COMMON CORE PANEL: VALUES VITER SUMMIT 2014

VIDEO: http://youtu.be/r4UF35a-w-Y

Sep 27, 2014

Panel
Lindsey Burke, Will Skillman Fellow in Education, The Heritage Foundation*
William Estrada Director of Federal Relations, Home School Legal Defense Association*
Dr. Neal McCluskey, Associate Director, Center for Educational Freedom, Cato Institute*
Sarah Perry, Common Core Coalition Manager, FRC*

Watch the entire event online athttp://valuesvotersummit.org/

COMMON CORE: BUILDING THE MACHINE

http://youtu.be/zjxBClx01jc

Testimony against the Common Core

http://catholicliberaleducation.wordpress.com/2014/09/21/testimony-against-the-common-core/

Testimony against the Common Core

Posted by stevenjonathanrc

The synthesis of all modern educational errors!

Not long after my arrival here in Atlanta, I was contacted by a colleague who works for the American Principles Project, founded by Dr. Robert P. George of Princeton. Amongst other things, they have worked tirelessly to take up arms against a sea of troubles inundating the shores of public education that goes by the name of the Common Core. I am honored that they invited me to give testimony in front of an educational committee before the Georgia House of Representatives this Wednesday in Milledgeville Georgia. I am to give testimony to support the fact that the Common Core is not the educational reform that will help put the disastrously misguided public educational system to rights.

Certainly there is much confusion about the Common Core, largely because what they assert and what they really portend are often two different things. In a disturbing meeting recently I heard someone of stature say “if someone is against the Common Core, it is because they don’t understand it.” This is a diametrically oppositional statement to the truth. The fact is this, if one is in support of the Common Core, it is because they don’t understand it.

On Wednesday, my testimony will include the following train of thought. I will begin by introducing myself to the committee and sharing my experiences in education that ought to lend weight to my testimony, especially the fact that last year I spent 24 days with a select group of educators from four school districts being trained in the development and implementation of the curriculum designed from the Common Core State Standards.

The fruit from the tree of Common Core will be bitter indeed!

I will follow with a statement of fact about the dismal state of public education today. I will introduce and expand upon three main points. First, I will discuss three stated ends of the public school educational program which are that of making good citizens, getting students ready for college, and preparing them to become active participants in the global economy of the 21^st century. Second, I will try to demonstrate that The Common Core State Standards have no chance of achieving these ends no matter how well implemented. The simple fact is that they are just the next generation in a long line of failing pedagogies belonging to the scientifically reduced methods of mis-educating children. My third point will be that the only educational reform available to remedy our national plight is that system that recognizes the true nature of a human person as the tri-partite soul in need of habits of mind and character to become authentically educated.

I will close with a plea to abandon the Common Core STATE standards as a national agenda and I will offer the committee the benefit of my experience if they would like to reform education in Georgia in a way that may benefit the students and their families living here and ultimately improve the common good.

The millstone in Milledgeville.

That will conclude my testimony. I am hoping for positive results, but God doesn’t call us to succeed, he calls us to enthusiastic battle. The Common Core agenda leads to soul death. I shudder to ponder Christ’s words in Luke 17:2 “It would be better for him if a millstone were hung round his neck and he were cast into the sea, than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin.”  Concerning the nationalized effort to make public education uniform by the deceitful title of Common Core STATE Standards, woe to those who stand idly by while such atrocities are committed on such a wide scale. I for one will speak out against the Common Core. I invite all to join me as we call for a recovery of what made the West great in the first place, an alignment of the well lived life with the Great Conversation. Please pray for me and the good folks at the American Principles Project!

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U. S. Senate Stands Against Dept of Ed Recklessness:

http://whatiscommoncore.wordpress.com/2014/09/24/u-s-senate-stands-against-dept-of-ed-recklessness-lets-thankhatch-thankkirk-thank-isakson-thankenzi-thankburr-thankmurkowski-thankroberts-thankalexander/

U.S. Senate Stands Against Dept of Ed Recklessness: 

Let’s #THANKHATCH #THANKKIRK #THANK ISAKSON #THANKENZI #THANKBURR #THANKMURKOWSKI #THANKROBERTS #THANKALEXANDER

Join Utahns Against Common Core in a  heartfelt thank you to the following U.S. Senators whose official letter both exposed Sec. Duncan’s assumption of unauthorized educational authority (which is only to be held by states); and called out Duncan’s unauthorized takeover of the rights of children with disabilities via standardized tests.

If you tweet, Facebook, or  email, please thank them.  What they did was important.  I’m using the hashtags #THANKHATCH, #THANKKIRK, etc.

Utah – SENATOR ORRIN HATCH  @SenOrrinHatch

Georgia – SENATOR JOHNNY ISAKSON  @SenatorIsakson

Alaska – SENATOR LISA MURKOWSKI @lisamurkowski

Kansas – SENATOR PAT ROBERTS @PatRoberts2014

Illinois – SENATOR MARK KIRK  @SenatorKirk

Wyoming – SENATOR MIKE ENZI @SenatorEnzi

North Carolina – SENATOR RICHARD BURR @SenatorBurr

Tennessee – SENATOR LAMAR ALEXANDER  @SenAlexander

———————————————————————–

If you live near Salt Lake City, please join us at 11:00 at tomorrow’s public and media event at Royal Wood Office Plaza, 230 west 200 south.  Bring signs.  Wear green if you have green.  Be prepared to take a turn on the soap box with the megaphone to use your freedom of speech and make your voice heard.

Inside the Royal Wood Office building, a federal agent of Arne Duncan’s Dept of Education will be meeting tomorrow with Utah State Office of Education leaders to ensure their compliance with federal mandates –mandates that the eight senators’ letter  just called illegal.   Let’s let our Utah State education employees know we defend their right to not comply, as they host this unauthorized federal visitor.

Exam erases U.S. exceptionalism: Opposing view

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/09/22/advanced-placement-us-history-exceptionalism-editorials-debates/16069579/

Exam erases U.S. exceptionalism: Opposing view

Defenses of the College Board's revised Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) Curriculum Framework have ranged from "it's a balanced document" to "teachers will have flexibility" to "what's wrong with a leftist slant?" None of these defenses should be acceptable.

To the "balanced document" argument, we say: Read it. A Pioneer Institute study by experts, including renowned Madisonian scholar Ralph Ketcham, describes the framework as "a portrait of America as a dystopian society — one riddled with racism, violence, hypocrisy, greed, imperialism and injustice."

OUR VIEW: Critics don't know much about history

The origins of the framework have been traced to the philosophy that the U. S. is only one nation among many, and not a particularly admirable one at that. Every trace of American exceptionalism has been scrubbed; seminal documents such as the Gettysburg Address have vanished.

What about teachers' flexibility? Will APUSH teachers still teach the vital content in their state history standards? Although the College Board (under duress) is erasing its warning that none of this state material will be tested, the practical reality remains that teachers won't waste time on it.

The exam's structure will encourage students and teachers to stick to the leftist framework. We'll have a national history curriculum rather than state flexibility and control.

The College Board's recent release of the previously secret sample exam confirms this conclusion. All sample questions are anchored firmly in the framework, even the pejorative language used to describe President Reagan. The sample exam makes it clear that if teachers want their students to score well on the APUSH exam, they will teach the framework.

So we're left with the argument that the APUSH course rightly veers off into progressive territory (diminishing content knowledge in favor of "historical skills" and "themes" and embracing identity politics) because accurate history is disfavored in some university programs. If so, parents will want their children to avoid APUSH. The unelected College Board may decide to impose revisionist history, but its customers need not buy it.

Jane Robbins is a senior fellow at the American Principles Project, a conservative advocacy group.

High School Dropout Rate Could Double Under Common Core

http://m.christianpost.com/news/high-school-dropout-rate-could-double-under-common-core--125961/

High School Dropout Rate Could Double Under Common Core

Common Core protest in Baltimore, Md., uploaded to YouTube on May 1, 2014. Available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6_K2qAz6hA

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A study released last year by a pro-Common Core group predicted that under Common Core's stricter set of state education standards, six-year high school dropout rates will likely double for states adhering to the federally incentivized nationally-based testing.

The finding was not well publicized and was only recently picked up on by Common Core critics.

The report released by the Carnegie Corporation in collaboration with McKinsey & Company found that teachers will not "meet the demand" of Common Core's expected student achievement levels for those students already behind more than one grade level unless there is broader change in school designs.

The study found that under Common Core's set of state standards the four-year graduation rate would fall from 75 percent to just 53 percent, while the six-year graduation rate would fall from 85 percent down to just 70 percent. The study also predicted that the four-year dropout rate would rise from eight percent to 14 percent, while the six-year dropout rate would climb from 15 percent to 30 percent.

The study stated that it would not be possible to avoid decreases in high school graduation rates by simply using "human capital strategies." Even if every teacher was able to increase sub-proficient children's proficiency by 1.25 grade levels per year for four years, those students who enter high school more than one grade level behind the standard would still be below standard level by the end of four years, the study found.

"McKinsey & Company used available estimates of what can be accomplished by top-quartile teachers (those able to 'move' student performance at the rate of 1.25 grade levels per year … ) to test whether or not it might be possible to avoid large drops in graduation rates using human capital strategies alone," The Carnegie report stated. "The short answer is no: even coordinated, rapid, and highly effective efforts to improve high school teaching would leave millions of students achieving below the level needed for graduation and college success as defined by the Common Core."

The study's findings that 47 percent of students are unlikely to graduate in four years should continue to fuel the national debate on whether the Common Core is the right direction for American education. The proponents of Common Core argue that the raised expected achievement level is necessary to compete with other countries that perform better on international tests because they have a set of national standards. Advocates will also say that it is too easy for graduates to receive their diploma and they are not prepared well enough for college or professional careers.

"Too often, the path to a diploma is not rigorous enough to prepare our graduates for their next steps," former Obama domestic policy advisor Melody Barnes wrote for Politico.

The advocates also claim that the curriculums and testing for English and math are "internationally benchmarked" and "evidenced-based." Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote that Common Core advocates are likely to dismiss skeptics as settling for mediocrity.

Marina Ratner, math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an opinion piece last month for the Wall Street Journal that the proponents' claims that Common Core is "internationally benchmarked" is not completely true.

"The most astounding statement I have read is the claim that Common Core standards are 'internationally benchmarked.' They are not," Ratner wrote. "The Common Core fails any comparison with the standards of high-achieving countries. . . . They are lower in the total scope of learned material, in the depth and rigor of the treatment of mathematical subjects, and in the delayed and often inconsistent and incoherent introductions of mathematical concepts and skills."

Hess points out that advocates of Common Core also claim that the standards are based off of scientific evidence proving what children should learn and when they should learn it. However, the scientific research is based off of surveys completed by education professionals asking them what they think high school graduates should have learned.

Hess refers to Vanderbilt professor Lynn Fuchs who said it has not yet been determined whether the Common Core makes sense to implement.

"It is a trajectory of learning that has no empirical basis," Fuchs said. "We don't know yet whether it makes sense to have this particular set of standards. We don't know if it produces something better or even different from what it was before."

While proponents say that Common Core standards are more rigorous, opponents point out that they have taken some of the rigor away by taking away many upper level math courses like calculus and geometry, and have also taken out much American literature and poetry from the English language arts classes.

A study released this week by the nonpartisan Pioneer Institute, a think tank that has been critical of the Common Core, found that Common Core is damaging to history and English instruction.

"Common Core dramatically reduces the amount of classic American literature and poetry students will read in favor of non-fiction or so-called 'informational texts,'" said the report's co-author Sandra Stotsky. "Consequently, the writers of the national standards attempted to shoehorn little bits and pieces of decontextualized U.S. History texts into the English standards. The simultaneous result damages instruction for both English and U.S. History classrooms."

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CORE STANDARDS

http://www.corestandards.org/assets/0812BENCHMARKING.pdf

FED DOE LETTER TO SUPERINTENDENTS

This is the key sentence for the Supers. It basically says, fall in line if you want to have a career going forward. The mafia use to "encourage and support" business owners to pay for protection too.

"The U.S. Department of Education seeks to encourage and support 

superintendents who commit to taking a leadership role in this transition with recognition and resources to help facilitate this transition to digital learning."

http://tech.ed.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/140904_FRPledgeIntroductoryLetter_ApprovedPledge1.pdf

Today's teachers more inexperienced, more likely to leave, researcher says

http://m.onlineathens.com/breaking-news/2014-09-20/todays-teachers-more-inexperienced-more-likely-leave-researcher-says?utm_source=Morris%20Digital%20Works&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Today%27sheadlinesfromTheAthensBanner-Herald09%2F21%2F2014#gsc.tab=0

Today's teachers more inexperienced, more likely to leave, researcher says

The number of U.S. teachers has grown dramatically in the past three decades.

But they’re a lot more inexperienced due to a growing number leaving the profession, according to researcher Richard Ingersoll.

The University of Pennsylvania professor and graduate student Lisa Merrill tracked the numbers of teachers and students back to 1987 in a recent research project. They also tracked other numbers, such as teachers’ years of experience.

They found the number of teachers grew by 48 percent from 1987 to 2008 compared to a 19-percent increase in the number of students.

Most of the growth in teacher numbers was in three areas, they found: special education; elementary education, because of expanded curricula; and math and science teachers because of tougher graduation requirements.

The teacher workforce has also become more diverse in one way, but less diverse in another.

The number of minority teachers more than doubled between 1987 and 2011, Ingersoll said during his keynote address at the University of Georgia College of Education’s day-long “State of Education” conference this week.

But men have been leaving the profession, he said.

In 1980, one in three teachers was a man. But by 2012, fewer than one in four teachers was male.

“This is a puzzling one,” he said. “We don’t know why this is.”

Many in the predominately female audience of about 140 people at the Georgia Center thought the gender shift might reflect a lessened respect for teachers.

One in the audience wondered if the profession had been “infantilized” by waves of prescriptive regulations that dictate what teachers must do.

The question of respect may be a big part of the reason why so many teachers are leaving the profession.

“People are coming into teaching at faster rates, but it turns out they’re also leaving at faster rates,” Ingersoll said.

Teachers cite a lack of autonomy and influence often as a reason for leaving. However, Ingersoll said low wags is the main reason dissatisfied teachers cite when they leave a teaching job.

After the 1988-89 school year, about 9.8 percent of first-year teachers left teaching. But in 2008-09, the attrition rate was 13.1 percent, he said.

About 23 percent of first-year teachers are gone in two years, and 41 percent within five years, he said.

Back in 1987, if you divided teachers up into groups based on their years of experience, the largest group would be those with 15 years of experience, he said. In 2008, the largest group was first-year, beginning teachers..

All that inexperience translates in one way into money saved for schools; new teachers make less than veteran teachers..

But there’s a cost to school systems, too.

“It’s not cost-free. In a sense, that investment (in training teachers in college) is going out the door, too,” he said.

And research shows, said Ingersoll, that teachers become better at their jobs with experience, at least up through their first decade of teaching.

Follow education reporter Lee Shearer at www.facebook.com/LeeShearerABH or https://twitter.com/LeeShearer.

THE REAL MOTIVATIONS BEHIND THE COMMON CORE LEARNING STANDARDS EXPERIMENT

http://m.eagnews.org/?url=http%3A%2F%2Feagnews.org%2Fdid-microsoft-press-release-inadvertently-reveal-true-purpose-of-common-core%2F&dm_redirected=true#3086

June 30, 2014

REDMOND, Wash. – A new, run-of-the-mill press release about a Texas school district’s technology purchases is, in actuality, a revelation about the real motivations behind the Common Core learning standards experiment.

On Sunday, the Microsoft Corporation issued a news release trumpeting the Pasadena Independent School District’s decision to purchase “12,900 Dell Venue 11 Pro Tablets with Windows 8.1 and Microsoft Office 365 with OneNote” for its students and teachers. 

Pasadena is the latest addition to a growing list of districts that are spending huge sums of tax dollars to put Microsoft devices, programs and services into their students’ hands.

The district’s decision was announced during the International Society for Technology in Education conference – “ the world’s largest ed tech conference  ” – which runs through July 1.

“There is a massive transition to digital happening across the country and around the world in education, and schools looking to prepare their students for the world beyond the classroom are empowering their students and teachers by providing devices, services, training and other elements needed for improved student outcomes,” Margo Day, vice president of U.S. education at Microsoft, said in the news release . “At Microsoft, we are proud to be a partner with so many great schools that are leading the way forward for education and in preparing our youth for tomorrow’s workforce.”

If the last part of that Day’s quote sounds familiar, it should. Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and other Common Core supporters have used that same language – probably word for word in some instances – to justify the one-size-fits-all learning standards that they’re busy foisting onto schools in more than 40 states.

The official fairy tale – er , “narrative” – of Common Core goes something like this: a group of well-meaning governors and big-hearted philanthropists got together and spontaneously decided the best way to improve America’s K-12 system was to create a set of “rigorous” and uniform learning expectations that would elevate and guide student learning in all 50 states.

What they didn’t mention was that synchronizing instruction among most of the nation’s 13,500 school districts allows Microsoft and other technology companies to create a suite of K-12 products and services that can be universally used in classrooms without any messy or expensive state-specific alterations.

Common Core actually makes far more sense when it’s viewed as part of a money-making scheme – advanced by corporations and the politicians they control – than an attempt to improve the nation’s public education system.

It’s a fact that Microsoft and other companies are enjoying – or will soon enjoy – a financial bonanza from the standards experiment.

What students will get out of the bargain is far murkier. The math and English learning benchmarks that make up Common Core were never field tested on actual students in actual classrooms before they were adopted by more than 40 states. A group of education scholars have gone so far as to argue that Common Core represents a step down in quality for students in many states.

Let’s be clear: only anti-modernists in the mold of the Unabomber would oppose efforts to use technology to invigorate and revolutionize K-12 education. There’s no reason why Americans can’t have exciting new technology in their kids’ classroom while preserving the long-held principle of locally controlled schools.

We understand that creating a one-size-fits-all education system would make things easier and more profitable for Microsoft and other companies. But in our view, that’s simply too high a price to pay.

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Bill Gates wants your kids to learn history this way

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/09/bill-gates-wants-your-kids-to-learn-history-this-way-and-hes-paying-to-get-it-into-schools/

Bill Gates wants your kids to learn history this way — and he’s paying to get it into schools

Bill Gates (Jeffrey MacMillan/For The Washington Post)

Bill Gates can’t seem to stop getting big ideas about public education — and then using part of his fortune to see them implemented.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent billions of dollars on various initiatives that Gates thought would help improve public education, including a small schools initiative that he abandoned when he didn’t get the results he wanted; pilot programs in creating controversial teacher evaluation systems linked to student standardized test scores; and promotion of the Common Core State Standards. The foundation has even funded an effort by the Council of Chief State School Officers to evaluate student work for things like creativity.

Now, this illuminating article in the New York Times Magazine, titled “So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class…,” explains how Gates stumbled onto a specific DVD history course and decided that “everybody” should watch it.  Gates, the article says, found the Teaching Company’s “Great Courses” series called “Big History.” It’s by David Christian, an Australian professor who is known for a TED talk on the history of the universe (see video below) and who says he was “influenced by the Annales School, a group of early-20th-century French historians who insisted that history be explored on multiple scales of time and space.” His history course melds different disciplines into explaining history.

Gates told the Times article’s author, Andrew Ross Sorkin, that after he watched it:  “I just loved it. It was very clarifying for me. I thought, ‘God, everybody should watch this thing!’”

So Gates got in touch with Christian. The story says:

He told Christian that he wanted to introduce “Big History” as a course in high schools all across America. He was prepared to fund the project personally, outside his foundation, and he wanted to be personally involved. “He actually gave me his email address and said, ‘Just think about it,’ ” Christian continued. ” ‘Email me if you think this is a good idea.’ ”

Christian emailed to say that he thought it was a pretty good idea. The two men began tinkering, adapting Christian’s college course into a high-school curriculum, with modules flexible enough to teach to freshmen and seniors alike. Gates, who insisted that the course include a strong digital component, hired a team of engineers and designers to develop a website that would serve as an electronic textbook, brimming with interactive graphics and videos. Gates was particularly insistent on the idea of digital timelines, which may have been vestige of an earlier passion project, Microsoft Encarta, the electronic encyclopedia that was eventually overtaken by the growth of Wikipedia. Now he wanted to offer a multifaceted historical account of any given subject through a friendly user interface. The site, which is open to the public, would also feature a password-protected forum for teachers to trade notes and update and, in some cases, rewrite lesson plans based on their experiences in the classroom.

Gates, who had already learned about the limitations of large bureaucracies through his foundation, insisted that the course be pitched to individual schools, rather than to entire districts; that way, he reasoned, it could grow organically and improve as it did so, just like a start-up company. In 2011, the Big History Project debuted in five high schools, but in the three years since, Gates and Christian — along with a team of educational consultants, executives and teachers, mostly based in Seattle — have quietly accelerated its growth. This fall, the project will be offered free to more than 15,000 students in some 1,200 schools, from the Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies in New York to Greenhills School in Ann Arbor, Mich., to Gates’s alma mater, Lakeside Upper School in Seattle. And if all goes well, the Big History Project will be introduced in hundreds of more classrooms by next year and hundreds, if not thousands, more the year after that, scaling along toward the vision Gates first experienced on that treadmill. Last month, the University of California system announced that a version of the Big History Project course could be counted in place of a more traditional World History class, paving the way for the state’s 1,300 high schools to offer it.

And there you have it. Bill Gates likes something; Bill Gates pays to get it into schools. It may be a good idea. It may be a bad idea. It doesn’t matter, because Gates has the money and clout to inject it into wherever he wants to inject it.

You can learn about the course at the Web site bighistoryproject.com, which says:

Big History examines our past, explains our present, and imagines our future. It’s a story about us. An idea that arose from a desire to go beyond specialized and self-contained fields of study to grasp history as a whole. This growing, multi-disciplinary approach is focused on high school students, yet designed for anyone seeking answers to the big questions about the history of our Universe.

The Big History Project is a joint effort between teachers, scholars, scientists, and their supporters to bring this multi-disciplinary approach to knowledge to lifelong learners around the world.

Here’s a short video from the website about life on Earth:

Here’s Christian’s 18-minute TED Talk on the history of the universe:

For those who would rather read than watch the video, here’s the transcript:

0:11 First, a video. (Video) Yes, it is a scrambled egg. But as you look at it, I hope you’ll begin to feel just slightly uneasy. Because you may notice that what’s actually happening is that the egg is unscrambling itself. And you’ll now see the yolk and the white have separated. And now they’re going to be poured back into the egg. And we all know in our heart of hearts that this is not the way the universe works. A scrambled egg is mush — tasty mush — but it’s mush. An egg is a beautiful, sophisticated thing that can create even more sophisticated things, such as chickens. And we know in our heart of hearts that the universe does not travel from mush to complexity. In fact, this gut instinct is reflected in one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy. What that says basically is that the general tendency of the universe is to move from order and structure to lack of order, lack of structure — in fact, to mush. And that’s why that video feels a bit strange.

1:31 And yet, look around us. What we see around us is staggering complexity. Eric Beinhocker estimates that in New York City alone, there are some 10 billion SKUs, or distinct commodities, being traded. That’s hundreds of times as many species as there are on Earth. And they’re being traded by a species of almost seven billion individuals, who are linked by trade, travel, and the Internet into a global system of stupendous complexity.

2:03 So here’s a great puzzle: in a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics, how is it possible to generate the sort of complexity I’ve described, the sort of complexity represented by you and me and the convention center? Well, the answer seems to be, the universe can create complexity, but with great difficulty. In pockets, there appear what my colleague, Fred Spier, calls “Goldilocks conditions” — not too hot, not too cold, just right for the creation of complexity. And slightly more complex things appear. And where you have slightly more complex things, you can get slightly more complex things. And in this way, complexity builds stage by stage. Each stage is magical because it creates the impression of something utterly new appearing almost out of nowhere in the universe. We refer in big history to these moments as threshold moments. And at each threshold, the going gets tougher. The complex things get more fragile, more vulnerable; the Goldilocks conditions get more stringent, and it’s more difficult to create complexity.

3:20 Now, we, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity despite the second law, and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility. And that’s the story that we tell in big history. But to do it, you have do something that may, at first sight, seem completely impossible. You have to survey the whole history of the universe. So let’s do it. (Laughter) Let’s begin by winding the timeline back 13.7 billion years, to the beginning of time.

4:08 Around us, there’s nothing. There’s not even time or space. Imagine the darkest, emptiest thing you can and cube it a gazillion times and that’s where we are. And then suddenly, bang! A universe appears, an entire universe. And we’ve crossed our first threshold. The universe is tiny; it’s smaller than an atom. It’s incredibly hot. It contains everything that’s in today’s universe, so you can imagine, it’s busting. And it’s expanding at incredible speed. And at first, it’s just a blur, but very quickly distinct things begin to appear in that blur. Within the first second, energy itself shatters into distinct forces including electromagnetism and gravity. And energy does something else quite magical: it congeals to form matter — quarks that will create protons and leptons that include electrons. And all of that happens in the first second.

5:05 Now we move forward 380,000 years. That’s twice as long as humans have been on this planet. And now simple atoms appear of hydrogen and helium. Now I want to pause for a moment, 380,000 years after the origins of the universe, because we actually know quite a lot about the universe at this stage. We know above all that it was extremely simple. It consisted of huge clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms, and they have no structure. They’re really a sort of cosmic mush. But that’s not completely true. Recent studies by satellites such as the WMAP satellite have shown that, in fact, there are just tiny differences in that background. What you see here, the blue areas are about a thousandth of a degree cooler than the red areas. These are tiny differences, but it was enough for the universe to move on to the next stage of building complexity.

6:04 And this is how it works. Gravity is more powerful where there’s more stuff. So where you get slightly denser areas, gravity starts compacting clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms. So we can imagine the early universe breaking up into a billion clouds. And each cloud is compacted, gravity gets more powerful as density increases, the temperature begins to rise at the center of each cloud, and then, at the center of each cloud, the temperature crosses the threshold temperature of 10 million degrees, protons start to fuse, there’s a huge release of energy, and, bam! We have our first stars. From about 200 million years after the Big Bang, stars begin to appear all through the universe, billions of them. And the universe is now significantly more interesting and more complex.

6:59 Stars will create the Goldilocks conditions for crossing two new thresholds. When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. If, like me, you’re wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion. So now the universe is chemically more complex. And in a chemically more complex universe, it’s possible to make more things. And what starts happening is that, around young suns, young stars, all these elements combine, they swirl around, the energy of the star stirs them around, they form particles, they form snowflakes, they form little dust motes, they form rocks, they form asteroids, and eventually, they form planets and moons. And that is how our solar system was formed, four and a half billion years ago. Rocky planets like our Earth are significantly more complex than stars because they contain a much greater diversity of materials. So we’ve crossed a fourth threshold of complexity.

8:08 Now, the going gets tougher. The next stage introduces entities that are significantly more fragile, significantly more vulnerable, but they’re also much more creative and much more capable of generating further complexity. I’m talking, of course, about living organisms. Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals. So, chemistry is dominated by the electromagnetic force. That operates over smaller scales than gravity, which explains why you and I are smaller than stars or planets. Now, what are the ideal conditions for chemistry? What are the Goldilocks conditions? Well, first, you need energy, but not too much. In the center of a star, there’s so much energy that any atoms that combine will just get busted apart again. But not too little. In intergalactic space, there’s so little energy that atoms can’t combine. What you want is just the right amount, and planets, it turns out, are just right, because they’re close to stars, but not too close.

9:11 You also need a great diversity of chemical elements, and you need liquid such as water. Why? Well, in gasses, atoms move past each other so fast that they can’t hitch up. In solids, atoms are stuck together, they can’t move. In liquids, they can cruise and cuddle and link up to form molecules. Now, where do you find such Goldilocks conditions? Well, planets are great, and our early Earth was almost perfect. It was just the right distance from its star to contain huge oceans of open water. And deep beneath those oceans, at cracks in the Earth’s crust, you’ve got heat seeping up from inside the Earth, and you’ve got a great diversity of elements. So at those deep oceanic vents, fantastic chemistry began to happen, and atoms combined in all sorts of exotic combinations.

10:08 But of course, life is more than just exotic chemistry. How do you stabilize those huge molecules that seem to be viable? Well, it’s here that life introduces an entirely new trick. You don’t stabilize the individual; you stabilize the template, the thing that carries information, and you allow the template to copy itself. And DNA, of course, is the beautiful molecule that contains that information. You’ll be familiar with the double helix of DNA. Each rung contains information. So, DNA contains information about how to make living organisms. And DNA also copies itself. So, it copies itself and scatters the templates through the ocean. So the information spreads. Notice that information has become part of our story. The real beauty of DNA though is in its imperfections. As it copies itself, once in every billion rungs, there tends to be an error. And what that means is that DNA is, in effect, learning. It’s accumulating new ways of making living organisms because some of those errors work. So DNA’s learning and it’s building greater diversity and greater complexity. And we can see this happening over the last four billion years.

11:26 For most of that time of life on Earth, living organisms have been relatively simple — single cells. But they had great diversity, and, inside, great complexity. Then from about 600 to 800 million years ago, multi-celled organisms appear. You get fungi, you get fish, you get plants, you get amphibia, you get reptiles, and then, of course, you get the dinosaurs. And occasionally, there are disasters. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid landed on Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula, creating conditions equivalent to those of a nuclear war, and the dinosaurs were wiped out. Terrible news for the dinosaurs, but great news for our mammalian ancestors, who flourished in the niches left empty by the dinosaurs. And we human beings are part of that creative evolutionary pulse that began 65 million years ago with the landing of an asteroid.

12:29 Humans appeared about 200,000 years ago. And I believe we count as a threshold in this great story. Let me explain why. We’ve seen that DNA learns in a sense, it accumulates information. But it is so slow. DNA accumulates information through random errors, some of which just happen to work. But DNA had actually generated a faster way of learning: it had produced organisms with brains, and those organisms can learn in real time. They accumulate information, they learn. The sad thing is, when they die, the information dies with them. Now what makes humans different is human language. We are blessed with a language, a system of communication, so powerful and so precise that we can share what we’ve learned with such precision that it can accumulate in the collective memory. And that means it can outlast the individuals who learned that information, and it can accumulate from generation to generation. And that’s why, as a species, we’re so creative and so powerful, and that’s why we have a history. We seem to be the only species in four billion years to have this gift.

13:43 I call this ability collective learning. It’s what makes us different. We can see it at work in the earliest stages of human history. We evolved as a species in the savanna lands of Africa, but then you see humans migrating into new environments, into desert lands, into jungles, into the ice age tundra of Siberia — tough, tough environment — into the Americas, into Australasia. Each migration involved learning — learning new ways of exploiting the environment, new ways of dealing with their surroundings.

14:15 Then 10,000 years ago, exploiting a sudden change in global climate with the end of the last ice age, humans learned to farm. Farming was an energy bonanza. And exploiting that energy, human populations multiplied. Human societies got larger, denser, more interconnected. And then from about 500 years ago, humans began to link up globally through shipping, through trains, through telegraph, through the Internet, until now we seem to form a single global brain of almost seven billion individuals. And that brain is learning at warp speed. And in the last 200 years, something else has happened. We’ve stumbled on another energy bonanza in fossil fuels. So fossil fuels and collective learning together explain the staggering complexity we see around us.

15:12 So, here we are, back at the convention center. We’ve been on a journey, a return journey, of 13.7 billion years. I hope you agree that this is a powerful story. And it’s a story in which humans play an astonishing and creative role. But it also contains warnings. Collective learning is a very, very powerful force, and it’s not clear that we humans are in charge of it. I remember very vividly as a child growing up in England, living through the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a few days, the entire biosphere seemed to be on the verge of destruction. And the same weapons are still here, and they are still armed. If we avoid that trap, others are waiting for us. We’re burning fossil fuels at such a rate that we seem to be undermining the Goldilocks conditions that made it possible for human civilizations to flourish over the last 10,000 years. So what big history can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power with collective learning.

16:28 And now, finally, this is what I want. I want my grandson, Daniel, and his friends and his generation, throughout the world, to know the story of big history, and to know it so well that they understand both the challenges that face us and the opportunities that face us. And that’s why a group of us are building a free, online syllabus in big history for high school students throughout the world. We believe that big history will be a vital intellectual tool for them, as Daniel and his generation face the huge challenges and also the huge opportunities ahead of them at this threshold moment in the history of our beautiful planet.

17:22 I thank you for your attention.

17:24 (Applause)

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LANOUE, Clarke County Georgia: Teacher Evals

http://m.onlineathens.com/opinion/2014-09-13/editorial-state-should-heed-lanoue-clarke-boe-new-education-evaluation-system?utm_source=Morris%20Digital%20Works&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Today%27sheadlinesfromTheAthensBanner-Herald09%2F16%2F2014#gsc.tab=0

Editorial: State should heed Lanoue, Clarke BOE on new education evaluation system

“You need to go back to the drawing board on this.”

That was Clarke County Schools Superintendent Phil Lanoue, speaking to two members of the local delegation to the state legislature at an Athens-Clarke County Federation of Neighborhoods forum last week.

His reference was to a new teacher evaluation system overwhelmingly approved by the Georgia General Assembly earlier this year, a system which Lanoue told forum attendees, including state Reps. Regina Quick, R-Athens, and Chuck Williams, R-Watkinsville, is expensive, time-consuming and won’t accurately measure how well teachers perform. As just one example of problems with the system, Lanoue noted that evaluation of music students would require significant time that could otherwise be used for instruction and student practice.

Briefly, House Bill 244, the legislation establishing the new teacher evaluation system set to become effective in the next school year, would base half of the annual evaluation of teachers on their students’ scores on state standardized tests, with the remainder of the evaluation based on other indicators of student performance and on classroom observation.

For teachers of subjects that don’t include a state standardized test, like band or chorus, annual evaluations would be based on measures of student achievement developed by the individual local school systems and approved by the state school board. Principals and assistant principals also would be subject to evaluation based on student test scores.

In other words, House Bill 244 is a perfectly bureaucratic response to what is the decidedly imperfect science of assessing how teachers and administrators are doing with regard to the decidedly challenging task of reaching the wide variety of students who attend the state’s public schools.

For the record, Quick and Williams voted in favor of House Bill 244, while Rep. Spencer Frye, D-Athens, voted against it. In the state Senate, Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, voted in favor of the bill, and Frank Ginn, R-Danielsville, did not vote.

At the Federation of Neighborhoods forum, Lanoue noted the difficulty of performance assessment, but did not, it should be noted, suggest that there is no place for assessment in the public school arena. Here’s what he said: “It’s impossible for anyone to be able to distill the hundreds of thousands of interactions that happen on every single day. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have assessment. We need to go back and create an equilibrium. It doesn’t mean lower the bar.”

Lanoue’s comments at the forum were backed up last week by a resolution approved unanimously by the Clarke County Board of Education asking Gov. Nathan Deal, the state legislature, and the state school board to put the new evaluation system on hold “and enter into a collaborative dialogue resulting in a broad-based system that supports students, teachers and leaders in improving student achievement by addressing the varying needs of school districts ... .”

What we have in Lanoue is a seasoned educator and administrator who recognizes the need for assessing how students and teachers are performing, but who makes a good case that the evaluation system now approved for the state will compromise instructional time and bring other negative consequences — a case bolstered by the Clarke County Board of Education’s resolution.

If they’re wise, state lawmakers, other elected officials and education officials will pay attention to what Lanoue and the local school board are telling them.

#Stopcommoncore Grassroots Effort Destroys ‘Misinformed’ Common Core PR Video

http://missourieducationwatchdog.com/stopcommoncore-grassroots-effort-destroys-misinformed-common-core-pr-video/

#Stopcommoncore Grassroots Effort Destroys ‘Misinformed’ Common Core PR Video

A textbook example of #CommonCorePRFail

How’s that revamped PR campaign to make the Common Core more palatable to parents and taxpayers compelled to pay for education reform directed/developed by private non-governmental organizations who have no accountability to those parents and/or taxpayers going?

It’s off to a bumpy start for the education reformers.  The first casualty of the ‘warmer, more emotional’ Common Core PR campaign is the video from Six One Seven Studios and ‘Grandad Learns About the Common Core’.  It caused quite a firestorm on many blogs as portraying an elderly veteran as not very smart on Common Core issues.  It didn’t deal with any facts about the Initiative, rather, it sought to dismiss concerns of the grandfather by the teacher that Bill Gates was not going to determine what his grandson read.   It was up to the teacher and the student to determine reading materials.  That’s the video’s message (other than the fact that the grandfather is portrayed in an extremely unflattering light) in a nutshell:  Bill Gates is NOT the boogeyman.

Don’t try to access the video now.  This is what you will see:

Thanks to reader Sandra Smith who commented on our original article about the video and let us know how grassroots efforts caused the video to be pulled:

Completely offensive. A big part of CC is turning kids against their dumb, misinformed parents. That way they will completely buy into what the schools tell them and ignore what their parents tell them. This smacks of communism, and yes I am a liberal making this statement.

The silver lining is that public opposition is getting to them if they feel the need to produce videos like this. Keep it up people. Make your voices heard! It’s the only way to save our education system. Silence = compliance. Our kids need us to stand up for them NOW.

Woot woot! Great work, California!!  That was some awesome research tying this studio into the education reform movement.  I wonder how much education reform money went down the drain for this PR video?  Again, it’s like the ‘bad boyfriend’ theory: you can’t make bad look good, no matter how much you try.  And a word of advice to the reform movement: tell the truth about your connections and the initiative.  Your lies will catch up to you.

Congratulations on this one, folks.  You shot huge holes in this narrative with your passion and persistence exposing the truth about the Initiative and the misinformation spread by the reformers.  The pulling of this video was because YOU are the ones who are in it ‘for the kids’.  It didn’t disappear because you received multi-million dollar grant from a special interest group/individual/Federal agency to shame the reformers into ditching a disingenuous PR video.  It disappeared because you have had it with the elites talking down to you and not telling the truth.  It’s because you love your kids.

Common Core State Standards Initiative Opponents: 1

Highly Paid Education Reformers: 0

Thanks to Andrea Dillon at Lady Liberty for the excellent meme used as the graphic for this post!  That may be the only photograph left of poor ‘misinformed’ Pop Pop as Six One Seven has scrubbed his existence from the Internet.  If you were so clever to download the youtube video, send it our way so we can view it from time to time to remind ourselves what the reformers really think about those opposed to the Initiative.

Published September 15, 2014

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EDUCATION: The History

http://images.library.wisc.edu/WI/EFacs/AppletonPlats/aplFox/reference/wi.aplfox.i0020.pdf

Readin’, ‘Ritin’, ‘Rithmetic and Religion

 

Readin’, ‘Ritin’, ‘Rithmetic and Religion

 

A new school year is about to begin and government education is cranking up for another year of teaching the 4 R’s.  We are all familiar with the 3 R’s, but no one talks about the 4th R, religion, The religion of public schools has been a major influence over the education of our childrenwith disastrous results. Here is what you should know about it.

 

Teachers in our public schools belong to powerful political unions known as the National Education Association, the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers, the AFT.Both these unions work with the Department of Education, the DOE, as they oversee the government’s educationagenda in our schools.  The unions and DOE endorse the religion of Humanism, which guides their influence over educational content nationally. The beliefs or tenets of this religion are contained in documents known as TheHumanist Manifestos I and II.  There are ten basic tenets of Humanism that guide the unions and DOE in determining the content of school curricula and textbooks. The tenetsshaping these materials are as follows:

 

1.

There is no God, his Son, Jesus Christ or his Spirit.

2.

There is no soul, life after death, salvation, heaven or hell.

3.

Humans are derived through evolutionary forces in nature.

4.

There are no absolutes of right or wrong.  Moral values are situational.

5.

There are no distinctive roles of male and female.

6.

Sexual freedom is between consenting individualsincluding pre-marital sex, adultery, homosexuality, lesbianism or any other consensual arrangement.

7.

Anyone has the right to abortion, euthanasia and suicide.

8.

America’s wealth needs to be equally distributed to reduce poverty and bring about equality for all.

9.

The environment must be controlled and all its energy sources.

10.

National patriotism and the free enterprise system must be removed. Disarmament and the creation of a one-world socialistic government is the desired outcome.

 

Before the Ten Tenets of Humanism, we had the Ten Commandments of God that guided the founding of our country and its directions in education. But, the move to dislodge the commandments was begun in the early 1900’s as European and German philosophers influenced byHumanism came to this country with the belief that God hindered man’s evolution.  Their beliefs became the driving force behind a radically different education system.  The great object was to get rid of Judeo- Christian values by establishing a system of state or national schools from which God would be excluded. All parents would be compelled by law to send their children to these schools if they had no other means of educating their children.

 

These philosophers influenced the view of American education and gathered disciples in higher education, such as John Dewey and his colleagues at Columbia Teachers College, who began to share the vision. These men became known as “Progressives” as they gradually movededucation away from a Judeo- Christian, capitalistic, individualistic nation to a socialistic, collectivist, atheistic and humanist nation.

 

John Dewey analyzed the traditional American education system and concluded that what characterized America’scapitalist, individualistic, religious system was high literacy. There was an emphasis on language learning which produced individuals and young people with independent intelligence who could stand on their own two feet and think for themselves.  

 

Dewey realized this approach of learning did not produce a collectivist type of individual, so he set out to make a radical shift from the development of academic skills to the development of social skills.  He wanted to shift education to deal with activities rather than the mind and intellect. His idea was to divorce students from the intellectual,academic, religious pursuits that dominated education. This change has been gradual over time and we have accepted the alterations without much resistance.  

 

In 1930, Humanism, A New Religion, by Charles Francis Potter, was published, in which the author stated, “Education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism and every American public school is a school of Humanism.  What can the theistic Sunday schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?”

 

Readin’, ‘Ritin’, ‘Rithmetic and Religion have undergone serious malevolent adjustments over the years as Humanist educators have taken over the public schools and manipulated these subjects  resulting in the deformity ofour country and the education of its people. Theestablishment of this religion of Humanism in our schoolsmust stop.  Our Congress should expel its existence so that it cannot continue forcing itself into our lives through our educational system.  It is time to petition the government for a redress of such a grievance as this and stem the tide of the five-day program of the 4th R, the religion of Humanism. This is tyranny over the minds of children held captive in public schools.

 

Priscilla Carroll is a resident of Athens, Georgia and aformer public school teacher.

 

 

CLAIM: CHRISTIANS SIN BY PUTTING KIDS IN PUBLIC SCHOOL

http://mobile.wnd.com/2014/05/claim-christians-sin-by-putting-kids-in-public-school/

CLAIM: CHRISTIANS SIN BY PUTTING KIDS IN PUBLIC SCHOOL

Christian parents, do you wish to obey God and reclaim America from a godless culture?

Then remove your children from the nation’s public schools.

That’s the plea from E. Ray Moore, who has been taking his message public during his campaign for lieutenant governor in South Carolina.

“If the evangelical community would step up and obey God in educating their own children, we could collapse the state model,” Moore told WND. “We’re feeding the monster by keeping our children there.”

Moore, who has served as a pastor, an Army chaplain and director of a Christian ministry for more than 35 years, co-founded Frontline Ministries Inc., a Christian ministry, and currently serves as president of the board. He also founded Exodus Mandate, a ministry to encourage and assist Christian families in leaving government school systems.

Moore is also executive producer of the award-winning film, “IndoctriNation: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America.”

“When I see a family in public schools or a pastor in public schools, I know there’s a great blindness or an area of disobedience in their lives in that particular area,” he said. “I think Christians are ignorantly doing this. There’s no Bible verse that gives you permission – as a Christian family – to put your children under false doctrine and in harm’s way.”

Ready to take a hard look at the true state of public education? Then don’t miss this unflinching and totally captivating documentary, “IndoctriNation: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America.”

The public school system has become the domain of the Democratic left, Moore argues, and it has fundamentally changed American culture because it successfully indoctrinated five or six generations of U.S. children.

“We estimate 70-80 percent of evangelical Christian children who are in public school for their entire educational career are abandoning the church and the Christian faith in their early adult years,” he said. “About 20 percent return after they get married and start having their own kids.

“It’s a holocaust going on in our churches, and we’re trying to fight a culture war while our resources are being depleted.”

Moore said children in public schools “do not hold a traditional view on family issues,” especially with regard to the sanctity of marriage. He also said students aren’t being taught the originalist view of the U.S. Constitution, and public schools are indoctrinating children with a “Marxist view of American history,” environmentalism, evolution and other “bizarre radical agendas.”

As evidence of a major cultural shift, he pointed to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center indicating a full 70 percent of Millennials (born in 1981 or later) support same-sex marriage. By contrast, 49 percent of those in Generation X, 38 percent of Baby Boomers and just 21 percent from the Silent Generation support homosexual marriage.

“It’s incredible,” Moore said of the cultural shift. “We’re losing the culture right in our homes and in our churches, and it’s because of government education.”

Another Pew Research Center analysis in 2011 showed mothers now spend an average of 13.5 hours a week with their children and fathers only 7.3 hours per week. Moore said if a family attends church, children may spend one to two hours a week there.

Meanwhile, U.S. public schools have their children for about 35 hours a week.

“Families don’t have family worship anymore,” he said. “Parents don’t instruct their children in the Christian faith much anymore at home. So we’re just losing the culture because we’re losing the youth.”

Anti-Christian trends in education

In January, a California-based legal organization reported a spike in hostility toward Christian students in public schools.

Attorney Bob Tyler of Advocates for Faith and Freedom told Christian News Network, “We have seen a dramatic increase of phone calls nationwide as it pertains to kids in public schools who are facing hostility because of their faith.”

According to the report, Tyler said the reports aren’t a result of student bullying.

“[The reports all surround] hostility from teachers and school administrators who are curtailing the students’ free speech rights simply because they’re Christians and they might express a Christian worldview,” he said.

In recent years, WND has reported the following attacks on Christians in the public school systems:

• “School scorched for having kids bow to ‘sun god’”
• “Christians ordered to teach Wiccan, pagan rites”
• “School targets Jesus Tattoo”
• “School: ‘Gay’ is OK, but pro-lifers must go”
• “Battleground schools fighting over sex, evolution, Bible”
• “School claims right to censor pro-life 6^th-grader”
• “Where do public school teachers send own kids?”
• “Are kids in Christian classes coming out less Christian?”
• “Persecution of Christians on the rise”
• “Judge orders ‘gay’ agenda taught to Christian children”

Escaping the public school system

Churches have failed their congregations on this issue, according to Moore, who says they should be focused on forming Christian alternatives to public schools.

But he said pastors address the public versus Christian education issue.

“I’m going to let you in on a dirty little secret of the evangelical pastors,” he said. “I’ve been in the ministry for 40 years, and I can tell you this is true because they tell me this when we talk privately. They are afraid to tackle this because they have so many public school addicts in their churches. If they address it strongly, they’ll lose their jobs.”

Moore added, “They’d rather hold onto their jobs, thinking they can do some good and win people to Christ, and not tackle the big gorilla in the room, which is public education. We think it’s the responsibility of the churches to meet this need.”

The ideal model, according to Moore, would be if churches would provide financial assistance to their tithing families who couldn’t otherwise afford the cost of a private education. Families who could afford the tuition would pay for it themselves.

“In South Carolina, it costs $11,500 to educate child in public schools,” he said. “If the system operated on the free market, if it were all private, just based on the cost of private education, we could do it at half the cost.”

But Moore admits that convincing churches to accommodate families’ educational needs is a major task.

“Getting them to do that is the tough part because they’re not even taking care of their affluent members right now,” he said. “Part of our problem is we’ve got to sell this to the churches and pastors.

“We would take charge of our children’s education, and in doing that, we would take charge of the country and our culture. This would be a reformation or a revolution.”

E. Ray Moore and former U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.

Left’s reaction to Ray Moore’s challenge

Moore has faced some criticism from the left over his view of public education. At an April 12 rally, he addressed a crowd in Charleston, telling the gathering:

“It is our hope and prayer that a fresh obedience by Christian families in educating their children according to biblical commands will prove to be a key for the revival of our families, our churches and our nation. We cannot win this war we’re in as long as we keep handing our children over to the enemy to educate. All of the symptoms and the things that we’re fighting and complaining about today have been caused because the culture has changed. The culture has turned against God, against our Constitution and against traditional values. Why is that happening? It’s fundamentally and largely [because] of the public school system. We’ve had six or seven generations where most of us have put our children in the godless, pagan school systems. It cannot be fixed. It’s a socialistic model, and we need to abandon that. As conservatives and Christians, if you think you’re going to win this war you’re in, and leave your children in those schools, it will not happen.”

Reacting to Moore’s speech, Huffington Post senior political reporter Jon Ward said, “This guy is of an age when protestant Christians were the moral majority. So he’s talking about these issues in a very outdated, outmoded, out-of-touch way.”

While Ward affirmed parents’ rights to provide religious education for their children, he added, “I don’t think most people think about it the way this guy does. Most people are much more, I think, reasonable in their approach and much less martial.”

But Moore says he’s “getting a very positive response from Christians and conservatives” across the country.

He recalled a speech he gave in 1999 while serving on a panel for the First Amendment Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Moore said many of the leftists on the panel expected him to say his group was planning to take over the public schools, run the school boards and fight to teach creationism once again.

“But I shocked them,” he said. “I came in, I threw my hands up and I said, ‘We give up! You all can have the schools. I’m taking the Christians and the churches out. We’re going to the promised land of Christian schooling and homeschooling. We’re going to take charge of our own education.’”

Moore said there was real concern in the crowd because the leftists didn’t like his idea.

“They were trying to tell me I couldn’t do that and I shouldn’t do that,” he said.

After the meeting ended, Moore said he began talking with a National Education Agency union leader from Tennessee in the lobby.

“She said to me, ‘Please don’t do that. That is a terrible idea. We need Christians in public schools. You bring so much to public education. Please don’t do that,’” Moore said.

But he added, “I thought to myself, ‘Wow, this must really be a good idea!’”

Moore isn’t concerned about preserving the public model, and he believes leftists and Americans with different belief systems should form their own private schools.

“Let them have their own schools,” he said. “Let the homosexuals have schools for their children. Let the atheists have schools for their children. They’re free to do it. Let the evolutionists have schools for their children.

“But stop indoctrinating our children and taxing us – it’s an obscene and coercive tax. Let them voluntarily pay for their schools, and we’ll have our schools. Don’t use the coercion of the state to coerce the population.”

South Carolina lieutenant governor race

Moore has taken a leave of absence from his position as executive director of Exodus Mandate so he could enter the race for the office of lieutenant governor in South Carolina. His slogan is, “What once was can be again.”

“Now why I’m running for lieutenant governor is, I had this ministry and I was unhappy with the Republican Party and the conservative movement and the churches and how slowly they are moving toward an education freedom model – or some people sometimes say school choice,” he said. “It’s moving so gradually. We’ve got to hurry that process up because our time is getting short where we can save the children because the culture is descending into the moral abyss very rapidly now because of public education.

“I saw a chance to run and elevate the debate in my state.”

E. Ray Moore

In January, South Carolina Lt. Gov. Glenn McConnell said he won’t seek re-election. Instead, he’ll serve as president of the College of Charleston.

The date of the primary is June 10. Other GOP candidates seeking the Republican nomination in the primary include retired developer Pat McKinney, business consultant Mike Campbell and former South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster. Campbell, the son of former Gov. Caroll Campbell, served as state chairman for Mike Huckabee’s 2008 presidential campaign in the state. McKinney is a member of Gov. Nikki Haley’s re-election finance team.

The Democrat candidate, running unopposed in his party, is former state House Rep. Bakari Sellers a former member of the South Carolina steering committee of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

If Haley is re-elected this year, she will face term limits and cannot run again in 2018, a situation that may position the next lieutenant governor to seek the governorship in four years.

While Moore said the office of lieutenant governor in South Carolina is primarily tasked with presiding over the state Senate and managing the Office of Aging and Disability, he said, “All the lieutenant governors have their projects that they work on.”

“I’m going to concern myself and my special projects with the reforming of our family lives, cultural development and moral and spiritual renewal,” he said. “One way that I would do that is to be a strong advocate for marriage and for private, Christian and home education. I think we can renew our culture. That would be one of my projects.”