Posted on 02/04/2005 10:29:38 AM PST by hedgetrimmer
Educators across Tulsa County are joining a massive effort to get Tulsa talking about education. They're looking for 10,000 volunteers from all over the county to come up with some ideas to make education better.
News on 6 reporter Ashli Sims says Tulsa Talks is unprecedented in its size and scope. And the nation is watching. If you have an opinion about how area schools are run, Tulsa Talks wants you. "We ask our fellow citizens to get involved." Carol McGowen with Tulsa Talks says the project is basically a conversation about education. It's based on a national model called study circles.
The idea is folks from every corner of the city will meet in groups of ten to twelve led by an impartial facillitator. Over a series of five weeks they are supposed to talk about issues in education and develop a plan for action.
McGowen: "we hope this will be a process that unites the community that lets everyone feel that they have a voice that they are being listened to and that their voice matters." Study Circles have been organized in more than 300 communities across the country, but never in a city the size of Tulsa.
Advocates say all the talk can lead to change. In Winston-Salem, North Carolina study circles inspired a community-sponsored scholarship program that pays for continuing education for teachers. In Kansas City, Kansas study circles came up with the idea of a tutoring program to help Spanish-speaking children get ready for kindergarten. Study Circle participants in Inglewood, California wanted better facilities, so they campaigned for a bond issue that passed with 88% approval. And in Maryland, study circles led to a $250,000 pilot program to beef up staffing.
The goal to close the achievement gap between black and white students. And it seems like Tulsa Talks is already getting people talking. Community activist Julius Pegues: "I think Tulsa Talks is a step in the right direction, if we get full participation from citizens all over the city of Tulsa.”
Mary Hull, Tulsa Union Parent: "I'm interested in seeing the community work together. The Tulsa community and I am very excited I think it could be a really positive thing for Tulsa.”
So far, Tulsa Talks has a lot of folks behind it from OSU-Tulsa to TCC to OU Tulsa, as well as both Union and Tulsa Public Schools. The religious community is also giving the project a boost, with representatives from Christian, Jewish and Islamic faiths. Mayor Bill LaFortune calls this a historic day for Tulsa and he's also lending his support.
If you would like to get involved, please call the new Tulsa Talks office at 594-8189.
Parents who've investigated the Study Circles organization have found it is funded by George Soros and will change Tulsa school curriculum to indoctrinate and take authority away from parents over their child's education and curriculum.
Parents there are asking for help! They need help to disrupt or stop the facilitated meetings and stop the takeover of their school district by this organization.
Tulsa area freepers can you help? Some parents are meeting with the Mayor today, and they need support!
Are there any oklahoma education activists out there? They need to know about this.
The group has a website
http://www.operationinformation.com
Contact them if you can help.
Good luck. When I was growing up in Wagoner Tulsa had great schools. Sounds like they have really deteriorated since then.
read later today...
BTT!!!!!!
Sounds like the same old California BS to me that ruined their schools and is in the process of ruining public schools all across the nation. If you want to improve education, bring in competition. Gimme me tax money spent on schools back and let me spend it where I think my kids will get the better deal.
Born Conservative runs the Public Schools ping list - perhaps someone on his list knows.
Thanks,
These study circles are effectively "change agents" to disrupt constitutional political process and replace an American indiviudalist viewpoint in the public schools with a globalist socialist view. The parents in Tulsa are feeling at a loss right now about what to do. They know they have to stop the consensus process and get their elected officials to rebuke these NGOs that are pushing it.
Do you have any ideas?
They know they have to stop the consensus process and get their elected officials to rebuke these NGOs that are pushing it. Do you have any ideas?
Get as many people as possible to read the following articles thoroughly:
Using the Delphi Technique to Achieve Consensus - ( http://www.eagleforum.org/educate/1998/nov98/focus.html ).
The Delphi Technique — How to Disrupt It. - ( http://www.learn-usa.com/transformation_process/acf002.htm ).
About Consensus and Facilitation - ( http://www.learn-usa.com/transformation_process/~consensus.htm ).
What American Citizens Need to Know About Consensus and Facilitation - ( http://www.learn-usa.com/transformation_process/acf004.htm ).
“Consensus” and “Facilitation”: When You Hear These Words, Beware of Being Suckered - ( http://baltimorechronicle.com/consensus_oct02.html ).
And see this Free Republic thread:
The Delphi Technique - ( http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a36dbfb367608.htm ).
I've included the URL's so that you can simply copy then paste the above links into your email program and send them out, or paste them into your word processor and print them out.
I would recommend that, after reading and understanding the articles, people should do some role playing and practice disrupting the technique. Good luck!
Learn-usa is Dr. Coffman's website, is it not?
Thank you so much for your help. I'm going to fax these articles over to them today.
The Delphi techniques are dangerous.
If you can ping anyone in Tulsa, please do.
I don't think they are going to embrace it. I know people who are working on this problem as we speak.
If you want..just go to the Okie forum...and ping that list of people.
Seen or hear about this?
Becky
can't understand your fear of this process. Sure, it was created by a bunch of liberals...but now it is being applied to an overwhelmingly conservative town. They want Tulsans to facilitate, they aren't shipping in Yankees.
It sounds like a good way for the average Tulsans to share thoughts and ideas on how the schools are working for them. What's wrong with that?
If you read the articles on facilitated meetings and the delphi technique, you will see these meetings are NO WAY for the average Tulsan to get a thought across to anybody. Because you see, the outcomes of the meeting have already been decided. You can go and talk til your face turns blue, the facilitators will just nod and say "good point" but when it comes to implementing their agenda, your opinion will have no effect.
The schools should be first and formost listening to the parents, then taxpayers. When "stakeholders" who could come from anywhere, come in to a school district and start implementing policy, you will see the schools decline in the same fasion they have in California-- into agenda driven, political indoctrination camps bereft of academics.
Don't say it can't happen there, because the study circle facilitation is a tried and true technique, their teaching tolerance program is a tried and true technique and the way they steamroll over parents because they are a well funded NGO is tried and true.
The people who brought this to my attention, also showed me that the study circle group is linked to George Soros open society foundation. Remember Mr. Soros, was going to spend a milion $ of his own money to throw the presidential election? If the Mayor of Tulsa is a democrat, he may be tainted by allowing these study circle meetings to continue, because Mr. Soros is one of the heavy hitter donors to the Democratic party. Now most mayors don't run on political a political platform, so if he is following Mr. Soros, obviously he is tainting his office with his own party politics.
If Tulsans don't work to stop this, this study circles group with ties to George Soros and intnernational socliasts (the curriculum they would like used at the school comes from an Hungarian curriculum) your schools will quickly sink to the bottom and become as chaotic and terrible as the schools in California. I don't think you want that do you?
But for this to be a Delphi program the "facilitators" would have to have an agenda. Yet this is not the case, as Tulsa Talks is publicly and openly soliciting private citizens of any stripe to serve as facilitators. To my knowledge, there is no screening other than guaging one's ability to commit the time and effort through to reach an outcome.
Mayor LaFortune is a republican, as are a large majority of Tulsans. Certainly one outcome of this process is that liberal points of view regarding education will emerge. But so will conservative voices. Though conceived by liberals, I believe that this process can just as easily serve to give voice to a community that is overwhelmingy populated by persons with traditional values. Any other outcome is simply too difficult to engineer, based on the design of the program locally.
I think you have presumed too much. I think that this process was simply out there as a model and it was embraced as a method of encouraging grassroots participation in education.
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