Missouri Education Watchdog

Senator Chappelle Nadal Struggles with the Right to an Education

2012-01-27T11:50:00.000-06:00

Last night, the Washington University Brown School Policy Forum and Teach For America held a public forum to discuss St Louis Public Education. On the panel were: Senator Chappelle-Nadal (District 14), Senator Cunningham (District 7), Representative Dieckhaus (District 109), Representative Jones (District 63), Dr. Nicastro (Commissioner of Ed), and Dr. Senti (Cooperating School Districts of Greater St. Louis.) The discussion focused on the Turner Decision, the previous legislative stalemate on a solution, and the current legislative "fix" proposals.

Quick review of the facts: In Missouri, according to the constitution, you have a right to a free public education. Additionally, you have a right to go to school in a neighboring accredited school district if your district loses its accreditation. St. Louis City school district lost their accreditation last year. Families attempting to transfer into neighboring districts were denied entrance because the districts claimed they did not have the space to accommodate them. The Turner family sued to claim their right to attend the neighboring district and won. The fix that is needed must recognize the both rights of the unaccredited district students to an education, and the rights of the neighboring districts not to be overrun and undercompensated for all the students transferring in.

Senator Chappelle-Nadal, through her statements, made it clear that she struggles with this right guaranteed in the MO Constitution. It seemed as if she were confusing it with one's Miranda Rights which say, if you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided to you by the state. Notice the MO Constitution does not say, if you cannot afford to pay for your own education, the state will provide one for you. Senator Chappelle-Nadal seems to think that those families who are currently finding a way to pay for private education in the city, because the public education provided by the city was substandard, should not be afforded the right to a free education like everyone else.

This attitude may stem from frustration over what has been a bungled system for many years. Students in private schools are not counted in the public funding formula. For those families to now have an avenue to exercise their right to a free public education means an increase in the number of students who have to be added to the funding calculation. Missouri has not met its full education funding requirements for years and this just exacerbates the problem. With the massive budget deficit the state is facing now, this just makes the legislature's job that much more difficult. It is however, a reality, and the legislature cannot just ignore the rights of some families because it makes their job more difficult. That was basically the decision in the Turner case.

The proposed solutions in the legislature now include:

Providing a business tax credit, as is done with the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTCSP), which allows businesses that contribute money to nonprofit Scholarship-Funding Organizations (SFOs) to receive an income tax credit. SFO's award scholarships to students from families with limited financial resources. This fix is being considered because the St Louis Catholic Schools have already told the legislature they have 8,000 seats waiting in their schools and would love to take in students from the unaccredited district. This gets around the Missouri Constitution's Blaine amendment which prohibits funds from the public treasury to be used to fund schools with religious affiliations. So long as the money does not go through the state's hands, it is not in conflict with the Constitution.

Another option being considered is a clearing house where districts can list the seats they have available which can then be matched with students looking to transfer. This option provides some stability for the receiving districts. The biggest obstacle here is the issue of funding. There is no consensus yet on how much these transfers will cost the receiving districts.

And of course the state cannot just abandon the St Louis district. They have been making improvements and it is hoped that they can regain accreditation. That will take a minimum of five years so they don't have, as Senator Cunningham called it, the yo yo problem with district falling into and out of compliance every other year. She assured parents that students taken into the transfer program would be allowed to stay for the duration of their k-12 education. That made sense. Her next comment, not so much.

There is a true concern of a slippery slope with the failing school district. Families transfer out or move out of such districts which means there is less money still in the district to try to fix it. Once you get below a certain level, the district faces bankruptcy. No family wants to move into an area without a school so there is tremendous pressure to fix the St Louis schools. If not, you end up with the Detroit public schools, where urban flight has resulted in consolidation and class sizes up to 60 students. Senator Cunningham saw a silver lining in the St Louis situation and the Turner Decision. She predicted that open enrollment would actually draw good families INTO St Louis, knowing they would have their pick of schools. The air must be getting pretty thin up there in the clouds to think that a lot of families would want to move to an economically depressed region where their children were guaranteed a long commute to school every day, twice a day, where something as simple as being a cheerleader would require tremendous family coordination to accommodate practice schedules and where there was no guarantee they could get into the specific district that they wanted. What exactly would the chamber of commerce put on its billboard? "Come to St Louis - where your child can go somewhere else to school!"

Senator Cunningham noted last night that the Kansas City schools, who as of January 3rd this year faced a similar dilemma due to the loss of their accreditation, have already solved their problem by having "collar districts", those surrounding the city district who may also be within the city's boundaries, annex the city schools and assume governance for them. The Catholic schools have similarly offered their services there. The panelists blamed those supporting the status quo in St Louis for blocking progress on a fix here. Specifically they were referring to the Cooperating School Districts, MO Association of School Board Superintendents, and the Association of School Board Members.

Frederick Mann set us up for a whole host of problems back in the early 1800's when he pushed for free public education. It sets up a line item on state budgets that never goes away and is under constant pressure to grow. Free things are rarely appreciated. Frequently they are tossed away because their value is perceived to be very low. We know education isn't free, but when you're not specifically paying for it out of your pocket and it is described as free in the constitution it is easy for people to think of it as free of cost. And once you make it mandatory you take away a very useful tool, the threat of removing the item or service, which could be used to motivate those who are not putting any effort into their education. It is a recipe for failure.

Representative Dieckhaus also struggled with the concept of a guaranteed right to an education, confusing it with a societal moral obligation to provide this service. That kind of language plays well on a campaign trail, but actually makes the legislature's job even more difficult because it enflames discussions like this and makes providing solutions far more tricky.

No one on these panels ever comments on why these public schools are failing. They also don't make specific proposals on how to change them. But the audiences at these types of events are not staying quiet on the topic anymore. You can hear them begin to address this issue in their questions. Eventually the politicians are going to have to name the problems because that is the first necessary step to fixing them.

Dick Morris and School Choice Week Presentation in St. Louis. Beam Me Up, Scotty

2012-01-26T13:03:00.000-06:00

Americans For Prosperity hosted a panel discussion on School Choice last night at Loyola Academy, a private Jesuit school for inner city young men. School Choice is blitzing the nation with the message "shining a spotlight on effective education options for every child." The St. Louis panel touched on those options.

The panel consisted of Dick Morris (political strategist and commentator), Dana Loesch (Radio host and CNN commentator), Mike Podgursky (Professor of Economics University of Missouri) and Robbyn Wahby (Executive Assistant to STL Mayor Francis Slay). The panel discussed educational topics such as:

charter schools
vouchers to private/parochial schools
the effect of teacher unions on public education
the rising cost of funding to schools with negligible rise in test scores
the reasons schools are failing
data to determine failing schools
the falling population in the city residential areas and how it affects the STL city public schools

Podursky nailed it when he gave some of the reasons public schools are failing:

there is a lot of regulatory crust
no innovations and no free market
different kids have different needs and one specific school cannot meet all the needs of all the kids
schools are tied too heavily to standardized testing

As he was talking, I thought, "How is sending students to charter schools (schools supported by taxpayers dollars and under the same government mandates) freeing them from the regulations, lack of innovation, teaching to a student's need vs the system, and reducing the testing?"

THAT question was NEVER answered. This is the problem with the School Choice movement in general and in Missouri with the funding of charter schools. It never addresses the underlying fact that the government is still providing the blueprint and the rules and regulations for what the children are learning. The money is being transferred to "free markets" (which conservatives love) but the system is still controlled by the government. That's not really free market, is it? That's not really an authentic choice for parents, is it?

Dick Morris stated, "Choice is where you send your child to school and the money follows the child." He outlined why this is a revolution in education and gave his reasons why this choice movement is needed:

In the 1960's and 70's the "Rankings of the States" was released by the NEA. The states began to fund education more heavily: test scores did not change
In the 1980's, states were pushed to upgrade the curriculum and standards and demand better testing: results did not change
In the 1990's, NCLB was instituted focusing on which schools were failing and concentrating efforts to increase testing scores: no uptake occurred

Based on this dismal track record, Morris believes we need to be creative and provide options for education: school choice.

This really was an alternate universe I found myself in last night in St. Louis. Morris stated, and apparently believes, education needs to be creative and innovative and released from NCLB type mandates. Amazingly, the subject of Race to the Top mandates (and those "mandates formerly known as RTTT" implemented in states which didn't receive RTTT money) and Common Core standards was never mentioned by Morris. What the school choice advocates are advocating just doesn't make sense. State educational providers are operating under NCLB on steroids and Morris is stating that you can choose your publicly funded school and it's a true choice in education? How are more federal governmental mandates allowing more local control? Is it that these folks just don't get it, or is it they just don't care? Is the idea of "we have to do SOMETHING overrides a thoughtful approach to educational problems?"

Morris may have answered my last question. He said, "We will never have the political will to close the failing schools. We're just going to close the empty ones". There it is. Through choice, most parents will take their kids out of traditional public schools. The remaining public schools are going to be populated with the kids who aren't motivated or who have undiagnosed disabilities, whose parents are disengaged from the education process and for whom an alternative school has not yet been opened. Morris believes, in a free market, some group will step forward and bring those kids into their alternative school, and the now empty public school will be closed.

Morris may be correct, that we are seeing an education revolution, but it is on the delivery of education, not the education itself. What kind of choice is this being foisted on and paid for by taxpayers? Free Market or more of the same governmental control?

What IS the magic bullet and allure of charter schools that allegedly makes them so much better in terms of education in the eyes of School Choice advocates? Is it the delivery and school expectations from the charters that apparently doesn't exist in the traditional public schools? If it is, why aren't we pushing for those things from our public schools now? It's not true free market competition since standards and assessments are still controlled by government regulations. So what is it?

Can You Choose a Good School If You Don't Know What One Looks Like?

2012-01-25T11:11:00.001-06:00

This is National School Choice week and the major players are striking hard to move this ball down the field in SOME direction. School choice is a hotter topic than the republican field of presidential candidates for most because, education affects everyone; from the parents, to students, to teachers, to state budgets, to businesses who supply goods and services to education, to the regular childless taxpayer. We all are impacted by America's public education system. Education reform is no doubt needed, but a vision of it is still as clear as mud some 80+ years after it was first talked about.

The Atlantic wrote a good piece about School Choice, which covers the history of this piece of education reform. Here is the first part of that article:

How School Choice Became an Explosive Issue

By Kevin Carey

Conservatives champion it. Liberals loathe it. But both sides have distorted the cause, and students are paying the price.

Bill Cosby and Dick Morris presumably disagree about most things, so it's instructive to note that both have officially endorsed "School Choice Week," which began yesterday with a series of rallies and events around the country celebrating the idea of parents being able to decide where their children go to school. Indeed, school choice seems like such an obviously good idea that the most interesting thing about School Choice Week is why it exists at all.

That school choice is valuable is beyond dispute. That's why there's a multi-billion dollar private school industry serving millions of students. And it's why there is a much larger system of school choice embedded in the American real estate market. While some parents pay school tuition directly, many more pay it through their monthly mortgage and property tax bills. Anyone who has deliberately purchased a home in a "good" school district is, by definition, a beneficiary and supporter of school choice...

A key concern that Carey brings up is the idea that, while many parents would like to be able to choose a different school for their child other than the public one they are geographically districted for, they often lack the skills necessary to make a good decision about which school that is.

Choice requires both information and consumers who are well equipped
to use it. Schools are highly complex organizations whose workings aren't
always apparent at first glance. It's very difficult for parents who have no
personal experience of having attended a good school to pick and choose among
school choice options for their children. Looks can be deceiving--shiny new
facilities and well-organized classrooms can mask poor teaching and incoherent
curricula. Schools vying for students in the market tend, like any competitor,
to present a self-interested view of themselves. Parents need much better
information about school performance, and education in its interpretation, in
order to make good choices on behalf of their children.

Reputation takes a while to build and many charter schools do not survive long enough to develop a good reputation. We know that 37% of charter students perform below their public school peers on standardized assessment.

Opening up K-12 education to the free market does not magically conjure from the air organizations that know how to educate children.

What is guaranteed to fail is any program in which parents have not taken an active role. In Californi,a where parents have the "trigger option", which essentially allows them to fire what they deem a failing school, public schools are rapidly being turned into charter schools. Many look at this as the way for parents to finally have a say in how their child is educated. Another way to look at it, however, is parents continuing to shuck their responsibility for their child's education by firing one nanny and hiring another. Expecting any outside organization to magically transform a neighborhood of serially disengaged children into both enthusiastic and successful learners is like expecting a one time visit from a professional organizer to cure the chronic hoarder.

One school in California that was recently turned into a charter, previously had mice in the cafeteria, clogged drinking fountains and urine puddles in the bathrooms. Now, unless you have the world's hardest water, drinking fountains only get clogged by people putting gum, paper and other objects into them. Human waste that does not make it into the waste removal system only occurs if you have: a) students with palsy or, b) lie on a constantly active fault line or, c) students who don't care to aim. If the janitor weren't constantly having to clean out the drinking fountains, he might get to those messes. Exterminators would be called if budgets weren't spent on security measures to scan the kids as they enter school and on a security force to deal with the violence children choose to bring into a school. In other words, if the students and their parents actually took ownership of and responsibility for their school many of these problems would go away. But the parents of this school simply voted to give someone else a shot at civilizing their children.

If they, as the Atlantic author suggested, don't even know what a good school looks like, then maybe the first effort of school reformers and choice advocates should be to start educating the parents about how a school is supposed to work and what the expectations are for them and their children once in it. Otherwise school reform will be a never ending cycle of replacement babysitters for schools in the worst neighborhoods.

Thoughts on the Costs of the New Apple Education Revolution. Who Pays for it? Who Can Afford it?

2012-01-24T05:00:00.000-06:00

This is an article on Apple's wonderful new revolution in the delivery of education in terms of how much money this will cost individuals and/or taxpayers. It will be quite a bit. Where will the money come from? Tax increases? Have the taxpayers had any say in any such tax increase to cover new educational deliveries and technology which create substantial financial return for private companies?

Apple may have an innovative product that makes learning faster and easier for students. The question is can districts/taxpayers afford such costs in our present economy? How many trillions of dollars of debt is the United States in currently? $16 Trillion?

I can't wait for the numbers to come out on how much the underfunded mandated Common Core standards will cost the taxpayers. I expect we can't afford the Federal Government's or the consortias' Education Revolution costs either.

From Gizmodo:

You Can’t Afford Apple’s Education Revolution

What Apple showed us today was nothing less than the future of education. The future we'd all been imagining for decades, no less. Harry Potter stuff. It's going to change the way we learn, the way we think, the way we live.

But let's remember that right now, today? It's entirely out of reach for all but a few of us.

Let's start with the good. There's a lot of it. Fifteen bucks for an interactive textbook is an amazing price; they'd normally cost a hundred new, about half that gently used. The features that Apple's introducing—particularly those instant flash cards that might have gotten me through Chemistry unscathed—are indisputably an improvement over stale highlighters and multi-colored Post-Its.

All of this represents the best kind of progress, a paradigm shift in education. That is, if you can afford it.
I've argued before that iPads are cheap for what they are. And that's true, assuming that what they are is a secondary device on which people with healthy disposable income can watch their YouTubes and send some emails and play Sword and Sworcery for hours and hours. But while iBooks are very affordable textbooks, the iPad makes for one insanely expensive backpack.

Under the best case scenario, you're a teenager in a district that has bought iPads for every single student. It's free for you, which is great! But even with a healthy discount, all those tablets carve a multi-million dollar, taxpayer-funded chunk out of the education budget. Money that could be going to dozens of other in-classroom aids, teacher salaries, healthy lunches, etc. They'll come from somewhere, at the expense of something else.

Which would be fine if that iPad were a standalone device that could accommodate four years of curricula. It's not. Not even close.

Standalone? Try writing a 20-page term paper on an iPad. Or better yet, try telling every student they need to buy a $70 wireless keyboard. Oh, and it's going to be spending a lot of time in your backpack, so better tack on a $40 Smart Cover. The reality is that no matter how far Apple has pushed into the cloud, iPads still need laptops to complement them. And those accessories, those laptops? Whether it's the student or the schools, someone's paying for them.

Which might even be worth it if the iPad could disappear textbooks from your life altogether. But it can't, not remotely. While Apple's got three major textbook partners lined up, at the moment the selection is treacherously limited. Which means that for now, and potentially for a long time, backpacks across the country are going to be loaded down with hefty Pre-Calculus and AP Physics tomes no matter how many iPads schools buy.

And even the ones that exist have their pitfalls. You can argue that they only cost $15 a pop—money that under Apple's plan can also come from schools, not individual students—and that those savings alone make them worth it. Which would be true, if publishers hated money. But publishers are businesses, and the business model in this place is clear: instead of selling an updated textbook every 5-10 years for $100, update and sell every year for $15. And it'll work; it's not like you can hand down an iBook from year to year. In fact, you expressly can't.

And then consider this: these iPad textbooks are every bit as big as their dead tree counterparts, and you need a lot of digital storage to lug them around. The eight books on display in the App Store today average out to about 1.5GB each; a full year's course load would quickly fill up a 16GB iPad, which means either schools/students will have to shell out for the more expensive 32GB version, or students are responsible for their own external storage options. My wallet hurts.

What all this adds up to is a education revolution for the landed gentry. Or even worse, schools that can't afford it chasing a wave that's years away from cresting. Millions of dollars spent on a supplementary learning tool. A distant horizon mistaken for the here and now.

Let's be clear; this is indisputably the future. What we saw today is what our classrooms will look like once iPads are far cheaper, once digital textbooks can be handed down as easily as physical ones, once teachers of every subject have several educational material options to choose among. For now though, it's important to remember that "new" and "different" always come at a premium. One that the vast majority of us can't afford.

Polar Monitors Used to Track Student Depression, Suicide, Cancer, Alcohol/Drug Use, Sexual Activity? Public Student Data Stored on polargofit.com website

2012-01-23T08:06:00.000-06:00

Polar Monitors may not only measure and provided data to schools about physical activity and heart rates in PE classes, there may also be assessments relating to student suicide, depression, cancer and diabetes risk. It can even track student sexual activity, drug and alcohol use. The company states this these invasive assessments are only suggested for those students 18 years or older, but is this the type of information that should be gathered by educational institutions on students of any age?

The circumvention of FERPA law will allow this information to be disseminated on your student to various federal agencies and private companies. The article contains a nifty link so you can see how this information will be gathered and how with the click of a mouse, broadcast to the cloud(s).

You can also read how school districts are funding these expensive monitors while cutting teachers and support staff. We'll be writing more about this in the future and provide links so you can determine if your school district is signing onto this program providing your student's data and personal information to entities, probably without your knowledge or active permission.

This is from "Is the Privacy of the American Student at Risk" at The Revered Review:

***********************************************

School: A place where children learn to read and write. A place where they learn mathematics, science and history. Moreover, a place, away from home, where children are supposed to be safe.

Yet now it’s a place, across the country, where children’s hearts are being monitored, their activities are being tracked, and it’s being determined if students are obese or overweight. In addition, health risk assessments are being made on students and the information can be stored or saved as a PDF file.

In this physical education class, students are training using spin bicycles. However, in many schools, students are using Polar monitors in physical education classes. (Photo Credit: MJMonty)

Some students across the country, including in many small towns—are now wearing heart rate monitors and activity monitors—sometimes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week—as part of their schools’ phys ed programs. The New York Post reported that three schools were using these monitors and some, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and parents, questioned the possible intrusion into students’ privacy.

(Link here to continue reading the rest of the article from Revered Review)

The Sunday Education Weekly Reader 01.22.2012

2012-01-22T05:00:00.000-06:00

Welcome to the Sunday Education Weekly Reader for January 22, 2012.

This week we thought we'd pass on some interesting tweets pertaining to Education for you to review.

Sit down with a cup of coffee and read about the meaning of "choice". Do these opinions on education and what determines a good education remind you of "what IS the meaning of IS?"..... Charter schools. Vouchers. Choice. That's all good, right? Or maybe not... http://bit.ly/zHKDVR

Oh my goodness, are students now going to be held accountable for their success....or failure? We thought that was reserved only for the teachers.... Aren't students also responsible for their own education, former teacher Walt Gardner asks? http://bit.ly/z7rols

This won't adapt well to Common Core Standards because, well, it's not "common"....A Group Of Schools In Sweden Is Abandoning Classrooms Entirely http://zite.to/xZulYR

Not hi-tech and students are loving it. Imagine that......An old fashioned tactile activity making a comeback in school. http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/powell-middle-school-teacher-steps-back-in-time-starts-sewing-club/1211217

Arne Duncan just can't keep his mandates to the states, now the Federal Government wants to micromanage local school districts. Can you define "smother"?.....What's next for #RaceToTheTop? @ArneDuncan says it's time for a district-level competition: http://bit.ly/Ag02PU

Educational thought for the week from Cary Grant:

My first great chance came in 1936, when I was borrowed by RKO for Sylvia Scarlett playing opposite Katherine Hepburn. This picture did nothing to endear its female lead to the public but it helped me to success. For once, the audiences and the critics did not see me as a nice young man, with regular features and a heart of gold. After this picture I made one after another, probably too many.

I know I'm sticking my neck in saying this, and the ill-fortuned won't agree with me.

But I do believe people can do practically anything they set out to do--if they apply themselves diligently, and learn. Few people recognize opportunity because it comes disguised as hard work and application.

Too often people are afraid of disappointment--or of making the mistakes that lead to disappointment? How else can you grow?

Follow Up Story on Slaves Picking Oranges in Math Lessons

2012-01-21T06:00:00.000-06:00

Do you remember the outcry about the math word problems for third graders which used slaves picking oranges? The example was used to integrate history lessons into math, one of the goals of common core standards. The parents of the students were outraged that slaves would be used in the math problems and that math shouldn't be taught in that manner. We agreed but wondered if this was because of the push of common core standards and that history must be worked into mathematics because the time to study history has been reduced in the classroom.

Reading between the lines, I believe we were correct. This first article from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution details some of the challenges the teacher faced:

The math assignment was sent home with more than 100 students. Among its 20 questions were word problems on slaves picking cotton and oranges. Some mentioned Douglass: "If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?"

“This is an unfortunate incident,” Rollins said. “I don’t believe the teacher wanted to expose those kids to anything offensive. Gwinnett County teachers are dedicated. They work hard and try on a daily basis to do the right thing.”

But mistakes can occur because the burden on teachers to create lessons, tutor kids, analyze data and complete paperwork can be daunting, especially in a district the size of Gwinnett County Schools, the state’s largest system.

Beaver Ridge principal Jose DeJesus issued a letter to parents this week on the school’s website informing them about the situation and reassuring them that teachers “embrace diversity” and are not biased.

“Our third graders have been studying famous Americans and had been reading about Frederick Douglass, a former slave,” DeJesus wrote. “These particular questions were an attempt at incorporating some of what students had been discussing in social studies with their math activity. First, let me say that I understand the parents' concerns about these questions. While I encourage our teachers to create cross curricular lessons, my expectation is that those lessons be appropriate and provide true connection between the subject areas. That did not occur in this case and we are working to ensure that this does not happen again and that this situation is handled appropriately.” (emphasis added)

The second ACJ article identifies the teacher who "resigned for personal reasons":

A Gwinnett schools investigation found former Beaver Ridge Elementary School teacher Luis Rivera was the author of a third-grade homework assignment that used slave beatings to teach math concepts.

In a statement to school officials obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Thursday, Rivera, a teacher at the school since August 2008, apologized and said some of the questions he wrote were in “poor taste.”

Rivera’s 20-question homework assignment used slave beatings and picking cotton to link lessons about ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass to math computation. One of the problems read: “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?”

Rivera told officials he was following the district’s curriculum, which asks that teachers explain what Douglass had to overcome to succeed and become a hero.

Beaver Ridge teachers are asked to create cross-curricular assignments and assessments and Rivera said he was attempting to do so.

“As a minority myself, I understand the trials and tribulations associated with being a minority,” he wrote. “There was no intent to harm, or to offend. Rather, I was trying to make connections for the students, while completing my assignment of cross-curricular integration.”

The homework assignment also had questions about Mary McLeod Bethune, Susan B. Anthony and Paul Revere.

The teacher used poor judgment, but I believe Mr. Rivera when he stated he was trying to complete an apparently difficult juggling act of combining math and history lessons so as to fulfill his mandated assignment. He should be held accountable for his insensitivity, but not blamed for trying to teach in a cross-curricular integrated mode as required by his school district. The parents of Beaver Ridge students should read Truth in American Education to understand the travesty of common core standards and why this may very well happen again:

Some parents of Beaver Ridge students who received the assignment asked that counseling be made available for kids.

At a Gwinnett school board business meeting Thursday, Henry White, who does not have children, called the incident an "egregious act of assault on the minds of a kid by an adult" and also recommended counseling.

With all due respect to Mr. Henry White, this incident is "an egregious act of assault on the minds of a kid by the NGA, CCSSO, Governor Sonny Perdue, the Georgia State Board of Education and the adoption of the Common Core standards".

Perhaps if the parents and Mr. White understood the impossible position the common core standards place teachers, they would demand a return of local control and the cessation of nationalized standards and assessments. Maybe then an education integrating history facts with math problems isn't what is considered an excellent educational model in their school, and such nonsensical teaching mandates can be thrown in the trashcan.

The teacher's poor judgment isn't why the kids may need help, the "one size fits all" mode of education is what will lead them to mediocrity and failure.

Here's a video report from wsbtv.com on the teacher's personnel file obtained via a Sunshine Request in which he was described as an "exemplary teacher" and served on the Black History committee:

Hansel & Gretel In Teach For America

2012-01-20T13:00:00.000-06:00

We all remember the story of Hansel and Gretel. They got lost in the woods and came across a house made of gingerbread. Facing a candy smorgasbord in the midst of their incredible hunger was too much for them. That was all it took for the evil witch to trap them. Only through their own cunning were they finally able to escape.

Today's Gretel is a recent college graduate wandering the business sector looking for a job and often not finding one. Along comes Teach For America who promises them the equivalent of a house made of candy. TFA would train them, with the minimal waste of time, guarantee them job placement in a system that supplies health care and maybe even pension benefits, pay for their masters degree and maybe even their housing. Not only that, but they would work with them to get a student loan forbearance and pay their interest for the two years of their service. For many, this is too tempting an offer to pass up. But like Grimm's Gretel, they soon find themselves trapped and facing a fiery oven.

This is not the picture TFA paints of those in their program. According to them, their ranks are filled with shiny happy people performing miracles in inner city and rural schools.

One recent teaching graduate I talked to was approached many times by TFA. She ultimately declined to apply, but many of her friends did, and ten of them ultimately joined the ranks. None of them have stories that align with the slick image TFA's media department paints of their corp's members.

The internet is full of anecdotes, blogs and message boards filled with stories of woe from TFAers; about being ill prepared for teaching in the hard core classrooms they were sent to, about incredibly long days preparing lesson plans the TFA-way that they never got to use because the behavior issues in the classroom were so bad, about administrative leaders who were forced to take them in because of district contractual agreements who, in protest, did little or nothing to support them, about facing teacher certification exams that contained basic teaching concepts they knew nothing about.

The graduate I talked to was told she would be perfect for the teaching position she applied for in one school, but unfortunately the school was required to hold 10 positions open for TFAers, so they could not hire her. This may have been an easy way to let her down, but there are plenty of stories of other people who have heard the same line.

It would be one thing if the TFA teachers coming in actually were better teachers, but the graduate told me of a friend of hers who got in to TFA (primarily because of the financial benefits) with an undergrad degree in elementary education which qualified her to teach grades k-6. TFA told her they didn't have any positions open in that grade range, but they would like to place her in a middle school teaching math. The new recruit informed them that math was, unfortunately, her worst subject and that she in fact was short one math course in her program. Undaunted, TFA pushed her on to take the math praxis (which she barely passed) and threw her into a 7th grade math class. TFA is counting on her personal ambition to overcome any guilt about not being the best candidate for the job. What does that say about TFA's ethics, or that of their corps?

TFA likes to brag about their record on keeping their corps members in teaching and their alumni in education in general. But a closer examination of their own reports shows that they are playing games with the numbers. Barnett Berry, head of the Center for Teaching Quality, based in North Carolina, looked at the reports TFA points to to support their claim that 2/3 of their graduates are working in the field of education after their two year commitment.

TFA alumni are defined as those who have finished the two-year commitment. But only 87.1 percent of members completed their commitment in 2007, and dropout numbers were higher in earlier years. Yet that 13 percent or higher drop-off is not factored in. What’s more, the field of education is loosely defined to include everything from working with a nonprofit advocacy group to getting a graduate education degree. Finally, there is no sense of whether those who responded to the survey tended to be recent alumni, perhaps only a year past their initial commitments and more likely to be in graduate school or teaching for a third year, or older alumni who have moved on to other careers.

The bottom line was, that the best that could be claimed from reading the stats in TFA's reports is that 16.6% of their recruits were teaching k-12 after their 2 year commitment. The graduate I talked to said the TFA program absolutely killed any desire to stay in teaching for one of her friends.

Many of the alumni remain in the field of education by taking the higher paying administrative jobs in education like principals and superintendents. Their two years in the classroom, plus the carefully polished clout of TFA, catapult them over others who have spent years in the system and know, with great certainty, about the challenges of running a school. A higher percentage of them lead charter schools than public schools perhaps because charters can get around some of the more difficult problems of public schools, like dealing with students who willfully resist participating in the education process. Those students are sent back to the public school to deal with and the TFA principal gets the cushier job of presiding over the students who really want to be there, and usually at a higher salary too.

This is hardly surprising since TFA's main strategy is to recruit leaders from college and the community (they do have older recruits looking for a second career). The fact that these people are motivated to find high paying, high visibility jobs is not surprising. Many TFA recruits come from political science and pre-law programs so it is also not surprising that alumni who leave the field of education, often run for public office. That's the TFA profile.

Comment sections after many stories about TFA are filled with confessions by former corps members recalling daily crying sessions after another fruitless day of teaching, unanswered requests for help from TFA and incredibly long grueling hours. So if TFA puts their pretty posters up at your school with promises of the "sweet" life, better look in the windows first to see if there is a cage in there waiting for you.

GLSEN releases its Curriculum for Elementary Students Aligning with Common Core Standards for English Language Arts

2012-01-20T08:30:00.000-06:00

Long time readers of this blog know we have been calling for the legislators to provide relief from the implementation of the Common Core standards.

If you, as a parent, appreciate your elementary student being taught about LGBT issues through Common Core standards via English Language Arts, you applaud Missouri's adoption of Common Core standards.

If you, as a parent, believe this is an issue to be taught at home at an age appropriate time determined by you, then the Common Core curriculum is not curriculum you should support. It probably won't do much good to talk to your school principal if this is adopted, nor DESE. This will be implemented by our 26 state consortia for students to learn and teachers to teach.

From the article in Education News:

The GLSEN toolkit outlines its application within the Common Core States Standards for English Language Arts and the Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) Standards (4th Edition).

What happened to schools telling children to be nice to everyone because they were a human being? Why are we demanding children to be nice to everyone based on their sexual orientation to the world? Students should be taught to be respectful to each other because of a shared humanity, not because of a particular trait.

“Our latest research on bias-based remarks and bullying in America’s elementary schools provides new understanding of the experiences facing our youngest students,” said GLSEN Executive Director Eliza Byard. “Ready, Set, Respect!is a new instructional resource informed by our findings to address homophobia, gender expression and LGBT-inclusive family diversity at the elementary school level.”

Ready, Set, Respect! contains suggested lesson plans that focus on name-calling, bullying and bias, LGBT-inclusive family diversity and gender roles and diversity. The templates are designed for teachers to use as either standalone lessons or for integration into existing curriculum content or school-wide anti-bullying programs. The toolkit also contains helpful tips for teaching more inclusively and intervening in bullying and promoting respectful recess playtime and physical education.

Do you just possibly think there is a different agenda present in this push to teach 1st graders about these issues? The 68 page report from GLSEN may be found here.

The Education Reformer Cabal (Rhee, Duncan, Gates) Gets Called out at a Data Quality Campaign Conference. It was NOT Appreciated.

2012-01-19T08:35:00.000-06:00

The Data Quality Campaign group had a meeting in Washington DC yesterday about the data to be extracted and supplied by public school children. From the DQC website:

Over the next three years, the DQC will continue to assist states in developing data systems based on the 10 essential elements and in using the information to improve student performance. To help ensure that states benefit from their infrastructure investments, the DQC will focus on two high-priority needs: building demand for the newly available information and helping state agencies assist all stakeholders in harnessing this powerful source of information.

Students are now seen as possessing powerful sources of information for the state agencies. They are not kids eager to learn, they are now to be data driven widgets to supply the workforce. Visit the website and surf around. You can see the tentacles grabbing the data starting in Pre-K on your human capital, sharing it with other states and federal agencies. Do you still think the common core standards (enacted and necessary for data to be shared across state lines) are state led when the data is mandated to be shared with the Federal government?

In 2005, the Data Quality Campaign (DQC) identified the 10 Essential Elements of a Statewide Longitudinal Data System to provide a roadmap for state policymakers as they built statewide longitudinal data systems designed to collect, store, and use longitudinal data to improve student achievement and outcomes. In 2007, through the America COMPETES Act (Public Law 110–69), the federal government codified twelve “Required Elements of a P-16 Education Data System.” In 2009, through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the federal government required states, as a condition of receiving State Fiscal Stabilization Funds, to commit to building a data system which consists of these elements. The subsequent cycle of the federal Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) program, known as the FY 2009 ARRA grants, required that any statewide longitudinal data system supported with the funds must include the 12 COMPETES Act elements. States are required to report annually on their progress in implementing a statewide longitudinal data system that includes the 12 COMPETES elements.

Anyone who still believes the adoption of Common Core Standards was state led must write on the board 100 times (do they still have chalkboards in school?) the definition of "coercion". In fact, the adoption of common core standards should not be labeled state "led", it is state "coerced":

The intimidation of a victim to compel the individual to do some act against his or her will by the use of psychological pressure, physical force, or threats.

DQC provides the roadmap. The states didn't come up with the road map. States are following a script. That's not leading any reform. DQC is partially funded by the Bill Gates Foundation. That's a clever way to make more money, isn't it? Fund a company which provides services as a result of the mandates from the Federal Government....and the taxpayers have to pay for the mandates. This is the new definition of entrepreneurship. Don't use your own money to risk success. Use taxpayer funding to provide money for mandated programs you helped create that will ultimately provide your company with increased business.

One brave retired math teacher (who should know something about numbers and how research is gathered and interpreted) showed up yesterday at the DQC conference providing information on data quality and information about some of the speakers. He gave pamphlets to attendees on how data is easily skewed so education reformers such as Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan can make their claims that data and technology are imperative to ensure education excellence. The DQC didn't want any other research other than theirs presented. He was asked to leave by a policeman and he complied.

So much for the critical learning and research skills these same education reformers claim they want to impart to students. The lesson really is: If you have enough money, lobbyists and politicians in your pocket, your data is what you want it to represent.

From GFBrandenberg's Blog:

So much for freedom of speech…

… if it goes against the agenda of the ultra-rich and their acolytes, one might somehow suspect.
There I was, in a neatly pressed and clean suit and tie, having registered early on-line. I had still had my registration documents (not much) and was holding some pieces of paper, just like many others there. The problem is that I was giving some of those papers out.

At a conference on data quality.

What is this world coming to?

I was giving out a leaflet discussing — data quality and information about some of the speakers. Not positive towards a couple of the speakers, to be accurate. Someone in the conference administration asked me to give up the leaflets, which I declined to do. Soon I was talking to security officers, who told me that I was not allowed to be in the hotel, at the specific request of the tenant — that is, the “Data Quality Campaign” management.

Guess that someone over there reads my blog pretty carefully? Just wonderful … wish I didn’t have readers like that.

Let me also point out that DCQ is a Gates-funded group. Arne Duncan, and Michelle Rhee are both on the agenda of this conference today as speakers… I have been highly critical of them and have given the press and the public access to a lot of data that I could only find by pretty hard searching myself, and that most likely, most other people wouldn’t have found out on their own. Data which shows that the goals and methods and conclusions of this Gates/Duncan/Rhee group are all mistaken at best or perhaps malign.

Nobody beat me up or anything, but I was only able to give out a dozen or so leaflets while I was standing near the front of the auditorium, just outside the Kinko’s where I had my leaflets copied. (Most expensive Kinko’s I’ve ever been to! DAAG! 20 cents per page, per side!) So these things I was giving away were worth forty cents each, plus tax. Man, I was being generous! (Or that’s what I should have said, but didn’t think of saying at the time.)

I wasn’t interested in getting into a shoving match or being picked up or arrested.

So I walked outside and gave out a few there and went home and then wrote this.

You can read the "subversive" pamphlet here. Why would DQC be so concerned about a retired math teacher's data?

Begging at the Education Appropriations Altar

2012-01-18T14:52:00.002-06:00

Yesterday, the MO Education Appropriations Committee held a hearing to hear public petitions and testimony regarding Missouri's spending on education. The full gambit of what MO spends money on, that it considers education, was not discussed. Rather, several state and local groups came forward to o on record either requesting that their funding not be cut or that they might receive an increase. The witnesses who testified represented a wide array of interested parties which, knowing that this hearing did not cover the full education budget for the state, makes me very curious about what else we fund.

The Missouri Kidney Foundation was one such petitioner. In the big picture the money they receive is small and it does go towards educating Missourians about kidney disease and treatment/insurance options, but it seems strange to be paying them out of the Education Budget as opposed to, say, the HSS Public Health Services budget.

The Missouri Association of Sheltered Workshop Managers representative was warmly welcomed by the Committee. From their website, "The MASWM is comprised of a group of professional leaders dedicated to enhancing Sheltered Workshops in Missouri, programs for the people we serve and the business services we provide. The association is a leader in the field of disability awareness through education, advocacy and active involvement in the legislative process." Sheltered workshops are independent local businesses (e.g. thrift store, packaging plant, light assembly) who employ persons with disabilities giving them a dignified way to provide for themselves because, as one site said, they "would rather earn money using their abilities than be given money for their disabilities." Considering the small stipend they receive from the education appropriation versus the $100 a day they would cost the state to keep them in adult day care, this seems to be money well spent. Look for the businesses in your county here and check out what they do.

The appropriations committee's job is difficult, balancing the needs and the budget available to support such operations. A clear sense of their mission is necessary to accomplish this. Several of the witnesses from yesterday will challenge the committee to keep that mission in mind and be consistent in their decision making process.

For example, MOREnet was there making a modest request for $317,000, (given that their funding in previous years had been as high as $16 million.) MOREnet members provide connectivity services like internet access and networking to the states schools and libraries. Their goal is to" explore and deliver new ways to enhance learning opportunities."

Speaking immediately after them was Parents as Teachers who has experienced sharp declines in their funding recently. Through their representative's testimony and follow up questions, it was made clear that one of PAT's major goals in to have parents engage with their children. The was met by a field of heads bobbing affirmatively on the committee agreeing that this was very important.

Juxtapose this with the previous testimony from MOREnet who bragged about how they were able to supply the Joplin dorms, which housed families dislocated after the tornado, with internet access in only a couple days. Their representative noted that he was sure those parents appreciated being able to have Nickelodeon back for their kids so quickly.

So, parents who had a unique opportunity to reconnect and engage with their children after a disaster, were quickly resupplied with the heroin of cable access so they could plop their kids down and disconnect from them again. This seems somewhat at odds with the head bob inducing goal of PAT.

That conflict of purpose for education is a little easier for the committee to resolve since MOREnet does provide internet access and computer networking services to our state's schools, both k-12 and post secondary, which certainly falls in their bailiwick of education funding.

The request from an other petitioner, Teach For America, will prove a little more challenging for the committee in terms of staying consistent. Their upbeat and positive presentation painted a picture of a program that will help students in Missouri's poorest performing schools. The whole story is more complex and poses a real problem for the state. We will have more on TFA later this week.

Here's a Brilliant Educational Reform Idea. (Not Really).

2012-01-17T05:00:00.000-06:00

Many states, including Missouri, have toyed with the idea of lowering the age of compulsory schooling to age 3. That's one way to ensure the implementation of universal pre-school. Educated Citizenry 2020 lists this as one of the long term educational goals for our state and follows Arne Duncan's long term vision on the importance of early childhood learning and expansion of services.

Access to college and higher education has been a hot button issue of late as well. The Obama administration believes not only early childhood learning is important, so is higher education learning. From The Nation:

On June 8, President Barack Obama visited Northern Virginia Community College. He rolled up his sleeves and tooled around under the hood of a hybrid car that students were learning to repair. Later, he gave a speech on the importance of more Americans gaining access to higher education—not just at four-year universities but at community colleges and occupational training programs too.

A Harvard University report found higher education was required of many jobs in the near future, but only required a post-secondary certificate or associate degree. It disputed that many jobs required a four-year college degree. From a report entitled "Pathways to Prosperity":

The president’s remarks departed significantly from the “college for all” rhetoric that frequently dominates the education policy debate. That conversation burst open in February, when the Harvard Graduate School of Education released a report called “Pathways to Prosperity.” The report noted that of the 47 million American jobs expected to be created between now and 2018, about two-thirds will require some sort of education beyond high school, yet a much smaller proportion will require a four-year college degree. About 14 million of these new jobs will be in “mid-skill” occupations that require just a post-secondary certificate or associate’s degree: jobs such as dental hygienist, construction manager and electrician. Such occupations can provide a path into the middle class; indeed, 27 percent of workers with occupational licenses earn more than the average recipient of a bachelor’s degree.

This causes consternation with some education reformers who believe every student should attend college regardless of income, desire or intellect:

The Harvard report—warmly embraced by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan—set off a storm of criticism from self-declared education reformers, who rose to defend the “college for all” approach. “While I agree that all students could benefit from more exposure to the world of work, I vehemently disagree with the [Harvard] authors’ main argument: that we already tried preparing all students for college and it didn’t work,” wrote Kati Haycock, president of the Washington, DC, think tank Education Trust, which focuses on closing the achievement gap and was a major player in advocating for No Child Left Behind and, more recently, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant program. “Most schools still resist the idea that all kids can and should be college-ready. By continuing long-standing, unfair practices of sorting and selecting, they create what is essentially an educational caste system—directing countless young people, especially low-income students and students of color, away from college-prep courses and from seeing themselves as ‘college material.’”

Mandates are in the works for universal preschool and the Washington DC council may be taking the first stab at mandating mandatory post-secondary education. A bill has been introduced that will mandate that everyone apply to at least one post-secondary institution and take either the SAT or ACT. It apparently doesn't matter if the individual doesn't want to attend a post-secondary institution, he/she will be compelled to apply to a college, trade, seminary or vocational program.

So much for allowing parents and students to determine what's best for the student. Your government is nudging (and perhaps legislating) students (who are now adults) into decisions post high school. Do you suppose if the student is accepted into a program he/she will be required (and pay money he/she may not have) to attend that institution?

From westofroanoke.com:

Washington, DC, Considers Making it Illegal Not to Apply to College

01/07/2012

2 Comments

Washington, DC - The thirteen members who make up the Washington D.C. council, are poised to consider legislation requiring all students in the city’s public high schools to apply to at least one post-secondary institution before graduating.

The three page legislation, titled, College Preparation Plan Act of 2012 was introduced by the council’s chairman, Kwame R. Brown (Democrat) on January 4, 2012.

According to the District of Columbia’s official website, the bill has been referred to the District’s Committee of the Whole, meaning all thirteen members of the council will soon be required to vote on the unprecedented legislative act. The thirteen member council is comprised of eleven Democrats, two independents and no Republicans.

Among other things, the bill states:
“To require that all students in Public High Schools apply to at least one post-secondary institution before graduating; to require that all Public High Schools instruct students on the application process, how to apply for financial aid; any relevant materials needed for parents; any other preparation courses necessary to streamline a transition to post-secondary education; to require OSSE to gather information on the number of students that actually attend a post-secondary institution; and to require that every student take the SAT or the American College Testing program (ACT) before graduation.”

The bill also states that “The Mayor shall create a plan that ensures that each student will apply to at least one post-secondary institution before graduation (“plan”). The plan shall include a mandatory workshop. The mandatory workshop shall include the following:
(A) Instructions on how to apply to post-secondary institutions;
(B) Information on how to apply for financial aid;
(C) Information to help students identify the most effective post-secondary institutions, including those with a high graduation rate;
(D) Any relevant materials needed for parents; and
(E) Any other preparation courses necessary to streamline a transition to a post-secondary institution.”

A Death March? The Takeover of American Education by the Elites

2012-01-16T07:06:00.000-06:00

To understand how and why American taxpayers are paying into an public education system that really isn't a public entity any longer, you should read this post from Potter-Williams Report detailing the privatization of public education. There is not much add to this excellent article on the total co-opting of education by the elitist party made up of Democrat and Republican politicians, except you might want to ask your "conservative" Republican state and national legislators why they support an organization backed by George Soros dollars:

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March of the Education Elite

A ruling class of education entrepreneurs has been hard at work for thirty years capitalizing on the dissatisfaction with government schools. The lucrative enterprise began back in the early eighties when the Department of Education issued a “A Nation at Risk,” a doomsday report which declared the nation’s students were falling behind the rest of the world in achievement testing.

Education reform then became a political football which Republicans grabbed from its traditional guardians, the Democrats, and took to the end zone; thus starting a movement toward privatization of the public schools. According to online website edutopia:

James Harvey, a member of the commission that produced "A Nation at Risk," expresses concern about the uses made of the report and the direction it has given to school reform. Today, he says, "educational decisions have been moved as far as possible from the classroom. Federal officials are now in a position to make decisions that would have been unimaginable even two years ago. They've established the criteria for disciplining schools, removing principals and teachers, and even defining appropriate curriculum for American classrooms."

So how did the federal government end up with so much power when Republicans are so opposed to big government? Easy. Elitist conservative right and elitist liberal left joined forces to transform the system from the ground up.

Eventually, Democrats joined with Republicans in this new ed-business and the shake-up of the different camps continues to the present day.

How did opposite political parties converge to create the widespread public/private partnerships in education now present in cities across the country? This alignment began in earnest in 1989 when Teach for America, the well-funded teacher recruiter organization, came into being.

TFA consists of an elitist culture of college grads gleaned mostly from top universities. Its purported mission: to “ensure kids growing up in poverty get an excellent education.” Sounds admirable until you look at whether the achievement gap has changed. According to Wendy Kopp, founder of TFA, “the needle” hasn’t moved much in the last 20 years. So, why is she still in business? Because she has a good thing going.

The touted teacher corps spawned several high rollers in the ed-biz during the last two decades. TFAers created non-profits and charter schools across the country. KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter schools founded by TFA alums and now run by Richard Barth, Kopp’s husband and founding principal of TFA, hold a seat at the head of the table. The New Teachers Project became an arm of the TFA when TFA alum Michelle Rhee, took charge of the non-profit. TNTP has contracted with schools across the nation.
All this didn’t happen by accident. Kopp honed her skills while at Princeton when she helped revive a fledgling business journalism magazine put out by the Foundation for Student Communication. Her summer jobs consisted of making appointments with investors, and asking for money.

As a result, she was an excellent beggar when it came to hitting up corporations for money to keep TFA going. So, with so many high-powered business connections, why did she take donations from George Soros’ Open Society Institute out of Baltimore, Maryland? It’s well known Soros’ money goes to leftist causes. Was Kopp acting as a bridge between liberal Democrats, conservative Republicans, and Leftist billionaires? Does one’s sense of decency go out the window when millions of dollars stare her in the face?

2005: A pivotal year for comingling of political parties in education reform

When Kopp was in the process of organizing staff for her newly created non-profit back in the fall of 1989, she hired a Harvard grad introduced to her by her brother. Whitney Tilson knew finances, and he helped Kopp set up the business. After a few months with TFA, Tilson left to become a hedge fund manager and investment entrepreneur.

The year 2005 proved to be a pivotal year for the formation of a left/right coalition in creating money-making opportunities in the world of education.

In Steven Brill’s Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools Whitney Tilson calls himself a lifelong Democrat, but he co-opted the education message of the right: charters, vouchers and anti-union.
In 2004 he was invited to a fundraising party for then Illinois state Senator Barack Obama at the New York City apartment of George Soros. A year later in June 2005, Tilson again met up with Senator Barack Obama who was helping Tilson and two other financiers start an ed-biz known as Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). Today DFER and Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst highly influence the school reform movement.

The same names come up again and again in the tight knit club of education “reformers.” Rhee was recruited out of Cornell by TFA in 1992 and went on to manage the TFA spinoff TNTP. Rhee’s experience with TNTP brought her up close and personal with local school districts across the country. Much like Kopp, she had natural ability to fundraise from billionaire investors and to persuade superintendents and principals to contract her consulting organization to help with hiring new teachers.

Meanwhile the state of New York was undergoing a major makeover in how politicians, unions and policy setters conducted public school business. For two years Joel Klein, head of NY public schools held off a contract with Randi Weingarten, President of American Federation of Teachers. The standoff led to an arbitration hearing in the summer of 2005 where Michelle Rhee agreed to testify about teacher tenure. This self-proclaimed lifelong Democrat had joined forces with conservatives and opposed the unions’ stronghold on government schools. There’s no indication Rhee has ever denounced her Democrat affiliation even though she now looks like a Republican.

Also during 2005, Klein was influential in shutting down a contributor of the No Child Left Behind program. Democrat and education guru Diane Ravitch had worked on the NCLB bill signed into law in 2003 by George Bush. However Klein (also Democrat) threw her under the bus, therefore causing Ravitch to retaliate and claim poverty itself was the most important factor in whether a child achieves in school, not just bad teachers and accountability—as Klein, Rhee and Obama repeat often.

And in 2005, the first ever Aspen Ideas Festival was held, and Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, and Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson (now Rhee’s husband) sat on an education panel together. [note: a search for a video of this panel came up blank, but Johnson spoke of this meeting in a 2008 panel discussion at the Harvard “Business Summit”; see video here]

Well before Rhee ever became DC schools chancellor; well before she and Kevin Johnson married in 2011; and well before Barack Obama became president, they all either knew each other or were acquainted with each other’s work.

So far all the people reviewed here are Democrats. Yet, Klein had become good friends with Republican Governor Jeb Bush of Florida. Bush had implemented new education rules which raised achievement levels and Klein wanted to know more about it. It didn’t take long before more Republicans and Democrats threw party loyalty aside and became pals..

Eventually, Rhee took Democrats to task for sticking with the status quo mostly held by the teachers’ unions. Even Obama praised her in his debate at Hofstra University before the 2008 elections. She obviously was on his radar most probably all the way back to 2005 when she hit the public circuit in the high profile arbitration hearings with the AFT. Is Rhee doing Obama’s bidding on the transformation of education?

Moving Toward Centralization By Way of Elitists

The “bipartisan” outcome of the back and forth between traditional enemies has led to systemic change in how the federal government now controls much of the conversation when it comes to school reform. Like James Harvey of “A Nation at Risk” said, “Federal officials are now in a position to make decisions that would have been unimaginable even two years ago.”

The DoED issued a Core Curriculum now used by 42 states, as well as a standardized sexual education curriculum. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called for longer school days including Saturdays in some places. Don’t states and municipalities have specific needs which may not match the national guidelines?

Obama ramped up his education spending when he carved $100 billion out of the stimulus bill to dangle money in front of starving school systems. Why? To help poor children achieve? Or to make the old localized systems beholden to a centralized authority?

This alliance between leftist elitists and conservative elitists is not moving away from big government; in fact, it’s moving at warp speed toward bigger government.

To get an understanding of elitists’ mindsets, here are some examples. From Jacobin website:

While visiting a KIPP school in New York City early one morning, where fifth graders were busy with drills at 7:00 a.m., Kopp quietly lamented, without a touch of irony, that her own child of the same age was still in bed. Thus, in the KIPP model, we are presented with the solution to the nation’s educational inequalities: for poor children to succeed, they must willingly submit to Taylorist institutionalization.

Elitism by its very nature causes its adherents to separate from the common masses. In elitists’ minds, they ‘have arrived’ due to their intelligence, financial stability and eagerness to succeed; but here’s the flip side to their self-congratulatory kudos: anyone who isn’t successful must be too ignorant or too poor or have no motivation to achieve beyond their pitiable state.

In his book Indoctrination: How 'Useful Idiots' Are Using Our Schools to Subvert American Exceptionalism, Kyle Olson shows his elitist stripes when he writes:

Education reformer Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of Washington DC schools has said it perfectly: Schools should operate from the position that parents will do nothing to help with their child’s education. Blaming parents is no virtue and accountability is no vice…The blame lies with administrators who are unwilling to remove ineffective and burned-out teachers. The blame lies with teachers unions that are more concerned with increasing pay and benefit levels for their members than they are about teacher quality.

Olson finds it repugnant to blame parents but has no problem blaming unions, administrators, and teachers. Why? These kids weren’t dropped by a stork somewhere out in a cornfield. If teachers are responsible for kids’ lousy grades, what exempts the people who brought the students into the world? Whether Olson knows it or not, he’s promoting socialism. The individual parents are not responsible; no, it’s everybody else’s fault; it’s society’s fault.

He states “the blame lies with teacher unions that are more concerned with increasing pay and benefit levels for their members than they are about teacher quality,” yet he and other Rhee followers constantly equate higher salaries with increased performance. Maybe the unions are dangling some carrots of their own to get teachers to jump through hoops. Rhee can do it, but unions can’t?

The education entrepreneurs know there’s no money to be made in blaming parents—the only thing blaming parents will get you is a lot of grief and anger. Olson, Rhee, Kopp, Obama, Tilson, and all the rest of the self-appointed education engineers would be run out of every last school district if they presumed to tell inner city mothers and fathers they are doing a lousy job. It’s better just to get the tikes away from the useless, good for nothing parents and bring in TFAers and longer school days for the lower feeble minded common ruck while the ruling class get to nurture their little ones.

The march of the education elites goes on. They alone will know what’s best for children, parents, principals and administrators.

The Sunday Education Weekly Reader 01.15.12

2012-01-15T19:07:00.000-06:00

Welcome to the Sunday Education Weekly Reader for 01.15.12. Today we feature:

Rahm Emanuel's bullying tactics to push his agenda for schools (we thought bullying in schools and work environments had been banished)
Sex education (a national curriculum) in the classroom coming soon to your school?
George W. Bush on his thoughts about the 10 year anniversary of No Child Left Behind

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Nancy Pelosi should call astroturf out when it's evident from the left. Here's a story about Rahm Emanuel and his method of operation he utilizes to ram charter schools through in Chicago.

The most disturbing revelations of Chicago's Millionaire Mayor One Percent was the use of paid outside agitators to hold signs, march, and speak in favor of closing public schools and Board of Education officials forging documents to push out homeless students from one school. All of the revelations have come out since New Year's Day, although many of the details had previously been published in Substance, some as early as last summer, when Substance first exposed what is now widely known as Rahm's "Rent A Preacher" scheme.

Things became even more serious on the evening of January 6, 2012. State Representative Esther Golar said she was at the meeting about the proposed closing of Walter Reed School in Englewood, which is set to receive Guggenheim students, and saw people arrive on a bus. She said she talked to them and discovered they were from a halfway house and were paid $25 to come to the meeting.

It looks as if community organizing is still alive and well in Chicago. That's one way to push charter schools through in Illinois.

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Education Week reports:

A new set of standards outlines the minimum that students should learn about their sexuality from their earliest years in school until they leave high school.

The standards, developed over the last few years by dozens of health and education experts, say that by the end of 2nd grade, students should be able to use the proper name for body parts, including male and female anatomy. By the end of 5th grade, they should be able to define sexual abuse and harassment. By the end of high school, they should be able to describe common symptoms of and treatments for sexually transmitted diseases including HIV, according to the standards released today with the backing of four national health education groups.

Is this within the purview of your school and federal government to mandate such courses to teach to your child? You might want to call your school board to determine if such a curriculum will be offered/mandated in your public school system. Ask your superintendent if such a course will help your human capital to become STEM ready.

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And finally, the best for last. George W. Bush talked to TIME magazine about the 10th anniversary of the bipartisan and largely failed policy of No Child Left Behind. It's a short piece but quite telling. This paragraph caught my eye:

So when NCLB is finally re-authorized, what changes would you like to see?
Progress toward excellence. [Former Secretary of Education] Margaret Spellings recognized that in order to be able to accurately judge, you need to measure progress toward the absolute. But what I’m worried about is the pressure to have too many goals or measure the wrong thing.

With all due respect to the former president, this is one of the worst policies ever in education and has been a sorry blueprint for students, teachers and administrators. It's been a colossal failure for increasing academic achievement and billions of dollars are down the drain. He should not only be worried about too many goals and/or measuring the wrong "thing", he should be penitent NCLB was ever passed and these goals and measurements have been put in the hands of the federal government, the NGA and the CCSSO.

Taxpayers are forced to pay taxes for services in which they have no voice. And he's actually PROUD of this?

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Education thought for the week:

Teachers open the door. You enter by yourself.--Chinese proverb

Republicans Applauded by a Democratic Lawmaker for Supporting Obama's Educational Agenda

2012-01-15T06:00:00.000-06:00

On the heels of our last posting, Republicans are Supporting the Federal Takeover of Education, a blogger in Nashville confirmed (from a Democratic congressman's lips) the alliance of conservative Republican legislators and Obama's educational plan. From Enclave:

Democrat Jim Cooper celebrates conservatives supporting President Obama on charter schools

Congressman Jim Cooper has been making the interview rounds. Yesterday he met with the press and characterized the feather in Obama's domestic cap as charter schools:

In domestic policy, it's amazing what you find here. If you talk to folks in Nashville, some of the most conservative folks in Nashville who are, for example, charter school advocates, real education reform advocates, are thrilled with Obama. Thrilled. And [Education Secretary] Arne Duncan has done a great job, and this isn't just Race To The Top money, but it's an amazing change in policy at the federal level with very little fanfare, that Congress didn't have anything to do with, really.

Those of us who are not "real education reform advocates", that is those of us who question the warping influence of venture philanthropy wealth in public education, are not quite as thrilled as the conservatives and Rep. Cooper is with President Obama move to the right. (Photo credit: The Entrepreneur Center).

We aren't the only ones mystified about this marriage of conservatives and progressives. Charters (privatization) and amazing changes at the federal level (nationalization of standards and unconstitutional powers to the Department of Education) are the educational reforms du jour. Both of these "reforms" take power away from the taxpayers.

Are you starting to believe this is an alliance of the elite? No wonder Congressman Cooper, Jeb Bush, Obama, Arne Duncan, School Choice Week, and other educational reform proponents are celebrating. It's fun having all the money and power. The taxpayers are mandated to pay for unproven, untested, underfunded and unconstitutional mandates that result in a financial windfall for the companies providing services for the mandates.

Congressman Cooper states the change in federal policy had very little fanfare. He's correct. The circumvention of existing FERPA laws was accomplished via regulatory action allowing invasive personal data on children to be shared with other federal agencies and private organizations. Instead of celebrating, Congressman Cooper and other state legislators should be fighting tooth and nail to make certain their citizens are not forced to share their personal data with the government.

I'm not holding my breath.

Republicans are Supporting the Federal Takeover of Education. How to Register Your Displeasure with the Republican Leadership.

2012-01-14T16:32:00.000-06:00

This picture of Obama, Arne Duncan and Jeb Bush illustrates the bipartisanship present in the current educational reforms pushed by the current administration.

We keep asking the question: Why are Republicans backing the federal centralization of education? Aren't Republicans supposed to be the party of small government and individual liberty? Haven't we heard the Republican politicians on the state and national level state decry Obamacare because of the mandates impinging on individual choice? Aren't Republicans supposed to be from the party not aligning itself with increased centralization? What's the difference between the takeover of healthcare and the takeover of education?

Why are Republicans such as Jeb Bush wrapping themselves in the educational mandates in Race to the Top or the Educational Reforms Formerly Known as Race to the Top? These mandates are from Arne Duncan and are nothing but the Federal Government directing public education on all levels to the point where local school districts are ruled impotent and useless. This impotence and uselessness of legal institutions and officials reminds me of the current stance of state legislators. They state, "Oh, it's all the Board of Education's doing. Oh, it's all the governor's fault. Oh, it's not OUR fault we have mandates the state can't afford. Oh, we think centralization is a good thing, don't you worry about it, it will all be fine".

They refuse to act on not implementing the standards or refuse to fund unconstitutional programs that plunge us into more debt. They look at voters and shrug their shoulders. I'm thinking we might as well have mandates to do away with the state legislature since it can't apparently have any influence or power in standing up against federal regulations and mandates. Taxpayers might as well save the money paying state legislator salaries as they aren't apparently interested in protecting the state constitution from federal intrusion.

Many of our legislators want to expand charters and expand Teach for America which will take school decisions out of local districts' hands (and taxpayers) and give them to private companies and DESE. Once again, public money is being used to fund education via agencies and companies unaccountable to the taxpayers. Are you feeling good about this scenario? Why aren't the legislators on the state level acting to keep us out of debt and increased federal control?

This lack of action has been noted by a former teacher and writer in California. Doug Lasken has written a great piece calling Republican politicians to task for their refusal to confront this educational nightmare head on. It's time to call these politicians to task for supporting this administration's disastrous educational policy:

Stop the Department of Education’s Power Grab

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Doug Lasken

Here’s my bio: I am a retired LA Unified teacher of 25 years, currently coaching debate at a private school (I also teach writing in Korea each summer through the UCLA Writing Project) and I have consulted for a number of research institutes, including Fordham, Pioneer, and WestEd . I have been politically active in the “education wars” for many years, starting in the 80′s when, as a classroom teacher, I was told never to teach English to Hispanic students (per so-called “bilingual education”), never to teach grammar, spelling or phonics (per Whole Language), and never to use direct instruction for science (per “constructivist” philosophy). I have freelanced many articles across the county on these subjects and am now engaged in opposing the Common Core standards, a colossal cash cow that will do virtually nothing for American education.. This petition represents my current level of frustration with the GOP for not acting as the opposition party it is supposed to be against Obama’s corrupt and ill-advised education initiatives..

Best, Doug Lasken

We the undersigned do not agree on all things, but we are in close agreement on education, and in particular these five propositions:

1. The federal government is barred by the United States Constitution from imposing academic standards and public school curricula on the states, the very thing it is attempting to do through the Obama administration programs Race to the Top (RttT) and the Common Core Standards(CCS).

2. In addition to imposing standards and curriculum on the states, RttT mandates that states collect extensive and detailed personal information on students, and that this information be submitted to the federal Department of Education, from which it will be available to other agencies. We oppose this on Constitutional grounds.

3. The national price tag for CCS is estimated at $30 billion (and perhaps as much as $210 billion) most of which cost is to be borne by the states. This money will enrich special interests- publishing and testing empires- but will do virtually nothing to save America’s bankrupted public schools. The undersigned believe that spending $30 billion on standards is like painting a car before junking it- good for the painters, a useless expense for the car owner.

4. The news media has decided that since conservatives object to spending money, and since conservative views are represented in the Republican party, then people who object to RttT and CCS must be represented by the Republican party. The undersigned have found, however, that the Republican party, as distinct from individual candidates, does not represent those seeking sound education policy. Time and again, at all levels from local to federal,the undersigned have encountered ignorance and indifference regarding RttT and CCS from the Republican party and the people it has helped to achieve office. Republicans as much as Democrats have been seduced by the $30 billion and slick sales talk into acquiescence to RttT and CCS. The news media is oblivious to this.

5. Therefore, we the undersigned here state that the Republican party does not represent our views on American education, that the Republican party is in fact aligned with the Democratic party in pushing through wasteful and highly problematic Democratic programs, and that we therefore disavow allegiance to and support of the Republican party in its policies towards education, and we ask that the media acknowledge that this diminution of Republican support has occurred.

If you would like to sign this petition, write to Doug Lasken at dlasken514@aol.com

Aristotle Is Dead

2012-01-13T14:34:00.002-06:00

Aristotle RIP

Ok, so that's not exactly news. He's been dead for 2300 years or so. But the deductive reasoning Aristotle championed is now dead. Sure he made some errors in his conclusions about the natural sciences, but that was because his access to the technological means to truly study natural phenomenon was limited, which skewed his conclusions. But was he wrong to even investigate and form those opinions? Ask any high school or older student today and you will probably hear, "Yes, he was wrong." His conclusions were opinions and all opinions are equal, therefore, there is no point in investigating any opinion.

Dr. Stephen Anderson wrote an essay on moral education programing in Canadian schools titled, Moments of Startling Clarity. His essay, published in Education Forum, looked at the phenomenon of moral relativism and political correctness in the minds of today's students.

You would think that a population who has been so steeped in the language of minority rights and character traits would recognize human rights abuses and be able to form opinions against such practices. But this example, from his senior philosophy class, paints a different picture of the mind of today's youth.

I decided to open by simply displaying, without comment, the photo of Bibi Aisha. Aisha was the Afghani teenager who was forced into an abusive marriage with a Taliban ﬁghter, who abused her and kept her with his animals. When she attempted to ﬂee, her husband's family caught her, hacked off her nose and ears, and left her for dead in the mountains. After crawling to her grandfather’s house, she was saved by a nearby American hospital.

I felt quite sure that my students, seeing the suffering of this poor girl of their own age, would have a clear ethical reaction, from which we could build toward more difficult cases. The picture is horriﬁc. Aisha’s beautiful eyes stare hauntingly back at you above the mangled hole that was once her nose. Some of my students could not even raise their eyes to look at it. I could see that many were experiencing deep emotions. But I was not prepared for their reaction.

I had expected strong aversion; but that’s not what I got. Instead, they became confused. They seemed not to know what to think. They spoke timorously, afraid to make any moral judgment at all. They were unwilling to criticize any situation originating in a different culture. They said, “Well, we might not like it, but maybe over there it’s okay.” One student said, “I don’t feel anything at all; I see lots of this kind of stuff.” Another said (with no consciousness of self-contradiction), “It’s just wrong to judge other cultures.”

The refusal to judge receives the highest esteem in today's culture. Denyse O'Leary wrote of TheBestSchools.org :

In recent decades, a new view has taken root. The new view is that courage and cowardice have no intrinsic reality. Neither does the classical virtue of justice or the vice of injustice. It all depends on how you feel about things, which in turn depends on your culture. That underlies the students’ inability to move from “I feel bad” to “This is wrong.”

Holding this view means that one is incapable of seeing the wrongness of genocide by the Hutus, or human sacrifice of the Mayans, or stoning of rape victims by fanatical Muslims. And if you cannot see that such behavior is wrong, you are not motivated to do anything to stop it.

It could be said that this cultural relativism arose from the field of anthropology where early anthropologists refused to judge the cultures they were studying because such judgements were based on Western social biases. This belief led to their refusal to sign the 1947 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Carolyn Fluehr Lobban, a professor of anthropology said, "[T]his view is being challenged by critics inside and outside the discipline [of anthropology], especially those who want anthropologists to take a stand on key human-rights issues."

Writer Elsa Zee, who teaches college in Canada, has heard the mantra many times in her classroom; all opinions are equal. From her own black students she heard that slavery was neither good nor bad. Either view is just an opinion and all opinions are equal.

And then, one day, I realized: their opinion has nothing to do with thinking. It has to do with not thinking. They don't give - in fact, they don't have - any arguments, not even bad arguments, bad thinking. Nothing at all. Not even a logical fallacy. Not a single shred of backing.

They just " know" that opinions are equal.

I'm thinking this explains why, even if they KNOW what communism really is (which most of them don't), today's youth will not see anything bad in it. They will actively resist forming an opinion about a political system that killed 62 million of its own people. Whether they do so, to adhere to a virtue of politically correct non-judgementalism or, because they do not wish to investigate and think too hard about it in the event they must defend their belief, we won't know. But we can assume they can't be counted on to stand up for what is right. An even scarier thought is that they will go along with anything dished out by our own government because forming an opinion about or investigating it is "wrong."

Judy Collins and the Majority of Americans "Really Don't Know Clouds At All" and the Danger to Individual Privacy

2012-01-12T14:47:00.000-06:00

Do you remember Judy Collins' song "Both Sides Now" in which she mentions clouds, love and life? She may have been on the cutting edge of technology in the late '60s and she didn't know how prophetic her words were regarding America's (and global) current technology phase. We are living in an age that allows data to be gathered from every human capital's life.

We've written about the common cartridge and the plan for a child's curriculum to be pre-loaded, plugged into a computer and delivered to the student for his/her study. The teaching profession will cease to become a profession, as teachers will mainly monitor the student's progression (or non-progression) with the curriculum. Direct teaching will become archaic as there will be decreased need for human instruction.

This administration believes to become globally competitive, we need to know what the other countries around the globe are doing and what they are studying so we can play on the same field with the same data. In this era of teaching "globalism" and the belief we are living in a global community and not an exceptional nation, an international curriculum becomes desirous and important. We now need the common cartridge to supply a national curriculum with the desire (the Clinton Global Initiative) to adopt international goals for education. We are not only ignoring the fact Federal law states a national curriculum is illegal, we are jumping ahead on the global Monopoly board eager to be part of international educational goals.

Via technology we can now be part of the global community, compare our nation to others (and vice versa), and live the international dream. Forget about the American dream, it has been extinguished in favor of common and international goals. How do we believe this revised global dream is occurring and replacing the American dream?

First, states must adopt common core standards because all the other states have to talk to each other to determine how their particular state is doing in implementing the standards and the result of the implementation. The data has to be uniform in the comparison and cut down on variables.
Second, the data is required to be sent to varying Federal agencies (Departments of Education, Labor and Health & Human Services) so they can run their own data supplying the answers to their particular questions and agendas. Traditional educational data (name, address, emergency information, test results, etc) is expanded to include the social and personal data needed to service the child.
Third, this information can be supplied to third parties the Department of Education deems appropriate in the interest of education without your knowledge or permission.
Fourth, in the circumvention of the FERPA law, there is no language indicating this information will not be shared with foreign entities. Why should there be any withholding of this information if it is to be used for the "global good"?

Your family's and child's information will be used from the time your child is born and all through the workforce. Where will this information be stored? In the Cloud. Don't know much about the Cloud? Here's an article from the Wall Street Journal describing the storage of data by the cloud where data taken from your child will reside:

At its most basic level, the "cloud" is simply the Internet, or the vast array of servers around the world that comprise it. When people say a digital document is stored, or a digital task is being performed in the cloud, they mean that the file or application lives on a server you access over an Internet connection, via a Web browser or app, rather than on "local" devices, like your computer or smartphone.

What are some pitfalls of personal information being stored in the Cloud?

Another problem is privacy. Many of these cloud services have good security, but prying hackers are relentless and smart, so consumers should be careful about what they store in the cloud. You may not care if a family photo is swiped, but your Social Security number is a different matter.

The cloud with "educational" data (paid for by school districts via taxpayers) will store this information and will then be used and/or sold for data driven decisions. This is ostensibly done to improve education. Starting at birth, children will now be tracked and assessed and this information entered into the cloud throughout their stint as a public schooled student.

Here is an article from MIT highlighting Google Chairman Eric Schmidt's speech about how life will be structured for us and our children and our increasing dependence on increased data. From MIT News:

A “global mind” comprising humans and computers offers huge opportunities for informed decision-making, democratization of information, and world-wide problem solving, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said at the MIT Sloan School of Management Tuesday.

Schmidt said the rapid accumulation of data will push people to find better ways to solve global problems, with new, faster technology to back them up.

Throughout his talk, titled “The Future of the Global Mind,” delivered before a capacity audience at the Wong Auditorium, Schmidt committed himself to the idea that evolution of and access to technology will benefit humanity. Discussing world leaders’ approach to the global economic crisis, Schmidt said that many world leaders he has met are extremely well-informed about the issues, and can offer thoughtful interpretations of the relevant facts and data.

“Technology is not really about hardware and software any more,” Schmidt said. “It’s really about the mining and use of this enormous [volume of] data” in order to “make the world a better place.”

This is the future of the world envisioned by this current administration as well as it is ignoring FERPA law and writing regulations allowing your child's data to be released to the global cloud. Do you believe that it is our DATA that will make the world a better place or the PEOPLE inhabiting the world?

If you subscribe to the mindset that people are only important for their data, then you should jump on this technology bandwagon with MIT and Eric Schmidt. If the endgame is the person's data, the path taken to get there is secondary. The purpose of educational data is not to improve the education itself, it's to improve the data resulting from the education. It doesn't matter WHAT the curriculum is...as long as the data is trending upward, it can be deemed a success.

Do you know you are providing this information on you and your child to venture capitalists and technology companies via the Federal government for free and without your active permission? Just by your child walking into a public school and receiving services entitles the government to data mine your child. The data is fed into the cloud and then transmitted to who, what and where?

When Mr. Schmidt states "the mining and use of this enormous [volume of] data” (is used) in order to “make the world a better place” who is deciding how and why this information is to be used? Whatever happened to the apparent archaic idea that the individual could affect change on his/her own? Would Abraham Lincoln have achieved the presidency based on his data set? Did Lincoln require government intervention (or private research firms) to reach his goal? Would he have been allowed to pursue his goals based on his data set of failure?

According to Schmidt's and Arne Duncan's theory, people are valuable on the global level for their data and need to be tracked so an institution, agency and/or entity can "make the world a better place". This is important to understand. The data is for the WORLD to become better, NOT the individual. The need of the state supersedes the desire of the individual.   The information is to be used for governmental systems, the workforce, and private companies making a financial killing interpreting human data sets.

When children are born today, parents should negotiate a price for the government to take data information for their child. There is no free lunch and there should be no free data taken from your baby for the government to use for its purposes via through the Cloud. The government belongs to the people, the people do not belong to the state. The peoples' data does not belong to the state nor should be taken from the people.

As Judy Collins sang in her song about clouds:

But now they only block the sun/They rain and snow on everyone/So many things I would have done/But clouds got in my way

Why Should You Stand Up Now?

2012-01-11T14:03:00.002-06:00

The catalog of dystopian literature that is required reading for middle and high school is quite large; from 1984, to Brave New World, to The Giver. So you would think that with all of us reading these novels, and seeing the wretched outcome which began with the best intentions, we would be on our guard against having any of that happen in our real world. Unfortunately, these books tend to plop you down in the middle of the new "utopian" society and rarely take you through the path that society traveled to get there. Recognizing that path is critical to preventing society from ending up in the dystopia. Andy Andrews has written a book that brings that path into focus as he tries to answer the question, "How Do You Kill 11 Million People?"

The book is a short read but it effectively lays out the position that we at MEW have been trying to make for almost a year now. Andrews chooses to examine, from among many possible examples, the way the Nazi government was able to eradicate 11 million people with the minimal use of force and personnel. Through a policy of lies and incremental changes, they were able to ultimately herd people, who sometimes outnumbered the Nazi guards 100:1, to the concentration camps. The general public was not willing to envision where the incremental changes being imposed might be going. By the time they were confronted with that reality, their fellow citizens were passing through their towns in cattle cars toward the death camps. Even then many were not willing to face their own failure to stop the small changes that were made earlier.

One particularly chilling passage from Pastor Erwin Lutzer's book When a Nation Forgets God, illustrates how human tendencies can lead to such horrific outcomes. A German eyewitness recalls what people thought in the last 30's. (emphasis mine),

We heard stories of what was happening to the Jews, but we tried to distance ourselves from it, because we felt, what could anyone do to stop it?

Each Sunday morning we would hear the train whistle blowing in the distance, when the wheels coming over the tracks. We became disturbed when we heard cries coming from the train as it passed by. We realized that it was carrying Jews like cattle in the cars!

Week after week the whistle would blow. We dreaded to hear the sounds of those wheels because we knew that we would hear the cries of the Jews en route to a death camp. Their screams tormented us.

We knew the time the train was coming and when we heard the whistle blow we began singing hymns. By the time the train came past our church, we were singing at the top of our voices. If we heard the screams, we sang the more loudly and soon we heard them no more.

Years have passed and no one talks about it now, but I still hear that train whistle in my sleep.

The German people were not uneducated or ill informed. They had a great Prussian education system and lots of news sources. But their leaders delivered the ultimate plan to them in stages and lied to them during the implementation phases to keep the people from rising up when they surely had the numbers (and clean conscience) to put a stop to it. This is why groups like Missouri Education Watchdog, Homeschooling United, and Truth in American Education are trying to expose the grand plan for education and get parents to speak up when the incremental changes are being imposed.

So yes, Parkway PE teachers may have just wanted a fun tool to get kids to think about exercising more. But the P20 database is already set up which can track individual student data. So, as long as it's been collected, what's to stop someone from adding the PolarGoFit data in there. (Maybe under: Amount of Non-school Activity Involvement , Health Condition Progress Report, Overall Health Status) From this point on, whatever the local school administration intended for that data is irrelevant. The data is out of their hands and the grand plan moves forward.

The plans already exist to share data from the LDS with various government agencies like Health and Human Services. This is where the data gets tied in to Obamacare. The government already plans to pay for everyone's health care which means they really do care about what you are doing now to maintain good health. They have convinced people that all health care policy will be reasonable and responsible. How do we know that? Because they have promised it will all be based on data. Where will HHS get this data? Why, from the P20 LDS of course. So you can pretty much count on that data about how sedentary you or your child was to be used to make decisions about the type and amount of health care services you or your child receive in the future. This is not wild conjecture. This is fact and it is pretty logical. What started as a simple accommodation on your part to wear some sort of tracking device will likely become the means by which you will be denied certain care in the future.

To all the parents who do end up going to their school board to fight against things like the PolarGoFit bracelets or the banning of home-packed lunches, while you may feel a little like someone who brings a tank to a knife fight, keep in mind that you may in fact be dismantling the train tracks before the boxcars can be loaded with human beings.

What Do Prince and Educational Reform Mandates Have in Common? They both Changed their Names.

2012-01-10T06:00:00.000-06:00

We are delighted to feature a guest blogger writing about Race to the Top like mandates that Missouri instituted but without Race to the Top funding. Similar to the announcement of the singer Prince changing his name to symbols (and thereafter being referred to as "The Artist formerly Known as Prince"), the Race to the Top mandates and their copy cat mandates have evolved into a name changing event as well. In the interest of being accurate and tracing their transformation, let it forever be known that the mandates instituted in Missouri will no longer be referred to as "Race to the Top". Hereafter, one will correctly speak of them in terms of "The Educational Reforms Formerly Known as Race to the Top".

As we move forward in 2012 with regards to education reform in Missouri, there seems to be a bit of confusion among our state legislators on Facebook in understanding what Race to the Top (RTTT) was and how components of the federal program are now being implemented in Missouri schools. First and foremost, Missouri DID NOT win a RTTT grant. I think most of us involved with the education issues understand and know this to be true. When legislators respond to concerned citizens, they all state this fact. However, upon further research into the reforms and programs being put into place by DESE, it is normal to question the difference. Below you will find the major components of the US Department of Education’s federally funded Race to the Top program. This information can be found here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/fact-sheet-race-top

The Race to the Top emphasizes the following reform areas:

1. Designing and implementing rigorous standards and high-quality assessments, by encouraging states to work jointly toward a system of common academic standards that builds toward college and career readiness, and that includes improved assessments designed to measure critical knowledge and higher-order thinking skills. (Common Core State Standards)

2. Attracting and keeping great teachers and leaders in America’s classrooms, by expanding effective support to teachers and principals; reforming and improving teacher preparation; revising teacher evaluation, compensation, and retention policies to encourage and reward effectiveness; and working to ensure that our most talented teachers are placed in the schools and subjects where they are needed the most. (Teacher and Leaders evaluation system tied to test scores)

3. Supporting data systems that inform decisions and improve instruction, by fully implementing a statewide longitudinal data system, assessing and using data to drive instruction, and making data more accessible to key stakeholders.

4. Using innovation and effective approaches to turn-around struggling schools, by asking states to prioritize and transform persistently low-performing schools. (turnaround model)

In June 2010, the Missouri State Board of Education officially adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). According to the DESE website http://dese.mo.gov/ Missouri schools need to transition to the new by the 2014/2015 school year as that is the first year all students will be REQUIRED to take the first Smarter Balanced Assessments aligned to the new standards. DESE refers to the new assessments as the Next Generation Assessments.

According to the DESE site http://dese.mo.gov/qs/esea-waiver.html Missouri is in the process of creating an evaluation procedure for teachers and leaders. Currently local districts may design their own evaluation systems. Under the new system, schools may use either the DESE created model evaluation tool, or align their own evaluation tool to the DESE tool.

Missouri currently has a statewide longitudinal data system and most recently secured a company to provide student information services at a cost to local school districts. http://dese.mo.gov/

Missouri has already implemented the strategies in utilizing the turnaround model in the Kansas City School District. Missouri also received a $9 Million grant from the Federal government to institute turnaround models and transform persistently low performing schools. http://www2.ed.gov/programs/sif/summary2010/moapp10.pdf

The state has also applied for a NCLB waiver to release our state from the accountability mandates within the law. http://dese.mo.gov/qs/esea-waiver.html

In the 44 page waiver request, the state has to agree to certain terms. It does not take a rocket scientist to make an educated guess as to what the federal government wants in return for granting the waiver. If you guessed all of the above actions and compliances must be agreed to by a state, you are correct! You receive a gold star and may move to the head of the class!

So… in light of all of the changes DESE has made over the past two years, I guess one could say the state of Missouri has fully implemented all of the components of RTTT, only one chunk at a time and without having to “officially” state that we won Race to the Top.

I hope this clears up any confusion our elected officials may have with regards to RTTT and the NCLB waiver. As anyone can clearly see, they are all one of the same! Yes Virginia, there really is RTTT in Missouri! Shh! Just don’t tell our legislators that!

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Our guest blogger has eloquently explained the issues surrounding "The Educational Reforms Formerly Known as Race to the Top". This concocted controversy of stating that Missouri didn't receive RTTT (even though we are instituting the mandates) should be put to rest so taxpayers and legislators can focus on the facts of the current educational landscape which is detrimental (and unconstitutional) for students, parents, teachers and taxpayers.

Enjoy "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" singing about "Controversy". Our guest blogger has cleared up any such controversy about Race to the Top spin from our legislators.

Welcome to Common Core Math Standards! Slaves are Picking Oranges and Getting Beatings.

2012-01-09T08:50:00.000-06:00

Did you read the story about the outrage of a Georgia school using references to slaves picking oranges in a Math problem?

Some Georgia parents are outraged after they say an elementary school used examples of slavery and beatings to teach their children about math.

The problems in question appeared on a third grader's math assignment.

One problem said, ‘Each tree had 56 oranges. If 8 slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave work?'

But the questions didn't stop there.

‘If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in 1 week?'

Terrance Barnett was outraged when he read his son's third grade homework assignment."I'm having to explain to my 8-year-old why slavery or slaves or beatings are in a math problem, that hurts," he said.

Another father, Christopher Braxton, had a similar reaction. "It kind of blew me away," said Braxton, "If Frederick, if anyone got any beatings you don't put that into the homework of any sort."

Reasonable taxpayers and parents like Mr. Barnett and Mr. Braxton ARE correct when they state "you don't put that into the homework of any sort". What many parents and taxpayers are unaware about is WHY these type of comments may appear more often in math problems. There is a reason and it's because of common core standards. From the school:

The Gwinnett school district spokesperson, Sloan Roach, said the third grade teachers were attempting to cross curriculums by adding some social studies lessons into the math problems. But the problem with these questions was the lack of historical context. (emphasis added)

"We understand that there are concerns about these questions and we agree that these questions were not appropriate," said Roach.

Perhaps Mr. Roach should have explained the "cross curriculum" mandate this teacher was attempting to fulfill, otherwise known as Common Core standards. The mandates (note that these are mandates, not suggestions) require the "cross curriculum" of math problems and social studies content. From ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development):

"...although standards in science and social science are being considered, the common core standards currently address only English language arts and mathematics. Effectively integrating all content areas into instruction is essential for students to receive a comprehensive education.

By adopting Common Core's standards for their own, California and Massachusetts (MEW comment: insert YOUR state's name here) significantly weaken the intellectual demands on students in the areas of language and literature. They also weaken the base of literary and cultural knowledge needed for actual college-level work now implied by each state's current or draft standards."

So how is a school teaching the social studies it now does not have time to teach because of Common Core Standards mandates? They are combining math problems to include historical facts normally taught in social studies! The teachers have no time to teach civics or history, so those clever folks (they are NOT your state or school district employees) who are now writing the standards for YOUR teachers have mandated they integrate history and cultural knowledge in a tidy math word problem.

The third grade teacher was probably attempting to integrate what he/she is mandated and "allowed" to do within the mandates. This is one of the first egregious examples of how the common core standards nightmare will manifest itself. Did the teacher use bad judgment in the curriculum written? Yes and no. "Yes" to the parents and taxpayers as it came across as being incredibly insensitive but "no" if you understand the legalistic and dispassionate interpretation of the curriculum integration mandate by the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Again, these type of mandates circumvent common sense which Mr. Braxton succinctly sums up in one sentence:

"Whoever put together this paperwork and everything else, the schools and everything else shouldn't teach it this way," said Braxton.

Mr. Braxton is correct. "The schools and everything else SHOULD'NT teach this way". When a school has been mandated to teach subjects in a "one size fits all" method, the argument and push back should be targeted to CCSSI, the state school boards and the governors who signed onto this unproven, untested, unconstitutional and underfunded experiment which will hinder students and teachers.

Welcome to the world of Common Core standards.

Did the district provide enough training (maybe it didn't have the money available for these underfunded mandates) to this teacher so he/she could effectively integrate social studies and math "seamlessly" (a buzz word in Common Core public relations talking points)? The teacher's treatment of an important subject in American history used out of context in a math problem has caused concern on many levels. Will the teacher now be labelled as an "ineffective teacher" so he/she can be reassigned or terminated and a TFA teacher can take his/her place in the classroom?

This whole scenario is a script for disaster.

The Sunday Education Weekly Reader 01.08.12

2012-01-08T20:45:00.000-06:00

Welcome to the Sunday Education Weekly Reader for January 8, 2012. This week's articles include:

Question for the education political junkies regarding the latest Republican debate
Privacy concerns raised and lawsuit filed...but not regarding education privacy invasion
An update on student tracking bracelets
Parents should be careful what they wish for

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Are you concerned about the state of American education? Do you disagree with the increasing nationalization and centralization of standards constitutionally left to the states? Are you hoping the Republican presidential candidates will take a stand against this tightening of the Federal noose?

I've received reports from two sources about the intriguing discussion of education between the candidates during the Republican debate on January 7, 2012:

One source says there was NO discussion of education by the moderator or candidates
Another source: "The debate was two hours long. Number of references to education = 1 (Ron Paul accused Rick Santorum of supporting NCLB), discussion time: about 15 seconds. There was not one question on education from the moderators."

Regardless if the educational debate lasted 0 seconds or 15 seconds, the federal takeover of education creating a system with no taxpayer accountability continues without serious debate.

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A lawsuit has been filed against the Department of Homeland Security over its plans to monitor social media sites.

Where's the outrage over the Department of Education's circumvention of FERPA privacy laws gutting protection of the usage of student/family private data? When did the act of walking into a public school allow the government to gather and share personal data of its citizens with agencies and private entities?

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We wrote about the tracking bracelets used in the Parkway District in gym class and the future plans of the district to send them home with the students to measure behavior 24/7 for one week. The company manufacturing these bracelets, polargofit, is located in Finland, but China is ready to jump on the bandwagon as well.

The Chinese version may be more versatile and the school district might want to expand its tracking ability on students. There are tags for clothing, key fobs, etc which opens up a world of possibility for expanded tracking information.

From the product website:

UHF Access Control Tags & Wristbands

860~960 MHz ISO 18000-6B, ISO 18000-6C and EPC Gen 2 tags and wristbands for building security, personnel access control, student attendance, bag and equipment tagging, logistics, inventory and manufacturing management systems, toll collection, parking and vehicle access control and laundry management.

It's important to keep track of the human capital (and the physical data) needed for the workforce. Yes, it's all for the children, right?

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Should children from birth should be tracked by the government?

"In its successful Early Learning Challenge application, Massachusetts committed to establishing a system of developmentally appropriate assessment of young children, birth to third grade, including kindergarten entry assessment."

Maybe Ritalin can be prescribed for a squirmy 6 month old who doesn't fit into the standard data set for that age group.

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Educational thought for the week:

How Fathers Influence Academic Achievement

‎"The way fathers play with their children also has an important impact on a child's emotional and social development. Fathers spend a much higher percentage of their one-on-one interaction with infants and preschoolers in stimulating, playful activity than do mothers. From these interactions, children learn how to regulate their feelings and behavior. Rough-housing with dad, for example, can teach children how to deal with aggressive impulses and physical contact without losing control of their emotions."

Schoolchildren Used Once Again for Adult Agendas: OWS & Common Core State Standards Initiative

2012-01-07T22:06:00.000-06:00

You may have read last week about 3rd grade children singing a pro-occupy Wall Street song in a Virginia public school. It was named "Part of the 99" and the Daily Mail listed the words to the song:

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Some people have it all
But they still don’t think they have enough
They want more money
A faster ride
They’re not content
Never satisfied
Yes — they’re the 1 percent

I used to be one of the 1 percent
I worked all the time
Never saw my family
Couldn’t make life rhyme
Then the bubble burst
It really, really hurt
I lost my money
Lost my pride
Lost my home
Now I’m part of the 99

Some people have it all
But they still don’t think they have enough
They want more money
A faster ride
They’re not content
Never satisfied
Yes — they’re the 1 percent

I used to be sad, now I’m satisfied
’Cause I really have enough
Though I lost my yacht and plane
Didn’t need that extra stuff
Could have been much worse
You don’t need to be first
’Cause I’ve got my friends
Here by my side
Don’t need it all
I’m so happy to be part of the 99
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There is some question whether or not 3rd graders could come up with such lyrics, life experiences and knowledge of the Occupy Movement to sing such a song, or whether they were provided with the words and idea by adults with a pro-Occupy agenda.

Below is a video from middle school students extolling the virtues of common core standards. We've provided videos of teachers singing Common Core praises, but this is the first we've seen of children being excited about being part of an expensive experiment that is:

untested
unproven
unconstitutional
underfunded

Do you think 8th grade students know what common core standards are or are they furthering an adult agenda? Do you think these children wrote the script for Common Core or were they provided with a script and props by the adults?

The students hold up flash cards for the camera and are great looking kids. Ask yourself as you read through the common core talking points if you truly believe these kids know what they are flashing on the screen. Do they believe the reason students are having dismal test results is because the country doesn't have national standards? Do they believe their high school success depends on standards set by a consortia? Do they know these standards are underfunded and will impact their future economic lives? Are they aware they are entering a "one size fits all" education which does not foster creativity or innovation on behalf of the teachers or the students?

Watch the video on the Cocopah Middle School website:

An introduction to the Common Core Standards, presented by students of Cocopah Middle School

Look Who's On the Guest List at the MO Legislature

2012-01-06T10:36:00.000-06:00

Missouri may have scored another first this week. It was announced on St Louis Today and on the StudentsFirst website that Michelle Rhee's organization, StudentsFirst, was invited to Missouri by a bi-partisan group of legislators to help craft our state's new education legislation. This is the first time anyone can remember that a lobbying group was actually invited to come influence the legislative process.

StudentsFirst announced on its website today that it will begin pushing for laws in Jefferson City to further organization’s mission — one that centers around school choice and accountability, rewarding teachers based on performance, and eliminating wasteful school spending. The group’s plans include lobbying legislators and possibly giving financial support to certain candidates. The organization is in 11 states, according to its website, and recently added Iowa to the list.

Education is expected to be a hot topic in Jefferson City this year. The Post Dispatch reported that House Speaker Tilley has been shaking up the Elementary and Secondary Education Committee, adding members who have a noted lack of education experience, to help pave the way for this new legislation. Michelle Rhee is known for bringing a business approach to education, so having more business oriented people on this committee may mean a more receptive audience to StudentsFirst's message.

Given what was reported in the Post, we can get a glimpse of what the future of education in Missouri might look like. Those added to the joint committee on Elementary and Secondary Education include people who believe in; eliminating the state constitutional ban on giving public money to private schools, tax credits to pay for tuition at private schools, school choice, performance pay and phasing out teacher tenure.

The Post reported that these new members include:

Rep. Dwight Scharnhorst, R-St. Louis County, has long championed legislation establishing tuition tax credits to pay for autistic children to attend private schools.
Rep. Jay Barnes, R-Jefferson City, last year proposed repealing the constitutional ban on using state money to support religious schools.
Rep. Doug Funderburk, R-St. Peters, last year sponsored a bill allowing home-schooled students to participate in public high school sports.
Rep Kurt Bahr, R-St. Charles
Rep. Mike Leara, R-St. Louis County
Rep. Mike Cierpiot, R-Lee's Summit
Rep. Ira Anders, D-Independence
Rep. Chris Carter, D-St. Louis

StudentsFirst has a goal of identifying and keeping good teachers which, to them, means the elimination of the role of seniority in teacher layoffs, which are expected with the continued down economy. They believe, "At least 50 percent of teachers' and principals' evaluations should be based on how much academic progress their students make." As we saw in New York, principles aren't too happy about having their jobs on the line based on student performance. Wonder how that will go over in Missouri.

StudentsFirst was invited to participate in the legislative process. I guess the rest of the Missouri taxpayers who have their own wish list for education will just have to be party crashers.

With the DESE agreement to adopt Common Core Standards and the associated fiscal hit that will add to the state's education budget just for implementation, this committee has its work cut out for them. They must find a way to identify and keep top teachers, who will need to be retrained on a new set of standards, that will also require a complex computer based data system to offer continuous data flow on student and teacher performance, while also paying for all the additional and ancillary administrative staff that will be needed to oversee the federal and state reporting requirements so that everyone may be assured their tax dollars are being spent wisely. This should be done with little to no impact on direct student funding of education. In addition, they are going to overhaul a system modeled on the assembly line to make it flexible enough to meet to every parent's needs while still attempting to maximize the economies of scale. The phrase about a fool's errand comes to mind. I wish them luck and will be watching closely to see what comes out of this committee.

Why Does the Parkway School District Want to Monitor Physical Activity 24/7 on Students? Is it a "Nudge"? (Video)

2012-01-05T11:15:00.000-06:00

We wrote yesterday about children wearing bracelets home in the near future (provided by the Parkway School District) to track their physical activity and sleep patterns. The plan is to have the children wear them 24/7 for one week and to extract the data on the activity level and sleep information. The school apparently believes it needs this data to make the correlation between physical activity (one hour of moderate to vigorous activity a day), sleep hours, and academic achievement.

This data will be noted individually and could be applied to an entire class, according to the district from the video on the Parkway's website. (At the end of this article are notes I typed from the video). The information on the polargofit bracelets given to the Board members begins around 48:40 and ends at 58:14.

What is bothersome to me is there is no serious discussion about possible the legality of what the school is proposing in gathering student data, and no mention of parental permission either being sought by the school or given by the parents. Near the end of the information given by the district employee on the bracelets, there is some laughter (the conversation is muffled) about tracking kids and using GPS's on students.

I could not determine how much these devices would cost the district in total and I did not see it listed on the published agenda. Here is a press release about polargofit and its mission:

"Polar Active will forever change the ways teachers educate and students learn PE" said Padovan. "With the activity monitor, students exercise based on their individual fitness level, so it shifts the focus from athletic ability to personal improvement, which is key to developing positive lifelong habits around exercise." PolarGoFit.com PolarGoFit.com is an online web service for teachers and students to monitor and track student activity. This time-saving and flexible portal allows for easy documentation of all activity data, tracking daily and long-term progress and sharing reports with students, parents and school administrators. The ability to evaluate tangible activity data helps to assess students objectively for their effort and results. This also helps encourage and motivate students to stay active for longer periods of time and maintain a healthy weight.

About Polar Headquartered in Lake Success, NY, Polar USA is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Finland-based Polar Electro OY, which invented the first wireless heart rate monitor (HRM) in 1977. Polar now operates internationally in more than 80 countries. Polar heart rate and fitness assessment technology delivers unparalleled insight into the human body from valuable training guidance and feedback, to enabling individuals to improve their fitness level and sports performance. Polar technology is key to the success of leading fitness facilities, athletic teams, corporate wellness facilities, health insurance providers and thousands of physical education programs around the world. "

Notes from the video:

Video of the School Board Meeting December 7, 2011
http://www.pkwy.k12.mo.us/boe/archive/boe120711.cfm

48:45 starts the discussion of the bracelet. Rough transcript of the conversation. Parenthesis denotes questions from the Board.
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So kids can "self-monitor" moderate to vigorous exercise. Teachers took a class this summer and the teachers wore them through the fall.

Henry, Ross Elementary, Shenandoah Elementary Schools.

Kids see it as a cool gadget.

Goals. Health, fit, active kids ready to learn.

Kids were "jealous" so bracelets will be shared.

Used as much as they can during PE classes.

Ideally, let the kids wear the monitor an entire week 24/7 and look at sleep patterns as well as physical activity patterns. Interested in seeing the results of that and identity correlation between sleep patterns and academic achievement. **MEW comment: Is this the governmental "nudge" touted by Cass Sunstein and our Commissioner of Education Chris Nicastro?**

Start with one grade level and then add grades one at a time.

In physical education for the longest time we've just been looking at fitness data.

We don't want to just assess fitness we want to assess behavioral change w/regard to physical activity patterns with our students and then we know we've done our job and this tool here will help us do that.

(How do you follow this?)

Each day there is a graph and they try to fill up the tube with moderate to strenuous activity. Keeps 7 days worth of data. Teachers download the information in a graph to the parents.

Idea: get them into the hands of the elementary students at the beginning of the new year.

(How do you plan to use the data and how will you run the data)

We are uploading data--body strength, muscle strength--into PARS. Correlate fitness levels to MAP scores, SAT score. Hope to do the same with physical activity.

Will do individually. Sure we will have school data, entire 5th grade, we'll have the ability to track individual students.

(Question about GPS, school cameras, tracking kids. Laughter)

No, they won't be able to track our students.
Ends at 58:14

Related links:

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/01/local-st-louis-schools-use-bracelets-to-monitor-children-at-school-and-at-home/

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/01/04/new-psa-you-should-feel-very-very-badly-about-your-obese-child-you-know/