http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/liberal-academics-reject-evolutionary-science/article/2569083

Liberal academics reject evolutionary science

Some people don't like to face facts. That's the conclusion I draw from an article in Psychology Today entitled "Evolutionary Psychology 2.0" by Glenn Geher, a psychology professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Geher describes how David Buss, a pioneer in this field starting back in 1999, produced research on "evolved behaviorial sex differences." Politically incorrect! Everyone knows that there are no differences in behavior between males and females except those imposed by The Patriarchy, etc., etc. Or at least that was the reaction in much of the academy.

In 2010 Geher and a student named Dean Gambacorta conducted a study on people who had "a strong resistance to accepting the idea of evolved behaviorial differences." Such people, they found, tend to be clustered in three groups: people who "are very politically liberal," people who "are academics (especially in the social sciences)" and people who "have no children." As you might expect there is considerable overlap between these groups. They are evidently the sort of people who believe that little boys and little girls would not behave differently if they were treated in equal ways. Give your boy a doll, your girl a truck. Of course parents who try this encounter resistance as strong as that shown by very liberal childless academics.

So in response Geher argues that evolutionary psychology should refashion itself in 2.0 form. "Perhaps the movers of the field need to re-market it a bit — emphasizing the fact that EP is NOT ALL ABOUT evolved behaviorial sex differences — research on that topic is simply a slice of EP."

In other words, avoid confronting liberal academics with facts they refuse to accept. So much for the idea that conservatives refuse to accept science while liberals always respect its findings. We can't have people believing things that are politically incorrect.

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School district begins prepping 4-year-olds for workforce

http://m.eagnews.org/?url=http%3A%2F%2Feagnews.org%2Fschool-district-begins-prepping-4-year-olds-for-workforce%2F&dm_redirected=true#2849

School district begins prepping 4-year-olds for workforce

July 27, 2015

RACINE, Wis. – Officials in the Wisconsin’s Racine County are preparing 4-year-olds to make sure they’ll be ready to enter the workforce when they’re adults.

Racine Unified School District employees, early childhood experts and members of the Atonement Lutheran Church are working together through a new A.I.M. Now program – an acronym for Achieve, Imagine, and Motivate – to get the county’s youngest students ready for the real world, the Journal Times reports.

“Hopefully that will be a self-sustaining model to get kids to be kindergarten-ready when they enter that phase of their schooling,” Racine County Executive Jonathan Delagrave told the site. “We feel that’s really critical to creating a Racine County-ready workforce.”

The 4K program is the newest idea from the “Higher Expectations for Racine County Youth Program.” And although enrolling students will be about 15 years away from the working world, local officials want to start getting them ready now, at least the best of the lot.

The program relies on funding from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instructionand the state’s child care subsidy program to target specific students: those living in families with a household income of 185 percent or less than the federal poverty threshold that possess good reading skills. The program will run the full day, as opposed to the current half-day 4K program currently offered in Racine’s public schools, according to the Journal Times.

“To get the school up and running, Higher Expectations received a $50,000 contribution from Racine County as well as an undisclosed amount of funding from SC Johnson and Educators Credit Union,” according to the site.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction offers detailed information and research about the purported benefits of 4K, as well as a history of the state’s tug-of-war with the idea. A policy brief posted to the site “explores key developments, starting with the inclusion of education for 4-year-olds in the 1848 Constitution and the establishment of the first private kindergarten in the country in Watertown in 1856, and follows the surge in public education for 4-year-olds in the late 1800s, the decline from 1920o-1970, and the resurgence from 1980-2010,” the DPI site states.

Yet despite Wisconsin’s long history with 4K, the state DPI does not offer any local data on how the practice has impacted students in the long run.

“While it is difficult under Wisconsin’s current assessment system to draw meaningful large-scale conclusions about the impact of 4K programming on children’s development, data from the national SWEEP study as well as data collected by individual districts seem to indicate that four-year-old kindergarten is benefiting the development of participants,” according to the DPI site.

School districts in Eau Claire, Montello, and Wausau have all used some form of 4K program since 2000.

But 4K could soon just become regular kindergarten, because Wisconsin officials are already looking at ways to prepare even younger kids for learning and their college or career.

Higher Expectations executive director Jeff Neubauer told the Journal Times A.I.M Now is also planning a child care program for 3-year-olds that will serve as a feeder program for 4K.

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http://freebeacon.com/blog/dont-know-much-about-history/

The New AP U.S. History Standards Aren‘t Bad: They‘re Meaningless

Well, it took me a while, but I finally tracked down AP United States History: Course and Exam Description Including the Curriculum Framework Effective Fall 2014, the new standards according to which high-school students hoping to receive “advanced placement” credit when they attend university will be tested. I’ve read thousands of words about the new standards these last few weeks—denunciations, defenses, counter-denunciations, etc., etc., ad taedium—but almost nothing that quoted the standards themselves.*

Anyway, ugh. This PDF is 134 pages long, four times the length of the document it replaces. It is one of the most turgid, boring things I have ever read. Where earlier versions gave a short list of themes (“Culture,” “Religion”), an outline of American history (“The French and Indian War,” “Compromise of 1877”), and a few sample questions for students taking the AP history exam, we now have a list of “Key Concepts.” On every page it is made clear that these concepts, which have wonderfully vivid names (ID, WXT, PEO, POL, WOL, etc.) are what teachers are being asked to impart. Names, dates, facts, documents—the ordinary material of history—are merely instrumental. This sort of question is out the window:

Under the Articles of Confederation the United States central government had no power to

(a) levy taxes

(b) make treaties

(c) declare war

(d) request troops from states

(e) amend the Articles

Instead, students will now be asked to “Analyze how emerging conceptions of national identity and democratic ideals shaped value systems, gender roles, and cultural movements in the late 18th century and the 19th century”. Thank god those charged with teaching these “concepts” and ”issues” will “have flexibility to use examples”!

The most generous interpretation of the new standards is that they are hopelessly naive, presuming that students who do not yet know anything about history might themselves write it—the same way that middle-school English teachers pretend that students who have not heard of iambic pentameter can and should be writing verse of their own rather than memorizing poems by rote. Really, though, the problem here is with the AP system itself. AP courses are premised on a vulgar, credentialist view of education, one in which certain discrete “skills”—e.g., critical thinking—are identified, acquired, and traded as if they were hard currency in exchange for college credits. When these skills are not nebulous, they are inconsequential: the “nuance” prized by the College Board, for example, sounds suspiciously like the ability to say “On the one hand, x; on the other hand, not x.”

But who am I to stand in the way of History? At least graduates of these courses will be exquisitely nuanced critical thinkers, capable of analyzing key concepts and questions of gender, race, and class. Too bad they’ll also be utterly ignorant.

*One exception is the wonderful open letter to the College Board, the non-profit corporation that issues the standards, signed by Robert P. George, Harvey Mansfield, Patrick Deneen, Robert Merry, and Wilfred McClay among others: the signatories criticize the new standards for their emphasis on “abstractions” at the expense of “acquisition of extensive factual knowledge” and for “scrub[bing] away all traces of what used to be the chief glory of historical writing—vivid and compelling narrative—and reduc[ing] history to an bloodless interplay of abstract and impersonal forces.”

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NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND

If you want to know more about what's wrong with the No Child Left Behind Reauthorization bills that recently passed Congress and are now headed to a conference committee, it's worth your time to listen to these interviews. The first is Robin Eubanks, and Atlanta-based lawyer who has been investigating trends in public education for years now. We made these arguments (and more) to members of Congress, with varying levels of success. If your congressman, or Sen. Isakson or Sen. Perdue, holds any type of townhall meeting during the August recess, please attend if you can and make your opinion known. We have to stop the bill that comes out of conference.

https://soundcloud.com/alice-linahan/attorney-robin-eubanks-author-of-credentialed-to-destroy-how-and-why-education-became-a-weapon

https://soundcloud.com/alice-linahan/dr-peg-luksik-on-the-women-on-the-wall-call-with-alice-linahan  

This is all "bribe" money from the Federal Government to keep states and municipalities in subservience to the government. Each Federal dollar is a ball and chain on our freedom. More than ever before we do NOT want DC telling us how to live our lives. 

http://edlibertywatch.org/2015/06/more-dangerous-federal-control-with-new-preschool-grants-within-the-every-child-achieves-act-2/

More Dangerous Federal Control with New Preschool Grants within the Every Child Achieves Act

Karen R. Effrem, MD – President of Education Liberty Watch and Executive Director of the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition

The Every Child Achieve Act’s (ECAA) Early Learning Alignment and Improvement Grants (Sec. 5610)[1] offer new federal funds to “assist states” to “more efficiently using existing Federal resources to improve, strengthen, and expand existing high-quality early childhood education, as  determined by the State.” Despite the benign and pleasant sounding offer of help and resources to be used as states see fit, these grants greatly expand federal control over preschool as Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind have done for K-12.  Here are the problems:

There is no evidence of long-term effectiveness of early childhood programs that justify their great cost, but there is evidence of academic and emotional harm.[2]

Each state applying for a grant must promise to and explain how it will use “existing Federal, State, and local resources and programs that the State will coordinate to meet the purposes of this part, including”… “Head Start”[3] and the “Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG).[4]” [Sec. 5902]

Analogous to the Common Core standards incentivized by Race to the Top and the federal mandates for statewide standards and tests required by the 1994 version of the ESEA, there is a rapid spread of statewide or federal early learning standards and early childhood assessment incentivized by the 2011 and 2014 Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge (ELC) Grants and mandated by the 2007 Head Start and 2014 Child Care and Development Block Grant reauthorizations.

According to the ELC Collaborative analysis of the ELC grants[5], at least 15 states declared openly that they are aligning their early learning standards to Common Core or admitted that they are aligning to the K-3 standards, which is a de facto admission of Common Core alignment.

Mentioning it eleven times in the legislation, Head Start requires not only every Head Start program, but also every other state pre-k program[6] to fully align to the Head Start Child Outcome Framework,[7] a set of national early childhood standards, which is being correlated to Common Core.[8] Most state standards and the Pearson Work Sampling System (WSS) kindergarten readiness assessment contain similar or identical language to the Head Start framework in its various iterations.  Pearson also admits in its advertising video that the WSS is based on “national standards.”[9] The only national preschool standards that are available are the Head Start Child Outcome Framework. This is federal control of academic content that includes the thoughts and attitudes of our youngest children, and should be concerning regardless of one’s views on any particular topic.  The K-12 Common Core standards promote social emotional goals[10] as well, but are much less overt than the Head Start Child Outcome Framework.

The CCDBG strongly incentivizes[11] a “tiered quality rating system (QRS),” to rate programs and providers. Though portrayed as “voluntary,” many programs, including private and religious programs, comply in order to be competitive in a bad economy for funding and referrals.  In most states, eighty per cent of child care is private.  The main requirement for a top rating in the QRS is use of the state early learning standards that are often far more subjective, controversial, and psychosocially based than those in K-12. This is resulting in a state takeover of private and religious childcare, because now these organizations outside of the state system are being bribed or coerced to teach the public program curriculum in order to get a good rating. Minnesota admitted this in its ELC application.[12] The rating systems themselves are subjective and controversial and lack evidence they will improve child outcomes.[13]

Both the Head Start and individual state standards, which are all remarkably similar, are also vague, subjective, and in some cases, controversial, both for academic topics and for the non-cognitive social emotional topics, which are actually required for preschool but not for K-12.  Here are some examples:

Approaches to Learning (Head Start[14]): “Child shows interest in and curiosity about the world around them.” Substantially similar language to this extremely subjective standard is also found in multiple state documents and the WSS.

Language and Literacy (Maryland[15]): “Shows beginning understanding of concepts about print.” Similar language is found in multiple states, the WSS and the Head Start Framework.

Mathematics (Illinois[16]): “Count with understanding and recognize “how many” in small sets up to 5.” There is identical language in the WSS, similar language in the 2015 Head Start Framework, and this standard is noted to be correlated to Common Core.

Social Skills (Minnesota[17]): “Displays concern, respect, care, and appreciation for others and the environment” “This very subjective standard on “concern” or “empathy” is found in many state standards, the WSS, and the current Head Start Framework.

Social Studies (Florida[18]):  “Make sure your three year-old has access to books and other materials that show diversity in family composition and in careers.” This family structure diversity issue, again, regardless of one’s views, is controversial and difficult enough for adults to navigate and it should be up to each family to decide how to manage the discussion.  Although no longer in the 2015 Head Start Framework, it is definitely important to the national organization:

One Head Start document on family engagement said the following: “THE TERM “FAMILY” is used to convey all of the people that may play both a parenting a role in a child’s life and a partnering role with HS/EHS staff. This includes fathers, mothers, grandparents, kith and kin caregivers, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgendered) parents, guardians, expectant parents, teen parents, and families with diverse structures that include multiple relationships with significant others.”[19] The Florida standards define family as “a group of individuals living together.”

An HHS blog recommended using “Inclusive intake and enrollment forms that are not specific about the gender of parents and caregivers” in order to make GLBT families feel more welcome.[20]

The noble sounding prohibitions “in this part [Sec. 5902(g)]” on federal interference with “early learning and development guidelines, standards, or specific assessments, including the standards or measures that States use to develop, implement, or improve such guidelines, standards, or assessments;” or anything to do with what determines the designation of “high quality” is at best worthless and at worst quite disingenuous.  This is because this bill already requires the states to comply, align, and coordinate with the major federal programs, Head Start and CCDBG, that mandate or strongly incentivize either  federal or state standards and the quality rating system that also requires these very problematic standards.  The ELC grants have also had the same effect, because states changed policy regarding the standards, curriculum, and the rating systems to win them. Finally, there is no enforcement mechanism behind the prohibition.

The student data collection and invasions of privacy already occurring with P20W longitudinal data systems are particularly frightening in the early childhood realm because of the greater emphasis on social emotional and developmental issues as well as efforts to integrate this data with prenatal medical data and then integrate it with K-12 data:

“Rhode Island’s proposed early learning data system will be linked to both the state’s K-12 data system and to the state’s universal newborn screening [genetic] and health data system, helping to identify children with high needs, track participation in programs, and track children’s development and learning.” (Emphasis added)[21]

There is also a national effort going on to integrate Head Start data with every other type of preschool data and K-12 data.[22]

This provision is also of dubious value due to cost issues, especially when the national debt level is so high.  The authorization for appropriations for this new nanny state program is the extremely vague and always alarming “such sums as may be necessary for each of fiscal years 2016 through 2021 [Sec. 5903].” The income eligibility for participants in this program is absurdly extravagant for median income only requiring that “family assets do not exceed $1,000,000 (as certified by a member of such family) [Section 5901(b)(2)(B)(iii) - Emphasis added].

Due to this unconstitutional, invasive, and expensive expansion of federal control that will further harm states’ rights, parental autonomy, and the innocence and privacy of young children without any benefit, the Early Learning Alignment and Improvement grants within ECAA, as well as the entire underlying bill, should be rejected.

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[6] Head Start Act Compilation – Section 642B(a)(2)(A) says that when giving out “collaboration grants,” the national Head Start offices will work with “entities that carry out activities designed to benefit low-income children from birth to school entry, and their families.

[7] Section 642B(a)(2)(B)(iii), which says, “promote alignment of curricula used in Head Start programs and continuity of services with the Head Start Child Outcomes Framework and, as appropriate, State early learning standards,” is just one example.

[10] Effrem, K. – Psychosocial Manipulation in the Common Core Standards and Aligned Tests and Curriculum, 2/12/2015 http://bit.ly/1AElgkm

[11] CCDBG – Section 658G(b)(3)

[12] Minnesota admitted in its ELC application, “Minnesota’s Early Learning and Development Standards (called the Early Childhood Indicators of Progress, or ECIPs-see C1) for children birth to five are at the foundation of [Parent] Aware. Parent Aware Program Standards require that instruction and assessment be aligned with the ECIPs and the ratings are built on the ECIPs, which function like a scaffold. For example, ELD Programs must ensure that their staff members are familiar with the ECIPs before earning 1 star, and to reach 3 or 4 stars requires both familiarity with the ECIPs and also alignment of curriculum and assessment with them.” (Emphasis added)  http://unitedfrontmn.org/minnesotaracetothetopapplication/files/B1.pdf  pp. 2-3 of PDF

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Tell Congress to VOTE NO on HR 5 and SB 1177...
  http://edlibertywatch.org/2015/06/1294/

Student Psychological Profiling in Federal Education Legislation, Testing, & Policy

Karen R. Effrem, MD – President of Education Liberty Watch & Executive Director of the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition

Uncle Sam is lately wearing a white coat and placing American students on the psychiatrist’s couch. The number of federal education bills, tests, programs and other policies promoting indoctrination and assessment of affective attitudes, beliefs, “mindsets,” “non-cognitive skills” and other non-academic traits is rapidly and alarmingly proliferating.  Here are the most recent and very concerning examples:

1)      The Every Child Achieves Act (S 1177) – This is the 792 page Senate version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization.  Some of the many examples of federal expansion of mental health screening in the schools include:

Training teachers who are not mental health professionals to mentally screen student

Doing special education (IDEA)-style behavioral monitoring and intervention school-wide without delineation between observation, suggestion, and treatment nor clear methods of parental consent and privacy protection for behavioral information.

The federal government is promoting the concept that schools taking on the functions of families and physicians by paying for schools to provide mental health care
They are even putting mental health in physical education

2)      The Student Success Act (HR 5) – The House version of the ESEA/NCLB reauthorization expands affective testing by omission instead of commission and also continues mental health programs for certain groups:

The rewrite of the section that discusses state standards, assessments and accountability leaves out the key protection that prohibits the federally mandated state tests that “evaluate or assess personal or family beliefs and attitudes.”  This was one of the few good pieces of language in No Child Left Behind.
Title I funding includes funding for coordination of all sorts of health and social services, including mental health.

3)      The Strengthening Education Through Research Act (SETRA – S 227)

The Senate reauthorization bill for the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) that houses the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress also plans to allow “research on social emotional learning.” (See Section 132)  The 2002 reauthorization of this bill gave us the scourge of the state longitudinal databases and was extremely problematic at the time.

4)      Measuring Psychological Variables in the NAEP

Education Week reports that The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) intends to start collecting affective survey data on students who take the test in 2017:

“The nation’s premiere federal testing program is poised to provide a critical window into how students’ motivation, mindset, and grit can affect their learning… The background survey will include five core areas—grit, desire for learning, school climate, technology use, and socioeconomic status—of which the first two focus on a student’s noncognitive skills, and the third looks at noncognitive factors in the school. These core areas would be part of the background survey for all NAEP test-takers. In addition, questions about other noncognitive factors, such as self-efficacy and personal achievement goals, may be included…”

5)      A summary of the grant proposals in the preschool version of Race to the Top, called the Early Learning Challenge, had various states boasting about how they would profile and monitor our babies:

“California will offer additional provider training in assessing social – emotional learning and ensure greater access to developmental and behavioral screenings.”

“The state’s (Minnesota) existing birth-to-five child development standards will be aligned with K-12 standards, which will be expanded to include non-academic developmental domains for children ages five to 12.”

6)      A Federal  Register notice of a grant program called the Middle Grades Longitudinal Study is described and seeks to add social emotional assessment:

Title of Collection: Middle Grades Longitudinal Study of 2016-2017 (MGLS:2017) Item Validation and Operational Field Tests.

Abstract: The Middle Grades Longitudinal Study of 2016-2017 (MGLS:2017) is the first study sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), within the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education (ED), to follow a nationally-representative sample of students as they enter and move through the middle grades (grades 6-8). The data collected through repeated measures of key constructs will provide a rich descriptive picture of the academic experiences and development of students during these critical years and  allow researchers to examine associations between contextual factors and student outcomes. The study will focus on student achievement in mathematics and literacy along with measures of student socioemotional wellbeing and other outcomes.

The problems with these proposals and efforts are numerous, both from the policy and medical/scientific viewpoints.  Here are just a few:

1)     These measures set up the federal government as arbiters of what is normal thought, behavior, belief, attitudes, and values in children, even very young children – The danger of this situation to freedom of thought and conscience is profound and cannot be over stated.  There is recent history of attempts to make racism and homophobia delusional disorders treated by antipsychotics in the most recent version of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5).  That “treatment” was forced on California state prison inmates in 2005 under that paradigm.  Extreme racism and homophobia were ultimately not added to the DSM, but given the widespread teaching of the issue, even in preschool an kindergarten coupled with the new Supreme Court ruling on same sex marriage and statements by activists who want to attack expressions of religious conscience regarding homosexual unions as prejudice,  there is more than a little reason to be concerned.

2)     These socioemotional standards and assessments are extraordinarily vague, subjective, and difficult to apply to children, especially young children.  Here are some examples of expert opinion (See Child Mental Health Quotes and References for details):

“Without highly reliable, multimethod, multiinformant measurement batteries whose validity has been demonstrated for diagnosis, it will be difficult for a practitioner to justify the individual diagnosis of children’s personal qualities, such as self-control, grit, or growth mind-set,” was in an essay by two researchers that admit that the assessments are not valid and ready to be used for judging children, teachers and schools.

“At present, most psychiatric disorders lack validated diagnostic biomarkers, and although considerable advances are being made in the arena of neurobiology, psychiatric diagnoses are still mostly based on clinician assessment.” [Translation: Psychiatric diagnosis is an educated guess.]

“Broad parameters for determining socioemotional outcomes are not clearly defined”

“Childhood and adolescence being developmental phases, it is difficult to draw clear boundaries between phenomena that are part of normal development and others that are abnormal.”

3)     Socioemotional standards and screenings are leading to overmedication with psychotropic medication that can have brain damaging and life threatening side effects – Studies are finding alarming increases in medication of young children without adequate studies on the effects of these drugs on growing bodies and brains.  The drugs can cause suicidal thoughts and actions, violence, psychosis, stunted growth, brain damage, and a 25 year shortened life span.

4)     Data from these subjective assessments will be in an electronic dossier that will follow a child for life – The federal government already has much data due to contracts like PARCC and SBAC that require individually identifiable data to be given to the US DOE, through the linking of federally mandated state longitudinal databases, and via the regulatory gutting of Family Education Rights and Privacy Act.  Parents greatly opposed the InBloom database held by private entities and there is no evidence that this contained socioemotional data.  Wait until many parents understand how routinely their children’s minds will be probed.  In addition, given the willful misuse of citizen data by the IRS and NSA, and the inability of the federal government to protect the integrity of its employees’ data, there is plenty of reason for parents to be upset.  Also, at some point employers and universities will have or demand access to this data.

5)     Belatedly putting in parental consent requirements will not make profiling via academic assessments or routine mental screening in schools acceptable – We have already seen how the prohibitions on psychological assessment in the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA) are sidestepped and the gaping loophole of the statute not applying to assessments and curriculum. The notion of parental consent will be used as a fig leaf to assuage concerns long enough for the government or corporations to figure out a way sidestep the rules.  Asking consent for something that is so constitutionally, legally and ethically wrong does not make it right.

6)     The rapidity and scope by which the Constitution, federal law, ethics, and parental autonomy are being shredded is breathtaking and very alarming, particularly with this issue – Parents are expected to submit their children to this kind of government profiling and psychological experimentation with no explanation, no way to express concern or opt their children out, no way to see the federally mandated academic statewide assessments , the NAEP or any of the international assessments that do much of this profiling to find out what was asked of their children.  Federal law currently prohibits federal government involvement in regular curriculum and standards, but somehow it is now fine for the federal government to mandate and support the assessment or screening or teaching of socioemotional topics, because they want to assess something that is ostensibly a positive trait or this will have an alleged benefit for a child?  This defies logic.

Short of shutting down the US Department of Education or at least the Institute for Education Sciences that houses the National Center for Education Statistics, the data mining and emotional profiling arm of the US DOE, we can halt the ESEA/NCLB and other federal legislative reauthorizations until there is an administration that is not so in favor of Common Core, expansive federal control, testing, profiling, and data mining.  The other very important and practical thing to do is to support Senator David Vitter’s Student Privacy Protection Act (SPPA) as a stand-alone bill. Data privacy and freedom of conscience are too important for this bill to be lost and eventually watered down in the monstrous reauthorization bills. This is the only legislation offered that truly protects against the psychological profiling described here while updating and strengthening FERPA from all of the weakening that happened during this administration. Our children deserve nothing less.

[NOTE:  A fully referenced and more detailed version of this article in PDF format is available at this link: Student Psychological Profiling in Federal Education Legislation - Footnoted]

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http://www.edchoice.org/Blog/June-2015/Breaking-Down-the--2015-Schooling-in-America-Surve.aspx

Breaking Down the "2015 Schooling in America Survey"

With the close of another school year and a blossoming of expansive school choice programs this year comes curiosity about the progress of K–12 education in the United States.

Is it advancing? Is it going well? How might it improve?

Our recently released 2015 Schooling in America Survey aims to tap public opinion to answer those questions and more. For an at-a-glance summary of survey top lines, click through the helpful slide show below. 
 

Some key points you will find in the slide show include the following: 

• One out of six people people rank education as the No. 1 issue facing America.
• Americans give low ratings to the federal government’s performance in K–12 education
• Very few Americans know how much we spend per pupil on K–12 education. 
• A significant number of public school parents give low grades to their public schools.
• Actual enrollment numbers do not reflect American’s school type preferences.
• About twice as many Americans support school vouchers than oppose them.
• Americans’ top two reasons for supporting vouchers are “access to schools having better academics” and “more freedom and flexibility for parents.”
• The top reason people say they oppose school vouchers is that they “divert funding away from public schools” (See the slide show above for our take on this data point.)
• A majority of Americans think education savings accounts should be universal.
• Most public school parents report their children spending 16 days or more in standardized testing.
• Common Core State Standards are a polarizing topic. Half of Americans support them and the other half oppose or did not know about them. 

Schooling in America is an annual project, commissioned by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice and conducted by Braun Research, Inc. (BRI). For more information on public opinions, methodology, and more, please download the full report on our website at edchoice.org/NationalSurvey2015.
 

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