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Clash over Common Core: Opposition Grows as National Education Standards Approach

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Erika Russell, a mother of four from Maine, had no intention of embroiling herself in the fight over Common Core.

As she put it, “I sent my kids to public school, so I wouldn’t have to worry about what they’re learning.”

Then her then-9-year-old, second-grade daughter returned home from school one day in January of 2012 with a frown.

“She asked me, ‘Mom, Can you home school me?’ I said, ‘What about your friends?’ and she just told me she would see them at sports. Then, I knew something was wrong and I should start looking into this.”

Over the next 18 months, the 36-year-old Russell, who resides in Sidney in the central part of the state, helped found “No Common Core Maine,” a coalition of concerned parents, educators and activists– and one of a growing number of organizations nationwide who have made it their mission to stop Common Core’s implementation.

Read more from this story HERE.

Justice Department Bids to Trap Poor, Black Children in Ineffective Schools

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Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, Joe BidenNine OF 10 Louisiana children who receive vouchers to attend private schools are black. All are poor and, if not for the state assistance, would be consigned to low-performing or failing schools with little chance of learning the skills they will need to succeed as adults. So it’s bewildering, if not downright perverse, for the Obama administration to use the banner of civil rights to bring a misguided suit that would block these disadvantaged students from getting the better educational opportunities they are due.

The Justice Department has petitioned a U.S. District Courtto bar Louisiana from awarding vouchers for the 2014-15 school year to students in public school systems that are under federal desegregation orders, unless the vouchers are first approved by a federal judge. The government argues that allowing students to leave their public schools for vouchered private schools threatens to disrupt the desegregation of school systems. A hearing is tentatively set for Sept. 19.

There’s no denying the state’s racist history of school segregation or its ugly efforts in the late 1960s and early 1970s to undermine desegregation orders by helping white children to evade racially integrated schools. These efforts included funneling public money to all-white private schools. But the situation today bears no resemblance to those terrible days. Since most of the students using vouchers are black, it is, as State Education Superintendent John White pointed out to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, “a little ridiculous” to argue that the departure of mostly black students to voucher schools would make their home school systems less white. Every private school participating in the voucher program must comply with the color-blind policies of the federal desegregation court orders.

Read more from this story HERE.

National Expert Says Alaska has Adopted Common Core “but With a Different Name”

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0 (11)On August 12, 2013, Dr. Sandra Stotsky delivered a preliminary review of Alaska’s Standards in English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics. While the teleconference had been arranged a while ago to help legislators and the public evaluate the rigor and changes in Alaska’s standards, interest in Dr. Stotsky observations on Alaska’s standards intensified after the Governor Parnell’s email statement on August 8, 2013 regarding the “misinformation” on Alaska’s New Standards.

Dr. Stotsky is uniquely qualified to speak on the issue of educational standards. She was the only person with a background in English Language Arts on the Validation Committee for the Common Core, and is quite familiar with the standards. Due to the many flaws of the Common Core, she refused to lend her signature to the Common Core standards. As Lt. Commissioner of Education in Massachusetts, she lead the effort that resulted in the revitalization of education in that state and resulted in the highest student achievement scores in the world in subsequent years. Dr. Stotsky has had a distinguished career in the field of education and has recently testified in Michigan and Indiana on their standards.

After giving a brief overview of the basics of the Common Core Initiative and Standards, she compared the Alaska Standards to the Common Core English and Math. The audio of the first section can be found here.

Quoting Dr. Stotsky (at the 2:26 mark)

“… what Alaska has done is simply adopt Common Core but with a different name. It has changed the introductory matter in the document, the text that is there before the standards, but from my perusal of the actual English Language Arts Standards in what Alaska has adopted, it has adopted pretty much exactly what Common Core has. So it is not a different set of standards, there is nothing that is in it that suggests it is tailored to Alaska in any particular way; it is simply, for the most part, a set of skills, generic or abstract skills, and that is what common core consists of…. Alaska adopted the same appendices and supporting material that goes with Common Core’s ELA Standards.”

What does this mean for what Alaska’s teachers will be teaching and the assessments?

Dr. Stotsky suggested that there will probably be more writing than reading in every common core classroom because common core ELA standards stress writing more than reading at every grade level. This is not good because this is the reverse of what a century of research has indicated as the basis for developing reading and writing skills. The foundation for good writing is good reading. Good reading skills are needed in every subject of the curriculum. The implication is that far more time will be spent on writing than reading which is not, as I suggest, is primary for learning how to read well in every subject including English.

The Common Core Standards rarely have anything to suggest as an illustration what the level difficulty of the standard is and what might be an example lesson that could be done to address that standard.

Dr. Stotsky contends that what common core gives you is a skill and it gives it in an appendix, a set of titles that you have to get some idea of a level of complexity for from using readability formula. This is not easily done by a either a reading or an English teacher. It is hard to interpret what the standard means and the examples are not there. The level of complexity in the appendix has such a wide range to accommodate different levels, but by the time you get to the high school level it is unclear what level of difficulty is.

Unless you have examples, teachers have little to guide them.

What are the deficiencies in what Alaska adopted?

Dr. Stotsky states “Alaska has adopted the same limitations that are in the common core standards. I don’t see where they have done anything different. ”

The major issue is that the common core or the new Alaska Standards expect English Teachers to spend 50% of their reading instructional time on informational texts at every grade level. This is not something that English teachers are trained to teach. They are typically trained to teach the 4 major genres of literature: poetry, drama, fiction and non-fiction. They are not trained to teach informational texts. There is no body of information that English teachers have ever been responsible for teaching.

There is then a reduction in literary study and increase in something called informational texts. It means that there will be a reduction in opportunities students have for developing critical thinking and college readiness.

If critical thinking or analytical thinking if it comes from anywhere it comes from learning to read between the lines of complex literary texts. So those opportunities are going to be reduced when English teachers have to have less than 50% literary study and more than 50% informational text.

Another deficiency in the new Alaska Standards is that there are many developmentally inappropriate writing standards, especially for average middle school students. They are not linked to appropriate reading standards or to prose models.

Most of common core’s college readiness and grade level standards in ELA are empty skills. They do not provide a list of recommended authors or works, just examples of complexity. They do not require British Literature besides Shakespeare. They require no authors from the ancient world, like the Iliad, the Odyssey, or the Aeneid. Common Core requires no selected pieces from the Bible as literature, so that students can learn about the influence of the King James Version of the Bible and Shakespeare on English and American literature. Nor does Common Core require the study of the history of the English language, and without requirements in these areas, students are not prepared for college coursework.

The reliance on informational texts distorts the English curriculum.

As the sole member of the Validation Committee of the Common Core with an ELA background, Dr. Stotsky’s committee was charged with ensuring that the Common Core standards were internationally benchmarked and had a research base. Dr. Stotsky kept asking for the documents and evidence that supported the international benchmarking of the standards from the Common Core committee. There was no evidence and eventually the Common Core committee settled for the standards being “informed by” documents in other countries. But there was no research and no other countries named to suggest that our standards as a whole were comparable (which is what benchmarking means)to the best standards in other countries.

There is no body of research that supports the idea that 50% of what students read in the English Class should be informational texts. Of course they should be reading informational texts in other subjects, but there is nothing that suggests that this is a benefit in the English class. It distorts the English curriculum.

Part of the problem with Common Core can be traced to who were the chief writers of Common Core’s ELA standards. Any state group of legislators should want to know who chose them and what their credentials were. We can’t get any information officially from CCSSO and NGA the two groups that sponsored these standards supported by the Gates Foundation. Why can’t we get any information on the credentials and the rationale for the choice of who the standards writers? They are private organizations who have copyrighted Common Core standards. So that there can be no change in them.

Dr. Stotsky continued in her discussion on Alaska’s standards. “Alaska has adopted essentially the same, but it has said it hasn’t adopted Common Core, so I can see they have done an end game around the issue of copyright. As long as Alaska claims it has its own standards, then it can claim the copyright issue doesn’t matter. The question will be will they ever change if they want to stay aligned or the same as what Common Core Standards are, which have been copyrighted by these two private NGOs.”

Now who were the people chosen in ELA? Their names are well known, David Coleman, who is now the head of the College Board, and Susan Pimentel. I knew her well for many years professionally. Neither of them has ever taught in K-12 or in higher education, English or in anything else. Neither of them has ever written about curriculum and instruction, neither of them has any reputation in the area of reading or literary study, nobody knows officially why they were chosen to write the standards. But it was David Coleman’s idea that it should be 50-50 for informational texts and literary study. He insists to this day that students need to spend 50% of their time in an English class learning how to read informational texts. This means that literature teachers all over the country are doing things that they certainly never anticipated having to do. Instead of teaching a whole play, or a whole long Epic poem, they are teaching excerpts. This is the only way they can get in long novels or long plays. This is hardly the kind of literary study that one would want, particularly when literary study is happens to be important for students intellectually in developing critical thinking.

It seems to me that a state that is going to have standards that are called college readiness standards that are tied to college admission requirements … the people you want to consult about quality and rigor of those standards would be your higher education faculty who teach freshman courses in mathematics, science, reading, and English. (as opposed to the Education Department Faculty). No state legislature understands why the most relevant people to look at something called college readiness standards were not even asked as a group. The people who teach freshman college students were never asked to look at these college readiness standards.

Dr. Stotsky concluded her presentation with the following question: “One might want to ask why the math, science and engineering faculty were not asked. Why did you need some far away agencies tell you what those requirements should be?”

Dr. Stotsky then graciously fielded questions from the callers, including Alaska Department of Education staff. There was a very lively discussion on informational texts and literature and how that would enter accountability. She also provided insight on how legislators in other states have addressed the challenges posed by the Common Core. The question and answer section is in part 2 and can be listened to here.

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Dr. Barbara Haney is an economist, political activist, and social media consultant in Alaska. She has previously served as a program director and faculty member at University of Alaska, Eastern Illinois University, University of Notre Dame, and other colleges and research institutions. In addition to her university experience, Dr. Haney has served as an ABE educator and a home school educator. She has served as a district chairman, national delegate, and campaign volunteer in various Republican campaigns. Dr. Haney receives mail at [email protected]

William Ayer’s Staff at “Achieve Inc.” Wrote Alaska’s Standards?

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Many Alaskans may not be familiar with an organization named Achieve, Inc. but it has been the primary driver in the implementation of Barack Obama’s educational agenda. It is an organization that enshrines the mojo of William Ayers and specializes in the implementation of the common core standards and facilitates the entry of states into one of two consortia: Partnership for Assessing College and Career Readiness (PARCC) or Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). William Ayers is a long time friend ofLinda Darling Hammond, the Senior Adviser of SBAC. Therefore, it would hardly be surprising that the use of educational consulting firm that enshrines William Ayer’s mojo would then facilitate the writing of a state’s educational standards would result in a state becoming a member of a consortium headed by Linda Darling Hammond.

That is exactly what happened in Alaska.

The Alaska Department of Education continues to insist that the state of Alaska wrote its own educational standards and that they are “Alaska owned” and “Alaska made” and “cutting edge stuff.” The information submitted by the state of Alaska for funding under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) clearly conflicts with that narrative. The ESEA Flexibility document is a tedious compendium of nearly 1,000 pages and is hardly a New York Times best seller; on a summer day in Alaska, it is hardly a choice reading. But as you read the actual document, rather than AK DEED’s cherry picked power point about the document, the truth of the matter emerges.

Of course, you have to get to the appendix attachment 5 of the actual document to find it out. This is a stark contrast to Dr. McCauley laughing at Rep. Wilson’s questions on the Common Core at the 8:11 mark here. The nervous laughter by Dr. McCauley is generally an indication to dig deeper.

The narrative that these standards are “Alaska’s Standards” and they were “written by Alaska teachers” was the marketing ploy decided upon early on by AK DEED. It was part of the plan laid out by Achieve, Inc with Commissioner Hanley. This blog will bear that out.

It may be true that Alaskan teachers wrote standards. It may be true that these standards were on a server for public comment. But that is not what was adopted. There are multiple iterations of the standards, and only the initial drafting involved teachers. Achieve’s staff was consulted at each phase of the process.

The Final Standards are not the ones written by the teachers and differ in substantial ways. I won’t bore the reader with gory details of Alaska’s standards that have been discussed by SBAC and in the blogs of other states, but after this article, the curious reader will readily see that these standards were actually not written by Alaskan teachers. With rare exception, they are word for word identical to the Common Core. There never was any intent on the part of Commissioner Hanley to adopt standards written by Alaska teachers. There was an intent to engage in a misinformation/publicity campaign calling the standards “Alaskan Made” as noted in the discussion of the Alaska Board of Education meeting minutes under 4 A1 on page 3 in December of 2011. But this was before the standards were even adopted, and even then they were admitting that the Common Core was the source document. By January of 2013, they were morphed and massaged into the Common Core standards publically licensed by CCSSO.

This is the same tactic that was used in Utah.

As detailed in a letter dated June 7, 2012 from UA President Patrick Gamble to US DOE Secretary Arne Duncan, Alaska’s journey into the Common Core process was tightly scripted. The implementation of the Common Core Standards began in 2010. Alaska DEED, under the direction of Mike Hanley, began planning the implementation of the common core with the assistance of William Ayer’s Achieve, Inc. This can be found buried in the ESEA Flexibility document. For convenience of the reader, this document is listed separately here. Gamble states

“…Alaska Department of Education and Early Development Staff coordinated with Achieve, Inc in the initial planning stages, of the standards revision process in 2010. Staff from Achieve reviewed Alaska’s revision plan and provided feedback via phone conversations and teleconferences. Achieve provided critical guidance for consideration of appropriate stakeholders, identifying key decision makers, and process-specific tasks, which Alaska incorporated into the review.”

Achieve, Inc. is nowhere mentioned in the ESEA Flexibility power point presented to Alaska’s Finance Subcommittee on Education. Indeed, Achieve Inc is not mentioned in the main narrative of the document, except in Patrick Gamble’s letter. Yet the process in Alaska clearly followed the guide written by Achieve Inc. to implement the Common Core.

I wonder how much in consulting fees was spent on that activity by the State of Alaska? The flexibility document discusses $300,000 spent on meetings, but does not list the consulting fees paid to William Ayer’s firm.

Achieve, Inc instructed AK DEED’s staff via telephone consultations at every part of the process. In the initial phase, teachers were pulled together and asked to compare the Common Core Standards to the existing Alaska Grade Level Expectations (AK-GLE). Standards were scored based on a rubric of anywhere from full alignment to not aligned at all. If not aligned, educators were then asked if the Alaska standard was more rigorous or less. Clearly then, the subsequent step would be to involve educators into accepting the Common Core Standards, or nearly so, while leaving them with the impression that they actually wrote them, or at least had a personal investment in them.

According to Patrick Gamble’s letter, Brian Gong and Karin Hess of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment were meeting facilitators. Brian Gong does have a background in psychology and worked for Educational Testing Services (ETS) before his work in Kentucky. Karin Hess’s work is in learning progressions. One could view leading educators from their own GLEs to the Common Core as an application of a learning progression. One could speculate on why psychologists were used to facilitate these meetings, but that is left for the reader to investigate. The process seemed to follow the path that is in the Achieve’s Path to Implementation document on page 20.

After the initial round, the Alaska English standards magically emerged nearly perfectly aligned with the Common Core but lacked informational texts listed in the common core. The Alaska’s math standards had very little in common with the Common Core, perhaps suggesting that psychological maneuvering and jedi-mind tricks are not easily used on math teachers. The reports and scoring of these “teacher driven” standards still exist in archive form.

The creation of the draft standards was probably the last that most teachers involved in the process saw of the standards until they were published in their final form for approval. By December of 2011, the new standards were made available for public comment, according to page 3 of December 15-16 minutes of the Alaska State Board of Education. The Commissioner also indicated in this meeting that the Common Core was used as the starting point and that they intended to promote the Common Core standards were “made in Alaska.” There was also a discussion of a publicity campaign to gain further support for the “roll-out” of the standards as “Alaska made.”

The standards “sat on the server” for public comment and were submitted to the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) for review. This is where the magical transformation of the standards took place. The first set of standards was apparently not quite close enough to the Common Core for approval by the CCSSO and suggestions were made to bring about a greater alignment of Alaska’s standards and the Common Core. That is when another set of standards emerged. These are probably the changes suggested by “stakeholder comments” that are discussed in the ESEA Flexibility document. It is in this period that the Alaska math standards morphed into the Common Core practically verbatim. Pythagorean Theorem, multiplication table memorization, and a host of other math concepts were purged from the state standards. The Common Core informational texts were brought into English Language Arts (ELA) standards and the literature not part of the Common Core removed. EPA manuals and UN publications took the place of British literature and other American classics. These are, quite frankly, major document changes that were undertaken by DEED with little oversight by the legislature, the taxpayers, the parents, and the teachers.

While it may be true that the document sat on the server for public comment, it really doesn’t seem that the AK DEED promoted it much. Certainly it sent out emails to the regular suspects, but these were all pre-defined by Achieve, Inc. Voters, taxpayers and parents didn’t seem to be a priority for DEED. They can spend $300,000 for meetings to fly all over the state to obscure areas, but heaven forbid they spend $5.00 on a promoted post on Facebook that could reach the whole state, or go large and spend $85.00 on an ad on Drudge or Facebook. They didn’t even advertise in papers outside of Anchorage, nor consider the free publications in the state that appear to garner substantial readership in the outer reaches of the state. You can believe that every educational consultant on the planet knew about them, and you can bet these “stakeholders” were submitting comments.

In June 2012, the Final Standards were approved. By August 2, 2012, the exchange between the CCSSO and AK DEED show that the final standards are quite closely aligned, but perhaps not close enough. The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) Executive Committee approved proposed changes to the SBAC Governance document on 9/18/2012. Under this provision, states that had standards that were “substantially identical” to the common core could enter the consortia. This action allowed Alaska to be considered for membership status. However, the state would have to prove that the standards were “substantially identical.”

By January 22, 2013, Scott Norton, Strategic Initiative Director of the CCSSO issued the memo stating

“…analysis showed that the final Alaska ELA and Math Standards track nearly exactly with the Common Core, employing the same structure and language used in the CCSS, with nearly all the CCSS being used verbatim in the Alaska Standards.”

This should put to bed the notion that Alaska’s Standards were written by Alaskans, owned by Alaskans, or originated in Alaska.

The truth is that the plan was in place long ago by Commissioner Hanley and Achieve, Inc. to call the Common Core standards “Alaska made and owned” and not the common core. Then the state would be entering the consortia and proving their standards were substantially identical while telling the Alaskan public that they were not the common core. After all, the teachers attended the meeting where they were drafted right? So they will defend them, to their own detriment and that of Alaska’s children, parents, and taxpayers.

Are there some minor differences between Alaska’s Standards and the Common Core? Of course, every state is allowed to 15% either in the form of an additional sentence or an additional clause to a sentence to provide clarification. Alaska doesn’t have nearly that much variance from the Common Core. Never fear, Achieve tells states how to deal with that 15% on pages 23 of implementation guide. Anything that is not part of the Common Core is to be ignored. It won’t be on the Consortia tests. As Brian Gong notes in his 2012 presentation, the Consortia drive the process. Retention and promotion for teachers and principals are now tied to the results of the SBAC tests. Only the Common Core content will be on that test, not the “state content.” Thus, anything that varies from the Common Core will be merely letters on a page.

The ESEA Flexibility money totaled $69 Million for Alaska. In exchange for that money and Alaska’s right of self-determination and freedom, they agreed to enter a consortia program that is going to cost billions to implement. Well, now I understand why the state’s finances are in such a bad state and why virtue is so lacking.

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Dr. Barbara Haney is an economist, political activist, and social media consultant in Alaska. She has previously served as a program director and faculty member at University of Alaska, Eastern Illinois University, University of Notre Dame, and other colleges and research institutions. In addition to her university experience, Dr. Haney has served as an ABE educator and a home school educator. She has served as a district chairman, national delegate, and campaign volunteer in various Republican campaigns. Dr. Haney receives mail at [email protected]

Is Common Core Failing the Test? (+video)

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Photo Credit: Ethan BlochPresident Barack Obama’s goal of holding all students across the U.S. to the same high academic standards may be on the verge of unraveling as states take a hard look at the more rigorous tests under development — and balk.

Backed by $360 million in federal grants, some 40-plus states have spent the past three years working with testing companies to develop math and language arts exams tied to the academic standards known as Common Core. They’re minimizing the dreary fill-in-the-bubble multiple choice in favor of more challenging tasks. Kids as young as third grade, for instance, will be asked to write essays synthesizing information from multiple nonfiction texts and to explain their reasoning on math problems.

Yet now that the new tests are almost ready, state officials are complaining that they’re too long and too costly and require too much computer technology. They’re also beginning to push back against the exams as an unwanted federal intrusion on local policy, echoing a groundswell of opposition from tea party critics of Common Core.

Georgia dropped out of the testing collaboration on Monday, saying it would create its own exams instead. Pennsylvania, Alabama, Oklahoma and Utah have already withdrawn. There are strong indications that Florida and Indiana will be next. Other populous states are also teetering. The Michigan Legislature has effectively nixed the new tests by blocking spending on them, though the ban may be revisited next fall. New York is officially undecided but it’s already spending heavily on alternatives. Texas and Virginia never signed on in the first place.

Read more from this story HERE.

Liberty High Valedictorian Makes a Stand, Says the Lord’s Prayer at Graduation (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTube

An Upstate high school valedictorian tore up his graduation speech and prayed instead.

Valedictorian Roy Costner spoke at his Liberty High School graduation as people in the crowd cheered when he threw away his pre-approved speech, reciting the Lord’s Prayer instead.

…Costner said he spoke to his pastor and prayed before deciding his speech was the time to make a statement.

“It was an emotional moment,” Costner told FOX Carolina on Tuesday. “It was overwhelming to look out and see the crowd and yelling.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Fighting the Education Anti-Gun Fanatics

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Photo Credit: Corey Lowenstein

For a while, I’ve been wondering if it’s parental malpractice to put your kids in public schools. More and more, it’s gone beyond wondering. For example, last week the Washington Post reported a nasty case of abusive behavior by school officials in Calvert County, Maryland: A five-year-old who brought a cowboy-style cap pistol on a school bus — orange-tipped, and something that no one could possibly mistake for a real gun — was interrogated for two hours (an interrogation that was so long, or so stressful, that he wet his pants) and then suspended for 10 days. Who treats a five-year-old that way?

The Post reports: “…children in first and second grade have been disciplined for pointing their fingers like guns and for chewing a Pop-Tart-like pastry into the shape of a gun. In Pennsylvania, a 5-year-old was suspended for talking about shooting a Hello Kitty bubble gun that blows soap bubbles.”

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, another kindergartner was punished for bringing a tiny Lego gun — the illustration in the Boston Herald places it next to a quarter coin — with detention, and forced to write a letter of apology to the school bus driver. For bringing a tiny piece of plastic.

What’s up with this? It’s not based on any concern with safety. Lego guns, cap guns, bubble guns, nibbled Pop Tarts, and fingers are no threat to safety. And the wild overreaction in these cases says there’s more going on here than simple school discipline. As I said, who treats a 5-year-old this way? It smacks of fanaticism.

In fact, it seems like a kind of quasi-religious fanaticism … doing its best to exterminate the very idea of guns. It’s some sort of wacky moral-purity crusade. If a few toddlers have to suffer along the way, that’s tough. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

Read more from this story HERE.

One Inch Toy Gun ‘Traumatizes’ Students, Results in Kindergartner’s Discipline (+video)

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Photo Credit: WGGBA plastic Lego sized gun caused a disturbance on a Old Mill Pond Elementary School bus Friday morning.

Mieke Crane is the mother of the six-year-old kindergarten student who brought the gun on the bus.

“I think they over-reacted totally. I totally do,” said Crane.

Another student on the bus saw the toy and yelled to the driver.

“She said he caused quite a disturbance on the bus and that the children were traumatized,” said Crane.

Read more from this story HERE.

Student Tweets that School Should Enact Budget Cuts, Starting With Principal’s Job, Gets Suspended

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Photo Credit: WNDA high-school student in upstate New York has been suspended and accused of trying to incite “a social media riot” after he suggested budget cuts for his public school – beginning with elimination of his principal’s job.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1969 that students have a right to self-expression, as long as that expression doesn’t disrupt classwork or school activities or invade the rights of others.

And that’s where the conflict about the student’s action lies, because the Syracuse Post-Standard reports the superintendent of Cicero-North Syracuse High School accused senior Patrick Brown of using Twitter to incite “a social media riot.”

Whether the purported “social media riot” was disruptive to classwork or school activities remains unclear.

Brown was suspended for three days Thursday after starting a Twitter hashtag, #s–tCNSshouldcut, that solicited ideas for district budget cuts for next year after voters rejected a $144.7 million budget plan. The hashtag quickly became popular, and students posted ideas during the school day.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Radical Transformation of America’s Classrooms

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Photo Credit: abdulrahman.stock

Liberal education has been very successful in this country because nobody challenged the progressive educators and their agenda. We are waking up to the unraveling of our society caused by this liberal education and wondering, what happened. Could it be too late to reverse the damage?

Conservative news outlets are pointing out the obvious—our children have been indoctrinated into socialism for 33-40 years and this indoctrination is finally bearing fruit. We have bred a nation of young, entitled citizens who do not like to work, do not like to read or study anything too involved or complicated that exceeds Twitter’s 140 words, do not take responsibility for their actions, exhibit righteous indignation if their demands are not met, claim racism and hate speech if others disagree with them, and are afraid of their shadows.

Students no longer explore and discuss the history of America even in the History Department of the local college—it has long been replaced by courses that praise and promote sexual, “racial and ethnic differences,” instead of highlighting our common American heritage, what made America great and an exceptional nation that has contributed to the betterment of mankind. Socialist professors admire, teach, and laud the history of non-western cultures as superior to our own culture.

As the Blaze reported, Thomas Klingenstein commissioned a report on Bowdoin’s (a liberal arts college) academic and non-academic curriculum. The National Association of Scholars produced 355 pages of information describing in great detail what the college was teaching.

Short on critical thinking skills, the college, instead of concentrating on scientists, men of letters, philosophers and orators who contributed to western thought and civilization, chose courses such as Queer Gardens, Beyond Pocahontas: Native American Stereotypes, Sexual Life of Colonialism, and Modern Western Prostitutes.

Read more from this story HERE.