http://eagnews.org/south-dakota-drops-teaching-high-schoolers-about-american-revolution-founding-documents/

South Dakota drops teaching high schoolers about American revolution, founding documents

PIERRE, S.D. – North Dakota students may or may not learn about the first 100 years of America’s history.

Important topics like the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War and the framing of the U.S. Constitution may simply be ignored by teachers under new history standards approved by the state’s board of education last Monday, the Argus Leader reports.

Current standards do not allow history teachers to delve into topics before the Civil War, so the new standards open up the door but don’t require teachers to cover early American history, as many would have preferred. The recently adopted history standards are set to take effect in 2016-17 school year and whittle the current standards from 117 pages to 44.

“Our current history standards do not even give an option as to whether it’s comprehensive or modern,” board president Don Kirkegaard told the news site. “It’s strictly modern.”

The board decision concludes a yearlong public hearing process plagued by parental protests over the history question as well as opposition to Common Core social studies and science standards.

As part of that process, numerous history processors from virtually all of the state’s large universities sent a letter to the school board explaining why they believe that not requiring students to learn early American history will be a serious problem, both for higher education and the state in general.

“Incoming freshmen arrive unprepared for history because they aren’t learning early American history at the high school level, according to the letter, which was signed by instructors from (Dakota State University,) University of South Dakota, South Dakota State University, Northern State University, Augustana College, Presentation College, the University of Sioux Falls and Black Hills State University,” the Argus Leader reports.

“And the problem isn’t just a matter of college freshmen being ready to discuss Thomas Paine at a university level. A sound understanding of history and civics can help them when they’re in the voting booth, watching the news and making life decisions,” according to Dakota State University dean Ben Jones.

“It’s disabling their citizenship,” he said.

Harrisburg School District Secondary Curriculum Director Michael Amolins seems to agree.

“I think progress helps our students prepare for the 21^st Century. So rather than just having them memorize a list of historical events on a time line, we’re trying to get them to use that information in context so that when they’re looking at current events they can make good informed decisions as citizens and voters,” he told KSFY.

Augustana history professor Michael Mullin told the site “history really isn’t about yesterday.

“History is really about understanding today. And I think they forgot that,” he said of the decision to make early American history optional. “They just want to think about today but without a context.”

The Argus Leader’s editorial board also chastised state board members for their vote, and urged them to “step back and take another look at this.”

From the news site’s Saturday editorial:

Ben Jones, dean and associate professor of history at Dakota State University, has said he and his colleagues are “astounded by the level of ignorance” of U.S. history that they see in freshmen.

But there are other important reasons to teach high school students about our nation’s early history.

Constitutional topics are common in today’s political debate and students without a solid understanding and who do not have the appropriate level of context for these discussions are at a disadvantage. As citizens, we need to understand our rights and duties as well as appreciate how they came to be.

The Constitution is referenced in nearly every important election campaign. The separation of church and state, religious and press freedoms, the 2nd Amendment and gun rights are all popular political topics of our time. But without an understanding and appreciation of the early debates on these matters, young citizens are not able to accurately assess Constitutional protections and threats. Rhetoric and misinformation can easily fill the void.

From Around The Web

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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/31/conservative-victory-on-ap-us-history-framework-not-so-fast/

CONSERVATIVE VICTORY ON AP US HISTORY FRAMEWORK? NOT SO FAST

Last week, Danniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, cited recent changes the College Board made to the Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) framework as a “victory” for conservatives. Experts on the framework, however, think that is quite a stretch.

Henninger asserts in his editorial that the College Board – which is led by its president, David Coleman, known to many as the “architect” of the Common Core Standards – has ditched its left-wing bias in its APUSH framework as a result of conservative backlash, an outcome Henninger describes as “an important political event.”

In May of 2014, Breitbart News contributors Jane Robbins, senior fellow of American Principles Project, and retired APUSH teacher Larry Krieger wrote about the College Board’s replacement of the traditional framework with one in which “George Washington gets one brief mention; other founders, such as Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, none.”

“The Declaration of Independence is referred to in passing in one clause of one sentence,” they continued. “The redesigned Framework inculcates a consistently negative view of American history by highlighting oppressors and exploiters while ignoring the dreamers and innovators who built our country.”

As Henninger aptly describes, the College Board’s APUSH framework “read like a left-wing dream. Obsession with identity, gender, class, crimes against the American Indian and the sins of capitalism suffused the proposed guidelines for teachers of AP American history.”

However, Henninger seems overwhelmed with the changes made this year by Coleman’s team.

“The College Board delivered on its promise,” he writes. “The new guidelines, which convey an understanding of American history to thousands of high-school students, are about as balanced as one could hope for.”

His announcement that the left-wing “tilt” in the guidelines has “vanished,” and that the rewritten framework is now “almost a model of political fair-mindedness,” is very much an overstatement to those who have been warning Americans about the dangers of liberal indoctrination of the nation’s young people and its consequences for the nation itself.

As Henninger notes, Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and contributing editor to National Review Online, has pressed for competition to the College Board, which has enjoyed a monopoly on the APUSH. Fears over calls for other testing companies to come up with an APUSH framework likely have led the College Board to make some changes that can be perceived as having responded to the conservative outcry.

Kurtz tells Breitbart News that while he agrees the APUSH battle is one of the few that has put the left on the defensive, the left-wing “tilt” of the framework has not “vanished.”

“I emphatically disagree that the recently revised AP U.S. history framework is a true victory for conservatives,” Kurtz states. “Yes, the College Board has removed the most biased phrases from the framework, and even thrown in a brief good word or two about the free enterprise system. But the changes are largely cosmetic.”

Kurtz continues:

The framework remains focused on trendy leftist themes like gender identity and environmentalism, rather than traditional themes like military or diplomatic history. More important, AP U.S. history textbooks and course syllabi have already been conformed to the controversial 2014 framework. There are no plans to change them again. Even if there were, there are really no significant changes to be made since the new framework simply removes a few controversial statements and does not insert fundamentally new themes. The real intentions of the College Board are revealed by the brand new AP European history framework, which shares all the leftist biases of the original 2014 AP U.S. history framework.

Similarly, Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), explains that while he understands some want to declare a “conservative victory,” he views whatever changes the College Board made only as “a battle won in a long war.”

“The College Board played this beautifully,” Wood tells Breitbart News, and continues:

It made lots of conspicuous concessions of the sort that would persuade many smart, observant people that APUSH had been restored to mainstream ideas and good historical judgments. Dan Henninger is not alone in declaring it a conservative victory. There are also liberal and centrist academic historians (e.g. KC Johnson) who are breathing a big sigh of relief. And it is telling that historians who are on the radical left are upset that their 2014 APUSH victory has been snatched back.

Wood said he spoke to Coleman before the College Board released its latest APUSH revision.

“I want to give credit where credit is due,” he said, adding,

The College Board went through the whole 2014 document and attempted to scrub the political tendentious phrases, the silly identity-politics-style posturing, the sneers directed at conservatives and traditionalists, and the wild imbalance between favored progressive themes and disfavored traditional themes.

“But, unfortunately, there is a lot more to fixing the problem than this,” Wood asserts, citing, as Kurtz did, the problem that the standards are part of a larger initiative that includes the AP examinations, the textbooks, and teacher instruction.

“None of those other things have been changed,” Wood emphasizes. “That means the students taking APUSH are going to be tested on the 2014 standards. The new 2015 standards are, at least for the next several years, window-dressing.”

The problem is not much different from what has taken place with the Common Core standards initiative, and the method is likely one that Coleman borrowed from his experience in developing the nationalized reform, one that has grown tremendously unpopular even while it remains ingrained in public school classrooms.

Proponents of the Common Core initiative frequently demean its opponents, arguing Common Core is “just standards” and nothing more. In fact, the Common Core is far more than standards: it includes federally funded tests aligned with the standards, expensive textbooks and instructional materials, teacher training and rigid guidelines, massive student data collection, and teacher evaluation based on student performance on the tests aligned with the standards.

In states where the Common Core “standards” have been “repealed,” replacement standards are often little more than carbon copies or “rebrands” of Common Core. Similarly, some states, like Wisconsin, allow school districts to choose whatever standards they like – except that the required state standardized test is still aligned to the Common Core, making it highly unlikely that school districts would change out their entire curriculum and textbooks for other standards when their students will still be assessed based on the Common Core test.

How can Coleman and the College Board, then, really wipe far-left ideology out of the APUSH when the examinations students take, their textbooks, and the training their teachers receive still are operating under it?

“The only lasting solution to this problem is the creation of a company, advised by top traditionalist scholars, that can compete directly with the College Board,” argues Kurtz. “The College Board is desperately afraid of such competition, and such changes as it has made are only efforts to avoid that threat.”

“If we make the mistake of prematurely declaring victory, we will kill off the chance to restore true intellectual competition and local choice to education,” he adds. “And once the College Board is secure in its monopoly, it will be completely in the control of the leftist professors who already advise it and determine its basic direction.”

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/05/08/lessons-in-a-trash-can-teaching-kids-how-to-manage-earths-resources/

Lessons in a trash can: Teaching kids how to manage Earth’s resources

Student Keelan Bell holding a Clarke Middle School chicken (Photo by Debbie Mitchell)

How will young people become the leaders that society needs to adapt to environmental change? That’s the question that Wick Pritchard,  a VISTA volunteer at Clarke Middle School in Athens, Georgia, asks and answers in the following post. Clarke is a high-needs, high-achieving traditional public school serving a very diverse population in a district committed to equity and opportunity.

By Wick Pritchard

How will our present middle-school students become the leaders that society needs to adapt to environmental change? At Clarke Middle School in Athens, Georgia,, we are betting on resource management. We believe that schools can cultivate environmental awareness in their students by focusing on managing the resources around them. We have chosen three school settings to pilot this idea: the school vegetable garden, the family and consumer science kitchen, and the cafeteria trash can.

You can learn a lot by looking in the cafeteria garbage can, which I have been doing for the past school year. Your perspective of sustainability will change. You will discover that it is difficult for our students to stop for the tiniest moment to separate the recyclable and compostable items on their lunch tray from items that go to the landfill. And you will see waste: one day, 73 Chiquita bananas, bright yellow, entirely unblemished — and untouched by  students.

As an AmeriCorps VISTA, I fight poverty in the United States. One manner in which I do this is by teaching  young people how to manage the planet’s resources. Before my year of service as an AmeriCorps VISTA, I completed a masters’ degree in environmental planning and design while working on the Tybee Island Sea Level Rise Adaptation Plan. Last month I was shocked when a report surfaced that oceans along the U.S. East Coast rose four inches between 2009 and 2010. This rapid spike in sea level rise was described by climate scientists as a “1-in-850-year event” or in other terms “very extreme” and “unprecedented.” Global climate change contributed to this event.

Events like the spike in sea level rise, coupled with my trashcan observations, underscore the need to educate our young people in how to handle environmental change. Here’s what we are doing at Clarke Middle School to help achieve this:

The garden. Three years ago, Clarke Middle School Principal Tad MacMillan not only greenlighted a school vegetable garden; he also started a plan that would spin sustainability into the school ethos using a school garden as the engine. Collaborating with the University of Georgia Office of Service-Learning and UGArden (the University of Georgia’s student teaching garden), Clarke Middle School planted a garden right in front of the school.

This garden was our first area of attack in our fight to teach our students to manage their resources wisely. Because most of our students live in an urban area, they lack an awareness of gardens let alone natural ecosystems. Due to this fact, we use the school garden as a jumping off point for environmental awareness. Literally.

Four students are jumping over garden rows, the baby plants cowering from death by sneaker. These students and their classmates are in the garden to transplant collard and kale starts they grew in the school greenhouse. Dr. Mitchell, the school agriculture science teacher, places their activity into context. “Many of our students operate on a first grade awareness of a garden (thus the jumping),” she says. “In the past, kids were able to learn about gardens in their family garden,” she adds, “but now most of them have had no contact whatsoever with gardening. The more time they spend in the garden, however, the more they will learn about the makeup of garden.”

She allocates at least 10 minutes of each class period for garden work and garden related activities such as feeding the school chickens. Over the course of this year, I have indeed seen students learn their place in the garden, walking between garden beds not in them, high-stepping over garden beds not stomping them.

Without access, our students do not have the opportunity to form meaningful relationships with the natural world. They have no inner contextual map of their place within it. With no relationship how can we assume that they will attach value to the environment? At Clarke Middle we believe a school vegetable garden is a great starting point for students to plant a relationship with the natural world.

The kitchen. We chose the kitchen as our second area of attack to teach resource management. “Can we cook today?” the students plead. Baking powder, sugar, and salt are added to flour. Butter is cut into the mixture and milk added. Biscuits are rolled, patted, and cut out. A student reflects, “I don’t have to go to the Golden Pantry on Saturday mornings any more. Now I’ll make my own biscuits.”

Whether Hope Zimmerman, the school family and consumer science teacher, is introducing taste buds to arugula from the school garden or scratch biscuits, she is teaching our students to draw a map of the resources that keep all of us fed. This map includes the knowledge that preparing food from scratch can be inexpensive and nutritious as well as tasty. It can also help connect students to a time period other than their own, to a time when grandparents made apple sauce at home.

“Oh, no, we must use the peeler,” Mrs. Zimmerman politely demands. “Something happens when the students start using the peeler,” she says, “and I like it. I stop being the teacher. They stop being the students. They become community members, sharing stories about their grandparents and the food they prepare. They are focused, attentive.”

The apples Mrs. Zimmerman and her students use to make apple sauce have come from the school cafeteria. Since students cannot return uneaten apples on their trays to the kitchen, they have become accustomed to tossing them into the trash. Now our students are learning to divert their uneaten fruit, unopened cartons of milk, and unopened bags of carrots to the family and consumer science classroom where these trash bound items are transformed into ingredients for food labs.

Without practice in managing resources, our students will build few skills to manage any type of resource be that food related, environmental, or financial. Without management skills, how can we expect them to make choices that will have a positive impact on their future social and natural environments? Cooking from scratch in a family consumer science classroom is a perfect environment for learning about resource management.

The trash can. Back to the trash can, our third point of attack to teach resource management. In the trash I find roasted cauliflower, fresh broccoli florets, entire uneaten baked sweet potatoes, cups of guacamole. It doesn’t stop there. I even see unopened ice cream in the trash. But this picture is changing.

From November to December of 2014, our students diverted from the trash: 767 pounds of compost, 299 pounds of recycling, 260 bananas, 249 oranges, 341 apples, 207 unopened cartons of milk, 131 unopened cartons of juice, and much more. And we are not stopping. At last count we were nearing 2,000 pounds in compost collected.

At Clarke Middle School we are connecting our garden to our kitchen to our trashcans to our classrooms to our environment to our society. We are starting to manage our resources more wisely and gaining ground in the fight against environmental degradation. We are building a relationship between our students and the ecosystems that support society so that in the future our students will be able to manage not just a concept in a book but a living system they understand, perhaps even love.

As one of our sixth-graders told me while working in the compost pile, “We don’t need another Dust Bowl.”

Sent from my iPhone

Science and Social Studies Standardsp

The Georgia Department of Education is conducting a review of the Science and Social Studies K-12 Standards.  This process began over the 2015 summer with a survey of over 18,000 K-12 educators. The educator survey has closed, and results are being analyzed. In addition to the educator survey, the Department welcomes comments from family members, community members, business representatives, and professionals in this survey.

In addition to the educator survey results, these survey results will be offered to a working committee that consists of educators from K-12 and higher education as they revise the standards. The final version of the revised standards will go through a period of public review and comment in the Spring of 2016.

Note that Georgia’s K-12 standards provide a general guide for what content knowledge and skills students are expected to learn. Standards are not meant to dictate instructional strategies or programs. Those are local decisions.

This survey will be open from August 10, 2015, until Tuesday, September 15, 2015, at midnight (12:00 a.m. EST).

Thank you for providing your voice in the standards revision process.

Science and Social Studies Standards

Click on the following links to access the current course descriptors:

> Science
> Social Studies

Access all the grade level and course standards below.

Surveys for Science and Social Studies Standards

After you have reviewed the standards, please click on the link below to access a survey to provide your feedback:

> Survey for Feedback of the Science and Social Studies Georgia Performance Standards

Science Standards	Social Studies Standards
Kindergarten	Kindergarten
Grade 1	Grade 1
Grade 2	Grade 2
Grade 3	Grade 3
Grade 4	Grade 4
Grade 5	Grade 5
Grade 6	Grade 6
Grade 7	Grade 7
Grade 8	Grade 8
Biology	American Government/Civics
Chemistry	Economics
Earth Systems	Psychology
Environmental Science	Sociology
Physical Science	United States History
Physics	World Geography
	World History

contract is called “Investing in Educational Excellence”, or IE2

May Kay Bacallao warns of continued Federal and Corporate control of American education:

http://www.educationalfreedomcoalition.com/ie2-investing-in-educational-excellence/

Don't Do It!

The Fayette County School Board is about to enter into a contract with the appointed Georgia State Board of Education as of June 15, 2015.  I am writing this letter to warn the citizens of Fayette County.  Don’t do it! It is a trick. The contract is called “Investing in Educational Excellence”, or IE². The contract is based on meeting CCRPI score targets.  The CCRPI (College and Career Performance Readiness Index) allots points for initiatives from the U.S. Department of Education such as PBIS (Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports), the completion of Career Pathways (workforce development over academics), the AP and IB program (initiatives that dictate what is taught and tested in advanced classes), strict adherence to lower level grade specific standards in math (Common Core), and many other programs.  The CCRPI scores are calculated by the U.S. Department of Education.  The percentages and categories for points have been adjusted annually by the U.S. Department of Education.  The scores were contrived so that they would decrease each year, even with the same test scores.  Look at Fayette County’s scores in 2013 and 2014.  Notice that the average score at each level dropped.  This did not happen because absolute student achievement on standardized tests decreased.  The target scores increase each year, so the test scores would have to increase for the scores to stay the same.  As the scores continue to drop, the schools will look for ways to earn extra CCRPI points.  They will embrace any and every initiative of the U.S. Department of Education.  The Fayette County superintendent wants to place a PBIS representative at every school.  Why?  He wants those CCRPI points from the U.S. DOE.  PBIS is behavior modification for students.  CCRPI is behavior modification for school officials.  To avoid being taken over by the Opportunity School District, schools need to score a 60 on the CCRPI.  But according to HB 441, which did not pass this year, Charter and IE² schools would have needed an 80 on the CCRPI to keep local control.

What’s in it for Fayette County?  Our local Board of Education would be able to waive certain state laws. But the laws they will be able to waive are the ones that benefit students. 

1. Class size maximums- Why would citizens, parents, and students want larger classes than the law allows?

2. According to state law, 65% or more of the budget must be spent on instruction.  After closing 4 schools, the percent of the budget spent on instruction actually decreased in Fayette County!  Why would anyone want to spend less than 65% on instruction?

3. The state has a base teacher salary schedule based on years of experience and education.  Local school systems go beyond that base schedule and pay teachers more than the minimum.  This contract would allow local school systems to pay teachers less than the state minimum for years of experience and education.  Local school systems are already permitted to pay teachers more than the minimum required by law. 

4. Certified teachers- the contract would allow the school system to hire non-certified teachers.  Some may disagree about the value of a certified teacher over a non-certified teacher, but research has shown that students with certified teachers perform better than students with non-certified teachers.  This is already happening in other districts with programs such as Teach for America and the increased hiring of guest teachers who are not U.S. citizens and do not have to be certified.

In these next few weeks you will read about the FCBOE budget and how they want to spend $20,000,000 more for fewer students.  As the arguments about taxes go back and forth, know that the FCBOE already voted to enter into a contract with the State BOE so they will have the FLEXIBILITY to do whatever they want with the money.  They may tell you they will use the money to reduce class size, or pay teachers more, but they won’t have to do that because they voted to exempt themselves from those aspects of state law. In exchange for this FLEXIBILITY, they will have to do whatever the U.S. Department of Education wants them to do to get CCRPI points so Fayette County schools will not be taken over by the appointed State Board of Education.  Details about these bills can be found atwww.EducationalFreedomCoalition.com

A Comparison of Fayette County CCRPI Scores

Fayette County School	2013	2014	Change
Bennett's Mill Middle	94.4	81.9	-12.5
Booth Middle	88.9	90.4	1.5
Rising Starr Middle	93.8	92.6	-1.2
Fayette Middle	83.9
Flat Rock Middle	84.4	82.9	-1.5
Whitewater Middle	91.2	88.1	-3.1
Brooks Elem.	90.1
Brelinn Elem.	90.2	91.7	1.5
Cleveland Elem.	84.6	80.1	-4.5
Crabapple Elem.	93	90.9	-2.1
Fayette Intermediate	83.6
Fayetteville Elem.		82.4
Huddleston Elem.	88.3	83.5	-4.8
Hood Avenue Primary	90.8
Inman Elem.	89.5	86.9	-2.6
Kedron  Elem.	95.3	93.4	-1.9
North Fayette Elem.	74.7	79.5	4.8
Oak Grove Elem.	89.3	90	0.7
Peachtree City Elem.	94.9	93.2	-1.7
Peeples Elem.	94.8	95.4	0.6
Robert J. Burch Elem.	82.1	76.9	-5.2
Sara Harp Minter Elem.	87.5	90.3	2.8
Spring Hill Elem.	85.6	79.4	-6.2
Tyrone Elem.	93.2
Fayette County High	78.3	71.9	-6.4
McIntosh High	91.9	92.9	1
Sandy Creek High	75.5	72.9	-2.6
Starrs Mill High	90.1	85.4	-4.7
Whitewater High	84.8	84.5	-0.3
Total	88.025	85.7125	-8
Elementary Average	88.67647	86.68571	-1.43077
Middle School Average	89.43333	86.95	-3.36
High School Average	84.12	81.52	-2.6

Details on the three choices

Consequences of Flexibility
Everyone really needs to read this presentation. Remember, the CCRPI scores are about more than just academics. The CCRPI rates adherence to lower level standards for teaching that are too grade specific, with points for unproven programs from the U.S. DOE. In addition, the CCRPI scores were designed to decrease every year, even with the exact same test score results. Paulding's application promises that CCRPI scores will increase or the schools will face sanctions. The future of our schools is uncertain under any plan except "Status Quo."
DOE IE2 Charter and Status Quo Presentat
Microsoft Power Point Presentation [333.0 KB]
Download

Example of an IE 2 Contract: Paulding County's IE2 Application

Paulding County's IE2 Draft Contract
Paulding County IE2draft.pdf
Adobe Acrobat Document [1.1 MB]
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