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DNC's failing Common Core exposed by WikiLeaks

After obtaining a recent data dump of hacked emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee (DNC), WikiLeaks exposed the extreme unpopularity of the federal government’s Common Core State Standards … and how the average American voter sides with local — and not federal — control of education.

The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLSA) argues that the latest series of leaked communications between DNC strategists surfaces something that should have already been plain to see for the American public for some time — that the only champions of the Common Core is the federal government and others under its payroll who personally benefit from its implementation.

“Thanks to WikiLeaks … a shining beacon of obviousness has finally entered the election scene,” HSLDA Deputy Director of Federal Relations Andrew Mullins asserted. “[The leaked information serves to confirm in Americans’ minds beyond a doubt that] the Common Core State Standards are deeply unpopular, and local control of education is a winning issue for American voters.”

Hiding problems with the Common Core

Highlighted among the emails divulged by WikiLeaks is one communication written by DNC Deputy Communications Director Eric Walker, where he is seen chastising his colleagues for creating a video that consists of quotes from GOP candidates who condemn the Common Core and its nationwide implementation.

“[The Common Core is] a political third rail that we should not be touching at all,” Walker admonished fellow Democrats. “[I request you to] get rid of [references to local control of education, because] most people want local control of education.”

Mullins says that such reminders and warnings within progressive circles should be expected and frequent as the 2016 presidential election nears — if the Democratic Party wants to have any voting parents left standing in its corner by November.

“It should come as no surprise that the Common Core State Standards are such a toxic issue, given their popularity (on the ‘absolute disdain’ end of the popularity spectrum) with teachers, parents and students,” the legal expert contends. “People associate the Common Core with public humiliation of students, privacy violations and data intrusion.”

But even though the Common Core is opposed by many on both sides of the political spectrum, it continues to dominate public education in an overwhelming majority of states.

“While the Department of Education’s ability to incentivize state adoption of the Common Core with waivers was dealt a blow by the Every Student Succeeds Act, the standards remain in place in many of the states that were original adopters,” Mullins explained. “Consequently, state-by-state withdrawal from the Common Core State Standards remains an ongoing political issue, and is a key concern for parents and advocates.”

Common Core leaving or staying put?

Despite the recent leak — and more and more Americans finding out that the federal government threatens to withhold funding to states who don’t abide by its Common Core standards — Mullins is doubtful that the federalized instruction will be on its way out after votes are cast this fall.

“Will this email leak actually make a difference for education policy in this election?” the homeschooling advocate poses before answering his own question. “In the grand scheme of things, probably not.”

He goes on to tell how the Democratic campaign to stay in control in the White House continues to unabashedly assert that big government should take more control of education and continue its power grab — all the while maintaining that its increased presence in instruction is “for the children.”

“While direct references to the Common Core may be noticeably absent from the Democratic platform, the party’s interest in a one-size-fits-all Federal approach to education remains,” Mullins informed. “On page 32, the platform calls for the federal government to play an expanded role in education — which is exactly how we got the Common Core to begin with.”

The pro-family advocate insists that all parents — regardless of where their children are receiving their instruction — should be mindful of what kind of education their ballots are supporting, come November … and whether they think more government (and less parental) control of education is in the best interests of their children.

“As this election season rolls on, it is important to remember that parents know what is best for the education of their children, whether they attend public school, private school or are educated at home,” Mullins stressed. “The Common Core Standards may be a ‘third rail issue’ right now, but unless we remain alert to the expansive reach of federal control in education, we may have bigger things to worry about than ‘third-rail’ electrocution.”

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Why I regret letting my teen sign up for an AP course

(iStock)

It was 11 p.m., and I was preparing to go to bed, when I noticed the light under my 15-year-old son’s door. “Still awake?” I asked, peeking in.

He was hunched over his desk, his heavy textbook open, surrounded by piles of papers. “AP World History,” he said wearily.

He did not need to elaborate.

When my son registered to take an Advanced Placement class during his sophomore year, I was proud. My boy had done well as a freshman at his public school, and now he felt responsible enough to commit to an additional degree of academic rigor.

I did not understand what he was getting into. The rural high school I attended offered no AP options, but course work on the undergraduate level would surely boost the educational opportunities for my son at his decent — but not outstanding — big city school. The classes would give him college credit, allow him to explore advanced academics and provide a preview of what was ahead.

A few months into the school year, I’m wondering whether I was wrong to let him sign up. Had I done some research, I might have discovered a 2013 Stanford study reviewing the literature on AP, which concluded that parental assumptions like mine are often unfounded. Yes, ideally, AP classes enhance the standard high school curriculum, but because the AP experience differs widely from school to school, and is dependent primarily on the skill of individual teachers, it’s impossible to predict whether a student will benefit. Not all colleges give credit for AP courses, the Stanford researchers found. Although students who opt for AP tend to do better in college, it’s unclear whether their success results from the courses, or simply reflects these students’ higher level of academic motivation.

My misgivings started when the homework began to pile up. I knew my son would have a lot of material to cover — the syllabus had been explicit about the required reading. But most of his homework seemed to consist of filling in charts. Night after night, I watched him spend hours scanning the pages of his textbook for relevant facts about ancient civilizations. He was not reading to learn but simply to plug correct bits of information into appropriate boxes.

“But you talk about this stuff in class, right?” I asked him. “You discuss the Code of Hammurabi, and all that?”

No, he told me, they did not. They took notes from the teacher’s slideshow presentations.

This did not remind me of college.

I graduated from an academically rigorous liberal arts school. In my freshman humanities class, I read a book a week: philosophy, literature, biographies, social science. But my classmates and I did not spend our time charting the number of syllables in Emily Dickinson’s poems or listing all the noble houses in Ssu-ma Chien’s chronicle of Chinese history. We were asked to think critically, raise questions, cite relevant passages and discuss a work’s implications in the wider world.

Nothing like that appeared to be taking place in my son’s AP history class. But I kept my mouth shut.

“I would enjoy learning about this,” he told me one night, “if the whole point wasn’t to go through it as fast as possible and then take a kajillion quizzes.”

“I’m sure that’s not the whole point,” I said.

At back-to-school night, I looked forward to meeting the teacher, who would undoubtedly put all this in perspective. Instead, she talked for 15 minutes about tests and grading policies.

At the end, my husband raised his hand. “What’s the main thing you want students to get from this class?” he asked.

I leaned forward expectantly. Now, surely, the teacher would mention an appreciation for the sweep of human history or the importance of an informed perspective on world events.

“Test-taking strategies and study skills,” she said briskly. “That’s the main thing.”

Our boy was right. The whole point really was to pass a regimen of tests and quizzes while hurtling from the prehistoric era to the 21st century. Once I got over that, I appreciated his teacher’s honesty. High school students need study skills. and they are not always taught explicitly. By June, our son should be an expert.

Although the course is not what either of us expected, I admire his diligence on these late nights. He’s learning to manage his time and assimilate information quickly, skills which will undoubtedly serve him well in life. But part of me wishes I had dissuaded him from signing up for the AP class. A college-level class should get kids excited about undergraduate coursework, not turn them off to learning. I worry that after this, he will be reluctant to take another history course. And that would be a shame.

Kate Haas is an editor at Literary Mama. She lives in Portland, Ore.

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Common Core Spending Will Likely Not Bear Any Fruit

September 16, 2016 By Shane Vander Hart 1 Comment

WSKG, an NPR affiliate station, aired an interview with Mindy Kornhaber from Penn State University who was one of the authors of a new study that tracked Common Core spending.

In a nutshell, all of this spending likely won’t impact student achievement.

Some of the interview highlights:

On the Race to the Top competition:

Kornhaber: Within the Race to the Top guidelines, there were five criteria and two of those relate directly to the Common Core. They called for [the use of] common standards and the use of common assessments for which only the Common Core state standards really were available.

On how the money was spent:

Kornhaber: Well, different states used it to get their systems aligned to the Common Core. So they used it in part to get data systems that could track how well kids were doing. They used it in New York State specifically to develop curriculum modules. [They used it] to help districts in some states get access to better professional development that would enable teachers to teach to the new standards and things like that.

On why she likens it to the Gold Rush:

Kornhaber: For the Common Core, teachers and districts and states were asked to mine for better student achievement and to do that, they would need a lot of equipment. They’d need new computers, they’d new data systems, they’d need new curriculum materials, etc. But as in the case of the Gold Rush, most people who went mining in search of gold did not come up with gold.

Jaspers: So you’re saying that despite all of this money being spent, it’s not necessarily going to yield better results. That’s, kind of, your read on the situation?

Kornhaber: Yes. And that read comes from the fact that prior reforms that are similar to the Common Core also did not boost achievement.

A couple of things to mention. First we’ve noted that this was going to be a colossal waste of money, and secondly, this demonstrates that money was spent to develop curriculum at the state level as was the case in New York so let’s dispense with the nonsense that Common Core was just about standards.

Shane Vander Hart is one of the administrators and frequent writer at Truth in American Education and an advocate with this network of grassroots activists this website represents.   He is the editor of Caffeinated Thoughts, a popular conservative Christian multi-contributor website based in Iowa that focuses on state and national politics, culture, current events, and faith.  He is cofounder of Iowa RestorEd, a grassroots group that wants to restore Iowa’s place at the top U.S. K-12 education.  Shane also is the online communications director for American Principles Project and American Principles in Action.  Feel free to follow Shane on Facebook and on Twitter.

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New Study Tracks Spending On Common Core

The Common Core learning standards have been in place for a few years now. A lot of the news coverage in New York has been about Common Core-aligned tests. But tests are just one piece of the puzzle.

A new national study looks at the money put towards implementation of the Common Core, $4.35 billion from the federal government and also about $330 million from private philanthropy. Where did the money go? WSKG’s Bret Jaspers talked to Mindy Kornhaber from Penn State, one of the authors of the study. Click the player to hear the edited interview.

Interview highlights:

On the Race to the Top competition:

Kornhaber: Within the Race to the Top guidelines, there were five criteria and two of those relate directly to the Common Core. They called for [the use of] common standards and the use of common assessments for which only the Common Core state standards really were available.

On how the money was spent:

Kornhaber: Well, different states used it to get their systems aligned to the Common Core. So they used it in part to get data systems that could track how well kids were doing. They used it in New York State specifically to develop curriculum modules. [They used it] to help districts in some states get access to better professional development that would enable teachers to teach to the new standards and things like that.

On why she likens it to the Gold Rush:

Kornhaber: For the Common Core, teachers and districts and states were asked to mine for better student achievement and to do that, they would need a lot of equipment. They'd need new computers, they'd new data systems, they'd need new curriculum materials, etc. But as in the case of the Gold Rush, most people who went mining in search of gold did not come up with gold.

Jaspers: So you're saying that despite all of this money being spent, it's not necessarily going to yield better results. That's, kind of, your read on the situation?

Kornhaber: Yes. And that read comes from the fact that prior reforms that are similar to the Common Core also did not boost achievement.

On why the entire reform effort is more than the just the learning standards:

Kornhaber: We need to have a set of standards that help teachers to know what it is that children should know and be able to do. And that's all well and good. But the Common Core isn't only about putting out standards. We have to be very careful that the standards themselves don't represent the reform as a whole. The reform as a whole includes the standards and includes aligning many other things to the standards including tests and consequences for teachers.

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The New Sex Primer

“Come, you spirits 
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe topful
Of direst cruelty!”
—Lady Macbeth

By the fall of 2017, kindergartners in Washington State will be taught to “understand the range of gender roles, identity, and expression across cultures.”1 For those unclear about what precisely will be taught, the kindergarten curriculum developers provide a helpful glossary that includes a definition of “gender”:

Gender: A social construct based on emotional, behavioral, and cultural characteristics attached to a person’s assigned biological sex. A person’s social and/or legal status as male or female.

• Gender expression. The way someone outwardly expresses their gender, whether consciously or unconsciously.

• Gender identity. Someone’s inner sense of their gender (see Transgender).

• Gender roles. Social expectations about how people should act, think, or feel based on their assigned biological sex.

Kindergarten now marks the starting point for government indoctrination of children into the brave, new, sexless, science-denying orthodoxy of the “transgender” movement, the end result of which is not a more compassionate society, but a society in which there is no public recognition of, or respect for, sexual differentiation.

In early May 2016, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) joined the ranks of the foolish by issuing guidelines pertaining to gender-dysphoric students in K–12 schools. Students who wish they were the opposite sex may now use opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms, and on school-sponsored overnight trips, they may room with opposite-sex students.

These guidelines also apply to “gender non-binary” students who don’t “identify” as either male or female and to “questioning” students who aren’t yet sure which sex they would like to be. In other words, these students may make their restroom, locker room, and hotel room selections in accordance with their unstable sexual confusion.

In an effort to facilitate student confusion, the CPS “guidelines” mandate the use of Newspeak by faculty and staff, requiring them to lie by using opposite-sex pronouns when referring to gender-dysphoric students.

Exploitation of Title IX

One week later, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Education (ED) issued an almost identical edict, except theirs came with a threat of the loss of federal funds for non-compliance with what they euphemistically describe as “significant guidance.”

Elementary, middle, and high schools all around the country have been accommodating requests (or demands) from parents to have their gender-dysphoric children granted access to restrooms, locker rooms, and athletic teams that correspond to the sex these children wish they were rather than the sex they actually are. In a case in Illinois, a male student sued his district for the right to unrestricted access even to the girls’ locker room, which includes showers. Often school administrations are accommodating these requests without informing the parents of students whose privacy is being invaded.

The DOJ and the ED, through the intrusive Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which is an unelected collective of bureaucrats, have proclaimed that henceforth, in the section of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 that prohibits discrimination based on “sex,” the word “sex” includes “gender identity” and “gender expression.” Further, sex-segregated restrooms constitute discrimination based on “sex,” meaning that schools have no legal right to maintain separate restrooms for boys and girls.

There are multiple problems with this creative argument, the first of which is that the word “sex” in Title IX means sex.

Second, progressives themselves relentlessly assert that sex and “gender identity” are wholly distinct.

Third, Title IX specifically states the following: “A recipient [of federal funds] may provide separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex, but such facilities provided for students of one sex shall be comparable to such facilities provided for students of the other sex.“2

Fourth, neither the DOJ nor the ED has lawmaking authority, so neither can change the definition of the word “sex” in Title IX.

Exploitation of Title VII

But the Barack Obama administration had still more government power to wield illicitly in its quest to eradicate sex-segregation. Like the ED, the DOJ under Attorney General Loretta Lynch has declared that the word “sex” in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 includes “gender identity” and “gender expression.” The abuse of Title VII is far more dangerous than that of Title IX because it has broader applicability.

Whereas Title IX applies only to schools, Title VII applies to every business in the private sector with over 14 employees, to every government entity, and to every religious organization, including religious schools of every grade level from elementary through college.It even applies to churches, which are exempt only from the prohibition of religious discrimination. Churches and other religious institutions are not exempt from the ban on “sex” discrimination.

So if the Obama administration’s redefinition of the word “sex” to include “gender identity” prevails, even churches couldn’t prohibit gender-dysphoric persons from using opposite-sex restrooms. The decree—it can’t veraciously be called a law—would mandate that gender-dysphoric guests at church weddings or attendees of concerts and athletic events at Christian colleges be allowed in opposite-sex restrooms.

Since men are permitted to go shirtless on beaches, at pools, in public parks, in high-school swim classes, and on swim teams, there would be no legal warrant for prohibiting women who “identify” as men but forgo bilateral mastectomies from going shirtless as well.

Sex Segregation versus Racial Segregation

Progressives, who never tire of exploiting race as an analogue for sexual deviance, compare racially segregated restrooms to sex-segregated restrooms, again misconstruing the issues. Racially segregated restrooms were unjustifiable because they were based on the false belief that people of different races are ontologically different. Sex-segregated restrooms are justifiable because they are based on the true belief that men and women are different—a true belief that even homosexuals implicitly acknowledge when they say they are attracted only to persons of their own sex.

When announcing the DOJ’s lawsuit against North Carolina following that state’s passage of a law prohibiting de-sexed, co-ed restrooms, Attorney General Lynch said, “It was not so very long ago that states, including North Carolina, had signs above restrooms, water fountains and on public accommodations keeping people out based upon a distinction without a difference.”

If there is no more difference between men and women than there is between blacks and whites—as Lynch clearly implies—then how is it justifiable to maintain single-sex restrooms or showers anywhere? Why not allow men and women and boys and girls to share the same restrooms, locker rooms, showers, shelters, and hospital rooms just as blacks and whites do?

Lynch also suggested that the unwillingness of women to share restrooms with gender-dysphoric men is evidence of fear, disrespect, misunderstanding, closed-mindedness, unfairness, lack of compassion, unjust regressive discrimination, and the denial of equality. If that’s the case, then how would she characterize the unwillingness of gender-dysphoric men to share restrooms with non-gender-dysphoric men? If separate restrooms for men and women are analogous to separate restrooms for blacks and whites, then aren’t separate restrooms for gender-dysphoric men and normal men also analogous to separate restrooms for blacks and whites?

Justifying Deception

The left uses the little-known history of some cross-dressing men successfully deceiving women in restrooms as a perverse ethical justification for allowing men in women’s restrooms. The argument goes something like this: Since gender-dysphoric men in especially convincing disguises have successfully deceived and violated the privacy of women who don’t want to share restrooms with men, let’s just openly allow gender-dysphoric men to continue to invade women’s privacy.

That’s analogous to arguing that since some peeping Toms successfully spy on women through windows without being found out, there’s no harm done, so no foul. Or, since some husbands commit adultery without their wives ever finding out—again, no harm, no foul.

Others believe, however, that the deception per se is harmful. The use of ever-more-elaborate disguises—including chemically and surgically facilitated ones—by gender-dysphoric men to conceal their sex from women who don’t want to use restrooms with objectively male persons is comparable to peepers using ever-more-sophisticated technology to peep.

Questions for Progressives

There are still more critical questions that should be posed to anyone who supports de facto co-ed everything, questions that will expose the incoherence of the subversive un-sexing of America:

1. Why should gender-dysphoric men and women be allowed to dictate that restrooms, showers, locker rooms, shelters, and hospital rooms no longer correspond to objective, immutable sex?

2. Why should gender-dysphoric men be able to dictate that they get to use restrooms with only women, but actual women are prohibited from saying they should get to use restrooms with only women?

3. If stalls provide sufficient privacy to separate gender-dysphoric men from women in restrooms, and curtains provide sufficient privacy to separate gender-dysphoric men from women in changing areas, why don’t stalls and curtains provide sufficient privacy to separate gender-dysphoric men from other men in men’s restrooms and changing areas?

4. If there is a mismatch between a person’s sex and his feelings about his sex, how can progressives be certain that the error resides in the body rather than the mind? If a person has XY chromosomes that have commanded his brain to produce and release male hormones to which his body is able to respond, thereby developing normal, unambiguous, healthy, fully functioning male anatomy, he is clearly male. If he nevertheless desires to be—or insists that he is—female, might this not be an error of his mind?

5. If a man “identifies” as “bi-gender” and has appended faux-breasts to his torso while retaining his penis, should he be permitted to decide at will which locker room he uses in the altogether?

6. Those who suffer from gender dysphoria claim that their DNA and the genitalia it shapes are wholly unrelated and irrelevant to “gender” and “gender identity,” and that genitalia shouldn’t matter when it comes to restrooms, changing areas, and showers. They further claim they want to use restrooms with only those whose “gender identity” they share. So, why do gender-dysphoric men demand to use women’s restrooms? How do they know that the males using the men’s restrooms do not “identify” as women, and how can they be sure that the females using the women’s restrooms do “identify” as women? Is it possible that gender-dysphoric men are basing their restroom choices on genitalia? If so, why are they permitted to do so, but actual women are not?

7. Leftists claim that people who don’t want to share restrooms, changing areas, showers, shelters, and hospital rooms with persons of the opposite sex are hateful. If it’s hateful for women to say they want to share these facilities only with other women, why isn’t it hateful for gender-dysphoric men to say they want to share them only with women?

8. Progressives routinely mock opponents of co-ed restrooms, asking whether historical restroom practices that require restroom-usage to correspond to sex will also require “genitalia police” to determine whether restroom-users are in reality the sex that corresponds to the restrooms they seek to use. Well, in the mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up progressive world, will there be “gender-identity” police demanding proof that all restroom-users are either the sex that corresponds to the restrooms they seek to use or have proof that they have been diagnosed as gender-dysphoric? If not, how will women know if their fellow restroom-users are actual women, or gender-dysphoric men masquerading as women, or male predators masquerading as gender-dysphoric men?

9. If the views of Obama and Lynch prevail and gender-dysphoric men are permitted in women’s restrooms, on what basis could all other men be prohibited from using women’s restrooms? Normal men couldn’t be prohibited from using women’s restrooms based on their male sex because men would already have been allowed in. And normal men couldn’t be prohibited from using women’s restrooms based on their “identification” as males because that would constitute discrimination based on “gender identity,” which Obama and Lynch argue violates Title IX and Title VII.

The Final Chapter

The editorial board of the Charlotte Observer opined that “the thought of male genitalia in girls’ locker rooms—and vice versa—might be distressing to some. But the battle for equality has always been in part about overcoming discomfort.”3 This comment reveals what many Americans don’t realize: identifying as the opposite sex does not require or necessarily include any surgery, cross-sex hormone-doping, or even cross-dressing; the mere assertion of one’s “gender identity” is sufficient.

Of course, none of those actions can efface the truth of sex; all they can do is mask it. But Americans should disabuse themselves of the rationalization that sharing a shower with Caitlyn Jenner might not be so bad as long as his testicles have been given the heave-ho and his pesky penis has been tucked inside.

And this brings us to the final chapter in the dystopian cultural narrative the left is writing: the end of sex-segregation everywhere. The elimination of the binary. No more public recognition of or respect for objective maleness and femaleness. “LGBTQQAP” activists and their ideological allies seek to create a solipsistic, make-believe world in which nothing outside the self is recognized as real or meaningful. Objective, immutable, biological sex, which is the source of feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy, will become a hoary relic of the past. Even language will be co-opted to serve an ontological and epistemic lie.

A compassionate society helps those who suffer from disordered thoughts and emotions. It does not affirm confusion or facilitate fiction. This most profound distortion of reality and morality must be resisted. •

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This article originally appeared in Salvo 38

We highly recommend subscribing to Salvo!

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Notes

1. Washington State Health and Physical Education Standards (March 2016), 32
2. 34 C.F.R. Part 106, Subpart D, §106.33: www2.ed.gov/policy/rights/reg/ocr/edlite-34cfr106.html.
3. “Taking the fear out of bathrooms,” The Charlotte Observer (May 13, 2016): charlotteobserver.com/opinion/editorials/article77475147.html.

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Facts about Children’s Literacy

Children who are read to at home have a higher success rate in school.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a divison of the U.S. Department of Education1, children who are read to at home enjoy a substantial advantage over children who are not:

• Twenty-six percent of children who were read to three or four times in the last week by a family member recognized all letters of the alphabet. This is compared to 14 percent of children who were read to less frequently. 
• The NCES¹ also reported that children who were read to frequently are also more likely to:
  • count to 20, or higher than those who were not (60% vs. 44%) 
  • write their own names (54% vs. 40%) 
  • read or pretend to read (77% vs. 57%) 
• According to NCES², only 53 percent of children ages three to five were read to daily by a family member (1999). Children in families with incomes below the poverty line are less likely to be read to aloud everyday than are children in families with incomes at or above poverty. 
• The more types of reading materials there are in the home, the higher students are in reading proficiency, according to the Educational Testing Service.³
• The Educational Testing Services reported that students who do more reading at home are better readers and have higher math scores; however, students read less for fun as they get older.³

Children who read frequently develop stronger reading skills.

• According to the National Education Association, having kids read a lot is one of the crucial components of becoming a good reader. Young readers need to become practiced at recognizing letters and sounds. The only way to get good at it is to practice.⁴
• The U.S. Department of Education⁵ found that, generally, the more students read for fun on their own time, the higher their reading scores. Between 1984 and 1996, however, the percentage of 12th grade students reporting that they "never" or "hardly ever" read for fun increased from 9 percent to 16 percent. 
• A poll of middle and high school students commissioned by the National Education Association⁶ found that 56 percent of young people say they read more than 10 books a year, with middle school students reading the most. Some 70 percent of middle school students read more than 10 books a year, compared with only 49 percent of high school students. 

Other facts 

• The substantial relationship between parent involvement for the school and reading comprehension levels of fourth-grade classrooms is obvious, according to the U.S. Department of Education.⁷ Where parent involvement is low, the classroom mean average (reading score) is 46 points below the national average. Where involvement is high, classrooms score 28 points above the national average - a gap of 74 points. Even after controlling for other attributes of communities, schools, principals, classes, and students, that might confound this relationship, the gap is 44 points. 
• The National Assessment of Educational Progress⁸ tested children nationwide for reading skills. The results for reading tests for fourth-grade students were: Below the most basic level 38 percent; Proficient 31 percent, and Advanced 7 percent. 

¹ U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2000.

² U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, from http://www.nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id+56.

³ Educational Testing Service, 1999. America's Smallest School: The Family.

⁴Gutloff, Karen. 1999, January. "Reading Research Ready to Go." NEA Today. Washington, DC: National Education Association.

⁵U.S. Department of Education. 1999. The Condition of Education 1998.

⁶Poll commissioned for the National Education Association by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, February 2001.

⁷U.S. Department of Education. 1996. Reading Literacy in the United States: Findings From the IEA Reading Literacy Study.

⁸U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 1999, March. The Executive Summary of the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress Reading Report Card for the Nation, NCES 1999-50, Washington, DC.

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http://www.oregonlive.com/education/index.ssf/2016/09/portland_elementary_school_ban.html

Portland elementary school bans homework

The lucky students at one Portland elementary school got the good news when they started school this week: There will be no homework whatsoever.

Instead this is what the school urges students to do in the evenings and on weekends: Play outside. Cuddle with your parents. Play board games with your siblings. Pick up a favorite book to read or be read to. Run around and be as active as you can.

Why ban homework? A team of teachers at Cherry Park Elementary in the David Douglas school district in East Portland dug into the research and found that, while high school students learn more when they do homework, for elementary pupils, there is little to no evidence homework does any good.

Principal Kate Barker says assigning regular homework isn't a fabulous idea at any elementary school, but especially not at Cherry Park, where at least 75 percent of students live at or below the poverty line and families speak more than 30 different languages.

"We find that homework really increases that inequity," Barker said. "It provides a barrier to our students who need the most support."

Barker's No. 1 goal for parents? To interact with their children in a positive manner. "So often when students come home with homework, it's not the most positive interaction for parents and children," she said.

Even the school's past practice of requiring students to log 25 to 30 minutes reading or being read to evoked more sense of drudgery than joy at times, she said.

"We are going to continue to encourage families to read with their children, but not with the reading logs coming back and forth," she said.

"We know that is one of the No. 1 indicators of success is the amount of time children spend being read to or reading for others. And I don't know of anybody that doesn't love to be read to. But when you tie a reading log to it, it just changes the flavor," she said.

Barker says the school will carefully monitor if students are making enough academic progress and will tweak things if they are not. But making better use of the school day, not assigning homework, will be the strategy if change is needed, she said.

Teachers got on board with the no-homework policy once the rationale was explained, Barker said. Parents have been 100 percent in favor of the change.

And the students? They, she said, "are cheering."

-- Betsy Hammond

betsyhammond@oregonian.com

@chalkup

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http://occupytheory.org/list-of-pros-and-cons-of-charter-schools/

List of Pros and Cons of Charter Schools

Ever since the first charter school appeared in the U.S. in 1991, the debate over the advantages and disadvantages of this form of alternative education has been ongoing.

Pros of Charter Schools

1. More Choices
One of the most compelling arguments for charter schools is that they provide more choices for families. The local school may be too small or not have enough of an academic focus. Whatever the reason, parents should be able to have an alternative.

2. Encourages Competition
Another benefit of charters is that they encourage competition, which tends to cause schools to try harder and try to achieve more “client” (parents and students) satisfaction.

3. Improve Education
Many charter schools like Harlem Children’s Zone or the KIPP network are known for developing innovative new ways to teach or find other ways such as a longer school week to improve education.

4. Can Cater to Smaller Group of Students
Charter schools also have the advantage of deciding what kind of student they are catering to; they do not have to try to appeal to everyone and in the end not provide properly for anyone. Montessori school have already paved the way by deciding on a curriculum for a certain audience, and charter schools today are able to do the same.

Cons of Charter Schools

1. Decreased Funding
However, there are also some definite disadvantages of charter schools; one of the major drawbacks is having charters leads to less funding for the more traditional schools. It seems fiscally inefficient for the government to invest in two separate types of schools, which results in loss of funding for one type.

2. Lack of Equal Opportunity
Since charter schools can decide what type of student they wish to attract, which is considered beneficial by some, this means that not all students have equal opportunity to attend, which is seen as a disadvantage to parents of the non-targeted children. For example, less academically-able children may not be eligible, special education services may not be available, and low-income families may not be able to send their children to certain charter schools. 

3. Less Accountability and Transparency
Charter schools are administered by private, not pubic bodies and may not have to give out the same information as public schools, which means there may be a lack of accountability and transparency. Charter school boards are usually not elected by the public; instead the charter organizations choose board members. 

4. Decreased Diversity
Many people fear that charter schools will engender less diversity since there is usually a target market for each school, which could cause economic and racial divides. Even though the choices to use one charter school over another is driven by parental choice, the possibility of having more homogeneous schools is a worrying one for many people.

With over 5000 charter schools now operating in the U.S., the issues raised enter the ongoing debate. A consensus of whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages has not yet been reached; it seems clear that the arguments for and against should be considered and the issues raised taken into account before it is decided whether this alternative form of education is preferable to enrolling in a more traditional public school. 

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http://time.com/4474496/screens-schools-hoax/?xid=fbshare

Screens In Schools Are a $60 Billion Hoax

Dr. Kardaras is the author of the new book Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction is Hijacking Our Kids—and How to Break the Trance. 

As the dog days of summer wane, most parents are preparing to send their kids back to school. In years past, this has meant buying notebooks and pencils, perhaps even a new backpack. But over the past decade or so, the back-to-school checklist has for many also included an array of screen devices that many parents dutifully stuff into their children’s bag.

The screen revolution has seen pedagogy undergo a seismic shift as technology now dominates the educational landscape. In almost every classroom in America today, you will find some type of screen—smartboards, Chromebooks, tablets, smartphones. From inner-city schools to those in rural and remote towns, we have accepted tech in the classroom as a necessary and beneficial evolution in education.

This is a lie.

Tech in the classroom not only leads to worse educational outcomes for kids, which I will explain shortly, it can also clinically hurt them. I’ve worked with over a thousand teens in the past 15 years and have observed that students who have been raised on a high-tech diet not only appear to struggle more with attention and focus, but also seem to suffer from an adolescent malaise that appears to be a direct byproduct of their digital immersion. Indeed, over two hundred peer-reviewed studies point to screen time correlating to increased ADHD, screen addiction, increased aggression, depression, anxiety and even psychosis.

But if that’s true, why would we have allowed these “educational” Trojan horses to slip into our schools? Follow the money.

Education technology is estimated to become a $60 billion industry by 2018. With the advent of the Common Core in 2010, which nationalized curriculum and textbooks standards, the multi-billion-dollar textbook industry became very attractive for educational gunslingers looking to capitalize on the new Wild West of education technology. A tablet with educational software no longer needed state-by-state curricular customization. It could now be sold to the entire country.

This new Gold Rush attracted people like Rupert Murdoch, not otherwise known for his concern for American pedagogy, who would go on to invest over $1 billion into an ed-tech company called Amplify, with the stated mission of selling every student in America their proprietary tablet—for only $199—along with the software and annual licensing fees.

Amplify hired hundreds of videogame designers to build educational videogames—while they and other tech entrepreneurs attempted to sell the notion that American students no longer had the attention span for traditional education. Their solution: Educate them in a more stimulating and “engaging” manner.

But let’s look more closely at that claim. ADHD rates have indeed exploded by 50 percent over the past 10 years with the CDC indicating that rates continue to rise by five percent per year. Yet many researchers and neuroscientists believe that this ADHD epidemic is a direct result of children being hyper-stimulated. Using hyper-stimulating digital content to “engage” otherwise distracted students exacerbates the problem that it endeavors to solve. It creates a vicious and addictive ADHD cycle: The more a child is stimulated, the more that child needs to keep getting stimulated in order to hold their attention.

Murdoch’s Amplify wasn’t the only dubious ed-tech cash-grab. The city of Los Angeles had entered into a $1.3 billion contract in 2014 to buy iPads loaded with Pearson educational software for all of its 650,000 K through 12 students—until the FBI investigated its contract and found that now-former Superintendent John Deasy had a close relationship with Apple and Pearson executives. (Before the deal was killed in December 2014, the Pearson platform had incomplete and essentially worthless curriculum and such feeble security restrictions students that bypassed them in weeks.)

Despite the Amplify and LA debacles, others still seek to convince naïve school administrators that screens are the educational panacea. Yet as more American schools lay off teachers while setting aside scarce budget dollars for tech, many educators and parents alike have begun to ask: Do any of these hypnotic marvels of the digital age actually produce better educational outcomes for the kids who use them?

We could look to Finland, whose school system routinely ranks toward the top globally and has chosen to skip the tech and standardized testing. Instead, Finnish students are given as many as four outdoor free-play breaks per day, regardless of the weather—while here, a sedentary American child sitting in front of a glowing screen playing edu-games while over-scheduled and stressed by standardized testing is seen as the Holy Grail.

Dr. Kentaro Toyama, an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, once believed that technology in the classroom could solve the problems of modern urban education. No Luddite, he had received his Ph.D. in computer science from Yale and had moved to India in 2004 to help found a new research lab for Microsoft; while there, he became interested in how computers, mobile phones and other technologies could help educate India’s billion-plus population.

Rather than finding a digital educational cure, he came to understand what he calls technology’s “Law of Amplification”: technology could help education where it’s already doing well, but it does little for mediocre educational systems. Worse, in dysfunctional schools, it “can cause outright harm.” He added: “Unfortunately, there is no technological fix…more technology only magnifies socioeconomic disparities, and the only way to avoid that is non-technological.”

The list of supporting education experts and researchers is long:

• The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development said in a 2015 report that heavy users of computers in the classroom “do a lot worse in most learning outcomes” and that: “In the end, technology can amplify great teaching, but great technology cannot replace poor teaching.”

• An exhaustive meta-study conducted by Durham University in 2012 that systemically reviewed 48 studies examining technology’s impact on learning found that “technology-based interventions tend to produce just slightly lower levels of improvement when compared with other researched interventions and approaches.”

• The Alliance for Children, a consortium of some of the nation’s top educators and professors, in a 2000 report concluded: “School reform is a social challenge, not a technological problem…a high-tech agenda for children seems likely to erode our most precious long-term intellectual reserves—our children’s minds.”

• Patricia Greenfield, distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA, analyzed more than 50 studies on learning and points out that reading for pleasure among young people has decreased in recent decades, which is problematic because “studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary…in a way that visual media such as video games and television do not.”

• Education psychologist and author of Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds Jane Healy spent years doing research into computer use in schools and, while she expected to find that computers in the classroom would be beneficial, now feels that “time on the computer might interfere with development of everything from the young child’s motor skills to his or her ability to think logically and distinguish between reality and fantasy.”

• John Vallance, a Cambridge scholar and headmaster of Australia’s top K-through-12 school, Sydney Grammer, has said: “I think when people come to write the history of this period in education…this investment in classroom technology is going to be seen as a huge fraud.”

There has also been surprising research coming out of Canada: Students don’t even prefer e-learning over traditional education. In a 2011 study, researchers found that students actually preferred “ordinary, real-life lessons” to using technology. Those results surprised the researchers: “It is not the portrait that we expected, whereby students would embrace anything that happens on a more highly technological level. On the contrary—they really seem to like access to human interaction, a smart person at the front of the classroom.”

We are projecting our own infatuation with shiny technology, assuming our little digital natives would rather learn using gadgets—while what they crave and need is human contact with flesh-and-blood educators.

Schools need to heed this research in order to truly understand how to best nurture real intrinsic learning and not fall for the Siren song of the tech companies—and all of their hypnotic screens.

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