Georgia House of Representatives



House Study Committee on theRole of Federal Government in EducationA Short History of American Education and the Resulting Dangers of Common CoreHow many of you remember what Barrack Obama said on October 30, 2008? Or do you recall what Michelle Obama stated on May 14, 2008?Let me refresh your memories just in case you were not paying attention:“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” — Barack Obama,?October 30, 2008And here’s Michelle’s statement:“We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.” — Michelle Obama,?May 14, 2008Just exactly what do you think they meant by those statements?Common core is set to consolidate power for education inside three entities; one, a small unelected, unaccountable group in Washington D.C. which established the copyrighted standards, two, textbook companies which write to the standards and three, testing companies whose tests are designed to ensure the standards are strictly adhered to. That in itself refutes the idea that local boards still have decision making power as to what is taught. You cannot have standards driving how textbooks are written, and textbooks aligned to the Common Core, with testing developed to test what the standards and textbooks dictate, with evaluations of teachers tied to the testing, federal money attached to the testing and still have local decision making. It’s impossible.We are told common core does not dictate what is taught. Then we are told that students across the nation will be learning the same thing when they graduate. Which is it? You can’t have it both ways.Georgia’s Constitution intends for the people of Georgia to be the decision makers of what and how our children are taught. Georgia’s Governors and the State BOE are following the very steps Congress began a number of years ago. Congress has chosen to abdicate its Constitutional duty to the executive branch by passing “outlines” of law and allowing the executive branch to “fill in the blanks with regulations” that all too often violate the intent of our Constitution. Now we watch as Governor Deal and our State Board of Education gives up their authority over our children’s education by allowing groups in Washington D.C., companies like Pearson and McGraw-Hill, and testing companies take COMPLETE CHARGE of what our children learn while claiming that “Georgia is still in charge of educating our children.” The attitude seems to be that if we repeat this lie that the local boards still have decision making power long enough that everyone will come to believe it.Even the Georgia Legislature has culpability here. They refuse to stand up and tell the Governor and the BOE that Georgia is supposed to decide what our children are taught. Make no mistake about this, taking a wait and see attitude is nothing more than giving tacit approval to what is happening to education in Georgia.I stated earlier that this is part of our current President’s idea to fundamentally transform America. Some of you might even be so foolish as to think “that is impossible because this was ‘state led’ and the Federal Government is barred from being involved in what is taught in the classroom.” You would be partially right in that thought. But there are ways to circumvent the process and the method currently being used to implement these standards is exactly how the Feds have chosen to get around laws that prevent undue influence from the Federal Government concerning what is taught in our classrooms.Remember my question relating to Michelle’s and Obama’s statements? What do you think they meant by those statements?I think that meant they intended to change everything about who we are, where we came from and where we’re going as a nation.Much of philosophy behind the common core has been pushed by Bill Ayers. You must ask yourself if you believe that common core coming into play at this point in history is accidental or could there be something else taking place? Is it really coincidence that Barak Obama announced his major political entry into politics from Bill Ayers’ House? Is it coincidence that Arne Duncan, Bill Ayers, Barack Obama, David Coleman, and Jason Zimba all have ties with each other through Chicago?Now I want to ask you another question. What is the most important thing to control to effect long term permanent change in traditions and history and to move us into a different place as a nation? What can you use to best affect the culture and beliefs of a nation’s citizens? Let me give you a clue……ITS NOT IN OLD FOLKS HOMES. It is in a nation’s youth.But how do you change a nation’s youth? You MUST take over education. Hitler understood that. Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while in prison and I want you to listen to what he wrote: “whoever has the youth has the future”. Hitler understood what Progressives, Socialists, and Communists believe: THE YOUTH ARE KEY TO CHANGE ANY COUNTRY.Hitler believed the first duty of the state was to create citizens that were strong of body and mind. Hitler also wrote “The whole education in a national state must aim first of all not at stuffing the student with mere knowledge but by building bodies which are healthy to the core.” In other words Hitler was seeking a common core of education to develop the kind of citizen he wanted. That citizen had to have two qualities, he wanted race to be burned into the souls of Germany’s children and he wanted education to teach them to be ready for war and not to fear death. Those of you that recall history prior to WWII should remember the brown shirts and how through education Hitler actually had them turning in their own families for crimes against the state.In referring to Nazi Germany Louis Snyder stated, “The ultimate purpose of education was to fashion citizen’s conscious of the glory of country and filled with fanatical devotion to the national cause. National Socialism would furnish the necessary elite for the nation.” Now my point with all of this is simply this. Centralized control of anything is a major step toward tyranny. We have seen the Health Care system placed under the control of the Federal Government. Now we are watching as Education is evolving into a form of central control. No, our education is not being placed DIRECTLY under the control of the Federal Government. If anything what is happening is even worse. It is being placed under the control of an ELITE group in Washington D.C. that is unaccountable to the public, while at the same time the making of our books and tests is being done by outside interests to align with the Common Core, again who are unaccountable to the public, which will be promoted by the Department of Education in Washington D.C. another institution that has no direct accountability to the public. AND WHILE ALL OF THIS IS TAKING PLACE YOUR ARE ASKING THE PUBLIC TO PAY FOR IT WITH THEIR TAXES! I have to ask this question, is it really possible for anyone to fail to understand that this entire concept of the Common Core and how it came into being is so far outside the idea of the Constitutional Republic upon which this nation was founded as to be totally unrecognizable as even remotely a part of that concept? Oh, no you say. We still have local school boards and they have local control. That is window dressing for people that either refuse to think, or don’t want to face reality. You cannot sandwich our students between common core standards on one end, and high stakes testing on the other end, and then claim you not dictating what gets taught. If a teacher is to be evaluated based the scores of the children she teaches, then unless she’s a fool that teacher will teach to the test. Listen to what the Hall County School Superintendent stated in an article in the Gainesville Times on September 19, 2014, “In spite of the rhetoric, at the end of the day local districts can teach their children what they deem to be important; what it doesn’t have a say in is what’s tested.”Now let’s think about what he is saying. Yes, the local boards can control what is taught, but they have NO CONTROL over what is tested. Only a fool would draw the conclusion that we can teach what we think best for our children without paying attention to what OUR CHILDREN WILL BE TESTED ON! As long we take Federal dollars then the Feds WILL TELL us what to do. And if our money from them is tied to how our kids do on the test CAN THERE BE ANY DOUBT that our school administrators are going to insist that teachers teach what is expected to be on the test that marks them for evaluation?Even before the Common Core was put into place in Hall County, I know for a fact that some Principals were asking teachers to change grades. I know of one teacher that flat refused, and so the Principal went ahead and changed the grade himself. Common Core with its high stakes testing will cause this to continue and we will likely see more cheating taking place as administrators look for ways to make their schools appear to be “meeting the standards.”We talk about teaching our children history. But do we ourselves know our history? For instance, suppose I asked you who would you consider the father of modern education in America? Who would you say? Anyone? Most people recognize John Dewey as the most influential person during the 20th century. But suppose I asked you to tell me something about him. How many of you could actually do that. We really need to understand who he was to understand if the changes and ideas he expounded are something we desire to place into the lives of our children. One of the most succinct descriptions I have read about John Dewey came from Dr. Dennis Cuddy in his article in 1989 titled, “The Conditioning of America.” Here is what Dr. Cuddy states concerning John Dewey:The conditioning of modern American society began with John Dewey, a psychologist, a Fabian Socialist and the “Father of Progressive Education.” Dewey used the psychology developed in Leipzig by Wilhelm Wundt, and believed that through a stimulus-response approach (like Pavlov) students could be conditioned for a new social order.The ideas that are continually pushed onto American Education are not really new. Take for example “OUTCOME BASED EDUCATION.” How many of you would be surprised that it was the vogue in England as early as 1862? What happened to it? It was abandoned because teachers were finally able to convince those in charge that it was a failure. Listen to what George E. Overholt and Wayne J. Urban of Georgia State University said of Outcome Based Education in 1976 in Accountability in American Education: A Critique.“The call for “sound and cheap” elementary instruction was answered by legislation, passed by Parliament during 1862, known as The Revised Code. This was the legislation that produced payment [for] results, the nineteenth century English accountability system.... The opposition to the English payment-[for]-results system which arose at the time of its introduction was particularly interesting. Teachers provided the bulk of the resistance, and they based theirobjections on both educational and economic grounds.... They abhorred the narrowness and mechanical character the system imposed on the educational process. They also objected to the economic burden forced upon them by basing their pay on student performance.”Why is this important to know? Simply put Outcome Based Education and Common Core State Standards have one major common element that comes from B.F. Skinner, operant conditioning. One aspect of operant conditioning is knowing punishment may come if a certain behavior is not achieved. Such as the teacher knows if her students do not do well on a high stakes test she may be dismissed, or fail to receive a pay increase. This concept may work with some individuals in certain situations. But when one is teaching children there are a lot of external factors that the teacher has little or no control over. Yet know matter, the teacher is to be judged on this one item, the test. But what is behind the type of education that John Dewey desired for America? He believed that studies should not be built around academic subjects, but instead they should be built around occupational activities that allowed a maximum of interaction between students for the purposes of socialization. Dewey believed that orienting studies that developed academic skills, increased intellectual facilities and the resulting high literacy was the root of where Western Civilization had gone wrong with education. He believed this wrong because he saw that it produced a person that had independent intelligence and that this led to an anti-social behavior. One statement that Dewey made in 1898 in his essay on “The Primary-Education Fetish was this, “…..The pleas for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to me a perversion.”In the early 1900s we began to see the rise of tax exempt Foundations. These organizations were originally established by people that had accumulated and were still accumulating very large fortunes. The idea proposed was that this would give these people a place to put part of their fortunes and the funds could then be used for good purposes to benefit the American people. What has actually taken place is the very opposite of what had been expounded as the justification for these organizations. What has happened over time is these groups have been discovering ways to manipulate society and the government into doing things that are not necessarily to the benefit of the American people, but that continue to increase power for a certain few. I would point you to two things for a deeper understanding of this. One is the Congressional Committee known as the Reece Committee, and its forerunner, the Cox Committee, and the resulting book simply known as Foundations written by Rene A. Wormser, counsel to the Reece Committee.During an interview in 1982, Norman Dodd, the chief investigator in 1953 for U.S. Congressman B. Carroll Reece, Chairman of the Special Committee on Tax Exempt Foundations known as the Reece Committee, stated that he discovered that the goal of a number of the Foundations, through its trustees, were intent on gaining control of education in America for the sole purpose of changing education to move it away from the Founding Principles and those concepts and rights that are found in our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution and its associated Bill of Rights. (See you tube “Norman Dodd on Tax Exempt Foundations” and Foundations by Wormser.)There are a number of Foundations that are currently working toward this end and I will not attempt to list them all, but some that must be mentioned are the Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation/Foundation. The primary goal of these groups is to move our nation from its individualist mentality to a collective mentality.I will not attempt to explain the relevance of a number of organizations, books and essays that have been organized and written, but I would submit to this committee that if you do not know about these organizations and their agendas, and you have not made yourself familiar with the writings of those have come before us that have been shaping American education even as far back as 1762, then I would have to question if you should be sitting on this committee. I submit that if you are not knowledgeable of these things then you simply do not have the appropriate frame of reference to understand what is happening in American Education.Please stay with me as I hit some of the highlights of the next material in an effort to save time, in hopes that I can entice you to read more about it both here and in additional research on your own.I place the following in this report for your latter review. Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Wilhelm Wundt, The Revised Code passed by Parliament in 1862, Edward Lee Thorndike, Psychology by John Dewey (became one of most read and quoted books in American education) , The Whole Language/OBE Fraud by Samuel Blumenfeld, The General Education Board, founded in 1902 via an act by Congress but endowed by Rockefeller, Intercollegiate Socialist Society which later became the League for Industrial Democracy for which John Dewey served as President in 1939,The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, National Education Association, Italian educator Maria Montessori, Frederick T. Gates of the Rockefeller Foundation, William Boyce Thompson, founding member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Thompson so admired Russia that he gave $1 million to the Russian Revolution. The Institute of International Education which negotiated the U.S>-Soviet Education Agreements established by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The Progressive Education Association founded and organized by John Dewey, Series published by Harold Rugg titled The Frontier Thinkers, published by Progressive Education Association. The Council on Foreign Relations was founded by men with Socialist ties. For instance Edwin Mandell House wrote Philip Dru: Administrator, a book that touted socialism as Marx dreamed it. Walter Lippmann another founder was a member of the Fabian Society and the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. In 1922 the Council on Foreign Relations endorsed the idea of world government. The International Bureau of Education, a book International Understanding by John Eugene Harley in which he basically calls for nations to be willing to give up Sovereignty and the best way he proposed of instilling that idea is to build a foundation in children to think in those terms. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Dare the School Build a new Social Order by Professor George Counts of Columbia University.Toward a Soviet America by William Z. Foster in 1932 called for “…a U.S. Department of Education; implementation of a scientific materialist philosophy; studies revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology; students taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and general ethics of a new socialist society; present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy. The whole basis and organization of capitalist science will be revolutionized. Science will become materialistic, hence truly scientific. God will be banished from the laboratories as well as from the schools. All of which has now been implemented.In 1932 the National Education Association created the Educational Policies Commission. In 1944 they prepared a report titled Education for All American Youth. Some of the goals laid out in this report are: federal programs for health, education and welfare combined in one giant bureau, Head Start programs, pre-school programs, removal of local control of political and educational matters “without seeming to do so,” and sex education. Please note that sex education was being planned long before we had the ‘free love’ explosion from the late 60s and 70s.This idea of removing control of political and educational matters links the common core standards with the concept of Regionalism which was a major aspect of the T-Splost so many fought. Yes, our local boards are currently being left in place, but their function is cosmetics. They will have little to nothing to do with what our children are taught in the future.In a book called The Story of the Eight-Year Study published in 1942, the changes that the Progressive Education Association wanted to make in secondary school were constantly met with the statement “but it can it be done without risking admittance to college.” One of the goals of the Common Core State Standards has been to remove those barriers by requiring colleges to make certain that students accepted into college that graduated under the CCSS are not placed in remedial classes. The net result of this move will be the dumbing down of most colleges and universities to be sure incoming freshmen can pass the course work.Another aspect that Progressives have been developing for years is how to remove control from local school boards. One major step forward with this was by instituting across America control of education at the State level. By doing this it placed the federal government in a much better position for control. The Feds could now use money to have at least some amount of influence over education. The problem with controlling education in this manner is you still cannot really affect what gets taught. Anything that brings into place a situation of overall testing is one of the best ways to control what is taught if one cannot gain full control over the things taught in American schools.Humanism is and has been a major part of the agenda of Progressive Educators. In 1933 John Dewey was a signatory on the book A Humanist Manifesto I. I would remind the reader what Humanism is. I will take a quote from Secular Humanism and the Schools: The Issue Whose Time Has Come I by Onalee McGraw, Ph.D. from Critical Issues Series2 from the Heritage Foundation. “The basis of humanist belief is that there is no Almighty God, the Creator and Sustainer of life. Humanists believe that man is his own god. They believe that moral values are relative, devised according to the needs of particular people, and that ethics are likewise situational.”An update has also been written i.e. Humanist Manifesto II.It is vital that we as a nation recognize the impact that Humanism has had and is having in our schools. We see it constantly in the situations that arise in today’s schools that would never have taken place during the first half of the 1900s. School shootings, stabbings and all manner of incidents that depict the lack of respect for others and especially for life are a direct result of the humanist religion that has been allowed into schools. I have mentioned B.F. Skinner and operant conditioning, and I am sure that some of you dismissed that as not really a part of our schools. How did Skinner see this concept being implemented in our schools? In a book Skinner wrote in 1948 titled, Walden Two he makes some very telling statements.“What was needed was a new conception of man, compatible with our scientific knowledge, which would lead to a philosophy of education bearing some relation to educational practices. But to achieve this, education would have to abandon the technical limitations which it had imposed upon itself and step forth into a broader sphere of human engineering. Nothing short of a complete revision of a culture would suffice”Now Dr. Skinner died before he could see his school of the future realized, but I would say today that it is here in the Common Core State Standards. Listen to this next excerpt and see if it sounds familiar to you.“Since our children remain happy, energetic, and curious, we don’t need to teach ‘subjects’ at all. We teach only the techniques of learning and thinking. As for geography, literature, the sciences-we give our children opportunity and guidance, and they learn for themselves. In that way we dispense with half the teachers required under the old system, and the education is incomparably better. Our children aren’t neglected, but they’re seldom, if ever, taught anything.”To me this sounds just like so many of the stories I keep hearing from both parents and students under the CCSS. Many of you know that during the 1990s there was a strong movement for teachers to act only as facilitators and guidance counselors. Some other eye-opening thoughts that can be found in Walden Two are:“History is honored in Walden Two only as entertainment”“We are always thinking of the whole group.”“We are opposed to competition”“The community, as a revised family”This sounds like the collectivism we are constantly hearing talked about in the news. Even though Walden Two was a fictional book, it sets forth what Skinner believed to be the way our schools should be. It also sounds just like what we are seeing develop and what we are hearing from the behavioral elite. Bertrand Russell wrote in his publication Impact of Science upon Society that “every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen. He also said in that publication, “Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are this schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school master would have wished….Influences of the home are obstructive; and in order to condition students, verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective…. It is for future scientist to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black. Congressional CommitteesThere are two Congressional committees that are deemed important for anyone trying to understand the whys of our current educational system today. The first one held its hearings in 1952. It is:Subversive Influence in the Educational Process: Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary: United States Senate, Eighty-Second Congress, Second Session on Subversive Influence in the Educational Process. Robert Morris was counsel on this project and below you can read the testimony of Dr. Bella V. Dodd, who was assisted by her attorney Godfrey P. Schmidt. Mr. Morris: Dr. Dodd, how recently have you been associated with the Communist Party?Mrs. Dodd: June 1949.Mr. Morris: Do you mean you severed your connection with the Communist Party at that time?Mrs. Dodd: They severed their connection with me. I had previously tried to find my way out of the Communist Party. In 1949 they formally issued a resolution of expulsion….Mr. Morris: Dr. Dodd, will you tell us what relationship you bore to the Communist Party organization while you were the legislative representative for the Teachers’ Union?Mrs. Dodd: Well, I soon got to know the majority of the people in the top leadership of the Teachers’ Union were Communists, or at least, were influenced by the Communist organization in the city.Senator Homer Ferguson (Mich.): In other words, the steering committee, as I take your testimony, was used for the purpose of steering the teachers along the line that communism desired?Mrs. Dodd: On political questions, yes…. I would say also on certain educational questions. You take, for instance, the whole question of theory of education, whether it should be progressive education or whether it should be the more formal education. The Communist Party as a whole adopted a line of being for progressive education. And that would be carried on through the steering committee and into the union.Some of you may be thinking to yourselves “that may have been true in the 50s but Reagan defeated communism in the 80s.” If that is your line of thinking then I urge you to do some investigation, because what happened beginning in the late 50s is that the communist made a strategic move. They decided to continue with the communist party while at the same time to gradually and consistently to move their people into specific areas of our society where they could have enormous influence and to do so in a manner that would not bring to light their communist ideology. You will find in this report a list of the Communist Goals from 1958. Read it and don’t take it lightly if you cherish your freedom.Also, it is important to know that in 1985 Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev signed the U.S.-Soviet Education Agreement. The Carnegie-Soviet Education Agreement was instituted at the same meeting. This is further evidence of the influence of Communism being pushed into our educational system. Please keep in mind that the Carnegie Foundation is one of the prime behind the scenes instigators of the Common Core State Standards.The second Congressional Committee that needs to be known is the Reece Committee (1954) which had a forerunner called the Cox Committee (1952). Mr. Norman Dodd was asked by the Reece Committee to be their lead investigator. Both were basically charged with the investigation of tax exempt foundations.One important discovery of Mr. Dodd was that several of our foundations believed that they needed to get control of our educational system. Three of our best known foundations had actually divided the work of doing this between them. Those three are the Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford Foundations. In a meeting with Rowan Gaither, President of the Ford Foundation, Gaither asked Dodd this question, “Mr. Dodd, we invited you to come here because we thought that perhaps, off the record, you would be kind enough to tell us why the Congress is interested in the operations of foundations such as ours?” He then proceeded to answer his own question stating:“Mr. Dodd, all of us here at the policy making level of the foundation have at one time or another served in the OSS [Office of Strategic Services, CIA forerunner]or the European Economic Administration, operating under directives from the White House. We operate under the same directives…. The substance under which we operate is that we shall use our grant making power to so alter life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.”Dodd asked, “Why don’t you tell the American people what you just told me and you could save the taxpayers thousands of dollars set aside for this investigation?”To which Gaither responded, “Mr. Dodd we wouldn’t think of doing that.”Both of these committees met with so much behind the scenes interference that neither ever completely were allowed to finish their assigned task of a complete and thorough investigation. The Reece Committee did make a superficial report to Congress. However, the counsel for the Reece Committee, Rene Wormser, was so distraught over the inability for what the Reece committee had learned to be made public published the findings himself in a book called Foundations. Wormser also stated, “The Cox committee did find that there had been a Communist, Moscow-directed plot to infiltrate American foundations and to use their funds for Communist purposes.”A real coup for the communists came in the 1958 National Defense Education Act that was passed by Congress. This bill which set our education system up for control by the Federal Government had a clause to mandate that all beneficiaries of the act complete an affidavit disclaiming belief in the overthrow of the U.S. government by communist.Our schools have been continually moving away from academics and toward behavior modification. This has been the primary focus of men like Skinner, Bloom, Goodlad, and numerous others in the fields of sociology and psychology since the middle of the 1900s. A statement that clarifies what education is becoming today was prophesied by Professor John Goodlad in 1969: “The most controversial issues of the twenty-first century will pertain to the ends and means of modifying human behavior and who shall determine them. The first educational question will not be ‘what knowledge is of the most worth?’ but ‘what kinds of human beings do we wish to produce?’ The possibilities virtually defy our imagination.”We see this taking place in our schools under the current methods of teaching where teachers are not to teach but to be facilitators to allow the students to figure out things out for themselves. This is a dire indication that we no longer are seeking to impart knowledge, but a new type of human being.Congressman John Ashbrook from Ohio saw in the early 60s the dangerous trend that was occurring in education and spoke to what he saw in a speech he made to Congress July 18, 1961. With what could only be God-given insight he stated in his speech titled “The Myth of Federal Aid to Education without Control:”“In the report A Federal Education Agency for the Future we find the vehicle for Federal domination of our schools. It is a real and present danger….The battle lines are now being drawn between those who see control and uniformity of our local schools and those who oppose this further bureaucratic centralization in Washington. It is my sincere hope that the Congress will respond to this challenge and defeat the aid to education bills which will implement the goals incorporated in A Federal Education Agency for the Future.”Congressman Ashbrook saw what was about to take place and saw it clearly. He continued in his speech by pointing out the movement toward the internationalization and transformation of American Education. Listen to his comments:“That there was any doubt of the Federal bureaucrats’ intentions in this matter was laid to rest with the discovery of a Health, Education, and Welfare publication, A Federal Education Agency for the Future, which is a report of the Office of Education, dated April 1961.... I feel that its pronouncements are a blueprint for complete domination and direction of our schools from Washington. The publication was not popularly distributed and there was some difficulty in obtaining a copy.Fifty-six pages of findings contain recommendations which call for more and moreFederal participation and control and repeatedly stress the need for Federal activity in formulating educational policies. It recommends a review of teacher preparation, curriculum and textbooks. It calls for an implementation of international education projects in cooperation with UNESCO in the United Nations, and ministries of education abroad. Of course, it recommends an enlarged office of education and the use of social scientists as key advisers.... It places stress on “implementing international educational projects in the United States and bringing maximum effectiveness to the total international educational effort.” Would not the Communists, with their footholds and infiltrations in these organizations, love this? No detail has been overlooked—“curriculum will have to undergo continual reshaping and upgrading; and new techniques and tools of instruction will have to be developed” and “teacher preparation, textbooks, and the curriculum in these subject fields must be improved in the decade ahead.” In the report… we find the vehicle for Federal domination of our schools.”…The battle lines are now drawn between those who seek control and uniformity of our local schools and those who oppose this further bureaucratic centralization in Washington. It is my sincere hope that the Congress will respond to this challenge and defeat the aid to education bills which will implement the goals incorporated in A Federal Education Agency for the Future.”Possibly one of the most devastating events that set the stage for the beginning of the removal of our Constitutional Republic and toward a socialist democracy came in 1960 when President Eisenhower received a final report from his commission on the national goals. This report is significant for two reasons. It follows a 1955 White House conference that set out to establish new methods of policy making. The idea of planning by consensus instead of consent was set into motion at this conference in 1955 and it was quickly followed by the 372 page report Goals for Americans. This report called for and recommended that America carry out an international, socialist agenda.And how has Common Core been implemented in our state? Was it by consent or by consensus? We continue to hear the cry that it was State led. But being state led is nothing but consensus. Why consensus? Because the Progressives recognize that it would never have been implemented through the methods set forth in our constitution…..CONSENT!Do any of you on this committee see anything wrong with this concept of consensus? See if this helps any. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…..Did you catch that? CONSENT of the governed, not consensus of those governing!Bottom line on this is if the Common Core is as good as those promoting it tell us it is, would it not have been better to have instituted it following a manner that our current system of government dictates instead of bypassing the standard we are supposed to use?One of the most troubling statements that I have stumbled onto in looking at what has been happening in education over the last 100 plus years is comes from an article by Dr. Paul Brandwein in the May 1968 issue of the educational journal The Instructor.[Parents] often have little, if any knowledge of the rudiments of the human enterprise we call teaching and learning, or even the elements of the behavioral science undergirding child development…. The most formative years are what we call pre-kindergarten years…. Learning is synonymous with environmental behavior change….Learning…. is the modification of behavior through interaction with the environment….Really? That’s the definition of leaning in our educational system? Can there be any wonder if we define “learning as behavior change” that our children are falling behind in academics? What is learning? Since the idea of public education originated near the time of the founding of our nation let’s look at the definition from that time period. Webster’s 1828 Dictionary defines learning this way:Learning: Gaining knowledge by instruction or reading, by study, by experience or observation; acquiring skill by practice. Even in 1927 The New Century Dictionary of English Language defined education as: “The drawing out of a person’s innate talents and abilities by imparting the knowledge of language, scientific reasoning, history, literature, rhetoric, etc.—the channels through which those abilities would flourish and serve.There is nothing in either of these definitions of leaning that indicates changing the behavior of someone is the same thing as learning. But our investigation would not be complete unless we look at a more modern dictionary. In the online version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary we find the following definitions: The act or experience of one that learnsKnowledge or skill acquired by instruction or studyModification of a behavioral tendency by experience (as exposure to conditioning.)Now we’ve completed the circle from when we were looking at B.F. Skinner’s operative conditioning to now finding that we are supposed to believe that our children are supposed to undergo this behavioral change at the hands of the government.My conclusion from these definitions is since America had few rivals in education in the early part of the last century that it is highly probable that changing the definition of learning and reorienting teaching to that new definition is probably the main reason that has dumbed down the American education system. He who has the most toys should make the rules.Does that statement fit the belief system of anyone in this room? Then why are we letting this become a fact of how things are decided in American education?Part of what I hope to make clear is that money alone is shaping America. Certain groups in America began to realize that our political system, our domestic and foreign policies and now our educational system can be shaped by those that control money. The idea that money can be placed strategically to change the ideas, values and direction of every aspect in America should not be taken lightly by this committee, by our State legislature or by our Governor. As a matter of principle whenever any of us see that happening; it should strike fear into our hearts and we should do all we can to prevent it. This very concept is why we all need to understand what is taking place with foundations and the Gates Foundation is no exception. It is Gate’s money that has given us common core.To allow money to dominate and change America, whether it is education or anything else, goes totally against freedom and the rights of the American people to have a say in the direction of events that directly affect their everyday lives.How many of you are aware that Bill Gates, since 2009 has spent in excess of $3.38 Billion in an effort to conform education to his view of how it should be structured. In Georgia, Gates has seen fit to buy influence in our state to the tune of $1,980,892 to facilitate statewide implantation of CCSS instructional tools, and $500,000 to the Atlanta Schools to implement the Literacy Design collaborative tools in the area of social studies, science and other technical subjects. The obvious question any rational citizen would have to ask is if the CCSS are so great why does Gates or anyone have to place all manner of bribes across our nation? We could do well by paying attention to some of the quotes available from Gates himself on CCSS. In the Washington Post Gates stated, “It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won’t know for probably a decade.” Really? And Georgia plans to participate in what is obviously the single biggest EXPERIMENT in educational history allowing us to put a compete generation of kids and their education at risk?“Identifying common standards is just the starting point, we will only know if this effort has succeeded when the curriculum and tests are aligned to these standards. Secretary Arne Duncan recently announced that $350 Million of the stimulus package will be used to create just these kinds of tests; next generation assessments aligned to the common core. When the tests are aligned to the common standards the curriculum will line up as well, and it will unleash a powerful market of people providing services for better teaching. For the first time there will be a large uniform base of customers looking at using products that can help every kid learn and every teacher get better.”Now just exactly what did Gates say in this statement. Under the system called common core, corporations will be dictating what is taught and learned in school through the uniform materials they will be providing. Now I must ask you, is this what Georgia wants for its children. A uniform set of robots coming out of our schools? I ask you what two concepts really made America great? And what made America, America? America became great because it has always believed in the importance of the individual and in the importance of people being different and thinking different. You put all of America into one mold and you kill what made America, America. It is really that simple and that is precisely what is being attempted here.Now this is an excellent idea if you want to control the population and teach them specific and detailed ideas, values and concepts. But it totally the antithesis of what has brought so much innovation and new ideas to the forefront in America. If you want to set the bar for indoctrination of children then I can think of no better way to go about it than to implement the nationalization of our education system by continuing common core. Here is another quote from Gates that shows how much he thinks our children are like robots or computers:"Common Core I would have thought of as more of a technocratic issue. The basic idea of, 'should we share an electrical plug across the country?' Well, you can get partisan about that I suppose. Should Georgia have a different railroad width than everybody else? Should they teach multiplication in a different way? Oh that's brilliant [sarcasm], who came up with that idea? Common Core, the idea that what you should know at various grades, that that should be well-structured and you should really insist on kids knowing something so you can build on it; I did not really expect that to become a big political issue."We see here the innermost way that Bill Gates thinks and exactly how he sees educating our children. Just like a computer is technology so is the education of our children. No different than deciding what should be the standard gauge of a railroad system? And it is also obvious from this statement the Gates believes there is only one way to teach children! I think that most of us recognize that nurturing and teaching a classroom of children is far different than deciding on an electrical plug. Centralization and increased standardization is not the answer to our problems in education. Our problems stem from a number of issues and I cannot find even one of them that the common core state standards addresses. Poverty, broken homes, parents too busy to help their children with homework, drugs and alcohol in both our children’s lives and their parent’s lives, adding workloads to teachers thus reducing the time they can prepare and devote to students, are all issues that have far more to do with our educational problems than do standards. And one of the biggest issues comes with high stakes testing and common core promises to continue that monster. Teachers in Georgia have told me that they spend anywhere from 15% to 30% of their school year prepping and taking the mandated tests. Math StandardsWhile I could go into the issues with Math that have been discussed in a number of places, I will put the burden of this directly on the individual member of this panel. Primarily because while I have learned a great deal about the Math Standards, I cannot attest to having any true authoritative credentials to discuss them. I do know I have yet to find a really good math teacher that thinks the Math 123 version of teaching is the proper way to build a strong understanding of Algebra and Geometry.I have reviewed the information on the website of the U.S. Coalition for World Class Math and it appears to me to be very objective in its study of the common core math. Below is a summary of their findings:“While the math standards may be an improvement over existing standards in some states, they could be a lot better. And in the end, it appears that all the standards will do is ensure a student-centered, "understanding before procedure" approach to math education which so far has proven to be a disaster.?People need to tell their state legislators not to jump on the Common Core bandwagon. And if their state is talking about backing out, the move to do so should be complete: Drop the adoption of the Common Core standards.”If you are willing to investigate their findings you may go here: On their site you will find where they break down the standards by grade level and then give very specific areas where the math standards are good and bad.ConclusionWe are watching education being transformed by what is often called the Hegelian Dialectic process. This concept was formulated by the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and used very successfully by Karl Marx in codifying revolutionary Communism.The best way to understand how this process works is by simply looking at a statement made by T.H. Bell when he was Sec of Education (he was Sec. of Ed. from 1981-1985): “[We] need to create a crises to get consensus in order to bring about change.” Bell accomplished this by convincing Reagan to establish a committee to study excellence in education. This group established the crises when it published its findings in the document “A Nation at Risk.”I am not here to condemn standards, but I am here to sound the alarm at anything that begins a move toward further centralization of education. Local school boards currently are very limited in what they can actually do. Currently the state BOE and the mandates from the Federal Government bind the hands of the local boards of education. Two things must be recognized. The first and most significant thing that my research has uncovered is that until about 1930 American education was equal or better than any nation in the world. That then begs the question, ‘What changed in America during the 1930s?’ I think we all would recognize that as the era during which Progressivism went to star speed under Roosevelt.The second fact that is very important is that since the 1950s America’s rating in the world education system has been relatively low. Now with America’s “so-called rating” low we should recognize this fact. We set the standard for economic prosperity, creativity, and our scientific progress overshadows our nearest competitors. It is also important to recognize the basic fact that America tests everyone, not just our best, or just a select few as so many other countries do.What is wrong with Common Core? Here are just 20 questions that need to be answered. Is one purpose of common core to establish a level playing field? Common core removes parents from the equation. While maybe not the majority, many parents are willing to take the time to work with their children to help them understand complicated aspects of subjects they encounter in school. This is being removed in certain aspects such as math. The intent here is very likely to level the playing field by creating a situation where all children are now equal. Those whose parents desire to help are equal with children’s parents that just don’t care. Why has Common Core been instituted in a manner that goes totally against how our nation is designed to work with the people’s involvement either directly or through their representatives? Should America be satisfied to relinquish its 4th amendment right against invasion of privacy so that data collection can be implemented at the state level under the guise of “providing data to private companies to use to “improve education”?Does America really need taxation without representation? Common Core did not involve local parents or teachers during its design. Taxpayers will be required to pay taxes to support a system that was developed by some 60 appointed people only one of whom was in secondary education, and the taxpayer had no say in whether or not common core would be implemented.Why should taxpayers be forced to pay for the added costs needed to bring all school systems up to speed for common core’s implementation? Higher taxes will be required to implement common core as a result of the added cost of computers, tablets, internet upgrades for nearly all school systems to allow all students access to the internet.What is the real purpose of depriving parent’s access to know what the student is being taught since eventually virtually all work, testing, reading and other exercises will be done on the computer? Could the real purpose behind common core and the data collection be to protect certain companies from following in the footsteps of the encyclopedia? Common core will remove the possibility of using the numerous free open-source textbooks that have begun to appear on the internet, written by teachers and professors that just want to share knowledge in favor of a system that will be totally controlled by large textbook companies such as Pearson, who in essence are being given a monopoly on education materials and testing. Do we really need the relentless testing that came with No Child Left Behind and will remain under Common Core? High stakes testing will result in teachers continuing to teach to the test, and will provide the incentive for more cheating such as we’ve seen already in Atlanta and elsewhere.Do we really want to create “good little workers for business” or would America prefer to have a truly educated work force? We need to return to education as defined by true learning and stop education for the purposes of behavior modification using operant conditioning methods. Do we really want to continue to eliminate aspects of education that we know have worked in the past? Common core will continue to deprive children of things needed like recess for younger children along with many of the subjects that affect creativity which are already disappearing in many schools. Some schools have deemed cursive writing to be expendable. Why are aspects of education being eliminated? Common Core tends to ignore teaching things like citizenship, civics courses, and other elements necessary for students to understand their obligations to remain a free society. Also, less focus on the arts, music etc. This concept is not new; it has been in discussions for decades. In 1977 Joseph Californo, Sec. of Ed. under Carter, stated, “in its most extreme form, national control of curriculum is a form of national control of ideas.” Student mobility is cited as one reason common core is needed. So for less than 2% of the population are we going to implement a rigid set of mediocre standards? We know that at least 3 other states had standards better than the common core standards. If the purpose is to have a better educated student why adopt standards that are less than the best? Common Core is a massive experiment. The concepts are untested. Do we really want Georgia’s students be part of this guinea pig experience? The June 2012 Georgia State Board of Education minutes listed over $25,000,000 in state contracts for testing and development. Is this the best way to spend taxpayer money? Why has there been no study prior to implementation concerning the total cost to Georgia taxpayers?Does it really make sense to adopt common core to allow for the creation of “economies of scale” related to books and testing? The availability for free open-source material would preclude in a relatively short period of time the need for any such economies. Do we really want a nationalized education system that is being controlled by outside, unelected people in business, trade organizations and Washington bureaucrats? This sets the stage for controlling what is taught and whose ideas are implemented with no input from the taxpayer. We are told that each state can decide what gets taught. But in contrast to that the standards are copyrighted and we are told that states can add only 15% which will not be tested. If each state can decide what gets taught then can you explain to me why there is even any need for a common set of standards if states do not have to abide by them? Once we are deeply involved and discover this does not work for Georgia, how do we change the standards or the testing since both are controlled by outside entities? Why do those in authority continue to claim the standards were state led when it is obvious that it has been Bill Gates money that has led the adoption of the common core? ................
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