Vote NO on S1177 Education Reauthorization

AND YOU THOUGHT YOU’D HEARD IT ALL? Posted on May 11, 2015 Written by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, abcsofdumbdown.blogspot.com

#NO WAY ESEA #NO WAY ESEA #NO WAY ESEA
KEEP CALLING (202–224-3121) AND EMAILING YOUR SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVES!!!

S1177 (the Reau­tho­riza­tion of ESEA…the old No Child Left Behind Act) is a com­bi­na­tion of Repub­li­can Con­gress­man John Kline’s HR5 Stu­dent Suc­cess Act and Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor Lamar Alexander’s Every Child Achieves Act 2015 (S1177)

You, mem­bers of Grass­roots Amer­ica, killed HR5 last Feb­ru­ary. You can kill its com­pan­ion bill S1177, which is com­ing up for a full vote in the Sen­ate any day now.

READING NOW CONSIDERED CLASS WARFARE! IS READING GOING THE WAY OF MATHEMATICS (delib­er­ate dumb­ing down): 2+2=13?

The Read­ing Wars have suc­ceeded in bring­ing our nation to a level where, for the moment, it is not fair for more priv­i­leged par­ents to read to their chil­dren at night. What’s next? All chil­dren? Com­put­ers should take care of that. The fol­low­ing is proof “they” couldn’t care less about the less privileged/minority chil­dren being able to read. Are the “priv­i­leged” ones next on their delib­er­ate dumb­ing down list?

In a Wash­ing­ton Post arti­cle dated August 1, 1977, enti­tled “Com­pe­tency Tests Set in 26 Schools,” Thomas Sticht—who was later named to U.S. Sec­re­tary of Labor Eliz­a­beth Dole’s Secretary’s Com­mis­sion on Achiev­ing Nec­es­sary Skills (SCANS)—was also men­tioned as an asso­ciate direc­tor at the National Insti­tute of Edu­ca­tion (NIE) at the time mas­tery learn­ing was imple­mented in the D.C. schools. The Post arti­cle quoted Sticht exten­sively, ver­i­fy­ing that he and Spady were both deeply involved in the imple­men­ta­tion of the new mas­tery learn­ing cur­ricu­lum. Later, in 1987, The Wash­ing­ton Post again para­phrased Sticht as follows:

Many com­pa­nies have moved oper­a­tions to places with cheap, rel­a­tively poorly edu­cated labor. What may be cru­cial, they say, is the depend­abil­ity of a labor force and how well it can be man­aged and trained, not its gen­eral edu­ca­tional level, although a small cadre of highly edu­cated cre­ative peo­ple is essen­tial to inno­va­tion and growth. End­ing dis­crim­i­na­tion and chang­ing val­ues are prob­a­bly more impor­tant than read­ing in mov­ing low income fam­i­lies into the mid­dle class.

The crazy Whole Lan­guage agenda, fol­lowed by the Skin­ner­ian Direct Instruc­tion dog train­ing read­ing instruc­tion meth­ods, have brought the USA to a level where demo­graphic groups of Amer­i­cans will be labelled as elit­ist or deprived depend­ing on whether they read to their chil­dren at night. What an insult to the mil­lions of low income Amer­i­cans who read to their chil­dren every night! It’s not just in the wealthy white sub­urbs that par­ents read to their children.

Why was Samuel Blumenfeld’s Alpha Phon­ics www.howtotutor.com, the tra­di­tional phon­ics way to teach read­ing, NOT ever accepted, or even con­sid­ered by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment for fund­ing? Shame, shame!

Is “read­ing to your young chil­dren at bed­time” becom­ing part of a class war­fare dis­cus­sion? The bolded words below sound like THOUGHT POLICE!

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/reading-to-children-at-bedtime-abc-questions-value-of-time-honoured-practice/story-fni0cx12-1227335151442

Swift said par­ents should be mind­ful of the advan­tage pro­vided by bed­time read­ing. “I don’t think par­ents read­ing their chil­dren bed­time sto­ries should con­stantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly dis­ad­van­tag­ing other people’s chil­dren, but I think they should have that thought occa­sion­ally,” he said.

THE ABC HAS QUESTIONED WHETHER PARENTS SHOULD READ TO THEIR CHILDREN BEFORE BEDTIME, CLAIMING IT COULD GIVE YOUR KIDS AN “UNFAIR ADVANTAGE” OVER LESS FORTUNATE CHILDREN.

Read­ing to chil­dren at bed­time: ABC ques­tions value of time-honoured practice. Read­ing at bed­time an unfair advantage? www.humptydumpykids.com

THE ABC has ques­tioned whether par­ents should read to their chil­dren before bed­time, claim­ing it could give your kids an “unfair advan­tage” over less for­tu­nate children. “Is hav­ing a lov­ing fam­ily an unfair advan­tage?” asks a story on the ABC’s web­site.

“Should par­ents snug­gling up for one last story before lights out be even a lit­tle con­cerned about the advan­tage they might be con­fer­ring?” The story was fol­lowed by a broad­cast on the ABC’s Radio National that also tack­led the appar­ently divi­sive issue of bed­time read­ing. “Evi­dence shows that the dif­fer­ence between those who get bed­time sto­ries and those who don’t — the dif­fer­ence in their life chances — is big­ger than the dif­fer­ence between those who get elite pri­vate school­ing and those that don’t,” British aca­d­e­mic Adam Swift told ABC pre­sen­ter Joe Gelonesi.

Gelonesi responded online: “This dev­il­ish twist of evi­dence surely leads to a fur­ther con­clu­sion that per­haps — in the inter­ests of lev­el­ling the play­ing field — bed­time sto­ries should also be restricted.”

Con­tacted by The Daily Tele­graph, Gelonesi said the bed­time sto­ries angle was high­lighted by the ABC “as a way of get­ting atten­tion”. Asked if it might be just as easy to level the play­ing field by encour­ag­ing other par­ents to read bed­time sto­ries, Gelonesi said: “We didn’t dis­cuss that.”

Swift said par­ents should be mind­ful of the advan­tage pro­vided by bed­time read­ing. “I don’t think par­ents read­ing their chil­dren bed­time sto­ries should con­stantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly dis­ad­van­tag­ing other people’s chil­dren, but I think they should have that thought occa­sion­ally,” he said.

Filed Under: Education

http://agenda21news.com/2015/05/and-you-thought-youd-heard-it-all/#more-5686