by Bruce Shortt, J.D., Ph.D.

WELCOME TO THE CONTINUING COLLAPSE!

 

"Doing the Education Research that Illegal Aliens Won't Do

 Since 1997"

 

November 2008

 

RE-EDUCATE OR LIQUIDATE

One of the themes of The Continuing Collapse is that the Left has always understood that control of children through control of how they are educated is the "high ground" on the culture war battlefield.

 

Only pastors fearful for their jobs and Christians addicted to that middle-class welfare entitlement known as "free public education" seem unable to grasp the obvious.

In the last edition TCC provided video in which a Soviet defector explained how control of the content of education was central to any effort to destabilize a country. That was followed by an article reporting that William Ayers had recently declared - while affectionately nuzzling Hugo Chavez at a meeting in Venezuela on "progressive" education - that "education is the revolution."

And just what do "progressive" educators like Ayers have in mind for those of you who resist being re-educated into the new progressive world that they intend to create once they capture the government?

Fortunately, we don't have to guess. Ayers' former organization, the Weather Underground made this quite clear years ago:

Eliminating 25 million Americans

Thomas Lifson

That was the plan of the Weather Underground after taking power. The same Weather Underground headed by Barack Obama's friends William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, the people in whose house he launched his political career, and with whom he has worked and spoken on the subject of educational reform.

Confederate Yankee discovered  a video clip of testimony given by former Weather Underground member/FBI informant Larry Grathwohl, in which he speaks the following chilling words:

I asked, "well what is going to happen to those people we can't reeducate, that are diehard capitalists?" and the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated.

And when I pursued this further, they estimated they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers.

And when I say "eliminate," I mean "kill."

VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJn5b8_weUY

 

Databasing Students and Teachers:

 

Obama's Plan for Tracking Children Like Cheap Sweaters at Walmart

 

Sen. Barack Obama vows to “change the world.” For starters, he’s made an “historic commitment to education” for “every American child” that begins “from the moment they’re born to the day they graduate college.”

 

What are some of Obama’s extraordinary education plans? Embedding positive behavior in students and developing a data system to monitor them.

 

Let’s first look at Obama’s education track record. It’s his exalted 7-year stint to reform Chicago schools as chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) with “distinguished scholar” and unrepentant terrorist William Ayers that according to CAC’s records showed no academic achievement. ...

 

This ideological alliance was fomented during Ayer’s Weatherman days where cop killers were hailed as freedom fighters and radical cohorts were encouraged to recruit students, “bring the revolution home” and “kill your parents.” ...

 

Next in Obama’s “Mandatory Use of Funds” section, there is a “longitudinal data system” created to “monitor students” as they “move from grade to grade.” Obama’s data system will include “a unique student identifier” and a “teacher identifier” that matches “each student to each teacher…”

 

S. 2111: The Positive Behavior for Effective Schools Act amends the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to allow “educational agencies, and schools to increase implementation of… school-wide positive behavior supports.”...

 

Naturally, Obama, a rookie Senator, on the verge of becoming the President of the United States, seeks policy and governing guidance. But who would’ve prepared and guided Obama to formulate education laws embedding behavioral and social outcomes into students or conceive legislation that mandates a student-teacher monitoring data system?  Bill Clinton or Bill Ayers?  Ignoring Obama’s Marxist anti-American radical associations isn’t a desperate distraction; it’s a dangerous mistake that really could change the world.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/5701

Just Like Hugo Chavez:

 

 Our Highly Trained Education Professionals who Teach Teachers also Think Ayers is Doing Important "Progressive" Work

Over 3,000 educators nationwide, including six Brown professors, have signed a statement supporting the man Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain called a "washed-up terrorist" at the third presidential debate last Wednesday...

Both residents of the Chicago area, Ayers and Obama first met in 1995 when they served on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school reform initiative. They also were board members of the Woods Fund, a Chicago charity, from 2000 to 2002.

Ayers, now a distinguished professor of education and senior university scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was a co-founding member of the radical activist group the Weather Underground in 1969. The group's extreme tactics to end the Vietnam War included planting bombs in the Pentagon and the United States Capitol....

"I think he's doing a lot of positive, progressive, constructive work right now," said Professor of English William Keach, the first member of the University's faculty to sign the statement of support. Keach was referring to Ayers's work in the field of education.

http://media.www.browndailyherald.com/media/storage/paper472/news/2008/10/22/CampusNews/Profs.Sign.Statement.In.Support.Of.Ayers-3499040.shtml

California Government Schools are Now Unquestionably Centers of Child Abuse  

 

In the aftermath of the takeover of California government schools by the homosexual activists who pushed through SB 777, an assembly of thousands of SBC pastors was asked to speak out on behalf of rescuing children from California government schools. A majority of the pastors and the SBC hierarchy couldn't be bothered.

 

You might be interested in the type of thing that several thousand Christian leaders were unwilling to trouble their empty little heads and hard hearts about.

 

 

SACRAMENTO, October 23, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Parents of students attending an elementary school in Hayward, California, are in a frenzy after learning the school allegedly made no effort to inform them their children were to participate in today's homosexual "Coming Out Day" school event, reports the Pacific Justice Institute (PJI), a legal firm specializing in the defense of religious freedoms and parental rights.

 

Parents of children at Faith Ringgold School of Art and Science were shocked to see a poster announcing the homosexual event, as they had not received any previous notification. In fact, according PJI, the school specifically decided not to inform parents ahead of time. ..

 

The recent development at the elementary school, however, has provided powerful anecdotal fodder for the Yes on 8 campaign.

“Coming Out Day” is far from the first time children as young as five at Faith Ringgold have been indoctrinated with the pro-homosexual agenda.  The school is in the midst of celebrating “Ally Week” as part of “Gay and Lesbian History Month.”

 

When one mother asked her daughter earlier this week what she was learning in kindergarten at the school, the 5-year-old replied, “We’re learning to be allies.” The mother also learned that her daughter’s kindergarten classroom is regularly used during lunchtime for meetings of a Gay Straight Alliance club.

 

LifeSiteNews.com attempted to contact the school board regarding the issue. There was no answer, however, and the board’s phone mailbox was full. A representative at Faith Ringgold at first claimed she knew nothing about the “Coming Out Day,” but then said that only the principal, Diana Levy, could answer questions about the event....

 

Faith Ringgold seems to have set the promotion of the homosexual agenda as a priority on its 2008 calendar, as several other pro-homosexual events are slated in the coming weeks.

 

For instance, several parents have noticed numerous posters around the school promoting talks on the family scheduled for later this week; all of the posters, however, depict only homosexual “families.”  As well, On November 20, the school will host TransAction Gender-Bender Read-Aloud, where students will hear adapted tales such as “Jane and the Beanstalk.”

http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/oct/08102306.html 

 

And What is the Largest Organization Allied with California's Sodomite Activists?

 

[The Union For California's Highly Trained Education

Professionals, Of Course]

 

Here's a pop quiz: Who's donated the most money to an effort in California to defeat Proposition 8, an initiative on the November 4 ballot that would define marriage as between a man and a woman in the state?

 

A) Gay-advocacy organizations

B) Civil-rights groups

C) The California Teachers Association

 

If you guessed "C," you understand the nature of modern liberal politics. And if you didn't, perhaps you're wondering what exactly gay marriage has to do with K-12 public education. The high school dropout rate is 1-in-4 in California and 1-in-3 in the Los Angeles public school system, odds that worsen considerably among black and Hispanic children. So you might think the CTA, the state's largest teachers' union, would have other priorities.

 

Yet last week the union donated $1 million to the "No on Proposition 8" campaign. Of the roughly $3 million raised by opponents of the measure so far, $1.25 million has come from the teachers' union. "What does this cause have to do with education?" said Randy Peart, a public school teacher in San Juan who was contacted by a local television station. "Why not put that money into classrooms, into making a better place for these kids?"

 

In fact, the CTA and its parent organization, the National Education Association, have used tens of millions of dollars in mandatory teachers' dues to advance all manner of left-wing political causes. And members like Ms. Peart are right to ask questions. In some years barely a third of the NEA's budget has gone toward improving the lot of teachers themselves.

 

In addition to vigorously fighting school choice and other reforms that benefit underprivileged children but threaten the public education monopoly, the NEA has directly (or via state affiliates) bankrolled Acorn, the Democratic Leadership Council, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and, naturally, the Human Rights Campaign, which lobbies for "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equal rights."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122480597946864923.html

 

TCC hopes that all of the Southern Baptist pastors who voted against speaking out on rescuing California's children from indoctrination in the sodomite worldview in California's schools are proud of themselves.

 

 

Bad Company Corrupts Good Character

 

Demonstrating a remarkable grasp of the obvious, the National Bureau for Economic Research "discovers" that our highly trained education professionals' enthusiasm for "mixed ability" classes is educational poison.

In this paper, we estimate the extent of ability peer effects in the classroom and explore the underlying mechanisms through which these peer effects operate. We identify as low ability students those who are enrolled at least one year behind their birth cohort ("repeaters").

 

We show that there are marked differences between the academic performance and behavior of repeaters and regular students. The status of repeaters is mostly determined by first grade; therefore, it is unlikely to have been affected by their classroom peers, and our estimates will not suffer from the reflection problem. Using within school variation in the proportion of these low ability students across cohorts of middle and high school students in Israel, we find that the proportion of low achieving peers has a negative effect on the performance of regular students, especially those located at the lower end of the ability distribution.

 

...a higher proportion of these low achieving students results in a deterioration of teachers' pedagogical practices, has detrimental effects on the quality of inter-student relationships and the relationships between teachers and students, and increases the level of violence and classroom disruptions.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w14415 

The education establishment undoubtedly already knew this. It's just the small price we have to pay for a more egalitarian educational environment. 

 

 

The Obama Messiah Demonstrated His Extraordinary Executive and Policy

Prowess When He Ran a

Multi-Million Dollar

"Education Reform"

Program In Chicago

 

[Millions spent; No gains in student performance]

 

If THE ONE can't do it, why should we be surprised when mere mortals can't make "school reform" work?

So, what was Barack Obama up to when he ran former Weather Underground bomber Bill Ayers' "education reform" foundation?

Not much good - at least according to the guy in charge of Chicago's public schools while he was there.

 

"There was a total lack of accountability" at Obama and Ayers' Chicago Annenberg Challenge, former city school superintendent Paul Vallas has told The Post. Indeed, "If you went back and asked, you'd be hard-pressed to find out how the money was spent."

Well, maybe.

 

As it turns out, the Obama-helmed CAC was directing big bucks toward the propagation - in Chicago public schools - of the whack-job racist ideology most famously preached by Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

That's the bottom line of research on CAC documents by Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

 

For example, the Obama-led foundation funneled more than $200,000 to an outfit called the Coalition for Improved Education in South Shore.

Its mission: training public-school teachers in "Afrocentric" education, a pseudo-scientific movement that (as a trainer brought in with CAC funds put it) rejects Western civilization, and America in particular, as "white supremacist" and seeks to "recover our disrupted ancestral culture."

 

Reading, writing and 'rithmetic this isn't. All of which gives the lie to Obama's breezy assertion in last week's debate that his CAC activities were somehow bipartisan or mainstream.

 

It also certainly explains why schools chosen for the foundation's largesse showed no gains in student performance.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/10222008/postopinion/editorials/obamas_education_idiocy_134770.htm

 

 

 Hooray for Safe Sex Education!

 

Government high school spreading AIDS like a San Francisco bathhouse

 

Another triumph by our highly trained education professionals.

 

NORMANDY, Missouri (AP) -- Students at a suburban St. Louis high school headed to the gymnasium for HIV testing this week after an infected person told health officials as many as 50 teenagers might have been exposed to the virus that causes AIDS.

 

Officials refused to give details on who the person was or how the students at Normandy High School might have been exposed, but the district is consulting with national AIDS organizations as it tries to minimize the fallout and prevent the infection -- and misinformation -- from spreading.

 

"There's potential for stigma for all students regardless of whether they're positive or negative," Normandy School District spokesman Doug Hochstedler said Thursday. "The board wants to be sure all children are fully educated."...

 

A teacher in a neighboring district singled out a girl who dates someone at Normandy High and instructed her to get tested, Hochstedler said. A competing school's football team initially balked at playing Normandy's 8-0 team.

 

Sophomore Tevin Baldwin said that many of his classmates in this working-class city of about 5,000 residents want to transfer out of the district, which encompasses other towns.

 

The St. Louis County Health Department said last week that a positive HIV test raised concern that students at Normandy might have been exposed. The department is not saying whether the infected person was a student or connected with the school, only that the person indicated as many as 50 students may have been exposed....

 

 Students in grades four through 12 already take classes that discuss the consequences of risky behavior, including HIV, he said.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/10/23/high.school.hiv.ap/index.html

 

 

MORE NEWS ABOUT THE "BEST EDUCATED GENERATION EVER"

(Your child is less likely to graduate from high school than you were)

WASHINGTON — Your child is less likely to graduate from high school than you were, and most states are doing little to hold schools accountable, according to a study by a children's advocacy group.

More than half the states have graduation goals that don't make schools get better, the Education Trust says in a report released today.

And dropout rates haven't budged: One in four kids is dropping out of high school.

"The U.S. is stagnating while other industrialized countries are surpassing us," said Anna Habash, author of the report by Education Trust, which advocates on behalf of minority and poor children. "And that is going to have a dramatic impact on our ability to compete," she said.

In fact, the United States is now the only industrialized country where young people are less likely than their parents to earn a diploma, the report said.

High schools are required to meet graduation targets every year as part of the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law.

But those targets are set by states, not by the federal government. And most states allow schools to graduate low percentages of students by saying that any progress, or even the status quo in some cases, is acceptable.

For example:

— In North Carolina, schools must improve by 0.1 percentage point each year. At that rate, it would take nearly a century to raise the graduation rate, now 72 percent, to the state goal of 80 percent....

...In 2005, the nation's governors made a pact to adopt a common system of tracking graduation rates.

Now the federal government is poised to raise the bar on graduation rates. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is expected to issue new rules next week that will force states to use the common tracking system and will judge schools not only on graduation rates but on the percentage of black and Hispanic students who graduate, too....

Spellings proposed the new rules earlier this year. Final rules may differ somewhat, but Spellings said earlier that states would be required in most cases to count graduates as kids who leave high school on time and with a regular diploma....

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/2113077/posts

 

Britain Reaps the Fruit of "Progressive" Education

The British Journal of Educational Psychology finds that brainpower of Britains' 14-year-olds has slipped 'radically' in just one generation.

 

Bright teenagers are a disappearing breed, an alarming new study has revealed.

The intellectual ability of the country's cleverest youngsters has declined radically, almost certainly due to the rise of TV and computer games and over-testing in schools.

 

The 'high-level thinking' skills of 14-year-olds are now on a par with those of 12-year-olds in 1976.

The findings contradict national results which have shown a growth in top grades in SATs at 14, GCSEs and A-levels.

Professor Shayer warned that without the development of higher-order thinking skills, the future supply of scientists will be compromised.

'We don't even have enough scientists now,' he said.

 

Previous research by Professor Shayer has shown that 11-year-olds' grasp of concepts such as volume, density, quantity and weight appears to have declined over the last 30 years.

 

Their mental abilities were up to three years behind youngsters tested in in 1975.

His latest findings, due to appear in the British Journal of Educational Psychology.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1080791/Dimming-How-brainpower-todays-14-year-olds-slipped-radically-just-generation.html

 

Of course, our schools are different.

 

AND NOW A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR SCHOOL REFORMERS

 

Yet more evidence that even modest efforts to hold our highly trained education professionals accountable will be subverted and swept away.

 

The Maryland State Board of Education is set to discuss the High School Assessments at its monthly meeting tomorrow. According to the Baltimore Sun, there will be an effort led by board member Blair Ewing of Montgomery County to delay the requirement that makes the tests a condition for graduation. The board enacted the assessments in 2000, but the Class of 2009 is the first to face the requirement.

 

Mr. Ewing stresses that he merely wants to postpone the graduation standard, not eliminate it. He told the Sun that he doesn't believe that all students have been exposed to teaching that prepares them to pass the tests. No doubt he is right, but, as Mr. Alonso so eloquently argued, why is it right to pass these students on with the facade of having been educated? A high school diploma doesn't do much good to the young man or woman who can't read, can't do math or doesn't have the skills to get a good job.

 

Schools have known for years that the tests would be a requirement for graduation in the spring, so it is hard to imagine what purpose is served by a year's delay....Efforts to delay, or even scuttle, the tests are not surprising. Other states that imposed them also experienced opposition from those claiming to have the interests of students in mind. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/26/AR2008102601778.html   

 

 

Finally, TCC has captured the image of a conservative school reformer hard at work....See the link below.

 

http://donquijote.cc/db1/00010/donquijote.cc/_uimages/DQWindmill.gif

 

REMEMBER:

 

1. Feel free to circulate The Continuing Collapse.

 

2. If you aren't hearing about at least some these government school problems from your pastor, why is he your pastor?

 

3. FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS SEND THEIR CHILDREN TO GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS.

 

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm – but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” T.S. Eliot