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Posted on 10/09/2012 1:38:05 PM PDT by Kaslin
When we list the areas that Barack Obama wants to "fundamentally transform," as he promised before his 2008 election, let's not overlook his plans for education. They are as fundamentally transformational, costly and dictatorial as Obamacare.
It's well-known that public schools are not graduating students as well-educated as before, that Americans score poorly on international tests, and that billions of federal dollars showered on public schools have not achieved any of the designated goals, which were to raise test scores and to eliminate the gap between higher income and lower income students. The Obama progressives want us to believe that the remedy is to turn over total control to the federal government.
That's illogical and unacceptable, but it fits right in with Obama's attitude that there is no higher power than the federal government. If Obama is reelected, he will be able to accomplish this task with help from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, a graduate of Chicago politics.
So the Obama Administration has latched onto a national education curriculum called Common Core that was launched by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers in 2009. Those organizations have very official names as though they are government agencies, but they are actually private groups financed by foundations, such as Gates and various corporations.
Their plan is to induce all elementary and secondary schools to accept a comprehensive national education system that will enforce a national curriculum. National standards will be locked in by the tests students must take called assessments, which in turn are tied to teacher evaluation. The standards instruct the teachers what to teach so their pupils can pass the tests and teachers can get positive evaluations.
This process bypasses parents and state and local school boards, and will fundamentally transform education by dictating what every child will learn and not learn. Of course, the Obama crowd loves this because a takeover of the education system could be as consequential as the takeover of banks "too big to fail," or of General Motors, or of the health care industry with Obamacare.
No Child Left Behind was a step in this direction, but it allowed the states to set their own standards. Common Core, on the other hand, requires all states to adopt the same federally endorsed standards.
This will be achieved by carrot-and-stick methodology. The carrot is the offer of federal money, such as Race to the Top money granted if, and only if, the states first adopt the Common Core standards. The stick is the threat to withhold federal funds from states that don't obey.
Cato Institute researchers have concluded that, despite the claim that the adoption of Common Core standards is technically voluntary, "adoption will almost certainly be de facto involuntary, and the standards themselves ultimately federal."
What some opponents are now calling "Obama Core" ought to be held unconstitutional because the federal government has no power over education under the Constitution. Furthermore, Obama Core is unlawful, since it violates federal laws that specifically prohibit the federal government from having any say over curriculum or tests.
The essence of Obama Core is control of curriculum because that is where minds are molded and stimulated to higher levels of learning and character is formed. The standards for math and English literature are the only two subjects that have so far been released, and even those were made public only after the majority of states had signed up to use Obama Core.
Many parents will recognize the math standards as "Fuzzy Math," i.e., teaching very little arithmetic or standard algorithms, and class time wasted in having kids describe how they got their answers instead of teaching them the best way to get correct answers. The English and literature standards are worse because they omit traditional and classical literature, confine kids to boring informational readings such as instruction manuals, and fail to teach cursive writing.
The so-called standards are set low enough for most students to pass the tests. Education commentators say that the graduation standards do not prepare students for college work, and some admit that the goal is only to move kids to two-year community colleges with open admission.
The Obama Core advocates are even planning to impose their standards on private schools. As the school choice movement grows, the attempt will be made to force any private or charter school that accepts public funds to adopt Common Core standards and have their students take the national tests.
Obama Core is a comprehensive plan to dumb down schoolchildren so they will be obedient servants of the government and probably to indoctrinate them to accept the leftwing view of America and its history.
[...]One must understand that the situation with low academic test scores and unacceptable behavior of students was deliberately created over a period of 80 years, starting in the 1930s with the Carnegie Corporation’s plan to use schools to bring about a Soviet-style (performance-based) planned economic system.
See reference to Carnegie Corporation’s Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies (1934) and Carnegie-Soviet Academy of Science Agreement (1985). The latter agreement was signed the same year Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev signed the U.S.-USSR Education Exchange Agreement. The first experiment with Outcomes/Performance-Based Education (the restructuring system being implemented today) was Carnegie Corporation’s “Eight Year Study” (1933-1941).
To get an idea of the enormity and severity of the problems addressed by this article, see the OECD-SSRC Stupski Next-Gen Data System Workshop (October 2010) presentation which states the following: “We will build capacity to leave a dying system and give birth to a new one…”[..]
[...]This agenda MUST be stopped or all of us will suffer: our children, their teachers, and our free political and economic system of government. Once FREE WILL is destroyed, there is no protection from descending to the level of animals, subjected to “training”. Only human beings can be educated. Why have we opted for animal training, with or without the computer, rather than continuing to educate our children in the traditional way for upward mobility?
This is the ultimate war for our children’s minds and souls. No other war has ever been more important. If you don’t have time to read this entire article, please at least click on the links at the beginning of this article as well as their associated links.[...]
http://www.newswithviews.com/iserbyt/iserbyt102.htm
http://www.crossroad.to/text/articles/Bush4-99.htm
So much of our rights have been signed away that we know nothing about...Nixon signed off on a UN treaty: Overpopulation is a Safety Hazard.
VIDEO: Charlotte T. Iserbyt
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzAX_jgCf_w
There are lots of videos at youtube on this womens tremendous experience, knowledge and insight. Also one at the link posted above.
One of the women (black) who I work with brings her son and daughter into work after school. The little girl is 6 or 7. I asked her what she learned in school today and she said they learned about recycling pumpkins. Unbelievable. I was helping her read and she was struggling with very simple words but she knows how to recycle a pumpkin.
Will “Obama Core” prepare you to use an “Obama Phone”???
There is a big difference between a political pitch and the actual goals of the expenditures. This idiot presupposes that the goals of those Federal dollars were to improve educational results by the general public's understanding of the term. Such is demonstrably not the case.
Are you calling the author a idiot, and if so please explain
Had you clicked the link I provided in the post, you would have had your answer. The author believes that Federal educational spending has been a failure. He's an idiot because he believes that the purpose of the spending was to improve education. Anyone truly familiar with the system knows that, while it might have been pitched that way, the purpose was not to improve student performance. Quite the contrary.
If you go to the link in the post, it goes to a book, published by Reagan's former Undersecretary of Education. Its title is:
the deliberate dumbing down of america,
"deliberate," as in, 'intentional.' The author was obviously in a position with access to the documents detailing the history and purpose of US educational policy. Her book is meticulously footnoted and sourced and has circulated among conservatives for over a decade.
The author is posing as an authority, yet he clearly has not read it. So, I think that's enough explanation as to why I think he's an idiot, because he believes that the purpose of the spending was to improve performance, Iserbyt's book standing as proof to the contrary.
In fact, the system has been fabulously successful at mass-producing the stupid drones we see leaving American schools today. In fact, the Chinese are studying the system for what should by now be obvious reasons. After all, the Department of Education is staffed with hordes of psychologists and other professionals well versed in proven methods of human conditioning. In fact, the most pivotal book on teacher education today was written by famed behaviorist B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity. It's a rather pointed title, isn't it? Skinner's purpose was the usual elitist drivel about protecting the planet from the the lust for resources on the part of the American middle class.
Seeing as Iserbyt's book is posted online in its entirety for free at the link I provided you, understanding and incorporating those details is up to you. I don't post links to sources lightly, because I am busy writing books and articles. In fact, I just completed an article proposing a means to transform American education, so if you think I am an idiot, you can go read it and throw tomatoes at me.
Once upon a time, FReepers took posted links seriously, especially when the content was challenging or from a poster with a well-established reputation. There was also a time on FR when most of the posters were familiar with Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt's book (as well as John Taylor Gatto's book to the same effect). Of course, once upon a time, the vast majority of FReepers read a lot of books (and I'm not talking about you Kaslin). Sadly, those days are quite apparently long gone.
Well?
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