 StudentsFirst's full court press has started as of last week. We now have a video from the organization with an Olympic theme of American students falling behind in educational competition with other countries.
Never forget that Michelle Rhee has moved herself into a position the same as Jeb Bush - profiting from control of Education which in Parent's terms is "Controlling Our Children." These are financial ventures of which they were also involved in implementing RTTT and the CCS. They are playing both sides of the table and the poker chips are your children.
We are somewhat behind the curve of some folks in getting this video. It hit the national circuit last week and it has not been a critical success with many bloggers, educators and writers. They take Ms. Rhee and her organization to task for this video.
· The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Online picked up on all the backlash that Rhee’s new “ad” has created.
· EdWeek also took notice of the commercial’s poor reception.
· Gary Rubinstein took umbrage at the inaccuracies of the ad.
· Liz Dwyer took offense at the tone.
· Anthony Cody pointed out that the commercial’s message is homophobic.
· Diane Ravitch called the ad “disgusting”
Not all is lost for Ms. Rhee - "REDSTATE" liked it!
Below is StudentsFirst email about American students falling behind other countries. Read it and determine what you think about the video. One bit of information about international testing that just might skew Studentsfirst's message is that the US educational systems test every public education students, including special education students. Other countries don't test all their students so these test results might not be "apples to apples". Here's another thought: if American students are "falling behind", maybe this is because of the onerous federal mandates districts and teachers must adhere to...and what does "education reform" of the Obama administration and private organizations do? Just creates MORE mandates via Common Core/RTTT.
StudentsFirst should make a video pointing out that fact instead of placing all the blame on teachers and public schools. They can't possibly succeed with unattainable standards and mandates. Was nothing learned from the failure of NCLB? Apparently not. It's just easier to blame the teachers and schools that have to teach under goals that can never be reached:
*************************************************************************************************
No bronze, no silver, and certainly no gold.
The London Olympics are well underway and, while our athletes are putting on an incredible performance, the U.S. continues to fall behind in a far more important competition: our children's education. We can do better than this.
While our teachers and students are working incredibly hard, the U.S. education system has failed to give them the support they need to succeed. The sad thing is, we know what it takes to improve things, but we just aren't doing it.
Let me give you an idea of how badly we're doing. If our education system jumped into a pommel horse routine ... well, let's just say it wouldn't look too pretty:
That's right: 25th place in math and 17th in science.
If the U.S. education system is ever going to go for gold we need to shape up. Your involvement is helping StudentsFirst bring common sense reforms to states across the country, but we need your voice to help us spread the word.
See how U.S. education stacks up and share our latest video with your friends and family now:
http://www.studentsfirst.org/olympics-video-2
Thanks you for all you do -- keep it up.
Hari Sevugan
Vice President of Communications
StudentsFirst
P.S. Learn more about how we can make change in a new op-ed written by Michelle Rhee in USA Today: http://ow.ly/cE5lT
 by MISSOURI EDUCATION WATCHDOG Aug 4, 2012
Remember when everyone was all upset that the new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was going to require people to purchase something just to be considered a citizen in good standing? But then the Supreme Court reassured us that it wasn't a criminal matter if we didn't purchase health insurance, because it was just a tax. Citizens would just be fined. However, the IRS has been named as the enforcement agency for the healthcare bill, and according to section 7201 of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC), it is a federal crime for anyone to willfully attempt to evade or defeat the payment of federal taxes. The IRS has the authority to incarcerate anyone found guilty of tax evasion. So how is it an honest statement that failure to comply with the terms of the PPACA will not result in criminal incarceration?
Why am I talking about health care in an education blog? PPACA, like Freddie Mac and Sallie Mae sets up a hybrid public/private entity which ties people to government while enriching private businesses. If you want a home, your mortgage is ultimately going to be owned by the government through Freddie Mac. If you want a student loan, the pressure has been applied to send you into the arms of government supplied student loans (which are a great investment for Uncle Sam since they can never be forgiven.) The government is forcing you into a businesses relationship with private insurers with PPACA. They have already stated that their end goal is a single payer system, but those private insurers know that the government will contract with them to manage that system so they will end up with guaranteed business no matter what. The reason this topic is here is because they are setting up the same scenario in education.
Stephanie Simon of Reuters attended a gathering of investors in Manhattan, and the business sector they were looking to invest in is education. The conference was billed as a how-to on "private equity investing in for-profit education companies," and was attended by about 100 hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, and education vendors.
"You start to see entire ecosystems of investment opportunity lining up," said Lytle, a partner at The Parthenon Group, a Boston consulting firm. "It could get really, really big."
...The entire education sector, including college and mid-career training, represents nearly 9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, more than the energy or technology sectors.
...Traditionally, public education has been a tough market for private firms to break into -- fraught with politics, tangled in bureaucracy and fragmented into tens of thousands of individual schools and school districts from coast to coast.
Now investors are signaling optimism that a golden moment has arrived. They're pouring private equity and venture capital into scores of companies that aim to profit by taking over broad swaths of public education.
And government is pushing for them to be able to do that. From education reform advocates pushing for the expansion of charter schools, to Teach For America creating its own shorthand education degree course collecting money both from government and students to pay for their business, to the coming explosion of on-line learning, there are so many profit avenues into public education.
The goal: an education revolution in which public schools outsource to private vendors such critical tasks as teaching math, educating disabled students, even writing report cards, said Michael Moe, the founder of GSV ( an investment firm in Chicago that specializes in education.)
Back to the question of why talk about the health care situation in an education blog. Just like you are required now by the government to purchase something from a private company for health, you will be required to pay a private business (through your taxes if not directly) to comply with the government mandate that your child be educated. You must send your child to school. Homeschool parents know this all too well as many of them are harassed by school officials and local police for being unfit parents who fail to do the right thing and send their kids to public school. Unless you are strong enough to do the work of educating your child yourself and put up with push back like this, you have no choice but to send your child to public school. Now that the job of that public school is being outsourced to private business, you are in essence required to participate in a private business contract not of your choosing. If you don't, and the PPACA is the legal precedent, you might be subject to incarceration.
I have no problem if a charter school wants to come in and try to do a better job educating children. But in the current environment of regulation, they will only be able to provide the regular public school education in a different building. I have no problem if a company wants to create educational modules to help teach a subject. But if the government is going to have the authority to either bless that method or not, regulating whether the module fulfills the governments requirements, then we will not have the free market operating. We will have the continuation of government control over education and government selection of winners and losers in the private sector. We will have yet another pubic/private hybrid on our hands that is the worst of both worlds.
 Lord Monckton tells us during his visit to the UN's Rio+20 summit last week, the walls of the conference center were festooned with disturbing images, many painted by children under the rubric, “children teaching their parents.”
In one painting, a child painted the sun, dressed as a doctor taking the temperature of the earth. The diagnosis? "I'm sure you have humans!"
Our children are being taught by fraudulent scientists and extremists that people are a plague!
These extremists who are teaching our children are so entirely detached from any form of rationality or reality that they no longer understand how malevolent, unpleasant, anti-Democratic, anti-Western and how downright unfair their policies are to the people and the other creatures on this planet.
They have lost the plot and all of humanity is about to pay the price. Speaking out against this at these conferences has become increasingly difficult. This was the first time at any UN conference that he had attended with CFACT, that the negotiating text was hidden from non-negotiating delegates such as himself until after the negotiations were complete. We only saw the final draft after the document was ratified!
I believe the time has come to instruct the UN to return to first principles or the United States to totally disconnect from all association and financial support to them.. It was not created to hand control over our lives to the Left. The many UN bureaucrats actively employed to throttle the free world's hard won freedom and prosperity -- living off the taxpayers -- must be kicked out and told to get a proper job.
Using our children around the world by continually repeating to them that humans are ruining the world, killing the plants, animals and planet as a whole, especially starting at the very young age of Pre-K & K, is mind control. Add to that children on Earth Day now known as Mother Earth Day by the United Nations, showing children all over the world wishing they or humans were dying or dead because we are guilty of killing the plants and animals is not only a very depressing but shows what a controlling force the United nations has become to the world.
The UN framework, run by tinpot dictators, is designed to close down the West through global governance on a local level. That means the absurd so-called environmental laws that cannot be passed on national levels will now be forced upon us through city and county governments. We risk the loss of the property and livelihoods that advance our society from right under our noses.
We need to initially explore the natural resources of the United States (natural gas and oil) and remove all of the "sustainable development" laws which have been placed on the people of the United States for unproven science and outright lies.
I cannot emphasize how dis-tasteful for me it is to know our country has allowed the United Nations to use our children in perpetating this fraud.
 There are only 2 institutions left standing in the way of the Same Sex Agenda: the Boy Scouts and the Biblical Christian Churches.
Recent news: the files of all the lawsuits re: pedophilia within the Boy Scouts' of which there were many cases in the 1980s and '90s have just been released to the public (names redacted). REMEMBER: this was BEFORE the Boy Scouts cracked down on THOUROUGH background checks of adults in their organizations as is NOW the case.
Scouts have the highest level of scrutiny and maintain their protection of boys as a primary objective down to every troop level. That is why the gay activists have fought so hard against their strident procedures - molesters go after innocent boys in the easiest places they can find them -- even AFTER the Supreme Court stated years ago that the Scouts WERE a private organization and therefore COULD regulate who their members were in a split 5-4 decision.
In other words, the safety of children TRUMPED the "discrimination" against homosex men
to become troop leaders. How sad that it was NOT a 9-0 decision. The Scouts should be supported financially FOR sticking to their beliefs to make up for the loss of years of law suits and discrimination against THEM by those who are prejudiced against their common sense philosophy and mission to be "clean and reverent."
But, as you can see, just like the FOURTH vote on attempts to legalize Same Sex "Marriage" in Maine coming up in Nov., the "other side" will never give up til they get everything they want--especially an "open, legal door" to our children in Scouts and in the schools.
This administration is bent on ruining our children and doing so through whatever nasty means they can come up with from the schools teaching them how to have oral and anal sex starting in the middle schools to enforcing gay, lesbian, transgenders policies.
COMMUNISM ON THE MOVE!!!!!!!
Haven't we learned ANYTHING from the Penn State Sandusky trial?
Agenda 21 to me is a big, all consuming Octopus with many, many out reaching tentacles. One of those tentacles is the Education of our children. Lies are not necessarily used in regard to Education as in Global Warming, but the United Nations does have a very well orchestrated plan, implemented through UNESCO and with the help of Progressives here in America to bring our children to socialism through Education.
The Founders of our country believed the key to a free Republic was a public education for all children. They also stated “Religion, morality, and knowledge as being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind.” The Founders influence on American education continued in force for nearly 150 years until the rise of Dr. John Dewey near the turn of the 21t century.
Dewey, a Marxist, believed children were free spirits who learned better by using their hands (chores/work) not their minds and they did not need their parents or teachers forming their minds. Kindergarten was Dewey's solution to creating a wedge between family and home. He felt each grade should allow a child to learn by personal experiences; through inquiry; social experience and Marxism. Dewey believed Nature wanted children to be children so there was no need for formal education. They are to be workers as a rule – “worker bees.”
The Dewey Society formed along with the Progressive Education Assoc. a socialistic education system which was the basis for teacher's schools for years. Then in 1963 Lyndon Johnson came into the picture and he signed the Elementary & Secondary Education Act (ESEA) providing Federal funds for Primary & Secondary education rather than the states. ESEA allowed for Federal grants and Title I funds for schools (low income schools) (free lunch programs) and tied Federal funding to standards and accountability. This was known as the "War On Poverty" out of the faulty assumption that poverty creates illiteracy. Actually the equation of poverty is the breakdown of the family unit. Sadly, LBJ thought the federal government should take money from state citizens only to give it back as 'free' money designed to "strengthen" state schools. It should have immediately been seen as Statism/Socialism and counter to the ideals of Federalism. ESEA is renewed every 5 years by a vote of congress and is due to be renewed again in 2011; it should not be renewed.
Introducing Marc Tucker, a another devote Marxist and the final link to Agenda 21 -
1. Nov 1992, Tucker wrote a letter to Hillary Clinton laying out his and others (Rockefeller, etc) socialistic plan for Education and the Poor. The Clinton’s pushed for it’s implementation.
2. Clinton writes Exe. Order 12852 - President's Council on Sustainable Development to include following the Earth Charter under the UN plan for Education.
This is the beginning link to Agenda 21 and Education.
There is more to this story, many details and names but I will leave that for another time so you can see how the Agenda of socialism has come to today. Parents check your children’s textbooks, look at the curriculum and keep them out of International Education Programs.
|
RSS Feed