Thursday, February 06, 2014


School Tells Kids They Can't Celebrate USA

Why would people be "offended" by celebration of a place where they have chosen to live?

Students and parents at a Colorado high school are outraged after administrators turned down their request for a spirit week day honoring America because it might offend non-Americans.

“They said they didn’t want to offend anyone from other countries or immigrants,” a 16-year-old member of the student council told me. “They just really did not want to make anyone feel uncomfortable.”

The student council at Fort Collins High School had proposed having a day to celebrate the United States during next week’s Winter Spirit Week. The young people pitched “’Merica Monday” – and invited their classmates to dress in patriotic colors. Their proposal was promptly shot down by administrators.

“They said they didn’t want to be exclusive to any other country,” a 17-year-old member of the student council told me.

The students and parents who talked to me about this incident have asked to remain anonymous. The parents feared their children might face reprisals from liberal educators.

“It’s bizarre and idiotic that we’ve come to this crossroads in our society that we are having to sacrifice our own culture and belief system,” one of the parents told me. “I can’t even tell you how it got our blood boiling.”

After the administrators rejected the day to celebrate America, the teenagers offered a compromise – “My Country Monday.”

“We opened it up to everyone – no matter what country you are from,” the 17-year-old student told me. “That got declined, too.”

The school’s decision left students frustrated, confused and angry.

“It’s shocking,” the 16-year-old said. “There are men and women fighting for our country and we should be able to celebrate that and be proud that we live in a country where we are allowed to vote – the right to free speech. They won’t even let us celebrate it.”

The irony, said the students, is that they are required to participate in Cinco de Mayo celebrations. One member of the student council pointed out the hypocrisy – and noted that students were not being forced to dress in red, white and blue for “’Merica Day.”

“We were confused why we couldn’t do one day that was for America,” the student told me.

The parents said they are “so tired” of political correctness.

The principal at Fort Collins High School did not return my phone calls and neither did the assistant principal. A spokesperson for the Poudre School District sent me a statement acknowledging they rejected the “’Merica Day” celebration.

“Building administration met with the students to discuss the inconsistency of this day versus the other planned theme days including PJ day and Twin day,” the statement read. “The students then suggested changing the first day to My Country Monday and administration agreed. This theme day allows students to showcase their pride in America and for international students, their country of origin.”

However, parents and students said that’s not accurate. They said My Country Monday was originally rejected last week and was only reinstated midday Monday – shortly after I called the school district and began making inquiries (a coincidence, I’m sure.)

I asked the district spokesperson to clarify their statement. The spokesperson did not return my message.

“They said they didn’t feel comfortable having a day celebrated where students might feel uncomfortable with the patriotism that students are showing,” one of the students told me.

Unbelievable. This is the United States of America. We welcome the huddled masses yearning to be free with arms wide open. But if you come to our land and take offense at our values and traditions, then don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

And shame on the administrators at Fort Collins High School for treating American school children like second-class citizens.

To the young patriots at Fort Collins High School, I offer these words: America, America, God shed His grace on Thee. Don’t let your teachers tell you otherwise.

SOURCE





Panelist at Podesta Think Tank on Common Core: 'The Children Belong to All of Us'

Adolf lives!

In addressing criticism of the Common Core national education standards, a panelist at the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank, said critics were a “tiny minority” who opposed standards altogether, which was unfair because “the children belong to all of us.”

The CAP was founded by John Podesta, former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and now an adviser to President Barack Obama.  At a CAP event to promote Common Core on Friday, CNSNews.com asked about the critics who say federal monetary incentives attached to Common Core is driving the states to implement the standards.

Paul Reville, the former secretary of education for Massachusetts and a Common Core supporter, said,  “To be sure, there’s always a small voice – and I think these voices get amplified in the midst of these arguments – of people who were never in favor of standards in the first place and never wanted to have any kind of testing or accountability and those voices get amplified.”

“But those are a tiny minority,” he said. “An overwhelming majority of teachers are saying this is something – as [panelist] Toby [Romer] said – that makes sense.”

Reville continued, “Again, the argument about where it came from I think privileges certain sort of fringe voices about federalism and states’ rights, and things of that nature, when really what we’re doing at the national level here now, state by state, is what a lot of our states thought made sense individually.”

Common Core The Classroom

“Why should some towns and cities and states have no standards or low standards and others have extremely high standards when the children belong to all of us and would move [to different states in their educational lives]?”

“And the same logic applies to the nation,” Reville said. “And it makes sense to educators. It makes sense to policymakers, and it’s why people have voluntarily entered into this agreement.”

“So, it’s less about where it came from and more about, ‘Okay, now we settled on this as a set of targets, what are the strategies we need to implement, to be successful at it?’ because educators and students want to be successful,” Reville said.

The Common Core website describes the creation and mission of the standards as follows:

“The nation’s governors and education commissioners, through their representative organizations the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) led the development of the Common Core State Standards and continue to lead the initiative.”

“Teachers, parents, school administrators and experts from across the country together with state leaders provided input into the development of the standards,” reads the website.

“The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a state-led effort that established a single set of clear educational standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and mathematics that states voluntarily adopt,” says the website.  “The standards are designed to ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared to enter credit bearing entry courses in two or four-year college programs or enter the workforce. The standards are clear and concise to ensure that parents, teachers, and students have a clear understanding of the expectations in reading, writing, speaking and listening, language and mathematics in school.”

But critics such as Lindsey Burke, a Will Skillman Fellow in Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation who has studied the standards, said the initiative is about federal funding and centralizing education rules.

“Common Core was developed by two national organizations, it’s adoption incentivized with billions in federal funding and waivers from the onerous provisions of No Child Left Behind, and the national tests funded with federal grants,” Burke said.

“These are not the hallmarks of a ‘state-led’ process,” she said. “Moreover, these are not high standards.”

“They are, to reference the work of Stanford Professor of Mathematics Emeritus James Milgram, standards that prepare students for ‘non-selective community colleges,’” Burke said. “The English Language Arts standards de-emphasize the reading of fiction and classic literature in favor of informational texts.”

“But most concerning, Common Core removes the ability of parents and teachers to direct academic content and will have a homogenizing effect on the educational choices available to families,” Burke said.

The Washington Post published a commentary on Jan. 20 by Marion Brady, a retired teacher and author, who explained why Common Core has been criticized by people of all political stripes.

“Few oppose standards, but a significant number oppose the Common Core State Standards,” Brady wrote. “Those on the political right don’t like the fact that—notwithstanding the word ‘State’ in the title—it was really the feds who helped to railroad the standards into place.”

“Resisters on the political left cite a range of reasons for opposing the standards—that they were shoved into place without research or pilot programs, that they’re a setup for national testing, that the real winners are manufacturers of tests and teaching materials because they can crank out the same stuff for everybody—just to begin a considerably longer list,” Brady wrote.

But Jennifer Davis, co-founder and president of the National Center on Time and Learning who moderated the panel at CAP, told CNSNews.com that teachers are “truly embracing” Common Core.

“On the teacher side, I mean, all of the work were doing all over the country we’re finding teachers truly embracing and knowing that Common Core is important for their children and for their future in their schools,” Davis said, adding at one point, “It takes a village” to get this kind of education reform accomplished.

SOURCE





Schoolteacher Cheating

Philadelphia's public school system has joined several other big-city school systems, such as those in Atlanta, Detroit and Washington, D.C., in widespread teacher-led cheating on standardized academic achievement tests. So far, the city has fired three school principals, and The Wall Street Journal reports, "Nearly 140 teachers and administrators in Philadelphia public schools have been implicated in one of the nation's largest cheating scandals."

Investigators found that teachers got together after tests to erase the students' incorrect answers and replace them with correct answers. In some cases, they went as far as to give or show students answers during the test.

Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, identifies the problem as district officials focusing too heavily on test scores to judge teacher performance, and they've converted low-performing schools to charters run by independent groups that typically hire nonunion teachers. But William Hite, superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia, said cheating by adults harms students because schools use test scores to determine which students need remedial help, saying, "There is no circumstance, no matter how pressured the cooker, that adults should be cheating students."

While there's widespread teacher test cheating to conceal education failure, most notably among black children, it's just the tip of the iceberg. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, published by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics and sometimes referred to as the Nation's Report Card, measures student performance in the fourth and eighth grades. In 2013, 46 percent of Philadelphia eighth-graders scored below basic, and 35 percent scored basic. Below basic is a score meaning that a student is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at his grade level. Basic indicates only partial mastery. It's a similar story in reading, with 42 percent below basic and 41 percent basic. With this kind of performance, no one should be surprised that of the state of Pennsylvania's 27 most poorly performing schools on the SAT, 25 are in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia's four-year high-school graduation rate in 2012 was 64 percent, well below the national rate of 78 percent. Even if a student graduates from high school, what does it mean? What a high-school diploma means for white students is nothing to write home about, as suggested by the fact that every year, nearly 60 percent of first-year college students must take remedial courses in English or mathematics. What a high-school diploma means for black students is nothing less than a disaster, as pointed out by Drs. Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom in their 2009 book, "No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning." They state that "blacks nearing the end of their high school education perform a little worse than white eighth-graders in both reading and U.S. history, and a lot worse in math and geography." Little has changed since the book's publication.

Hite rightfully said that test cheating by adults harms students, but that harm pales in comparison with the harm done by teachers awarding fraudulent grades and conferring fraudulent high-school diplomas, particularly to black students. You say, "Williams, what do you mean by fraudulent diplomas?" When a student is given a high-school diploma, that attests that he can read, write and compute at a 12th-grade level, and when he can't do so at the eighth-grade level, that diploma is fraudulent. What makes it so tragic is that neither the student nor his parents are aware that he has a fraudulent diploma. When a black person is not admitted to college, flunks out of college, can't pass a civil service test or doesn't get job promotions, he is likelier to blame racial discrimination than his poor education.

Politicians, civil rights organizations and the education establishment will do nothing about the fraud. In fact, they give their full allegiance to the perpetrators.

SOURCE



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