Tell Ryan: No federal control
of schools, Phyllis Schlafly hits House speaker
for pushing massive reauthorization bill, 11/30/15, WND
After seven years of rule by decree
by President Obama’s Chicago crony Arne Duncan, why are Republicans about to
reauthorize the federal government’s authority over the nation’s public
schools? And why is the new House speaker, Paul Ryan, rushing a 1,059-page bill
to a floor vote only two days after the text was released on Nov. 30? Fourteen years ago, while the nation was
distracted by the 9/11 attacks and the start of the war in Afghanistan,
President George W. Bush was determined to enact “No Child Left Behind” to
fulfill his father’s pledge to be the “education president.” To get that bill
through a Democrat-controlled Senate, Bush let Sen. Ted Kennedy write its most
important provisions.
“No Child” expired near the end of
Bush’s second term, and Obama has governed the nation’s public schools for
seven years without congressional authority. Now Congress is about to serve up
a new education law that will control public education long after Obama leaves
office.
Two provisions in the House version
attracted enough conservatives to pass with the minimum of 218 votes, but both
were stripped from the final bill. One provision would have recognized a
parent’s right to opt out of state testing; the other, called “Title I
portability,” would have allowed students in failing schools to transfer
per-pupil federal funding to another public school.
The bill gives teachers unions what
they wanted most: eliminating the link between teacher pay and student
performance. No wonder NEA has launched a campaign to “get ESEA done.”
The bill gives liberals and ethnic
lobbies what they wanted most: disaggregation of data, which means continuing
to collect and report test scores separately for each minority group, with the
stated purpose “to close educational achievement gaps” between groups. The
inevitable result is that when schools fail to “close the gap,” the apparent
solution will be to spend more money on the same failed programs.
All conservatives got in exchange
was language that prohibits the federal government from doing what it never had
the authority to do anyway, such as requiring states to adopt Common Core.
That’s no compromise, because Common Core is still the easiest way for most
states to comply with federal requirements.
The demographics of public school
students are changing too fast for any federal role in education, as three
statistical trends illustrate. First, the percentage of school-age children who
do not speak English at home reached an all-time high of 22 percent in 2014 and
continues to rise with the vast wave of refugees from Muslim countries (not
just Syria) and Central America.
Second, the percentage of public
school students who qualify for school lunches reached an incredible 51 percent
in the 2012-13 school year, up from 33 percent in 1994-95.How can students
learn about American history, economy and culture if schools operate on the
assumption that parents are not even responsible to feed their own children?
Third, the percentage of children
under 18 who were living with their own mother and father who are married to
each other has fallen to just 64 percent, while the percentage living with
“mother only” rose to 24 percent. The overwhelming weight of social scientific
evidence demonstrates that children of unmarried parents suffer a lifetime of
disadvantage no amount of public investment can overcome.
A prime purpose of public education
is to teach children “who we are” as Americans, but the definition of “who we
are” has been hijacked by liberals. Obama has used “who we are” to promote
everything from Syrian refugees to the Dream Act to closing Guantanamo, and
even Speaker Ryan recently said we must increase the number of Muslims allowed
into our country because of “who we are.”
In Tennessee, where tens of
thousands of Muslim refugees have resettled, state standards for social studies
require middle school children to spend three weeks studying the tenets of the
Muslim faith. Schools cannot teach anything positive about Christianity, but
seventh-grade students were required to write that “Allah is the only God” and
“Muhammad is the messenger of God.”
In Georgia, students were given a
fill-in-the-blank exercise: “Allah is the (BLANK) worshiped by Jews &
Christians.” Students were penalized unless they completed the sentence with
“same God” as the correct answer.
The AP U.S. History (APUSH)
Standards are guidelines for how public schools are teaching school kids “who
we are.” APUSH presents American history as the migration of various people
coming into conflict with each other, and treats the English settlers who
founded our country as just one group of migrants (white Europeans) who are
guilty of oppression against Africans, Indians and Mexicans.
As Frederick M. Hess pointed out in
a recent article, liberals view schooling primarily as a way to combat poverty
and racism, undermine traditional family values, and trash American heritage
and heroes. If you oppose that liberal agenda, tell your member of Congress to
vote No on the bill to reauthorize federal control of public education.
http://www.wnd.com/2015/11/tell-ryan-no-federal-control-of-schools/
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