AP U.S. History Bias Still Runs Deep, Omits Assimilation

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424414/ap-us-history-bias

AP U.S. History Bias Still Runs Deep

Even after revisions, it too often presents hotly debated opinions as facts.

The College Board set off a national controversy in the summer of 2014 when it put into effect a sharply revisionist, left-leaning curriculum framework for its AP U.S. History (APUSH) course. Although the College Board initially dismissed the critics, its tune changed after opponents raised the threat of competition from a company advised by top-notch traditional scholars. The result was a revised APUSH curriculum framework issued in the summer of 2015. In a bid to deflect criticism, the College Board removed many of the earlier version’s most biased passages and generally pared back the content. Unfortunately, the underlying bias remains, as does the need for a competing alternative to the College Board.

To illustrate this, we are going to dig deeply into the revised APUSH framework’s coverage of one major theme in American history: immigration. By any reckoning, immigration is an important part of American history. Since “Migration and Settlement” constitutes one of the seven “Thematic Learning Objectives” of the new APUSH framework, the College Board evidently agrees.

The problem with the latest APUSH framework is that it variously downplays, omits, and distorts the significance of the assimilationist ethos in American history. Instead of conveying the nature and importance of assimilation, the College Board projects a contemporary multiculturalist perspective onto earlier eras. This does an injustice both to the facts and to a theme that rightly serves as a foundation for successful civic education: assimilation.

Immigration also featured prominently in the controversy over the 2014 APUSH framework. The background of that framework was an alliance between the College Board and a group of scholars committed to “end[ing] American history as we have known it” by substituting a more transnational narrative for the traditional account. The idea was to cultivate a sense of global citizenship in place of the more usual focus on national identity. Nothing could have been farther from the Founders’ intentions, or from the actual course of American history.

America has been the most successful immigration country in the history of the world precisely because newcomers and their children have assimilated. They have, in the vernacular, become “Americanized.” This assimilation ethos has been with us since the founding. On November 15, 1794, President George Washington wrote Vice President John Adams, worrying that if immigrants are bunched together and settled in a “body . . . They retain the language, habits, and principles (good and bad), which they bring with them. Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, laws: in a word soon become one people.” Political rivals Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton held similar views on the need for assimilation, as did James Madison.

Thus did Congress in 1795 require naturalized citizens to take an oath, not only swearing loyalty to the United States but also renouncing previous political allegiance. Successful assimilation, then, is patriotic assimilation. Abraham Lincoln remarked that although immigrants were not directly descended from the founding generation, by accepting the American creed as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, they became “as though they were the blood of the blood and the flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote the Declaration, and so they are.” This core American idea of immigration with assimilation is entirely missing from the APUSH framework.

The first tip-off to the framework’s revisionist approach is its frequent use of the word “migration” in place of “immigration.” The word-picture associated with migration (and migratory populations) suggests groups of people moving from one place to another without necessarily sharing any strong ties to their new destination; it does not suggest powerful new bonds of political loyalty grounded in an immigrant’s transfer of allegiance from the “old country” to the United States.

The first tip-off to the framework’s revisionist approach is its frequent use of the word ‘migration’ in place of ‘immigration.’

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The denationalized “migration” concept was part of the 2014 APUSH controversy. It was noted, for example, that authors of the 2014 framework had recommended highlighting for students the advantages of using “migrant” in place of “immigrant,” while having classes trace the wanderings of those who had merely passed through America without becoming citizens. These exercises were meant to press students “to think beyond national histories.” Not only has the College Board retained this preference for “migration,” but a broader anti-national bias continues to pervade the framework.

The latest version of the framework explains phenomena as diverse as the internal migration of African-Americans from the southern states to other parts of the United States, the westward movement of American settlers across the continent, and immigration to the United States from foreign countries as different forms of “migration.” As a result, the framework blurs, disguises, and simply fails to describe the central significance of the immigration-assimilation narrative in American history. Yet at a moment when the children of immigrants are entering America’s schools in numbers not seen since the heyday of Ellis Island, it becomes more important than ever to get the story of patriotic assimilation as an integral part of civic education right.

Insofar as it treats of assimilation, the framework is off base. Discussing the latter half of the 19th century (p. 62), the framework says: “Increasing public debates over assimilation and Americanization accompanied the growth of international migration. Many immigrants negotiated compromises between the cultures they brought and the culture they found in the United States.” Yet the notion that the assimilation ethos was somehow controversial is largely mistaken.

There was little debate over assimilation and Americanization in the American mainstream (whether among elites or popular opinion), and little “resistance” to assimilationist initiatives from immigrants. Presidents of all parties (Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft), immigrant leaders such as Louis Brandeis (the most prominent Jewish American immigrant of the period and a future Supreme Court justice), captains of industry, labor leaders, progressives, and the general public enthusiastically supported the Americanization of immigrants.

To be sure, there were a few proto-multiculturalist intellectuals, particularly Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne, who objected to assimilation, but their voices were drowned out by the Americanization chorus. The “debate” on assimilation that the College Board is talking about began in the mid-1960s. There was not much debate on assimilation from 1865 to 1965.

To suggest otherwise is to project the modern multiculturalist ethos backwards. That, in turn, renders invisible a major development in American history: the breakup of the “melting pot” consensus after the 1960s and the corresponding rise of warring assimilationist and multiculturalist camps. Perhaps the College Board would prefer not to expose the shallow historical roots of its own multiculturalist perspective.

Throughout the framework, the College Board insists that immigrant communities were somehow fighting off American attempts to assimilate them, that they were keen on “negotiating compromises between cultures.” No doubt there are examples of migrants who rejected the American mainstream, but this was not true of the bulk of the immigrants who settled permanently in America before 1965. Many immigrants, of course, did retain religious and cultural traditions descended from their countries of origin, yet the relative ease with which these traditions were harmonized with what was then proudly called the “American way of life” is notable (particularly when compared with the immigration experiences of other countries). Surely there were concerns about whether immigrants were assimilating and how best to achieve assimilation. But the goal itself was not in fundamental dispute, and that critical fact needs to be clearly conveyed.

When discussing Irish and German “international migrants” in the mid 19th century, the framework highlights their fighting off nativist hostility and settling “in ethnic communities where they could preserve elements of their languages and customs.” This is part of the story, to be sure, yet perhaps less than half of the historical record. What about the assimilationist successes?

American-history courses used to highlight individuals like Carl Schurz (1829–1906), a liberal combatant in the German uprising of 1848 who immigrated to America and rose to be a confidant of Abraham Lincoln, a Union Army general, and the first German-born senator and cabinet secretary. The framework now focuses so strongly on the downside of the immigrant experience that teachers are effectively discouraged from offering such examples.

The College Board’s framework also stacks the deck in favor of the pro-increasing-immigration side of our national debates in two specific instances. First, the framework (p. 72) presents all the proponents of the 1920s legislation that limited immigration as irrational bigots: “Nativist campaigns against some ethnic groups led to the passage of quotas that restricted immigration, particularly from Southern and Eastern Europe, and increased barriers to Asian immigration.”

No doubt a block of the proponents were motivated by ethnic prejudice. However, others, including President Coolidge, future president Herbert Hoover, and mainstream business, labor, military, veteran, and African-American leaders (including major newspapers such as the Chicago Defender and spokesmen such as A. Philip Randolph) believed that immigration should be reduced to assist the assimilation of the large group of immigrants currently in the country, and to keep wages and living conditions good for those already here. President Coolidge’s support of the legislation was not based on ethnic considerations — for example, he vehemently opposed restricting Japanese immigration on those grounds and declared that “our country numbers among its best citizens many of those of foreign birth.”

The distinctive blending of individualism, enterprise, and faith unpacked by students of American culture since Alexis de Tocqueville is given only perfunctory attention

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Second, just before taking note of our present-day immigration debates (p. 87), the framework states that new immigrants have “supplied the economy with an important labor force.” While the contemporary immigrant labor force clearly holds cultural, economic, and historical significance, the College Board’s framing here subtly takes a position in our debates. After all, opponents of increasing immigration argue that the arrival of large numbers of low-skilled immigrants has resulted in wage losses and wage stagnation for American workers in the lower-skilled categories, including many African-Americans and Latino Americans. Indeed, economic arguments against increasing low-skilled immigration were forcefully made by leading African-American historical figures, including Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. Our point is not that one side or the other has the better argument, but that the College Board has no business taking sides in a contemporary political dispute. By arguing that new immigrants have “supplied the economy with an important labor force” without presenting the perspective of critics of increased immigration, the College Board effectively does just that.

When the College Board turns to internal migration, the bias is equally striking. This is especially so when treating the greatest internal migration of them all: the settlement of the West. The opening up of the West is one of the great success stories of American history. In the College Board’s rendering, however, the experience is portrayed as largely negative. Western settlement regularly “fuels social, political, and ethnic tensions.” The distinctive blending of individualism, enterprise, and faith unpacked by students of American culture since Alexis de Tocqueville is given only perfunctory attention, while the treatment of the Indians, the destruction of the bison, and such take up most of the space. Manifest Destiny is still portrayed as an arrogant belief in the “superiority” of American institutions, rather than an expansion of the sphere of democratic liberties. And of course the framework refers to “internal migrants” rather than the more positive “pioneers,” a term that (perhaps not surprisingly) never appears in the College Board’s entire American-history framework.

This was already the trend of the 2014 framework, and little in the treatment of the West has changed. All this may have something to do with the fact that New York University historian Maria Montoya, an expert on Western expansion, was a newly appointed member of the committee that supervised the 2015 revisions. Montoya’s work explicitly attacks what she calls “the traditional American Western narrative.” Like other authors of the College Board’s history frameworks, Montoya energetically rejects the concept of American exceptionalism, seeing America’s westward expansion on the model of European imperialist colonialism instead. Montoya criticizes those who portray expansion as the work of “intrepid pioneers” and questions the idea that the movement west helped to create “democratic, free, individuals.” She depicts westward expansion instead as an imperialistic venture that imposed capitalistic ideas of private property on the more communal notions of land ownership held by Mexican Americans and Native Americans. In substance and emphasis, the 2015 revisions closely track Montoya’s view of western expansion.

So a close look at the central theme of “Migration and Settlement” in the revised APUSH framework reveals that very little has changed since the controversial 2014 edition was issued. A few of the more incendiary passages have been removed, but the overall tilt toward multiculturalist revisionism and contemporary progressive politics remains. The many APUSH textbooks that already lean this way would have nothing of significance to change, even if the College Board were to insist on revisions (which it has not done). The supposed addition of a new “Thematic Learning Objective” on “American and National Identity” has little content to it, as witness the fact that both American exceptionalism and the assimilationist ethos are essentially absent from the framework.

On grounds of both historical accuracy and the imperatives of civic education, we believe that far greater emphasis on America’s assimilationist ethos is called for. To the extent that others may disagree, that only strengthens the case for competition in Advanced Placement testing. There should be no official version of American history. Only the creation of an advanced-placement testing company able to offer a true alternative to the College Board’s version of history can restore choice to states, school districts, and the voters they represent.

— John Fonte is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of Sovereignty or Submission?, which won the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Paolucci Book Award in 2012. Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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IF COMMON CORE IS SCARY, HIDE FROM NEW "COMMUNITY SCHOOLS" - PART 1

http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2015/09/thorneroneil-if-common-core-is-extremely-troubling-beware-of-s1787-part-1.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2FbYHz+%28Illinois+Review%29

THORNER/O'NEIL: IF COMMON CORE IS SCARY, HIDE FROM NEW "COMMUNITY SCHOOLS" - PART 1

By Nancy Thorner and Bonnie O'Neil - 

By now most Americans are familiar with Common Core as a scheme by the federal government to rewrite education. This experimental program was sold to state governments, sight unseen; without a shred of proof it was better than the program it replaced. This maneuver was largely accomplished through taxpayer-funded bribes, deception, and federal bludgeoning. Common Core proponents used vague language about "excellence" in education, "raising the bar," and "getting this nation's children ready for the workforce”, as selling points that new standards were needed. Little or nothing was mentioned about the accompanying curriculum, rewritten textbooks, or the extensive, expensive new testing programs.

Now that Common Core is entrenched in most American classrooms, a multitude of problems have been exposed and experienced by students, parents, teachers, and administrators. The extensive testing program is why parents are becoming activists to get Common Core out of their schools. It is why many teachers, child psychologists, and education experts are continually speaking out against the flawed program and why some states are regretting their hasty decision to accept it. 

Because Common Core is copyrighted, it cannot be altered by anyone other than the owners of the copyright. The NGA Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) have been granted a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to copy, publish, distribute, and display the Common Core State Standards for purposes that support the Common Core State Standards Initiative. These uses may involve the Common Core State Standards as a whole or selected excerpts or portions. This License extends to the Common Core State Standards only. 

Under Common Core, an Orwellian nightmare is already taking place through the data-mining of students and their families.  An unprecedented monitoring and tracking of students, including everything from biometric data to information on children's beliefs and personal family values has become far too common.  Employing the same tactics as those used to foist Common Core on state governments, the Obama administration has states monitoring or increasing existing programs that accumulate student information.  Privacy rights are being abused, and most parents are either unaware or too trusting of their schools and government to understand the potential harm.

It stands to reason that all the data collected will be shared with the U.S. Department of Education and other entities both within and outside the federal government.  Consider also how advancing technology will likely increase the scope of data gathering and expand it beyond most people's wildest nightmares. Facial expression cameras are already being strapped to wrists of students to detect emotion and capture facial expressions.  How long will it take before all vestiges of privacy are stripped from vulnerable students? 

However, as controversial and unsettling as Common Core has proved to be, prepare yourself, because there are even more disturbing educational programs currently being designed and enacted at the federal level.  Blame it on the “slippery slope” explanation or possibly the progression of a determined administration that knows they have just one more year left to put forth their liberal plans to “fundamentally change America.”  Either way, every conservative should be exceedingly alarmed with the most recent change in education that this administration has planned for America.  

Just when you thought it couldn't get worse. . .

Despite campaign promises by Republicans to reign in the Obama administration on issues such as healthcare, illegal immigration, and education, little or nothing has been achieved. Even though, Common Core is now recognized as an educational disaster in the making, there has been little action from either party at the federal level to reign in the continually expanding federal Department of Education or preferably eliminate it altogether.  The education of our children was assigned by law to the States, not the federal government.     

A Communists’ dream education bill is currently in the Senate as witness to the danger of allowing the Department of Education to exist. It is S1787 or "The Full Service Community Schools Act” bill (full text is here), crafted to amend Title V of the Great Society Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.  S1787 gives the current administration virtually everything it wants, and then some, even when our laws do not give the federal government any right to meddle in what has been granted to individual states.  Actually, they are more than just meddling, they are making enormous, radical changes.  Unfortunately, these changes will most likely shape the future of America and thus the future of our children and grandchildren. 

The essence of the new education system, "Community Schools," is to provide every need (every meal, health care, of the student.  Although the bill sounds friendly, it is not.  Any initiative that shifts the center of a child’s universe away from home, church, and family to that of complete dependence upon a government entity should be seriously questioned. "Community Schools" goes further than just strengthening government's authority over our children.  It robs parents of their role, their responsibilities, and the time honored family unit that allows families to unite in a bond of cooperation and love that can only be fully realized by those who have nurtured the child from conception to birth and each stage of that child’s life.  Parents are not perfect, but even with all their flaws, nobody loves that child as much as they do.   It is in the home in which bonding occurs and most often lasts a lifetime.  Is there anything more important for a child than the unconditional love of parents and family?  The government thinks there is.  They believe they can do a better job of raising our children than we can. No, they cannot!

The full scope of Obama’s newest change to schools is a subject that deserves a detailed, fact packed Part 2.  Our next article will be a more in-depth look at "Community Schools" and will provide facts as to why we believe this system mirrors that which can be seen in Communist schools and why Americans must wake up to the dangers of allowing a liberal federal government to once again interfere with state rights for the purpose of making drastic changes to our public school system

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-next-great-education-debate/2015/09/11/f726ceca-5881-11e5-b8c9-944725fcd3b9_story.html

The College Board is in a position to create a de facto national curriculum

The writer is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

The College Board set off a firestorm last year by issuing what many saw as a left-biased curriculum framework for its Advanced Placement U.S. History course. This summer’s much-discussed revisions to that framework amount to less than meets the eye. The underlying bias remains, and few of the vaunted changes will filter down to the classroom.

The controversy, moreover, points to what will likely be our next great education debate. The College Board’s determination to issue detailed curriculum frameworks for all of its AP exams, in combination with the expansion of the AP program over the past decade or so, has brought the United States to the threshold of something nobody claims to want: a national curriculum.

Emerging around the time of the 1957 Sputnik launch, the early AP program highlighted the national interest in cultivating the very best students. In the 1980s and ’90s, worries about failing schools and an interest in maximizing opportunity for all spread AP courses from a few elite institutions to schools across the country. Initially, the focus was rightly on finding and educating talented students, regardless of income, ethnicity or race. Gradually, however, AP came to be seen as a method for quickly overcoming the achievement gap between poor and minority students and others, regardless of preparation.

In the 2000s, politicians of both parties jumped onto this expansion bandwagon. Federal and state governments began subsidizing AP testing fees. Several states mandated AP courses in all schools. Meanwhile, the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations moved aggressively to expand AP participation.

As a result, the proportion of public high school graduates who took at least one AP exam rose from 18.9 percent in 2003 to 33.2 percent in 2013. The College Board has argued that all students who score a certain minimum on the PSAT would benefit from AP classes, regardless of preparation and eventual performance on the test. By College Board reckoning, 42.6 percent of 2013 graduates ought to have taken at least one AP class. A few schools have even begun to automatically enroll most students in AP courses. There, as in Lake Wobegon, all children are above average.

A substantial body of scholarly literature now raises questions about the excesses of AP expansion. Yale University’s William Lichten, for example, describes whole schools in which not a single AP student passes an exam. He calls the AP surge in many places a “disaster.” The proportion of students earning the lowest AP score of 1 has doubled over the past 20 years. Of all AP exams taken during high school by the class of 2013 in the District, 51.9 percent received a failing grade of 1. Summarizing the critics’ findings, Harvard University’s Philip Sadler challenges the College Board’s claim that students who fail AP exams still benefit from having taken the course. Such students would be better served by less rigorous courses designed to strengthen their foundations, Sadler says. Yet the surge goes on.

And as a result, by replacing its traditionally minimalist course guidelines with detailed curriculum frameworks, the College Board is now in a position to create a de facto national curriculum.

The massive increase in revenue from government-subsidized testing fees has also allowed the College Board to take over the sort of teacher training once managed by states and districts. Since it writes the exams, signs off on every AP course syllabus, controls teacher training and manages the revision of approved textbooks, the College Board is capable of exercising exceptionally tight control over the curriculum. In effect, the College Board is becoming an unelected national school board, independent of district or state control. Critics have rightly warned that Common Core takes us far down the road to a national curriculum. The College Board, presided over by Common Core architect David Coleman, is swiftly transporting us to the terminus of that highway.

While this summer’s revisions in the AP U.S. History framework eliminate the most biased passages, the broader emphasis remains on themes such as gender and the environment, at the expense of military, diplomatic and political history. Equally important, textbooks and course syllabi were revised with the controversial 2014 framework in mind. They have not been redone in light of the 2015 changes, which would necessitate few additions in any case. So the 2015 revisions are largely cosmetic, designed to mollify critics while forcing minimal changes to the course itself. The College Board can stage-manage this response precisely because it controls every part of the curriculum.

The new AP European History framework reveals the College Board’s intentions more clearly. It is a virtual twin of the 2014 U.S. History curriculum, highlighting colonial oppression and the downside of capitalism, while playing down religion, democratic development and the failings of socialism.

So the debate goes on. But we are having a debate to begin with because, through a combination of runaway expansion and its unprecedented attempt to control course content, the College Board’s AP testing monopoly has broken all bounds. In the absence of competition from a company advised by top traditional scholars, the College Board will have nationalized the curriculum — and pulled it sharply to the left.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/rweb/wildcard/the-decline-of-play-in-preschoolers--and-the-rise-in-sensory-issues/2015/09/01/f9c8900f3bc452faa62abaf009cfe4ff_story.html?tid=kindle-app

The decline of play in preschoolers — and the rise in sensory issues

By Stephanie McCrummen

September 12 at 4:18 PM

RED BANK, S.C. — The trailer where Dylann Roof found refuge is faded yellow with a thousand tiny dents. It is on the western edge of Columbia, S.C., along an unpaved road strewn with damp garbage, and it is where Roof briefly lived until the day he allegedly killed nine black church members at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.

Now, a month after the June 17 shootings, the blinds are drawn at noon and the family that hosted Roof is inside, where the boom of gunfire and explosions is so loud the trailer vibrates.

“Ha ha. I just killed all them mothers,” says Justin Meek, 18, playing a video game in which blood and body parts fly across a 42-inch TV screen.

The trailer where the Meek brothers live with their mother in Red Bank, S.C. (Michael S. Williamson/The Post)

“You got enemy on the other side! Use a grenade!” says his brother Jacob, 15. “Kill yourself! Kill yourself!”

On a lopsided couch is Lindsey Fry, 19, flicking her tongue ring, eyes locked on a cracked cellphone for news about the shooting, which has lately included her boyfriend Joey, 21, the third Meek brother who lives in the trailer, which is in a town called Red Bank that the Meeks call Dead Bank.

“Wow,” she suddenly says and reads aloud what she is seeing on her phone: “The expanded scope of the investigation now includes people with whom Roof associated in the weeks before the June 17 shooting.”

She looks at Joey. Joey looks at his two brothers and his mother, Kim Konzny.

They are the people with whom Roof was associating in the weeks before the shooting, and this is the place he drifted into with little resistance, an American void where little is sacred and little is profane and the dominant reaction to life is what Joey does now, looking at Lindsey. He shrugs.

For several weeks, Dylann Roof slept on the floor here. He played video games. According to the Meeks, he showed off his new Glock .45-caliber handgun, drank heavily and retreated to his car to listen to opera. And sometimes he confided in his childhood friend Joey, who wasn’t the type to ask questions.

When Roof showed up asking Joey for a place to stay, Joey says, he invited him in without hesitation. When Roof told him that he believed in segregation, Joey didn’t ask why. When Roof mentioned driving two hours to Charleston and visiting a church called Emanuel AME, he didn’t ask anything about it. When Roof said that he was going to “do something crazy,” as Joey remembers it, he and Lindsey hid Roof’s gun but then gave it back, blowing it all off as a drunken episode.

“I didn’t take him seriously,” is what Joey says again and again to the people who keep asking the same questions again and again, including investigators who arrived at the trailer after one of the most notorious mass killings in recent American history.

Why did he do nothing? they asked.

What kind of people would do nothing?

The Meek brothers -- from left to right Jacob, Joey and Justin -- peek out the window of the trailer. (Michael S. Williamson/The Post)

The trailer, waking up:

It is nearly noon and the dogs are barking.

“Who’s here?” Jacob says, jumping up and peeking through the blinds, but the view is the same as ever — no people, an abandoned trailer next door, a skinny pine tree and some empty vodka minis in a patch of weedy grass. Beyond is the whoosh of highway traffic and the rest of Lexington County, a place that is roughly 80 percent white, the result of decades of white flight from neighboring counties and Ku Klux Klan activity, including a drive-by shooting of three black teenagers in 1996 — not that any sense of history filters into the trailer. “The KKK, that’s one thing I don’t understand,” as Joey says. “Was the KKK an actual violent thing?”

There are no books here, no magazines, and the wood-paneled walls are bare. A stained blue towel hangs over the window in the door. The only furniture in the living room is the couch, two side tables and a metal stool positioned in front of the TV, which is wired to two large speakers and the Xbox that one of the Meek brothers is always playing.

“Man, blew my car up,” says Justin, 18, a high school dropout who is sitting shirtless on the stool.

Kim, 41 and twice divorced, is cleaning. She is constantly cleaning. She wipes the kitchen counters. She straightens the blinds. She folds up the sofa where Lindsey and Joey sleep, folds the sheet and zebra blanket, and drops them in the corner where Roof often lounged, as Jacob does now.

“Mom, want to know my theory? Dylann stayed here to get revenge on Joey,” says Jacob, but no one pays attention.

He is 15, and wears long-sleeved T-shirts that flop over his hands, a habit developed in middle school, when he used to cut himself. He says he stopped doing that when Joey found out, held a knife to his arm and said, “You want to do it? Do it right. Let’s cut it open, let’s see your bone.” He wears a wristband that says “FEEL,” and he is pacing around the living room when Lindsey, who wound up here after running away from home with a heroin addict, comes out of the shower.

She adjusts a faded pink bra under a thin tank top. She yawns and steps over the floor vent where Joey had her hide Roof’s gun. She settles on the couch with her pit bull puppy, Daisy.

“Oh Daisy,” she coos to the dog. She lights a cigarette and starts scrolling on her cellphone. “It’s hot,” she says after a while. “Jacob, you cold?”

Christon Scriven, 21, looks out the door of the trailer as the FBI had pulls up outside. (Michael S. Williamson/The Post)

“I like the cold,” Jacob says, pulling his sleeves over his hands. “You don’t like the cold?”

“Yeah, well, kind of,” Lindsey says.

“You like lake water,” Jacob says mysteriously, but her attention is back to the phone, which she will look at for hours as she waits for Joey, who is out building a fence, an off-the-books day job of the sort available to a high school dropout with a record of juvenile delinquency.

In some ways, everything happening in the trailer is because of Joey. He has an amateur tattoo on his forearm that says “loyalty,” which translates into an open-door policy for whichever troubled friend happens to show up at the trailer. Lindsey was one of those, and so was Roof, a childhood friend who got back in touch this spring after a lapse of several years.

Joey was happy to hear from him. For one thing, Roof had a car and could take them places, including, one day, a lake. He dropped the Meeks off there and disappeared. The next day Joey and Lindsey were in the trailer behind theirs with friends when Lindsey saw the news alert on her phone.

“He did it,” Joey remembers thinking immediately.

They went back to their trailer. They locked the door and drew the blinds. They turned on the TV and watched the flashing red lights around Emanuel AME. A historic black church, Joey now learned. A Bible study. Nine people.

The Meeks stayed up all night, peeking through the blinds, hoping that the suspect still at large was not really the person who had just been in their trailer. But when the surveillance tape of the blond bowl cut came out the next morning, Joey cursed the TV and called the police.

He identified the Timberland boots Roof was wearing. He identified his thin T-shirt and the black marks on it, and with an urgency that startled the Meeks, FBI agents arrived at the trailer door within the hour — coming into the wood-paneled living room, taking two shirts Roof had left, his empty vodka bottles, and then taking Joey.

He says he was questioned about what Roof had told him, but that after a while, it seemed like the questions were beginning to dwell on the extent of his own involvement.

Why did he not alert police when Roof intimated his plans? If he suspected Roof on the night of the shooting, as Joey says he did, why did he not call police at that point? Why did he give Roof his gun back?

“People think it’s my fault,” he says now, home from work, talking with Lindsey. He looks at his cellphone.

“You think the FBI got my phone tapped?” he asks.

“I bet they have my phone tapped,” says Lindsey, who was also questioned.

Joey Meek, left, watches as his brother Jacob plays a video game while Lindsey Fry does dishes. (Michael S. Williamson/The Post)

“Would you believe your friend if they said something like that when they were drunk?” Joey says, shaking his head. “You can’t tell me you would. I didn’t believe it. I brushed it off.”

“Well, I said to the FBI, you don’t know what it’s like to be in this situation,” says Lindsey.

“Exactly,” Joey says, and once again he is going over everything that happened.

How he cursed Roof when he saw the surveillance tape.

How he cursed him again as he watched the court hearing where the daughter of a 70-year-old victim said to Roof, “I will never talk to her ever again,” and the mother of 26-year-old victim said, “Every fiber in my body hurts,” and “You have killed some of the most beautifulest people that I  know.”

How he took away Roof’s gun that drunken night, and how he gave it back. Why had he given it back?

“I thought he was going to do something that night, in his drunkenness,” Joey says, and as he goes over it again, he starts thinking less about Roof than another friend of his named Shane, and what Shane had done in his own drunkenness.

Before the trailer, the Meek brothers lived in another part of Lexington, in a house in a subdivision called Ridgewood. A family photo from those days shows them smiling in front of a brick fireplace, the boys in button-downs and polos.

Roof had lived on an adjacent street, and Shane lived nearby. Shane boxed with Justin, taught Jacob survival skills and was closest in age and friendship to Joey. When he was a teenager, Shane made YouTube videos with titles such as “Shane on Ambien,” in which he stumbles through a disheveled house while several younger kids laugh at him, push him around and swat him with a drumstick. Shane often stayed with the Meeks, who liked having him around. “Hi, Mom,” he would say to Kim when he came through the door, making her laugh.

Daisy, a pit bull puppy, sits near the boots that belonged to Shane, a friend of the Meeks who killed himself in May. (Michael S. Williamson/The Post) 

He would stay for weeks at the house in Ridgewood, and when Kim lost the house to foreclosure, he would stay at the trailer, even though he had his own trailer by then. He was around when Roof arrived in May, but the two didn’t interact very much. Mostly, Shane drank and played video games. He was 21 at that point and saying troubling things that none of the Meeks took seriously. One day it was about his sorrow over not seeing his newborn son, who was living with his estranged girlfriend in another state. One day it had to do with being evicted. One night he messaged Justin saying that he was going to drink a bottle of bug poison, and Justin didn’t believe him and went back to playing Xbox.

Kim was the first to find out. She called Joey to say that Shane had put a shotgun in his mouth and killed himself. Joey remembers getting teary, and he also remembers not believing it and asking Roof to drive him over to Shane’s trailer.

Lindsey and Roof stayed in the car, and Lindsey remembers Roof not saying a word or expressing any kind of emotion. Joey and Justin, meanwhile, walked up to Shane’s door, half-expecting to see Shane waiting for them, laughing that they fell for his joke. But then they were inside, seeing Shane’s blood all over the couch, and Joey was getting sick.

“Anyways, when I was in there I had grabbed his boots — they’re right over there,” Joey says now, pointing to a pair of worn cowboy boots he took from the trailer that night as a memento. The boots are mixed into a pile of shoes in the bedroom where sometimes Shane slept, and sometimes Roof slept, and where Justin now drops onto a twin mattress on the floor and closes his eyes.

A neighbor named Christon  Scriven comes in and lays next to Justin. Christon, who is black, also knew Roof and says of him, “I still love him as a friend.” Then comes a friend they call J. Boogie, and a tattooed guy they call Gizmo, who sits on the carpet. A brown cigarette is rolled, lit and passed around.

“Joey!” Christon calls into the living room. “You’re stupid!”

Justin Meek, 18, sitting with neighbor Christon Scriven, motions for quiet as hears a car outside.(Michael S. Williamson/The Post)

Justin laughs and falls in and out of sleep. Gizmo stumbles to the mattress, drops and sleeps, and after a while, Christon says, “I have no sympathy for people. Nobody has any sympathy for me. I care for me and me only.”

He passes the cigarette to Justin, and Justin drops ashes in the bed, and in the chemical-smelling haze, Christon plays a country song on his phone. “Well I caught my wife with a young man and it cost me 99,” he and Justin sing.

He switches to Lil Wayne. “Family first, you get your family killed,” he and Justin rap, and the dogs start barking.

“The police here?” Christon says. Justin looks up. Joey comes in and looks through the blinds. Nothing. Christon aims a finger at him — “Bang,” he whispers — and Joey leaves.

“Joseph!” Christon yells after him.

“Hey!” Justin calls.

“Somebody! Anybody!” Christon yells, but nobody answers. Soon Justin is asleep again, and Christon is looking at him. He rubs the back of his hand on Justin’s cheek. He takes a lighter and flicks it at Justin’s hair.

Gizmo wakes up, goes to the kitchen, gets a bottle of syrup and squeezes it into his mouth.

It is nearly sundown when Kim comes home after being out all day.

“She’s here!” Jacob yells, and he gets up to make a frozen pizza.

Kim yanks up a crumpled hamburger wrapper off the floor. She grabs two plastic cups filled with cigarette butts and empties them into the garbage.

“Jacob!” she snaps when he drops the pizza carton on the floor. “Pick up that trash! Pick it up now!”

He picks it up.

“I’m so tired of these people over here, all day, every day,” Kim yells to no one. “I have no peace! I have no quiet!”

She goes into her bedroom on the other side of the trailer and shuts the door.

Kim Konzny checks her phone during a break from her job at Waffle House. (Michael S. Williamson/The Post)

When she comes out, her long, black hair is piled into a bun. It is near 10 p.m. She gets into her Toyota, a black Waffle House visor dangling from the rearview mirror, and turns onto the highway.

In the dark mile ahead, the Waffle House is bright and sharp, and this is where Kim found a job after her second husband left, and, as she says, “everything went backwards.”

“Hash browns?” she says at the start of a shift that will end near dawn.

“Scattered and smothered,” she calls to the cook.

She wipes the counters, refills the napkin holders, pours water into the Bunn Automatic, and when break time arrives, goes out into the muggy night. She sits on a curb and smokes, scrolling through the phone where she keeps photos of life before the trailer.

There is the mother and father she loved. A decent childhood in South Carolina.

The first husband, a military man. Joey, Justin and Jacob, who was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, where the husband was stationed and where Kim says he started saying things like “No one could ever love you,” and she left, eventually moving the boys back to South Carolina.

The second husband, Sean, her friend since kindergarten. He is the one in the photo by the fireplace where the boys are in pinstripes and polo shirts, where Kim is smiling, where Jacob, Justin and Joey are smiling, Joey’s chin tilted up slightly, an arm draped around Sean’s shoulder.

“My beautiful family whom I love greatly!” reads the caption.

This was at the house in Ridgewood. It was vinyl-sided with two stories and a decent yard. And though Joey had started climbing out of his bedroom window at night, Sean was trying to keep him in line. The boys had friends Kim liked, including the quiet one with a blond bowl cut, and the funny one with dark, curly hair. The family went to church, Kim got her degree as a medical technician and a job in her field, and this was how life was going, she says, until the Friday she came home from Aaron’s rent-to-own furniture store — “He said he wanted an L-shaped couch,” she says. “He said he wanted an ottoman” — and Sean said he was leaving her.

That fall was when Jacob started cutting his arms. Joey dropped out of high school. Kim lost her job, couldn’t afford the house and rented the banged-up trailer off the highway.

She lost 10 pounds, then 20 and went to a doctor who diagnosed her with anxiety and depression. She got the job at Waffle House. She got on food stamps. She started spending hours shut in her bedroom, posting self-help mantras on Facebook, and it was somewhere between “God can restore what is broken” and “Pray to have eyes to see the best in people” that the blond kid became an alleged mass murderer, and the curly headed one killed himself, and Kim became someone who tries hard not to think about much beyond the next cigarette, which she finishes now as she keeps scrolling in the last minutes of her break.

“Don’t let this world make you bitter,” reads one post.

“Friend says shooting suspect supported segregation,” reads another.

“Hi Kimmy,” reads a text message from Shane’s mother. “I’ve been a wreck. I don’t know how he could have done it. Kimmy, I loved him so much and I can’t stop crying.”

Kim drops her phone. The screen cracks. “Dammit,” she says, and break is over.

She goes back inside, where a regular says to her, “Hello, little girl.”

“Hey,” she says.

“How’s Joey doing?” he asks.

“Working,” she says of the son she is constantly telling to “go out there and grow as a young man” and “get it together” and “stop hanging onto my coat feathers,” and whose video she now shows to the cook.

“Look, my son’s on TV,” she says, showing him a video of an interview Joey gave after the shooting, talking about Roof. The cook glances at the screen and goes back to frying. “My son called the FBI at 8:15 that morning — yep. He’s his best friend. Maybe his only friend.” She puts the phone back in her pocket and moves on to her tables.

Konzny sometimes hangs around at the Waffle House after her shift is over. (Michael S. Williamson/The Post)

After 2 a.m., it is quiet again, and she sits at the counter to eat a plate of scrambled eggs.

Two waiters, a young man and a young woman, are talking.

“I’m one drop away from killing everyone,” he says.

“My last day at McDonald’s I wanted to kill everyone,” she says.

“I can’t kill myself, because then I’d go to hell, so I’m stuck here,” he says, and fake punches her in the arm. She flinches.

“I’m very sensitive,” she says.

“I’m going to go home. Watch TV,” he says.

“No one cares,” she says. “I need a hug.”

He holds up a large steak knife and smiles. She winces and laughs weakly, and Kim finishes eating, drops the heavy plate in the sink and, three hours later, goes back to the trailer to see what is waiting for her there.

Clockwise from top left: Justin Meek, Lindsey Fry, Jacob Meek and Joey Meek. (Michael S. Williamson/The Post)

What is waiting is more of the same.

“You see that?” Lindsey says one day, looking through the blinds, the dogs barking. “They stopped in the driveway — a white Jeep,” she says, but the white Jeep leaves, and she goes back to scrolling on her cellphone.

Another day, Justin is playing Xbox, grenades exploding, bodies flying, and he says, “Mom, when did Shane die?”

“Why bring up that subject?” Jacob says, pacing, sleeves flopping. “Why?”

Another day, Kim goes into her bedroom, closes the door, smokes a cigarette and says, “It’s like we’re being punished for something, only I can’t figure out what.”

Another day, Jacob opens the door and stands next to Kim, who is in bed scrolling with one hand, smoking with the other.

“Mom,” he says.

“Mom, Mom, Mom,” he says, knees pressed against her bed.

“Mom?” he says, and lays in bed with her.

“Mom, Mom,” he says, nudging close to her, but she inches away, and he goes back to the living room, where Lindsey is hugging her puppy, who keeps throwing up.

Another day, Joey comes home from work with another friend in need of a place to stay for a while, this one named Brandon, who pours himself a glass of iced tea and sits on the living room floor.

The drinking continues. The smoking continues. The chemical haze continues. The cellphone scrolling continues. The blinds stay shut. The blue towel hangs, and the shrugging continues, too, right up until one night when, as they will recall later, there’s a knock at the door.

It is a man no one knows except Brandon, who had argued with him earlier and who now barges into the trailer, pulls out a handgun and cocks it.

He points the gun at Brandon. He points it at Jacob. He points it at Justin. He points it at Lindsey. He points it at Joey, who stands up in the middle of the living room and says, “Shoot me.”

As the others watch, Joey inches toward the gun.

“Shoot me,” he says again, moving closer, and he keeps saying it.

“If you’re going to shoot anybody, shoot me,” he says, and as he closes in on the man, the man begins backing up.

“Shoot me,” Joey keeps saying, and now the man is out of the trailer and putting his gun back into his waistband, and Joey is escorting him up the rutted road, and the man is walking toward the highway, disappearing into the dark, and now Joey is shaking.

He keeps shaking and is unable to stop. He tries to steady himself by sitting down on his knees. He tries to breathe. He curses.

He gets up, and as he walks back toward the trailer, he punches a tree trunk twice, hard enough to bloody his knuckles.

Kim Konzny vacuums as her son Jacob plays video games and Lindsey checks her phone. (Michael S. Williamson/The Post)

And now it is the next day.

“I could see the tip of his gun,” says Lindsey.

“He pointed it at me first,” says Jacob.

“He said, ‘This is a 9 millimeter,’ ” says Justin.

“I thought I was about to die. I thought we were all about to die,” says Lindsey, but the emotion is drained from her voice, and from all their voices, and Lindsey goes back to scrolling through her phone, where a friend has posted a photo of a blank white flag and the caption, “Welcome to the new U.S.A. — We stand for nothing.”

Kim is in her bedroom, the door shut. Jacob is pacing around the living room, sleeves flopping. Justin is on the Xbox, and the sound of explosions rattles the walls.

When Joey comes home, he lays on the plastic-covered twin mattress where Dylann Roof once slept, and now Lindsey and Daisy lay down next to him.

“I’m wondering how I can get away from all this,” he says. “If it was my choice and I had the money? I’d have a mile-long driveway surrounded by acres of woods. Have nothing to worry about. People’d be scared to walk down the driveway it’d be so dark.”

“What time is it?” Lindsey asks after a while, but Joey doesn’t answer. He is looking at the puppy, who has been throwing up again. He’s trying to see what’s wrong.

“Baby, what time is it?” Lindsey asks again.

“7:22,” Joey finally says, putting his hand on Daisy’s chest.

He holds it there. He looks at Lindsey. He looks at Daisy. He is startled.

“I don’t feel a heartbeat,” he says, even though it is there. “How come I can’t feel it?”

Stephanie McCrummen is a national reporter for The Washington Post. Before that, she was the paper’s East Africa bureau chief. She’s also written about the suburban housing boom and education reform, among other subjects.

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Study: Common Core & 2 Testing Consortia Violate Federal Laws, Unlikely to Improve Academic Achievement

Study: Common Core and Two Testing Consortia Violate Federal Laws, Are Unlikely to Improve Academic Achievement

“Competitive federalism” doesn’t run afoul of federal law, would produce better results 

Contact Jamie Gass, 617-723-2277 ext. 210 or jgass@pioneerinstitute.org

BOSTON – In the wake of the U.S. House and Senate’s passage of bills that would reauthorize the federal No Child Left Behind law, a new Pioneer Institute research paper finds that national English and mathematics standards, known as Common Core, violate three federal laws that prohibit the federal government from exercising any direction, supervision or control over curricula or the program of instruction in the states.

Dr. Williamson M. Evers, author of “Federal Overreach and Common Core,” proposes a better approach.

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“Competitive federalism, under which states learn from and seek to improve on each others’ standards and tests, is both legal and would produce better results than monolithic national standards and tests,” says Dr. Evers. “Monopolies are hardly the best way to produce either academic quality or value for taxpayers.”

Prohibitions on federal control over curriculum and instruction can be found in the Education and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the General Education Provisions Act of 1970, and the 1979 Department of Education Organization Act, which established the U.S. Department of Education. But the Obama administration has, nonetheless, pursued a national policy on curriculum standards and directly funded two national testing consortia.

Common Core was developed by a group of Washington, D.C. education trade organizations and pushed out to the states by the federal government through the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RttT) initiative, which gave out more than $4 billion in federal grants.

Adherence to Common Core was one of the criteria on which state funding applications were judged. Massachusetts’ application for the first round of RttT grants was ranked 13^th out of 16 states. In the second round, the commonwealth made clear it would adhere to Common Core in an otherwise largely identical application and finished first.

The federal government is forbidden by federal law from favoring a particular set of curriculum-content standards over others.

RttT also drove the schedule for state adherence to Common Core. Applicants for the first round of grants had to agree to adhere to the standards before they were even published. During the second round, states had just two months to review the standards.  States generally take about two years to develop and adopt academic standards. RttT was the way in which nearly every state adhered to Common Core.

The federal government has also spent more than $360 million to fund two consortia that have developed national Common Core-based assessments.

In addition to tying it to RttT grants, the U.S. Department of Education made adherence to Common Core a condition for states seeking waivers from the accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind, even though the secretary of education has no statutory authority to place conditions on such waivers. Secretary Duncan’s additional NCLB waiver conditions were never authorized by Congress.

Dr. Evers also describes the unusual way in which a majority of states adhered to Common Core. It was in almost every case adhered to via processes that bypassed state legislatures and other elected bodies. There were no bills, hearings or public debates in Congress relating to the U.S. Department of Education directing, incentivizing or funding the adoption of national standards or tests.

Federal law requires that state standards and testing be aligned. Dr. Evers argues, by controlling nationalized curriculum-content standards and assessments, the federal government gains de facto control over public school curricula.

Dr. Evers points out that Common Core dictates what is taught, when it will be taught, and how. For example, it prescribes that Algebra I should be taught in ninth and tenth grades, what technique should be used to teach geometry, and the split between fiction and informational texts (non-fiction) in English.

“Bill Evers’ scholarship is impressive in its scope and detail,” said Jim Stergios, executive director of Pioneer Institute.  “He provides a history of the federal government’s attempts first to establish and then to deepen a directive role in K-12 public education.  Along the way he underscores the pedigree of Common Core and the national testing consortia —and why they are poorly conceived education policy.”

The exhaustively researched, 60-page study includes a sweeping history of the federal role in K-12 public education.

For example, President Carter’s secretary of health, education and welfare, Joseph Califano, said “the pressures of local politics, close to the parents of the children in school, are far preferable to those of national politics.” Califano thought a national K-12 test would encourage “rigid uniformity” and that whoever had control of what went into the national test would unavoidably have too much power. Ultimately, Califano thought that “national control of curriculum” is “a form of national control of ideas.”

No Child Left Behind, passed in 2001 under President George W. Bush, required students to be tested in English and math every year from grade three through eight, but left it to states to develop curriculum-content standards and tests.

Williamson M. Evers is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where he specializes in research on K-12 education policy especially as it pertains to curriculum, teaching, testing, accountability, school finance, and the history of African-American education. Evers was the U.S. assistant secretary of education for planning, evaluation, and policy development from 2007 to 2009. He was a senior adviser to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings during 2007. From July to December 2003, Evers served in Iraq as a senior adviser for education to Administrator L. Paul Bremer of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

“Federal Overreach and Common Core” is the latest installment in Pioneer Institute’s ongoing review of the academic quality, legality and cost of Common Core.  Pioneer is the national leader in independent research on the topic.

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Pioneer Institute is an independent, non-partisan, privately funded research organization that seeks to improve the quality of life in Massachusetts through civic discourse and intellectually rigorous, data-driven public policy solutions based on free market principles, individual liberty and responsibility, and the ideal of effective, limited and accountable government.

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VIDEO: COMMON CORE TROJAN EXPOSED IN 3-MINUTES

If you think Common Core is just a set of academic standards that keep our children well educated, think again. This short 3-minute video pinpoints the legion of facts underlying why there is such a national uproar against Common Core and all that it represents. Please do "your" homework and research each of the statements in this video. Common Core is not education, it is without a doubt, indoctrination of your children and grandchildren, and your state and local governments are complicit. Why? There are huge, huge pockets of money tied to compliance with these public private/private educational partnerships. This, my friends, is ONLY the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Eduction pales in comparison to the corporate beast being created right under our noses and it's labeled "superior education".  Don't be fooled. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=fxpPfnKzxp0&app=desktop