As a former home school mom I still support the efforts of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) knowing that the freedom to home school will always be under threat. I find the article below between President of the HSLDA and the Leader of Common Core of interest.
For those who still deny the secular progressive agenda behind the Common Core State Standards, the American Humanist Association (AHA) provides a nice little check-list of ‘guiding principles’ they believe should be taught to all children in all schools.
AHA’s Ten Commitments: Guiding Principles for Teaching Values in America’s Public Schools express the importance of, among other things, critical thinking, global awareness, human rights (as set forth by the United Nations), social justice, and service to an interdependent world.
So how do our new standards and aligned curriculum resources stack up to these guiding principles? Not only does Common Core get an A plus, but Common Core developer, Linda Darling-Hammond, is an endorser of AHA’s Ten Commitments.
Although not dated, it appears AHA released the Ten Commitments less than a year ago. Therefore, Hammond’s endorsement comes long after the creation and release of Common Core.
CCSSO created Common Core lesson plans and resources, by the dozens, fall right in line with AHA’s vision of morality in education, while the English Language Arts standards themselves, through the heavy use of informational texts (propaganda), lay the perfect foundation for social engineering as called for by John Dewey, the father of progressive education and a drafter of the first Humanist Manifesto.
David Coleman, dubbed ‘the architect’ of the standards, was in recent years a symposium speaker and participant in the IAS School of Social Science Dewey Seminar, where the impact of educational institutions on society, sociopolitical orders, and democracy were examined through a series of workshops and seminars.
The American Humanist Association, whose motto is ‘Good Without God’, makes clear their belief that it’s not just a school’s right, but its duty, to see that students develop the convictions needed to shape a ‘democratic’ and ‘just world’.
From AHA’s website:
“Many students spend as much or more time in school than they do at home. Therefore, the school must be a place that supports family and community efforts to build strong values.”
“This ethical mission is an essential part of all education, public and private, elementary through high school and university. In a democratic and pluralist society, we believe that the values presented should be the moral foundation of education.”
For AHA to say they support family and community efforts to build values in one breath, then specifically lay out what those values should be in another, tells us exactly what we need to know – that AHA educators intend to teach theirvalues, regardless of whether they conflict with the values of the parent. But so it is and has always been with the secular progressive education movement…Constitution be damned.
See examples of Common Core lessons and resources that promote social justice, global awareness, and interdependence here and here.
Also, go to the Common Core / CSCOPE / CES Connection page to read about the Coalition of Essential Schools, the progressive education reform movement behind Common Core.
By Merrill Hope
As the federally mandated public education Common Core standards steamroll over the nation’s classrooms, plenty of parents and educators have taken to the public forum in protest to “stop common core.” Yet, the program’s proponents tell Americans they have nothing to fear because the Common Core is “rigorous’. In fact, “rigor” has become the go-to word to describe the Common Core. College board president appointee David Coleman, an architect of the Common Core standards, reminds us that the Common Core allows us to talk about “rigor” more concretely and these days, we hear the word “rigor” enough to be sure of one thing — no one is quite sure what “rigor” means anymore. So, let’s clear it up!
”Rigor” has a rich etymology from its Latin roots to the old French meaning of “to be stiff,” which birthed the medical term “rigor mortis.” Later, “rigor” entered the mouths of Middle English speaking serfs to mean “rigid” and “rigor” has maintained that definition for centuries. Even today, Merriam-Webster defines “rigor” as “harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper, or judgment” and as “the quality of being unyielding.” Encarta calls it “something that obstructs progress and requires great effort to overcome…”
Harsh. Severe. Stringent obstruction. Yup, that’s old school rigor, the kind that even William the Conqueror and Geoffrey Chaucer would have understood. But one definition, “the application of precise and exacting standards in the doing of something,” jumps up like a page from “The Giver,” Lois Lowry’s brilliant dystopian novel where “precise language” is king. ”The Giver” itself stands not too far from the realities of “rigor.” This 1994 Newberry Medal winner awarded by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, was also challenged and/or banned on and off in the late 1990′s and again, from 2000-2009 by the very same organization — the American Library Association. Lowry packs intricate themes into this cautionary tale about trading in freedom for security, providing tremendous insight into “rigor” as redefined for the 21st Century.
But, fret not. Because of the Common Core, “rigor” doesn’t mean “rigor” anymore. No echoes of Sir Lancelot’s voice here. Instead, “rigor” in the new and improved internationally bench marked lexicon means, well, something that is associated with “high levels of rigor.” It’s about rigorous content and rigorous instructional practices. It’s a refreshed and recycled rigor where it’s all about rigor. Go on! Google it! See how rigorous rigor can be. Scaffolding thinking! Staircase of complexity! Dual intensity! Hey, it’s authentic rigor sans the crotchety old back-to-basics. Nope, not your parent’s rigor. Rigor is now a higher-order brain process that is rigorous. Really rigorous rigor.
Equally exciting is that “rigor is for everyone,” writes academic Barbara Blackburn, Ph.D., in “Rigor is NOT a four-letter word.” She defines “true rigor” as “creating an environment in which each student is expected to learn at high levels, each student is supported so he or she can learn at high levels, and each student demonstrates learning at high levels.”
So, that’s rigor, folks. And now that you’ve got rigor under your belt, don’t forget to read Robyn Jackson’s “Rigorous Instruction for the Classroom” where she introduces another very important Common Core word: ROBUST.
Merrill Hope is a contributing writer who, over the years, has inked articles for The Hollywood Reporter, Backstage West and a host of lifestyle publications. More recently, she blogs online for Save America Foundation. Most importantly, though, she is a wife, a mom and a dachshund lover. You can reach her on Twitter at Merrill Hope @outoftheboxmom.
Written by Alex Newman
A highly controversial school curriculum used in much of Texas known as “CSCOPE,” which came under relentless assault from activists and parents who said it was promoting “progressive” anti-American and anti-Christian propaganda, was dealt a major blow by policymakers this week. However, despite media reports and legislators heralding the death of the divisive educational program, major elements remain in place. Still, the news was lauded as a victory for common-sense education as the national battle over Obama-backed “Common Core” standards heats up.
The CSCOPE program was touted online by its developers as a “customizable, online curriculum management system” for Texas schools. Despite being used in more than two thirds of state school districts, the scheme largely flew under the radar — at least for a while — until a broad coalition of concerned parents, teachers, political activists, Tea Party groups, and others eventually cried foul.
The system surged into the national spotlight earlier this year when conservative media outlets began exposing the curriculum contents, which critics lambasted as everything from “Marxist” indoctrination to “pro-Islam” attacks on Christianity. Others complained that parents were not allowed to access the material due to “licensing” restrictions.
Produced by the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative (TESCCC), the lesson plans included, for example, an assignment to design a new communist flag based on symbols used by socialist regimes. A controversial handout for “social studies,” meanwhile, portrayed humanity as evolving upward from a purportedly selfish free-market economic system toward socialism. The final step was communism, where, supposedly, “all people work together for everyone.” Another lesson suggested the famous Boston Tea Party could be considered an act of terrorism.
Among the most controversial elements of the entire scandal were school materials that critics viewed as hostile toward Christianity. One lesson plan, for instance, introduced the Christian religion as a “cult,” even suggesting that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ described in the Bible represented repackaged versions of Egyptian and Persian mythology — an absurd notion that has been debunked by countless scholars and theologians. Opponents also blasted what they said was a “pro-Islam” bias in the lesson plans.
After the state-wide outcry turned into a national scandal, Texas lawmakers, under heavy pressure from constituents, eventually got involved in the issue. On Monday, months after the furor first erupted, legislators and TESCCC board members announced during a press conference that CSCOPE was essentially dead. The entity responsible for producing the material, meanwhile, will no longer be producing lesson plans or curriculums. Policymakers seemed delighted to put the controversy behind them.
“I’m pleased that the CSCOPE Board has made the decision to get out of the lesson plan business,” said Republican State Senator Dan Patrick, the chairman of the Senate Education Committee who led much of the effort to stop the scheme. “This is a positive development for students, parents, teachers, and for the Regional Service Centers. I want to thank the members of the Senate Education Committee for their months of work on this issue. I also want to thank Attorney General Abbott and his staff in providing valuable assistance in our review of CSCOPE.”
Sen. Patrick of Houston noted that once the TESCCC board officially approves the measure later this week, he would notify the state Board of Education that they no longer needed to review the 1,600 CSCOPE lesson plans. “The CSCOPE era is over,” the senator continued. “However, what the last several months has proven is that the state will have to create a plan to monitor all online material in the future so that our schools and classroom remain completely transparent to parents and the legislature knows what is being taught in our classrooms across Texas.”
TESCCC Chair Anne Poplin and other board members thanked Sen. Patrick and his fellow lawmakers on the state House and Senate education committees, saying their leadership had been “invaluable” and that they look forward to having a “positive relationship” in the future. “We believe that this is the best decision moving forward, and allows us to continue to provide high-quality services to the more than 1,000 school districts and charter schools in Texas,” Poplin and another board member said in a statement.
While spokesmen for the entity responsible for CSCOPE originally defended the material, it appears that the support softened as critics’ outcry grew louder. More recently, officials across the state rushed to distance themselves from the program as well. Conservative activists, meanwhile, celebrated the latest developments, with some arguing that more work was needed to rein in out-of-control educational bureaucrats and prevent similar occurrences.
“Never underestimate the power of blogs and grassroots pressure from conservatives in Texas!” wrote longtime CSCOPE critic David Bellow, a Texas Republican Executive Committeeman who has been blasting the program for months in online articles. “We must not let our guard down though and the Texas Legislature needs to continue to take action to prevent bad curriculum and an online backdoor curriculum from being introduced into Texas schools with no oversight.”
Not everyone was celebrating, however. State Board of Education Vice Chairman Thomas Ratliff of Northeast Texas was among those expressing concerns. “I’m already getting emails from superintendents and teachers at my districts saying, ‘Now, what?’” Ratliff said in a statement. “There were 1,600 lessons in that thing. That’s not easily replaceable…. For some districts, they are a small, optional part. For other districts, it was a lifeline. It’s a sad day for small school districts and the state, and it’s all because of politics.”
As CSCOPE critics celebrated the small victory and its backers complained, some media reports and officials suggested that the death of the program might not have arrived yet. Indeed, even though the controversial lesson plans will be taken down, the federally funded “Regional Education Centers” will continue to operate, and “management portions” of CSCOPE will remain available to school districts, according to media reports.
Even SBOE Vice Chair Ratliff noted that the “heftier” elements of the scheme, which outline the K-12 government-mandated requirements and the timelines for learning them, remain intact. “So, yes, the rumors of their death have been exaggerated,” Ratliff was quoted as saying in the Longview News-Journal. “It is not CSCOPE that’s going away; it’s just that one component.” The element that has been banished: the controversial but optional lesson plans. Everything else essentially remains in place.
To prevent a similar situation — Texas children being taught anti-American or anti-Christian propaganda — lawmakers are working on a bill, Senate Bill 1406, to provide more oversight of CSCOPE. The bill passed a third reading in the state House, and opponents of the controversial lesson plans are urging activists to back the legislation. Because CSCOPE still exists and will continue to be offered at Texas schools, Republican state Rep. Steve Toth also said he planned to continue pushing the legislation.
The 20-member governing board in charge of CSCOPE, meanwhile, is asking lawmakers to pass House Bill 1675, which would keep the federally funded “Regional Education Centers” open until 2019. Even anti-CSCOPE lawmakers indicated that they did not see a problem with the program, local media outlets reported. Why Texas or any other state would need or want unconstitutional federal funding for its education programs remains unclear — especially considering the “strings” that are almost always attached.
As the education battle over CSCOPE was heating up in Texas, a much larger fight was brewing nationwide — the effort to stop the Obama administration-backed “Common Core” standards. The controversial effort, which has relied mostly on federal bribes and bullying, aims to track students and standardize education across America by getting state governments to adopt the widely criticized standards. Some 45 states — not including Texas — have already signed up for the plan, but over a dozen so far are considering withdrawal. Activists and experts say that battle is just getting started.
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, politics, and more. He can be reached at anewman@thenewamerican.com.
CSCOPE representatives and superintendents across the state continue to LIE to parents and members of the community that CSCOPE has no affiliation with COMMON CORE.. Are they LYING…. you be the judge?
Below is an excerpt from CSCOPE’S Parental Advisory memo available on school district websites across the state. FULL MEMO HERE. The memo was written in hopes of diffusing concerns and questions from parents and the public in regard to CSCOPE’s pro Islamic, Anti American stance and it’s relation to Obama’s Common Core Standards (which Texas did not adopt). Below you will see in the highlighted area that the memo emphatically states that CSCOPE has no affiliation with COMMON CORE.
CSCOPE’S password protected sight has an Instuctional Focus Document for teachers to utilize in lesson planning. As you will see on this portion of the Instructional Focus Document, the highlighted area gives the teachers a link to go to.
You will see many of EPSILEN’S partners..The New York Times (that ought to be some relief, lol), etc…… Then scroll to the bottom of the page where you will see the following…
CSCOPE: HOW DID TEXAS GET IT HERE?
By Danette Clark
In 1992, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) entered into a partnership with Texas Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) and Austin Interfaith to direct funds to low-performing schools for use in teacher training, parent leadership training, and after-school enrichment. From this partnership, several IAF ‘Alliance Schools’ were created.
Texas IAF is part of the Saul Alinsky-founded and Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation. Saul Alinsky is the Marx-loving, God-hating community organizer known for his influence on President Obama and ACORN.
According to a 2009 study by the Annenberg Institute, Texas IAF’s Alliance Schools network grew to ”roughly a quarter of the Austin Independent School District’s elementary schools and half of the district’s high-poverty schools” in an eight-year period.
The study also reveals that Texas IAF and Austin Interfaith developed a collaborative relationship with former Austin ISD Superintendent, Pascal Forgione.
The Alliance Schools model can now be found in approximately 160 schools throughout the state – a speck on the map when compared to the number of Texas schools infected by the Coalition of Essential Schools.
As I wrote in Unravelled! The 30 Year Agenda Behind Common Core, the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) is the radical reform movement behind both CSCOPE and Common Core.
CES, which is modeled after secularist reformers like John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Paulo Freire, and George Counts, functions as a communist-style education movement with the stated intent of ‘educating for a more democratic and just society’.
Westbury High School in Houston and R.L. Paschal High School in Fort Worth are two of the original twelve schools that were established (or ‘redesigned’) by Theodore Sizer in 1984 to become CES member schools.
According to StateUniversity.com, the R.L. Paschal Essential School, which is a small autonomous unit embedded within the larger Paschal High School, survived and flourished by “keeping a very low profile“.
The largest expansion of CES progressive reform in Texas came years later by way of the Houston Annenberg Challenge.
In 1993, then President Bill Clinton announced that Ambassador Walter Annenberg would donate 500 million dollars to improving public schools in America. It was this 500 million, plus matching grants from private sources, that aided in the nationwide expansion of Theodore Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools.
Through the Annenberg grant, communist and domestic terrorist Bill Ayers created the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, wherein he and Barack Obama served on the board to further expand CES schools in the State of Illinois.
Both Ayers and President Obama have continued to this day to do their respective parts to promote and expanded CES schools nationwide. Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop still aids schools and districts across the country in implementing progressive reform through smaller learning community grants and funding from sources like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Brown University, and the Annenberg Institute.
In addition to the well known Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Walter Annenberg’s ‘Challenge to the Nation‘ also provided for the expansion of progressive reform to Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, the San Francisco Bay area, South Florida, and Houston.
In Houston, it was the Brown Foundation, Houston Endowment Incorporated, and several corporate and business leaders who collaborated to apply for a piece of the challenge grant money being offered by Annenberg.
Delia Quintanilla served as the first director of the Houston Annenberg Challenge (HAC). Six local universities were called on to provide support to the HAC by providing university staff, faculty, and students to interact with districts and aid in implementing reform.
The Annenberg Institute kicked off the HAC by choosing eleven ‘Beacon Schools’ to “‘light the way‘ to quality school reform for other funded schools”.
According to Chester Finn, Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the Beacon Schools chosen appeared to have been ’cherry picked’. Finn reported that the eleven schools chosen by Annenberg were doing better than the Houston average when they entered the program and were performing at about the same level three years later. Therefore, although it may have appeared to outsiders that the first few years of reform in those eleven schools was effective, as Finn stated, he could “scarcely tell what was caused by Annenberg and what may have been shaped by other influences”.
In 1995, Humble Independent School District opened Quest Early College High School. Quest is an Annenberg Challenge Grant Beacon School, a First Amendment School and a Coalition of Essential Schools Mentor School.
CES mentor schools act as a model of reform for others schools, offering school study tours, advocacy training, legislative action sessions, and professional development opportunities.
A Houston Annenberg Challenge 2 year summary report revealed that by 2001, approximately 100 metropolitan schools had already introduced Critical Friends groups on their campuses and the HAC had trained 300 coaches in both Annenberg-funded and non-Annenberg-funded schools.
The report further revealed that promising teachers and curriculum trainers were identified through group collaborations. Specifically:
“Teachers from Annenberg schools collaborate actively in Critical Friends Groups, Literature Study Circles, Professional Academies, Teacher Writing Groups, and Teacher Action Research Teams. From these activities expert teachers emerge as peer leaders in roles such as Critical Friends Group Coaches, Content Specialists, and Reading Learning Facilitators. Furthermore, a number of teachers have become certified as curriculum trainers in national programs including the Coalition of Essential Schools and the New Jersey Writing Project.”
Just as educators were identified and chosen through these collaborative efforts, some were also identified as not worthy to continue their involvement in the progressive reform process.
According to an article printed by the Houston Press in 1998, director Delia Quintanilla was dismissed a little more than a year after the Houston Annenberg Challenge got off the ground, and a troubleshooting team from the Annenberg Institute was being sent to Houston to “evaluate and audit the effectiveness of the local administration of the grant”.
Annenberg Challenge National Coordinator, Barbara Cervone, expressed “serious concerns about the leadership, coherence and pace of the Annenberg effort in Houston”.
Despite tensions between proponents of CES’s radical reform methods, HAC pressed on with strict oversight and instruction from the Annenberg Institute and further donations from ‘philanthropic’ organizations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation.
Annenberg established the New Visions in Leadership Academy to train like-minded radicals for placement as principles into Texas Annenberg/CES schools. According to this job posting, “more than 300 seated school leaders from Houston-area K-12 districts” graduated from New Visions in the first 10 years.
In 2002, Humble ISD passed a $230,000,000 bond measure to build Atascocita and Kingwood Park High Schools and redesign existing elementary, middle, and high schools.
Cecilia Hawkins, who served as the principal of Quest Early College High School for four years, left her position at Quest to work with community organizations in an effort to expand district reform.
From CES’s website (2005):
“Inspired by its experience with the Coalition of Essential Schools and the Houston Annenberg Challenge (now the Houston A+ Challenge) through Quest High School… Humble has not only put into place a process to remake its high schools but it has reorganized its entire district…”.
What has come as a surprise to many involved in exposing CSCOPE is the fact that several principals and superintendents seem to have no problem with the Anti-American content, errors, and ’fuzzy math’ found in CSCOPE lessons.
Understandably, it must be difficult to accept that there could be that many radical educators in a state like Texas, willing to break the law and deceive children and parents for profit or to advance a political agenda.
The fact is, Texas is a big state with several universities; and universities, for the most part, have often been a refuge and breeding ground for radicals.
CES schools have always relied heavily on the school-university partnership to implement and advance K-12 reform. ‘Professional development schools‘ are often created wherein universities and schools collaborate to ”prepare new teachers, to renew the professional knowledge of veteran teachers, and to conduct site-based research into teaching and learning”.
In many states, CES has infiltrated and affected university course offerings for up and coming teachers, principals, and superintendents.
For example, Sam Houston University, as a requirement for superintendent certification, offers an internship course led by Dr. Shirley Johnson. Johnson is the executive director of Texas Coalition of Essential Schools.
According to Johnson’s course syllabus and guidelines, all interns must complete a “Leadership Profile”, the cost of which is to be paid by the student directly to Texas CES. Students are then given the opportunity to attend a feedback session related to the leadership profile — no doubt to allow the instructor to gauge whether the student would be a productive leader in a CES-style school.
Several other avenues exist for identifying prospective radical educators for placement in these indoctrination centers. Texas ASCD, for example, who partners with CES and actively promotes and expands CES reform, identifies, recruits, and trains teachers and curriculum leaders, many of whom are identified in collaboration with local universities.
Read about the connections between Texas ASCD and educators behind CSCOPE and Common Core here and here.
CSCOPE is Common Core
In January of 2010, Governor Rick Perry formally rejected the nationally proposed Common Core State Standards, stating that he would not “commit Texas taxpayers to unfunded federal obligations or to the adoption of unproven, cost-prohibitive national standards and tests”.
Ironically, the very people behind Common Core were already actively working within Perry’s state and had been for many years.
Linda Darling Hammond, one of several radical educators behind the design of CSCOPE, has worked with Texas schools for years through her organization, School Redesign Network.
Achieve, Inc., an organization that has aided in authoring the Common Core standards, launched the American Diploma Project in 2005. Texas was one of 13 states to join the America Diploma Project Network.
As I wrote here, Achieve, Inc. is not only made up of several Coalition of Essential Schools/Annenberg reformers, but it was literally created by leaders of the National Governors Association and the Annenberg Institute.
The Grow Network (now owned by McGraw-Hill) was founded by David Coleman, who is said to be ’the architect’ of Common Core. In 2004, the Texas Education Agency entered into a four-year, 17.7 million dollar contract with Grow Network for online Personalized Study Guides to be provided to Texas educators and students.
Considering many of the same educators behind CSCOPE are also behind Common Core, and considering the rumor that Common Core offered to purchase the CSCOPE program for use with the national standards; it appears that CSCOPE was a ‘test-run’ for Common Core.
It seems likely that Texas is the guinea pig and CSCOPE a pilot project –being tested before going all in and using it with Common Core standards in more than 45 states.
It can’t be a coincidence that the same educators behind Common Core just-so-happened to have been chosen to contribute to the design of CSCOPE. Those educators, Wiggins, Tighe, Hammond, Jacobs, and others, have spent years providing professional development to Texas educators over, and over, and over on how to use their designs and teaching strategies, the same designs they are teaching Common Core states to use with Common Core standards.
Here’s an interesting side-note – Although it has been more than three years since Texas rejected Common Core, former Austin ISD Superintendent Pascal Forgione, the same superintendent who has worked hand-in-hand with Alinsky’s IAF and Linda Darling Hammond’s School Redesign Network, is participating in a conference later this year inAustin to discuss Common Core.
Forgione is now executive director of Educational Testing Service’s K-12 Center located in Austin.
K-12 Center works in partnership with the CCSSO and other organizations to develop Common Core assessment systems and also partners with the Alliance for Excellent Education, where Linda Darling Hammond serves on the board.
The conference on Common Core, in which Forgione will be the keynote speaker, is scheduled to take place August 12th-14th in Austin.
Did Forgione not get the memo that Texas rejected Common Core, or does he know something that we don’t?
Apr. 2, 2013 10:10am Tiffany Gabbay
As a greater level of scrutiny is being placed on the controversial curriculum systems CSCOPE (in Texas) and Common Core Standards (nationwide), concerned parents spoke to TheBlaze about their troubling experiences, revealing that not even home-schooling is beyond the reach of these encroaching systems.
Home-schooling not beyond the reach of Common Core?
Keven Card, a former Marine from Houston who has home-schooled his children for the last six years, thought his family was safe from the reach of Common Core, but soon learned otherwise. As noted on his blog, two years ago Pearson Education, which is linked to Common Core, acquired Texas Connections Academy, the online charter school Card uses to homeschool his ninth-grader.
One lesson plan featured a video dubbed, ”China Rises,” that appears to tout the virtues of Communism over capitalism.
“It blew my mind,” Card told TheBlaze in an interview.
“They make kids watch a video that makes capitalism look bad and Communist China look good. It’s absolutely unbelievable.”
Below are several screenshots of the program, “China Rises,” along with a video that Card was able to record and save for his own records.
The captions below read:
The next time you go shopping for clothes, electronics, shoes, toys, or even food, check the label. There’s a good chance it says “Made in China.”
As you might guess, China has one of the most productive economies in the world, and it has been growing at a rapid pace in recent decades. This growth has brought great wealth to Chinese entrepreneurs and businesses and improved standards of living for millions of people.
The China Rises website provides preview clips and information on the content featured in the program. Notably, the “Party Games” and “Getting Rich” sections, Card explained, are of particular interest as they “address the changing politics and economy of China.”
It is also worth pointing out that the documentary was produced in partnership with The New York Times and Discovery Times.
Card notes that the video preview made available under the “Getting Rich” sub-section of the site talks about capitalism’s “cruelties” as it shows a man whose lost his hand in a machine. The section appears at the 1.12 mark.
When asked how long questionable lessons like China Rises have been on his son’s roster of studies, Card said he first noticed curriculum changing roughly a year or two ago when a religious studies lesson favored the Muslim faith over Christianity.
“I wrote a letter to the principal of the Texas Connections Academy, but never received a reply,” the concerned father said. Pearson acquired our school in 2011.
What is StudentGPS and what does it track, exactly?
A Texas mother whose child is enrolled in the fifth grade at a Texas public school told TheBlaze that while some of the lesson plans at her child’s school are worrisome, she is most concerned about data mining, especially in light of the fact that, come next year, her school will implement something called “StudentGPS dashboards.”
“I’m not sure if it will be just at our school or all of them,” the Blaze reader, who asked to remain nameless out of concern for her child and school faculty explained. “I have a feeling our school will be one the earlier ones to implement the StudentGPS.”
According to the StudentGPS website, the program is part of a partnership with the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation (MSDF), are particularly beneficial in identifying “at-risk students” by providing educators a “collection of reports and metrics that provide educators with access to historical, timely, and predictive information on all students to help improve education outcomes for all Texas students.”
The dashboards are said to “flag emerging issues such as problems in attendance, class work, and test performance as early as possible” as well as “provide instant access to analyzed data, instead of requiring requests to a data analyst for ad hoc reports.”
While the site states that “loading dashboard data to TSDS is strictly optional,” schools are encouraged to do so as they provide a “rich, sophisticated, empirical approach to teaching that help schools, classes, and individual students get more from their educational opportunities.”
The Blaze reader said she found out about the GPS “dashboards” while on a call with the school principal about the district’s plan to allocate iPads to all students next year. She said that she was concerned about the kinds of data that would be tracked on the iPad, but that once she heard about StudentGPS, she was concerned “even more.”
Below are tutorial videos provided by the StudentGPS Dashboards official website, which is part of the “Texas Student Data System.”
Student GPS dashboard overview
Kids know about global warming and wars
Another item the concerned mother noted was that her 5th grader brought home a questionable homework assignment earlier this week. The parent told TheBlaze that the lesson (screenshots of which are featured below) is being used as practice for the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) exam, which is to be administered by schools next week.
The lesson in this case was not produced by CSCOPE, but rather a independent company. Nonetheless, some of the language and themes will still raise eyebrows.
“The content seems designed to undermine parental authority,” the Texas resident said. “Adults are just too stupid to get anything right. I assume the intent is to drive a wedge between parent and child.”
The excerpts below ask why children are not permitted to vote, especially when (see section 3) they understand “global warming and war” and know that adults have only made the world’s problems worse.
The Texas mom said that while CSCOPE is implemented at her school, teachers are not forced to use its lesson plans. She added that while that may be a good thing, she has still “come to expect verbiage on global warming and fossil fuels” and believes CSCOPE’s influence will only increase. The Blaze reader also expressed concern over the fact that experienced teachers are growing tired of trying to overcome “the hurdles” and will likely leave the schools out of sheer frustration.
“We are part of a good, close community, which makes this [CSCOPE implementation] that much harder,” she explained.
Below is an excerpt of the homework assignment:
Those cases cited above are but a fraction of the questionable lesson plans that seem to be par for the course with Common Core and CSCOPE. As a result of TheBlaze’s coverage, other concerned parents may also come forward to express their concerns and experiences with these controversial curriculum systems.
Upon originally finding out about CSCOPE and discovering their lack of transparency I filed a Public Information Request over a year ago on CSCOPE and the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborate (TESCCC) who owns Cscope asking for lesson content and financials. TESCCC asked for the Attorney General’s office to deem them a non Governmental entity and not subject to the Public Information Request under Texas Government Code 552.104 and 552.110.
Now get this. The group of men and women who make up the Board of Directors of TESCCC or actually the Directors of the Education Service Centers. They receive tax money and form a non profit called TESCCC which owns the product called CSCOPE. They use state employees to sell their product to a school district who survive off of tax money as well and they want to be deemed a NON GOVERNMENTAL ENTITY? Wow.. wouldn’t that just be nice? TESCCC has taken in millions leasing CSCOPE to Texas School districts on a yearly bases. They claim they have no check register as reported to the Attorney General’s office.
See the Attorney Generals Ruling April 4, 2012
Many citizens across the state have now got involved and are requesting information on TESCCC. In requesting their board minutes from the inception to the non profit organization TESCCC, those responsible can’t seem to locate them. The following are the minutes that they have located and the attorney general ordered them to be released. Though you will find the majority of them blacked out. Why,we don’t know yet. What do they have to hide?
TESCCC Board minutes released from the Attorney General’s Office.
In this excerpt from the minutes they were working on an Out of State Business Plan.
Notice in the following excerpt where they must have been discussing the modification of CSCOPE with Common Core and selling Cscope out of State.
I found Thomas Poe’s statement interesting of looking at the issue of making money verses serving students of Texas.
by The Blaze/Tiffany Gabbay
TheBlaze has been at the forefront in uncovering the disturbing details of the nationalized curriculum standard known as Common Core. One of the most troubling aspects of this federal program is that government bureaucrats are currently mining sensitive and highly personal information on children through Common Core’s tracking system.
The data will then reportedly be sold by the government to outside sources for profit.
To discuss Common Core’s practice of data mining, Glenn Beck hosted an array of guests on TheBlaze TV Wednesday, including documentarian Andrew Marcus, columnist Kyle Olson; Kris Nielsen, author of “Children of the Core”; Jane Robbins of the American Principles Project; and lawmakers T.W. Shannon, Michael Caldwell and Clarence Mingo III.
Watch part of the segment via TheBlaze TV below:
According to the conservative think tank American Principles Project, Common Core’s technological project is “merely one part of a much broader plan by the federal government to track individuals from birth through their participation in the workforce.” As columnist and author Michelle Malkin has pointed out, the 2009 stimulus package included a “State Fiscal Stabilization Fund” to provide states incentives to construct “longitudinal data systems (LDS) to collect data on public-school students.”
In other words, an aggregation system to mind personal data on children including information about their health, family income, religious affiliation and homework.
Even more off-putting is the revelation that a 44-page Department of Eduction Report released in February indicates that the Common Core data-mining system could one day implement monitoring techniques like “Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging” (scanning one’s brain function), as well as “using cameras to judge facial expressions, an electronic seat that judges [a child’s] posture, a pressure-sensitive computer mouse and a biometric wrap on kids’ wrists.”
“This is like some really spooky, sci-fi, Gattaca kind of thing,” Beck said.
Through the stimulus bill, Americans’ privacy has been increasingly compromised. Now, permission that once had to be granted by parents to Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to release students’ data has changed with a January 2012 regulation mandating that all information collected by schools since 2009 can be shared among federal agencies without consent.
In the following clip, Beck lays out a new theory on how business and government are colluding to accomplish mutual collective goals in a system very similar to state capitalism. He also theorizes how GE may be involved with Common Core.
Aside from President Obama, whose administration has been a steady supporter of Common Core standards, other leaders and advocates of the system include Bob Corcoran of General Electric (which donated over $33 million to Common Core in 2012), Bill and Melinda Gates, as well as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
How can you fight back against the data mining happening within Common Core and CSCOPE? Beck and his panel of experts explain:
Posted on March 19, 2013 By Danette Clark
Grant Wiggins, one of eight designers of curriculum, standards and instruction of the pro-communist Texas CSCOPE curriculum, also provides professional development to aid educators in implementing the national Common Core State Standards. Pearson, the education service company widely known for publishing textbooks, has partnered with the Council of Chief State School Officers in providing training and other resources to states implementing Common Core.
Pearson is the company who helps create, prints, and scores the Texas State STAAR tests. This company also publishes booklets to help students study for the STAAR tests. These should be good booklets since Pearson knows exactly what is on the STAAR tests. UUM! Do you think this might be a conflict of interest? No more than Pat Hardy, State Board of Education member who reviews the STAAR tests and promotes CSCOPE, stating that the CSCOPE assessments and STAAR tests are similar in type. Comment by Janice
Through the ‘Pearson Common Core Institute’, Wiggins provides instruction via several Pearson Common Core webinar videos. In one such webinar, Wiggins discusses “how issues of backward transfer relate to the Common Core”.
Why does the Texas SBOE give Pearson contracts to print GED material, all the STAARs, and then Texas allowed Pearson to purchase Texas online virtual education?
Pearson also supports TASA (Texas Association of School Administrators) who are working to implement common core into Texas schools.
‘Backward transfer’ (also commonly referred to as ‘backward design’ or ‘planning backwards’) is part of the Understanding by Design® framework for curriculum, assessment, and learning created by Wiggins and co-author, Jay McTighe, also a designer of CSCOPE.
As explained here and here, the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) is the progressive education reform movement behind both CSCOPE and Common Core. Grant Wiggins has worked with the Coalition of Essential Schools for many years, studying CES method and pedagogy, and incorporating them into the creation of his own curriculum and instruction design for use in CES schools. A staple of the CES reform model has long been the use of ’essential questions’ in identifying desired results of teacher instruction.
Stage one of Wiggins and McTighe’s backward design process is identifying essential questions.
In 2011 and 2012, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) partnered with ASCD (the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) to hold statewide summits in several states on the implementation of Common Core. Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design® was originally published by ASCD. Read about Texas ASCD’s involvement with the Coalition of Essential Schools and CSCOPE here and here. Also, read more about Wiggins and others behind the Coalition of Essential Schools at Name Names — The People Behind the Largest Progressive Indoctrination Movement in the U.S.
Dr. Jeff Turner, superintendent of Coppell ISD is on his way to Washington DC again. Why? Turner flew to Washington on Dec. 5th to discuss Common Core Standards and non adoption of them in Texas. Dr. Turner is also President of the Texas Association of School Administrators, TASA. TASA is gearing up to attend the American Association of School Administrtors, AASA to hear humanist Linda Darling Hammond who is associated with Communist William (Bill) Ayers speak on the Common Core Standards. Hammond is also an education adviser to the Obama administration. Why are Texas Taxpayers funding this? Why are we having to pay for our superintendents to travel to here about the Marxist Common Core standards Texas did not adopt?
Dr. Turner seems to be all about promoting an education of the 21st Century. An education that is NOT based on individual achievement but on the collective. It is a watered down education that removes vocabulary, novels, cursive writing and the basics of algebra. Why are our administrators buying into this?
Though Common Core was not officially adopted in Texas the Education Service Centers have found a way to implement a similar product that has Common Core written all over it, called Cscope. Cscope is an online curriculum that nearly 80% of Texas school districts have purchased and implemented it without parents knowledge. The curriculum has not been available for parents to see and teachers had to sign a non-disclosure statement that they would not release the contents or say anything negative about it. Csocpe is pro Islamic and anti Christian. It pushes a global collectivist agenda. It is based on the Marxist/progressive ideology of Obama education adviser Linda Darling Hammond who is associated with communist Bill Ayers. Hammond has been a regular speaker at Cscope Conferences.
Dr. Turner has also signed a contract for the Coppell ISD with TASA’S School Transformation Network. Here is their Visioning Document. Notice following the document are the original 35 superintendents that promoted this vision.
****TASA and those behind the Texas Schcol Transformation Network which has plans on taking Texas education on a progressive/Marxist path. ***
In Texas today unbeknownest to parents and taxpayers there is a progressive/Marxist curriculum called Cscope is a that has been implemented in nearly 80% of the Texas Schools. Parents have not been aware that it is in their schools due the fact that homework is discouraged and most school districts to not purchase text books. It is online and parents have been denied access to the material. As alarming as it is Teachers were required to sign a non-disclosure statement that they would not release the contents are say anything negative about it.
For more information on Cscope go to www.txcscopereview.com
Cscope, What is behind the Curtain, Part I
Cscope, What is behind the Curtain, Part II
