Category: Education
Education Agenda for the Next President – Undoing the Damage of the Obama Regime: Disproportionate Discipline
Certain students see themselves as “untouchable.” Oklahoma City Schools and other school districts forced to adopt the Department of Education’s “steps of action” can expect similar outcomes. As others have pointed out, all students, including minority students, are harmed when criminals and criminals-in-the-making are allowed to control our schools. One civics lesson students need to learn is that under our system of justice, the punishment fits the crime, not the race. That should be the policy of the next administration. The next attorney general should lift the diktats and restore justice in our schools. Continue reading
Muslim Indoctrination and the Department of Education: From Hijab Dress-Up to Convert
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. Continue reading
Catching Up with Some Common Core Profiteers, Beyond the Project Veritas Videos
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. Continue reading
Common Core By a New Name and on Steroids, ‘Every Student Succeeds Act’
States must coordinate with eleven different federal statutes and submit their plans for approval by the feds. Statutes include “the Soviet-style Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act that’s designed to connect the K-12 education system to government-controlled workforce-development, the Head Start act that centralizes preschool standards, the Education Sciences Reform Act (which seeks to boost data-collection on students)….” Standards must focus on “minimal workforce-development rather than academic knowledge” – just like Common Core! States will comply or lose their federal money. The federal government will determine “college-and career-readiness,” thus continuing its power grab on campuses. Continue reading
Supporting “Undocumented Youth” and Breaking the Law: the White House Guide for Educators
For years, educators have been conspiring on ways to subvert federal immigration law. Now the Obama Department of Education is helping them. The latest Education Department guidelines, says Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, will provide “ideological encouragement and talking points to answer citizens and legislators who criticize the use of public and private resources to subvert the nation’s laws on immigration.” Continue reading
The Legacy of Arne Duncan, Common Core and So Much More: College (Part 2)
Currently, over 600 colleges are designing, creating, or already have competency-based education programs. This number has grown from 52 last year. As with Common Core, it is being funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with “guidance” from the U.S. Department of Education. Continue reading
The Legacy of Arne Duncan: Common Core and So Much More! (Part 1)
Duncan has done his part in Obama’s campaign to expand the reach of the government under the guise of civil rights. He oversaw the expansion of the department’s Office of Civil Rights as the department investigated sexual assault on college campuses. He pushed the nation’s schools to change discipline policies because of the disproportionate suspension and expulsion of minority children. Continue reading
Common Core, Creeping into Everything
All kinds of creepy Common Core things are embedded in the Every Child Achieves Act (ECAA), which is really a “rewrite” of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), according to Dr. Karen R. Effrem of Education Liberty Watch. But while Common Core is popular enough to make its way into vacation Bible schools, politicians know it’s toxic. So they disguise it. American Principles in Action calls the Act “A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” and offers 21 reasons to oppose the 792-page bill (122 pages longer than the NCLB bill). Continue reading
Transforming Education Beyond Common Core: Games for Muslim Appreciation, Emotional Intelligence, Diversity, and Masturbation
While the event received virtually no press coverage, Games for Change revealed game developers with financial support from the Department of Education. Among the five judges were two representatives from U.S. government agencies. What they promise is a future of teachers as “Dungeon Masters” tracking students as they navigate games, games whose lessons parents are ignorant of. Profiting are the techno-gurus, progressive educrats, and a political regime seeing the fruition of a plan to completely transform education in America. Continue reading
Transforming Education Beyond Common Core: Crony Capitalists Promote Gaming in the Classroom
It is true: the technology can offer promising results in many applications, for example in medicine or flight simulation. But the overall thrust was that games provide advantages in “cultivating dispositions” – games for “social change,” as the name of the group and festival indicates. As for such subjects as history, one wonders: can we really go back in history, or just the history that the game designer decides to create for us? Continue reading
Transforming Education Beyond Common Core: Getting the Word Out About Gaming for Social Change
The dangers of indoctrination become clearer when one considers the fact that the games being supported by the Department of Education focus on “social change.” Most of the presentations at the four-day Games for Change event involved lessons about tolerance of the Muslim “other,” global warming, sustainability, bullying, Native American culture, nuclear disarmament, and sexuality. Continue reading
Transforming Education Beyond Common Core: Arne Duncan’s “Classroom of the Future”
Replacing our traditional ways of learning, through reading, writing, and study – contemplative and solitary activities—are the communal and hands-on activities promoted in Common Core and now digital learning. Both Common Core and digital learning serve to obscure a large part of the reason for the achievement gap: reading ability. Students who are poor readers lag in other subjects. To cover up this inability, Common Core emphasizes “speaking and listening skills.” Similarly, games offer an opportunity to hide differences in ability. Continue reading
Texas Senator Ted Cruz Announces for President – Appeals to Christian and Conservative Values
On Monday, March 23rd, I had the pleasure of taking part in another Liberty University (LU) convocation. During this event, Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz announced his candidacy for president of the United States.
Common Core Test ‘Refuseniks’
The resistance is coming from the political right and the political left. Those on the right are opposed to federal testing that measures emotional responses more than knowledge and infringes on privacy. The left often rejects accountability standards. So a grassroots movement of “opting out” is taking hold among the states.
Watch Out, Scott Walker: You Carry the Burden of Ronald Reagan’s “Legacy” in “Liberal Learning”
References to Shakespeare or the classics, the kind of liberal learning that detractors claim Republican governors threaten, are nowhere to be found. Instead, so-called societal challenges such as health, literacy, sustainability or gender studies promote activism.
Presidential Candidate Jeb Bush and the Albatross of Common Core
In her column, “Your Common Core Marketing Overlords,” Michelle Malkin revealed that Jeb Bush’s non-profit, Foundation for Excellence in Education, was among those saturating the airwaves with pro-Common Core commercials last spring.
Obama’s “Free” Community Colleges Power Grab: Imposing Common Core on Higher Education?
Quite obviously, the plan is a political move, one more attempt to gain Democratic voters through “free” programs. It is also a power grab, a way to get the public used to the idea of another federal program to which states answer, and as a way to further impose Common Core on college.
Recall Starts Before Anti-Common Core Arizona Schools Superintendent Even Takes Office
Diane Douglas, a little-known, outspoken opponent of Common Core who ran for Arizona Superintendent of Schools on that issue, surprised everyone this fall when she won. Incredibly, only five days after the election – the day it was announced she had won – a couple of opponents launched a recall effort against her. They formed a political committee and started a Facebook page, which has almost 10,000 likes already.
Obama Slipping Common Core and Propaganda into “Arts Education”
Shortly after President Obama took office, in August 2009, an invitation to a conference call sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts was sent to a handpicked group of 75 “artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people.” They were asked to “join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!”
One More Way to Impose Common Core: the National Association of State Boards of Education
Common Core will make its citizens compliant to the demands of the corporations that now control the government, which in turn grants them special favors. As the federal government controls the state government, it takes away the freedom of parents to direct their children’s education. Go to one state school board meeting and you will see and hear how much board members toe the line…
The Common Core Fight, Part II: Small Victories and the Way Forward
In spite of hundreds of millions of dollars from Bill Gates and affiliated business and non-profit groups, and promotion by the Department of Education, support for Common Core among parents of school-age children is plummeting.
The Common Core Fight, Part I: What Went Wrong, What Went Right, and What to Do Next
The Washington Post reported that within two years of an organizational meeting at Bill Gates’ Seattle headquarters, 45 states and the District of Columbia had adopted the Common Core State Standards. President Obama, whose administration was “populated by former Gates Foundation staffers and associates,” was “a major booster.”
“Transcending” the Idea of “American History” and Forgetting D-Day
Recently, Cal Thomas, in what has become a journalistic ritual, bemoaned the loss of knowledge about American history in a column titled “D-Day=Dumb Day for Many.” This historical occasion was the 70th anniversary of D-Day on June 6. Thomas cited a study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni that showed only 70 percent of recent college graduates knew that D-Day occurred during World War II. This and other dismal statistics revealing historical ignorance were attributed to the fact that very few colleges require survey courses on American history. Continue reading
The Closing of the Presidential Mind – Part 3: Unveiled Ignorance – ObamaCare and its Roots
President Barack Obama’s most famous policy initiative has proved to be, arguably, his most divisive and politically damaging. ObamaCare has become at once his calling card for a high rating from liberal historians and a political albatross. As the impracticality of the system has met with the reality of consumers’ everyday needs, the administration has been forced to change the rules governing the nation’s health-care system seemingly every day. The legality of these edicts has been questionable at best; they ensure that the health-care sector, one-sixth of the nation’s economy, is governed by the daily caprice of the nation’s chief executive.
The Closing of the Presidential Mind – Part 2: Growing Government
President Barack Obama took office in 2009 amid a major recession. He promptly exploited the economic situation to pursue a grand and sweeping agenda of growing government. The theories he embraced went far beyond his campaign rhetoric, as he pushed policies that sought to reshape fundamentally the U.S. economy and society.
Common Core: They Want Your Kids
The George Soros-founded and funded Center for American Progress (CAP) report serves this effort: to expand the role of public schools, fulfilling Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s vision of “community schools” on a national scale.
Common Core: What’s Behind Arne Duncan’s Race Card?
During a November speech, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan claimed that opposition to the “Common Core State Standards” was coming from “white, suburban moms” upset because their children were no longer as “brilliant” and their schools no longer as “good” as they thought they were.
Common Core: Teaching to the New Test- Part III
Common Core basically is the “student-centered” learning based on the ideas of progressive education theorist John Dewey, and disproven by the numerous studies analyzed by Jeanne Chall.
Common Core: Teaching to the New Test – PART I
It took the sleeping giant a while to figure out what was going on with the Common Core (so-called) State Standards. Put together largely by a well-connected Washington, D.C., non-profit called Achieve, these education “standards” were attached to the Race-to-the-Top contest in 2009 for $4.35 billion in stimulus funds.
Affirmative Action Times Two before the Supreme Court
Two cases currently before the U.S. Supreme Court will clarify where the high court stands on the constitutionality of racial preferences in college admissions. The result may be a green light for such programs—or, more likely, fresh new blows and a judicially hastened end for race-based practices in higher education and other government institutions.
Be Afraid: Government “Help” for the Children
Ronald Reagan famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'”
Children of the State: The Democrats’ Vision
What can one say about a video ad on behalf of President Obama’s reelection that uses children to prod parents to vote for him by blaming them for a nightmarish future if they don’t?
The Truth About Common Core
I just heard another Republican politico, a state senator here in Georgia, at a meeting, claim that Common Core is not a federalized education curriculum, but a “state-led” education reform initiative.
Free Market Socialism
Before Obama got around to digging up his copy of last year’s State of the Union address, crossing out a few lines, adding something about Iraq and Bin Laden, before heading out for another round of golf, David Brooks wrote a New York Times column urging Obama not to forget to mention the importance of promoting education for a free market economy. He titled it, Free-Market Socialism.
The International Indoctrination of a Generation
Are Americans citizens of a nation or citizens of the world?
