Obama presumes to put out black school fires

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Posted on 27th February 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Obamaschool | Politics

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“Obama strengthens black schools” is the headline for Politico’s story today that includes the above video and links to the executive order. Since that order is a pdf, making the text an effort open, I have copied the full text of the executive order on a webpage with a link to the pdf. I do so hoping it will help get people to look at it with some care. Just because it is about black education, does not mean it is good for black education. My opinion is that this executive order further federalizes control of schools — particularly black schools. It is nannyism that holds back individual black kids by allegedly coming to their rescue because they are black.

My opinion here is qualified by having been there and seen it done:

My own public education was at segregated schools in Texas. In 2nd-4th grades I was enrolled in the white school at Bastrop — a small East Texas town which also had a school for Negroes and a school for Mexicans. El Paso, where I spent 5-12, had a small Negro population, whose children were sent by law to their own school. A Borderlands article gives this history: “Douglass School Served Black Community Well.” I graduated from El Paso’s Austin High School in May 1954, the month the US Supreme Court ruled segregation unconstitutional. I remember my Mother’s concern at the time for the black kids, saying: “There won’t be the Negro football leagues any more, or a Negro girl winning beauty queen.” In the same vein, Borderlands includes this:

According to Arnold Williams, currently a biology teacher for the Socorro Independent School District, when Douglass closed, “Many students were upset at the fact they had to leave… They got used to the idea of being isolated from almost everything in society. They felt like a big part of their life was being shut out and a new door was opening.” Williams says some students were intimidated by society and the new surroundings, for Douglass had always been their home.

These things were thought and said a half a century ago. Today black beauty queens abound and many sports heroes are black guys. El Paso was to play a key role in ending sports segregation in 1966 — a story told by the recent movie Glory Road and which I blogged about when the movie was released.

In the present time, handschooling is a new big step to individualizing learning. The mobile a student uses does know or care about the race of its user. At the global online knowledge commons everybody studies from the same webpage, in an equality more pure than even the most visionary person could have hoped for in 1954.

My Mother was an individualist. I recall her teaching me in the setting of Bastrop that racial discrimination is simply wrong. The Bastrop setting in 1942-46 featured a white nannyism. We lived in a large and comfortable home near the edge of the center of town where only whites lived. Just a couple of blocks north of our house the small shacks where the Negroes lived began. I recall watching one day as the all-white volunteer Bastrop Fire Department rushed past our house. I looked on from the distance of our front yard as the white volunteers put out the fire that was burning one of the shacks, while the Negroes watched.

NEVER should we allow an African-American to be put in the position of those who were neither expected to nor knew how to put out the fire I saw in Bastrop. I may never get another reader for Handschooling.com, but I will say here: The Obama executive order yesterday is sending the federal government to put out presumed fires and thereby demeaning everyone involved in the HBCU. This move is akin to resuscitating Douglass School in 2010 and making it dependent on federal agencies. What follows is language from the executive order itself. I have left in cosmetic references to private sector inclusion, but clearly this is a federally controlled project with the central goal of nannying the historic black colleges and universities — of putting our their fires:

Here are excerpts from the federal nanny take-over provisions of the executive order: (more…)

Government education overeach, dicey indeed

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Posted on 23rd February 2010 by Judy Breck in Obamaschool | Politics | Schools we now have

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In an ideas piece in Politico this morning, the author Nia-Malika Henderson speculates that the Obama education proposals will get broad support. She concludes her article with this quotation from Republican strategist Rich Galen:

“Even if you are a little dicey on it as a Republican because you are worried about government overreach with education, you have to think long and hard about the fact that you voted against kids’ education.”

With apologies to Mr. Galen, his response is Pavlovian: We have been programmed for decades to think throwing money at government (“public”) schooling somehow improves our kids’ education. That education has only gotten worse and worse over those decades.

Now along comes the Obama-led takeover / makeover of America into European-like socialism. The worst of the education piece is it further makes certain an underclass will be formed by the schools — now one that is dependent on and defined by the federal government.

Some thoughts on ending the underclass Obamaschool would perpetuate, and how handschooling is a potent protection of the right and ability of individual kids to learn:

Handschooling will — at last — break each individual child’s learning free to go beyond the control of education establishments. Sound scary? Nothing scares me more about the future than limiting yet another young generation to the analog, tradition-dominated, doling out of a bit of this knowledge and a bit of that knowledge by some remote priesthood (pedagogical, secular, ideological, political, — yes and/or religious too).

We should all be very afraid of education policy reigning from far away. The range of control and chaos these distant pedagogues cause is wide. There is the sort that pumps gushes of money into celebrating mediocrity which perpetuates an underclass the nanny standard setters can count on to keep them in power. There are tyrannies that nurture hatred and spawn fanaticism in the young, even to the horror of blowing people up. Settling for inferior, and even destructive, education for other people’s children is all too easy when those children are in other people’s neighborhoods and towns and beyond.

While we nurture our children up close, we should strive for equal opportunity to learn for each child. Serendipitously, wonderfully — in the 21st century there is a brand new way to do just that! Handschooling has almost suddenly opened the way for every youngster across the world to learn from a global commons of that is known by humankind.

Government’s “right” to look a student’s records, really?

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Posted on 22nd February 2010 by Judy Breck in Obamaschool | Politics | Schools we now have

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The Barack Obama, who will not reveal his own school records, is pushing to take the lid off of individual student privacy. We learn about this in a leading education publication, The Chronicle of Higher Education — not in the mainstream media. The circulation of this Chronicle report beyond educationists is further curtailed by the fact that after two public paragraphs, the article is cut off for all but paid subscribers.

In the Chronicle’s very revealing first sentence, the attitude toward students coming out of Washington is stated:

The Obama administration is opening a new campaign to persuade states of their full legal rights to develop and use student-records databases, after stalling in its bid to write new privacy rules that would make those rights unambiguous.

By “those rights” they mean the government’s rights! This is federal government education shoving socialism to convince state-level government education that the rights belong to the governments, NOT TO THE STUDENTS.

While public anger rises against government takeover of health care and the attempt to massively tax energy, socialized education is coming in by stealth. The man reaching out above to take a student hand has as “central to his agenda” taking away the individual right of our kids to academic privacy.

This report is a clear look at the intention of the Obama Administration to micromanage our children in a culture of learning dependency. Let us hope the legal and political obstacles he is hurdling will trip up Obamaschool this time.

Is the focus on school reform big pots of stimulus money?

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Posted on 13th February 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles | Obamaschool | Politics | Schools we now have

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Did you feel I was unduly skeptical of good efforts in my post today about the Do school differently report? There is justification for skepticism if the focus now in education reform is on pots of money. If money is there for the taking, does the availability of still more billions gushing toward education justify once again costly, time-consuming programs aimed at making over schooling? The eSchool introductory article on which I based my post about the Do school differently report includes these lines:

One of the report’s biggest strengths is that it includes a good amount of detail on how the federal government and other players might help bring about a change in STEM education, said Elena Silva, a senior policy analyst with Education Sector, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

Although not all of its recommendations are new–people have been advocating for better STEM education and the need to be globally competitive for a number of years, Silva said–its timing is well-planned.

The report “takes advantage of the fact that we have big pots of stimulus money to be spent,” Silva said. “People are looking for roadmaps.”

Who has given approval to Obamaschool?

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Posted on 8th February 2010 by Judy Breck in Obamaschool | Politics | Schools we now have

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Obamaschool is underway with minimal evaluation and debate in Congress. Why is this very large socialized education project just happening without the Congressional consideration health care required? President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan show up in a classroom for a presser and simply announce what is being done. What they are calling “Race to the Top” is the expenditure of $4.35 billion in grants to the states that empowers the Secretary of Education to very broadly judge what the states do with the money.

They have now announced another $1.35 billion in the next EdFed budget. Until this big reach from Washington into running our local schools is at least debated and passed in Congress, the money gush should wait. Do we need a Constitutional amendment to authorized federal management of local learning? Until we have settled these important questions about taxpayers costs and states rights, the cat in this post is speaking truth to power.

You can read for yourself what has actually been authorized relative to the Race to the Top project the Department of Education part of the Recovery Act on this webpage at the Library of Congress. SEC. 14006. STATE INCENTIVE GRANTS is apparently what authorizes the gush of money to states in grants that let the EdFed limit and judge what schools do with the money they receive.

How we can keep Obama from creating underclass youth by taking over American education

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Posted on 5th February 2010 by Judy Breck in Obamaschool | Politics | Schools we now have

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Reading the post today that I have written about in the comments that follow has changed my approach. The need to stop the further socialization of learning has become critical, with what Obama is pushing. In the face of that threat, Handschooling is a major way to get local nurture and individual teaching to the children of America and across the world.

This is this what I read today: an explanation of what Obama and Arne Duncan are up to in taking over education, by Susan Durand:

Indoctrination Disguised as Education Reform: How Arne Duncan’s well-funded Race to the Top program will inject (even more) propaganda into your child’s head.

As Durand points out, Texas Governor Rick Perry has said “no” — as have some local districts in various states. Still, I am horrified for what this means for the current generation now in schools.

But can these Obama/Duncan moves really be a ploy to make community organizers out of the already under-served class created by failing public schools? After some further investigation, I think the answer is: yeah, that’s right. As the article points out, by authorizing charter schools the folks who run those can teach 1) what they want to, and 2) what the fed tells them to. Scary.

When I read the parts in the article about indoctrinating kids, I thought: What is this woman saying? She must be a conspiracy theorist. I have had, for example, only the most positive thoughts about Wendy Kopp and Teach for America. Controlled by AmeriCorps? Who are they? So I did some digging.

This is AmeriCorps — our .gov taxpayer paid bureaucracy which is, self-proclaimed: “A program of the Corporation for National Community Service”

It took some real digging in the Teach for America website, but sure enough, as it says buried down in this page, “Teach For America is currently a member of AmeriCorps, the national service network.”

And there I found an example from the Teach for America website how AmeriCorps sets the rules for the their members who teach under TFA and AmeriCorps grants:

My guess is that learning itself is going through a phoenix-like collapse and rebirth. I have thought for a long time that the delivery of knowledge by the internet will inevitably liberate individual students from captive classrooms. It think it will also liberate teachers to become independent professionals. How funny it would be to see the system they are sending out tentacles to control withering in the paws of Arne and The One.

A major part of the ongoing mission of handschooling.com is to shed light on this crucial struggle between educational control and individual learning.

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