Get Off the Federal Ed Choice Train!

Time to get off the [Federal] Choice Train? 

Yes, disembark the Federal Choice Train, that is necessary but likely insufficient for preservation of Liberty. Itasca Small is to be commended for shining her spotlight on the Trojan Horse known as “School Choice.” Does anyone really believe charter schools are not government funded schools?  Many of the dollars for charter schools flow through the same government pipelines that supply “traditional” schools and have the same strings attached. Every school and/or student who accepts government funding is in the ESSA cross hair. Government has pulled the trigger and ESSA is speeding on its way. What reason would lead  anyone to believe ESSA and its downstream regulations will not apply to charter schools? Moreover, those who have studied ESSA say its web contains barbed hooks set to ensnare not only unsuspecting private school students but also homeschool students who unwittingly accede to funding sources such as Education Saving Accounts.

Itasca’s words are not only on target, but hit dead center: “Your Children are in the governmental indoctrination mill inspired and implemented by technocratic collectivists who would make Marx, Engels, Lenin, Dewey, House, Wilson, FDR, Stalin, Alinsky, BHO, HRC, et.al, proud of the depths to which their lowly efforts have sunk!” Enemies of Liberty control government schools and fully intend to create their version of The New Soviet Man. Remember, it was Tocqueville who noted in the 1830s, “[T]the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it [tyranny] as entirely an affair of the mind as [is] the will which it is intended to coerce.”

To the usual list of aspiring totalitarians — collectivists, communists, the Fabian Society, the Frankfurt School, leftists, Marxists, progressives, socialists, environmentalists, and globalists — must be added educationists, particularly those with an Ed.D. awarded by graduate schools of education and who claim they are “change agents”— you know, those who have the hubris to believe, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” No institution is better suited for coercing mind and will than government controlled schools and accreditation agencies. Textbooks from major education publishers, aligned to government curricula, are the tongs and hammers forging serfs’ chains. And you thought only cigarettes were carcinogenic.

Each reader should verify for himself the veracity of Itasca’s assertions. One of the broadest and most thorough explications of the largely hidden entanglements among proponents of the Marxist-Humanist project (including foundations, associations of academics, government functionaries, individual academics, big business associations, religious associations, philanthropists, luminaries, and Big Education), is Robin Eubanks’ Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became a Weapon. Though not an easy read, persistence rewards. Eubanks continues to investigate. A general outline of ongoing findings appear at her blog, Invisible Serfs Collar. Selected recent passages show events in Arizona are not unique.

“Antithesis of the Briar Patch: School Choice as the Snare Instead of an Escape,” posted November 15, 2016, warns, “School Choice as it has been developed over the decades by think tanks and professors is actually a trap pretending to be a remedy so it can be put into place as a matter of law.”

Finger nails scratching chalkboard may be the reaction of some as they read school choice is “actually a trap pretending to be a remedy.” How could this be? Patrick Henry averred, March 23, 1775, “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.”

Let us consider the past. Attend, writes Eubanks, “to a book published in 1990 called Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools by John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe. Both will later serve on an ed reform project sponsored by the Hoover Institution, the Koret Task Force, with one of President-Elect Trump’s ed advisors, Bill Evers, so he should be more than familiar with this history of School Choice, but the 1990 book was actually published by the Brookings Institution. Several fed ED grants funded the book along with the Olin and Bradley Foundations that have gone on to finance both School Choice initiatives and the experimental economics/Neuroeconomics work we covered in the last post.”

To buttress the assertion that both left and right support school choice, Eubanks reproduces this footnote from the 1990 book:

“The classic argument for vouchers is developed in Milton and Rose Friedman Free to Choose (1981)…The Friedmans’ argument is of course associated by educators with political conservatism. But vouchers have also been proposed by social democrats on the left, who seek to enlist markets in the cause of justice and equal opportunity for the poor. Perhaps the most influential of these proposals has come from Christopher Jencks, who, along with like-minded colleagues, urged administrators within the Office of Economic Opportunity (within the late Johnson and early Nixon presidencies) to take vouchers seriously and encourage experimentation by states and districts.”

Eubanks draws a line connecting the 1981 dot to the 1990 book and to today. “Education reforms for results embodying actual changes in the students at an internalized level in how they think, feel, and ultimately act [aka, The New Soviet Man] needed a new conception of schools and how they operate. That’s what School Choice has always been about. This is from the Foreword to the 1990 book, written by the Brookings’ President (my bolding):

“… the nation’s education problem, then, is an institutional problem. To overcome it, the authors recommend a new system of public education based on fundamentally new institutions. They propose a shift away from a system of schools controlled directly by the government–through politics and bureaucracy–to a system of indirect control that relies on markets and parental choice.”

Eubanks concludes, “Envisioned as a theory in 1990 then, but that same pursuit of active and experiential is what accreditors now require and what the December 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) wrote into federal law for the states and districts to all implement. There is another useful confession in this book that no one seems willing to concede anymore now that School Choice is not just a theory:

“Any private schools that do participate will thereby become public schools, as such schools are defined under the new system.”

A month later Robin wrote (December 11, 2016 at 8:11 am): “Can you see why blindly advocating for charters and School Choice which hide language that fits this MBE template is so dangerous? How the deceit surrounding the Common Core is actually enabling Goebbels level research on our children? This is not a ‘No Harm, No Foul’ level of verbal jousting on who is right about the nature of education reforms.. . . Under these realities of expressed intentions, pretending the Common Core is just a vision of preparation for the workplace in a planned economy is criminal,” maintains lawyer Eubanks. The full text of this quotation, and its context, can be read here: Least any think the Trojan Horse is the exclusive product of the Marxist-Humanist project, Eubanks identifies the “Right Pincer false narrative.” On December 11, 2016 at 7:39 am
(http://invisibleserfscollar.com/linking-school-choice-and-third-party-government-escaping-requires-we-recognize-the-incarceration/#comment-792240) the role of religious organizations is mentioned.

“It is actually John Paul II who is quoted by Argentinian Antonio Battro as saying this: “His Holiness said to the academicians: ‘Scientists themselves perceive in the study of the human mind the mystery of a spiritual dimension which transcends cerebral physiology and appears to direct all of our activities as free and autonomous beings, capable of responsibility and love [notice that order], and marked with dignity. This is seen by the fact you have decided to expand your research to include aspects of learning and education, which are specifically human activities.’”

“Battro also hypes this quote from Santiago Ramon y Cajal and used it as the epigraph to the introduction to the book The Educated Brain: Essays in Neuroeducation that came out of this 2003 meeting at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. I think this is why the Pioneer/APP report misrepresents the nature of the Common Core. Everyone targeting the student’s belief and value systems to control the future decisions that are likely to reach at an unconscious or deliberate level and then grounding it at a neurobiological level is just not a winning sales pitch. It is an accurate statement though. The true communism always had to control consciousness and that is what we are back to. It’s what the theory of Ascending from the Abstract to the Concrete was all about. It is no accident it was created in the very year–1962-that the Marxist Humanist vision launched globally with the West in its sights primarily. Here’s that last quote, which gives way to the favorite metaphor of neurons being the ‘mysterious butterflies of the soul’ to be targeted by a new vision of education that fits with Tranzi OBE and systems thinking and the vision these charters lock into place legally. It also fits with the language of ESSA and the regulations issued under it.”

Classical education associations are not immune. Eubanks, on December 12, 2016 at 9:17 am,
(http://invisibleserfscollar.com/linking-school-choice-and-third-party-government-escaping-requires-we-recognize-the-incarceration/#comment-792713)  writes, “I was having an Offline discussion about my Classical Ed posts that the Search Engine Overlord made me take down and how it fits. Did you know Classical Conversations is presenting at the Global Home Education conference that is turn pushing these Rio principles? http://therioprinciples.org/ Look at that March 2016 date. Could there be a better summary of the role of education to push the Human Development Society [Marxism]? Mercy me. Everything organized keeps coming out at the same vision.

“Look at Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation and Michael Farris of HSLDA as speakers along with unesco. http://www.ghec2016.org/en/content/speakers No wonder Ms Burke would not let me post a comment on the Foundry touting charters where I warned people to actually READ the charters and not just assume it laid out an academic vision. In my experience it generally limits it in language that is reflective of those Rio Principles.” More examples of the Right pincer movement are scatted throughout other posts. Of course, individuals such as Burke or Farris or Robbins would protest that their intentions are pure and their motivations, genuine. Isn’t this similar to Lenin’s Useful Idiots?

One last tidbit, appearing December 12, 2016 at 11:54 am. (http://invisibleserfscollar.com/linking-school-choice-and-third-party-government-escaping-requires-we-recognize-the-incarceration/#comment-792765)

“Have you seen this? It sounds so nice until you know how charters actually work and how Bela Banathy and others at CASBS imagined them as an invisible means to transform education. How nice for Bill Clinton to fund that after all the reform plans he pushed as Governor. http://www.aei.org/publication/how-federal-support-could-boost-private-school-choice-programs/

“Remember that Betsy DeVos was on the board of AEI until she was nominated and that AEI, through Rick Hess, has always been tied to PEPG. Secondly, this says that Andy Smarick is also president of the Maryland State Board of Ed and an ed prof at Johns Hopkins. That puts him on the faculty with Lester Salamon, the author of the Tools of Government covered in this post.

“I think I am going to start calling Ms DeVos, who seems to naively believe that this is all about her personal intentions to “help the children”–the Disingenuous Oligarch. That fits with her having been on the Board of both AEI and Jeb’s FEE. Plus the programs this AEI brief cites as School Choice are precisely the same categories she cites in her most recent American Federation for Children report. Teachers in the various states and parents should be the determinants of the actual effect of these Poison Accelerant programs hiding euphemistically behind the School Choice label.”

To be sure, other writers communicate valuable contributions, such as  Jane Robbins and Karen Effrem’s Oct 19, 2016 piece, Schools Ditch Academics For Emotional Manipulation (http://thefederalist.com/2016/10/19/schools-ditch-academics-for-emotional-manipulation/). Robbins works at the American Principles Project which is a member of the Atlas Network of think tanks. This may seem innocuous, but see “Whispering in the Ears of Princes and Parents: False Flag Education Narratives” (http://invisibleserfscollar.com/whispering-in-the-ears-of-princes-and-parents-false-flag-education-narratives/), where we read, “Dr Smith refers to his theories as ‘experimental economics’ and has confirmed, in a 2012 conference in Arizona, that the School Choice theories in general and the current darling being hyped as the be-all remedy, Education Savings Accounts, are products of experimental economic theories.”

Knowledge of the past enables individuals to uncover not only Common Core’s lineage, but to understand the pernicious effects of Big Education — effects highly deleterious to individuals and Liberty. One enduring example for the empirically orientated, is Hayes, Wolfer, and Wolf’s Schoolbook Simplification study, available at  http://www.indiana.edu/~educy520/sec6342/week_07/hayes96.pdf

Time To Get Off The [Federal] CHOICE TRAIN

The Common Core Juggernaut just keeps rolling along!
Crushing America’s Children and our Future under it’s tracks!

One important fact that many people do not know is that every charter school is a public school!  The concept is that the public school system charters a school outside the district system to provide public instruction to pupils according to a binding agreement—charter—between the school owner and the government. This agreement is a chain anchoring the school to the government and its mandates.

“SCHOOL CHOICE” is a term used to fool parents into believing that their children’s charter school is a truly separate entity not beholding to governmental edict.

A while back I received information that claimed that if you read every charter school’s application (I don’t recall if the actual charter was included), you will find a statement incorporating “college and career ready” goals in the charter school’s foundation.

I was not able to confirm this at the time because it was extremely difficult to find the foundational documents for charter schools online.  It is easy to find all the touch-feely language about what the school is going to do for your child, but, not so easy to find the underpinnings!

If it is true and every charter school must include allegiance to “college and career ready” outcomes, it is prima facie evidence that every charter school is Common Core-aligned at some level, whether transparent or occult!

Further, it is also clear that if ESAs would by definition be funded and controlled by government, every pupil would be required to meet Common Core-aligned outcomes, whether those funds are spent at the district, charter, private or homeschool level.

We must take a hard look at School Choice and ESAs to find the chains binding each pupil to the Common Core Juggernaut!  Better yet:  How about not wasting the pupils’ precious time verifying the chains and just look at the obvious:

If the government controls the funding, then, government shackles control the outcome!

Betsy DeVos is obviously Establishment! Her goal is School CHOICE! Her organization doubled-down on campaign mailers touting Bob Worsley as a “Conservative Leader” for LD 25.  DeVos’ spokesman did not care about anything but School CHOICE! The second mailer arrived in LD25 mailboxes shortly thereafter! (For anyone who is unaware, Bob Worsley is one of the four AZ Senators I dubbed, “The Four Horsemen!” They are the ones to thank for protecting Common Core in Arizona against legislative efforts to dump it!)

Mike Pence has always been Establishment! In this case, he is simply carrying-out the National Governors Association’s technocratic agenda for “creating” Human Capital by using “Smoke & Mirrors” in implementing the “Review & Replace” ploy to REBRAND Common Core!  He obviously already achieved their goal in Indiana, as Supt. Douglas and Gov. Ducey are leading the charge in attempting to accomplish in Arizona!

The “Review & Replace” tactic has always been intended as a shell game played for the unwashed ignorant masses who just don’t know what is best for “The Children!”  It’s purpose being to fool most of the people while they buy time for the entire Common Core Agenda to become entrenched in each State!

By “entire Common Core Agenda” I am distinguishing between the whole program and the so-called “Standards” being manipulated like marionnettes to keep the people’s attention, while the pea is removed from under all the shells, and at the end of the performance, when all the smoke clears and all the mirrors are pulled away, magically, ALL of YOUR CHILDREN and ALL of America’s Children—from Conception to stunted-Adulthood—are fully-immersed in all the Evil Putrid Waters of the Common Core Agenda!

And, Yes! Your Children are in the governmental indoctrination mill inspired and implemented by technocratic collectivists who would make Marx, Engels, Lenin, Dewey, House, Wilson, FDR, Stalin, Alinsky, BHO, HRC, et.al, proud of the depths to which their lowly efforts have sunk!

We just have to remember to hit the ground running when we make the LEAP to abandon the CHOICE TRAIN JUGGERNAUT!

FOR LIBERTY! ITASCA

On 12/16/16 9:19 AM, rwhawk@frontiernet.net wrote:
The only true choice most parents have now in AZ are to homeschool (that’s what God ordained marriage and families for) or private school paid by parent and/or supplemented with the Scholarship and Tuition Tax Credit program.  Ideally, the churches should be behind and fully support both these choices but that is a whole new effort required in itself.

The traditional government school proponents cry out that charter schools eliminate accountability to the taxpayer but charters are at least accountable to the parents to some degree. In reality the traditional government schools have demonstrated very little accountability to both the taxpayer and the parent, These schools are only accountable to both the state and Fed Depts of Ed which are controlled by the Marxist based NEA, crony capitalists and UN programs and they keep pumping out socialist minded human capital. With the Marxist education philosophy so deeply embedded in the American education monster including Congress, teachers’ colleges, NCATE, credentialing, textbook publishers, etc we may want to review and rethink our goals and priorities

On Friday, December 16, 2016 4:18 AM, AZ SchoolChoice <AZSchoolChoice@cox.net><wrote:
Here is the latest from Anita Hoge about the dangers of student monitoring through ESSA and screening in schools for “mental health.” (http://www.capitolhilloutsider.com/choice-charter-schools-kill-public-schools/). I agree we do not want government sponsored choice which is globalism. Currently our only “choice” is what school we want to send our children to and if they will support the feds agenda. Good private, charter or public schools who will push back on the feds are few in number.

“Is our battle over yet? Can we rest assured that Donald Trump will keep his promise to rid our schools of all of the Common Core baggage? Are solid academics on the horizon, again?”
“Unfortunately this just doesn’t seem to be happening. President-Elect Trump has jumped off the TRUMP TRAIN and he has jumped on the phony CHOICE TRAIN. Keep in mind that Vice President-Elect Mike Pence is a pro-“CHOICE” Governor, and he muffled the true spirit of academic freedom by cleverly rebranding the Common Core standards in Indiana.”

“Indiana governor Mike Pence has made a serious miscalculation on what could easily become the sleeper issue of the 2016 presidential campaign, Common Core. After dramatically withdrawing Indiana from participation in Common Core, Pence was poised to become a hero to the grassroots movement resisting this egregious bid for federal control of America’s traditionally independent and locally run education system. Instead, Pence has created the illusion of quality and independence, while installing second-rate standards that are little more than Common Core rebranded.”

“And on the charter school “CHOICE” agenda Governor Pence has pushed charters.”

“But Pence has a robust record on the issue. As governor, he pushed through the most significant increase in charter school funding in years, according to Chalkbeat Indiana. Pence worked with the legislature to create a $10 million grant fund that would offer an extra $500 per student to charters that post better outcomes than traditional public schools. And if Pence had his way, the funding would have been even more robust—he initially pitched a $1,500 per charter school student increase.”(Source)  “Since the election, every new word coming from our President-Elect is beginning to sound a bit too familiar. It reminds us of the Senator Ted Cruz S 306 legislation that we parents fought when Sen. Ted Cruz was running for President against the TRUMP TRAIN. Not quite the words we wanted to hear from Mr. Trump. This sort of government-sponsored CHOICE sticks in our throats because we know the outcome–more oppression over our children and more Common Core for ALL. (Source)”

Common Core + Government CHOICE ? true freedom of choice. It is a pending disaster…the disappearing American dream.”

“Here’s the ‘same-game plan’ (Republicans and Democrats in bed together) that you can expect with the passage of any forthcoming Heritage/DeVos Common Core CHOICE legislation:”

•   Legislation to make Title I funds portable to cover ages 0-21, to be used as a scholarship for every child in any public, charter, private, religious, or homeschool.
•   Set up an ESA, education savings account, for government accountability and oversight over every family receiving federal financial CHOICE assistance. The federal camel will have its nose under your family’s tent.
•   Define exact government criteria to receive funding for all educational uses and “quality” evidence-based curricula (i.e., it all must be aligned to Common Core standards.)
•   Demand testing/curricula align with Common Core for national evaluative purposes, based on the national assessment test, the NAEP.
•   Defined “direct student services” will mandate that public school CHOICE be used as mental health specialized student support services for meeting government standards. This will include all children from birth to age 4, universal daycare, K-12, and through 2 years of free community college, which means hiring or contracting psychological personnel for support services.
•   All schools eventually bill Medicaid for support services—which is ObamaCare ages 0-21.
•   All schools—whether charter, private, religious or homeschools—become “chartered” under authorized charter management as an ombudsman named in ESSA.
•   Schooling is nationalized under the banner of Common Core CHOICE government schools.

“Was this Mr. Trump’s promise? Could this possibly be what parents want? Is this what American citizens want?” Homeschool anyone- that’s my advice for my children and future grandchildren. The feds will come after home schoolers too but it will be a slower process.
-Jen

Time To Get Off The CHOICE TRAIN

“CHOICE and Charter Schools Kill Public Schools.”

Do parents really understand Title I, IDEA, and ESSA? Do parents really understand how CHOICE is connected to all of the above?

CHOICE is federal financial assistance. You may have not thought about CHOICE in this way, but true, CHOICE comes with a bag of Common Core tricks tied to its coat tails. ESSA and the future of CHOICE will end representative government as we know it. Just think about the questions I posed in this article. The diminishing role of your elected officials means your vote is gone. Your voice is gone.

Many friends and fellow researchers know how long I have been preaching about the psychological manipulation of your children in the classroom. ESSA will never allow your child to escape the Skinnerian conditioning with the extreme techniques actually named in the legislation. Reading was actually removed and replaced with child development. Mental health is the story behind your child’s entire future. That was the plan developed in Pennsylvania, and it is the international plan to control and mold human capital.

So, when parents tell me, I love my school, or I love my child’s teacher, remember, it is your local school and the teacher in the classroom that inputs all the behavioral data on your child  into the federal data banks, and logs a complete psychometric profile of you, what you teach your child, and how much Intervention is needed to make your child a world citizen.

I dare any parent to say they are for CHOICE after they read my article on how both the Republicans and Democrats have set up a system of control through the disbursement of federal dollars that “follow the child.”  No one really thinks about the obvious problems. You’re thinking about the money. All carrots come with big sticks when your government says, “let me help you.” The rhetoric of conservative, liberal, Democrat and Republican is all for show. Let me remind you it was a Republican Congress that passed ESSA, and it took President OBAMA less than a day to sign it.
They were thinking, “We are more than half way there. All we need is CHOICE to control every school and every child in America.”

Will Mr. Trump deliver our children on a silver platter to the global cabal. Link: <http://bit.ly/2hSBkGU>