A Calendar of Indoctrination
At the NEA convention, teachers were given colorful 2015-16 school calendars created by the union’s Read Across America Campaign. The calendar is titled “Read, Discover, Explore” and it claims to celebrate “a nation of diverse readers.” One unfortunate but critically diverse characteristic that exists among students is that while some students can read, some can’t. What is the NEA doing to right this crippling wrong that harms so many students? Is the union encouraging a strong, phonics-based, proven-effective reading program for all students? No. Instead, the NEA’s goal is that of left-wing extremists, aimed at dividing even the youngest Americans into subgroups according to race, heritage, sex, sexual identity, disabilities, and ideology.
The NEA Read Across America calendar’s message to teachers says, “Our students need to see themselves in the books they read.” While the priority should be that students know how to read, literacy is not what this calendar is about. The calendar is simply one more tool in the union’s social-justice toolbox.
A calendar suggestion for September is that students write and illustrate stories from “their own culture,” completely missing the point that American students’ culture is American and it is advantageous for them to assimilate.
December’s book is A Boy and A Jaguar, about efforts to protect big cats around the world and condemning evil humans who kill animals.
In June, the NEA calendar celebrates Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. The featured book is Not Every Princess, published by the American Psychological Association, which includes “strategies to help children imagine, play, and envision themselves beyond the limited roles and expectations that gender stereotypes create.” The calendar suggests parents and teachers “check out” the “Rainbow booklist,” an annual bibliography of “quality books with significant and authentic Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning content, which are recommended for people from birth through eighteen years of age.” Rainbow Books is a joint project of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table and the Social Responsibilities Round Table of the American Library Association, and others.
The NEA calendar recommends other resources, such as DiverseBooks.org, TeachingTolerance.org, ColorínColorado.org, the Black Caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English, the American Indians in Children’s Literature Blog, and the Diversity in Young Adult books website, that lists books about race, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
February is Black History Month and the National African American Read-In. September is Hispanic Heritage Month. October is Bullying Prevention Month. December is Universal Human Rights month.
The United Nations International Youth Day is indicated on the NEA calendar, but Christmas is not. The 2015 UN Youth Day theme is for children to “engage politically, economic a l l y , and socially,” in a manner that “encourage[s] sustainable human development.” The NEA calendar will help teachers and students to remember that César Chávez Day is March 31 and on Sept. 27, Banned Books Week begins.
Afraid to Call it a Union
At the Representational Assembly convention of the NEA, a New Business Item (NBI) proposed calling the “association” a union. NBI 46 sought to add the word “union” when referring to the National Education Association. The new wording would have been: “NEA, the nation’s largest professional employee association and union.” After discussion, a vote was taken and the item was defeated.
A delegate from rural Missouri stated that the NEA affiliate in his area already has enough trouble getting teachers to join, and if they incorporated the word “union,” even fewer teachers would be NEA members. He said, “If we say union, we will lose people.”
The NEA is clearly and absolutely a union. In fact, it is the largest union in the nation. It is shrinking, but the power it wields should not be discounted. Just look at the state of public schools for proof of what the union manages to achieve.
Another defeated NBI suggested that the NEA union convention be broadcast online so members could watch from their homes using a password-protected site. This item was defeated by a vote of delegates. One delegate in opposition to the NBI said, “We want to control the flow of information.” She said that some of what goes on gets “ugly” and could be misunderstood by teachers who would watch. But letting teachers see their union in action is a great idea. Maybe if more teachers understood how radical their union is, they would drop their membership, at least in states where they are legally allowed to do so.
Crimes of the Educators: A Must-Read Book
A new book by the late Samuel L. Blumenfeld and journalist Alex Newman explains most everything that is wrong with American education. The book is Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.
Blumenfeld and Newman say that “socialist utopians have been responsible for inflicting more pain on the human race than adherents to any other political philosophy.” These utopians are going strong in the realm of education. Some have entered the fray in order to make money. The authors say, “Public education represents the largest river of government cash flow in the United States, and the educationists get the money no matter how much failure they produce.”
Crimes of Radicals
Progressives have taken over public schools, schools of education, and teachers unions. Education concepts based on the work of Paulo Freire, “a leading Marxist theoretician,” progressive John Dewey, education theorist and unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, and others have created a path of destruction as their faulty premises are used to teach future educators. The fallout is affecting children in classrooms every day.
John Dewey “advocated moving education away from individualistic high literacy in favor of social collectivism.” Dewey “wanted students to discuss information in groups rather than receive information by listening to a teacher.” This “cooperative learning” should more accurately be called “groupthink learning” because disagreeing opinions are drowned out by consensus.
Cooperative learning bases grades on students’ performance in a group. Competition is the hallmark of a capitalist, individualistic society, but “to the socialists, individualism creates a competitive spirit that is opposed to a collectivist spirit, which is needed in a socialist society,” according to the authors.
Crimes Against Reading
Progressives dismiss phonics as old fashioned and outdated. They promote “whole language” teaching methods as part of the “new literacy education,” which means children use pictures to decode and predict what might be happening. Whole language students memorize lists of words, as if they were Chinese characters, rather than using phonics to sound them out. This could work for some children up until about third grade when “the child will experience a learning breakdown,” as the number of words they must know to be literate outpaces the brain’s capacity to memorize. Memorizing becomes a block against seeing “words in their phonetic structure” and severely limits reading comprehension.
Children must learn to read phonetically in order to become good readers, to whom reading the written word is “easy, fluent, enjoyable, and accurate.” An intense phonics program is the only way to teach reading and to rescue those who have been cheated out of literacy.
The authors criticize group learning of reading, which takes place in classrooms when several children guess or predict what may happen by trying to decode using pictures instead of words. The authors state that the “purpose of whole language is to get rid of individualism. Reading is not, as whole language people claim, a social or collectivist activity. It is an individual activity.”
The public wonders, “How can children spend 12 years in school and not learn to read?” It’s because whole language relies on silliness; for example, if a student incorrectly sees the word “father” as “daddy,” that’s fine. Educrats call this a “miscue” and dismiss it because “the meaning is intact.” But people who can think realize it means the child doesn’t know how to read.
The authors assert that none of this is an accident. Limited reading capacity is one way to control the populace and keep students from independent learning opportunities. It means students learn only what progressive educators want them to learn. In this way they can be indoctrinated. It also is an insurance policy to maximize the number of low-information voters.
Causing ADD, ADHD, and Dyslexia
“The faulty methods currently used to teach children to read can physically impair their brains,” according to the authors. They quote a neuroscientist who writes:
We now know that the whole-language approach is inefficient: all children regardless of socioeconomic backgrounds benefit from explicit and early teaching of the correspondence between letters and speech sounds. This is a well-established fact, corroborated by a great many classroom experiments. Furthermore, it is coherent with our present understanding of how the reader’s brain works.
Increased dyslexia, ADD, and ADHD diagnoses began around the same time that whole language gained momentum in public schools. The predictive guessing, word memorization, and other whole language methods lead to reversing and transposing letters, inducing dyslexia, and sometimes leads to ADD or ADHD.
Math Disaster
This books tells us, “Arithmetic deals with quantity. Math deals with relationships and uses of complex symbols.” Children must master counting skills, but are not encouraged to do so when using new math or “fuzzy” math.
The authors say, “Until rote learning is restored in our primary schools in the teaching of arithmetic, we can expect math failure to plague American public education for the foreseeable future.” They continue, “Once arithmetic facts are memorized through drill and practice with pencil and paper, kids will later be able to use calculators and computers with accuracy, spotting errors when they make them, always able to do the calculations on paper if necessary.”
Common Core is fuzzy math. It is full of guessing and estimating, with less focus on precision and correct answers than is necessary for successful math education.
The authors recommend Saxon math and Singapore math programs, which are often used by homeschoolers, to parents who want their children to have a solid start in math.
Going Green
The United Nations favors instilling “radical new values in children,” teaching them about being “green” and “sustainable,” along the lines of UN Agenda 21, which would control “virtually every facet of life.” The green and sustainable philosophies promote growth of the group idea, so that “group good, group understanding, group interrelations, and group goodwill replace all limited, self-centered objectives, easing to group consciousness,” leading to the “smashing of individualism and notions of individual rights, to be replaced with collectivism.”
Blumenthal and Newman explain that according to UN Agenda 21, “literally everything about human existence must dramatically change: lifestyles, opinions, education, health, consumption, production, agriculture, diet, law, taxation, industry, governance, and much more.” It is effectively, the “regimentation of human society.” It is a cradle-to-grave management of people, slotting them into the area the government deems them most suited, according to massive amounts of data collected about them from the time they enter kindergarten, regardless of their own hopes and desires.
Sex Without Marriage
Schools in most states promote sex education. The authors say that “instead of teaching that love and marriage should precede sex, [schools] teach that sex comes first without love or marriage.” This has resulted in premarital sex, abortion, unwed motherhood, fatherless families, the spread of venereal diseases, and emotional entanglements with which youth are unable to cope. In many cases, sex education in schools introduces “words, thoughts, and concepts to children long before it is developmentally appropriate for them,” along with some ideas that are never appropriate.
School-led sex education curriculum is often associated with the National Sexuality Education Standards, which are developed in association with Planned Parenthood and the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network. The National Education Association teachers union promotes and allies themselves with these organizations.
The authors point out that a system unable to teach children to read certainly is incapable of teaching them about sex.
Teaching Nihilism
There is a multicultural and progressive treatise stating: “All knowledge is socially constructed. Therefore all knowledge is political.” Not only have secular humanists removed the Bible from classrooms, it has been replaced by multiculturalism and a belief that “humanity is a plague of the earth, causing global warming, species loss, destruction of the environment, and on and on.” This is a destructive message for children to hear.
The authors say, “Not to know the Bible is to be ignorant of the single most important spiritual and moral influence in Western civilization. That so-called educators and a school board can claim that Bible study is not curriculum-related is glaring proof that American public education is morally and academically bankrupt.”
Multiculturalism results in children being taught not to become Americans, but to be subdivided into groups; not to be patriotic, but to develop and maintain grievances against the country where they live. Assimilation has become a dirty word and has been replaced by a grievance mentality. According to revisionist historians now dominating education, most everything America has accomplished was motivated by greed.
The authors say that the current style of education promotes the idea that, “There is only the reality of one’s individual emotions and desires.” They continue: “Godless education leads to depression, suicide, and antisocial behavior.”
Common Core is “Consumer Fraud”
The authors say the Common Core movement “is basically a jobs program for bureaucrats, masters and doctors of education, and newly created think-tank staffs and ‘experts.’ It is also a make-work program for educators, administrators, career counselors, assorted federal bureaucrats, and textbook writers and publishers, who will rake in millions.”
Common Core-related data mining schemes by the Department of Education have nothing to do with education, according to the authors. They ask, “Does the federal government have the right to collect all this private information about every student and teacher in the public schools of America and house that data in perpetuity in a Washington data bank?” They say the answer is no, and that “it is a violation of the privacy rights of every American citizen.”
The same progressive educators who gave us Common Core are now promoting the Next Generation Science standards and National Sexuality Education standards.
Wake Up America!
Blumenthal and Newman tell us, “If there is any bright side to the whole battle over Common Core, it is that parents are becoming increasingly suspicious of both the education establishment and the politicians that fund it with ever-larger amounts of taxpayer money.” Common Core (CC) has also made clear the globalist education goals of certain politicians and private citizens like Bill Gates, the major non-governmental funder of CC. It is good that the public be made aware of reformers’ ties to the United Nations and their “New World Order” viewpoint, which favors teaching children to be “global citizens” with views at odds with “the U.S. Constitution, national sovereignty, individual liberty, God-given rights, Judeo-Christian values, and Western traditions,” and “the traditional notions of education.”
It is not too late for Americans to heed the warnings of the authors of Crimes of the Educators and to take steps to change education. We should accept their mandate to “convert our atheistic schools into godly schools, where the Bible is revered as America’s spiritual foundation, as basic to the American creed as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.”
The authors suggest other ways to save education:
• Legislators should refuse to fund the Department of Education.
• Teachers, legislators, and leaders must advocate literacy as the best solution to poverty.
• Parents must advocate for their children by taking action to oppose Common Core.
Homeschooling is mentioned by the authors as “one very bright spot in education.” Homeschooling grew by 75% between 1999 and 2012, with about 4% of American students now being educated at home. The authors say, “Although 67% of American parents send their children to public schools, many have no idea what really goes on there.” They say, “It’s time for American parents to wake up.” Is it really too much to expect students to learn to read using phonics, to write in cursive, to memorize arithmetic facts, and to study history in chronological order?
The authors say, “Now that you know, choose your side and take action.”
The NEA is a Social Justice Organization
The Orlando National Education Association (NEA) Representational Assembly further cemented the teachers union’s standing as a social justice organization. Educating students seems almost a sideline to the union goals of changing societal values and governmental regulations to reflect what the NEA thinks they should be. Whether it is promoting a radical LGBTQ agenda, climate-change activism, UN globalism, anti-capitalism, sex education and abortion rights, unfettered immigration policies, gun control, or any other liberal, progressive agenda item, the NEA fights at the forefront.
In her opening speech as NEA union President, Lily Eskelsen García said, “We truly, truly are the NEA. We are the rabble-rousers. We are the activists.” She spoke about her first time as a delegate at an NEA convention, saying, “I had this sense: we’re going to do something. We’re going to do something important. The people in this room are going to come together and something will be better for someone else’s child.” That’s a grand sentiment, but unfortunately most of what the NEA does and believes in doesn’t translate into making it “better” for anyone’s children. In fact, harm occurs when the union forces radical social-justice ideas down the throats of the nation’s families.
Promoting social justice themes was the subject of delegate-adopted New Business Item 10. NBI 10 says, “the NEA will use its communication tools to highlight examples of NEA members who incorporate social justice into their teaching practice or community engagement.” The union will promote curriculum developed by those who teach social justice and tell the stories of those members who take activist roles in their communities.
NEA Executive Director John Stocks, who is often referred to as a social justice warrior, gave his traditional July 4th address to the assembly. He promoted challenging “institutional racism,” spoke of his own experience benefitting from “white privilege,” and said American systems are failing.
“Simply said, America is not working for most Americans and that has a tremendous impact on our students, our schools, and our future,” according to Stocks. But many would disagree with Stocks about why America doesn’t “work” for some. Stocks fails to realize his union’s focus on social justice causes instead of teaching students is one of the main reasons that students and communities fail. If teachers focused on teaching students the fundamentals that would allow them to rise out of ignorance and poverty, the nation would be a better place.
Instead, Stocks told the delegates, “Sisters and brothers, I’ve been an organizer all my life. I’ve been a part of progressive causes and social justice organizing my entire career.” Maybe Stocks doesn’t understand that social justice organizing doesn’t help students learn. Maybe he doesn’t care.
Stocks tried to rouse delegates by speaking of a “New American Majority.” He said, “This movement is fueled by growing income inequality, the scourge of racial injustice, attacks on our voting rights, a political system rigged to benefit the wealthy and powerful, the corporate takeover of our public school system, and the threat of global climate change.”
Stocks praised radical groups, calling them “new organizational formations.” He specifically promoted “Occupy Wall Street, Freedom to Marry, Moral Mondays, Black Lives Matter, The Fight for $15, the Dreamers, and NextGen Climate.” Stocks says, “All of these organizations have at their heart a desire for social, racial, economic, and environmental justice; and the real possibility of uniting our nation in a grand alliance.”
Human and Civil Rights Award Winners
The social justice theme carried over into the NEA dinner held on July 2, to honor the 2015 Human and Civil Rights (HCR) Award winners. The theme of the $75 a plate dinner was “Justice For All: Never Forget, Never Give Up.”
The winner of the 2015 NEA César Chávez Accion Y Compromiso HCR Award is a theater troupe based in Colorado and headed by James Walsh, a teacher who “grew frustrated with the traditional way of teaching — lecture and discussion and taking exams and using textbooks.” Fulfilling his goal of throwing away textbooks, he began “using poetry, drama, and music to tell the stories of oppressed and marginalized people.” The Romero Theater Troupe aims to “[interpret] history through dramatic theater” and to “resurrect stories that have been lost.” In his acceptance speech he said of his productions, “No one leaves unchanged” and that the group inspires “audience members to become activists.”
Another Human and Civil Rights (HCR) award winner was the creator of BlackPast.org. The website is “an online encyclopedia with more than 3,000 entries,” somewhat like Wikipedia. It is a compendium of information that is created not solely by experts or historians, but by assorted “contributors.” The website is used in classrooms instead of a textbook. The day before the NEA dinner honoring the winners, BlackPast.org was approved for use by the New York City Board of Education. In accepting the award, Dr. Quintard Taylor said, “There is a racial crisis in America right now”; he also spoke about “police brutality.”
The NEA Leo Reano Memorial Award celebrating someone who impacts American Indian affairs was given to Denise Juneau, the Montana Superintendent of Public Education. Juneau, an American Indian, said in her acceptance speech that when she recites the Pledge of Allegiance, after the words, “With liberty and justice for all,” she adds the word “someday.” Apparently Juneau, who attended Indian reservation schools and eventually graduated from law school, is dissatisfied with her country. She said she hopes American children eventually won’t have to add “someday.”
Ms. Juneau is proud of the fact that there are very few private schools and no charter schools in Montana. She says, “We have a group of people who want to privatize public education in our state, and we consistently fight it back.” (ALEC’s 2013 Report Card on American Education rates Montana’s education policy climate a D+.) Ms. Juneau is in line with the NEA convention delegates who solidified their anti-school choice stance by adopting New Business Item 38, a renewed vow to fight Education Savings Accounts and vouchers that help students attend private schools, claiming they have a “negative impact on public education.”
Another NEA HCR award winner is the You Can Play Project, which has the goal of promoting locker room safety by changing attitudes in sports. The NEA says, “Our society is undergoing a historic cultural shift regarding the acceptance of gay people. You Can Play is spearheading that change in one of the last bastions of homophobia.”
The HCR President’s Award was given to Eliseo Medina, a former board member of the United Farm Workers and former executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union. He is now an immigration activist, proposing citizenship for those here illegally. Since 2010, Medina has been an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the United States, and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International.
Award banquet literature indicates that “social justice instructional lesson plans” based on the 2015 NEA HCR award winners will be available at the union website in a section titled Lessons
Learned From NEA Social Justice Advocates. Teachers are encouraged to use the curriculum in their classrooms.
The NEA and their HCR award winners seem to agree that America is an inferior nation, found to be lacking and insufficient. A grand alliance of leftist activists united behind a liberal agenda is the solution to all America’s problems, according to Stocks, García, the NEA union, and their award winners. This is what they aim to teach American schoolchildren.
Education Briefs
NEA convention delegates laughed at a speaker who raised a question about the legitimacy of global warming during discussion of New Business Item 18, having to do with “climate disruption.” Union leadership requested that members not jeer or laugh at speakers on several occasions. Pres. García said, “Please respect the diversity of opinion in debate,” but it didn’t help. Very few delegates dare mention anything outside the liberal union agenda for fear of public ridicule from their fellow NEA members.
The College Board has slightly changed the Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) Framework after outraged citizens and historians pointed out egregious flaws. The 155-page outline presents leftist material and an overall negative view of American history. Topics like American exceptionalism and the importance of religion in America’s founding are still lackluster. According to National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood, “The College Board writers are so attuned to the progressive worldview that they literally cannot make sense of key ideas that are repudiated by that worldview.”
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will commute from Chicago to Washington for the next two years and is moving his children from an Arlington, Va. public school to a private school in Chicago, although Duncan does not want others to have access to vouchers that would help them afford private schools. Duncan’s decision that Chicago public schools are not good enough for his children is particularly interesting in light of the fact that Duncan was the chief executive officer of those same schools when he previously lived in Illinois.
A clearinghouse that reviewed 90 different studies of Head Start programs found that most of the studies were flawed and not scientific. The best result found was that Head Start had “potentially positive effects” on general reading achievement and “no discernible effects” on mathematics achievement or social-emotional development for 3-year-old and 4-year-old children.
Book of the Month
The Catastrophic Decline of America’s Public High Schools: New York City — A Case Study, Jeffrey Ludwig, CreateSpace, 2014, $10.99
Author Jeffrey Ludwig says schools are “substituting what to think for how to think.” He has taught at Harvard University, several other colleges, and in New York City secondary schools. His book exposes so-called reforms that have supposedly been put in place to improve education.
Data-driven education reformers look at numbers but forget that teaching students involves more that analyzing numbers. Students must be taught logical thinking, creativity, persistence, study habits, responsibility, values, and self-control. These and other important aspects of education are often neglected, neither measured nor mandated.
The author says those who foisted Common Core on students don’t care about education or students. He says, “Armed with statistics and vast software systems, their intent is to establish one-size-fits-all curricula and success parameters in public education nationwide.” Ludwig says that “their underlying impulse is totalitarianism.”
Bill Gates, Bill Ayers, Arne Duncan, and many others, in conjunction with education mega-companies like Pearson and McGraw-Hill, hope to have from twelve to twenty years to indoctrinate students.
Ludwig points out that although they have issues with some aspects of reform, the NEA and the AFT teachers unions are “actually 100% on board with the political and social agenda of [the] reformers.” The unions sometimes object to student assessments that could influence teachers’ pay or advancement, but they love the chance to “[consolidate] power” and the opportunity to advance their “left-wing agenda.”
Beyond philosophical and curricular matters, Ludwig tells of utter institutional breakdown in New York City schools. For six years, he taught at a school where “students were being slashed by razor blades and box cutters in the hallways,” fires were regularly set, cursing by teachers and students was the “verbal norm,” the walls were full of graffiti, and students had sex in closets and in stairwells. This school had 18 security guards and two full-time armed New York City police officers, yet order could not be maintained.
Ludwig says “the goal of education is to teach students subjects and to build character.” In far too many schools, some students are out of control and the rest are lost in the chaos, while adults are consumed by political ideology, a grab for profits, corruption, or simply trying to keep their jobs.
Meaningful education reform includes the teaching of values and the use of vouchers that provide parents with education options.
FOCUS: Ali Baba Babble and Common Core
by Denis Ian
“Open sesame” is that mystical phrase from “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” It unlocks the cave sanctuary where all of the treasure is secured. But, in light of Common Core, “open sesame” has unleashed a deluge of questionable educationalists who see this moment as an opportunity to pile up their extremist treasures under the guise of Common Core — and they seem to have been largely successful. Common Core, at the moment, is bad stuff. But it has the potential to become extremely bad stuff. For months, in post after post and article after article, the great debate has been about various lessons and approaches that have emerged. Are they or are they not Common Core sanctioned? I used to think that was a valid question. Not anymore.
The very sponsors of Common Core hardly seem to mind these curriculum excursions into their absurdity, such as rewriting American history to coalesce with the current “PC” mindset. They seem barely ruffled by eye-popping, stomach-churning developments in sex education — for the littlest of students — who are now exposed to startling information and vividly detailed sexual escapades, all under the guise of “healthy living.”
The Common Core oligarchs seem somewhat soothed by the politically charged alterations to historical documents and events, provided they tumble to the left of center. In short, Common Core’s whoop seems to be “open sesame” — everything and anything is up for “reform.”
Anyone and everyone seems welcomed in the Common Core tent of the macabre. If you’re up for skewering America and its history, hop on board. If you’re inclined toward seedy sexual stuff, welcome home! If you’re in favor of disrupting and disturbing a particular activity like coal or petroleum production or sanctifying every tree and bog and swamp, then there’s a slot for you in the Common Core mayhem. Itching for a fight about who should control nutrition for kids? You’re welcome aboard. Cranky about tenure or teacher sovereignty in the classroom? All aboard. It seems anyone with a beef gets a plate at the Common Core buffet of all-you-can- eat nonsense.
Got beefs? Maybe against the military or the Tea Party? Scribble out a unit or a lesson package. You’re in. Got a hang-up about climate change or homosexual marriages? Fire away. Got a bug up your nose about Christianity or religion in general? Just punch out a screed about fanatics and zealots and it’ll find it’s way into Common Core.
The point? Common Core has given educational cover for a slender minority to pollute the actual education environment with any issue whatsoever, and it seems to give those issues — no matter how hare-brained or offensive — a certain legitimacy. Common Core has become the new “open sesame” because, by its very nature, it suggests that what is, is not acceptable. America must be altered, changed, renovated, rejuvenated, redirected, and most especially, cured. But only if those cures pass a certain muster.
Esteemed historical figures are pilloried at the politically correct whipping post. Historical documents — which were foundational to this nation for centuries — are now seen as attic junk to be recycled according to the “New Nonsense” of the day.
This is no time to hail this nation. Nope. It needs to be shamed. Made to appear as sinful as any other on the planet. It’s time to excoriate those blasphemers who think this is an exceptional nation based on a unique set of principles because, well, it makes us stand out a bit too much from the rest of the miserable world. And we can’t have that. No, siree. We’re even cajoled to empathize with the new medievalists, currently on a head-collecting mission in the sands of the Middle East, who will one day rocket us into a modern armageddon of real life-or-death preservation. It now seems wiser to “understand” our enemies than to even question them — to search for the vomit-inducing “root cause” of their bloody neo-medievalism.
Ever think we might be playing with a modern Ali Baba who isn’t so randy and dandy as the fictional one of yesteryear? I think not.
In schools today, Christianity is viewed as a dangerous cult, personal responsibility has been replaced by an all-knowing, all-soothing government, and espousing contrarian points of view will get you tattooed as a racist, a xenophobe, a homophobe, a sexist, a capitalist-pig, a Neanderthal — or a dastardly conservative.
Common Core has opened the floodgates for every miscreant with a special beef to step forward and set the record unstraight, because that is part and parcel of the New Nonsense. Ali Baba had his forty thieves, but Common Core has its horde of intellectuals who are determined to retool this nation into a supplicating, values-free, nonjudgmental mess. A nation like all of the others who feed off miserableness and are hellbent on cultivating it.
It’s time we slammed the door on Common Core. For good.
Denis Ian is a retired secondary teacher from New York. He taught social studies for nearly 34 years in a well-respected public school district and was involved in numerous reforms and educational innovations during his career. He’s now devoted to the anti-Common Core movement and contributes to many blogs across the nation.
Ali Obama and His Forty Thieves Are Robbing our Children of a Decent Education
by Orlean Koehle
Having directed the musical, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” when I taught speech and drama in a middle school many years ago, I am very familiar with the story and would add my comments to the excellent article by Denis Ian.
“Open sesame” opens the door to the vast “treasury” of every strange ideology and radical belief of Common Core-progressive educators and politicians, who are all playing their parts so well. The Chief Thief is Ali Obama, with his understudies played by Secretary of Education Ali Duncan. Chief funders are Ali Bill Gates and Ali Pearson Foundation (the main publisher of the e-books and tests for Common Core).
The 40 thieves have many layers, starting with the national cartel who actually wrote the standards (state and local educators were not involved). Governors, state boards of education, or bureaucrats signed on to Common Core, sight unseen, coerced by the possibility of winning $435 billion in grant money coming from the vast treasury of “stimulus money” from the chief thief, Ali Obama.
The next layer of thieves are the state legislators, who were originally bypassed and not consulted when the governors or bureaucrats signed on, but eventually agreed and gave their support (either willingly or silently by not opposing it); the teachers unions who (with the exception of a few states) are supporting this debacle and are receiving large hand outs (bribes) from the private treasury of Ali Bill Gates and other state and federal grants to do so.
The next layer of thieves are the superintendents and local school board trustees who are allowing this travesty of education into their schools, even though they have heard testimony after testimony from expert witnesses, parents, and students about how bad and harmful it is. School boards are also kept in line by the bribes coming from the state and federal treasuries, if they are willing to jump through all the hoops offered to them.
And lastly are the teachers who either truly believe in this new radical ideology and way of teaching or are so afraid of losing their jobs that they go along with it. Many courageous or disgusted teachers across the nation, however, have already resigned over this issue.
And who are the people who are being robbed blind by this vast group of thieves? They are our children. They are being robbed of what used to be an outstanding American, broad-based, highly-rated, liberal arts education. (That is back when liberal meant something good.)
And because of the radical, anti-American ideologies that children are being taught, the future of America is also being robbed. These graduating students in Common Core will know nothing of our great American heritage of liberty. They will know nothing of the three branches of government that are designed to keep power in check. They will not even notice as the executive branch grows larger and larger and the freedoms of America rapidly disappear. In fact, many of them will probably be applauding as that happens, for they will have already been so steeped in anti-American propaganda, they will be off in some foreign land fighting alongside ISIS.
There is one redeeming thought; the story of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” ends with all the thieves being boiled alive in hot oil. They get their just rewards.
Orlean Koehle is the President of Eagle Forum of California. Mrs. Koehle is the author of two books on Common Core: Common Core, the Trojan Horse for Education Reform and The Hidden Cs of Common Core: Cartel-written, Corporation-Driven, Cash Cow, Cradle-to-Grave Data Collection, Cogs in a Global Workforce, Cookie-Cutter Design, Costly, Central-Controlled, Citizens of the World, and Communist-Like.
