The War On Teachers

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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Mar 21, 2013 6:54 pm

Have to think this is Rahm Emanuel's revenge for the successful teachers' strike:


http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/loca ... 8820.story

chicagotribune.com
Principals on school closings: 'There's been no planning. Just slash and burn'


By Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, John Byrne and John Chase
Tribune reporters

4:14 PM CDT, March 21, 2013


As word dribbled out today about which Chicago public schools will be closed, some parents renewed their charges that minorities are being unfairly targeted while principals accused CPS of "slash and burn."

CPS officials are expected to release a list this afternoon of about 50 schools slated for closing, many educators, parents and students at targeted schools got word earlier today.

Natasha Norment, 28, said she was “very disappointed” after learning Wednesday evening through a news report that her 10-year-old daughter's school, Mahalia Jackson Elementary at 917 W. 88th St., was on the list.

“It seems that they’re targeting the African-American schools,” Norment said Thursday. “The majority of these schools are in black communities. I feel it’s not right.”

Clarice Berry, president of Chicago Principals and Administrators Association, said principals of schools on the closing list were told at 6 a.m. today and were instructed to inform their teachers but not to talk to anyone else until 5 p.m. Berry said she also was told by CPS not to talk to the media until 5 p.m.

“I’m angry. I’m upset. I’m shaking to the core. I didn’t think they’d actually go through with this, the largest number of closings ever. There’s been no real planning,” Berry said.

Berry said there has been little planning at schools that are expected to take in students whose buildings are shuttered. Principals have told her that nothing has been worked out to provide the libraries or air conditioning CPS has promised at all receiving schools.

“There’s been no planning. Just slash and burn,” she said.

Berry expressed anger at Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who is on a family skiing vacation in Utah this week. “You do this stuff and you run away on vacation,” she said. “That is really wonderful.”

The Chicago Teachers Union released a statement saying it was "outraged" as the "hit list" of schools.

"Today, a vacationing Mayor Rahm Emanuel is sending our school district into utter chaos," it said. "CPS lacks the capacity to close 50 schools. The CTU contends closing these schools are unnecessary, will not save the district or taxpayers a single dollar, and put students’ safety and academics at risk."

Today's expected announcement follows weeks of debate between CPS and City Hall over how many schools to close. The district, which says it needs to close under-enrolled schools to address a looming $1 billion deficit, has been working from a preliminary list of 129 schools released in mid-February.

In addition to closing about 50 schools, sources said the district will consolidate or overhaul staff at a number of other schools, bringing the total number of school actions to about 70. Urban districts around the country have been forced to close large numbers of schools, but if the number in Chicago holds it would likely be the largest number of schools shut down by a city in a single year in recent history.

CPS has never closed more than a dozen or so schools in one year. Emanuel has pushed to close a large number of schools all at once, and in return has offered a five-year moratorium on closures.

While district officials said they are closing a large number of schools to address a budget shortfall, they have not released details on how much it will cost to shut down schools, provide extra security and safety programs for students, and equip receiving schools with promised upgrades like science labs, libraries and air conditioning.

District officials said they'll pay for the investments by "redirecting resources from underutilized" schools, which will be closed.

Norment didn’t yet know where her daughter Navi will be going to school next year.

“Once the schools close and the kids are going to the other schools, are they still going to get the same quality of education? And is that school going to be overcrowded?” Norment wondered, before adding that her daughter is currently receiving “one-on-one education” at Mahalia Jackson Elementary.

Norment also worries about Navi’s ability to adapt to a new classroom that could separate her from friends she’d known since preschool.

“If she has to go to another school she’s going to have to get a whole new group of friends, a whole new group of teachers, and she’s used to these teachers and their teaching style,” she said.

Norment attended Mahalia Jackson Elementary as a child, which only added to her disappointment.

“The majority of the teachers I had are teaching my kid now,” she said. “So I know she is getting a good quality education.”

nahmed@tribune.com

jebyrne@tribune.com

jchase@tribune.com

Copyright © 2013 Chicago Tribune Company, LLC
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Mar 31, 2013 9:42 am

An out-of-control fake schools reform where test scores are everything... the out-of-control policing and criminal justice system may have caught the right people, justice may take draconian form... will anything change? The lesson learned seems not to be that the test regime is insane in the first place.


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/30/us/fo ... wanted=all


March 29, 2013
Ex-Schools Chief in Atlanta Is Indicted in Testing Scandal
By MICHAEL WINERIP



During his 35 years as a Georgia state investigator, Richard Hyde has persuaded all sorts of criminals — corrupt judges, drug dealers, money launderers, racketeers — to turn state’s evidence, but until Jackie Parks, he had never tried to flip an elementary school teacher.

It worked.

In the fall of 2010, Ms. Parks, a third-grade teacher at Venetian Hills Elementary School in southwest Atlanta, agreed to become Witness No. 1 for Mr. Hyde, in what would develop into the most widespread public school cheating scandal in memory.

Ms. Parks admitted to Mr. Hyde that she was one of seven teachers — nicknamed “the chosen” — who sat in a locked windowless room every afternoon during the week of state testing, raising students’ scores by erasing wrong answers and making them right. She then agreed to wear a hidden electronic wire to school, and for weeks she secretly recorded the conversations of her fellow teachers for Mr. Hyde.

In the two and a half years since, the state’s investigation reached from Ms. Parks’s third-grade classroom all the way to the district superintendent at the time, Beverly L. Hall, who was one of 35 Atlanta educators indicted Friday by a Fulton County grand jury.

Dr. Hall, who retired in 2011, was charged with racketeering, theft, influencing witnesses, conspiracy and making false statements. Prosecutors recommended a $7.5 million bond for her; she could face up to 45 years in prison.

During the decade she led the district of 52,000 children, many of them poor and African-American, Atlanta students often outperformed wealthier suburban districts on state tests.

Those test scores brought her fame — in 2009, the American Association of School Administrators named her superintendent of the year and Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, hosted her at the White House.

And fortune — she earned more than $500,000 in performance bonuses while superintendent.

On Friday, prosecutors essentially said it really was too good to be true. Dr. Hall and the 34 teachers, principals and administrators “conspired to either cheat, conceal cheating or retaliate against whistle-blowers in an effort to bolster C.R.C.T. scores for the benefit of financial rewards associated with high test scores,” the indictment said, referring to the state’s Criterion-Referenced Competency Test.

Reached late Friday, Richard Deane, Dr. Hall’s lawyer, said they were digesting the indictment and making arrangements for bond. “We’re pretty busy,” he said.

As she has since the beginning, Mr. Deane said, Dr. Hall has denied the charges and any involvement in cheating or any other wrongdoing and expected to be vindicated. “We note that as far as has been disclosed, despite the thousands of interviews that were reportedly done by the governor’s investigators and others, not a single person reported that Dr. Hall participated in or directed them to cheat on the C.R.C.T.,” he said later in a statement.

In a 2011 interview with The New York Times, Dr. Hall said that people under her had allowed cheating but that she never had. “I can’t accept that there is a culture of cheating,” she said.

Paul L. Howard Jr., the district attorney, said that under Dr. Hall’s leadership, there was “a single-minded purpose, and that is to cheat.”

“She is a full participant in that conspiracy,” he said. “Without her, this conspiracy could not have taken place, particularly in the degree it took place.”

Longstanding Rumors

For years there had been reports of widespread cheating in Atlanta, but Dr. Hall was feared by teachers and principals, and few dared to speak out. “Principals and teachers were frequently told by Beverly Hall and her subordinates that excuses for not meeting targets would not be tolerated,” the indictment said.

Reporters for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and state education officials repeatedly found strong indications of cheating — extraordinary increases in test scores from one year to the next, along with a high number of erasures on answering sheets from wrong to right.

But they were not able to find anyone who would confess to it.

That is until August 2010, when Gov. Sonny Perdue named two special prosecutors — Michael Bowers, a Republican former attorney general, and Robert E. Wilson, a Democratic former district attorney — along with Mr. Hyde to conduct a criminal investigation.

For weeks that fall, Mr. Hyde had been stonewalled and lied to by teachers at Venetian Hills including Ms. Parks, who at one point, stood in her classroom doorway and blocked him from entering.

But day after day he returned to question people, and eventually his presence weighed so heavily on Ms. Parks that she said she felt a terrible need to confess her sins. “I wanted to repent,” she recalled in an interview. “I wanted to clear my conscience.”

Ms. Parks told Mr. Hyde that the cheating had been going on at least since 2004 and was overseen by the principal, who wore gloves so as not to leave her fingerprints on the answer sheets.

Children who scored 1 on the state test out of a possible 4 became 2s, she said; 2s became 3s.

“The cheating had been going on so long,” Ms. Parks said. “We considered it part of our jobs.”

She said teachers were under constant pressure from principals who feared they would be fired if they did not meet the testing targets set by the superintendent.

Dr. Hall was known to rule by fear. She gave principals three years to meet their testing goals. Few did; in her decade as superintendent, she replaced 90 percent of the principals.

Teachers and principals whose students had high test scores received tenure and thousands of dollars in performance bonuses. Otherwise, as one teacher explained, it was “low score out the door.”

Ms. Parks, a 17-year veteran, said a reason she had kept silent so long was that as a single mother, she could not afford to lose her job.

When asked during an interview if she was surprised that out of Atlanta’s 100 schools, Mr. Hyde turned up at hers first, Ms. Parks said no. “I had a dream about it a few weeks before,” she said. “I saw people walking down the hall with yellow notepads. From time to time, God reveals things to me in dreams.”

“I think God led Mr. Hyde to Venetian Hills,” she said.

Whatever delivered Mr. Hyde (he said he picked the school because he knew the area from patrolling it as a young police officer), 10 months after his arrival, on June 30, 2011, state investigators issued an 800-page report implicating 178 teachers and principals — including 82 who confessed to cheating.

By now, almost all are gone. Like Ms. Parks, they have resigned or were fired or lost their teaching licenses at administrative hearings.

Higher Scores, Less Aid

Some losses are harder to measure, like the impact on the children in schools where cheating was prevalent. At Parks Middle School, which investigators say was the site of the city’s worst cheating, test scores soared right after the arrival of a new principal, Christopher Waller — who was one of the 35 named in Friday’s indictment.

His first year at Parks, 2005, 86 percent of eighth graders scored proficient in math compared with 24 percent the year before; 78 percent passed the state reading test versus 35 percent the previous year.

The falsified test scores were so high that Parks Middle was no longer classified as a school in need of improvement and, as a result, lost $750,000 in state and federal aid, according to investigators. That money could have been used to give struggling children extra academic support. Stacey Johnson, a Parks teacher, told investigators that she had students in her class who had scored proficient on state tests in previous years but were actually reading on the first-grade level. Cheating masked the deficiencies and skewed the diagnosis.

When Erroll Davis Jr. succeeded Dr. Hall in July 2011, one of his first acts as superintendent was to create remedial classes in hopes of helping thousands of these students catch up.

It is not just an Atlanta problem. Cheating has grown at school districts around the country as standardized testing has become a primary means of evaluating teachers, principals and schools. In El Paso, a superintendent went to prison recently after removing low-performing children from classes to improve the district’s test scores. In Ohio, state officials are investigating whether several urban districts intentionally listed low-performing students as having withdrawn even though they were still in school.

But no state has come close to Georgia in appropriating the resources needed to root it out.

And that is because of former Governor Perdue.

“The more we were stonewalled, the more we wanted to know why,” he said in an interview.

In August 2010, after yet another blue-ribbon commission of Atlanta officials found no serious cheating, Mr. Perdue appointed the two special prosecutors and gave them subpoena powers and a budget substantial enough to hire more than 50 state investigators who were overseen by Mr. Hyde.

Mr. Bowers, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Hyde had spent most of their careers putting criminals in prison, and almost as important, they could write. They produced an investigative report with a narrative that read more like a crime thriller than a sleepy legal document and placed Dr. Hall center stage in a drama of mind-boggling dysfunction.

She had praised Mr. Waller of Parks Middle as one of the finest principals in the city, while Mr. Wilson, the special prosecutor, called him “the worst of the worst.”

According to the report, Mr. Waller held “changing parties” where he stood guarding the door as teachers gathered to erase wrong answers and make them right. “I need the numbers,” he would urge the teachers. “Do what you do.”

(When questioned by investigators, Mr. Waller cited his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.)

Dr. Hall arrived in Atlanta in 1999, the final step in a long upward climb. She had advanced through the ranks of the New York City schools, from teacher to principal to deputy superintendent, and then in 1995, became the superintendent in Newark.

In Atlanta, she built a reputation as a person who got results, understood the needs of poor children and had a strong relationship with the business elite.

Her focus on test scores made her a favorite of the national education reform movement, nearly as prominent as the schools chancellors Joel I. Klein of New York City and Michelle Rhee of Washington. Like them, she was a fearsome presence who would accept no excuses when it came to educating poor children. She held yearly rallies at the Georgia Dome, rewarding principals and teachers from schools with high test scores by seating them up front, close to her, while low scorers were shunted aside to the bleachers.

But she was also known as someone who held herself aloof from parents, teachers and principals. The district spent $100,000 a year for a security detail to drive her around the city. At public meetings, questions had to be submitted beforehand for screening.

In contrast, her successor, Mr. Davis, drives himself and his home phone number is listed.

As long ago as 2001, Journal-Constitution reporters were writing articles questioning test scores under Dr. Hall, but when they requested interviews they were rebuffed. Heather Vogell, an investigative reporter, said officials took months responding to her public information requests — if they did at all. “I’d call, leave a message, call again, no one would pick up,” she said.

Community Pressure

What made Dr. Hall just about untouchable was her strong ties to local business leaders. Atlanta prides itself in being a progressive Southern city when it comes to education, entrepreneurship and race — and Dr. Hall’s rising test scores were good news on all those fronts. She is an African-American woman who had turned around a mainly poor African-American school district, which would make Atlanta an even more desirable destination for businesses.

And so when Mr. Perdue challenged the test results that underpinned everything — even though he was a conservative Republican businessman — he met strong resistance from the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.

“There was extensive subtle pressure,” Mr. Perdue said. “They’d say, ‘Do you really think there is anything there? We have to make sure we don’t hurt the city.’ Good friends broke with me over this.”

“I was dumbfounded that the business community would not want the truth,” he said. “These would be the next generation of employees, and companies would be looking at them and wondering why they had graduated and could not do simple skills. Business was insisting on accountability, but they didn’t want real accountability.”

Once the special prosecutors’ report was made public, it did not matter what the business community wanted; the findings were so sensational, there was no turning back.

Ms. Parks of Venetian Hills was one of many who wore a concealed wire for Mr. Hyde.

As he listened to the hours of secretly recorded conversations of cheating teachers and principals, he was surprised. “I heard them in unguarded moments,” Mr. Hyde said. “You listen, they’re good people. Their tone was of men and women who cared about kids.”

“Every time I play those tapes, I get furious about the way Beverly Hall treated these people,” he said.

Another important source for him at Venetian Hills was Milagros Moner, the testing coordinator. “A really fine person,” Mr. Hyde said. “Another single mom under terrible pressure.”

Ms. Moner told Mr. Hyde that she carried the tests in a tote bag to the principal, Clarietta Davis, who put on gloves before touching them.

After school, on Oct. 18, 2010, the two women sat in the principal’s car in the parking lot of a McDonald’s. Inside Ms. Moner’s purse was a tape recorder Mr. Hyde had given her. Thirty yards away, he sat in his pickup truck videotaping as they talked about how the investigation and media coverage had taken over their lives.

Ms. Moner: I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, my kids want to talk to me, I ignore them. ... I don’t have the mental energy. ...

Ms. Davis: You wouldn’t believe how people just look at you. People you know.

Ms. Moner: You feel isolated.

Ms. Davis: There’s no one to talk to. ... See how red my eyes are? And I’m not a drinking woman.

Ms. Moner: It has taken over my life. I don’t even want to go to work. I pray day and night, I pray at work.

Ms. Davis: You just have to pray for everybody.

Later, when investigators tried to question Ms. Davis about her reasons for wearing the gloves, she invoked the Fifth Amendment. On Friday, she was one of the 35 indicted.

Kim Severson and Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Atlanta.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 29, 2013


An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of the president of Caveon Test Security, a forensic data analysis firm. He is John Fremer, not John Caveon.

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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby justdrew » Sat Apr 13, 2013 11:49 pm

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/04/rhee-con

Much more on Rhee’s tenure in DC and the cheating scandal she knew about and buried from John Merrow. Rhee was completely unqualified to run a school system but certainly accomplished in getting people to lavish her with praise (up to and including the current occupant of the White House), and the consequences were pretty much inevitable:

It’s easy to see how not trying to find out who had done the erasing–burying the problem–was better for Michelle Rhee personally, at least in the short term. She had just handed out over $1.5 million in bonuses in a well-publicized celebration of the test increases. She had been praised by presidential candidates Obama and McCain in their October debate, and she must have known that she was soon to be on the cover of Time Magazine. The public spectacle of an investigation of nearly half of her schools would have tarnished her glowing reputation, especially if the investigators proved that adults cheated–which seems likely given that their jobs depended on raising test scores.

Moreover, a cheating scandal might well have implicated her own “Produce or Else” approach to reform. Early in her first year she met one-on-one with each principal and demanded a written, signed guarantee of precisely how many points their DC-CAS scores would increase.

Relying on the DC-CAS was not smart policy because it was designed to assess students’ strengths and weaknesses. It did not determine whether students passed or were promoted to the next grade, which meant that many students blew it off.

Putting all her eggs in the DC-CAS basket was a mistake that basic social science warns against. “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” That’s Campbell’s Law, formulated in 1976 by esteemed social scientist Donald Campbell (1916-1976) .

Applied to education, it might go this way: “If you base nearly everything–including their jobs–on one test, expect people to cheat.”

And the novice Chancellor was basing nearly everything on the DC-CAS.


Read the whole thing — I can assure you that it’s a better time investment than Won’t Back Down.

http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=6232
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Michelle Rhee's Blackboard Formula -

Postby JackRiddler » Thu May 02, 2013 4:43 pm

Image
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby Allegro » Thu May 02, 2013 11:18 pm

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Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Michelle Rhee & husband, Kevin Johnson

Postby Allegro » Fri May 03, 2013 12:16 pm

Research of Michelle Rhee’s husband showed that as a youth he became a born again Christian, meaning he’s accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and personal Savior. Among his several philanthropic projects, Kevin Johnson participates in Christian Athletes Ministries, which doesn’t have a web site that I could find. Should you read Being Kevin Johnson linked below, details of mid-1990’s sexual abuse allegations against him were dropped, and no charges were filed.

The surmise would be, after reading his apparent tendencies in religious fundamentalism and attentions to right-winged politicians, that his wife’s motivations within the education-industrial-complex as well as political choices would to some extent be encouraged by elements of her husband’s religious mission, however under reported by (sports) media, I presume.

Nonetheless, listening to a few Christian radio talk shows will affirm a notion that the war on education and teachers isn’t lost in Christian evangelicals’ and fundamentalists’ resolute “In the Name of Jesus Christ” points of view in the U.S.

_________________
Kevin Johnson | Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies

Kevin Johnson: The Spirit of Giving | The Official Site of the Phoenix Suns

Being Kevin Johnson

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REFERENCES ARE PERIODICALLY ADDED: The Prosperity Gospel; Prosperity Theology | White Savior Industrial Complex | Joshua Project | 1040 Window | Campus Crusade for Christ | Focus on the Family | American Family Association | Family Research Council | The Family | Chaplains Alliance for Religious Liberty | Opus Dei | Dominion Theology | Reconstructionism | Christian Fundamentalism | Christian Dispensationalism | Christian Evangelism | Pentecostalism | Muscular Christianity | Fellowship of Christian Athletes

National Association of Evangelicals | World Vision International | Traditional Values Coalition | Christian Coalition of America | International Center for Religion & Diplomacy | International Christian Concern | National Christian Foundation | Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability | ONE Campaign
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Thu May 09, 2013 8:45 am

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=36351

Thanks to conniption.


otlcampaign

The Color of School Closures
Posted on: Tuesday April 23rd, 2013

Image

Mass school closings have become a hallmark of today's dominant education policy agenda. But rather than helping students, these closures disrupt whole communities. And as U.S. Department of Education data suggests, the most recent rounds of mass closings in Chicago, New York City and Philadelphia disproportionately hurt Black and low-income students.

What can you do to end these discriminatory and unacceptable school closures?

Share this infographic with your friends on Facebook and Twitter – start the conversation in your community!
Send us your stories and data about closings in your district.
Learn about alternatives that support students rather than close school doors on them.
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby Luther Blissett » Fri May 10, 2013 9:45 am

My 14-year old stepdaughter went to a planning meeting for this Monday, participated in the student-led protest on district headquarters Tuesday, but did not participate in the walkout yesterday. There are rumors of a larger one today.

I had to teach her about "diversity of tactics" yesterday and not to lose her cool and let themselves be divided in the face of a common target.

Image
Image
Image
Image

Philadelphia: High school students walk out of class and march to City Hall to protest severe budget cuts and planned school closings, May 9, 2013.


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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby kyles » Mon May 13, 2013 4:30 am

By reading the posts and the images I am bit worry about the educational system and thinking that now it really need to be reformed. This is the age of advancement and our generation needs more then just what they are teaching in schools. Not only that the budget is also very important in this regard.
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby justdrew » Mon May 13, 2013 5:13 am

kyles wrote:By reading the posts and the images I am bit worry about the educational system and thinking that now it really need to be reformed. This is the age of advancement and our generation needs more then just what they are teaching in schools. Not only that the budget is also very important in this regard.


I'm sorry kyles, but I have reason to suspect you may be a new kind of spam bot. No offense intended if I'm wrong. Maybe we can chat a bit to clear it up. Just out of curiosity, what is your first language?
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Mon May 13, 2013 6:02 am

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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby justdrew » Mon May 13, 2013 6:24 am

Joe Hillshoist wrote:Same one as this guy:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=36364&start=90#p503130


that bot has been banned by ip
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Jul 30, 2013 9:27 am

Next Generation Science Standards In Kentucky Draw Hostility From Religious Groups

Huffington Post | By Rebecca Klein
Posted: 07/29/2013 5:11 pm EDT | Updated: 07/30/2013 1:08 am EDT

Supporters and opponents of the Next Generation Science Standards sparred during hearings in Kentucky last week, as critics took issue with the standards’ teaching of evolution and climate change.

The new standards were developed with input from officials in 26 states –- including Kentucky –- and are part of an effort to make science curricula more uniform across the country. While supporters feel the standards will help beat back scientific ignorance, some religious groups take issue because the standards treat evolution as fact and talk about the human role in climate change.

The Kentucky Board of Education adopted the standards in June and held hearings to get public feedback on the standards last week before they were presented to the state legislature for official approval.

Matt Singleton, a Baptist minister, is one of the opponents who spoke to the board about why the standards should not be adopted, according to The Courier-Journal. “Outsiders are telling public school families that we must follow the rich man’s elitist religion of evolution, that we no longer have what the Kentucky Constitution says is the right to worship almighty God,” Singleton said. “Instead, this fascist method teaches that our children are the property of the state.”

Another opponent, Dena Stewart-Gore, suggested that the standards will make religious students feel ostracized. “The way socialism works is it takes anybody that doesn’t fit the mold and discards them,” she said, per the The Courier-Journal. “We are even talking genocide and murder here, folks.”

Supporters of the standards contended that opponents’ fears are unfounded and that the standards’ curriculum is based on evidence.

A handful of states including Kansas, Maryland and Vermont have already adopted the Next Generation Science Standards. The Kentucky Board of Education will be accepting written testimonies regarding the standards until July 31.
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby mulebone » Tue Jul 30, 2013 11:38 am

The new standards were developed


Standards? What standards are they talking about?

My 15 year old entered public high school at the start of last year. In that year he learned that:

a. Slavery occurred during the Great Depression
b. The Great Depression occurred much earlier than the early 20th century.
c. That the spelling of words is fluid & spelling skills are something that they don't require potential teachers to master.
d. Angels are real.

Every day they have a prayer session in the cafeteria. Granted, it isn't mandatory but this is high school not church.

I've since discovered that the county I live in does not require a teacher to have a degree in the subject that they teach.

So, again, what standards?

& really, how do they expect children to care about school when the children are apparently smarter than the teachers?

As it stands now, I just tell my son that high school isn't necessarily about learning, it's more of a behavioral science experiment where they try to see how many pointless hoops you'll jump through & how much boredom you'll tolerate in order to get your diploma. This trains you for a lifetime spent on jobs where you will be bored senseless as you jump through an endless series of pointless hoops in order to get a paycheck.
Well Robert Moore went down heavy
With a crash upon the floor
And over to his thrashin' body
Betty Coltrane she did crawl.
She put the gun to the back of his head
And pulled the trigger once more
And blew his brains out
All over the table.
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 30, 2013 11:43 am

As it stands now, I just tell my son that high school isn't necessarily about learning, it's more of a behavioral science experiment where they try to see how many pointless hoops you'll jump through & how much boredom you'll tolerate in order to get your diploma. This trains you for a lifetime spent on jobs where you will be bored senseless as you jump through an endless series of pointless hoops in order to get a paycheck
.

boy I bet that makes him jump out of bed in the morning :P
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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