Petro Dollars Get Behind Common Core

My  and my husband's paths crossed this weekend when I happened to catch (out of the corner of my eye because I cannot imagine sitting down to watch this) an ad by Exxon Mobile, that ran during the golf tournament he was watching on tv, promoting the Common Core Standards. It was every bit the propaganda that CCCS enthusiasts could want.

"Forty five states have joined together to assure consistent academic standards across America.  These internationally recognized benchmarks are unlocking a better way to prepare our children for college and their careers. Because when our kids do better, America does better. Let's reach higher.  Let's invest in our teachers and inspire our students.  Let's solve this."

My husband looked over at me an innocently asked, "Hey, isn't that something you're following?"  (He generally leaves all kid related issues to me and knows that I write for an education blog, so it was a safe guess when the ad mentioned education that I might have some knowledge about it.)  It turned into a moment where my head popped up from the middle of the forest of education reform. I got a glimpse of the view from someone standing outside the forest. Here was someone who only paid passing attention to education being hit with this message from a well known company while watching his favorite passtime. To him the message sounded positive. It had all those manly buzz words, "internationally recognized" (not true), "children prepared for careers" (and out of the house), "invest", "reach higher", "solve." What's not to like for the average American male? Almost every state is in on it. They are going to fix the problem. Even if the average male doesn't know exactly what the problem is, the fact that there is a single one time fix available appears to be what the ad claims, so let's get behind these standards and get back to the 8th hole.

The ad is an intrusion into the mainstream and more importantly into the male world where, admit it guys, most of you don't spend much time thinking about public education.  Unlike the public service announcements about the fictitious government dependent Julia, or the seniors who secretly use food stamps to get healthy food (put out by USDA), this ad had a credible sponsor and a message that was hard for those not in the know to argue with.

But for those in the know it is disturbing.

Exxon is not in the education business.  If the ad were done by Pearson Publishing or any one of dozens of education technology companies it would be more understandable. Get the men behind this and we'll make more money. But an international fuel supplier promoting this is highly suspicious.  Does this count as a charitable contribution for them?  Does this count as a political contribution for them? Is this something they had to promise to do to get some drilling permits pushed through? Why would Exxon Mobile be promoting national education standards?

A look at their Let's Solve This website may give some indication why they're doing this. They have teamed with the National Math and Science Initiative to help promote those two subjects, both of which, coincidentally, one would need to work at Exxon Mobile. It just seems that promoting Common Core Standards which Exxon will, theoretically, have no input to, is a rather round about way to garner better future employees.

It does, however, fall right in line with the DOEd's goal of providing graduates ready for work. This could be the beginning of the official partnership between government and business, which is not a new discussion in the field of education, but is new outside of education, say, on the golf course.

Expect to see these ads running in more places, probably starting with sports where they will appear more inoccuous as opposed to running on the Sunday morning talk shows where they will smell of politics. I suspect more companies will join the chorus as they too vie for competent workers.  I just hope they all have a permanent budget line set up for these promotions, because I don't think the problem with education is going to go away any time soon.

Fixing Kansas City Schools Will Not Be Easy

America's press has told you the Joe Friday version of the story of the boy who was set on fire in Kansas City.  Just the facts, and fairly sterilized at that.  If you read enough news reports you can get the idea that this was a racially motivated attack. But it appears you have to leave American news reports to get the bigger picture (remember the zoom out post).  Selwyn Duke reported in the Canada Free Press on the atmosphere in the Kansas City schools that made this type of attack almost inevitable.

The boy raised his hand, eager to answer the question.  “What would you know about it?” exclaimed the teacher dismissively.  “You’re not our race."

This was not dialogue from a Hollywood movie.  According to a woman named Melissa Coon, it was what a teacher at East High School in Kansas City told her 13-year-old son, Allen, when he attempted to answer a question during Black History Month.  Coon identifies that teacher as Mrs. Karla Dorsey, who is black; Allen is white.

As has already been reported, Allen was a victim of a vicious racial attack last week in which two older black teens doused him with gasoline and set him alight, saying “This is what you deserve.  You get what you deserve, white boy.”  Not surprisingly, Coon has pulled her son out of East High and, concerned about further racial violence, intends to leave the K.C. area. 

While this crime is making headlines, Coon states that it was merely the horrible culmination of continual racial harassment her son had to endure at East High.  Moreover, after conducting an investigation that included extensive interviews with parents and students, I’ve learned that Coon’s son is not alone.  Other white students also report a pattern of racial harassment at the high school at the hands of their peers – and, shockingly, their teachers. 

Two of these victims were the twin 14-year-old daughters (first names withheld upon request) of Karin Wildeisen.  Ever since their family relocated from Texas they had endured racial animosity in the Kansas City school system and inappropriate behavior by staff, which included teachers laughing while boys humiliatingly manhandled the girls and a teacher slapping one of them on the backside.  But there was far worse to come.

The twins started coming home and talking about the goings-on in an advanced-English class taught by a teacher Wildeisen identifies as Ms. Veda Monday.  Wildeisen said that her daughters told her, “There are four white kids in the class; they are being targeted racially.”  They said that Monday, who is black, was feeding the class racial material, about which Wildeisen notes, “She’s teaching advanced English; she has no reason to be teaching civil rights.” 

But then there was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  One day Monday allegedly showed an explicit film involving portrayals of whites lynching blacks and then, reports ex-Texan Wildeisen, “in front of the class attacked my daughters, telling them that ‘everybody from Texas is ignorant rednecks’” and that all white people were ‘responsible for Jasper because [their] skin is white.’”  This reference is to an atrocity in Jasper, TX, in which three white men murdered a black man in 1998.

Where would a teacher get the idea that all whites are responsible for the Jasper tragedy?  It’s not hard to figure out.  Black-liberation theology (BLT) instructs, writes the man some regard as its father, Professor James Cone, “All white men are responsible for white oppression.”  And how common is BLT?  Well, Cone’s books were required reading at Barack Obama’s long-time house of worship in Chicago, Trinity United Church of Christ.

The end result of this is that Wildeisen, like Melissa Coon, decided to pull her children out of East High.  Also like Coon, she intends to leave the area, saying that it and the school are a “powder keg.”  As for now, her daughters are studying at home via a distance-learning program.

Another white victim is 15-year-old Ashley Miller, whose family had moved to K.C., MO, from Kansas.  Subject to racial harassment, she was called names such as “white b****.”  She also actually shared a class with Allen Coon, and as the only two white students in the room they became the target of sexual comments.  Moreover, she reports the same experience with race-baiting videos as do the Wildeisens: they would be shown, and an onus would be placed on the white students.  Her mother Melissa told me that she now fears for her daughter’s safety and, you guessed it, is in the process of withdrawing Ashley from East High.  And the rest of the pattern is holding, too: the Millers are contemplating leaving the area.

Yet even putting the brutal fire attack aside, Melissa Coon’s young boy by far got the worst of it.  The tow-headed Allen looks like “the classic all-American white boy,” says his mother, and “after the first week [of school] he was nothing but racially harassed.”  She says that “he was called every racial slur you can imagine,” such as “honkey,” “cracker,” “whitey” and “guero” (a Spanish slang term for whites that can be used in a derogatory way).  He was, she reports, pushed into lockers and was jumped in the bathroom.  And, even before the recent attack, he was sometimes menaced by groups that would follow him part of the way home.

Even more damning, though, is that multiple educators were complicit in the harassment.  Mrs. Coon related an incident in which a teacher she identifies as Ms. Carla Kinder called Allen “Casper” and then “got all the students to get involved.”  Other times, the students would initiate the harassment and the teachers would pick up the baton.  “They would tease him; people would make fun of him and they’d chime in,” said Coon.

This is the atmosphere in the Kansas City schools and the teachers, and even the administration, seem to be tacitly supporting it. Duke continues,

And Indifference 101seems to be a course offering at East High, too.  Melissa Coon had been complaining to the school’s administration about her son’s harassment repeatedly – only to be ignored and stonewalled – repeatedly.  At one point an administrator told her that her son could only have a transfer to another district school but said that Allen would have “more problems there” and that he should stay at more “racially diverse” East High (which has no more than 20 white students).  At another, a vice Principal Coon identifies as Ms. Jessica Bassett denied, while shaking and rubbing her hands together nervously, ever having heard about Allen’s problems even though they had been brought to her attention on at least five occasions.

St Louis Public Schools Superintendent Kelvin Adams spoke of the difficulty in firing a bad teacher in Missouri's metropolitan districts which has led to the retention of some really awful teachers. His comments, at a Show Me Institute Policy breakfast, indicated that it can take up to 100 days to get rid of a bad teacher. If you do the math, this is more than half a school year (180 days) that kids are subjected to teachers the administration would like to get rid of.  Is this the excuse that Kansas City officials will give for not disciplining their teachers who incite such behavior in their classrooms? Probably not, because the problem extends beyond the schools.   

And Coon’s experience with the local police hasn’t been much better.  Listening to her testimony I got the feeling that K.C. law enforcement didn’t want the arrest and prosecution of two black youths on a hate-crime charge, possibly for fear of the “powder keg."

Does anyone think that replacing the school board or superintendent is going to fix this problem? This problem is deeply embedded in the community.  You can read many explanations of why here and here, but one salient point both authors make is this.  If you repeatedly expose people to a limited set of facts designed to prove an agenda (otherwise known as propaganda), you will inevitably create people who believe your agenda to their core. If you do this in class, you end up with students who do what they did to Allen Coon. If you do this in the broader media, as Jack Cashill of the American Thinker posited on the  refusal of the media to report politically incorrect “hate crimes", you find the cumulative effect to be one that leads minorities, especially blacks, to think themselves "uniquely victimized.” And when you thus believe, you’re more likely to lash out.

If you display a group’s sins to the exclusion of its triumphs ad infinitum, you can make it appear a den of demons.  And, ever since the advent of video technology, propaganda films have been used the world over to cultivate racial and ethnic hostility.  It is Hate 101.

This is one cautionary tale regarding local control, but I mention it in the name of putting all the cards on the table. Surely we can turn curricula over to the schools and teachers without allowing them to teach hate and divisiveness. Can't we?

Schoolchildren Used Once Again for Adult Agendas: OWS & Common Core State Standards Initiative

You may have read last week about 3rd grade children singing a pro-occupy Wall Street song in a Virginia public school. It was named "Part of the 99" and the Daily Mail listed the words to the song:

******************************
Some people have it all
But they still don’t think they have enough
They want more money
A faster ride
They’re not content
Never satisfied
Yes — they’re the 1 percent


I used to be one of the 1 percent
I worked all the time
Never saw my family
Couldn’t make life rhyme
Then the bubble burst
It really, really hurt
I lost my money
Lost my pride
Lost my home
Now I’m part of the 99


Some people have it all
But they still don’t think they have enough
They want more money
A faster ride
They’re not content
Never satisfied
Yes — they’re the 1 percent


I used to be sad, now I’m satisfied
’Cause I really have enough
Though I lost my yacht and plane
Didn’t need that extra stuff
Could have been much worse
You don’t need to be first
’Cause I’ve got my friends
Here by my side
Don’t need it all
I’m so happy to be part of the 99
*********************************

There is some question whether or not 3rd graders could come up with such lyrics, life experiences and knowledge of the Occupy Movement to sing such a song, or whether they were provided with the words and idea by adults with a pro-Occupy agenda.

Below is a video from middle school students extolling the virtues of common core standards.  We've provided videos of teachers singing Common Core praises, but this is the first we've seen of children being excited about being part of an expensive experiment that is:

• untested
• unproven
• unconstitutional
• underfunded

Do you think 8th grade students know what common core standards are or are they furthering an adult agenda?  Do you think these children wrote the script for Common Core or were they provided with a script and props by the adults? 


The students hold up flash cards for the camera and are great looking kids.  Ask yourself as you read through the common core talking points if you truly believe these kids know what they are flashing on the screen.  Do they believe the reason students are having dismal test results is because the country doesn't have national standards?  Do they believe their high school success depends on standards set by a consortia?  Do they know these standards are underfunded and will impact their future economic lives?  Are they aware they are entering a "one size fits all" education which does not foster creativity or innovation on behalf of the teachers or the students?


Watch the video on the  Cocopah Middle School website:

  An introduction to the Common Core Standards, presented by students of Cocopah Middle School

Children Are Used to Push the Message of Contract For The American Dream

So after Common Core is all done and all our kids are properly educated by the Capital "S" State, what do they look like? The bright shiny faces in this video from Van Jones's Contract For the American Dream, tell us what their ideal world is like.



Am I being too petty when I ask, why did they have to give the kid with a lisp the piece about Social Security?

It is the lowest of low to use children as propaganda tools, but when you view them all as human capital would you expect anything different?

Arne Duncan and the Tempest in the Teapot

Readers of this blog are cognizant of the dangers of common core standards, Race to the Top, Vision for Missouri Public Education, or whatever name you place on the federalization of public education. It not only comes in the guise of the above programs, it also comes in the current push for charter schools by this administration.

Some people not familiar with the methodical takeover by the schools via stimulus money which bypasses state legislatures, or inane competitions by states for federal money being dangled like carrots on a string, may think I am overreacting or haven't thoroughly researched this subject.

Well, to any doubters out there, take a look at this article quoting Arne Duncan. Not only does he want your child from cradle to age 20, complete with a longitudinal data system to track your family and your child's progress, he now wants to make your child into a "good environmental citizen". I think the tempest in the teapot Arne Duncan has been creating is about to come to a full boil with his new statements and intentions for public education students.

Mr. Duncan is intent on pushing educational propaganda for programs not proven accurate. For example, one goal of the administration is to spend billions on wind power. Obama has stated he wants the United States to emulate Spain's energy program. However, what Mr. Duncan and other greenies fail to mention is that these programs are more expensive than traditional energy sources and for every green job created, 2.2 traditional jobs are deleted.

Duncan stated,

“Educators have a central role in this. A well educated citizen knows that we must not act in this generation in ways that endanger the next,” said Duncan. “They teach students about how the climate is changing. They explain the science behind climate change and how we can change our daily practices to help save the planet. They have a role in preparing students for jobs in the green economy.”

“Historically," Duncan said, "the Department of Education hasn’t been doing enough to drive the sustainability movement, and today, I promise that we will be a committed partner in the national effort to build a more environmentally literate and responsible society."

When did it become the responsibility of this Department to support a sustainability movement? WHO is going to teach students how our climate is changing; scientists who pushed theories for financial reward and now have to admit some of their data is not scientifically accurate? Why are we pursuing a green economy at the expense of proven energy systems when it has been proven green jobs are not financially sustainable and harmful to existing industries?

Duncan goes on to state:

"I want my department to help advance the sustainability movement through education."

This isn't education. This is propaganda, pure and simple. It is just one example of the danger of common core standards. This type of curriculum is what will be taught to your child under this Administration. This is not the school of critical thinking; it is the school of teaching distorted theories as factual information.

It is past time for parents, taxpayers, and legislators to say ENOUGH. Our children should not be taught false theories to fulfill an administration's goals. That's not education. That is indoctrination. I have an idea. Let's take the educational goals of this administration and "pour them down the drain". Tip that teapot over and fill it up with new goals. Take the Federal government out of the mix and place the education of children back to the parents. School choice is what parents want and students deserve, not spending millions of additional dollars for the Department of Education to push its political agenda.

(ht: a watchdog)