Category Archives: Common Core

Alex Newman: Study: Common Core Had “Significant Negative Effect” on Students 0 (0)

by Alex Newman

A barely noticed study on the Obama-backed Common Core scheme revealed that the controversial national “education” standards caused a “significant” decline in student achievement.

Basically, if the Common Core scheme had never existed, students would have been much better off, according to researchers at the federally funded Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction and Learning (C-SAIL).

Results show that student performance declined in both reading and math as a result of Common Core, the researchers noted.

“Contrary to our expectation, we found that [Common Core] had significant negative effects on 4th graders’ reading achievement during the 7 years after the adoption of the new standards,” the study found.

Indeed, Common Core is packed with quackery such as the “sight-word” method that was first exposed as a dangerous failure over 150 years ago when it was tried in Boston. Even contributors to the Common Core reading section are blowing the whistle!

The controversial standards also “had a significant negative effect on 8th graders’ math achievement 7 years after adoption based on analyses of [National Assessment of Educational Progress] composite scores,” according to the analysis.

Researchers were surprised a how bad it was. Mengli Song, one of the authors of the study, noted that it is getting worse, too. “It’s rather unexpected,” Song explained. “The magnitude of the negative effects [of Common Core] tend to increase over time. That’s a little troubling.”

The results, which come after the politically toxic scheme has infested everything to do with education, confirm once again that the critics have been right all along.

The only two subject matter experts on the Common Core Validation Committee tried to warn Americans about it, too. Some of it was even based on incorrect math!

Common Core has been a total disaster for education, as FreedomProject Academy and FreedomProject Media have been warning consistently since the scheme was established. But of course, the disaster began long before Common Core.

And despite false statements from U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Common Core is more firmly entrenched today than it was in the final year of the Barack Obama administration.

The Takeaway

As Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education warned in 1983, the disaster in public “education” literally threatens the future of America as a nation and a people.

It is time for the fraudulent “education” system to be exposed and replaced with real education before even more children are irreparably harmed — and the nation itself is destroyed.


Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at anewman@thenewamerican.com. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook

Almost Amerika 0 (0)

Almost Amerika- “Why the unified leftist rage over the election of Donald Trump? Because Obama did not put the ball across the finish line.”

by Bill Lockwood

Even Lefty Liberals are confessing they have never seen anything like the current hateful, lawless, and unprincipled rage boiling out of halls of academia, the Main Stream Media, Hollywood and from the Democratic Party. As reported by Liberty Counsel, Former White House Secretary Ari Fleischer told a recent audience he had never before witnessed such hostility toward an incoming president. “I’ve never seen the left go so nuts, so early, so hard …” What is the explanation of this concerted left-wing fury over Donald Trump’s election? How are we to make sense of all of this turmoil?

Contradictory to television analysis, it cannot be that the Lefties in America are simply acting like spoiled children, though they are certainly doing that. Neither is it to be explained on the basis that they actually believe that Russia had something to do with our election, or loved Hillary so fervently. Common sense tells us that the reactions we are witnessing demand a fuller accounting than this. Exploding emotions across the map demands another interpretation. It is buried in that C-word that the liberal gate-keepers of culture thought they had banned from American discourse. Communism.

Collectivists have been laboring since the days of Woodrow Wilson to turn America into a socialistic state. Media and government progressives of all stripes have been swooning over the wonderful experiments in the former Soviet Union, even traveling to Moscow to learn under the tutelage of the Lenin’s and Stalin’s how to do it better. They praised Adolph Hitler’s Nazism of government-partnership with businesses—before his purge of the Jews made that unpopular. Mussolini’s fascism was the man of the hour to the press.

From the silver screen to the New York Times they have continued through the years to honor such bloody dictators as Ho Chi Minh, Chairman Mao, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevera. The outcome was predictable. Radicals of the 1960’s began pouring into our streets to support communist control across the globe and protest our involvement in the Viet Nam War where our brave soldiers were to defend tiny South Viet Nam from the Red Army. Jane Fonda became the “progressive” poster-girl as she was photographed with the big NVA guns that were blowing our pilots out of the sky. Hollywood lionized her. The media still loves her.

Finally, with Barack Obama, the Left began their end game. God-given liberty would be curtailed as the Constitution would be stood on its head. We would become Amerika: the USSA. United Socialist States of America. A cog in the Socialist International wheel.

Obama’s rap sheet showed that he was the man to complete the job.

Hope and change was to be revolutionary after the order of Vladimir Lenin. Obama’s entire life has been dedicated to communism. Bill Ayers, in whose house Obama began his campaign, is a self-described communist of the Weather Underground. After being recruited by communists, Obama’s lead in community organizing was in the main a Saul Alinsky project. Alinsky was a dedicated communist.

According to Obama himself, his main mentor during his youth was Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party (Party #47544). Later, at Occidental College, our future president traveled with Dr. John Drew who later wrote that Obama “was a Marxist-Leninist” who supported a violent communist revolution in America. It is little wonder that this is exactly what we began to see all across the nation as blacks from Ferguson, MO to Baltimore, MD exploded with rage and the Oval Office goaded them on by endorsing the violent-mongers.

Obama is hard-wired to the Marxist-driven Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a well-known communist organization. According to Western Journalism DSA members served in Obama’s campaigns and many were appointed to posts within his administration. Van Jones is a perfect illustration of another official communist.

Judicial Watch recently obtained FBI files which reveal that Valerie Jarrett’s entire family has been hard-core communists, some of whom have even warranted investigation by the U.S. government in years past. Sam Webb, president of the U.S. Communist Party, announced in 2009 that “We now have not simply a friend, but a people’s advocate in the White House” (Western Journalism).  Not surprising since Obama was an actual member of a Chicago-based socialist organization called the New Party as well as another socialist organization called “Progressive Chicago.” These notes only touch the hem of Obama’s communist garment.

This is why Obama’s legacy includes a nation racially divided; a bloated debt; homosexuality enshrined as “marriage” for the first time in world history; dramatic expansion of a government surveillance state; social engineering via the HUD program; the complete entrenchment of Islamists in government; an open border with the executive office ordering our own Border Patrol to disobey the law; a gigantic expansion of unconstitutional Government Education with Common Core; and his single legislative “achievement” (ObamaCare) gained solely upon his flat-footed lie that we all might “keep our doctors.” A legacy encased in subversive immorality.

Back to the original question: Why the unified leftist rage over the election of Donald Trump? Because Obama did not put the ball across the finish line. In one massive effort, the sleeping giant of American middle-class aroused itself from its lethargy to elect a business-man who has promised to reverse the immoral collectivist trend. The final stage of Marxist society in which economic goods are distributed equally and outcomes are based on egalitarian concepts will have to wait. Lefties are furious. This is why, on Inauguration Day, there is War in America. Obama almost changed the spelling to “Amerika.” And the Left will not be peaceable until they do.

 

Tom DeWeese: The Mental Dismemberment of Children 0 (0)

The Mental Dismemberment of Children – With the creation of the Federal Department of Education there grew a massive industry in mind manipulation.”

by Tom DeWeese

This past Halloween I had an opportunity to take part in an activity that I haven’t done in a couple of decades- hand out candy to the children on Beggers Night. It was fun to see the creative costumes. Some of beautiful princesses; others, usually the boys, dressed as scary monsters from movies. The scariest was, hands down, a young man who dressed up as Michael Meyers from the Halloween movies. Even the other kids wanted to stay clear of him. He had it down so well, the jump suit, the walk. He said nothing as he approached, we carefully put the goodies in his bag.

A few of the kids simply wore outfits to look like bums or super heroes. I remember doing similar things as I prepared to rush the neighborhood in a contest to see how much I could collect. It was a good time with fine memories that rushed back as each new batch of kids came up with their open bags yelling “Trick or Treat!”

My main attention, however, was on the little children. So innocent. Some not really sure why their parents were encouraging them to approach these strangers. And why were they giving out candy? But always, with their parent’s encouragement they accepted and said “tank too.” So sweet. They made you want to hug them. The parents of the little ones seemed to be having the best time with the experience. You could feel their love of their children. This was a family outing. This was Americana at its best. Family. Neighbors hugging neighbors.

But as I watched this wonderful experience a thought went through my head and anger seeped in to my happy feelings. I kept thinking about the following Monday when these children would be forced into the local school house, away from their loving patents and into the control of a system that was designed to take advantage of their innocence and rob them of their trust.  My anger grew as I thought about how these young children, taught by their parent’s love to feel secure around others in authority, are to be subjected to a dictatorial federal system that has been transformed away from teaching basic academics to one that instead, focuses on controlling and remolding the children’s minds.

These thoughts reminded me of a story I had read several decades before, written by Ayn Rand in her book entitled The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. In the book Rand included a story written in the nineteenth century by famed writer Victor Hugo. The story was called “The Comprachicos.” Hugo said the term was a compound Spanish word meaning “child-buyers.” The Comprachicos traded in children.
Hugo went on to describe why they bought and sold the children and how they prepared them for purchase. They created monsters. Why? To make people laugh. Kings in their courts needed to laugh. The people needed side shows to make them laugh. To fill the need the Comprachicos created freaks.

The making of freaks for everyone’s pleasure became an art form. They had a talent to disfigure. They operated to change faces into hideous masks. As Hugo described it, the process was a sort of “reverse orthopedics. “Where God had put a straight glance, this art put a squint.” Worse, the Comprachicos became masters at erasing the child’s memory so that they had no recollection of a life before they were horribly disfigured. “Was it not always so?” Later, in China, the process became more perfected as they learned to put the very young children in a box or a bottle so that as their little bodies grew, they grew into the shape of the container. The perfect freaks were created.

Now, why did I have such thoughts on this Halloween night? It wasn’t because of the costumes. Those were make believe and a personal choice by the children. They were simply playing.

No, my thoughts of the Comprachicos were from the second half of Rand’s article when she made her point in the telling of the Hugo story. She saw, as I see now, that the Comprachicos of our day are found in the public school classrooms. Only today, they don’t physically deform the children. Today the education system is designed to deform the children’s minds. In this way these modern day Comprachicos are much more dangerous and evil than those Hugo wrote about. It’s much more difficult to see the immediate results of the deformity. Many, even the parents, find it nearly impossible to see the destruction that is occurring. And so the Comprachicos can work out in the open in complete secrecy.

With the creation of the Federal Department of Education there grew a massive industry in mind manipulation. In November, 1992, following the election of Bill Clinton to the Presidency, Marc Tucker, president of the National Center for Education and the Economy (NCEE) wrote an 18 page letter to Hillary Clinton. He excitedly outlined the opportunity the Clinton Administration now had to “remold the entire American system…” He provided a detailed blueprint for a revolution to completely change our nation and its citizens by training children from a very young age to properly serve the global economy.

There was little in Tucker’s plan that had anything to do with teaching how to read, write or calculate. That wasn’t important. Instead it was a plan to control the children’s knowledge base to fit Tucker’s vision of creating the proper global citizen cog. Today, Tucker’s proposal made to Hillary Clinton that fateful day is completely in place.

Read 
Tom DeWeese’s book, “Erase: A Political Thriller”

It started with Goals 2000, designed to create a new system of standards that no longer taught our American system of free enterprise and limited government. In fact, it taught them that such ideas were dangerous and selfish. Then came School-to-Work, which focused on job training rather then academics. It was all glued together by a new method of psychological control called “Outcome based Education.” OBE created a computer database on every child and focused on mental, psychological and behavioral evaluations. The data bases were made available to the schools, the government and future employers.

Teachers were designated as counselors to decide if problem children needed drugs to control their behavior. Ritalin over use was born. A system called “Transition” was employed which featured small groups of children sharing their thoughts, feelings, and opinions. Transition contains no academic significance whatsoever. It contains tactics such as role playing. Its purpose is to strip search the students for their ideas and attitudes so that a special personal curriculum can be created to assure those attitudes, such as love of family or country, for example, can be systematically deleted. It slowly trains them to not question authority.

Today, the new term is Common Core. It simply encompasses all of these forerunners to the plan to remold American education, and ultimately change American culture by dictating the thought and belief process of its citizens.  The indoctrination of the children is now in full swing. In 2011, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), another private group contracting with the Department of Education, advocated the “Whole Child Approach,” saying Whole child education is the expansion of education beyond just learning reading, writing, and arithmetic to include student health, community engagement, and social emotional learning (SEL). The ASCD report goes on to explain that “SEL focuses on feelings, emotions, and self-reflection, leading to inclusion of social responsibility and social justice initiatives.”

The Department of Education is now planning to use the SEL process to rate schools on their “nonacademic” factors through its new initiative called “Every Student Succeeds Act” (ESSA) that is to be enforced in the 2017-1018 school year. The bottom line for all of this mumbo jumbo is that children have been designated to be patients that are sick and in dire need of cure. If they believe they are unique individuals; if they love their families; believe their nation is a bastion of freedom; love God; etc. then they are deemed unhealthy, deluded and in urgent need of care.

The “curriculum” that now surrounds them drills home the need to openly seek to change the world in areas such as health care, climate regulation, and “sexual politics.” Children are graded on their activism, volunteerism, commitment to community rather than academic knowledge. Children are taught that only whites can be racist because racism is power and only whites have power. American civics is ignored.

Our founding ideas are dismissed as organized slavery controlled by the rich. Capitalism is evil. Wealth must be destroyed. Government control is the answer to all questions. These things, the children are assured, are the proper attitudes, values and beliefs. And it is their duty as citizens of the world to not only promote and carry out such ideas, but to consider any contrarian thoughts as evil, and to be stopped at all costs. These are the children of today.

In my book ERASE, I write of a process called “Globally Acceptable Truth.” This is an actual policy promoted through the United Nations. It advocates that the reason we have war, poverty and strife is because there is too much knowledge in the world. That, we are told, forces people to struggle to understand too many ideas in order to make decisions for their lives. It’s just too much to of a burden to live under. It’s the reason, we are told, that so many are failing today. They just can’t take the stress of life. So under Globally Acceptable Truth, these decisions are made for them making their lives less stressful.

That is the purpose of today’s education system.

So now, after decades of this mind control and manipulation passing as pubic education, what is the true outcome? Well, simply watch the nightly news as young people take to the streets to protest the election of Donald Trump. Listen to what they say. They are terrified at these politically incorrect ideas.  They oppose policies that seek to keep our nation independent and sovereign. They label any thoughts of the reduction of federal spending programs as hateful and racist. They loath the idea that people can have differing opinions. To advocate ideas of individuality, limited government, pro-second amendment, sound science, free enterprise – all such ideas can now get one labeled as unstable and possibly insane. Such dangerous thoughts must be cured.

So well have these modern day Comprachicos done their job that the once happy, innocent, trusting children now need counseling and safe spaces to protect them from ideas and opinions that are outside of their acceptable truth. They are reduced to coloring books and play dough to cope. Their minds have been remolded into the shape of a hideous, empty, vessel, kept in a state of planned constant adolescence where they remain pliable.

Many will say that the education system has failed. That’s wrong,. It is working perfectly for what it’s been designed to do. If you think it has failed that’s because you are still operating under the incorrect assumption that the purpose of schools are for teaching knowledge and learning academics. In fact, the Comprachicos of Yale and Harvard and every “institution of higher learning” and public school classrooms have succeeded in creating the perfect, pliable, unquestioning, obedient global village idiots, ready to take their selected spot in this well-ordered utopia. Of course, in reality the process is nothing short of child abuse.

I weep for those wonderful little bright eyed children from that Halloween night.  And for all the children just like them across this country.  If you dream of taking the country back, start by saving the children from mental dismemberment by these modern day Comprachicos.

To make the nation great again Donald Trump’s new Administration must set this very specific goal: Tear down the federal Department of Education and set free these young minds so that they may have a life of their own. For that is Freedom.

Read Tom Deweese’s Biography

Founding Fathers Supported Islam? 0 (0)

Founding Fathers Supported Islam?

by Bill Lockwood

President Obama has jumped the gun. He had hoped that by now his Common Core education standards would have already dumbed-down Americans to the point that they know nothing of our own history nor would they be able to read the Koran for themselves. So he lectured America this week from a Baltimore mosque that “Islam has always been a part of America.”

Visiting the Islamic Society of Baltimore on Wednesday, Obama eagerly assured Muslims that the dramatic rise in Islamic bloody terror against Christians and non-Muslims around the world should not in turn cause suspicion of Islam. Anti-Muslim bias and ill-feeling must be denounced, regardless of how much infidel blood flows at the hands of Muslims.

Within his remarks Obama showed what purposeful brainwashing can do to a mind. To support his thesis that Islam has always been woven into the fabric of America he pointed out (1) That the religion of many African slaves brought to America in the 17th century was Islam; (2) That Thomas Jefferson wanted the “Islamic” religion to be protected as was other religions, and; (3) That Jefferson and John Adams had their own copies of the Koran. It is difficult to believe that any person considers these sophomoric suggestions as proof that somehow “Islam has been woven into the fabric of America from the beginning,” let alone a president who was supposedly Harvard-trained. Stunning.

Regarding Jefferson’s view of Islam, consider that even Columbia-degreed Denise Spellberg, author of Thomas Jefferson and the Quran: Islam and the Founders, reminds us that the Founders believed both Catholicism and Islam were violent religions and that Jefferson himself had a “personal disdain” for Islam. Jefferson knew from his experience as Minister to France that Islam was spread by the sword.

In spite of his disdain, Jefferson urged “toleration” toward individual Muslims who may be in America. However, to equate this toleration to “Muslims being a part of the fabric” or “founding” of America insults intelligence. Further, that Jefferson and Adams owned a copy of the Koran does not mean they appreciated any of Muhammed’s teachings any more than owning a copy of Dreams From My Father means anyone likes the content.

Perhaps Obama, while he is on Thomas Jefferson—who launched America’s first war against Muslim Barbary Coast Pirates–will announce to the public what Jefferson himself reported to John Jay and to the Congress regarding Islam. He learned it directly from the Tripoli Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman. The ambassador answered us that [the right of piracy] was founded upon on the laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Other Founders

What exactly did the Founders of America think of Islam? Not only did they eschew it, but were outspoken that CHRISTIANITY is the great basis upon our free republic rests. That the liberty to even be in America while believing Muhammad’s Koran is traceable solely to Christian concepts of freedom—it certainly does not work the other way around.

The Father of American jurisprudence, Justice Joseph Story, in his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, “Indeed, in a republic, there would seem to be a peculiar propriety in viewing the Christian religion, as the great basis, on which it must rest for its support and permanence, if it be, what it has ever been deemed by its truest friends to be, the religion of liberty.” Story went on to point out that not only did the Founders as a whole wish Christianity to receive “encouragement” from the state, but that the real object of the First Amendment “was not to countenance, much less advance Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity by prostrating Christianity …”

James Iredell, a U.S. Supreme Court judge appointed by George Washington, made the same point in 1788. But it is objected that the people of America may perhaps choose representatives who have no religion at all, and that pagans and Mahometans may be admitted into offices … But it is never to be supposed that the people of America will trust their dearest rights to persons who have no religion at all, or a religion materially different from their own.

Samuel Johnston, governor of North Carolina and member of the Constitution ratifying convention in 1788, suggested that if Muslims ever became officials of the United States that it would be “an unfortunate” event and could only happen if people laid aside the Christian religion altogether. He likened this, as did other Founders, to having elected officials who were devoid of religion completely. Similar quotations could be multiplied many times over. The Founding generation, far from remotely supposing that Islam was “woven into the fabric” of our nation, disdained it as a violent religion.

Obama’s reminder that some of the African slaves brought to America is likely the truth. What he refuses to acknowledge, however, is that not one of those African slave came to America without the complicity of Muslim slave traders on the African continent. The Koran not only endorses slavery, but Muhammed himself, the epitome of what a Muslim should be, personally owned black slaves.

It is beyond sad to witness the occupant of the Oval Office so stultify his intelligence by re-writing history. But it is a forecast of what his Common Core standards have in mind for all students.

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