Muslim Indoctrination and the U.S. Department of Education from Hihab Dress-Up to Convert

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The World Hijab Day website presents hijab-wearing as a sign of empowerment; women and girls who wear hijabs are called “queens, princesses, and sultanas.” One blog post by Megan Baase, however, reveals that experimental hijab-wearing may have other effects.  Baase writes that she didn’t know much about Islam until World Hijab Day.  After reading about Islam and “why women wear hijabs,” she decided to convert: “I would’ve never learned about Islam if it weren’t for world hijab day.”Now, the U.S. Department of Education is encouraging Islamic proselytizing.

Ever since 9/11 educators have been trying to promote a positive view of Islam under the pretext of fighting harassment of Muslims.  American textbooks repeat Muslim doctrine as if it were historical fact, students are taken to pray in mosques, and girls are asked to dress up in hijabs, the Muslim head scarves.

When I taught at Georgia Perimeter College (2007-2010) I’d see posters on bulletin boards put up by a Muslim professor who advised the Muslim Student Association (a “legacy project” of the Muslim Brotherhood), inviting girls to “wear a hijab for a day.”  In 2009, at the annual meeting of the National Council for the Social Studies, I reported on such panels as “Muslim Perspectives Through Film and Dialogue.”

Now we have a World Hijab Day on February 1. The first one was held in 2013.  The organization’s website reported that that February, “Girls of all faiths across East Lancashire [United Kingdom] have been taking part in World Hijab Day to understand and appreciate the muslim [sic] culture.” At Pleckgate High School, the head of “RE and citizenship,” was quoted as saying, “Staff and pupils, Muslim and non Muslim, wore the hijab all day as a way of increasing understanding. . . .”

Here in the USA, in Texas, later that month, WND reported, “Students Made to Wear Burqas – in Texas.”  The exercise was part of the Texas CSCOPE curriculum.  In California, at Natomas Pacific Prep public charter school, some girls wore hijabs as part of their senior projects.

This year according to the World Hijab Day’s website, college campuses in Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania participated.  Advice for Muslim Student Associations on holding such events is offered at the site, as are testimonials from Muslim and non-Muslim women.  So is New York Assemblyman David Weprin’s statement in support of World Hijab Day 2016.

On February 11 of this year, the U.S. Department of Education sent out an official “Homeroom” blog post titled “Protecting Our Muslim Youth from Bullying: The Role of the Educator.”

It began: “Not since the days and months immediately after September 11 has the Muslim community faced the level of anti-Muslim bias and bullying that has been seen over the past several months. In the wake of Paris and other terrorist attacks, combined with the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a lack of information among the public about Islam, and the tendency to associate  Islam with terrorism, there has been an increase in expressions and incidents targeting the Muslim community. . . .”

An alleged “increased wave of anti-Muslim sentiment in our public discourse, political rhetoric and everyday interactions,” includes schools, where youth have been called, “terrorists” or “ISIS” and attacked physically, verbally, and through social isolation.

The “statistics,” however, come from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).   As evidence of 75 reported incidents, ranging from assault to fliers opposing a mosque in Fredericksburg, there are links to only 10 news reports that go so far as to only describe allegations (many of these will likely prove to be hoaxes).

The suggested activities and curricula also come from ADL, which has long been selling its anti-bullying programs and materials to schools.  These activities are aimed at the larger goal of controlling students’ emotions and thoughts, i.e., getting them to stop “hating,” and to uncritically accept all cultures and lifestyles. (Early in the Obama administration, such anti-bullying programs were directed at protecting gay students and were coordinated with then-“safe schools czar,” the co-founder of the Gay and Lesbian Independent School Teacher Network, Kevin Jennings.)

Among the Department’s suggested activities is holding a “Walk a Mile in Her Hijab Day.”  There is a link to a video of a classroom at Vernon Hills High School in Illinois, where girls are shown in a classroom helping each other put on hijabs.  It’s presented as a fun activity, dress-up for teenagers.  The event, held last December, was organized by the school’s Muslim Student Association President, Yasmeen Abdallah, who claimed it was intended to “denounce negative stereotypes.”

At a Rochester, New York, high school, another Muslim student, Eman Muthana, successfully petitioned the administration to participate in World Hijab Day this month.  Some parents became outraged.  Muthana said it was a way to share a cultural experience and fight prejudice.

The World Hijab Day website reported that Memphis Central High School also participated this year. The blog-poster, identified only as “Mary,” a “Christian, USA,” did not report any outraged parents, but only feeling good at “seeing so many people support one another.”

The World Hijab Day website presents hijab-wearing as a sign of empowerment; women and girls who wear hijabs are called “queens, princesses, and sultanas.”

One blog post by Megan Baase, however, reveals that experimental hijab-wearing may have other effects.  Baase writes that she didn’t know much about Islam until World Hijab Day.  After reading about Islam and “why women wear hijabs,” she decided to convert: “I would’ve never learned about Islam if it weren’t for world hijab day.”  The post features a picture of her and her four-year-old son, both wearing hijabs.  She writes that she “couldn’t say no” to his request to “be just like mommy.”

Although proponents claim such activities are cultural exercises, critics rightly point out that students are not asked to participate in the wearing of crucifixes or yarmulkes.  Now, the U.S. Department of Education, under the cover of anti-bullying, is encouraging Islamic proselytizing.

The development is alarming especially given the Department’s increased grip on day-to-day school operations.  “Dear Colleague” letters give directives on such things as bullying, rape prevention, and school discipline.  School administrators tend to act preemptively to fend off potential punishment from the feds.  It’s why school websites are plastered with anti-discrimination statements and notices about training in “affirmative consent.”

To ward off charges of creating a hostile school environment, school officials may want to have proof in the form of a list of activities that encourage cultural sensitivity – like having girls wear hijabs.

Such activities do have consequences.  We need to listen to what Muslim converts say, rather than what the Department of Education says.

RELATED ARTICLE: Campus Protesters Try to Silence Conservative Speaker, Demand College President’s Resignation

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research website. The featured image is of Vernon Hill students join their Muslim peers in wearing hijabs.

Changing Minds

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Two of the finest institutions of higher education in the United States, Columbia and Cornell, have been identified as leading the list of “most anti-Semitic,” as they continue to host Jew hatred events on campus.  By the time our students enter this new phase in their education, they have been well primed for the venomous climate, having been molded into frustrated, resentful, disrespectful, demanding, angry young adults, ill prepared for anything, unable to accept responsibility, and ripe to lash out at others. These young people have already been activated and prepared to join any group that uses “social justice” language, whether warranted or not.

The K-12 classes provide the first toxic element.  Education is being restructured according to a radical political ideology promoted by the White House, Bill and Melinda Gates, and other supporters of a federal takeover of education. The purpose is to produce workers for a Global Economy (aka Agenda 21).  The major players are Valerie Jarrett’s mother, Barbara Taylor Bowman, a member of the Muslim Sisterhood; native-born terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn Ayers (Weather Underground) who support a radical network to defeat America; and Secretary of Education (ret.) Arne Duncan, who promoted the Common Core Standards, with its drastic, untried curriculum overhaul that has lowered school standards to ensure that no child is left behind or excels at the expense of others. This is accompanied by the disturbing data mining that profiles the children (into adulthood) and their families. 

Classical literature, known to improve vocabulary and foster creative expression, thinking, speaking, and writing skills, has been jettisoned in favor of dry, uninspiring informational texts and Dystopian, sexualized, disheartening novels for children whose pre-frontal cortex is insufficiently developed to cope with the dark situations and mature content. The result is depression. Mary Calamia, licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist in Stony Brook, NY, has reported that children have come to hate school, cry, wet the bed, experience insomnia, and engage in self-mutilation – an increase of 200 to 300 percent more children with serious trauma than before the new curriculum’s introduction.

Math problems once solved in a few steps now require a convoluted system. Karen Lamoreaux, mother of three and member of Arkansas Against Common Core, presented a simple 4th grade division problem to the Board of Education that one could solve in two steps, but now requires 108 steps to completion.  In New York, principals have reported that some students are severely stressed and even vomit during testing.

History has become another endangered learning experience. A popular textbook is Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States,” which focuses on “the exploitation of the majority by an elite minority,” designed to inspire a “quiet revolution.”  Historians heavily criticize the book’s concentration on slavery, racism, and colonialism while omitting America’s enormous achievements for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,. Students do not learn America’s founding documents – The Declaration of Independence, The Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, The Bill of Rights, or the Ten Commandments.  A new vocabulary is in use to give new meaning to old ideas, including “framers” for “founders,” indicating a flexible and distorted view of our history and heritage, and a turn to global governance. 

True history has been replaced with a counterfeit version, introducing the second toxic element. History Alive, another oft-used textbook, contains multiple chapters on Islam (whitewashed of its 1400 years of ongoing bloodshed and conquest), without equal time for Judaism and Christianity. Such studies may also include unscheduled trips to mosques, simulating a hajj to Mecca, girls’ donning traditional Muslim clothing, learning Arabic calligraphy, memorizing the Five Pillars of Islam and the Shahada, the testimony required to become Muslim. And, as if these approaches were insufficient, political indoctrination is included, using the Palestinian narrative to vilify the State of Israel and world Jewry.

To whom do we owe this new development? America’s educational institutions receive significant donations to create Middle Eastern and political science study programs that ensure the installation of anti-American professors. The students are besieged by Islamic and leftist indoctrination that demonize Israel, Jewish and American history, and disallows opposing views. The hate agenda is presented as scholarly and the West is blamed for Islam’s self-imposed or invented ills. Scheduled anti-Israel events are designed to promote the narrative of Israeli colonialism, and to delegitimize and erode support for Israel by advocating a boycott-divestment-sanctions (BDS) effort.

The propaganda campaign is global, well-financed and well-organized but the biggest focus is college campuses, where Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Muslim Student Union use the rhetoric of social justice and human rights, historic Palestine, genocide, apartheid and oppression, to motivate the boycott movement and support the Islamic ideology of conquest. Jewish children are harassed and harmed. Our colleges are becoming breeding grounds for future jihadists who are turned against Israel and will one day soon turn against America.

The groups within the colleges are well-funded arms of the Muslim Brotherhood,  menacingly delivering their accusations and claims of apartheid, maltreatment of women, death to homosexuals, etc against the Jewish state, when, in fact, these are descriptive of the Muslim cultures. Islam allows homosexuality and pedophilia – sexual pleasure with pre-pubescent boys and infants, kidnapping for sexual slavery, polygamy, wife beating, stoning women, disfiguring their daughters with FGM and acid, chopping off hands and feet, death for apostasy, murder of Jewish and Christian civilians – and, quite recently, beheading a 15-year-old Iraqi boy for listening to pop music.  With the complicity of liberal instructors, a crisis is being nurtured for the purpose of acquiring power, diminishing freedom of speech, and promoting an increase of immigrating non-integrating Muslims who, throughhijra, will transform our Western countries. 

The situation has become so critical that schools are providing “safe spaces.” This is a concept not unlike “sacred space,” from Sharia, which Islam has established as an aggressive territorial system that holds all land on earth as given by Allah to Muhammad in perpetuity.  Kent State University invites students and community to a safe environment for ongoing interaction and conversation on diverse subjects.  The University of California Berkeley has adopted a policy requiring all “Caucasian” students to purchase mandatory Free Speech Insurance at $1,000 per semester “to cover the cost of therapy and rehabilitation of victims of unregulated, freely expressed Caucasian ideas.” Thus the schools encourage a mentality of victimization, anger and vengeance along with feelings of shame and White guilt.

This is social engineering, a force that is being cynically employed to restructure the soul of an entire generation of young people and render it vulnerable to the globalist one world order, in which none of the traditional values will have survived. With value and context stripped from books, a generation is being denied the aptitude to discern fact from fiction or right from wrong. Thus deprived of the ability to think critically, they are ripe for joining any number of hate groups on campus, the Occupy movements, Black Lives Matter, and those that favor a Palestinian state to the destruction of Israel. But, most significantly, they become easily malleable by and for the ruling class.

The pathway to the final destination goes by the Orwellian term, Agenda 21, the schema that indoctrinates to retrofit our children for future global citizenship, to overtake properties and communities, and to transform America with the enticing promise of social and economic development in a competitive (not free) marketplace. The all-powerful government will determine the equitable distribution of the fruits of all labor, meaning the successful countries will distribute its profits to third world countries until there is nothing left to share – except, perhaps, destitution and illness.  Only then will the elite bask in a society in which thinking has been obliterated and every spark of creativity trampled into the dust.

We are standing at a crucial time in history and working against the clock.

RELATED ARTICLE: Why Have Universities Been Overtaken by Mob Rule?

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Homeschooled Weirdoes and the Culture of Conformity by B.K. Marcus

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Remember that weird kid in school? I don’t mean the really scary one. I mean the borderline oddball. The one you had to talk to a bit to spot the weirdness. The boy who never knew what TV show everyone was talking about. The girl who, when you asked her what her favorite music group was, answered some long name that ended in “quartet.” The kid who thought you meant soccer when you said football.

How did you treat that kid? (Or were you that kid?)

In “Homeschooling, Socialization, and the New Groupthink,” I suggested that the most useful definition of socialization is “ensuring that a child becomes sociable, that he or she develops the intelligence and social reflexes that promote peaceful and pleasurable interactions.” I also suggested that some of homeschooling’s critics might mean something more sinister: indoctrination into a particular vision of society.

But after reading my article, third-grade schoolteacher Heather Lakemacher, commenting on Facebook, pointed out yet a different meaning of socialization: not seeming weird.

This is the real reason, she said, “why this stereotype of the poorly socialized homeschooler exists.” Whereas I had only addressed adult perceptions of homeschooled children, the true culprit, she said, is other kids:

Many of us who were educated in a traditional school have vivid memories of meeting other kids our age who were homeschooled and thinking, “Oh my god! This kid is so WEIRD!” It’s entirely possible that the child in question grew up to be a happy, well-adjusted, productive member of society. …

However, I think the stereotype exists because of the power of those childhood interactions with a peer who just didn’t behave in the way we were expecting them to behave. That’s not an argument against homeschooling, but data will always have a hard time dispelling emotionally charged memories.

She’s right. Odd kids can make a lasting impression.

Grownups regularly note how polite my homeschooled son is, or how he’ll talk to them at all when so many other kids clam up and fail to make eye contact. Adults find his lack of awkwardness with them charming. But what do schooled kids see?

Diane Flynn Keith, a veteran homeschooling mom and author of the book Carschooling, writes that homeschooled kids are, in fact, “not well-socialized in the traditional school sense.”

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but there’s nothing “normal” about our kids. Your homeschooled child is odd compared to the schooled population because they have not experienced ongoing school-based socialization and standardization. …

They haven’t been indoctrinated in the same way. They have not been steeped in the popular consumer culture to the degree that most schooled kids have been. They are not adult-phobic and peer-dependent. (“Yes, My Grown Homeschooled Children Are Odd — And Yours Will Be Too!“)

And most of the time, homeschooling parents love that about our kids — and about homeschooling in general. We don’t want them to be standard. Whether we admit it or not, we tend to think they’re better than the standard. But it’s true that our socially flexible and resilient children can be puzzling to their traditionally schooled peers, and vice versa.

So why does the assessment of weirdness flow only in one direction? Why don’t homeschooled kids think the mainstream schoolchildren are weird?

One answer is that our kids know the mainstream experience through television, movies, and books. They may not always track the finer distinctions between Degrassi High and Hogwarts, but they certainly know a lot more about schools and schooling than mainstream kids know about education outside a classroom.

But I think that even without the pop-cultural lens on the schooling experience, homeschooled kids are just less likely to see anyone as weird. It’s just not a part of their semantic reflexes. Instead they think, “I don’t get him,” or “I’m not into the same stuff she is.”

As a result, homeschooled kids aren’t just more tolerant of diversity; they’re probably also more diverse. And that’s a lot of what gets labeled weird by those who are better assimilated into the mainstream culture.

What’s probably obvious to anyone familiar with homeschooling is that it’s good for the emotional health of kids who don’t easily fit in. What is less obvious is the damage that a culture of conformity does not just to the oddballs in that culture but also to the kids who conform with ease — and to the liberty of the larger society.

For over half a century, studies have shown that the need for social acceptance not only changes our behavior but can even make us perceive the world differently — and incorrectly.

In the early 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments on the dangers of group influence. When presented with simple problems that 95 percent of individuals could answer correctly when free of group influence, 75 percent of Asch’s test subjects would get the answer wrong when it meant concurring with the group.

In 2005, neuroscientist Gregory Berns conducted an updated version of Asch’s experiments, complete with brain scans to determine if the wrong answers were a conscious acquiescence to social pressure or if, instead, test subjects believed that their group-influenced wrong answers were in fact correct. Not only did the subjects report that they thought their wrong answers were right; the brain scans seemed to confirm it: they showed greater activity in the problem-solving regions of the brain than in those areas associated with conscious decision-making. And the nonconformists who went against the group and gave correct answers showed heightened activity in the part of the brain associated with fear and anxiety.

Commenting on the implications of these experiments, author Susan Cain writes,

Many of our most important civic institutions, from elections to jury trials to the very idea of majority rule, depend on dissenting voices. But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think. (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking)

Groupthink, in other words, is dangerous to a free society. And we don’t always realize when we’re not thinking for ourselves.

This kind of cognitive conformity, however, isn’t fixed or universal. Not only does it vary, for example, between East and West; it has also declined in the West since the 1950s, according to a 1996 review of 133 Asch-type studies from 17 countries. That review assessed the cultures in which the studies took place to see if their results “related cross-culturally to individualism [versus] collectivism.” Unsurprisingly, test subjects were least susceptible to the reality-distorting effects of the group in the more individualistic national cultures.

We should expect the same to be true of more and less individualistic subcultures. I bet homeschoolers, for example, are less likely to show the Asch effect. I suspect the same thing of the oddballs at school.

That doesn’t mean everyone should homeschool, or that only weirdoes can be independent thinkers, but it does suggest that the more a culture values independence and diversity, the less vulnerable it will be to the distortions of conformity. And if socialization means helping kids fit in more easily with the culture of their peers, then parents of homeschoolers and schooled kids alike may want to reconsider the value of socializing our children.

B.K. Marcus

B.K. Marcus

B.K. Marcus is editor of the Freeman.

Yes, Students Are Customers, but the Customer Isn’t Always Right by Kevin Currie-Knight & Steven Horwitz

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“College students are not customers. That analogy needs to die. It needs to be drowned in the world’s largest bathtub. It needs a George R.R. Martin–esque bloodbath of a demise.”

These are the strong words of education writer Rebecca Schuman in response to Iowa’s recent attempt to pass a law tying professors’ job security to their teaching evaluations. Such laws, Schuman and others think, are based on the misguided idea that students are akin to customers.

OK, So College Isn’t Like a Restaurant

To an extent, we agree with Schuman, but we think she vastly oversimplifies. In one way, it is hard to deny that students are customers. They (or someone acting on their behalf) pay for a service and, like customers in any other market, students can take their tuition money elsewhere if they aren’t satisfied.

Whether the educational experience was to the student’s “liking” may not be a good measure of the quality of the university’s educational services. 

On the other hand, as Schuman points out, college education looks quite different from many other businesses. Unlike restaurant patrons, for example, students are buying a service (education) that isn’t geared toward customer enjoyment. A good college education may even push students in ways they don’t enjoy.

Whether the tilapia was prepared to the patron’s liking is a good measure of the restaurant’s food. Whether the educational experience was to the student’s “liking” may not be a good measure of the quality of the university’s educational services.

Rather than this distinction being evidence for Schuman’s claim, however, it actually points out one of its flaws. She overlooks the fact that not all customers have the same sort of relationship with a business as we see in the restaurant industry, which serves as the only basis of her customer analogy.

Yes, colleges certainly have a different relationship with students than restaurants have with patrons. Patrons are there to get what tastes good and satisfies them for that specific visit. Students are (presumably) there to receive a good education, which may not instantly please them and may sometimes have to “taste bad” to be effective. (Most people who go to the dentist don’t find it immediately pleasurable, either, but, in the long run, they are certainly glad they went.)

No Pain, No Gain

We can think of three alternative business analogies for the university-student relationship.

First is personal training or physical therapy. Like university education, they involve services that aren’t geared toward immediate consumer happiness. To help a client achieve good results, a trainer often has to make the workout difficult when the client might have wanted to go easier. And good physical therapy often involves putting the client through painful motions the client would rather not undergo.

Yet, these businesses see their clients as customers and probably take customer feedback quite seriously. Trainers need to push customers past where they want to go, but this doesn’t mean trainers dismiss negative feedback.

Credible Credentials

Second are certification services, firms that provide quality assurance for other firms. Such providers may find themselves at odds with their customers when they withhold certification, but if the firm asking for certification really wants an assurance of quality for its customers, that firm will understand why its unhappiness at being denied isn’t a reason for the certifying organization to just cave to whatever its customers want.

Schuman suggests that if students are customers, the university must be a profit-grubbing business.

For example, a manufacturer of commercial refrigerators might seek certification from Underwriters Laboratories to prove to restaurant owners that its appliances have been independently tested and proven to hold food at safe temperatures that won’t sicken customers. If tests reveal that the fridges aren’t getting cooler than 50 degrees — far above food safety guidelines — the fridges won’t get certified.

Any certifying bodies that give in to pressure to certify all paying customers will end up being punished by the market when someone (a competitor? a journalist?) reveals that the company’s certification doesn’t really certify anything. Protecting the quality of the certification process is in everyone’s interest, even if it makes some of a certifier’s customers unhappy with particular outcomes.

College students may well be like the firms seeking a certification of quality, with employers and graduate schools being the analogue of their customers, who will only hire or admit “certified” students.

The Cheapest Product at the Highest Price?

A third analogy is the nonprofit organization. Schuman suggests that if students are customers, the university must be a profit-grubbing business, and since a “business’s only goal is to succeed,” a customer-focused university will “purvey… the cheapest product it can at the highest price customers will pay.”

But does viewing the people one serves as customers necessarily turn one into a business whose concern is to sell poor products at a high price rather than to provide a good service? Credit unions, art museums, area transportation services, and, yes, private K–12 schools are often organizations that don’t operate for profit and yet provide services directly to paying customers.

Nonprofit museums charge admissions and nonprofit ride services charge for rides; therefore, they serve paying customers. But this does not mean they aim to make the maximum profit possible, or in fact any sort of profit, by providing the lowest quality at the highest price. (Of course, we would take issue with Schuman’s characterization of even more traditional profit-seeking firms as aiming to sell junk at high prices, but we can leave that to the side for our purposes here.)

Schuman is wrong to think that if universities see students as customers, this must turn them into profit-driven businesses in this narrow sense.

Is the Customer Always Right?

For all that, we sympathize with some of the basics of Schuman’s argument. As college professors, we understand her concern over putting too much stock in student evaluations of teacher performance. Even if students are customers, they surely aren’t customers in the same way the restaurant patron is a customer. And a restaurant will not automatically treat every customer comment card as equally influential in changing how it does business. Some restaurant customers have unrealistic expectations or don’t understand the food service business, and restaurants often have to decipher what feedback to take seriously and what to disregard.

We suspect that Schuman’s confusion may result from universities and professors thinking that they are selling something different from what students may think they are buying. Students generally want the degrees that come from education, with education being the process to get the degree. Universities (and professors) sell knowledge and skills, and the degree is simply the acknowledgement that students have obtained that knowledge.

Professors may think that they are selling something different from what students think they are buying.

Good learning may be difficult and, in the short run, unpleasant. But for students aiming for a degree, it would be better to go through classes that are agreeable and aren’t too difficult. If this is right, you can see why there’d be a mismatch between how students think their education is going and how it may actually be going, and why the former may not be the best gauge of the latter.

With a restaurant, the customer and the seller both agree on what the product is: a good meal (and good restaurateurs will generally defer to what the customer wants). With personal training, it may be that the trainer’s job involves pushing customers past where they’d go on their own, but the trainer and customer do still generally agree on the service: the trainer helps customers achieve their goal of fitness.

We appreciate and share Schuman’s concern that universities not over-rely on student evaluations and the degree to which students find their educations pleasurable in a narrow sense. But the issue isn’t as simple as saying that, because professors’ job security shouldn’t come down entirely to student evaluations, students aren’t customers.

Yes, there is a danger in treating students the way restaurateurs treat patrons. But there is also danger in the other extreme: if we stop viewing students as customers in some sense of the term, then instead of treating them with the respect we generally see in the personal training and certification industries and among nonprofits, we risk turning universities into something more like the DMV.

Kevin Currie-KnightKevin Currie-Knight

Kevin Currie-Knight teaches in East Carolina University’s Department of Special Education, Foundations, and Research. His website is KevinCK.net. He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

 

Steven HorwitzSteven Horwitz

Steven Horwitz is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at St. Lawrence University and the author of Hayek’s Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions.

He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

RELATED ARTICLE: This State Offered Free College Education. Here’s What Happened.

World Hijab Day Debuts in American Schools

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School officials in Rochester, New York are getting flak from angry parents and teachers for holding an event in solidarity with World Hijab Day. The event, held at the school and during school hours, encouraged the high school girls to wear the Islamic headscarf for the day. Boys were given carnations to wear in solidarity.

Unsuspecting students put on the 150 headscarves that were brought by teachers before the first bell rang. They were encouraged to participate in the “cultural event” by the school’s principal Sheela Webster, who insisted the headscarf had nothing to do with religion, but rather all about the “experiental” and “was actually around learning about the cloth.”

“Our perspective in it was not religious – it was really about experiential,” she said. “We are an experiential school; we engage kids in all kinds of activities and projects all of the time, so the perspective of being able to learn what a hijab is, why some women choose to wear it and why some women don’t choose to wear it, and we provide the opportunity to experience it; it is well within protocol of experiential learning.”

Unfortunately, learning about “why some women don’t choose to wear it” – or more pointedly, what happens to women in certain Muslim countries and societies who have no choice whether or not to wear it — was not part of the program.

As prominent Muslim human rights activist Asra Nomani writes in the Washington Post, events such as these are a “painful reminder of the well-financed effort by conservative Muslims to dominate modern Muslim societies. This modern-day movement spreads an ideology of political Islam, called ‘Islamism,’ enlisting well-intentioned interfaith do-gooders and the media into promoting the idea that ‘hijab’ is a requirement of Islam.”

Concurrent with the advent Islamism comes the culture of “honor,” the idea that a family’s or a husband’s honor lies in the chastity and modesty of their female members. To the Islamist, the hijab has become the quintessential symbol of that honor.

Stories have, unfortunately, become common in our time of women — both in the West as well in Muslim countries– who have been “honor” killed by their families or societies for not wearing a hijab.

Asra Nomani grew up in India in the 1960s in a conservative Muslim family. Yet, there was no Islamic law at the time that women should cover their hair. “But, starting in the 1980s,” she relates, “following the 1979 Iranian revolution of the minority Shiite sect and the rise of well-funded Saudi clerics from the majority Sunni sect, we have been bullied in an attempt to get us  to cover our hair from men and boys.”

On a theological level, it is interesting to note how many prominent Islamic theologians reject the idea that women are required to wear a hijab.

It is likely that high school sophomore Eman Muthana, originally from Yemen, who wears a hijab and requested the event, was unaware of history of the cloth she wears around her head every day.

Commenting on the event, Muthana said, “I just feel proud that I’m sharing my culture and actually not forcing that on them, because everybody has the choice to do that so. I just feel happy that they are supporting me. We are in America; everybody has the freedom of religion, I cannot force anything. And also, I cannot do anything bad to a country that opened its door for me.”

But somewhere, it seems, that was some coercion. A spokesman for the school district said, after consulting with a lawyer, he was told “there would be more of a legal issue if the school said no to the event” than to host it.

Locals took to social media to voice their disapproval.  High school teacher Jim Farnholz wrote, “As a high school teacher for over 30 years, let me say that this is wrong on so many levels. All religions are taught in our global studies classes. That being said, that is where understanding, tolerance and the good and bad of religion and history are taught. This, however, is a clear violation of separation of church and state.”

“What lesson will they wear a Yarmulke in? Or the Christian cross? Or the Hindu turban?” Dan Lane posted. “Funny how it always seems to be the Muslims they learn about, even in Common Core.”

“How disgusting and irresponsible for any educator to encourage a child to wear a symbol of oppression, whether it be religious or cultural,” Rebecca Sluman wrote.

Americans, who enjoy, religious freedom, must be wary of becoming unknowing accomplices to the agenda of political Islam. Commenting on events such as these, Nomani pleads, “Do not wear a headscarf in ‘solidarity’ with the ideology that most silences us, equating our bodies with ‘honor.’ Stand with us instead with moral courage against the ideology of Islamism.”

Meira Svirsky is the editor of ClarionProject.org

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Homeschooling, Socialization, and the New Groupthink by B.K. Marcus

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“But what about socialization?”

We who educate our children outside the school system confront an exhausting array of accusations posing as concerns, but the most puzzling — and the most persistent — is the socialization question. For years, I’ve taken it at face value:How, the skeptic seems to be asking, will your kids ever learn to be sociable if you keep them locked up at home all day?

That very few homeschooled kids lead the lives of sheltered isolation implied by this question does not seem to assuage the questioner. There’s something kids are assumed to receive from the process of group schooling — especially from large, government-funded schools — that helps them fit in better with society at large.

Learning to Be a Cog

I recently talked to a mom who wants to homeschool her daughter. The girl’s dad objects to the idea because, he insists, home education will fail to prepare her for “the real world.” I find it significant that this man is career military. The real world, as he knows it, is regimented, tightly controlled, and bureaucratized into stasis — at least compared with the very different real world of voluntary exchange and spontaneous order.

If your goal for your children is a lifetime of government work, then by all means send them to public school: the bigger, the better. But if, by “socialization,” you mean ensuring that a child becomes sociable, that he or she develops the intelligence and social reflexes that promote peaceful and pleasurable interactions with larger groups of friends and strangers, then the irony of the what-about-socialization question is that it gets the situation precisely backwards. It is schooled kids, segregated by age and habituated to the static and artificial restrictions of the schooling environment, who demonstrate more behavioral problems while in school and greater difficulty adjusting to the post-school world.

Does “Socialization” Mean Peer Pressure?

While homeschooled kids learn to interact daily with people of all ages, schools teach their students to think of adults primarily in terms of avoiding trouble (or sometimes seeking it). That leaves the social lessons to their peers, narrowly defined as schoolmates roughly their own age.

If your goal for your children is a lifetime of government work, then by all means send them to public school: the bigger, the better. 

Thomas Smedley, who prepared a master’s thesis for Radford University of Virginia on “The Socialization of Homeschool Children,” put it this way:

In the public school system, children are socialized horizontally, and temporarily, into conformity with their immediate peers. Home educators seek to socialize their children vertically, toward responsibility, service, and adulthood, with an eye on eternity.

As a result, most homeschooled kids grow into well-adjusted, flexible, and emotionally mature adults, open to a diversity of peers and social contexts.

Psychology professor Richard G. Medlin wrote in “Homeschooling and the Question of Socialization Revisited,”

Homeschooling parents expect their children to respect and get along with people of diverse backgrounds.… Compared to children attending conventional schools … research suggest that they have higher quality friendships and better relationships with their parents and other adults.

Furthermore, says Medlin, “They are happy, optimistic, and satisfied with their lives.” How often do you hear those words applied to any other group of children?

Meanwhile, “there seems to be an overwhelming amount of evidence,”according to researcher Michael Brady, “that children socialized in a peer-dominant environment are at higher risk for developing social maladjustment issues than those that are socialized in a parent-monitored environment.”

The Persistence of the Socialization Myth

The contention that kids kept out of large group schools will somehow suffer in their social development never made any sense to begin with. (In fact, large group schools may hurt social development.) Did no one enjoy any social skills before the era of mass education?

Decades of research now support the common-sense conclusion: the artificially hierarchical and age-segregated structure of modern schooling produces a warped form of socialization with unhealthy attitudes toward both authority and peers.

The students who escape this fate are those with strong parental and other adult role models and active engagement with a diverse community outside school. Homeschooling holds no monopoly on engaged parents or robust communities, but those advantages are an almost automatic part of home education.

So why does the socialization myth refuse to die?

Perhaps we have been misunderstanding the critics all along. Homeschoolers think of socialization as the development of an autonomous individual’s social skills for healthy interactions within a larger community. But maybe what we consider healthy isn’t at all what the critics have in mind.

Reprogramming the Quiet Child

Susan Cain’s 2012 book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, does not specifically address homeschooling, but Cain does talk about the history of education and the evolution of what she calls the “Extrovert Ideal — the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight.”

Starting in the 1920s, Cain tells us,

The experts advised parents to socialize their children well and schools to change their emphasis from book-learning to “assisting and guiding the developing personality.” Educators took up this mantle enthusiastically.…

Well-meaning parents of the midcentury sent their kids to school at increasingly young ages, where the main assignment was learning to socialize. (emphasis added)

In the 19th century, education was still understood to mean the development of an individual’s character, intellect, and knowledge. By the mid-20th century, education reformers had shifted the emphasis away from preparing the individual student for his or her future and toward integrating individuals into a larger group and a larger vision of a reformed society.

The New Groupthink

We 21st-century Americans may think of ourselves as “unlike the starched-shirted conformists of the 1950s,” to use Cain’s phrase, but she sees the extrovert ideal asserting itself once again in what she calls “the New Groupthink,” which, she explains, “elevates teamwork above all else.”

In ever more schools, this teamwork is promoted “via an increasingly popular method of instruction called ‘cooperative’ or ‘small group’ learning.” This “cooperative” approach, whatever the intentions behind it, actually hurts students — introverts and extroverts alike — both academically and intellectually. To explain why, Cain cites the work of Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, a Swedish psychologist and one of the world’s leading researchers on expertise.

Occasional solitude, it turns out, is essential to mastery in any discipline.

It’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which [Ericsson] has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful — they’re counterproductive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them.

Cain and Ericsson offer several reasons why deliberate practice is best conducted alone, “but most important,” writes Cain, “it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally.”

Co-ops, study groups, playgroups, and à la carte classes mean that a homeschooled student spends plenty of time with other kids, including conventionally schooled kids. But homeschooling also allows children more alone time for the kind of learning Ericsson describes.

This is not what most schools offer; neither is it compatible with the emphasis on cooperative learning.

The Homeschooled Self

“The structure and reality of traditional schools,” writes Rebecca Kochenderfer for Homeschool.com, teach kids “to be passive and compliant, which can follow the children throughout life. Children can learn to take abuse, to ignore miserable bosses or abusive spouses later on.”

“In a traditional school,” Kochenderfer adds, “someone else usurps authority.”

Kids from homeschooling families learn a very different lesson about authority and responsibility.

Researcher John Wesley Taylor used the Piers-Harris Children’s Self-Concept Scale to evaluate 224 homeschooled children for self-esteem. “On the global scale,” writes Taylor, “half of the homeschoolers scored at or above the 91st percentile. This condition may be due to higher achievement and mastery levels, independent study characteristics, or one-on-one tutoring situations in the homeschool environment.”

A strong “self-concept ” doesn’t mean that homeschooled kids are self-centered. “Their moral reasoning is at least as advanced as that of other children,” according to Richard G. Medlin’s research, cited earlier, “and they may be more likely to act unselfishly.” What it does mean, however, is that children educated at home are less likely to grow up to be followers.

In 1993, J. Gary Knowles, then a professor of education at the University of Michigan, surveyed 53 adults who had been taught at home by their parents. He found that nearly two-thirds were self-employed. That’s more than twice the global average and about 10 times the current national average. “That so many of those surveyed were self-employed,” said Knowles, “supports the contention that home schooling tends to enhance a person’s self-reliance and independence.”

That independence may be the real source of critics’ concerns.

“Public school educators and other critics,” Knowles commented, “question whether home-educated children will be able to become productive, participating members of a diverse and democratic society.”

But with so much evidence for the superior results achieved by homeschooling — both academically and socially — we have to question the critics’ goals. Is their concern really for the welfare of those educated outside the schools? Or is it rather, as so much of their language suggests, for the success of a particular vision of society — a vision that they fear the independently educated may not readily accommodate?

B.K. MarcusB.K. Marcus

B.K. Marcus is editor of the Freeman.

Parents Outraged at ‘Racially Divisive White Guilt Video’

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GlenAllenHSVirginia parents were in an uproar after officials at Glen Allen High School in Henrico showed students a controversial video as part of Black History Month.

The video, titled “Structural Discrimination: The Unequal Opportunity Race,” covers issues like racial profiling, manifest destiny and the “school to prison pipeline.” This animation was commissioned by the African American Policy Forum.

“Dr. King gave his life so that America would be a place where we are judged by the content of our character not the color of our skin,” radio personality Craig Johnson told WWBT-TV.

“Now we have poverty pimps being led by our current president Barack Obama who all they talk about is the color of skin.” The video depicts four individuals of different ethnicities running a race.

While two white individuals run the course, the other individuals are faced with road blocks like a pool of sharks and a police checkpoint.

It ends with the statement: “Affirmative action helps level the playing field.”

One parent wrote a letter expressing concern that the video was causing tensions within the school.

“Y’all are privileged. Get the – blank – over it,” read one of numerous tweets about the topic, according to that same parent.

Other relatives of students had a different view. “They are sitting there watching a video that is dividing them up from a racial standpoint.

It’s a white guilt kind of video,” Don Blake, whose granddaughter attended the assembly, said. “I think somebody should be held accountable for this.”

Here is the video shown at two assemblies by Dr. Gwen Miller the Principle :

Is the Scientific Process Broken? by Jenna Robinson

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The scientific process is broken. The tenure process, “publish or perish” mentality, and the insufficient review process of academic journals mean that researchers spend less time solving important puzzles and more time pursuing publication. But that wasn’t always the case.

In 1962, chemist and social scientist Michael Polyani described scientific discovery as a spontaneous order, likening it to Adam Smith’s invisible hand. In “The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory,” originally printed in Minerva magazine, Polyani used an analogy of many people working together to solve a jigsaw puzzle to explain the progression of scientific discovery.

Polanyi begins: “Imagine that we are given the pieces of a very large jigsaw puzzle, and … it is important that our giant puzzle be put together in the shortest possible time. We would naturally try to speed this up by engaging a number of helpers; the question is in what manner these could be best employed.”

He concludes,

The only way the assistants can effectively co-operate, and surpass by far what any single one of them could do, is to let them work on putting the puzzle together in sight of the others so that every time a piece of it is fitted in by one helper, all the others will immediately watch out for the next step that becomes possible in consequence.

Under this system, each helper will act on his own initiative, by responding to the latest achievements of the others, and the completion of their joint task will be greatly accelerated. We have here in a nutshell the way in which a series of independent initiatives are organized to a joint achievement by mutually adjusting themselves at every successive stage to the situation created by all the others who are acting likewise.

Polyani’s faith in this process, decentralized to academics around the globe, was strong. He claimed, “The pursuit of science by independent self-co-ordinated initiatives assures the most efficient possible organization of scientific progress.”

But somewhere in the last 54 years, this decentralized, efficient system of scientific progress seems to have veered off course. The incentives created by universities and academic journals are largely to blame.

The National Academies of Science noted last year that there has been a tenfold increase since 1975 in scientific papers retracted because of fraud. A popular scientific blog, Retraction Watch, reports daily on retractions, corrections, and fraud from all corners of the scientific world.

Some argue that such findings aren’t evidence that science is broken — just very difficult. News “explainer” Vox recently defended the process, calling science “a long and grinding process carried out by fallible humans, involving false starts, dead ends, and, along the way, incorrect and unimportant studies that only grope at the truth, slowly and incrementally.”

Of course, finding and correcting errors is a normal and expected part of the scientific process. But there is more going on.

A recent article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documented that the problem in biomedical and life sciences is more attributable to bad actors than human error. Its authors conducted a detailed review of all 2,047 retracted research articles in those fields, which revealed that only 21.3 percent of retractions were attributable to error. In contrast, 67.4 percent of retractions were attributable to misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud (43.4 percent), duplicate publication (14.2 percent), and plagiarism (9.8 percent).

Even this article on FiveThirtyEight, which attempts to defend the current scientific community from its critics, admits, “bad incentives are blocking good science.”

Polanyi doesn’t take these bad incentives into account—and perhaps they weren’t as pronounced in 1960s England as they are in the modern United States. In his article, he assumes that professional standards are enough to ensure that contributions to the scientific discussion would be plausible, accurate, important, interesting, and original. He fails to mention the strong incentives, produced by the tenure process, to publish in journals of particular prestige and importance.

This “publish or perish” incentive means that researchers are rewarded more for frequent publication than for dogged progress towards solving scientific puzzles. It has also led to the proliferation of academic journals — many lacking the quality control we have come to expect in academic literature. This article by British pharmacologist David Colquhoun concludes, “Pressure on scientists to publish has led to a situation where any paper, however bad, can now be printed in a journal that claims to be peer-reviewed.”

Academic journals, with their own internal standards, exacerbate this problem.

Science recently reported that less than half of 100 studies published in 2008 in top psychology journals could be replicated successfully. The Reproducibility Project: Psychology, led by Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia, was responsible for the effort and included 270 scientists who re-ran other people’s studies.

The rate of reproducibility was likely low because journals give preference to “new” and exciting findings, damaging the scientific process. The Economist reported in 2013 that “‘Negative results’ now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990” and observed, “Yet knowing what is false is as important to science as knowing what is true.”

These problems, taken together, create an environment where scientists are no longer collaborating to solve the puzzle. They are instead pursuing tenure and career advancement.

But the news is not all bad. Recent efforts for science to police itself are beginning to change researchers’ incentives. The Reproducibility Project (mentioned above) is part of a larger effort called the Open Science Framework (OSF). The OSF is a “scholarly commons” that works to improve openness, integrity and reproducibility of research.

Similarly, the Center for Scientific Integrity was established in 2014 to promote transparency and integrity in science. Its major project, Retraction Watch, houses a database of retractions that is freely available to scientists and scholars who want to improve science.

A new project called Heterodox Academy will help to address some research problems in the social sciences. The project has been created to improve the diversity of viewpoints in the academy. Their work is of great importance; psychologists have demonstrated the importance of such diversity for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving.

These efforts will go a long way to restoring the professional standards that Polyani thought were essential to ensure that research remains plausible, accurate, important, interesting, and original. But ultimately, the tenure process and peer review must change in order to save scientific integrity.

This article first appeared at the Pope Center for Higher Education.

Jenna RobinsonJenna Robinson

Jenna Robinson is director of outreach at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

Catching Up with some Common Core Profiteers: Beyond the Project Veritas Videos

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The Big Government-Big Education alliance has also had positive trickle-down effects for professors, who have benefited with publishing contracts and grants for their institutions.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the biggest funder of Common Core, continues to support universities that help in implementing their education initiatives.  Professors hopped on the Common Core gravy train at the get-go. There was the curious fact that Bill Ayers gave a keynote address at the 2009 convention of the Renaissance Group, “a national consortium of colleges, universities and professional organizations” dedicated to teaching and education.  Now if we could only learn how much Bill Ayers was paid for that keynote speech in Washington in 2009.

James O’Keefe’s undercover videos reveal what activists have been saying for years: Common Core is a set of standards written not for the benefit of students, but to enrich crony capitalists, such as mega-curriculum companies, Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt, Pearson, and National Geographic Education.

The latest, the fourth video, records former Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt executive Gilbert Garcia describing the constant “politicking” among school board members and superintendents, and former Pearson employee Kim Koerber describing how the 2013 $1.3 billion contract for supplying I-Pads to the Los Angeles school district was “written for Pearson to win.”  After an FBI investigation into bid-rigging, Pearson, in 2015, agreed to pay the district $6.4 million in a settlement.

Pearson issued a statement calling remarks in the videos “offensive,” asserting that they do not reflect the values of the company’s 40,000 employees.

But the Big Government-Big Education alliance has also had positive trickle-down effects for professors, who have benefited with publishing contracts and grants for their institutions.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the biggest funder of Common Core, continues to support universities that help in implementing their education initiatives.  To name a few, in November, the Foundation announced a grant of $34.7 million for “transformation centers” to improve teacher preparation programs on the campuses of the University of Michigan, Texas Tech University, and the Relay Graduate School of Education, as well as at the National Center for Teacher Residencies, and the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.  That same month, a grant of $1,799,710 was awarded to “support collaboration between Vanderbilt [University] and the Tennessee Department of Education in the area of education research and improvement,” and $764,553 was awarded to the University of Florida for “teacher leader fellows.”

Professors hopped on the Common Core gravy train at the get-go, as I described in 2012, in my report for Accuracy in Media, “Terrorist Professor Bill Ayers and Obama’s Federal School Curriculum.” There was the curious fact that Bill Ayers gave a keynote address at the 2009 convention of the Renaissance Group, “a national consortium of colleges, universities and professional organizations” dedicated to teaching and education.  Of course, I made no claim that Ayers wrote the standards; I just noted that he appeared at this conference in Washington with then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, his under secretary, and a representative from Achieve, the company that orchestrated Common Core.  Ayers’s close colleague, Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, led Obama’s education transition team and oversaw one of the two national Common Core tests.

Less well-known professors, who had bristled at the imposition of “standards,” suddenly began embracing Common Core standards.  This was the case with education professor Lucy Calkins and her colleagues at Columbia Teachers College, Bill Ayers’s alma mater, long a bastion of anti-testing/anti-standards.  These professors began writing teacher guidebooks, and presenting talks and workshops.  Since co-authoring Pathways to the Common Core, Calkins continues to do work for the publisher, Heinemann, a part of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  Her “Units of Study” curriculum is described by the publisher as a bestseller.  She also writes performance assessments, including the Grade 1 “Units of Study” in “Opinion, Information, and Narrative Writing.”  (Yes, students in first grade are expected to write op-eds.)  In a short video, Calkins explains her teaching philosophy that involves mini-lessons and group work.

In 2012, Marc Aronson, a lecturer in communications and information at Rutgers University, was advertising himself as a “Common Core Consultant,” speaker, and author.  Today, he describes himself on his personal website as an “author, professor, speaker, editor and publisher who believes that young people, especially pre-teens and teenagers, are smart, passionate, and capable of engaging with interesting ideas in interesting ways.”

Aronson apparently believes that pre-teens and teenagers are smart enough to weed out the lies in his Common Core-compliant middle school and high school textbook, Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover and America in the Age of Lies.  As I noted in my report, Aronson presents the KGB-fabricated lies about the FBI director’s homosexuality as probable.  For the benefit of 11-year-olds, he posits that photographs of Hoover with his friend Clyde Tolson “might be seen as lovers’ portraits.”  The book is filled with sexual innuendo and dwells on such irrelevant details in order to ascribe motives to Hoover for his presumably unfounded fears about the communist threat.  The accompanying discussion guide is a masterpiece of disguise: as ideological questions bearing their own answers.

It is therefore not surprising that Aronson would now write an article in the School Library Journal casting a skeptical eye on O’Keefe’s undercover videos and asking readers to “consider the source,” as the subheading to the headline, “Is Common Core Just a Scam to Sell Books?” asks.  He distances himself from the sales executives but never directly names the “source” that one should “consider.”  (Innuendo seems to be his modus operandi.) The implication is O’Keefe.  Aronson admits, “As a nonfiction fan, author, and editor, I have a stake in this.”  He denies that his stake is in the rise in nonfiction sales that have come as Common Core standards have edged out literature in favor of “informational texts.”  No, Aronson fell “in love with the standards” when he first read them, “years before they had any impact on royalty statements.”

Aronson also claims to have served recently on the New Jersey team that evaluated that state’s English Language Arts (ELA) and Math standards.  Contrary to the executives’ statements captured in the videos, his “team” carefully examined the standards “one by one, grade by grade, and listened to extensive comments from teachers, administrators, parents, professionals, and business leaders.”  He claims that he saw “commitment, not greed.”

He presents a “guiding principle” that sounds very familiar to those of us whose eyes have glazed and brains have flopped like dying fish from the Common Core sales literature: “From the first, our guiding principle was this: What will someone awarded a high school diploma be ready for? The group looked at each educational stage and benchmark to consider what students would need to know to be ready for the next step, and the next, so that after graduation they would have the skill set to begin the next phase of their lives.”

Aronson’s team included comments by Amy Rominiecki, a Certified School Library Media Specialist, on behalf of the New Jersey Association of School Librarians, in their report. (He links back to her statement when she testified in support of Common Core.)  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has also funded studies for the American Library Association (the parent organization of the American Association of School Librarians) on such things as Technology Access, training, and participation in the federal E-rate program.

Aronson attributes the continuing low performance of 12th graders in math and reading to economic inequality, stating, “If more students had more resources (social, emotional, financial, cultural, and technological), more would be ready to meet the challenges and opportunities that follow after secondary education.”

Of course, this author and educational entrepreneur has only the purest motives: “the children.”  Money may be important, “yet, there is a role for standards to play.” To that end, “as educators and communities who care about our nation’s youth, it is necessary we establish a path that’s best for as many students.”

Such bromides bring big bucks in the education world.  I am reminded of words by Bill Ayers at an education conference in 2013, something about being finite creatures hurtling through infinite space.  Now if we could only learn how much Bill Ayers was paid for that keynote speech in Washington in 2009.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research website.

Education Emergency: Our Children (and U.S.) at Risk

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As an independent physicist I’ve spent 40± years on environmental advocacy, and energy education. In the later part of this journey I’ve become increasingly distressed about what is happening in our education system.

After speaking out about this several times, in 2013 I was asked to put on a presentation to the US House Science, Space and Technology Committee, as well as to the North Carolina Legislators. The unabridged version of both of those talks is online at ScienceUnderAssault.info.

Since then, most of what I’ve seen indicates that the situation is getting worse, rather than remedied. This is a summary of key education parts that need to be immediately addressed. Hopefully it will encourage citizens to get more involved with rectifying this extraordinarily important matter.

1 – We can not effectively fix anything until we are on the same page. I believe that the place to start here, is that we need to fully agree on the overall objective of the education system. Exactly what is the product we expect to get at the end of a laborious 12+ year assembly line?

In my view, the number one criteria for determining whether the educational system has been a success or not is: do these graduates have the ability and inclination to do Critical Thinking?

Google founder Vint Cerf says that there is no more important skill to teach than Critical Thinking. He calls it the one tool we have to defend ourselves from the onslaught of misinformation we are saturated with today. He argues that Critical Thinking would enable citizens to be more thoughtful about what information they accept, then process, and then use. That skill is a major benefit in literally every aspect of life.

My experience is that while the education system gives lip-service to Critical Thinking, when the rubber-meets-the-road, it’s not really happening. An easy test is to ask any college or high school student today what they think about global warming. Do they provide a thoughtful, thorough analysis — or simply regurgitate propaganda?

My first recommendation is that this be adopted by every state education department, every local school board, every academic institution, etc:

“It is our obligation to produce critically thinking graduates.”

2 – I’m a zealous defender of my profession, Science. Most people are not aware of it, but Science is under a ferocious attack, worldwide. The reason is that individuals and organizations promoting political agendas, or their own economic interests, are acutely aware that real Science is not their
friend — as it will expose them for what they are.

Those self-serving parties realize that even though most citizens have faith in Science, very few actually understand what Science is. So they take advantage of that discrepancy, by purposefully making false Science claims. They are fully aware that only a small number of people will understand the fraud — and even fewer will say anything public about it.

From what I’ve seen, the most egregious assaults on Science are taking place in such newbie science branches such as Environmental Science, Earth Science, Ecology, etc.

This campaign is being supported by slick internet video “science” series like Crash Course, Bozeman Science, etc. Listen carefully to the Crash Course founder explaining why they made over 200 education videos. He says “We don’t really have a coherent answer.” SAY WHAT?! I call these QVC Science, as (IMO) they are effectively polished sales pitches.

Propagandizing Science starts in our local schools. The good news is that the solution is also there — and is entirely under our control (see #3). Recommendation number two is that I’m advocating that every state education department, every local school board, every academic institution, formally adopt and implement this standard:

“Science education will be apolitical.”

3 – In my countrywide travels and correspondences I’ve heard from many parents of students. Quite a few have complained about various matters going on in their district. I asked them what response they got when they expressed their concerns to the teacher, principal, school board or superintendent? Most said essentially the same thing: they were reluctant to speak out for fear of retribution to their child. What a wonderful system.

The remaining citizens are those with no school children. Those people understandably believe that the school system is being held accountable by those with the most at stake: parents of current children. But no!

My wife and I are in the second group. We were warned that because we had no kids in the system, that defenders of the status quo would instead attack us personally if we spoke up publicly about the secondary school system. We’d be accused of being anti-superintendent, anti-school board, anti-teacher, and/or anti-children.

It seems rather hypocritical that school districts who pride themselves for enforcing a “no tolerance” bullying policy between students, would actually tolerate intimidation of citizens who have the temerity to speak up about school system improvements…

Most people (including us) would like the federal government to stay out of the education business. Additionally we would also prefer that the state have minimal involvement in the education process. We want the ability to locally decide what is best for our children and our community. We rarely hear about the flip side to this freedom: responsibility. If we want to control things ourselves, for our interests, then that means that there has to be real community involvement — which includes unfettered and unpenalized inputs from parents and citizens.

So my third suggestion is that every state education department and school district officially adopt the following position for their interfaces with parents and the public (prominently putting it on their websites, letterhead, etc):

“Please tell us how we can do a better job!”

When inputs from the public are received the choice is very simple. The recipients can be genuinely appreciative that citizens take the time to make constructive suggestions to improve student education — or they can circle the wagons, and defend the status quo. Ironically, it’s the later action that necessitates more higher level intervention…

Whether you have children in the education system or not, is irrelevant. The future of our country, is literally at stake here. We all are going to sink or swim based on whether we have an effective education system. Please carefully investigate what is happening in your community.

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively, and to think critically.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of ShutterStock.com.

Does the United Teachers of Dade have a Coke problem?

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miami dade logoI have repeatedly written about issues in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools. The stories surround how the district protected those who helped students cheat and punished those who have reported the test cheating, namely Mr. Trevor Colestock.

This column will focus on members of the United Teachers of Dade (UTD) union. Specifically Antonio “Snow” White and Alton “Cokey” Roberts. Both are candidates running to be leaders in the UTD.

Let’s look at the official Florida records of White and Roberts.

According to official records Antonio “Snow” White was arrested on February 15, 2000 (see Page 7 of Florida Education Practices Commission Final Order) for buying cocaine and charged with possession of crack cocaine. Adjudication was withheld a month later. He was represented by a UTD attorney, who was Leslie Meek, wife of then State Senator Kendrick Meek who was the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in 2010 (see Page 4 of the Final Order).

Mr. White is currently a candidate for UTD First Vice President with the incumbent Caucus, the Frontline caucus, who according to some is slated to win. Ms. Christine Kirchner is also running in that caucus as a delegate.

QUESTION: Is this a person teachers want representing them as the Vice President of their union? What signal does this send to parents and students?

alton roberts

Alton J. Roberts

Alton “Cokey” Roberts, who is the brother of Cleve Roberts, is a Physical Education teacher and coach at Miami Norland Senior High School. Roberts signed a petition against Mr. Colestock, the man who reported the cheating at Miami Norland SHS.

What is interesting is Alton J. Roberts was arrested three times for possessing and/or purchasing cocaine according to the Florida Department of Education. All three arrests resulted in drug court deferment and adjudication was withheld. Alton Roberts is currently running as a delegate in his brother’s caucus, Empower U.

Alton Roberts was first sanctioned by the FLDOE on September 21, 1992, for possessing and concealing cocaine (pages 4, 7-8 of FL DOE Final Order) to which he plead no contest stemming from a traffic stop on July 21, 1990. He was sanctioned a second time by the FLDOE on January 14, 2016, for failing to report two arrests for purchasing and possessing cocaine, according to page 10 of the FL DOE Final Order. According to the Final Order dated January 28, 2016, he was arrested on June 24, 2005, and March 1, 2011, for purchasing and possession of cocaine.

QUESTION:  Is this the proper person to represent Miami-Dade teachers as a delegate at the Florida Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, and National Education Association conventions? What signal does this send to parents, students and teachers in the Sunshine State?

Mr Alton Roberts and Mrs. Brenda Muchnick, who was found to have helped students cheat, still work at Miami Norland Senior High School.

Mr. Trevor Colestock, who did the right thing in reporting the text cheating, has been bullied, labeled as a pariah and relegated to another position against his will and wishes.

These cases are classic examples of if you screw up, or sniff coke, you move up.

FINAL QUESTION: Does the UTD have a coke problem?

Now no cheating!

We report, you decide.

Related documents:

Antonio White Final Order before the Education Practices Commission of the State of Florida 

Alton J. Roberts Final Oder before the Education Practices Commission of the State of Florida

Alton Roberts Final Order before the Education Practices Commission of the State of Florida dated January 28, 2016

Arrest record of Antonio White

Lawsuit filed on Behalf of Marine Dad who Objected to Islamic Indoctrination of Daughter

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The Thomas More Law Center (TMLC), a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, yesterday afternoon, filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of former Marine, John Kevin Wood, and his wife, Melissa, who refuse to allow their teenage daughter to be subjected to Islamic indoctrination and propaganda in her high school World History class.  The lawsuit was filed against the Charles County Public Schools, the Board of Education, and the Principal and Vice-Principal of La Plata High School located in La Plata, Maryland.

Thomas More Law Center Files Federal Lawsuit On Behalf of Marine Dad Banned from School Property After He Objected to Islamic Indoctrination of Daughter

The Woods’ daughter was forced to profess and to write out the Shahada in worksheets and quizzes.  The Shahada is the Islamic Creed, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”  For non-Muslims, reciting the statement is sufficient to convert one to Islam.  Moreover, the second part of the statement, “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah,” signifies the person has accepted Muhammad as their spiritual leader.  The teenager was also required to memorize and recite the Five Pillars of Islam.

Charles County Public Schools disparaged Christianity by teaching its 11th grade students, including the Woods’ daughter, that: “Most Muslims’ faith is stronger than the average Christian.”

The Charles County Public Schools also taught the following:

  • “Islam, at heart, is a peaceful”
  • “To Muslims, Allah is the same God that is worshiped in Christianity and Judaism.”
  • The Koran states, “Men are the managers of the affairs of women” and “Righteous women are therefore obedient.”

Read the two exhibits containing Student worksheets here.

The sugarcoated version of Islam taught at La Plata High School did not mention that the Koran explicitly instructs Muslims “to kill the unbelievers wherever you find them.”  (Sura 9-5)

When John Kevin Wood discovered the Islamic propaganda and indoctrination of his daughter, he was rightfully outraged.  He immediately contacted the school to voice his objections and to obtain an alternative assignment for his daughter.

The Woods, as Christians, believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and our Savior, that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins, and that following the teachings of Jesus Christ is the only path to eternal salvation.  The Woods believe that it is a sin to profess commitment in word or writing to any god other than the Christian God.  Thus, they object to their daughter being forced to deny the Christian God and to her high school promoting Islam over other religions.

The school ultimately refused to allow the Woods’ daughter to opt-out of the assignments, forcing her to either violate her faith by pledging to Allah or receive zeros for the assignments.  Together, John Kevin Wood, Melissa Wood, and their daughter chose to remain faithful to God and refused to complete the assignments, even though failing grades would harm her future admission to college and her opportunities to obtain college scholarships.

Adding insult to injury, in an effort to silence all pro-Christian speech in her school, La Plata’s principal, without a hearing or any opportunity to refute the false allegations against him, issued a “No Trespass” notice against John Kevin Wood denying him any access to school grounds.

Wood served 8 years in the Marine Corps.  He was deployed in Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm and lost friends to Islamic extremists.  A few years later, Wood responded as a firefighter to the 9-11 Islamic terrorist attack on the Pentagon.  Wood witnessed firsthand the destruction created in the name of Allah and knows that Islam is not “a religion of peace.”  The school prevented John Kevin Wood from defending his daughter’s Christian beliefs against Islamic indoctrination, even though as a Marine, he stood in harm’s way to defend our nation, and the Charles County Public Schools.

Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, commented: “Defendants forced Wood’s daughter to disparage her Christian faith by reciting the Shahada, and acknowledging Mohammed as her spiritual leader. Her World History class spent one day on Christianity and two weeksimmersed in Islam. Such discriminatory treatment of Christianity is an unconstitutional promotion of one religion over another.”

Thompson added, “The course also taught false statements such as “Allah is the same God worshipped by Christians, and Islam as a “religion of peace. Parents must be ever vigilant to the Islamic indoctrination of their children under the guise of teaching history and multiculturalism.  This is happening in public schools across the country.  And they must take action to stop it.”

The Woods’ lawsuit seeks a court declaration that Defendants violated their constitutional and statutory rights, a temporary and permanent injunction barring Defendants from endorsing Islam or favoring Islam over Christianity and other religions, and from enforcing the no trespassing order issued against John Kevin Wood.

Read entire Federal Complaint here.

RELATED ARTICLE: Maryland High School Under Fire Over Islam Curriculum

VIDEO: Common Core $1.3 Billion Bid Rigging Scandal

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You have to see what this former textbook publishing employee reveals about a major Common Core scandal involving rigged bidding for a $1.3 billion contract in this new breaking undercover video.

Click the video below to watch now.

When he reveals the details of the scandal, we ask him why it was not part of what was shown on the news. His reply? “Maybe nobody has discovered it yet.”

Well now we have. And we’re going to discover a whole lot more with your continued commitment to blowing the lid off Common Core corruption.

Make sure you watch the whole video to learn how publishing companies lie to schools in order to boost their bottom lines.

What our videos have revealed about corruption in public education is appalling, and we are just getting started.

Thanks to our generous supporters, we’ve now been able to release four videos revealing the truth about Common Core, but we need more resources to continue our momentum.

I hope after you watch and share our latest breaking video about this Common Core contract scandal, you’ll take a moment and make a tax-deductible contribution today.

EDITORS NOTE: Be one of the first to see Project Veritas’s latest video uncovering a major scandal involving the country’s largest textbook publisher and how a $1.3 billion contract was rigged in their favor. If you haven’t made a donation to this project yet, please do so today. Your commitment is vital to our continued success.

Bernie Sanders Is Wrong on College and Jail by Kevin Currie-Knight

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In a December 15 tweet, Senator Bernie Sanders intimated that graduating from college decreases the likelihood that you will go to jail:

Sanders has long supported dubious measures for making college more affordable and hence accessible to all, and this may be why: he believes that “no college” is a path to jail.

Mike Rowe, the former TV host of the Discovery Channel series Dirty Jobs and a longtime opponent of the “college for all” message, responded to Sanders with outrage. Rowe challenged Sanders’s idea that the most viable option without a college degree is jail. He also brought home a favorite point of his, to throw into question whether a cost-benefit analysis of college really shows that college is the best path to a successful career.

I’ve written before against the “academic training for all” mentality that Sanders and so many others seems set in, but Rowe, unfortunately, also gets a few things wrong.

Upcredentialing and Downvaluing

While Sanders is right that college degrees significantly increase one’s job prospects, he’s wrong to think that “college for all” will increase job prospects for everyone. Rowe is right to note that there are viable career options that don’t require college degrees, but he overlooks that they are vanishing by the year.

We all strive to “outcredential” each other, and in short order, the college degree is the new high school diploma. 

As a recent study documents, more employers are demanding a college degree as a qualification for careers that never used to require one — from positions at an IT help desk to positions as a receptionist, office manager, or file clerk. What is behind this “upcredentialing” phenomenon?

College degrees and other certificates of learning are what economists call positional goods: their value partly hinges on how they stack up relative to what others have. If I live in an area where few have finished college, my degree will be of great value and probably open many doors. But if I live where college degrees are commonplace, mine will do little more than put me on an even footing with my equally credentialed peers. In that case, distinguishing myself from others may require me to get still more education than my peers.

The Education Arms Race

We can think of higher education as a game of chicken, where each person’s strategy is to outdo others without completely breaking their bank. Since I want to compete in the job market, and I have reason to think that many other people are getting college degrees, my strategy should be to get one, too, and perhaps one more impressive than theirs. But my competitors are probably thinking the same thing, and each of us knows what the other is thinking. We all strive to “outcredential” each other, and in short order, the college degree is the new high school diploma.

This is basically what Americans have done for the last several decades, at least since the GI Bill expanded college accessibility.

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, college enrollment in 1983 was 10.6 million, and, after a small dip between 1984 and 1985, it has steadily increased each year. In 2012, the number stood at 17.7 million. Data also show that more Americans than ever have college degrees, though the percentage of people with college degrees (20 percent to 40 percent) varies by state.

Upcredentialing occurs because it can. Employers want ways to differentiate candidates. When college degrees were scarce, the candidate with the college degree distinguished himself from everyone else right off the bat. But when more and more people have a college degree, employers can afford to make having one a requirement.

If this process looks circular, that’s because it is. Bachelor’s degrees are a pathway to many more career options because many careers now require bachelor’s degrees. But the reason many careers now require bachelor’s degrees is because people en masse get bachelor’s degrees because they are a path to a better future.

Trapped in a Vicious Circle

While I generally support Rowe’s “college isn’t the only way” message, I am more pessimistic than he is because I don’t see the circle breaking easily.

If the best way to have the best career prospects is to outdo my competition, how likely is it that I will decide not to go to college if I suspect that others are better satisfying employers’ expectations by going? I could take a chance, but it’d be a big chance; if I’m right, I save a lot of tuition money, still get a decent job, and accumulate four extra years of earnings and experience, but if I’m wrong, my career prospects are slim. Rowe might point out that many careers don’t require a college degree, but I’d remind him that the pool of such jobs is shrinking. Fifteen years ago, those jobs included file clerks and construction supervisors, both of which now require degrees.

If this process looks circular, that’s because it is.

Some companies are bucking the upcredentialing trend and recognizing that there is little reason for them to require college degrees for certain positions. I hope that as those companies find success with that model, others will follow suit and we will reach a tipping point. Rowe probably shares that hope.

None of this lets Sanders off the hook. Not only is his tweet horribly oversimplified (and to be fair, one can’t be terribly nuanced in a tweet). But “college for all” ceases to look so good when you understand that education is a positional good. Increasing college access to all will do little more than deflate the value of a college degree for everyone by fueling the very upcredentialing that is already making the degree ever less meaningful.

“At the end of the day,” some future tweet may opine, “a second PhD is a helluva lot cheaper than prison.”

Kevin Currie-KnightKevin Currie-Knight

Kevin Currie-Knight teaches in East Carolina University’s Department of Special Education, Foundations, and Research. He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

Detroit Public Schools: Beyond a State of Emergency

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Since 1999, the state has been “taking over” Detroit Public Schools. Since 2009, Detroit’s schools have been subject to a stream of emergency managers who move in for just under 18 months, do not answer to voters, and can basically do what they want without consequence.

The Detroit Public Schools state takeover is a dismal failure, as noted in this February 2015 Metro Timesarticle:

The district’s struggles can be traced to a skein of historic factors, beginning with the city’s long-declining population, a trend that started in the 1950s and continues today.

Another major factor was the approval of 1994’s Proposal A in a statewide referendum that radically changed the way Michigan finances education, shifting from a primary reliance on local property taxes to a “per pupil” foundation grant provided by the state.

The two factors — the continued loss of students and the state funding that comes with them (currently $7,296) — combined with a host of other problems to throw the district into a long downward spiral.

In an attempt to reverse that trend, the state has tried twice in the last two decades to address the crisis — not by addressing the underlying structural issues, but by usurping the elected board’s power.

The most recent Detroit Public Schools emergency manager, Darnell Earley, is chiefly responsible for water contamination in Flint, Michigan.

Detroit’s schools are in crisis, and being state-run has only exacerbated the problem.

In October 2015, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder announced a legislative package that would involve establishing a new Detroit school district while leaving the old district in place to pay off Detroit Public Schools’ crippling debt. The new, traditional school board would initially be appointed by the governor and mayor and would become an elected board by 2021. The new system would also be open enrollment.

In a January 14, 2016, Detroit Free Press article, lawmakers express concern over Snyder’s plan for Detroit public education:

The proposed legislation, which was introduced Thursday, would start with an appointed nine-member interim school board, with five of the members appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder and four by Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan. That board would hire a superintendent for the district. A nine-member school board — seven members from districts throughout the city and two from at-large — would be elected by Detroit voters in November and take over governing the district on Jan. 1, 2017.

That school board, however, would be more symbolic than substantive, said state Rep. Brian Banks, D-Detroit, because it would have no control over the hiring of a superintendent and would be subject to the same financial review commission that oversees the City of Detroit’s finances.

“It doesn’t go far enough to address our concerns. There should not be any appointed board for any length of time,” he said. “This is just going to be another form of an emergency manager.” …

Other concerns for Detroit lawmakers is the continuation of a form of the Education Achievement Authority, which will be run by a state-appointed CEO who will have authority over the bottom 5% of low-achieving schools in the state. The fact that a source hasn’t been identified to come up with the $515 million needed to pay off Detroit’s debt also is problematic, although a $250-million transfer from the state’s general fund has been included to establish the new district. …

Duggan didn’t support or reject the legislation.

“Coalition members and I, along with community stakeholders, the AFT (American Federation of Teachers) and the State Board of Education, are working closely with our Detroit legislators to have a single, unified position to eliminate the debt that is choking our schools; return control of DPS to a locally elected school board, and to create a Detroit Education Commission to establish a single standard of performance for all public schools in Detroit — district and charter,” he said in a statement referring to the Coalition for the Future of Detroit Schoolchildren. …

Part of the concern for Republicans are sick-outs by Detroit teachers protesting conditions in the schools.  Dozens of schools have closed over the last two weeks. …

[The lead sponsor of the bills, Sen. Goeff] Hansen said he expects hearings to be held on the two bills — SB 710 and 711 — within the next two weeks, with a goal of passing the legislation by April, when it is projected that DPS may run out of money.

As it stands, Detroit Public Schools are beyond deplorable.

In an effort to heighten national awareness about the Detroit Public Schools crisis, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) produced the following four-minute tour of Spain Elementary School featuring counselor Lakia Wilson:

And Detroit teachers, parents, and other activists have been publicizing the terrible conditions of Detroit Public Schools, as well. The following images have been taken from the Detroitteach Twitter page. Note that the images below are from facilities that continue to house children and their teachers.

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Above: Toilets leaking into preschool classrooms.

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Above: Broken bathroom stall for young children.

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Above: Pictures from a classroom.

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Competent intervention into the Detroit Public Schools crisis should have happened years ago. Let’s hope Michigan lawmakers are able to do right by Detroit in 2016.