certainly nothing about education that should lead anyone to doubt that the market could provide it. Like any other product or service, education is a combination of land, labor, and capital goods directed at a particular objective — instruction in academic subjects and related matters demanded by a class of consumers, primarily parents.

Here’s where things may get contentious. Critics of market-provided education are uncomfortable with education’s being treated like a commodity, subject to supply and demand. In the marketplace, consumers ultimately determine what is produced. Entrepreneurs take risks to serve them. And fickle consumers show no mercy when something new and attractive comes along. Ask the shareholders of Boston Chicken or Kodak, among others.

Why should parents alone determine what is and what is not acceptable education? But why not parents? To whose hearts are the interests of children closer? Besides, most parents would no more make educational decisions without consulting knowledgeable authorities than they would make medical decisions without consulting doctors. The uninformed-consumer argument against free-market education is a red herring.

Parents, and the private sector, should be free to determine what is and what is not acceptable academic education for the same reasons they are free to determine what is proper religious education. We don’t use the small number of neglectful parents as a pretext for government control or finance of religion. Nor should we use it as a pretext for government control or finance of schooling.

Defenders of government schooling have enlisted various economic arguments related to “market failure” to dispute the idea that parents in a free market should ultimately determine what educational services are offered. These arguments fail. Education does not have the characteristics of a “public good.” One person’s consumption of a given service can detract from another person’s consumption, and nonpayers can be excluded.

Nor does the positive-externality case succeed. Education obviously does have spillover benefits, but that is not enough in economic theory to justify government action. You would have to believe that the external benefits would cause education to be under-consumed unless the government subsidized it. No one has ever shown that. Nor could anyone. To believe that, you’d have to believe that parents engage in the following reasoning: I’d like to buy X amount of education for my child, but since society will benefit by my child’s erudition without paying anything for it, I’ll buy less than X amount of education. Ridiculous, isn’t it?

The argument that high-quality education is intrinsically too expensive for a significant portion of the population to afford also fails. A free market that can saturate society with refrigerators, microwave ovens, washing machines, and telephones — cellular and otherwise — can surely produce good education for a mass society. The key is entrepreneurship.

We think we know what education is and what methods work. And we do know some things. This sense of certainty might encourage us to think that education is best left to government. But we shouldn’t be so presumptuous, or we could wind up like the nineteenth-century Patent Office official who said the office should be closed because everything useful had been invented.

The world is open-ended. We don’t know exactly what we will learn tomorrow. As fallible beings, we can be sure that at any time, valuable information and opportunities are being overlooked. Scarce resources are being misdirected because our knowledge is incomplete. This is as true for education as for anything else.

What can we do to hasten the discovery and correction of error? We already have a method: entrepreneurship. What entrepreneurs do is search the landscape for instances where resources are being under-used, that is, devoted to the production of goods and services that consumers value less highly than other things those resources might be devoted to. What lures entrepreneurs to discover those instances is profit. Nothing approaches its power to stimulate discovery. Profit accrues when an alert entrepreneur, noticing what others have overlooked, switches resources from producing things consumers value less highly to producing things consumers value more highly.

The application of this principle to education should be obvious. Since we don’t know today all that we may learn about educational methods and objectives tomorrow, we need entrepreneurship in education. Government isn’t up to the task. Bureaucracy is the opposite of enterprise. It stifles enterprise. Government domination of education assures that the entrepreneurial innovation and creativity we are accustomed to in, say, the computer industry will be missing from education.

There is no good substitute for the decentralized, spontaneous entrepreneurial process that full privatization of education would stimulate.

Thus it is not only the case that the free market can provide education. We may conclude further that only the free market should provide education.

Summary

  • As long as government can tax its citizens and then provide educational services to them at a marginal price of zero, much private education will never come into being.
  • Most parents would no more make educational decisions without consulting knowledgeable authorities than they would make medical decisions without consulting doctors.
  • We don’t use the small number of neglectful parents as a pretext for government control or finance of religion. Nor should we use it as a pretext for government control or finance of schooling.
  • Government domination of education assures that the entrepreneurial innovation and creativity we are accustomed to in, say, the computer industry will be missing from education.

For further information, see:

“Education: What About the Poor?” by Chris Cardiff

“Restoring Parental Responsibility for Education” by Marshall Fritz

“Dissatisfaction Guaranteed and No Money Back” by Lawrence W. Reed

“The Spread of Education Before Compulsion: Britain and America in the Nineteenth Century” by Edwin West

“The Global Education Industry: Lessons from Private Education in Developing Countries” by Anthony Flew

“Is There A Viable Alternative to College?” by Jeffrey Tucker

Cliché #26: “Without Government Schools, Most People Wouldn’t Get An Education” by Max Borders

ABOUT SHELDON RICHMAN

Sheldon Richman is the former editor of The Freeman and TheFreemanOnline.org, and a contributor to The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. He is the author of Separating School and State: How to Liberate America’s Families.

EDITORS NOTE: The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) has been proud to partner with Young America’s Foundation (YAF) to produce “Clichés of Progressivism,” a series of insightful commentaries covering topics of free enterprise, income inequality, and limited government. This is the final installment in the series.

The table of contents with links to all previous chapters appears here. Watch for the announcement later this spring of the hard copy edition, to be distributed at schools and campuses across the country and abroad.

A new Friday series, “Real Heroes,” begins on FEE.org later this month.

The Florida FIX was IN: How Jeb Bush and his puppets threw our kids under the bus

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florida common core busA group of concerned experts got together to create logical and thoughtful solutions (HB1121 and SB1496), informed by other states’ efforts to remove Common Core and high stakes testing.  We were excited to present the best solutions we’d seen nationwide.  We trooped off to Tallahassee and presented this to as many Florida legislators as possible.

What we were told was shocking!  Several legislators said nothing gets done at all unless you have the blessing of the leadership which would not be forthcoming because they don’t want to embarrass Jeb Bush or repudiate the mantra of common core and high stakes testing.  Essentially, they do what they’re told.  While they campaigned to be our champions and fight Common Core, they did nothing but push the buttons they were told to push.

So we went to the leadership, and we saw the education advisor for Speaker Crisafulli, a skinny old crone who had been on this job over 30 years, Lynn Cobb, Special Counsel to the Speaker at Florida House of Representatives.  She cackled and growled that the Democrats own education and then denigrated the unions.   She claimed the ACT isn’t a nationally normed test used in Florida and then called US conspiracy theorists when we showed her the actual data from the ACT website.  We were summarily dismissed like navel lint.

Using lies, obfuscation and false data, they have managed to ruin the Florida’s education system and cripple our children as evidenced by the ACT results which show that we now rank 47th in the country.

Jeb Bush has used this failed system as his personal piggy bank for his presidential race, selling out to the vendors such as Pearson PLC, Microsoft, GE and others who stand to gain enormous wealth from the High Stakes Testing plan to test only on computers. This enables them major access to the $1.3 TRILLION market through the activities of the JEB BUSH Foundation for Excellence in Education.

Meetings of this foundation have been used to pay legislators and bureaucrats to travel and enjoy conferences, all expenses paid plus, where they will spend time with the vendors who will also become their benefactors. This is not a new plan for him as he used the same strategy with the Foundation for Florida’s Future to gather money all over the nation trading on his father’s name to become governor in the first place. See the article in St. Pete Times.

John Legg, Erik Fresen, Kelly Stargel, Manny Diaz, Marlene O’Toole, Don Gaetz, Matt Gaetz, Gary Chartrand and many others directly benefit either by owning charter schools or by potential positions in a new Jeb Bush White House, or other direct monetary benefit.

There is absolutely NO evidence, report, or theory which says computer testing is better for accuracy, ease of administration, fairness, data analysis or any logical reason. Using technology for learning is wonderful as an aid, but not necessary for testing. So why would we force our districts to spend over $2 billion on implementing this testing technology? None of this expense was ever presented to the public or they would certainly have “sticker shock.”

This expense is just the beginning. There are replacement costs, maintenance costs, upgrade costs, staff costs, training costs, and facility costs to stack on top of that. Four Districts in California have sued that state for a $BILLION for the unfunded mandates. Certainly we can expect the same here. Then taxpayers get to pay on both sides of that lawsuit because legislators ignore their duty to the voters in exchange for personal gain.

The bill that passed, SB616, requires a limit of 5% of time (9 of 180 days) for state testing UNLESS they have parental permission for more. How is that time counted? Who counts it? Who sends out letters to parents for permission? Who tracks their responses? What if some parents say “no”? What about the time wasted while kids are playing “musical computers” to share testing resources? Why isn’t that counted?

My head is spinning with the bureaucratic complexity and arbitrariness of that figure. Why not 3% or 13%? Why not just get out of the maniacal micromanagement of public schools? Teachers are certified and schools are accredited. Legislators are NOT.

State tests AND state standards LIMIT education choices and results. Who achieves the best results? Home school tops the chart. Private and religious schools do better as well. WHY? They can choose standards and curriculum to match individual needs. Because they allow more instruction time and less testing, they have more enrichment courses, and they don’t have to teach to the test.

I suggest that the Emperor, Jeb Bush, has no clothes. Here’s what one of his MAIN supporters, Senator Gaetz, said in committee January 7, 2015: http://thefloridachannel.org/videos/1715-senate-education-prek-12-committee/. At hour 1:15, after Commissioner Pam Stewart’s presentation.
“Here’s what I’ve learned today”

  1. “We don’t know how much time is consumed by Statewide Assessments.”
  2. “We don’t know how much money it costs to perform state mandated tests.”
  3. “We don’t know whether tests that are performed by state mandate are valid and reliable.”
  4. “We’ve learned today that we have no contingency plan if there are problems with statewide assessments.”
  5. “We have not beta tested statewide assessments.”

Then he voted for it.

Your children, your state, your taxes, your future just went down the drain. Are you going to let Jeb Bush and his sycophants get away with it?

Governor Scott should show us that he is not part of this.  Tell him to VETO this bill.  He has the power to rid us of Common Core and High Stakes testing by executive order.

RELATED ARTICLE: Video: Florida Senators Lee and Hayes: Why They are Done With Common Core Testing

Powerful Video: Future of New York State Education Exposed

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On March 31, 2015, the New York State Assembly proved that budgeting well takes a back seat to “budgeting badly but on time.”

rotten apple

Even before the official vote was taken, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie knew that the budget would pass the Democrat-controlled Assembly because “the people of this state want an on-time budget.”

So, according to Heastie,  it’s “the people” who “want” politicians to tell New York schools how to evaluate teachers– just so long as the screwy budget that also relieves New York’s wealthiest from sales tax on yachts is Approved. On. Time.

Due to that Democrat-induced, “on time” approval, New York now has a similar teacher evaluation stupidity that passed in Louisiana in 2012 (with student test scores counting for 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation unless the teacher is rated “ineffective,” in which case the test scores override all else). Moreover, New York has an extra layer of idiocy, even outdoing Louisiana: the “independent evaluator” nonsense that promises to introduce unprecedented disruption in the running of already-pressured schools as their administrators could be required to travel to other schools to evaluate teachers in unfamiliar contexts.

Did I mention that all of this “admin swap” means nothing in the face of the “ineffective test scores” trump card?

And “ineffective,” well, that is To Be Determined by the New York State Education Department (NYSED).

Ahh, yes. The bottom line is that all New York career teachers are now at the mercy of whatever test score “growth” NYSED concocts in its effort to please a governor who is decidedly and openly hostile to the “public school monopoly” he vowed to “bust” upon reelection.

There you have it, People of New York: A casualty of the “budgeting on time” that Heastie says you demand.

Therefore, don’t blame the “heavy-hearted” Democrats captured in short order in the brief, powerful video below. And certainly don’t blame those clueless legislators who voted for a budget without fully comprehending its ramifications.

The politicians are innocent… right?

Future of NYS Education, by Stronger Together (ST) Caucus

Florida and Georgia: A Tale of Test Cheating Scandals in Two States

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Disparity: Convictions in Atlanta, Impunity in Miami-Dade Schools.

On Wednesday, an Atlanta jury convicted 11 teachers on racketeering charges, with mixed verdicts on theft and false statement charges, in connection with the massive test cheating scandal in the Atlanta Public Schools.

The defendants, including teachers, a principal and other administrators, were accused of falsifying and altering test results to collect bonuses (incentive funds) and/or to keep their jobs.

One teacher was acquitted and 21 others took plea deals. The 35 educators were indicted in March 2013 by a grand jury.

Prosecutors claimed and successfully argued that the educators conspired to cheat on standardized tests as far back as 2005 after feeling pressure from school district officials to meet federal and local testing standards.

The educators said the pressure came from their supervisors, including former Superintendent Beverly Hall, who died of breast cancer last month.

Hall, who was superintendent for more than a decade, and her lawyer had argued she was too sick to stand trial.

In their report, investigators wrote that Hall “created a culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation” that allowed cheating to go on for years.

Hall maintained that she hadn’t done anything wrong, but resigned during the investigation.

Jurors deliberated for more than eight days. The racketeering charges could carry up to a 20-year prison sentence, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Sentencing is scheduled for April 8, 2015.

“This is a huge story and absolutely the biggest development in American education law since forever,” said University of Georgia law professor Ron Carlson. “It has to send a message to educators here and broadly across the nation. Playing with student test scores is very, very dangerous business.”

Logically, Mr. Carlson seems correct as the former Superintendent of El Paso, Texas schools, Lorenzo Garcia, was sent to federal prison, and five teachers and four principals were arrested in Philadelphia over the past year for test cheating with more arrests expected.

Yet, logic is being defied in Miami-Dade County, Florida, as citizen journalist and school library media specialist Trevor Colestock uncovered a massive test cheating scandal, Adobegate, at Miami Norland Senior High School; his findings verified by the Final Miami-Dade OIG Report; and the strange firing of one teacher and suspension of the other who was equally involved.

Mrs. Muchnick returned to Norland High in early January 2014.

To date, the teachers involved, Mr. Emmanuel Fleurantin and Mrs. Brenda Muchnick, were never arrested, charged, booked, and/or prosecuted as the State Attorney, the Florida Attorney General, and Governor Rick Scott refused to acknowledge this massive test cheating scandal and the almost $250,000 paid out through federal and state incentives to the faculty for an “A” grade for the 2011-12 school year tainted by cheating.

Each teacher at Miami Norland Senior High School received $1730.41.

Though the teachers got paid, the big winners from Norland’s academic successes tainted by cheating were school and district administrators: Reginald Lee went from being an assistant principal over the vocational department in which the cheating took place to the principal of Charles Drew Middle School and then Norland in November 2012; Luis Solano went from being the principal at Norland to the Associate Superintendent, Curriculum & Instruction at Collier County Public Schools in Naples; Nikolai Vitti went from being the Assistant Superintendent of the Education Transformation Office (ETO) at M-DCPS to the Chief Academic Officer of M-DCPS and then became the Superintendent of Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville; and Superintendent Alberto Carvalho became the Florida and National Superintendent of the Year shortly thereafter.

Also, the Florida Department of Education recently released information that revealed that Miami Norland SHS had 96 FCAT/EOC test invalidations over the past three school years.

Interestingly, 25 other public schools, all high schools, had more test invalidations that Norland, with 20 of the schools being in Miami-Dade, most of them in the Education Transformation Office.

The breakdown for the 26 schools, all high schools, in the graphic: 21 from Miami-Dade (96 at Norland-275 invalidations at North Miami Senior); 2 from Broward (97, 134 invalidations); 2 from Palm Beach (99, 100 invalidations); and 1 from Duval (110 invalidations).

For more information on how this information was obtained, please read pages 38-40 of the Test Score Validation Process manual proffered by Pearson.

Furthermore, the FBI declined to investigate as they deferred to the USDOE OIG who dismissed Colestock’s complaints and took no action.

Simply put, Florida and federal officials, unlike former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, passed the buck.

Perhaps politics played a part as Florida is, and has been, the epicenter of standardized testing since instituting the first high school graduation test in 1976, and reports of test cheating undermine the politics and profitability of standardized testing.

Former Gov. Jeb Bush, a Common Core and standardized test proponent, is in lock-step with President Barack Obama on these issues.

During his tenure as Florida governor, Bush expanded testing significantly, with lucrative contracts for testing and scoring going to Pearson, while creating the school grading system through his A+ Plan.

Beverly Hall served as the Atlanta Public Schools superintendent for more than a decade and was named Superintendent of the Year by the American Association of School Administrators in 2009. She was credited with raising student test scores and graduation rates, particularly among poor and minority students.

However, the award quickly lost its luster and was tarnished as the cheating scandal began to unfold when The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that some scores were statistically improbable.

Likewise, Miami-Dade Superintendent Alberto Carvalho was named the state and national Superintendent of the Year over the past year and lauded for the same accomplishments in test scores and graduation rates.

Could it be that Adobegate and high number of test invalidations on the FCAT and/or EOC exams over the past three school years went unanswered and unpunished to protect standardized testing and spare Mr. Carvalho, who like Beverly Hall is close to President Obama, from going down in flames like Ms. Hall and Mr. Garcia by the state and federal governments respectively?

A reasonable person may assume that Miami-Dade County Public Schools “created a culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation” when it chose to transfer and retaliate against Mr. Colestock for reporting, exposing, and publishing articles about the test cheating while returning Mrs. Muchnick to Norland and never seeking her or Mr. Fleurantin’s prosecution.

The implied message to teachers in Miami-Dade seems to be “keep your mouth shut about test cheating lest you want to end up like Mr. Colestock.”

The lack of inaction by the federal and state governments seem to condone M-DCPS’s actions and test cheating in general.

Like Atlanta, the victims in Miami-Dade County, Florida, besides the taxpayer, are low-income minority (mostly black) school children who are being denied the remedial help they need as false and misleading test scores suggest otherwise.

Where are the talking heads and advocacy groups who decry events in Brooklyn and Ferguson when it comes to test cheating in Atlanta and Miami? Why are they silent on these issues?

Question: Why is Florida rewarding test cheaters while Georgia, Texas and Pennsylvania are punishing test cheaters?

RELATED ARTICLE: Whistleblower Principal, Adell Cothorne, on the Atlanta Cheating Verdict