A charter school is a public school. There are state-specific rules around who can start a charter, who oversees the charter, and how the funding flows, and they are responsible for serving students with disabilities in keeping with state law and the charter school’s status as an LEA or a school of an LEA. If you have issues or concerns, get to know your state’s charter school law.
“Charters are competitors. They steal customers,
deplete revenues and increase costs.
When charters siphon off kids, they not only
take the money that comes with them,
they often cause nearby
schools to operate under capacity.”
Tell Walton Family to Hold Charter Schools Accountable
Instead of Being Part of the Problem
In the Public Interest is a great "Watchdog for America" since American's have to focus on so many things - they have the ability and resources to get to the truth - and truth is what they present.
Every day it seems like there is another headline about waste, fraud and abuse in for-profit charter schools across the country. Too many school districts lack the resources or political will to properly oversee a rapidly growing number of charter schools which, according to a recent report, led to at least $200 million in misspent taxpayer funds. All of this bad press should be enough to make even the most ardent supporters of charters welcome robust oversight and accountability.
Unfortunately, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. ITPI and the American Federation of Teachers just published Brought to you by Wal-Mart, a new report showing how The Walton Family Foundation (WFF) set the stage for the current spate of fraud in the industry. For over 20 years the foundation operated by Wal-Mart heirs has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the growth of charter schools and prioritized quantity over quality and ideology over good public policy. As you can read in the report, the Walton Family Foundation and groups it donates to have opposed common-sense regulations that ensure charter schools are serving students’ best interests. READ MORE
Every day it seems like there is another headline about waste, fraud and abuse in for-profit charter schools across the country. Too many school districts lack the resources or political will to properly oversee a rapidly growing number of charter schools which, according to a recent report, led to at least $200 million in misspent taxpayer funds. All of this bad press should be enough to make even the most ardent supporters of charters welcome robust oversight and accountability.
Unfortunately, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. ITPI and the American Federation of Teachers just published Brought to you by Wal-Mart, a new report showing how The Walton Family Foundation (WFF) set the stage for the current spate of fraud in the industry. For over 20 years the foundation operated by Wal-Mart heirs has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the growth of charter schools and prioritized quantity over quality and ideology over good public policy. As you can read in the report, the Walton Family Foundation and groups it donates to have opposed common-sense regulations that ensure charter schools are serving students’ best interests. READ MORE
| cashinginonkids_walmart_report.pdf |
Considering Wal-Marts full flegged support of the TPA/TPP maybe someone will be able to ask them why they have been involved in ruining our children's education and taking American jobs and sending them overseas. They are supports of the NWO!
The True Goal of School Choice!
Charlotte Iserbyt is the consummate whistleblower! Iserbyt served as Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration, where she first blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which would control curriculum in America's classrooms. Iserbyt is a former school board director in Camden, Maine and was co-founder and research analyst of Guardians of Education for Maine (GEM) from 1978 to 2000. She has also served in the American Red Cross on Guam and Japan during the Korean War, and in the United States Foreign Service in Belgium and in the Republic of South Africa.
Iserbyt is a speaker and writer, best known for her 1985 booklet Back to Basics Reform or OBE: Skinnerian International Curriculum and her 1989 pamphlet Soviets in the Classroom: America's Latest Education Fad which covered the details of the U.S.-Soviet and Carnegie-Soviet Education Agreements which remain in effect to this day. She is a freelance writer and has had articles published in Human Events, The Washington Times, The Bangor Daily News, and included in the record of Congressional hearings.
Website: www.deliberatedumbingdown.com Website: www.americandeception.com
Who and what groups are supporting the unconstitutional school choice agenda?
It is important for Mainers, and all Americans, for that matter, to ask the following question:
How is it possible for the following individuals and groups, who traditionally have been at odds, to all support school choice/virtual charter schools?
Arne Duncan, Obama's leftist Secretary of Education,
Edwin Feulner, President, Heritage Foundation and other neoconservative leaders,
The globalist (world government supporting) Council on Foreign Relations
The above support leaves most traditional (Goldwater) conservatives shaking their heads.
The end result of what Maine’s Governor Paul LePage and his Education Commissioner Stephen Bowen (and others in similar positions in ALL states) are doing will be the destruction of not only our formerly (pre-1965) excellent public education system, but, more importantly, the destruction of private education as well since once an education institution, be it public, private, home school, Christian, or charter school, accepts one penny of tax money from the federal, state, or local level, it MUST abide by ALL federal regulations and MUST take the federal test which means it must TEACH TO THE TEST which is 50% attitudinal (politically correct). THIS EQUALS TOTAL GOVERNMENT/CORPORATE CONTROL OF YOUR CHILD’S EDUCATION.
A top change agent with the NEA made NEA’s plan, and that of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and the neoconservative organizations, very clear in an article in Educational Leadership, in 1994. The following quote is taken from “the deliberate dumbing down of America,” page 321:
“TO OBE OR NOT TO OBE?” WAS THE QUESTION POSED BY MARJORIE LEDELL, ASSOCIATE of William Spady’s in his High Success Network, in her article for Educational Leadership’s January 1994 issue. From page 18 we read:
"Finally, raise the real issue and depend on democracy. Don’t let “to OBE [outcomes based education, ed] or Not to OBE” or “to implement or not implement efforts to improve student learning” cloud the overdue national debate about whether public education should exist or be replaced with publicly funded private education."
What Ledell is recommending (publicly funded, tax funded PRIVATE education) is being recommended by LePage and Bowen at the direction of the Obama Administration, the Heritage Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations. This is happening all over the country since the above agenda belongs to the National Governors Association (NGA), and the Governors take their orders from the NGA. Same for the state affiliates of the Heritage Foundation which take their orders from Heritage in Washington, D.C.
This NEA, NGA, CFR, Heritage Foundation plan, unfortunately being accepted and promoted by many well-meaning conservatives and Tea Party groups (not all, thank goodness...many are withdrawing their support when they get the information I am providing in this email) spells not only the end of private education, but, of utmost importance, and please read this over and over:
THE END OF OUR FREE ECONOMIC SYSTEM AND OUR REPRESENTATIVE FORM OF GOVERNMENT.
The goal of school choice, unbeknownst to many, is and has always been the opposite of what we are told. The goal is the takeover of the public and private school sectors through partnerships with the corporate sector in order to implement socialist work force training, formerly found only in communist countries. Carnegie Corporation, in its little blue book entitled "Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies", 1934, called for using the schools to change our nation's free market economy to a planned economy.Click here and type "Conclusions" into the search engine in order to read this little book.
Carnegie's "planned economy" is going in right now through public/private partnerships (school to work) and school choice/charter school proposals being recommended by the aforementioned groups. This is happening at the same time our representative republic with its elective form of government is being undermined through acceptance of tax-supported charter schools which have NO elected school boards (no accountability to the taxpayers). This is known as taxation without representation. When and if Americans accept unelected councils to run one of the largest economic sectors of our economy (publicly-funded charter schools) what is to keep them from accepting the unelected Soviet council form of government across the board?
Interestingly enough, and hard to accept, is the fact that none of this “planned” change in our economic system and form of government would have been tolerated had the building blocks not been put in place by prominent so-called “conservative” Republicans: President Ronald Reagan and Edward Feulner, Chairman of the Heritage Foundation, the leading conservative group in the nation. The following quote from an article in the May 14, 1984 issue of The Washington Post entitled “Industrial Policy Urged for GOP” sheds some light on behind-the-scenes activities which have led to acceptance of school choice and corporate-fascist workforce training necessary for a planned economy:
From “the deliberate dumbing down of America”, pp. 299-300: “A conservative study group founded by supporters of President Reagan is about to issue a report that advocates Republicans shed some of their deep-rooted antipathy to a planned economy. The “Industrial Policy Debate” is to be issued today by the Institute for Contemporary Studies, a think tank founded by Presidential Counselor Edwin Meese, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and other Reagan supporters.
As Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, 1981-1983, I served as liaison to the President’s Task Force on Private Sector Initiatives. The following information is taken from “the deliberate dumbing down of America,” 1999, pp. 175-176.
“EARLY IN 1981 THE PRESIDENT’S TASK FORCE ON PRIVATE SECTOR INITIATIVES WAS INstalled at 734 Jackson Place, N.W., Washington, D.C. Membership listed on The White House letterhead read like a “Who’s Who” of individuals in government agencies, universities, tax-exempt foundations, non-governmental organizations, business, media, labor unions, and religion. The names of some individuals on the task force follow: William Aramony, president, United Way; William J. Baroody, Jr., president, American Enterprise Institute; Helen G. Boosalis, mayor, City of Lincoln, Nebraska; Terence Cardinal Cooke, archbishop of New York; Governor Pierre S. Dupont, Delaware; Senator David Durenberger; Luis A. Ferre, former governor of Puerto Rico; John Gardner, chairman, Independent Sector; Edward Hill, pastor, Mt. Zion Baptist Church; Michael S. Joyce, executive director, John M. Olin Foundation; Edward H. Kiernan, president, International Association of Police; Arthur Levitt, Jr., chairman, American Stock Exchange; Richard W. Lyman, president, Rockefeller Foundation; Elder Thomas S. Monson, The MormonChurch; William C. Norris, chairman and CEO, Control Data Corporation; George Romney, chairman, National Center for Citizen Involvement; C. William Verity, Jr., chairman, Armco Steel, Inc.; Jeri J. Winger, first vice president, General Federation of Women’s Clubs; Thomas H. Wyman, president, CBS, Inc.; and William S. White, president, C.S. Mott Foundation.
This totally new and un-American concept of partnerships between the public and private sector has been readily accepted by our elected officials who ignore its roots in socialism and its implications for the discontinuation of our representative form of government and accountability to the taxpayers. Under the “partnership” process, determining responsibility when something goes wrong is like pinning jello to the wall.
Such a change in government, if presented in clear language to citizens at the polls, would be rejected. However, when implemented gradually, using the Marxist-Hegelian Dialectic, citizens don’t even notice what is happening. The shift is away from elected representatives. In time, after voters have become even more disenchanted with the candidates and election results, fewer and fewer citizens will vote. At that point a highly-respected member of the public will enter the picture to propose a solution to the problem: some sort of compromise toward parliamentary form of government found in socialist democracies which will be acceptable to Americans unfamiliar with the protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
One says to oneself, confidently, “This will never happen.” Look around you. What do you see? Site-based management in your local schools, transferring decision-making, traditionally exercised by elected school boards, to politically correct appointees and the creation of unelected task forces at all government levels; proposals to “separate school and state” which make no mention of governmental and social structure consequences—efforts to have government money (taxes) pay for services delivered by private religious or home schools, etc., with no public representation. There can be no accountability to the taxpayers under a system so alien to the United States’ form of representative government.
How clean, neat and tidy. Wholesale destruction of an entire, wonderful system of government without firing a shot.
As a U.S. Department of Education liaison with The White House during the early days of this initiative this writer inquired of one of President Reagan’s political appointees whether this initiative was not corporate fascism; a politically incorrect question that resulted in someone else replacing me as Liaison with The White House.”
Doesn’t the above agenda, set in 1981, sound exactly like what is being carved in stone as I write? Even I, who saw and experienced all that happened 31 years ago, am a bit in shock, realizing that what I saw and wrote about is actually being carried out exactly as planned.
Heritage Foundation’s role in the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the resultant loss of hundreds of thousands of American jobs (high unemployment) has caused the American people to accept any solution to their economic problems, even acceptance of the Carnegie Corporation’s planned economy and the transformation of our schools from academics to the Soviet workforce training system. What is happening represents an exquisite example of the use of the Hegelian dialectic: create the problem, people scream, impose the solution they would never have accepted had the problem not been deliberately created in the first place. Please read from “the deliberate dumbing down of america”, 1999, pp. 303-304:
THE 1993 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION OF WASHINGTON, D.C., DEDIcated to their twentieth year celebration, revealed the following:
The idea of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) originated with Heritage Fellow Richard Allen and has long been advocated by Heritage policy analysts.... The idea of creating a North American free trade zone from the Yukon to the Yucatan was first proposed by Heritage Distinguished Fellow Richard Allen in the late 1970s, refined by then Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, and further developed in a major 1986 Heritage Foundation study. (p. 4)
[Ed. Note: The Free Trade Agreement got the ball rolling for the development of skills standards by the newly formed National Skills Standards Board, endorsed by the U.S. Labor Department Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) study originated under Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole, and eventually led to the School-to-Work Opportunities Act and the dumbing down of American education curriculum for workforce training. With all of this emphasis on “standards” it should be pointed out that NAFTA allows exchanges of all categories of professionals, with those coming from Mexico and Canada having met their own countries’ standards, not necessarily equal to those required in the United States. If this process evolves the way most of these exchange processes have in the past, that disparity will be addressed in one of two ways—by changing U.S. standards to match foreign standards, or by altering both NAFTA nations’ standards to align with international standards like ISO 9000 or ISO 1400]
If we, in the year 2012, accept the NEA, NGA, Heritage Foundation, Council on Foreign Relations, Obama Administration school choice proposals being presented to us as a solution to the “deliberate” dumbing down of America (the Hegelian dialectic at work), we taxpayers will be funding the demise of academic education. We will also be funding the operation of profit-oriented corporations, not our local schools.
The ultimate goal for those who wish to put us into a collectivized regional government system under the UN will take place due to acceptance of this corporate fascist agenda. I hope the reader of this article will read and distribute the following three articles which discuss the use of our tax money to train our children as robots to spin off profits for the global economy:
1- How On-Line Learning Companies Bought America's Schools
2- Special Report: The ProfitMotive Behind Virtual Schools in Maine
3- Charlotte Iserbyt: Education Restructuring for Global Economy
And, unlike in the past. when we had locally elected school boards to which we could register our complaints, there will be nowhere to go to complain since charter schools are run by unelected councils. Unelected council form of government is, by the way, the Soviet council form of government.
Note: The writer understands well the disillusion being experienced by people reading this article since she, herself, went through the same disillusion after joining the Reagan Administration in 1981. As a loyal Reagan supporter I refused to read “Here’s the Rest of Him”, by Kent Steffgen, sent to me by United Republicans of California. Steffgen’s well-documented book exposed the “real” Ronald Reagan. In fact I was infuriated that any individual or group of conservatives would write such a “libelous” book about someone I respected and had worked so hard to get elected. I put the book in my bookcase and took off for Washington to work as a Reagan political appointee in the U.S. Dept. of Education. It didn’t take me long to recognize that my trust had been misplaced; that President Reagan was not what or who I had been lead to believe he was. One particular federally funded grant emanating from my office, which called for “controlling and manipulating the locals” shocked me into action. “the deliberate dumbing down of america” pp. 170-171 states:
ASSOCIATION FOR EDUCATIONAL COMPUTING AND TECHNOLOGY (AECT—A SPIN-OFF OF the National Education Association) received an $855,282 federal contract for “Project BEST” (Better Education Skills through Technology) in 1981. An explanatory brochure states:
WHAT IS PROJECT BEST? Project BEST is a cooperative effort involving both the federal, state, and local government and the private sector in the planning and use of modern information technologies to improve the effectiveness of basic skills, teaching and learning. On a sheet circulated within the U.S. Department of Education as an internal document entitled “Project BEST Dissemination Design Considerations,” there appeared the following information:
“PROJECT DESIGN FEATURES
What We Can Control or Manipulate?
State participation/selection process
Role of advisors
Content of program
Training of state leaders
Resource people utilized
Basic skills content areas emphasized
Perception of need to use technology”
BEST’s promotional flyer blatantly discussed how the project would serve not just in education, but for other program areas as well, to implement the national/international management system (MBO, PPBS, TQM):
“In addition, the State Team approach and the communications network with professional associations and other groups established by the project will serve as a model for the states in implementing similar efforts in other areas of education, or in such program areas as health, human services, housing, transportation, etc.”
Doesn’t the above plan sound like totalitarian socialism/fascism/communism?
As a former school board member I was shocked, especially by the call for “control and manipulation” at the state and local level. I leaked the document to Human Events which published it, and was subsequently fired for doing so. (As if the U.S. Department of Education is the equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency or the U.S. Department of Defense which necessarily has to classify its documents (to keep them from the public eye)!
Upon returning home I pulled the book “Here’s the Rest of Him,” available from my library, and read it start to finish. It tells the whole unsavory story about Governor Reagan; it tells a story I did not want to read. It says bad things about someone I had been conditioned to believe was the solution to our nation’s problems.
So, you see, don’t feel too badly about having been “had.” We, who are trying to warn the rest of you, have been “had” as well. The road to the truth is uphill, by foot, and seldom pleasant.
Please allow the last chapter of our nation’s history to be written by “us,” not “them.”
Iserbyt is a speaker and writer, best known for her 1985 booklet Back to Basics Reform or OBE: Skinnerian International Curriculum and her 1989 pamphlet Soviets in the Classroom: America's Latest Education Fad which covered the details of the U.S.-Soviet and Carnegie-Soviet Education Agreements which remain in effect to this day. She is a freelance writer and has had articles published in Human Events, The Washington Times, The Bangor Daily News, and included in the record of Congressional hearings.
Website: www.deliberatedumbingdown.com Website: www.americandeception.com
Who and what groups are supporting the unconstitutional school choice agenda?
It is important for Mainers, and all Americans, for that matter, to ask the following question:
How is it possible for the following individuals and groups, who traditionally have been at odds, to all support school choice/virtual charter schools?
Arne Duncan, Obama's leftist Secretary of Education,
Edwin Feulner, President, Heritage Foundation and other neoconservative leaders,
The globalist (world government supporting) Council on Foreign Relations
The above support leaves most traditional (Goldwater) conservatives shaking their heads.
The end result of what Maine’s Governor Paul LePage and his Education Commissioner Stephen Bowen (and others in similar positions in ALL states) are doing will be the destruction of not only our formerly (pre-1965) excellent public education system, but, more importantly, the destruction of private education as well since once an education institution, be it public, private, home school, Christian, or charter school, accepts one penny of tax money from the federal, state, or local level, it MUST abide by ALL federal regulations and MUST take the federal test which means it must TEACH TO THE TEST which is 50% attitudinal (politically correct). THIS EQUALS TOTAL GOVERNMENT/CORPORATE CONTROL OF YOUR CHILD’S EDUCATION.
A top change agent with the NEA made NEA’s plan, and that of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and the neoconservative organizations, very clear in an article in Educational Leadership, in 1994. The following quote is taken from “the deliberate dumbing down of America,” page 321:
“TO OBE OR NOT TO OBE?” WAS THE QUESTION POSED BY MARJORIE LEDELL, ASSOCIATE of William Spady’s in his High Success Network, in her article for Educational Leadership’s January 1994 issue. From page 18 we read:
"Finally, raise the real issue and depend on democracy. Don’t let “to OBE [outcomes based education, ed] or Not to OBE” or “to implement or not implement efforts to improve student learning” cloud the overdue national debate about whether public education should exist or be replaced with publicly funded private education."
What Ledell is recommending (publicly funded, tax funded PRIVATE education) is being recommended by LePage and Bowen at the direction of the Obama Administration, the Heritage Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations. This is happening all over the country since the above agenda belongs to the National Governors Association (NGA), and the Governors take their orders from the NGA. Same for the state affiliates of the Heritage Foundation which take their orders from Heritage in Washington, D.C.
This NEA, NGA, CFR, Heritage Foundation plan, unfortunately being accepted and promoted by many well-meaning conservatives and Tea Party groups (not all, thank goodness...many are withdrawing their support when they get the information I am providing in this email) spells not only the end of private education, but, of utmost importance, and please read this over and over:
THE END OF OUR FREE ECONOMIC SYSTEM AND OUR REPRESENTATIVE FORM OF GOVERNMENT.
The goal of school choice, unbeknownst to many, is and has always been the opposite of what we are told. The goal is the takeover of the public and private school sectors through partnerships with the corporate sector in order to implement socialist work force training, formerly found only in communist countries. Carnegie Corporation, in its little blue book entitled "Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies", 1934, called for using the schools to change our nation's free market economy to a planned economy.Click here and type "Conclusions" into the search engine in order to read this little book.
Carnegie's "planned economy" is going in right now through public/private partnerships (school to work) and school choice/charter school proposals being recommended by the aforementioned groups. This is happening at the same time our representative republic with its elective form of government is being undermined through acceptance of tax-supported charter schools which have NO elected school boards (no accountability to the taxpayers). This is known as taxation without representation. When and if Americans accept unelected councils to run one of the largest economic sectors of our economy (publicly-funded charter schools) what is to keep them from accepting the unelected Soviet council form of government across the board?
Interestingly enough, and hard to accept, is the fact that none of this “planned” change in our economic system and form of government would have been tolerated had the building blocks not been put in place by prominent so-called “conservative” Republicans: President Ronald Reagan and Edward Feulner, Chairman of the Heritage Foundation, the leading conservative group in the nation. The following quote from an article in the May 14, 1984 issue of The Washington Post entitled “Industrial Policy Urged for GOP” sheds some light on behind-the-scenes activities which have led to acceptance of school choice and corporate-fascist workforce training necessary for a planned economy:
From “the deliberate dumbing down of America”, pp. 299-300: “A conservative study group founded by supporters of President Reagan is about to issue a report that advocates Republicans shed some of their deep-rooted antipathy to a planned economy. The “Industrial Policy Debate” is to be issued today by the Institute for Contemporary Studies, a think tank founded by Presidential Counselor Edwin Meese, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and other Reagan supporters.
As Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, 1981-1983, I served as liaison to the President’s Task Force on Private Sector Initiatives. The following information is taken from “the deliberate dumbing down of America,” 1999, pp. 175-176.
“EARLY IN 1981 THE PRESIDENT’S TASK FORCE ON PRIVATE SECTOR INITIATIVES WAS INstalled at 734 Jackson Place, N.W., Washington, D.C. Membership listed on The White House letterhead read like a “Who’s Who” of individuals in government agencies, universities, tax-exempt foundations, non-governmental organizations, business, media, labor unions, and religion. The names of some individuals on the task force follow: William Aramony, president, United Way; William J. Baroody, Jr., president, American Enterprise Institute; Helen G. Boosalis, mayor, City of Lincoln, Nebraska; Terence Cardinal Cooke, archbishop of New York; Governor Pierre S. Dupont, Delaware; Senator David Durenberger; Luis A. Ferre, former governor of Puerto Rico; John Gardner, chairman, Independent Sector; Edward Hill, pastor, Mt. Zion Baptist Church; Michael S. Joyce, executive director, John M. Olin Foundation; Edward H. Kiernan, president, International Association of Police; Arthur Levitt, Jr., chairman, American Stock Exchange; Richard W. Lyman, president, Rockefeller Foundation; Elder Thomas S. Monson, The MormonChurch; William C. Norris, chairman and CEO, Control Data Corporation; George Romney, chairman, National Center for Citizen Involvement; C. William Verity, Jr., chairman, Armco Steel, Inc.; Jeri J. Winger, first vice president, General Federation of Women’s Clubs; Thomas H. Wyman, president, CBS, Inc.; and William S. White, president, C.S. Mott Foundation.
This totally new and un-American concept of partnerships between the public and private sector has been readily accepted by our elected officials who ignore its roots in socialism and its implications for the discontinuation of our representative form of government and accountability to the taxpayers. Under the “partnership” process, determining responsibility when something goes wrong is like pinning jello to the wall.
Such a change in government, if presented in clear language to citizens at the polls, would be rejected. However, when implemented gradually, using the Marxist-Hegelian Dialectic, citizens don’t even notice what is happening. The shift is away from elected representatives. In time, after voters have become even more disenchanted with the candidates and election results, fewer and fewer citizens will vote. At that point a highly-respected member of the public will enter the picture to propose a solution to the problem: some sort of compromise toward parliamentary form of government found in socialist democracies which will be acceptable to Americans unfamiliar with the protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
One says to oneself, confidently, “This will never happen.” Look around you. What do you see? Site-based management in your local schools, transferring decision-making, traditionally exercised by elected school boards, to politically correct appointees and the creation of unelected task forces at all government levels; proposals to “separate school and state” which make no mention of governmental and social structure consequences—efforts to have government money (taxes) pay for services delivered by private religious or home schools, etc., with no public representation. There can be no accountability to the taxpayers under a system so alien to the United States’ form of representative government.
How clean, neat and tidy. Wholesale destruction of an entire, wonderful system of government without firing a shot.
As a U.S. Department of Education liaison with The White House during the early days of this initiative this writer inquired of one of President Reagan’s political appointees whether this initiative was not corporate fascism; a politically incorrect question that resulted in someone else replacing me as Liaison with The White House.”
Doesn’t the above agenda, set in 1981, sound exactly like what is being carved in stone as I write? Even I, who saw and experienced all that happened 31 years ago, am a bit in shock, realizing that what I saw and wrote about is actually being carried out exactly as planned.
Heritage Foundation’s role in the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the resultant loss of hundreds of thousands of American jobs (high unemployment) has caused the American people to accept any solution to their economic problems, even acceptance of the Carnegie Corporation’s planned economy and the transformation of our schools from academics to the Soviet workforce training system. What is happening represents an exquisite example of the use of the Hegelian dialectic: create the problem, people scream, impose the solution they would never have accepted had the problem not been deliberately created in the first place. Please read from “the deliberate dumbing down of america”, 1999, pp. 303-304:
THE 1993 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION OF WASHINGTON, D.C., DEDIcated to their twentieth year celebration, revealed the following:
The idea of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) originated with Heritage Fellow Richard Allen and has long been advocated by Heritage policy analysts.... The idea of creating a North American free trade zone from the Yukon to the Yucatan was first proposed by Heritage Distinguished Fellow Richard Allen in the late 1970s, refined by then Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, and further developed in a major 1986 Heritage Foundation study. (p. 4)
[Ed. Note: The Free Trade Agreement got the ball rolling for the development of skills standards by the newly formed National Skills Standards Board, endorsed by the U.S. Labor Department Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) study originated under Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole, and eventually led to the School-to-Work Opportunities Act and the dumbing down of American education curriculum for workforce training. With all of this emphasis on “standards” it should be pointed out that NAFTA allows exchanges of all categories of professionals, with those coming from Mexico and Canada having met their own countries’ standards, not necessarily equal to those required in the United States. If this process evolves the way most of these exchange processes have in the past, that disparity will be addressed in one of two ways—by changing U.S. standards to match foreign standards, or by altering both NAFTA nations’ standards to align with international standards like ISO 9000 or ISO 1400]
If we, in the year 2012, accept the NEA, NGA, Heritage Foundation, Council on Foreign Relations, Obama Administration school choice proposals being presented to us as a solution to the “deliberate” dumbing down of America (the Hegelian dialectic at work), we taxpayers will be funding the demise of academic education. We will also be funding the operation of profit-oriented corporations, not our local schools.
The ultimate goal for those who wish to put us into a collectivized regional government system under the UN will take place due to acceptance of this corporate fascist agenda. I hope the reader of this article will read and distribute the following three articles which discuss the use of our tax money to train our children as robots to spin off profits for the global economy:
1- How On-Line Learning Companies Bought America's Schools
2- Special Report: The ProfitMotive Behind Virtual Schools in Maine
3- Charlotte Iserbyt: Education Restructuring for Global Economy
And, unlike in the past. when we had locally elected school boards to which we could register our complaints, there will be nowhere to go to complain since charter schools are run by unelected councils. Unelected council form of government is, by the way, the Soviet council form of government.
Note: The writer understands well the disillusion being experienced by people reading this article since she, herself, went through the same disillusion after joining the Reagan Administration in 1981. As a loyal Reagan supporter I refused to read “Here’s the Rest of Him”, by Kent Steffgen, sent to me by United Republicans of California. Steffgen’s well-documented book exposed the “real” Ronald Reagan. In fact I was infuriated that any individual or group of conservatives would write such a “libelous” book about someone I respected and had worked so hard to get elected. I put the book in my bookcase and took off for Washington to work as a Reagan political appointee in the U.S. Dept. of Education. It didn’t take me long to recognize that my trust had been misplaced; that President Reagan was not what or who I had been lead to believe he was. One particular federally funded grant emanating from my office, which called for “controlling and manipulating the locals” shocked me into action. “the deliberate dumbing down of america” pp. 170-171 states:
ASSOCIATION FOR EDUCATIONAL COMPUTING AND TECHNOLOGY (AECT—A SPIN-OFF OF the National Education Association) received an $855,282 federal contract for “Project BEST” (Better Education Skills through Technology) in 1981. An explanatory brochure states:
WHAT IS PROJECT BEST? Project BEST is a cooperative effort involving both the federal, state, and local government and the private sector in the planning and use of modern information technologies to improve the effectiveness of basic skills, teaching and learning. On a sheet circulated within the U.S. Department of Education as an internal document entitled “Project BEST Dissemination Design Considerations,” there appeared the following information:
“PROJECT DESIGN FEATURES
What We Can Control or Manipulate?
State participation/selection process
Role of advisors
Content of program
Training of state leaders
Resource people utilized
Basic skills content areas emphasized
Perception of need to use technology”
BEST’s promotional flyer blatantly discussed how the project would serve not just in education, but for other program areas as well, to implement the national/international management system (MBO, PPBS, TQM):
“In addition, the State Team approach and the communications network with professional associations and other groups established by the project will serve as a model for the states in implementing similar efforts in other areas of education, or in such program areas as health, human services, housing, transportation, etc.”
Doesn’t the above plan sound like totalitarian socialism/fascism/communism?
As a former school board member I was shocked, especially by the call for “control and manipulation” at the state and local level. I leaked the document to Human Events which published it, and was subsequently fired for doing so. (As if the U.S. Department of Education is the equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency or the U.S. Department of Defense which necessarily has to classify its documents (to keep them from the public eye)!
Upon returning home I pulled the book “Here’s the Rest of Him,” available from my library, and read it start to finish. It tells the whole unsavory story about Governor Reagan; it tells a story I did not want to read. It says bad things about someone I had been conditioned to believe was the solution to our nation’s problems.
So, you see, don’t feel too badly about having been “had.” We, who are trying to warn the rest of you, have been “had” as well. The road to the truth is uphill, by foot, and seldom pleasant.
Please allow the last chapter of our nation’s history to be written by “us,” not “them.”
FOR MORE ON CHARTER SCHOOLS GO TO WWW.CHARTERTRUTH.COM
