Trump’s Education Secretary Pick Wants To Allow PRAYER Back In School…

President-Elect Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education nominee Betsy DeVos, along wither her husband, Dick, had a profound interview with a group by the name of “The Gathering” back in 2001. --In it, Dick DeVos lamented that the “church, which ought to be, in our view, far more central to the life of the community, has been displaced by the public school as the center for activity.” --And politically correct atmosphere of today has nearly killed the church. --In fact, people have suppressed the simple act of praying in recent years — which is why Betsy DeVos wants to bring America back to the days where the freedom of expression is tolerated once more.

Read more at The Truth Division

Read More......

Education Insanity

Some credit Albert Einstein, others credit Benjamin Franklin, with the observation that "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing year after year and expecting different results." Whomever we credit, he was absolutely right. A perfect example of that insanity is education in general and particularly black education.

Read more at Townhall.com
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

INTERRUPTING WHITENESS National Education Conf Blame White Teachers & Students for School Woes

Obama wanted "a national conversation on race." This conference is what he meant: "interrupting whiteness" in American schools, "challenging white supremacy," and eliminating the "white privilege" of Caucasian students. A major national conference for teachers and school administrators starting on Saturday, October 10, in Baltimore will focus exclusively on race and racism, featuring workshops on “interrupting whiteness” in American schools, the “dominance of White supremacy” in society, “White privilege” enjoyed by Caucasian students, “white domination of thought,” and how to “decenter whiteness.”

Read more at PJ Media
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

History, American Democracy, and the AP Test Controversy

Wilfred M. McClay (University of Oklahoma) - Historical study and history education in the United States today are in a bad way, and the causes are linked. In both cases, we have lost our way by forgetting that the study of the past makes the most sense when it is connected to a larger, public purpose, and is thereby woven into the warp and woof of our common life. The chief purpose of a high school education in American history is not the development of critical thinking and analytic skills, although the acquisition of such skills is vitally important; nor is it the mastery of facts, although a solid grasp of the factual basis of American history is surely essential; nor is it the acquisition of a genuine historical consciousness, although that certainly would be nice to have too, particularly under the present circumstances, in which historical memory seems to run at about 15 minutes, especially with the young. --No, the chief purpose of a high school education in American history is...

Read more at IMPRIMIS/Hillsdale College
July/August 2015 | Volume 44, Number 7/8
Imprimis | A monthly digest on liberty and the defense of America's founding principles Read More......

Oregon allowing 15-year-olds to get state-subsidized sex-change operations

"The list of things 15-year-olds are not legally allowed to do in Oregon is long: Drive, smoke, donate blood, get a tattoo -- even go to a tanning bed. "But, under a first-in-the-nation policy quietly enacted in January that many parents are only now finding out about, 15-year-olds are now allowed to get a sex-change operation. Many residents are stunned to learn they can do it without parental notification -- and the state will even pay for it through its Medicaid program, the Oregon Health Plan." "It is trespassing on the hearts, the minds, the bodies of our children," said Lori Porter of Parents' Rights in Education. "They're our children. And for a decision, a life-altering decision like that to be done unbeknownst to a parent or guardian, it's mind boggling."

Read more at Fox News
Related: For more information on education in Oregon see PARENTS RIGHTS IN EDUCATION. Read More......

Conservatives likely to lose education reform battle in Congress

House Republican leaders handed conservatives a small victory on Tuesday by allowing votes this week on amendments to an education bill that will let states ditch federal education programs, and let parents opt out of federally required testing. --But the debate shaping up in Congress is likely to yield legislation to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that rejects more conservative language in favor of legislation that could end up passing with significant Democratic support. That means conservatives may end up either shooting down the final bill, or watching it pass over their objections.

Read more at Washington Examiner

Related: COMMUNISM IS ALIVE AND WELL - YOUR FREEDOMS SET TO EXPIRE SOON by Charlotte Iserbyt Read More......

Teacher: I Don’t Teach Shakespeare Because He’s White

The Washington Post has published a guest article by a California teacher arguing that American high school students shouldn’t read Shakespeare because he’s a dead, white man.
Dana Dusbiber, who teaches English in Sacramento, says she avoids Hamlet and all the rest because her minority students shouldn’t be expected to study a “a long-dead, British guy” (Dusbiber herself is white). And while Shakespeare is widely regarded as the premier writer of the English language, able to timelessly portray themes central to the human experience, Dusbiber says he only is regarded that way because “some white people” ordained it and he can easily be replaced.

Read more at the Daily Caller
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Lynne Cheney Op-Ed: The End of History, Part II

AFP/Getty Images: President Reagan speaking near the
Brandenburg Gate in West Belin, June 12, 1987.

By Lynne V. Cheney
Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2015
The new Advanced Placement U.S. history exam focuses on oppression, group identity and Reagan the warmonger.

If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

—Present Ronald Reagan, June 12, 1987

President Reagan’s challenge to Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev remains one of the most dramatic calls for freedom in our time. Thus I was heartened to find a passage from Reagan’s speech on the sample of the new Advanced Placement U.S. history exam that students will take for the first time in May. It seemed for a moment that students would be encouraged to learn about positive aspects of our past rather than be directed to focus on the negative, as happens all too often.

But when I looked closer to see the purpose for which the quotation was used, I found that it is held up as an example of “increased assertiveness and bellicosity” on the part of the U.S. in the 1980s. That’s the answer to a multiple-choice question about what Reagan’s speech reflects.

No notice is taken of the connection the president made between freedom and human flourishing, no attention to the fact that within 2½ years of the speech, people were chipping off pieces of the Berlin Wall as souvenirs. Instead of acknowledging important ideas and historical context, test makers have reduced President Reagan’s most eloquent moment to warmongering.

The AP U.S. history exam matters. Half a million of the nation’s best and brightest high-school students will take it this year, hoping to use it to earn college credit and to polish their applications to competitive colleges. To score well on the exam, students have to learn what the College Board, a private organization that creates the exam, wants them to know.

No one worried much about the College Board having this de facto power over curriculum until that organization released a detailed framework—for courses beginning last year—on which the Advanced Placement tests on U.S. history will be based from 2015 onward. When educators, academics and other concerned citizens realized how many notable figures were missing and how negative was the view of American history presented, they spoke out forcefully. The response of the College Board was to release the sample exam that features Ronald Reagan as a warmonger.

It doesn’t stop there. On the multiple-choice part of the sample exam, there are 18 sections, and eight of them take up the oppression of women, blacks and immigrants. Knowing about the experiences of these groups is important—but truth requires that accomplishment be recognized as well as oppression, and the exam doesn’t have questions on subjects such as the transforming leadership of Martin Luther King Jr.

The framework requires that all questions take up sweeping issues, such as “group identity,” which leaves little place for transcendent individuals. Men and women who were once studied as inspirational figures have become examples of trends, and usually not uplifting ones. The immigrant story that the exam tells is of oppressed people escaping to America only to find more oppression. That many came seeking the Promised Land—and found it here—is no longer part of the narrative.

Critics have noted that Benjamin Franklin is absent from the new AP U.S. history framework, and perhaps in response, the College Board put a quotation from Franklin atop the sample exam. Yet not one of the questions that were asked about the quotation has to do with Franklin. They are about George Whitefield, an evangelist whom Franklin described in the quote. This odd deflection makes sense in the new test, considering that Franklin was a self-made man, whose rise from rags to riches would have been possible only in America—an example of the exceptionalism that doesn’t fit the worldview that pervades the AP framework and sample exam.

Evangelist Whitefield, an Englishman who preached in the colonies, was a key figure in the Great Awakening, an evangelical revival that began in the 1730s. Here, however, he is held up as an example of “trans-Atlantic exchanges,” which seems completely out of left field until one realizes that the underlying notion is that we need to stop thinking nationally and think globally. Our history is simply part of a larger story.

Aside from a section about mobilizing women to serve in the workforce, the sample exam has nothing to say about World War II, the conflict in which the U.S. liberated millions of people and ended one of the most evil regimes in the history of the world. The heroic acts of the men who landed on Omaha Beach and lifted the flag on Iwo Jima are ignored. The wartime experiences that the new framework prefers are those raising “questions about American values,” such as “the internment of Japanese Americans, challenges to civil liberties, debates over race and segregation, and the decision to drop the atomic bomb.”

Why would the College Board respond to criticism by putting out a sample exam that proves the critics’ point? Perhaps it is a case of those on the left being so confirmed in their biases that they no longer notice them. Or maybe the College Board doesn’t care what others think.

Some states are trying to get its attention. The Texas State Board of Education, noting that the AP U.S. history framework is incompatible with that state’s standards, has formally requested that the College Board do a rewrite. The Georgia Senate has passed a resolution to encourage competition for the College Board’s AP program. If anything brings a change, it is likely to be such pressure from the states, which provide the College Board with substantial revenue.

Some 20 years ago, as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, I made a grant to a group to create voluntary standards for U.S. history. When the project was finished, I had standards on my hands that were overwhelmingly negative about the American story, so biased that I felt obliged to condemn them in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal called “The End of History.”

I learned an important lesson, one worth repeating today. The curriculum shouldn’t be farmed out, not to the federal government and not to private groups. It should stay in the hands of the people who are constitutionally responsible for it: the citizens of each state.

Mrs. Cheney, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, writes about history. Her most recent book is “James Madison: A Life Reconsidered” (Viking, 2014).
Read More......

Utopia’s Jailers

Necessity drives invention. In the field of military innovation, all sorts of inventions — the Maginot line, the flame fougasse, trench warfare, the Vickers machine gun — were rooted in the same urgent necessity: keeping Germans out. War is evil and ugly, but Europe experienced a worse horror when that necessity was inverted, and the totalitarian movement that controlled half of the continent decided it needed a way to keep Germans in. And so utopia’s jailers built the Berlin Wall and any number of similar fortifications. The ideologue may say that a wall is a wall is a wall, but in the case of a wall, intent matters: A society with barriers to keep out invaders is protected; a society with barriers to prevent exit is imprisoned.

Read more at National Review
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Why America Cannot have an Honest Dialogue on Poverty and Race

When it comes to race in America, there is a lot of yelling, name calling, and finger pointing, but little in the way of honest dialogue. This is too bad because if there was ever an issue in need of honest dialogue, that issue is race. As a college professor, I witness this need on a daily basis at the retail level in face-to-face interactions with students. My classes are comprised of people of all races, many of whom come from poor and lower-middleclass backgrounds. Most of my students need to get a good education as an essential step toward building a better life. What I see in my classes are plenty of students who work hard and smart toward that end. Unfortunately, I also see students who are just passing through on their way to nowhere. The latter group is composed of students who work neither hard nor smart. In fact they hardly work at all. They appear to believe that an education is something that can be given to them and should be because they are entitled to it. Their attitude can be summarized in these words: “I paid the tuition—give me the degree.” I should add that entitled college students come in all races and both genders and rarely pay their own tuition.

Read more at Patriot Update Read More......

Obama Wants Conservatives to Self-Cannibalize Over His Executive Action on Immigration

IMPORTANT ARTICLE by Mike Gonzalez
Having received a walloping in the elections, President Obama has promised to double down by tearing the country apart over illegal immigration. “I’ve shown a lot of patience,” he said with characteristic conceit at Wednesday’s contrition-free press conference. ✧ Make no mistake. It will be the opening salvo of a two-year campaign that will decide which course the country takes: one that fundamentally alters our way of life or one that conserves our many blessings.

Read more at The Daily Signal Read More......

Sanctioned "Sexuality Ed" - Is it Really Child Abuse?

I Spy Radio - Our Guests: Director of Parents Rights in Education, Lori Porter & their Strategic Analyst, Lew Barnes
This week: When parents and grandparents today remember "sex ed" from school, they remember it being about the biology, the “birds and bees,” and other basics like contraception. But not under Governor Kitzhaber. It’s no longer "sex education," it’s "sexuality education" that delves into values, lifestyles, and gender identity, offers explicit sexual content, and encourages promiscuous behaviors. Even more shocking, it's not just for high school and middle-school students, the curriculum is written for K-12.

Think about it: if someone off the street were to hand your children the materials and adult products that is being pushed in school -- under government mandates -- people would be going to jail for it. And Governor Kitzhaber is not only attached to this program but sanctions it. Even more ironic is this is being taught in our classrooms by teachers who are mandatory reporters.

Governor Kitzhaber's office has been rocked lately by allegations of fraud and conflicts of interest. We may have uncovered another conflict of interest regarding contracts and funding occurring under the Governor’s watch. Dennis Richardson may need to call for a second independent prosecutor.

Be sure to tune in this week to find out the shocking details of what is happening behind closed doors at schools all across Oregon, what your rights are, and what you and your local school board can do about it.

Busy on Saturday or Sunday? Not a problem. Monday, after the show airs, you can go to our webpage www.ispyradio.com and download it from our “past shows” page. Air I Spy at our new permanent time slot of Saturday at 11:00 a.m.

Sorry. Most links below don't work

Read More......

Hundreds of Colorado students protest history curriculum changes that would promote patriotism

ARVADA, Colo. – Hundreds of students walked out of classrooms around suburban Denver on Tuesday in protest over a conservative-led school board proposal to focus history education on topics that promote citizenship, patriotism and respect for authority, in a show of civil disobedience that the new standards would aim to downplay.

Read more at Fox News Read More......

Feds: Kids ‘entitled’ to U.S. education, no matter immigration status

The Department of Education said in a recently released fact sheet that it doesn’t matter if children are illegally in the country — they’re entitled to the same taxpayer-funded public education as everyone else. The declaration comes as states and localities around the nation have sought clarification from the federal agency about what to do with the scores of illegal immigrant youths who’ve crossed the border in recent months, insofar as schooling goes. “All children in the United States are entitled to equal access to a public elementary and secondary education, regardless of their or their parents’ actual or perceived national origin, citizenship or immigration status,” the fact sheet states. “This includes recently arrived unaccompanied children who are in immigration proceedings while residing in local communities with a parent, family member or other appropriate adult sponsor.” Read more at Washington Times. Read More......

Educational Decay: Loss of 18th Century Rigor

I have recently been reading Teaching A Generation of Leaders: A Thomas Jefferson Education for the 21st Century by Oliver Van DeMilleIle. ✧ This book was given to me by my sister, who was leaps and bounds above me in knowing the best way to educate her children. Having graduated Cum Laude from a University with a Bachelor’s in Education and having experience teaching in the public school, surely I had more expertise in educating children, compared to what she and her “odd” ideas of homeschooling could. She and most parents that are seeking an alternative to public school, in most part, are doing so because they have realized, what I have only recently become aware of, that an education today is NOT a true education. ✧ Betty Peters puts it succinctly when she states, “What is missing from 21st Century Skills? 18th Century Rigor!”

Read more at Wyoming Against the Common Core Read More......

Indiana Ends Common Core Education Standards

Indiana’s experiment with Common Core is over. ✧ Gov. Mike Pence signed legislation Monday requiring the state to come up with its own academic standards, making Indiana the latest state to pull its support for the national education standards known as Common Core.

“I believe our students are best served when decisions about education are made at the state and local level. By signing this legislation, Indiana has taken an important step forward in developing academic standards that are written by Hoosiers, for Hoosiers, and are uncommonly high.”

Read more at The Foundry Read More......

Malkin: Get To Know the Common Core Marketing Overlords

They’re everywhere. Turn on Fox News, local news, Animal Planet, HGTV, The Family Channel or talk radio. Pro-Common Core commercials have been airing ad nauseam in a desperate attempt to persuade American families to support the beleaguered federal education standards/testing/technology racket. Who’s funding these public relations pushes? D.C. lobbyists, entrenched politicians and Big Business interests.

Read more at RightWing News

Cripes! There is a pro-Common Core ad smack dab in the middle of this Michelle Malkin anti-Common Core article! (screenshot at 'read more')--bc

Read More......

Your Children and Governor Kitzhaber's Triple Threat

(Hat tip: KimR) - Governor Kitzhaber has put himself in charge of Oregon's Education System and Oregon's healthcare network:  the Oregon Health Authority.  As a result of this double take-over, there is a Triple Threat to our children and their families.  That threat includes the Network of School Based Health Centers (SBHCs); the grades K-12 Comprehensive Sexuality Education Standards that the Oregon Department of Education (ODE) promotes; and the Annual Adolescent Sexuality Conference in Seaside (ASC).  ...And what makes this Triple Threat even more unreasonable is that the governor is using our money to pay for it!

One part of the Triple Threat:  The SBHCs are sold to communities as basic healthcare for children.  However, as SBHC advocates are working toward implementing a clinic within your school, and as their Grant-Funded (your money!) planning continues, parents and school supporters learn that this “basic healthcare” actually and must include the offering of contraception, abortifacients, abortion and other medical services touted as treatment for the sexual health of youth, and parents are not kept informed as their children are accessing these treatment(s).  If parents research the Oregon SBHC Standards for Certification, they will learn that HIPAA law and Minors' Rights require that these treatments or referrals be part of a School Based Health Center.  SBHC advocates may tell communities that the clinic can be designed to reflect local values and not offer reproductive/contraception services.  THIS IS NOT THE TRUTH.  Advocates attempted this ploy in Clatsop County, but with months of persistence and research, parents and school supporters were able to expose the truth about the SBHC agenda, and were successful in stopping the implementation of a clinic in Astoria High School.

Another part of the Triple Threat:  In 2012, revisions to Oregon's grades K-12 Human Sexuality Education Standards (OAR 581-022-1440) were initially passed by the ODE and hidden as a “consent item” at their meeting.  Brad Victor, ODE's Sexuality Education Specialist at the time, bragged about being able to “Push the Envelope One More Time, Bingo Boom” with this consent process.  Mr. Victor also brags that Oregon's Sex Ed. Is one of the “most progressive in the country”.  These comments were made at the Adolescent Sexuality Conference along with Ms. Monica Rodriquez' comment that Oregon Sex Ed. “does not go far enough”!

This July, after adopting the extremely controversial curriculum deemed “ODE approved” in the Scappoose School District, one of the School Board members told parents who spoke strongly against the curriculum that, “You just have to trust the teachers”! (what if the curriculum itself is not trustworthy?)

A third part of Gov. Kitzhaber's Triple Threat to our children is the Annual Adolescent Sexuality Conference held in Seaside, OR.  This is a two (school) day event (next one already scheduled for April 7&8, 2014) in which students are encouraged to attend the conference, be “trained” in sexual behavior and choices, then return to their school to “educate their peers” and advocate for SBHCs.  The conference promotes the theme of “Empowering Youth” to make important decisions about their sexual behavior, and that they do not have to include their parents in these decisions!

Having attended the 2013 event, I can tell you that vendor displays included explicit images and “suggestions” and that the break-out/training sessions included subjects such as the fascination of Porn with discussions and materials which compromise the health and safety of the youth attending.  There is concern that some Oregon Revised Statutes may have been violated at this conference.  In one of the breakout sessions titled, “I Say Porn, You Say Porn”, sponsored by a youth empowerment group based in Eugene, YEPSA (Youth for the Education and Prevention of Sexual Assault), adults suggested that teen girls could safely send nude pictures of themselves as long as it was to their boyfriends and not to just everyone.  There have been recent cases in Florida and Montana in which teens have sent such pictures then, because of resulting harassment, have committed suicide.  There was even a case locally in Clatskanie in which a teen girl was severely harassed and physically bullied after sending such pictures.  This was a front page story in the Oregonian, August 6, 2013.  Those receiving these pictures are in possession of Child Porn.  There is currently a lawsuit (filed 10/15/13) in the U.S. District Court against  Clatskanie School District #6J and a School Administrator at the time of the harassment, Jeff Baughman.

Update on the 2014 Adolescent Sexuality Conference, ASC, Seaside, OR:  One of the keynote speakers at the conference is Cory Silverberg, co-founder of “Come As You Are” cooperative in Toronto, Canada.  This is a Sex Toy & Education Shop in Toronto, but this fact is not mentioned in Mr. Silverberg's bio for the Conference.  He will also be the presenter for a workshop at the conference titled:  “From Texting to Teledildonics:  Is Technology Changing Sex?”  (note: “Teledildonics cannot be found in the dictionary!?) This workshop is intended for “Youth & Adults”.  Mr. Silverberg is also writing a 3-part “inclusive” series of books for children about gender and sexuality.  We have also learned that an organization called “Center for Sexual Pleasure & Health” (CSPH) is promoting the Seaside Adolescent Sexuality Conference on their website.  This Center is located in Rhode Island-- One wonders why  an East Coast entity is interested in the ASC, thousands of miles away!?

There are 39 Work Sessions within the Conference and several General Assembly presentations.

You can access the ASC listing of 2014 workshops at www.oregon-asc.org/2014-conference/workshops

If you review the written summaries of these workshops, you will seriously question how Governor Kitzhaber's Oregon Health Authority and his Oregon Department of Education can possibly consider this “Best Practice” for the education of our youth.  Please ask them! 

I believe that if School Boards, School Administration/Staff and parents were actually asked to make the choice to spend millions of public dollars on SBHCs, Sexuality Education, and the Adolescent Sexuality Conference, or to spend those dollars on the Education which we expect and which our children need and deserve, that the choice would overwhelmingly be for the latter!  I also believe that Governor Kitzhaber's Triple Threat is a glaring reason to strengthen Oregon's Charter School law and the use of vouchers.

For more detailed information, contact:  www.parentsrightsined.wordpress.com 

Christine Bridgens

Warrenton, Oregon
<>
Read More......

School Test Teaches Kids: “Commands Of Government Officials Must Be Obeyed By All”

By Steve Watson - A parent of a ten year old was shocked to discover a grammar and writing test paper that their[sic] child brought home from school reads more like [a] document from an authoritarian country such as China. Read more at InfoWars… (Hat tip: Tom) Read More......

Top public schools demand more than Common Core

By Joy Pullmann (Hat tip: Kristie Hernandez) - The best U.S. public schools — including those with high numbers of poor and minority kids — require more of students than state standards and Common Core, and school leaders attribute their success partly to these high expectations.

The Common Core lists what its creators think students should know in K-12 math and English. Forty-five states agreed to it under pressure from the Obama administration in 2010. The Core calls itself “rigorous” and “internationally benchmarked,” but investigation into actually rigorous and internationally competitive standards within the United States casts doubt on these claims. Read more at Watchdog.org... Read More......