Posts Tagged ‘Public Education’
« Older Entries |Texas Social Studies Curriculum Vote Bring Out Worst in AP Bias, Labeling
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Texas Social Studies
April Castro and the headline writers at the supposedly “objective” Associated Press are obviously not pleased with changes the Texas State Board of Education made to the Lone Star State’s social studies curriculum.
Castro’s report (HT to an NB e-mailer) makes almost no attempt to hide her clear disdain. She includes references to a “far-right faction” (a “faction” that happened to constitute a two-thirds majority!) and “ultraconservatives,” while uniformly describing leftists as mere Democrats, and generally comes across as a sore loser in solidarity with the poor, outvoted libs.
You’ll also see in the excerpt that follows that the story’s headline is disgracefully over the top:
Texas ed board vote reflects far-right influences
AUSTIN, Texas — A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade.
Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation’s Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a “constitutional republic,” rather than “democratic,” and students will be required to study the decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard.
“We have been about conservatism versus liberalism,” said Democrat Mavis Knight of Dallas, explaining her vote against the standards. “We have manipulated strands to insert what we want it to be in the document, regardless as to whether or not it’s appropriate.”
…. Ultraconservatives wielded their power over hundreds of subjects this week, introducing and rejecting amendments on everything from the civil rights movement to global politics. Hostilities flared and prompted a walkout Thursday by one of the board’s most prominent Democrats, Mary Helen Berlanga of Corpus Christi, who accused her colleagues of “whitewashing” curriculum standards.
By late Thursday night, three other Democrats seemed to sense their futility and left, leaving Republicans to easily push through amendments heralding “American exceptionalism” and the U.S. free enterprise system, suggesting it thrives best absent excessive government intervention.
Castro should have been asking why the items described in the excerpt, plus the following cited by the AP writer in unexcerpted paragraphs, haven’t been in the social studies curriculum all along:
- “… the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its impact on global politics.”
- former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.
- “a reference to the Second Amendment right to bear arms in a section about citizenship in a U.S. government class.”
Apparently the ultimate insult occurred when “Conservatives beat back multiple attempts to include hip-hop as an example of a significant cultural movement.”
Oh the humanity.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
—Tom Blumer is president of a training and development company in Mason, Ohio, and is a contributing editor to NewsBusters
Texas Social Studies
Tags: Election 2010, Houston Voters, Public Education, Texas Textbooks
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Voters Trust GOP More Than Democrats on 8 Out of 10 Issues
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
CNSNews.com
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
By Matt Cover, Staff Writer
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., left, talks with Sen. John Cornyn, D-Texas, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 9, 2010, as they walk to McConnell’s office, following the weekly caucus luncheons. (AP Photo/Harry Hamburg)
The issue at the forefront of Americans’ minds – although not at the top of Congress’ agenda – is the economy, where a plurality of the public, 46 percent, trust Republicans, the survey found.
Only 41 percent of Americans trust Democrats more on the economy, marking a major turnaround during a year of rising unemployment despite nearly $800 billion in federal stimulus spending. At the start of President Barack Obama’s first term, January 2009, Democrats enjoyed a nine-point lead over Republicans on the issue.
Republicans are also trusted more, and by a similar margin, on what has become Obama’s and the Democrats’ signature issue: health care. Forty-five percent of Americans trust Republicans on health care issues, while only 42 percent put their faith in Democrats.
That gap widens among independents, who trust Republicans 45-to-29 percent over Democrats.
On taxes, Republicans hold an 11-point lead over Democrats, 48 to 37 percent. This gap has narrowed since February, the survey found, when Republicans enjoyed a 16-point advantage.
Republicans have a 10-point lead on national security issues, despite the fact that the Obama administration has continued many Bush-era policies and has increased U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan.
Rasmussen found that 47 percent of Americans place their trust in Republicans on national security issues compared with only 37 percent who trust Democrats.
Republicans have a smaller advantage on the more narrow issue of the war in Iraq, with 42 percent of the public trusting the GOP and only 38 percent putting more faith in Democrats.
Neither party earns much trust on the issue of immigration, though Republicans hold a slight advantage there as well. Thirty-nine percent of Americans have more faith in Republicans, while 34 percent place more trust in Democrats on the issue.
(A separate Rasmussen Reports poll found that 67 percent of Americans think that illegal immigrants place a “significant strain” on the federal budget.)
Americans also trust Republicans over Democrats by a small margin on Social Security, with 42 percent saying they trust the GOP and 38 percent saying they trust Democrats.
Surprisingly, Rasmussen reported an identical split on a different social issue: abortion.
Previous surveys had shown Republicans with a wide margin on the contentious issue; a margin which has shrunk to a mere four-point divide. Forty-two percent of Americans told Rasmussen they trusted Republicans more on the issue, while 38 percent said they put more trust in Democrats.
Democrats enjoyed a lead over Republicans on two issues: education and government ethics.
Americans reported that they trusted Democrats more than Republicans – 41 percent to 38 percent – on education issues, a finding that Rasmussen reported had swung back from a four-point Republican advantage in its previous survey.
Americans also said they had more faith that Democrats would run a more ethical government than Republicans. From the “likely voters” surveyed, 35 percent put more faith in the Democrats compared to 28 percent who trusted Republicans more to run an ethical government – 27 percent said they did not know who they trusted to run government ethically.
For these results, two surveys of 1,000 likely voters were conducted by Rasmussen Reports Feb. 27 – March 2, 2010. The margin of error for each survey was plus or minus three percentage points with a 95 percent level of confidence.
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, Healthcare Availability, Houston Voters, National Security, Public Education, Trust
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Kids’ info on state database – forever
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
Far more personal information on students than is necessary is being collected by public schools, according to the Fordham Law School Center on Law and Information Policy, which investigated education records in all 50 states. States are failing to safeguard students’ privacy and protect them from data misuse.
Some states collect a lot of data that has nothing to do with student test scores, including Social Security numbers, disciplinary records, family wealth indicators, student pregnancies, student mental health, illness and jail sentences. A couple of states record the date of a student’s last medical exam and a student’s weight.
The Fordham study reported that this collection of information is often not compliant with a 35-year-old law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). The only punishment for a FERPA violation is for the Department of Education to withhold federal education funding, but the department has never done that.
The building of databases that track students from pre-school through entry into the workforce began with the emphasis in the 1990s on testing and standards, and was expanded under “No Child Left Behind” mandates. This data collection has been proceeding at what observers call a “breakneck pace” under the Obama administration because of the offer of federal grants awarded through the Race to the Top competition, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and $250 million in stimulus funds.
Fordham law professor Joel R. Reidenberg, who oversaw the Fordham study, said that states are “trampling the privacy interests of those students.” He warns that years later, when these kids are adults, information from their elementary, middle and high school years can easily be misused by hackers and others.
The Fordham report made numerous recommendations to beef up student privacy, such as collecting only information relevant to articulated purposes, purging unjustified data, enacting time limits for data retention and hiring a chief privacy officer for each state. There is no indication that these suggestions will be implemented.
Obama Department of Education officials believe that collecting personally identifiable data is “at the heart of improving schools and school districts.” One of the four reform mandates of the Race to the Top competition is to establish pre-kindergarten to college-and-career data systems that “track progress and foster continuous improvement.”
The advocates of this massive data collection, in which individual students are clearly identifiable, claim that this is necessary to enable policymakers and educators to evaluate student and teacher performance. They assert that this enables educators to predict which students are in danger of dropping out, determine which are better teachers and better curricula, and track trends in academic progress by ethnicity and income level.
The advocates of this massive data collection seem to have little or no concern for privacy protection. Some 80 percent of states do not have a system to delete student records and therefore are likely to maintain them indefinitely.
Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan has an important ally in the Data Quality Campaign (DQC) for promoting this unprecedented student data system. All 50 states now have in place at least five of the DQC’s 10 “essential elements” for a statewide longitudinal data system, and 47 states plan to have eight or more elements in place within the next three years.
DQC was founded in 2005, largely with money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and DQC’s January 2010 publication, “The Next Step,” praises the “enormous progress” states have made in developing these pre-K through college data systems. The DQC website explicitly supports linking education data with “workforce, social services and other critical state agency data systems.”
A recent Education Week article noted that privacy laws make it challenging to link K-12 and postsecondary data in states that prohibit schools from storing students’ Social Security numbers. However, the Fordham Center reports that at least 16 states already record each child’s SSN.
Those who object to this organized invasion of student privacy warn that some states might change their laws about Social Security numbers in order to receive federal grants offered by the Department of Education for the building of longitudinal student databases. The changing of such laws may be what the DQC has in mind with its plan to help states “identify and put in place the necessary policies and practices” to implement longitudinal data systems.
This massive collection of private information on all schoolchildren is an ominous imitation of the file (called dang’an) on each student’s performance and attitudes, from school years through employment, compiled by communist China on every individual in order to exercise totalitarian control over the population. In China, it became impossible to get a job unless the individual had a dang’an approved by the authorities.
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, government control, Public Education
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Artificial Stupidity
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
A woman with a petition went among the crowds attending a state fair, asking people to sign her petition demanding the banning of dihydroxymonoxide. She said it was in our lakes and streams, and now it was in our sweat and urine and tears.
She collected hundreds of signatures to ban dihydroxymonoxide — a fancy chemical name for water. A couple of comedians were behind this ploy. But there is nothing funny about its implications. It is one of the grim and dangerous signs of our times.
This little episode revealed how conditioned we have become, responding like Pavlov’s dog when we hear a certain sound– in this case, the sound of some politically correct crusade.
People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities. In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators.
Educational institutions created to pass on to the next generation the knowledge, experience and culture of the generations that went before them have instead been turned into indoctrination centers to promote whatever notions, fashions or ideologies happen to be in vogue among today’s intelligentsia.
Many conservatives have protested against the specifics of the things with which students are being indoctrinated. But that is not where the most lasting harm is done. Many, if not most, of the leading conservatives of our times were on the left in their youth. These have included Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and the whole neoconservative movement.
The experiences of life can help people outgrow whatever they were indoctrinated with. What may persist, however, is the lazy habit of hearing one side of an issue and being galvanized into action without hearing the other side– and, more fundamentally, not having developed any mental skills that would enable you to systematically test one set of beliefs against another. Continued…
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Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, Houston Voters, Public Education
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Education: Too Important for a Government Monopoly
Thursday, February 18th, 2010
The government-school establishment has said the same thing for decades: Education is too important to leave to the competitive market. If we really want to help our kids, we must focus more resources on the government schools.
But despite this mantra, the focus is on something other than the kids. When The Washington Post asked George Parker, head of the Washington, D.C., teachers union, about the voucher program there, he said: “Parents are voting with their feet. … As kids continue leaving the system, we will lose teachers. Our very survival depends on having kids in D.C. schools so we’ll have teachers to represent.”
How revealing is that?
Since 1980, government spending on education, adjusted for inflation, has nearly doubled. But test scores have been flat for decades.
Today we spend a stunning $11,000 a year per student — more than $200,000 per classroom. It’s not working. So when will we permit competition and choice, which works great with everything else? I’ll explore those questions on my Fox Business program tomorrow night at 8 and 11 p.m. Eastern time (and again Friday at 10 p.m.).
The people who test students internationally told us that two factors predict a country’s educational success: Do the schools have the autonomy to experiment, and do parents have a choice?
Parents care about their kids and want them to learn and succeed — even poor parents. Thousands line up hoping to get their kids into one of the few hundred lottery-assigned slots at Harlem Success Academy, a highly ranked charter school in New York City. Kids and parents cry when they lose.
Yet the establishment is against choice. The union demonstrated outside Harlem Success the first day of school. And President Obama killed Washington, D.C.’s voucher program.
This is typical of elitists, who believe that parents, especially poor ones, can’t make good choices about their kids’ education. Continued…
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Tags: Congress, Election 2010, Houston, Houston Voters, Public Education
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The Fallacy of “Fairness”: Part IV
Friday, February 12th, 2010
Mixed up with the question of fairness to individuals and groups has been the explosive question of whether individuals and groups have the innate ability to perform at the same levels, if they are all treated alike or even given the same objective opportunities.
Intellectuals have swung from one side of this question at the beginning of the 20th century to the opposite side at the end. Both those who said that achievement differences among races and classes were due to genes, in the early years of the 20th century, and those who said that these differences were due to discrimination, in the later years, ignored the old statisticians’ warnings that correlation is not causation.
The idea that some people are innately superior (usually one’s own group) goes back for centuries, but various new facts that came out in the 19th and early 20th centuries gave the appearance of “science” to such beliefs during the Progressive era.
Sir Francis Galton’s research turned up the fact of remarkable achievements among members of the same family, which he regarded as evidence of genetic superiority. The rise of IQ testing, and especially the massive mental testing of soldiers in the U.S. Army during the First World War, showed great differences in test scores among various racial and ethnic groups.
In the public schools, there were similarly large differences in which ethnic group’s children failed to get promoted. In both the Army mental tests and in the schools, Polish Jews did poorly at that time. Carl Brigham– a leading authority on mental tests and the author of the SAT– said that the Army tests tended to “disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent.”
It should be noted that all of these conclusions were based on hard data, not mere “perceptions” or “stereotypes,” as so many inconvenient facts are dismissed today. What was wrong were not the data but the inferences.
Polish Jews were among the many immigrants from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe who were relatively recent arrivals in the United States. Many of these immigrants grew up in homes where English was not spoken, as Carl Brigham acknowledged in later years, when he recanted his earlier statements. In later years, Jews scored above average on mental tests. Continued…
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Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, Fairness, Houston, Houston Voters, Public Education
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The Fallacy of “Fairness”: Part III
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
Most of us want to be fair, in the sense of treating everyone equally. We want laws to be applied the same to everyone. We want educational, economic or other criteria for rewards to be the same as well. But this concept of fairness is not only different from prevailing ideas of fairness among many of the intelligentsia, it contradicts their idea of fairness.
People like philosopher John Rawls call treating everyone alike merely “formal” fairness. Professor Rawls advocated “a conception of justice that nullifies the accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstances.” He called for a society which “arranges” end-results, rather than simply treating everyone the same and letting the chips fall where they may.
This more hands-on concept of fairness gives third parties a much bigger role to play. But whether any human being has ever had the omniscience to determine and undo the many differences among people born into different families and cultures– with different priorities, attitudes and behavior– is a very big question. And to concentrate the vast amount of power needed to carry out that sweeping agenda is a dangerous gamble, whose actual consequences have too often been written on the pages of history in blood.
There is no question that the accident of birth is a huge factor in the fate of people. What is a very serious question is how much anyone can do about that without creating other, and often worse, problems. Providing free public education, scholarships to colleges and other opportunities for achievement are fine as far as they go, but there should be no illusion that they can undo all the differences in priorities, attitudes and efforts among different individuals and groups.
Trying to change whole cultures and subcultures in which different individuals are raised would be a staggering task. But the ideology of multiculturalism, which pronounces all cultures to be equally valid, puts that task off limits. This paints people into whatever corner the accident of birth has put them.
Under these severe constraints, all that is left is to blame others when the outcomes are different for different individuals and groups. Apparently those who are lagging are to continue to think and act as they have in the past– and yet somehow have better outcomes in the future. And, if they don’t get the same outcomes as others, then according to this way of seeing the world, it is society’s fault! Continued…
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Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, Fairness, Houston, Houston Voters, Ideology of Multiculturalism, personal responsibility, Public Education
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Woodland Heights CD-18 Candidate Forum
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
The Woodland Heights Civic Association held a candidate forum for candidates running in the Texas Congressional District 18 race last night. All candidates from both parties were invited. The candidates that attended were John Faulk (R), Tex Christopher (R), and Sean Roberts (D). Mitch Page was there to fill in for his wife, Brenda Page (R).
The event itself was a general meeting of the Woodland Heights Civic Association. This area is just north downtown Houston and is bounded on the north by Pecore Street, on the west by Studewood Street, on the east by I-45, and on the south by I-10. It is a historic area – there is quite a lot of information about it on their website.
As it was a general meeting, several reports were given. The one that interested me the most was about the crime in the area, for which they passed out a map which included all of the crime for the month of January. I scanned it and you can see it here. Not a pretty sight and exactly the type of information that needs to get out to all Texans about Bill White’s tenure as Mayor and the mess he left the city in.
Now to the candidate forum. It was sort of a cross between a forum and a meet/greet. Each candidate was allowed to speak for ten minutes and then the floor was opened up to questions.
John Faulk went first and talked about a few familiar themes – reduced spending, jobs and national security. Those were different themes than he talked about here. John has a wealth of knowledge about the district, having grown up in it and campaigned against the incumbent Sheila Jackson Lee in 2008, and it shows when he speaks. He seems to have substance while the other Republicans have talking points. This difference is far more noticeable when the candidates appear side by side than it is when reviewing position papers or issue pages.
Mr. Roberts also had a tough question from one of the residents – she asked him what, specifically, he wanted to do about education. Again, he brought up bringing funding back to the district and noted that Gov. Perry had just turned away a ton of money that the districts needed. She scolded him for that answer, saying that money has not proven to be effective in education and that the real problem was administrators and teacher’s unions. I’m guessing she’ll be voting in the Republican primary. Most likely for Mr. Faulk. But that is just a guess.
Overall, it was a good meeting. I met a lot of good folks, they were just as nice as they could be. I’d like to think candidate for Precinct Chair in 001 Peggy Lindow for the invitation. Here are a few pictures:
Tags: Election 2010, John Faulk, Public Education, Texas 18th Congressional District, unemployment
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What Should Children Be Taught in School? Texas Takes on the Debate
Friday, January 29th, 2010
What Should Children Be Taught in School? Texas Takes on the Debate
AUSTIN – Scores of Texans tried to sway State Board of Education members Wednesday as they prepared to make critical decisions on what students should be taught in U.S. history, government and other social studies classes over the next decade.
Religion and its role in U.S. history was one of the hottest topics at the public hearing on new social studies standards, but several other areas of the proposed curriculum also drew attention – including the lack of Hispanic historical figures and whether Texas students should be taught they are “global citizens.”
There was even discussion on whether students should have to learn the 50 state capitals, with one teacher from Lovejoy urging the board to refrain from such a requirement. But board member Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, disagreed and indicated she wants to see students memorize the capital cities.
Tags: Election 2010, Houston, Houston Voters, Public Education
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