Photo credit: Web and Facebook |
Have parents relegated their parental authority and their
rights to raise and educate their children entirely to schools, to progressive
ideology, and to the federal government? Do parents even know what their children
are taught and if so, do they care what their precious kids learn every day?
As a former college teacher, I know from experience that some
parents cannot wait to get their children out of the house; some only care if
they are fed and safe from harm; some only care that test scores are up and
their children are promoted, even socially promoted, to the next grade; some
only care that they get a diploma at the end of twelve years; others that their
entrance exams are high enough to get them scholarships and admission to the
college of their dreams; and some delude themselves that their children are
getting a balanced education in line with our American values.
Do many parents bother to sit in a classroom to hear for
themselves? Are parents even allowed anymore to sit in a class? Are parents
allowed to express their opinions to the school board without being arrested
for trespassing or thrown out of the meeting because they dared to ask an
inconvenient question?
A Chinese American mom from Colorado was pleading with the
school board in her county to reject Common Core because it is the same
curriculum as the Communist Core in China. Lily Tang Williams, who came to
America for freedom, grew up under Mao’s China. Nationalized standards represent
communist indoctrination, she said, preparing students to be good little
workers and not to think critically and independently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAIetn6sE00
“Chinese children are not trained to be independent thinkers;
they are trained to be cash machines and trained workers for corporations.” She asked rhetorically, “What happened to
individual rights and individual freedom in America? Where are the parents? Why
Common Core, this top down education from the federal government with
corporations holding the carrots and the federal government the sticks? Do you
want your children to be cheap workers for American corporations? Do not follow
China’s model! Their system produces great test-takers but not critical
thinkers!” Pleading with the board, Lily said that it took her ten years to get
rid of the brainwashing she suffered in her native China. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilaSvC9PGKk
The assault on our children and our parental rights is
relentless. The government is dictating what we feed them, how we raise them,
whether they are allowed to walk from school; they are going to weigh them in
schools without parental consent, and they are going to collect biometrics on
our children in order to build up a national database tracking them from cradle
to grave. Ask yourselves why? What is happening to our privacy, God-given
rights, and freedoms?
Teaching is an art and every child has God-given talents
that must be nurtured individually as much as possible. Children are not
numbers that can be neatly boxed into a rubric for the convenience of
Conformity Core dictated by the government.
Florida Standards Assessments (FSA) is testing for the
Common Core which is supported by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. http://www.fsassessments.org/resources/?section=3-test-administrators
One young child, Sydney Smoot, a fourth grader at
Brooksville Elementary School, spoke on March 17, 2015 to the Hernando County
School Board, voicing very articulately and with aplomb, her concerns about FSA
testing.
1.
One test and one end-of- the-year score defines
her as a failure or a success, regardless of anything else Sydney learned in
five years of school.
2.
She cannot share anything nor discuss the test
with her parents. Why if it involves her education and her future?
3.
Why should she be forced to take one test that
has not been tested nor validated on other students in Florida? How could it be
accurate and reflect what she knows?
4.
Why stress children the entire year, often
eliminating recess and other fun activities, in order to prep for one test
only, when they should be taught and tested throughout the year, measuring along
the way what they have learned? To accurately measure progress and what they
know, students should be tested at the beginning of the year, middle of the
year, and end of the year.
Seasoned teachers, who understand what is at stake, are
resigning in protest. Oklahoma City math teacher, Juli Sylvan, with more than
20 years teaching experience, expressed in her resignation letter her objection
to the data-mining of children, the implementation of the Common Core standards
in “defiance of state law,” and the fact that “It is a complete takeover of what
is taught in the public school system. It takes away the individual’s freedom
and joy of learning because of the one size fits all approach. All students
don’t learn or express themselves in the same way. Common Core tends to do away
with individualism — which is one of the attributes that makes America great.
Diversity is one of our greatest resources, but Common Core erodes this great
strength by taking parents, teachers, and elected officials out of the decision
making process.” http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/20443-in-resignation-oklahoma-teacher-blows-whistle-on-common-core
According to Sylvan, even though Oklahoma passed a law
ending Common Core in the state, education officials have continued
implementing the Common Core standards in violation of the state law by using
the scheme of Teacher Leadership Effectiveness (TLE) to coerce teachers into
Common Core compliance.
Governor Mary Fallin signed into
law HB 3399 on June 5, 2014, which withdrew Oklahoma from the Common Core
Standards Initiative (CCSSI), “allowing the state to adopt its own public
education standards.” http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/2014/201406100.asp
Sylvan told The New
American that “I was constantly being harassed and threatened with
termination for not implementing Common Core components (data collection,
testing, teaching strategies aligned to Common Core)”… “As a teacher in the classroom in that
environment with constantly being harassed, my ability to protect my students
from Common Core was being rapidly diminished.” Her conscience did not allow
her to “promote or contribute to the implementation of Common Core.”
And Common Core testing is now aligned with the national
standardized testing for college entrance exams.
I came across a pamphlet from the American Council of
Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) which is a non-profit organization launched in 1995
in D.C. with the purpose “to promote academic freedom, academic excellence, and
accountability in higher education.”
ACTA has a difficult job since colleges and universities
in the U.S. are experiencing low academic standards, weak curricula, more than
double the rate of inflation tuition fees, more demand for public and private
funding, no accountability to students, alumni, and taxpayers, and attacks on anything
American, on free thought and on free speech, usually relegated to a “free
speech” zone, a tiny campus spot far away from the usual student foot traffic.
Teaching, learning, rational debate, free exchange of
ideas, and the pursuit of truth are under attack, quite literally in some
cases, where students were physically threatened and attacked by their teachers
and the courts upheld this abominable behavior.
Professors have the freedom to speak their minds but
students’ academic freedom is another story.
A scientific study commissioned by ACTA found that almost half of
students attended classes in which professors frequently used political
comments in their classes even though they were totally unrelated to the
subject; 46% said that professors used the classroom to express personal
political views; and 42% “reported
reading assignments that presented only one side of controversial issues.” A
Zogby poll found that 58% of Americans believe bias in the classroom is a very
serious problem.
With adult literacy and skills declining thanks to fluff
courses and watered down curricula, and worthless degrees, the student loan
debt has ballooned to $826 billion, larger than the credit card debt, while
jobs for college graduates are scarce.
The National Assessment of Adult Literacy found that
millions of college-educated Americans cannot understand newspaper editorials
or instructions for taking medicine. As students learn less and less, they take
longer and longer to graduate. In 2007, the National Center for Higher
Education Management Systems reported a six-year graduation rate of 56.1
percent. The four-year graduation rate is so low that colleges no longer record
it. www.goacta.org
The moral of the story is, if you want education to
decline even further, and creative individualism that built such a successful
America, the former envy of the world to disappear, and, if you want to transform
American students into pliant proletariat workers for crony capitalist
corporations, Common Core is the way to indoctrinate them into the collectivist
utopian mindset.
No comments:
Post a Comment