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Fla. Gov. Rick Scott weighs in on 'Jesus' stomping incident at Florida Atlantic University

From: McClatchy

Florida Atlantic University has apologized for a controversial classroom lesson that led critics to accuse the school of religious intolerance. But that didn’t stop Gov. Rick Scott for stepping into the fray on Tuesday.

Scott penned a letter to State University System Chancellor Frank Brogan demanding an investigation. “I am requesting a report of the incident, how it was handled and a statement of the university’s policies to ensure this type of ‘lesson’ will not occur again,” Scott wrote.

Earlier this month, FAU instructor Deandre Poole told students in an intercultural communications class to write the word “Jesus” on a piece of paper, throw it on the floor and stomp on it. Ryan Rotela, a junior at FAU’s Davie campus, later complained he was thrown out of class when he refused to participate.


“Anytime you stomp on something it shows that you believe that something has no value. So if you were to stomp on the word Jesus, it says that the word has no value,” Rotela told CBS12, a West Palm Beach television station.

Rotela, who describes himself as a devout Mormon, went to Poole’s supervisor two days later to discuss the incident.

FAU officials defended the professor last week, but Rotela told The Palm Beach Post that he and an attorney from the Texas-based Liberty Institute met with FAU Dean of Students Cory King at the school’s Boca Raton campus on Monday and received an apology and a pledge that the disciplinary charges against him would be dropped.

“He apologized in person for what happened and how everything went out of control,” Rotela, 21, who lives in Coral Springs, told the newspaper.

He takes classes part-time at FAU, while working for a landscaping service.

FAU officials did not respond to The Miami Herald about Scott’s letter, but had issued a statement about the incident to The Palm Beach Post.

“This exercise will not be used again,” the statement said. “The University holds dear its core values.

We sincerely apologize for any offense this caused. Florida Atlantic University respects all religions and welcomes people of all faiths, backgrounds and beliefs.”

Said Kim Wilmath, a spokeswoman for the State University System of Florida: “The State University System prides itself not only on its commitment to academic freedom, but at the same time, its awesome responsibility to the people it serves.

“We are gratified to know that FAU has apologized for any offense the exercise has caused and has pledged never to use this exercise again. Clearly, there were things the university could have done differently by its own acknowledgement.”


The incident became fodder on blogs and among conservatives who questioned whether such liberties would have been taken with other religions.

In his letter, Scott makes clear he wants more than merely an apology.

“Whether the student was reprimanded or whether an apology was given is in many ways inconsequential to the larger issue of a professor’s poor judgment,” Scott wrote.

“The professor’s lesson was offensive, and even intolerant, to Christians and those of all faiths who deserve to be respected as Americans entitled to religious freedom.”

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/03/27/187044/fla-gov-scott-weighs-in-on-jesus.html#storylink=cpy

Texas School Blames U.S. For 9/11

From: KRISTV.com

Many parents check their children's school work to make sure they're getting good grades, but how often to you check the content of those lessons? One mother of a child in Flour Bluff ISD says when she did, she was shocked that lesson taught her son to blame the United States for the 9/11 attacks.

Kara Sands posted the test on her facebook page and it began to spread like wildfire. The test covers content watched on a video in class. What bothered her most is question #3 on the test. It asks why the U.S. may be a target for terrorism. Her son chose the correct answer - 'decisions we made in the United States that negatively impact people elsewhere.'

"I'm not going to justify radical terrorists by saying we did anything to deserve that, over 3,000 people died," Sands said. She contacted her son's principal and teacher, both met with her and contacted the video's distributor, Safari Montage.

Representatives say they stand behind the video, but have already changed the corresponding quiz that may have caused confusion.

Sands tells us the quiz opened her eyes to the content in lessons taught at the school. Her biggest concern is curriculum called CSCOPE.

Click here to read Flour Bluff ISD's response to the parent's concerns: 9/11 Curriculum, CSCOPE Curriculum

One worksheet on the Bill of Rights names food and medicine as rights, not personal responsibility. "He got marked wrong, because it is, it is our responsibility for shelter, its our responsibility for food for medicine, its not the government's responsibility," Sand said.

Flour Bluff officials say Sands is the only parent to complain about the test specifically, but her post on facebook now has 1,662 likes.

Several parents plan to meet next week and Sands says school board members Shirley Thornton and Wade Chapman have requested the concerns be brought up in the next school board meeting. The agenda for the March 28th meeting is not yet posted to confirm the item.

Sands says parents need to get involved.

"When I teach my children that you have to work hard and you have to earn a living and they go to school and learn something different I absolutely take issue with that," Sands said.

7-year-old playing an imaginary game at school is suspended

Philly 5th Grader Gets in Trouble, Searched in Front of Class,

Philadelphia News, Weather and Sports from WTXF FOX 29

Deaf Kid Can't Sign His Name Because the Symbol Looks Like A Gun

America’s Greatest Threat

FINANCIAL SENSE provides a sober assessment as to the real threat of big government to America's future.
The lack of self reliance is at the heart of the matter.

Students urge University of California to dismiss findings of widespread anti-Semitism

Campus Reform.org  is reporting on the efforts to suppress a report of widespread and endemic Anti Semitism proliferating throughout the state university system in California. This is truly a sad state of affairs as the American left continues its slide towards embracing an ancient form of bigotry in the name of equality. It is of course even worse now in Europe and is currently rooted in the phony claims of Islamophobia as a pretext for anti Semitism

Chris Christie’s teacher-tenure coup

From: NYPOST.com

Here’s a sign that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is fundamentally reshaping the Garden State: He’s got teacher-union leaders sounding like, well . . . Chris Christie.

The gov is just days away from enacting a sweeping reform of teacher-tenure laws, which currently guarantee lifelong jobs to even the worst educators.

And Christie has managed to twist the union into quite a pretzel: Its leaders now say they support making it easier to lay off the lemons among them.

“This legislation moves us in the right direction by making it harder to earn tenure, and less expensive and time-consuming to remove teachers who are not performing well,” said union boss Barbara Keshishian.

 

Yes, that’s the sound of Hell freezing over.

More precisely, it’s a labor leader explaining why she’s backing a bill that zaps the system that grants 98 percent of Newark’s new teachers near-automatic tenure — and jobs for life — every year without fail.

It’s a real testament to Christie’s skill. He called out the unions last year for running a system “where you have no rewards for excellence and no consequences for failure.”

And the Senate answered, passing a bill this week that requires four years of high ratings to win tenure, and lets schools revoke tenure and possibly fire teachers who get back-to-back negative reviews.

A watered-down version awaits passage in the Assembly, and a compromise bill should reach Christie’s desk soon.

This legislation is far from perfect: It fails to fix the “last in, first out” seniority rules that require the state to fire the newest teachers first whenever there are layoffs.

And, truth is, we’d rather see tenure abolished wholesale in Jersey and New York.

But the reform is a major achievement that should help dig public-school kids out of a failing school system.
Again, kudos to Christie.

Andrew Cuomo, please take note.
 

Grade-Schoolers In Trouble For Wearing Wounded Warriors Tees

Teacher penalizes students for saying "bless you"

Feds crack down on campus flirting and sex jokes

From: Washington Examiner

When I was growing up it was widely believed that colleges and universities were the part of our society with the widest scope for free expression and free speech. In the conformist America of the 1950s, the thinking ran, few people dared to say anything that went beyond a broad consensus. But on campus anyone could say anything he liked.

Today we live in an America with enormous cultural variety in which very few things are considered universally verboten. But on campus it's different. There saying something considerably milder than some of the double entrendres you heard in cable news coverage of the Anthony Weiner scandal can get you into big trouble.

These reflections are inspired by a seemingly innocuous 19-page letter on April 4 from the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights to colleges and universities. The letter was given prominence by Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which has done yeoman work opposing restrictive speech codes issued by colleges and universities.

OCR's letter carries great weight since there are few things a university president fears more than an OCR investigation, which can lead to loss of federal funds -- which amount to billions of dollars in some cases.

The OCR letter includes a requirement that universities adopt a "preponderance of the evidence" standard of proof for deciding cases of sexual harassment and sexual assault. In other words, in every case of alleged sexual harassment or sexual assault, a disciplinary board must decide on the basis of more likely than not.

That's far short of the requirement in criminal law that charges must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. 

And these disciplinary proceedings sometimes involve charges that could also be criminal, as in cases of alleged rape.

But more often they involve alleged offenses defined in vague terms and depending often on subjective factors. Lukianoff notes that campus definitions of sexual harassment include "humor and jokes about sex in general that make someone feel uncomfortable" (University of California at Berkeley), "unwelcome sexual flirtations and inappropriate put-downs of individual persons or classes of people" (Iowa State University) or "elevator eyes" (Murray State University in Kentucky).

All of which means that just about any student can be hauled before a disciplinary committee. Jokes about sex will almost always make someone uncomfortable, after all, and usually you can't be sure if flirting will be welcome except after the fact. And how do you define "elevator eyes"?

Given the prevailing attitudes among faculty and university administrators, it's not hard to guess who will be the target of most such proceedings. You only have to remember how rapidly and readily top administrators and dozens of faculty members were ready to castigate as guilty of rape the Duke lacrosse players who, as North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper concluded, were absolutely innocent.

What the seemingly misnamed Office of Civil Rights is doing here is demanding the setting up of kangaroo courts and the dispensing of what I would call marsupial justice against students who are disfavored by campus denizens because of their gender or race or political attitude. "Alice in Wonderland's" Red Queen would approve.

Indiana School Employee: Education Reform Worse Than the Holocaust

From: Big Government

Last week, my organization praised the Indiana lawmakers for passing some of the nation’s most significant education reforms. In one of Education Action Group’s weekly newsletters, we said that Indiana’s new voucher program and its decision to lift the cap on charter schools will transform the state’s public education system, to the benefit of all Hoosier families and students. (An EAGtv report that details Indiana’s education reforms can be found here.)

Well, EAG’s audacity in celebrating the idea of school choice generated a number of hateful email responses – from unionized Indiana teachers.

The writers (all with the telltale “k12.in.us” in the email address) accused us of “attacking public education” and “bashing” teachers. One writer blamed us for demoralizing “those of us in the trenches and on the front lines of the classroom.”

Does School Choice Work? Hypocritical White House Won’t Look at Evidence

From: Commentary Magazine

As the House of Representatives prepares to vote today on Speaker Boehner’s bill to revive the Washington D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that gives disadvantaged children a chance to escape failing public schools and to get a quality private education, the administration continued to advocate its defeat.

Among the arguments put forward by the White House yesterday was the claim that scholarship recipients don’t do any better than other students. But, as the Washington Post pointed out in a trenchant editorial, the evidence points in a different direction. There is, in fact, a wealth of evidence that students who take advantage of voucher programs do better in reading and have better graduation rates than other low-income inner city students.

NASA Hack James Hansen in 1986: 2°-4° warmer in 2010. The Reality: No Change!

From: The Blog Prof

Don Surber made this great catch today:

Don writes:

From the Miami News on June 11, 1986: Dr. James “Hansen said the global temperatures would rise by 2 to 4 degrees in the following decade,” meaning 2001-2010.

...Steven Goddard mocked James Hansen.

This is what has happened with global temperatures over the last decade:

...How can a man who has been consistently wrong for 35 years be considered a scientist, let alone an expert?

A good question. Another one: what does Hansen have to do to be discredited in his own field of study? Since the 90s, every single IPCC 'model' (they aren't really models - they're scenarios) have been proven to be no better than what comes out of your butt after spicy food that you're not used to. See here:

In science, every theory is supposed to be judged by it's predictive capability versus actual reality. Not in the case of global warming where instead of proving the model is right or wrong, the experimental reality is being fudged. For the alarmist, anything that seems out of the norm (whatever that means) is due to global warming. If it doesn't snow enough, it's obviously global warming. If it snows too much? Well, that's global warming too. Never mind that no IPCC model predicts any such thing.

Why Preschool Shouldn't Be Like School

From: Slate.com

By Alison GopnikPosted Wednesday, March 16, 2011, at 2:15 PM ET
 
Is preschool too early for formal instruction?Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb.

They pressure teachers to make kindergartens and nurseries more like schools. So does the law—the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act explicitly urged more direct instruction in federally funded preschools.

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There are skeptics, of course, including some parents, many preschool teachers, and even a few policy-makers. Shouldn't very young children be allowed to explore, inquire, play, and discover, they ask? Perhaps direct instruction can help children learn specific facts and skills, but what about curiosity and creativity—abilities that are even more important for learning in the long run? Two forthcoming studies in the journal Cognition—one from a lab at MIT and one from my lab at UC-Berkeley—suggest that the doubters are on to something. While learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes them less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution.

What do we already know about how teaching affects learning? Not as much as we would like, unfortunately, because it is a very difficult thing to study. You might try to compare different kinds of schools. But the children and the teachers at a Marin County preschool that encourages exploration will be very different from the children and teachers in a direct instruction program in South Side Chicago. And almost any new program with enthusiastic teachers will have good effects, at least to begin with, regardless of content. So comparisons are difficult. Besides, how do you measure learning, anyway? Almost by definition, directed teaching will make children do better on standardized tests, which the government uses to evaluate school performance. Curiosity and creativity are harder to measure.

Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments. We might start by saying: Suppose we gave a group of 4-year-olds exactly the same problems and only varied on whether we taught them directly or encouraged them to figure it out for themselves? Would they learn different things and develop different solutions? The two new studies in Cognition are the first to systematically show that they would.

In the first study, MIT professor Laura Schulz, her graduate student Elizabeth Bonawitz, and their colleagues looked at how 4-year-olds learned about a new toy with four tubes. Each tube could do something interesting: If you pulled on one tube it squeaked, if you looked inside another tube you found a hidden mirror, and so on. For one group of children, the experimenter said: "I just found this toy!" As she brought out the toy, she pulled the first tube, as if by accident, and it squeaked. She acted surprised ("Huh! Did you see that? Let me try to do that!") and pulled the tube again to make it squeak a second time. With the other children, the experimenter acted more like a teacher. She said, "I'm going to show you how my toy works. Watch this!" and deliberately made the tube squeak. Then she left both groups of children alone to play with the toy.

All of the children pulled the first tube to make it squeak. The question was whether they would also learn about the other things the toy could do. The children from the first group played with the toy longer and discovered more of its "hidden" features than those in the second group. In other words, direct instruction made the children less curious and less likely to discover new information.

Does direct teaching also make children less likely to draw new conclusions—or, put another way, does it make them less creative? To answer this question, Daphna Buchsbaum and I gave another group of 4-year-old children a new toy. This time, though, we demonstrated sequences of three actions on the toy, some of which caused the toy to play music, some of which did not. For example, Daphna might start by squishing the toy, then pressing a pad on its top, then pulling a ring on its side, at which point the toy would play music. Then she might try a different series of three actions, and it would play music again. Not every sequence she demonstrated worked, however: Only the ones that ended with the same two actions made the music play. After showing the children five successful sequences interspersed with four unsuccessful ones, she gave them the toy and told them to "make it go."

Daphna ran through the same nine sequences with all the children, but with one group, she acted as if she were clueless about the toy. ("Wow, look at this toy. I wonder how it works? Let's try this," she said.) With the other group, she acted like a teacher. ("Here's how my toy works.") When she acted clueless, many of the children figured out the most intelligent way of getting the toy to play music (performing just the two key actions, something Daphna had not demonstrated). But when Daphna acted like a teacher, the children imitated her exactly, rather than discovering the more intelligent and more novel two-action solution.

As so often happens in science, two studies from different labs, using different techniques, have simultaneously produced strikingly similar results. They provide scientific support for the intuitions many teachers have had all along: Direct instruction really can limit young children's learning. Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific—this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.

Why might children behave this way? Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental. It's this kind of learning, in fact, that allows kids to learn from teachers in the first place. Patrick Shafto, a machine-learning specialist at the University of Louisville and a co-author of both these studies; Noah Goodman at Stanford; and their colleagues have explored how we could design computers that learn about the world as effectively as young children do. It's this work that inspired these experiments.

These experts in machine learning argue that learning from teachers first requires you to learn about teachers. For example, if you know how teachers work, you tend to assume that they are trying to be informative. When the teacher in the tube-toy experiment doesn't go looking for hidden features inside the tubes, the learner unconsciously thinks: "She's a teacher. If there were something interesting in there, she would have showed it to me." These assumptions lead children to narrow in, and to consider just the specific information a teacher provides. Without a teacher present, children look for a much wider range of information and consider a greater range of options.

Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise. Indeed, these studies show that 4-year-olds understand how teaching works and can learn from teachers. But there is an intrinsic trade-off between that kind of learning and the more wide-ranging learning that is so natural for young children. Knowing this, it's more important than ever to give children's remarkable, spontaneous learning abilities free rein. That means a rich, stable, and safe world, with affectionate and supportive grown-ups, and lots of opportunities for exploration and play. Not school for babies.

Fed instructs teachers to Facebook creep students

From: The Daily Caller

Education Department officials are threatening school principals with lawsuits if they fail to monitor and curb students’ lunchtime chat and evening Facebook time for expressing ideas and words that are deemed by Washington special-interest groups to be harassment of some students.

There has only been muted opposition to this far-reaching policy among the professionals and advocates in the education sector, most of whom are heavily reliant on funding and support from top-level education officials. The normally government-averse tech-sector is also playing along, and on Mar. 11, Facebook declared that it was “thrilled” to work with White House officials to foster government oversight of teens’ online activities.

The only formal opposition has come from the National School Board Association, which declined to be interviewed by The DC.

The agency’s threats, which are delivered in a so-called “Dear Colleague” letter,” have the support of White House officials, including President Barack Obama, who held a Mar. 10 White House meeting to promote the initiative as a federal “anti-bullying” policy.

The letter says federal officials have reinterpreted the civil-rights laws that require school principals to curb physical bullying, as well as racist and sexist speech, that take place within school boundaries. Under the new interpretation, principals and their schools are legally liable if they fail to curb “harassment” of students, even if it takes place outside the school, on Facebook or in private conversation among a few youths.

“Harassing conduct may take many forms, including verbal acts and name-calling; graphic and written statements, which may include use of cell phones or the Internet… it does not have to include intent to harm, be directed at a specific target, or involve repeated incidents [but] creates a hostile environment … [which can] limit a student’s ability to participate in or benefit from the services, activities, or opportunities offered by a school,” according to the far-reaching letter, which was completed Oct. 26 by Russlynn Ali, who heads the agency’s civil rights office.

School officials will face lawsuits even when they are ignorant about students’ statements, if a court later decides they “reasonably should have known” about their students’ conduct, said the statement.

Following the discovery of “harassment,” officials may have to require mandatory training of students and their families, according to the Ali letter. “The school may need to provide training or other interventions not only for the perpetrators, but also for the larger school community, to ensure that all students, their families, and school staff can recognize harassment if it recurs and know how to respond… [and] provide additional services to the student who was harassed in order to address the effects of the harassment,” said the letter.

Facebook is developing new features that will make it harder for principals to miss episodes of online “harassment,” and so will increase the likelihood of government action against the teenage users of Facebook and other social-media. “We’re adding a unique feature, developed with safety experts, that lets people also report content to someone in their support system (like a parent or teacher) who may be able to address the issue more directly,’ Facebook declared Mar. 11. “It is our hope that features like this will help not only remove the offensive content but also help people get to the root of the problem,” the company statement declared.

The department’s re-interpretation expands legal risks for schools beyond those set by the Supreme Court in a 1999 decision, said a Dec. 7 NSBA statement. The court decision, which interprets several federal laws, says schools are liable for harassment that school officials know about and that “effectively bars” a student’s access to an educational benefit.

The remedies being pushed by administration officials will also violate students’ and families’ privacy rights, disregard student’s constitutional free-speech rights, spur expensive lawsuits against cash-strapped schools, and constrict school official’ ability to flexibly use their own anti-bullying policies to manage routine and unique issues, said the NSBA letter. The government has not responded to the NSBA letter.

The leading advocate for the expanded rules is Kevin Jennings, who heads the Education Department’s Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Jennings founded the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network advocacy group, and raised at least $100,000 for the Obama campaign in 2008, according to Public Citizen, a left-of-center advocacy group. In an September 2010 interview on the government’s StopBullying.gov website, Jennings said that “in a truly safe school … students feel like they belong, they are valued, they feel physically and emotionally safe.”

Ken Trump, a Cleveland-based school-safety consultant, says the administration is so determined to focus on gay and lesbian teens that it is asking Congress for $365 million to conduct bullying-related school surveys in 2012. In 2011, the administration ended a program that gave roughly $300 million per year to states to counter physical violence and drug-abuse in schools.

The primary purpose behind the administration’s initiative is to “create a social and political climate where it is impossible to express conservative moral beliefs” about sexuality, even when research data shows those beliefs help many people live prosperous and happy lives, said Laurie Higgins, the school-advocacy chief of three-person Illinois Family Institute, in Carol Stream, Ill. Everyday experience and careful research show that children are most likely to prosper when they’re raised by their parents, not by school officials and D.C.-based special-interests, she said.

Children do not have any right to bully other kids, gay or straight, to hurt them, taunt or tease them, but they do have a right to speak their minds, and champion their beliefs, said Higgins. Kids learn to treat each other with respect, especially when they and their peers have the ability to hold each other responsible for good, bad or trivial actions, she said.

One of the better things about Facebook, said Higgins, is that it promotes responsible behavior by requiring teens to identify themselves with their real names and pictures. But the kids’ ability to mature into adults will be stymied if the federal government, special-interests and school officials intervene in kids’ conversations about girls and boys, sports and fashion, studies and music, whenever they offer judgements or facts that are disliked by influential political advocates, such as Jennings’ GLSEN, Higgins said. “Kids will be inhibited if they fear their moral reasoning will be seen by others as criminal,” she said.

GLSEN’s advocates strongly support the federal initiative. The Department’s October “guidelines are thorough, comprehensive and list examples in current law to support each provision…. When it comes to bias-based bullying in particular, we have to be willing to name the problem if we want to protect all of our students,” said a Dec. 21 GLSEN statement. Almost 90 percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students “experienced harassment in the past year because of their sexual orientation,” according to a 2009 GLSEN survey of more than 7,000 students, said the statement.

Advocates for gays and lesbians say teens who identify as gay or lesbian are four times as likely as normal kids to kill themselves, and they cite multiple examples of teen-suicides following anti-gay statements or physical violence.

The anti-harassment legislation is frequently supported by the ACLU and its state affiliates, partly because ACLU officials also support the goal of government-supported diversity. In contrast, the libertarian Foundation for Individual Rights In Education, or FIRE, opposes anti-harassment bills as threats to free-speech. On Feb. 15, its website presented arguments against a pending bullying-related bill in Congress, dubbed the Tyler Clementi Higher Education Anti-Harassment Act. The draft act “is redundant, it replaces the clear definition of harassment with a vague, speech-restrictive definition that conflicts with Supreme Court precedent, and it treats adult college students like children who need special laws,” said FIRE’s statement.

This month, Higgins’ side won an expensive free-speech victory when a federal appeals court in Chicago upheld a token award of $25 dollars each to two students who were punished by school officials in Naperville, Ill., for wearing unapproved t-shirts following a school event that was intended to promote acceptance of homosexuality. The “Day of Silence” event at the school was organized by GLSEN. The two students’ shirts carried the message “Be Happy, Not Gay,” and were worn on a day declared to be a “Day of Truth,” which was organized by a national conservative group that opposes GLSEN’s goals.

“[A] school that permits advocacy of the rights of homosexual students cannot be allowed to stifle criticism of homosexuality,” said the appeal court’s decision, authored by Judge Richard Posner. “The school argued (and still argues) that banning ‘Be Happy, Not Gay’ was just a matter of protecting the ‘rights’ of the students against whom derogatory comments are directed. But people in our society do not have a legal right to prevent criticism of their beliefs or even their way of life,” said the ruling.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/03/16/fed-instructs-teachers-to-facebook-creep-students/#ixzz1GmMSyJqO

Corbett's budget secretary goes after PA colleges

From: witf.org

If you didn’t see Governor Tom Corbett’s budget coming, you “must have been living under a rock.” That’s the opinion of Budget Secretary Charles Zogby, who, during a Tuesday morning interview, pointed out candidate Corbett was very clear on how he’d tackle Pennsylvania’s $4 billion budget gap. “He said very emphatically he’s not going to raise taxes. He’s not going to raise fees. That’s the budget he presented. He didn’t raise taxes. He didn’t raise fees. I don’t think that should come as any surprise to anyone.”

Corbett’s budget has been public for a week now. The $27.3 billion plan trims about a billion dollars off current spending levels, and slashes spending for 19 departments, including more than $600 million in support for higher education. Zogby said he expects reduced funding for state-related and State System of Higher Education schools to be the focal point of this year’s budget debate, and he and the rest of the Corbett Administration aren’t afraid to take the institutions on.

When asked whether Penn State University President Graham Spanier was “crying wolf” when he said the funding cuts would lead to tuition increases, reduced courses and the possibility of closed campuses, Zogby said, “I think there’s a little bit of that.” He continued, “I worked in DC for a time, and in budget matters they had a ‘close the Washington Monument’ strategy. Close the most visible and painful thing that you can find, even though it might not be affected. I really can’t say whether a branch campus of any university would close or not. But I think those sorts of tactics, including tactics of saying there’s going to be large tuition increases for parents and students, I think that tends to be more trying to generate excitement than really having a substantive argument or discussion on the merits.”

Funding for the 14 SSHE schools would go from $444 million to $232 million; Penn State’s revenue would drop from $304 million to $152 millon; and Pitt, Temple and Lincoln would see similar cuts. Zogby said the reductions are born out of both necessity and philosophy. “Again, I go back to results and performance,” he said. “What we get for our state dollars. And I think it’s very difficult, when you put the money into the institutions, to see what it is that we’re getting. What’s the yield, the benefit, that we’re getting with our tax dollars.”

The Corbett Administration plans to use schools’ graduation rates as proof of poor performance. “Look at 4-year graduation rates at some of the Penn State branch campuses,” Zogby said, pulling out a page of statistics. “We’ve got DuBois at 29 percent of the students graduating in four years, yet 49 percent of those students are there getting state aid, at an average of $3,000. We’re looking at other campuses that have 15, 21 percent, 26 percent four-year graduation rates. It’s scandalous. These kids are going, and they’re paying five, six years to get what used to take a four-year education. Many of them are supported by the largesse of the state, yet what results are we getting?”

Educators say many students are taking longer to graduate because they’re working their way through college, but Corbett made a similar argument on Monday, during a York County press conference. “I am concerned about the graduation rates. Graduation rates in four years, I think University Park is 60 percent in four years? I come from an era where you have four years.” Zogby’s source for graduation rate data, the National Center for Education Statistics, says Penn State’s main campus has a 62 percent four-year graduation rate.

Both Zogby and Corbett’s rhetoric softens when the topic shifts from state-related to SSHE schools. Corbett blasted Penn State’s tuition increases, but Zogby conceded SSHE institutions have done a good job of keeping their rates low. “I would say the SSHE is on firmer ground than other institutions” when it comes to their public concern about the impact of Corbett’s cuts, said Zogby. “That was a difficult area to make cuts in, but something we had to do. Like other institutions, the SSHE needs to adjust and make some choices to see how it can live within its means.” The proposed cuts represent a more than 20 percent budget hit for many of the 14 SSHE schools. When Corbett appeared on KDKA Radio on Friday, he blasted Penn State but appeared willing to compromise on SSHE funding. “In the whole budget process, we just finished the first quarter. We made a proposal. We need to sit down and hear what they have to say.” On Monday, Corbett said he’s willing to negotiate specific line items, but he’s holding firm on his $27.3 total.

Arne Duncan’s Brave New World: Dept. of Education Wants Your Kid’s Blood Type?

From: Pajamas Media

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the Department of Education — already ensnared by allegations of insider trading — appear to be maneuvering for greater federal influence over state education boards. The vehicle: a supposedly state-led effort titled “Common Core Curriculum.” Says Gretchen Logue, co-editor of missourieducationwatchdog.com:

Arne Duncan ran the Race to the Top competition, but only a few states got money from that. … They had all this money left over and they told the states if they wanted it they had to sign on to Common Core standards. Most states signed on.

That money became “Title I” funding, which many states used over the last two years to avoid major cuts to education. That money is now drying up. Continues Logue:

The states were told if they did not sign on they were in danger of losing Title I funding. … They had to have the money to satisfy the federal mandates; if they didn’t get the money they couldn’t satisfy them.

CCC itself is only a vehicle to put in place a database of student data, which Logue says would be shared across several federal departments including Education, Commerce, and Labor. Parts of this database already exist and are used by local school districts to send data to their state boards of education, which compile the data and pass it on to the federal government. Says Logue:

It was a way for school districts to get information to the states and the states would then compile it and send it on to the federal government. … It was fairly innocuous.

What the states send to the government now is fairly benign. It mostly consists of test scores, basic demographic information, and district sizes.

But Logue says the feds are now trying to create something entirely different:

The Common Core standards were the vehicle to get the longitudinal database. … They want to get all these systems where they interconnect. … The data sets already exist and are coded.

Indeed PJM has seen the data sets — and they might be accurately described as a brave new world. While not all of the information in these sets is mandatory at this time, the level of detail being asked for is unsettling.

The sets include such things as hair color, eye color, gestational age at birth (whether a child was premature or not), blood type, blood test results, birth marks, and even bus stop arrival time.

These datasets are from the National Education Data Model. From its website:

NEDM is the single, comprehensive model of education data and is prerequisite to establishing automated and comparable systems.

According to Logue, these databases appear to be designed to track students from pre-kindergarten through at least age 20, and for the government to feed them into the workforce:

The whole purpose is to take the educational information and feed it into what they call the P-20 pipeline. … The data system in Illinois is the most advanced at this time.

Indeed, the Illinois program has some frightening aspects of its own, which are presumably mirrored at the federal level. In a document titled ILDS (Illinois Data System) Data Warehouse Architecture & System Design, Illinois defines “workforce” and lays out state and federal involvement in “workforce development.” From page 80:

The term workforce is defined as consisting of the workers engaged in a specific activity, business or industry or the number of workers who are available to be assigned to any purpose as in a nation’s workforce.

The public workforce system is a network of federal, state, and local offices that function to support economic expansion and facilitate the development United States workforce. The system is designed to create partnership with employers, educators, and community leaders in order to foster economic development and high-growth opportunities in regional economies so that businesses find qualified workers to meet their present and future workforce needs. (Emphasis added)

The highlighted areas would seem to indicate that workers should be assigned to purposes rather than choose their own preferred work, and that the government can and should do the assigning.

Forty-one states — plus the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands — have signed on to a set of standards that makes local school boards all but superfluous. State boards of education become redundant as well if curricula are decided at a national level rather than at a state level.

Local control, long a hallmark of the U.S. education system, would be lost to a “one size fits all” solution imposed by bureaucrats who cannot possibly know the needs or challenges of a local school district.