!!!!

If the history of the twentieth Century taught us anything, it should have taught us that it is the nature of totalitarian dictatorships that one of their highest priorities is to control the education of a nations youth.  One has only to think of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini’s imposition of state control of eduction to recall the generations of enslaved people those systems produced.  Hitler Youth being one terrible example.

The Catholic Church has always taught that the right to educate a child belongs in the first place to the parents of the child.  Catholic schools, where they succeeded owed their success to the respect the school administrators paid to that principle and it was my experience as Vicar for Education in the Archdiocese of Miami and as bishop of two dioceses that when Catholic schools failed in their programs of education it was frequently because the administrators of such schools more or less usurped the role of parents in the education of their children.

Sometimes parents are not only the primary educators of their children, they are the only educators.  I am referring to those parents who educate their children at home.  I have known many parents who taught their children at home using the one of the excellent programs of education that are available from Catholic colleges and universities.  Without exception those children have received a better education at home than they would have received in a public school.  The best Catholic schools can do an excellent job also.

I am appalled by the attacks made on home schooling.  The worst is occurring in Germany (why am I surprised) where home schooling is actually illegal.  In the United States attacks on home schooling emanate primarily from the teachers unions who would like to promote a monopoly on education.

Not all parents are able to provide a good education for their children and so we must have schools, both public and private.

I consider it dangerous that the Obama administration hypocritically fosters to expand the federal governments control of all education of youth.  Perhaps those who have advocated the abolishment of the Department of Education are wrong, but there can be no doubt that ever since its creation that Department has sought to extend the control over all primary and secondary education by the Federal Government.

Now we are engaged in the struggle to prevent the Obama administration from imposing the ‘reform’ known as the Common Core Project.  I have posted several posts on this subject recently and now I draw your attention to the column of Jim Geraghty below.

– Abyssum

==================================================================================================================================

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

National Review Online

November 26, 2013

An Uncommon Contempt Displayed towards Those Objecting to Common Core

Our friend Ramesh on the Common Core debate:

Arne Duncan had to backtrack from [his statement that Common Core critics are mostly “white suburban moms who – all of a sudden – their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were”] which also happens to be clearly false. Students aren’t yet being tested to determine whether they meet the standards, so poor test results couldn’t be generating a backlash. The contempt that the remark revealed is real enough, though. Proponents of the Common Core tend to view its critics as an ignorant mob. Support for it is, in certain circles, a sign of one’s seriousness about education reform.

Yet the reform strategy it represents hasn’t been thought through well, and it seems unlikely to work. The debate that surrounds it is an extended exercise in missing the point.

You can see why ‘common core’ would be a seductive idea in theory. Way too many American schools are failing the students who come in through their doors, and so there’s a natural belief that if we could just get those worst-performing schools up to some minimum standard, and establish some sort of universal floor or threshold for quality, everyone’s kids would be better off.

Why, you could use the slogan . . . “Leave no child behind!”

Of course, ‘No Child Left Behind’ is what we tried with a national system of standardized testing back in 2001, with decidedly mixed results. Of course, President Obama granted waivers to 26 states exempting them from the No Child Left Behind requirements, effectively nullifying the law.

Establishing that minimum standard is easier in theory than in practice, and parents have good reason to be wary of an effort to centralize control and authority of education matters. If I’m a concerned parent with a beef with how my local school is teaching my children, I can join the PTA or attend my local school-board meeting. Those school administrators should, at least theoretically, be more attentive and responsive to my concerns, as they’ll see me at the school and around town. My state legislator will run into me much less frequently, and the evidence suggests Secretary of Education Arne Duncan seethes with contempt for parents who disagree with him and avoids interacting with “white suburban moms.”

Local control isn’t perfect, but it is, in theory, the most self-correcting. And if a school over in some other district wants to change their curriculum, say to emphasize more math, or more history, or more foreign languages, and the local parents are fine with it . . . why should I complain or weigh in? Even if my school finds a formula to improve student performance, it may not work over there and their ideas many not work over here. If there’s anything that frustrating efforts at education reform have taught us, it’s that way too many success stories can’t be replicated elsewhere. Jaime Escalante proved to be an astonishingly successful calculus teacher, but after he and his successor retired, “a very successful program rapidly collapsed, leaving only fragments behind.”

As Ramesh notes, trying to standardize education across the country amounts to strangling experimentation and innovation:

The case for having a “common core” in the first place is weak. High standards may be valuable, but why do they have to be common? It isn’t as though different state standards are a major problem in U.S. education. There’s more variation in achievement within states than between them. Common standards may make life a bit easier for students who move across state lines, but they also mean that we lose a chance for states to experiment.

Finally, which is most remarkable and surprising — that Barack Obama is president of the United States, that Joe Biden is vice president, or that Arne Duncan has been secretary of education for five years and will remain in the job for the foreseeable future? It’s not like Duncan could cite a record of remarkable improvement during his tenure in Chicago:

Soon after Arne Duncan left his job as schools chief here to become one of the most powerful U.S. education secretaries ever, his former students sat for federal achievement tests. This month, the mathematics report card was delivered: Chicago trailed several cities in performance and progress made over six years.

Miami, Houston and New York had higher scores than Chicago on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Boston, San Diego and Atlanta had bigger gains. Even fourth-graders in the much-maligned D.C. schools improved nearly twice as much since 2003.

The federal readout is just one measure of Duncan’s record as chief executive of the nation’s third-largest system. Others show advances on various fronts. But the new math scores signal that Chicago is nowhere near the head of the pack in urban school improvement, even though Duncan often cites the successes of his tenure as he crusades to fix public education. . . .

The Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, which represents business, professional, education and cultural leaders, concluded in June that gains on state test scores were inflated when Illinois relaxed passing standards and that too many students still drop out of high school or graduate unprepared for college. The Consortium on Chicago School Research, a nonpartisan group at the University of Chicago, reported in October that Duncan’s closure of low-performing schools often shuffled students into comparable schools, yielding little or no academic benefit.

Obama picked Duncan because he was “his” guy. Then again, it’s not like President Obama trusted Arne Duncan enough to let his schools teach his daughters; while the Obamas lived in Chicago, their daughters went to the private University of Chicago Lab School, where the tuition is $25,000 to $28,000 per child per year.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

November 26, 2013

Bad News for Generic Democrats, and Probably Specific Democrats as Well

Get used to generic ballot results like this: “A new CNN/ORC International poll indicates a dramatic turnaround in the battle for control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections. Democrats a month ago held a 50 percent to 42 percent advantage among registered voters in a generic ballot, which asked respondents to choose between a Democrat or Republican in their congressional district without identifying the candidates . . . The Democratic lead has disappeared. A new CNN/ORC poll indicates the GOP now holds a 49 percent to 47 percent edge.”

Note that in the final generic ballot polls of 2010, Republicans had much bigger leads.

An Uncommon Contempt Displayed towards Those Objecting to Common Core

Our friend Ramesh on the Common Core debate:

Arne Duncan had to backtrack from [his statement that Common Core critics are mostly “white suburban moms who – all of a sudden – their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were”] which also happens to be clearly false. Students aren’t yet being tested to determine whether they meet the standards, so poor test results couldn’t be generating a backlash. The contempt that the remark revealed is real enough, though. Proponents of the Common Core tend to view its critics as an ignorant mob. Support for it is, in certain circles, a sign of one’s seriousness about education reform.

Yet the reform strategy it represents hasn’t been thought through well, and it seems unlikely to work. The debate that surrounds it is an extended exercise in missing the point.

You can see why ‘common core’ would be a seductive idea in theory. Way too many American schools are failing the students who come in through their doors, and so there’s a natural belief that if we could just get those worst-performing schools up to some minimum standard, and establish some sort of universal floor or threshold for quality, everyone’s kids would be better off.

Why, you could use the slogan . . . “Leave no child behind!”

Of course, ‘No Child Left Behind’ is what we tried with a national system of standardized testing back in 2001, with decidedly mixed results. Of course, President Obama granted waivers to 26 states exempting them from the No Child Left Behind requirements, effectively nullifying the law.

Establishing that minimum standard is easier in theory than in practice, and parents have good reason to be wary of an effort to centralize control and authority of education matters. If I’m a concerned parent with a beef with how my local school is teaching my children, I can join the PTA or attend my local school-board meeting. Those school administrators should, at least theoretically, be more attentive and responsive to my concerns, as they’ll see me at the school and around town. My state legislator will run into me much less frequently, and the evidence suggests Secretary of Education Arne Duncan seethes with contempt for parents who disagree with him and avoids interacting with “white suburban moms.”

Local control isn’t perfect, but it is, in theory, the most self-correcting. And if a school over in some other district wants to change their curriculum, say to emphasize more math, or more history, or more foreign languages, and the local parents are fine with it . . . why should I complain or weigh in? Even if my school finds a formula to improve student performance, it may not work over there and their ideas many not work over here. If there’s anything that frustrating efforts at education reform have taught us, it’s that way too many success stories can’t be replicated elsewhere. Jaime Escalante proved to be an astonishingly successful calculus teacher, but after he and his successor retired, “a very successful program rapidly collapsed, leaving only fragments behind.”

As Ramesh notes, trying to standardize education across the country amounts to strangling experimentation and innovation:

The case for having a “common core” in the first place is weak. High standards may be valuable, but why do they have to be common? It isn’t as though different state standards are a major problem in U.S. education. There’s more variation in achievement within states than between them. Common standards may make life a bit easier for students who move across state lines, but they also mean that we lose a chance for states to experiment.

Finally, which is most remarkable and surprising — that Barack Obama is president of the United States, that Joe Biden is vice president, or that Arne Duncan has been secretary of education for five years and will remain in the job for the foreseeable future? It’s not like Duncan could cite a record of remarkable improvement during his tenure in Chicago:

Soon after Arne Duncan left his job as schools chief here to become one of the most powerful U.S. education secretaries ever, his former students sat for federal achievement tests. This month, the mathematics report card was delivered: Chicago trailed several cities in performance and progress made over six years.

Miami, Houston and New York had higher scores than Chicago on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Boston, San Diego and Atlanta had bigger gains. Even fourth-graders in the much-maligned D.C. schools improved nearly twice as much since 2003.

The federal readout is just one measure of Duncan’s record as chief executive of the nation’s third-largest system. Others show advances on various fronts. But the new math scores signal that Chicago is nowhere near the head of the pack in urban school improvement, even though Duncan often cites the successes of his tenure as he crusades to fix public education. . . .

The Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, which represents business, professional, education and cultural leaders, concluded in June that gains on state test scores were inflated when Illinois relaxed passing standards and that too many students still drop out of high school or graduate unprepared for college. The Consortium on Chicago School Research, a nonpartisan group at the University of Chicago, reported in October that Duncan’s closure of low-performing schools often shuffled students into comparable schools, yielding little or no academic benefit.

Obama picked Duncan because he was “his” guy. Then again, it’s not like President Obama trusted Arne Duncan enough to let his schools teach his daughters; while the Obamas lived in Chicago, their daughters went to the private University of Chicago Lab School, where the tuition is $25,000 to $28,000 per child per year.