Common Core In-Sync with American Humanist Association’s 10 Guiding Principles for Teaching Values

By Danette Clark

(Updated — originally posted June 28, 2013)

For those who still deny the secular progressive agenda behind the Common Core State Standards, the American Humanist Association (AHA) provides a nice little check-list of ‘guiding principles’ they believe should be taught to all children in all schools.

AHA’s Ten Commitments: Guiding Principles for Teaching Values in America’s Public Schools express the importance of moral/character education with a focus on, among other things, critical thinking, global citizenship, human rights, social justice, and service learning.

So how do our new national standards and aligned curriculum resources measure up to these guiding principles? Not only does Common Core get an A plus, Common Core assessment creator and validation committee member, Linda Darling-Hammond, is an endorser of AHA’s Ten Commitments.

Although not dated, it appears AHA released their Ten Commitments in 2012. Therefore, Darling-Hammond’s endorsement of them came after she signed off on Common Core.

The American Humanist Association, whose motto is ‘Good Without God’, makes clear their belief that it’s not just a school’s right, but its duty, to see that students develop the convictions needed to shape a ‘democratic’ and ‘just world’.

From AHA’s website:

“Many students spend as much or more time in school than they do at home. Therefore, the school must be a place that supports family and community efforts to build strong values.”

“This ethical mission is an essential part of all education, public and private, elementary through high school and university.  In a democratic and pluralist society, we believe that the values presented should be the moral foundation of education.”

As with many Common Core lessons, AHA calls for students to learn about real world problems and injustices — ‘real world problems’ that, more often than not, are sensitive political and social issues that should not be addressed in school and certainly have nothing to do with a quality education.

Lesson plans and resources created by Common Core partner organizations, Asia Society, Pearson Education, Discovery Education, Expeditionary Learning, Crayola, and more, fall right in line with AHA’s vision of morality in education, while the English Language Arts standards themselves, through the heavy use of informational texts (propaganda), lay the perfect foundation for social engineering as called for by John Dewey, a drafter of the Humanist Manifesto.

David Coleman, dubbed ‘the architect’ of the standards, was in recent years a symposium speaker and participant in the IAS School of Social Science Dewey Seminar, where participants examine, through a series of workshops and seminars, “the impact of educational institutions on society, sociopolitical orders, and democracy”.

For AHA to say they support family and community efforts to build values in one breath, then specifically lay out what those values should be in another, tells us exactly what we need to know — that AHA educators intend to teach their values, regardless of whether they conflict with the values of the parent. But so it is and has always been with the secular progressive education movement…Constitution be damned.

Carnegie Corporation: From Philanthropy to Frightening Control to Common Core

By Danette Clark

In the trailer for the upcoming Common Core documentary, Building the Machine, Political Scientist Dr. Andrew Hacker refers to the little man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz when suggesting that, with regard to Common Core, we don’t know who’s pulling all the strings.

Well, we know there are lots of little men (of little character) with big corporate interests behind Common Core. We also know Bill Gates and the Obama administration have thrown their full weight into the initiative.

Of course, Common Core is the concerted effort of many — after all, 45 states signed on before the standards were even written — but it does appear that Carnegie is the one great and powerful force working all the controls from behind the curtain.

From the creation of high school academic credits and the College-Level Entrance Examination Program, to federal Pell grants and the establishment of the largest testing organization in the world (ETS), Carnegie Corporation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (hereafter “Carnegie” or “the foundations”) have made important and historic contributions to America’s education system.

With each contribution, however, has come increasing influence and power. Likewise, with each passing decade and sitting Carnegie president, the foundations’ objectives for use of that power have changed dramatically.

For example, according to Carnegie.org, former Carnegie Corporation president, John W. Gardner, led the foundation into an “era of strategic philanthropy — the planned, organized, deliberately constructed means to attain stated ends.” From Gardner, “…the Foundation inherited a commitment to… moral leadership as a key feature of a democratic society, and thus of its educational systems”.

As a psychologist, Gardner believed in the merging of education and behavioral science to address world problems and create social change.

Gardner also opened the door to federal intrusion and control by inviting the federal government in to collaborate with Carnegie on the implementation of new education initiatives.

David Hamburg, Carnegie president from 1982 to 1997, further expounded on the foundations’ work of diffusing social science and education research “to improve social policy and practice”. To that end, Hamburg forged partnerships with leading institutions that, according to Carnegie.org, “had the capability to influence public thought and action”.

During this time, other partnerships were formed as well, with anti-capitalists and communists, also bent on using education to engineer a new social order.

Although Carnegie now claims to support and promote best practices in education, it has long supported one reform over all others –the Annenberg Institute’s Coalition of Essential Schools — the same progressive, indoctrinating, whole-child reform supported by President Obama for more than twenty years.

In fact, the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) movement has become such an integral part of the work of Carnegie Corporation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, that it could easily be argued that the three are now synonymous.

This is important for those opposed to Common Core to realize and learn from, because while we were sleeping, the most influential ‘philanthropic’ organization in the country gave birth to an exceedingly politically radical education initiative, drove its expansion for three decades, and now carries it forward into the creation of Common Core.

Carnegie Brings Anti-Capitalists and Would-Be Common Core Creators Together

In 1981, Carnegie donated seed money to CES founder, Ted Sizer, for the research project that led him to start the Coalition of Essential Schools.

As explained here, the late Ted Sizer was a humanist who preached that schools must shape children morally and politically in order to create a more just world.

Co-founder of CES schools, Deborah Meier, is a Marxist-socialist and a long time friend and associate of Bill Ayers, Mike Klonsky, and other anti-American educators.

Just a year after CES was officially established at Brown University, Carnegie created the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy (now known as the National Center on Education and the Economy).

The Forum, led by Marc Tucker, commissioned a Task Force on Teaching as a Profession to address the need to “fundamentally change the nature of the education system to take advantage of a professionalized teaching force and to base that new system on higher standards for both students and teachers”.

The Task Force was led by James B. Hunt and its members included former Carnegie President John W. Gardner, American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker, Vice-President of IBM Lewis Branscomb, and Coalition of Essential Schools Co-Founder Deborah Meier.

Remember, James Hunt and IBM President, Louis Gerstner would later come together to form Achieve, Inc., the organization charged with writing the Common Core State Standards. Hunt’s organization, the Hunt Institute, is part of the joint effort of NGA, CCSSO, and Achieve in creating Common Core.

Under Tucker’s direction, the Carnegie Task Force wrote and published a report titled, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century, which called for and led to the creation of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, of which Tucker, Meier, and Hunt served as founding board members.

In 1987, with the help of Carnegie Corporation, Marc Tucker went on to establish the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) as an independent institution that would continue the work of the Carnegie Forum.

Damning enough on its own (but we’ll explore further nonetheless) is the fact that NCEE’s Vice President Judy Codding was one of four charter principals who participated in the creation of Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools. According to CES, Codding led two early Essential School efforts in New York and later greatly contributed to the expansion of “Coalition ideas” in California.

According to NCEE’s website, …”in 1991, NCEE invited the University of Pittsburgh, 23 states, 6 cities and three national foundations to join with it in creating New Standards, a collaborative committed to… student performance standards and matching assessments to launch the standards movement in the United States”.

This initiative, which later came to be known as the New Standards Project, was cited at the 1996 National Education Summit (that gave birth to Achieve) to outline the “qualities of a world-class education standards system”.

From its start, the NCEE New Standards Project has been led by CES reformers,  including Annenberg’s current and long-time Executive Director, Warren Simmons.

As admitted by NCEE, “many of the leaders in the New Standards work went on to play leading roles in the development of the Common Core State Standards, which built in part on the foundation laid by (The) New Standards (Project)”.

In other words, Common Core was, in fact, built on the foundation laid by Carnegie and the Coalition of Essential Schools.

ANNENBERG AND GATES FOUNDATION MONEY SPENT THE WAY CARNEGIE SEES FIT

With the Carnegie-created NCEE working in nearly two dozen states to lay the foundation for a new national standard, Carnegie began focusing its efforts on infiltrating additional districts and states.

Just before becoming president of Carnegie Corporation in 1997, Vartan Gregorian served as director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform where he led in the selection and distribution of Annenberg Challenge grants used to implement CES reform in various school districts across the country, including Chicago where an Annenberg Challenge site was led by communist Bill Ayers and Barack Obama.

While the Annenberg Institute admits that each group chosen to receive grants had to meet “unique conditions” and that “independent, non-profit entities” were “specially created” to run each Annenberg Challenge site, it was not made known that several of those ‘independent entities’ were specially created by Carnegie. Yet another blow to the “Common Core is state-led” claim; even the early roots of Common Core weren’t state-led.

In Chicago, for example, it was reported that three of the largest independent education foundations came together in support of and lobbied for the approval of the Annenberg grant proposal submitted by the Bill Ayers consortium. However, it was not reported that the presidents of two of those so-called ‘independent education foundations’, namely Adele Simmons of the Mac Arthur Foundation, and Patricia Graham of the Spencer Foundation, were from Carnegie.

Patricia Graham, whom Obama himself (in an attempt to diminish the influence of Bill Ayers) later credited with choosing him to chair the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, was an advisor to Carnegie Corporation and had recently served as chair of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

In Pennsylvania, it was the Philadelphia Education Fund (PEF) that was ‘chosen’ to receive an Annenberg grant. PEF’s executive director was Warren Simmons, now director of the Annenberg Institute. Just prior to that, Simmons co-directed the Carnegie/NCEE New Standards Project.

Carnegie’s control also appears to extend to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has reportedly invested more than $2 billion in Common Core.

The same year Gregorian become president of Carnegie Corporation, he met with and convinced Bill Gates to form the Gates Learning Foundation (now the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), to which Gregorian was appointed as one of only six directors.

With the title of advisor to the Annenberg Foundation under his belt, and now, holding great power over both the Gates and Carnegie foundations, Gregorian began meeting with leaders of other top organizations across the country to discuss ways to combine their grant making efforts.

From inception through today, the education arm of the Gates Foundation has been led by Annenberg/CES reformers, likely all placed there under the direction of Gregorian.

Current director of the Gates Foundation’s College Ready in the United States Program, Vicki Phillips, was Executive Director of the Annenberg Challenge at Greater Philadelphia First.

Up Next – Biased Science Standards and Mandated Curriculum

Achieve, Inc. and Carnegie led in the creation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) that were released last year.

These standards came to be in the same way as Common Core’s English and Math standards — the almighty Carnegie said it shall be done, gathered its favorite progressives together to complete the task, provided the funding, and had its partner, the US Department of Education, throw its weight behind it.

Not surprising, NGSS teaches the Big Bang Theory and evolution as fact, with no reference to creationism. Man-made global warming is also a fact in these standards and students are required to explore solutions to the warming crisis.

While this document doesn’t specifically state whether Carnegie “launched” or simply “advanced” CCSSO and NGA, both organizations, by way of Carnegie funding alone, are certainly subject to Carnegie control.

CCSSO, which also receives federal funding, has been in Carnegie’s pocket for decades. In 1987, while Carnegie’s Task Force on Teaching (CES co-founder Deborah Meier, James Hunt, etc.) were busy establishing the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, another leader in CES reform, Common Core’s Linda Darling-Hammond, was gearing up to lead the drafting committee of CCSSO’s newly formed Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC).

INTASC, founded with Carnegie dollars, of course, was created to develop standards “compatible with the advanced certification standards of the new National Board for Professional Teaching Standards”.

The most recent version of INTASC’s Model Core Teaching Standards were specifically revised to align with the Common Core State Standards.

With student and teacher standards complete, Carnegie’s focus as of late has been on professional development and the creation of Common Core lessons, texts, and assessments.

So what’s next? Will Carnegie and its bestie, the US Department of Education, secure their hard work and vested billions by mandating specific Common Core content?

Even before Common Core was implemented in most states, there was a Call for Common Content issued by the Albert Shanker Institute, proclaiming that “core curriculum must build a bridge from standards to achievement”.

The Albert Shanker Institute is led, in part, by Linda Darling Hammond and Anthony Bryk, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Signatories include several CES educators and power players in the creation of Common Core, such as Achieve, Inc. Founding Chairman Louis Gerstner, former Achieve, Inc. President Robert Schwartz, and Carnegie’s Marc Tucker.

In other words, the great and powerful Carnegie is already calling for common content. It’s just a matter of time.

‘Radical Math’: Social Justice Indoctrination in Math Class Courtesy of Common Core Assessment Creators and Obama-Backed Ed Reform

By Danette Clark

Re-post with new information. Original posted January 12, 2013.

To ensure that not a single minute of precious indoctrination time is wasted in the school day, liberal educators have incorporated brainwashing into every course subject, including math.

Next month, the organization, Creating Balance in an Unjust World, will hold its annual conference on “math education and social justice”.

The conference is sponsored by Radical Math, an organization founded by Jonathan Osler, a math and community organizing teacher at a Coalition of Essential Schools high school in Brooklyn, NY.

The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) is the progressive education reform movement expanded by President Obama and domestic terrorist William Ayers through their work with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge in the 90’s.

As I explained here, Common Core ‘architect’ David Coleman’s Grow Network also worked with Chicago Public Schools, Obama, and Ayers during that time.

Common Core assessment creator, Linda Darling-Hammond, who served as education advisor to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, is a long-time advisory board member to the Bay Area Coalition of Essential Schools (BayCES/National Equity Project).

Radical Math and the Creating Balance Conference both provide training and resources for teachers to learn how to teach mathematics for social justice.  For example, participating trainers coach elementary school teachers to not use traditional math lessons when teaching children to calculate the cost of food. Rather, they recommend making it clear to students that in a truly just society, food would be as free as the air we breathe.

Radical Math’s website provides over 700 lesson plans and other resources covering a wide range of political and social issues (with extreme bias), including globalization, the redistribution of wealth, and various ways the poor are discriminated against and oppressed by whites, banks, corporations, the rich, and the government. One such resource, Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers, contains chapters titled, “Sweatshop Accounting”, “Racism and Stop and Frisk”, “When Equal Isn’t Fair”, “The Square Root of a Fair Share”, and “Home Buying While Brown or Black”.

Rethinking Mathematics is a creation of Rethinking Schools, an organization that refers to William Ayers as “a long-time supporter”. In 2011, Ayers was keynote speaker at  Rethinking Schools’ 25th Anniversary Benefit.

Co-founder and co-organizer of the Creating Balance in an Unjust World/Radical Math Conference, Kari Kokka, works with Linda Darling-Hammond at the Standard Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity (SCALE), the very organization currently creating Smarter Balanced and PAARC assessments for the Common Core State Standards.

Name Names — Radical of the Week

THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE LARGEST PROGRESSIVE INDOCTRINATION MOVEMENT IN THE U.S.

RADICAL OF THE WEEK

Linda Darling-Hammond

Linda Darling-Hammond, who served as education advisor to President Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, is currently developing assessments for our new national curriculum, the Common Core State Standards.

Darling-Hammond is a long time advisory board member to the National Equity Project, formerly known as the Bay Area Coalition of Essential Schools and the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools (or BayCES). The National Equity Project/BayCES opened in 1991 as a regional office for Theodore Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools (CES).

CES is an outgrowth of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University and is the progressive reform movement behind Common Core.

Through an organization she co-founded called the School Redesign Network, and through the National Equity Project/BayCES, Darling-Hammond has worked closely over the years with socialist, Deborah Meier, communist, Bill Ayers, and several ultra-liberal organizations, including the crooked and recently de-funded ACORN, to open new progressive schools and transform existing public schools into progressive indoctrination centers. This reform effort was once widely known as the ‘small schools initiative’ or ‘small schools movement’.

To read more about Meier and Ayers, look for them at the Name Names page.

The most liberal school systems in our country today known for political and social indoctrination are districts that dove head first into CES/small school reform years ago and remain there today. Namely, Chicago Public Schools, New York City Public Schools, Oakland Unified School District, and Seattle Public Schools (among others).

Today, the National Equity Project’s main focus is addressing “race and class-based gaps in achievement… resulting from historical and institutional biases”. In short, ‘white privilege’.

Darling-Hammond has long been an advocate for repaying what she refers to as “an education debt” owed to African-Americans, a view fostered by many radical educators, including Obama friend, the late Derrick Bell, who was also an advocate for reparations for slavery.

The National Equity Project provides ‘equity coaching’ to educators in numerous school districts nationwide. This is the same equity coaching that brought us the ‘peanut butter and jelly sandwich is racist’ mentality that made news last year.

Darling-Hammond, who also had a hand in the creation of the controversial CSCOPE curriculum in Texas, recently endorsed the American Humanist Association’s Ten Guiding Principles for Teaching Values in America’s Public Schools. These principles include global awareness, a commitment to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, social justice, and service to an ‘interdependent world’.

Read more about the ‘education debt’ here. Also, see the other faces behind the Coalition of Essential Schools at Name Names.

Crayola Common Core Lessons Promote Globalization and Interdependence

Go here for an important update to this post.

By Danette Clark

Crayola joins the list of big name education companies who have sold out our children and America to the United Nations’ global agenda.

Teaching children ‘to take action as global citizens’ in an ‘interdependent world’ and to ‘think about the world more holistically’ are the focus of Crayola lessons provided in partnership with the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), one of the two main organizations responsible for the creation of the national Common Core State Standards.

Crayola, Lego Education, Apple, and Disney (among others), as members of P21 — Partnership for 21st Century Skills, entered into a ‘strategic partnership‘ with the Council of Chief State School Officers in 2010.

According to P21’s Executive Chair, Kathy Hurley, CCSSO and P21 work very closely on Common Core, as well as CSSO’s Next Generation Learner program, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act re-authorization.

Hurley is also Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for Pearson Education. Pearson, in partnership with CCSSO, has been instrumental in implementing Common Core in many states by providing resources and employing progressive educators, like Coalition of Essential Schools disciple Grant Wiggins, to provide professional development training.

The U.S. Department of Education hosted the launching of P21 and Crayola’s Champion Creatively Alive Children program in 2011.

Crayola lessons, like other Common Core material, are designed to create, in children’s minds, a specific and biased perspective of the world — globalization over national sovereignty, interdependence over self-reliance, and social and economic equity governed by a few over social and economic freedom governed by self.

Crayola-recommended resources promoting social justice, globalization, and the theory of global warming, are listed here along with writings by humanist Linda Darling-Hammond, CSCOPE’s Robert Marzano, and progressive Howard Gardner, also CES disciples.

Read more about CES (Coalition of Essential Schools) and Common Core at Unravelled! The 30 Year Agenda Behind Common Core and at the Common Core / CSCOPE / CES Connection page.

James Rubenstein’s anti-semitic book, The Cultural Landscape, is also listed as a Crayola Arts-Infused Education Resource.

Despite Arne Duncan’s denial that Common Core purposes a political agenda, the curriculum itself proves otherwise — that Common Core has everything to do with the political and global agenda of those who created it, and nothing to do with a sound education for the benefit of those being taught — our children.

CSCOPE – How Did Texas Get Here?

By Danette Clark

In 1992, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) entered into a partnership with Texas Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) and Austin Interfaith to direct funds to low-performing schools for use in teacher training, parent leadership training, and after-school enrichment. From this partnership, several IAF ‘Alliance Schools’ were created.

Texas IAF is part of the Saul Alinsky-founded and Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation. Saul Alinsky is the Marx-loving, God-hating community organizer known for his influence on President Obama and ACORN.

According to a 2009 study by the Annenberg Institute, Texas IAF’s Alliance Schools network grew to “roughly a quarter of the Austin Independent School District’s elementary schools and half of the district’s high-poverty schools” in an eight-year period.

The study also reveals that Texas IAF and Austin Interfaith developed a collaborative relationship with former Austin ISD Superintendent, Pascal Forgione.

The Alliance Schools model can now be found in approximately 160 schools throughout the state — a speck on the map when compared to the number of Texas schools infected by the Coalition of Essential Schools.

As I wrote in Unravelled! The 30 Year Agenda Behind Common Core, the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) is the radical reform movement behind both CSCOPE and Common Core.

CES, which is modeled after secularist reformers like John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Paulo Freire, and George Counts, functions as a communist-style education movement with the stated intent of ‘educating for a more democratic and just society’.

Westbury High School in Houston and R.L. Paschal High School in Fort Worth are two of the original twelve schools that were established (or ‘redesigned’) by Theodore Sizer in 1984 to become CES member schools.

According to StateUniversity.com, the R.L. Paschal Essential School, which is a small autonomous unit embedded within the larger Paschal High School, survived and flourished by “keeping a very low profile“.

The largest expansion of CES progressive reform in Texas came years later by way of the Houston Annenberg Challenge.

In 1993, then President Bill Clinton announced that Ambassador Walter Annenberg would donate $500 million to improving public schools in America. It was this $500 million, plus matching grants from private sources, that aided in the nationwide expansion of  Theodore  Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools.

Through the Annenberg grant, communist and domestic terrorist Bill Ayers created the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, wherein he and Barack Obama served on the board to further expand CES schools in the State of Illinois.

Both Ayers and President Obama have continued to this day to do their respective parts to promote and expanded CES schools nationwide. Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop still aids schools and districts across the country in implementing progressive reform through smaller learning community grants and funding from sources like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Brown University, and the Annenberg Institute.

In addition to the well known Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Walter  Annenberg’s ‘Challenge to the Nation‘ also provided for the expansion of progressive reform to Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, the San Francisco Bay area, South Florida, and Houston.

In Houston, it was the Brown Foundation, Houston Endowement Incorporated, and several corporate and business leaders who collaborated to apply for a piece of the challenge grant money being offered by Annenberg.

Delia Quintanilla served as the first director of the Houston Annenberg Challenge (HAC). Six local universities were called on to provide support to the HAC by providing university staff, faculty, and students to interact with districts and aid in implementing reform.

The Annenberg Institute kicked off the HAC by choosing eleven ‘Beacon Schools’ to “‘light the way‘ to quality school reform for other funded schools”.

According to Chester Finn, Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the  Beacon Schools chosen appeared to have been ‘cherry picked’. Finn reported that the eleven schools chosen by Annenberg were doing better than the Houston average when they entered the program and were performing at about the same level three years later. Therefore, although it may have appeared to outsiders that the first few years of reform in those eleven schools was effective, as Finn stated, he could “scarcely tell what was caused by Annenberg and what may have been shaped by other influences”.

In 1995, Humble Independent School District opened Quest Early College High School. Quest is an Annenberg Challenge Grant Beacon School, a First Amendment School and a Coalition of Essential Schools Mentor School.

CES mentor schools act as a model of reform for other schools, offering school study tours, advocacy training, legislative action sessions, and professional development opportunities.

A Houston Annenberg Challenge 2 year summary report revealed that by 2001, approximately 100 metropolitan schools had already introduced Critical Friends groups on their campuses and the HAC had trained 300 coaches in both Annenberg-funded and non-Annenberg-funded schools.

The report further revealed that promising teachers and curriculum trainers were identified through group collaborations. Specifically:

“Teachers from Annenberg schools collaborate actively in Critical Friends Groups, Literature Study Circles, Professional Academies, Teacher Writing Groups, and Teacher Action Research Teams. From these activities expert teachers emerge as peer leaders in roles such as Critical Friends Group Coaches, Content Specialists, and Reading Learning Facilitators. Furthermore, a number of teachers have become certified as curriculum trainers in national programs including the Coalition of Essential Schools and the New Jersey Writing Project.”

Just as educators were identified and chosen through these collaborative efforts, some were also identified as not worthy to continue their involvement in the progressive reform process.

According to an article printed by the Houston Press in 1998, director Delia Quintanilla was dismissed a little more than a year after the Houston Annenberg Challenge got off the ground, and a troubleshooting team from the Annenberg Institute was being sent to Houston to “evaluate and audit the effectiveness of the local administatration of the grant”.

Annenberg Challenge National Coordinator, Barbara Cervone, expressed “serious concerns about the leadership, coherence and pace of the Annenberg effort in Houston”.

Despite tensions between proponents of CES’s radical reform methods, HAC pressed on with strict oversight and instruction from the Annenberg Institute and further donations from ‘philanthropic’ organizations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation.

Annenberg established the New Visions in Leadership Academy to train like-minded radicals for placement as principles into Texas Annenberg/CES schools. According to this job posting, “more than 300 seated school leaders from Houston-area K-12 districts” graduated from New Visions in the first 10 years.

In 2002, Humble ISD passed a $230 million bond measure to build Atascocita and Kingwood Park High Schools and redesign existing elementary, middle, and high schools.

Cecilia Hawkins, who served as the principal of Quest Early College High School for four years, left her position at Quest to work with community organizations in an effort to expand district reform.

From CES’s website (2005):

“Inspired by its experience with the Coalition of Essential Schools and the Houston Annenberg Challenge (now the Houston A+ Challenge) through Quest High School… Humble has not only put into place a process to remake its high schools but it has reorganized its entire district…”.

What has come as a surprise to many involved in exposing CSCOPE is the fact that several principals and superintendents seem to have no problem with the Anti-American content, errors, and ‘fuzzy math’ found in CSCOPE lessons.

Understandably, it must be difficult to accept that there could be that many radical educators in a state like Texas, willing to break the law and deceive children and parents for profit or to advance a political agenda.

The fact is, Texas is a big state with several univerities; and universities, for the most part, have often been a refuge and breeding ground for radicals.

CES schools have always relied heavily on the school-university partnership to implement and advance K-12 reform. ‘Professional development schools‘ are often created wherein universities and schools collaborate to “prepare new teachers, to renew the professional knowledge of veteran teachers, and to conduct site-based research into teaching and learning”.

In many states, CES has infiltrated and affected university course offerings for up and coming teachers, principals, and superintendents.

For example, Sam Houston University, as a requirement for superintendent certification, offers an internship course led by Dr. Shirley Johnson. Johnson is the executive director of Texas Coalition of Essential Schools.

According to Johnson’s course syllabus and guidelines, all interns must complete a “Leadership Profile”, the cost of which is to be paid by the student directly to Texas CES. Students are then given the opportunity to attend a feedback session related to the leadership profile — no doubt to allow the instructor to gauge whether the student would be a productive leader in a CES-style school.

Several other avenues exist for identifying prospective radical educators for placement placement in these indoctrination centers.

Texas ASCD, for example, who partners with CES and actively promotes and expands CES reform, identifies, recruits, and trains teachers and curriculum leaders, many of whom are identified in collaboration with local universities.

Read about the connections between Texas ASCD and educators behind CSCOPE and Common Core here and here.

CSCOPE is Common Core

In January of 2010, Governor Rick Perry formally rejected the nationally proposed Common Core State Standards, stating that he would not “commit Texas taxpayers to unfunded federal obligations or to the adoption of unproven, cost-prohibitive national standards and tests”.

Ironically, the very people behind Common Core were already actively working within Perry’s state and had been for many years.

Linda Darling Hammond, one of several radical eductors behind the design of CSCOPE, has worked with Texas schools for years through her organization, School Redesign Network.

Achieve, Inc., an organization that has aided in authoring the Common Core standards, launched the American Diploma Project in 2005. Texas was one of 13 states to join the America Diploma Project Network.

As I wrote here, Achieve, Inc. is not only made up of several Coalition of Essential Schools/Annenberg reformers, but it was literally created by leaders of the National Governors Association and the Annenberg Institute.

The Grow Network (now owned by McGraw-Hill) was founded by David Coleman, who is said to be ‘the architect’ of Common Core. In 2004, the Texas Education Agency entered into a four-year, $17.7 million contract with Grow Network for online Personalized Study Guides to be provided to Texas educators and students.

Considering many of the same educators behind CSCOPE are also behind Common Core, and considering the rumor that Common Core offered to purchase the CSCOPE program for use with the national standards; it appears that CSCOPE was a ‘test-run’ for Common Core.

It seems likely that Texas is the guinea pig and CSCOPE a pilot project –being tested before going all in and using it with Common Core standards in more than 45 states.

It can’t be a coincidence that the same educators behind Common Core just-so-happen to have been chosen to contribute to the design of CSCOPE. Those educators, Wiggins, Tighe, Hammond, Jacobs, and others, have spent years providing professional development to Texas educators over, and over, and over on how to use their designs and teaching strategies, the same designs they are teaching Common Core states to use with Common Core standards.

Here’s an interesting side-note — Although it has been more than three years since Texas rejected Common Core, former Austin ISD Superintendent Pascal Forgione, the same superintendent who has worked hand-in-hand with Alinsky’s IAF and Linda Darling Hammond’s School Redesign Network, is participating in a conference later this year in Austin to discuss Common Core.

Forgione is now executive director of Educational Testing Service’s K-12 Center located in Austin.

K-12 Center works in partnership with the CCSSO and other organizations to develop Common Core assessment systems and also partners with the Alliance for Excellent Education, where Linda Darling Hammond serves on the board.

The conference on Common Core, in which Forgione will be the keynote speaker, is scheduled to take place August 12th-14th in Austin.

Did Forgione not get the memo that Texas rejected Common Core, or does he know someting that we don’t?

CSCOPE Curriculum Designer Employed by CCSSO Partner to Aid in Implementing Common Core

By Danette Clark

An update and correction to this post can be found below.

Grant Wiggins, one of eight designers of curriculum, standards and instruction of the pro-communist Texas CSCOPE curriculum, also provides professional development to aid educators in implementing the national Common Core State Standards.

Pearson, the education service company widely known for publishing textbooks, has partnered with the Council of Chief State School Officers in providing training and other resources to states implementing Common Core.

Through the ‘Pearson Common Core Institute’, Wiggins provides instruction via several Pearson Common Core webinar videos.

In one such webinar, Wiggins discusses “how issues of backward transfer relate to the Common Core”.

‘Backward transfer’ (also commonly referred to as ‘backward design’ or  ‘planning backwards’) is part of the Understanding by Design^® framework for curriculum, assessment, and learning created by Wiggins and co-author, Jay McTighe, also a designer of CSCOPE.

As explained here and here, the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) is the Bill Ayers backed progressive education reform movement behind both CSCOPE and Common Core. Linda Darling Hammond, developer of both CSCOPE and Common Core, has worked to implement CES reform for many years.

Grant Wiggins has worked with the Coalition of Essential Schools for many years, studying CES method and pedagogy, and incorporating them into the creation of his own curriculum and instruction design for use in CES schools.

A staple of the CES reform model has long been the use of ‘essential questions’ in identifying desired results of teacher instruction. Stage one of Wiggins and McTighe’s backward design process is identifying essential questions.

In 2011 and 2012, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) partnered with ASCD (the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) to hold statewide summits in several states on the implementation of Common Core.

Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design^® was originally published by ASCD. Read about Texas ASCD’s involvement with the Coalition of Essential Schools and CSCOPE here and here.

Also, read more about Wiggins and others behind the Coalition of Essential Schools at Name Names — The People Behind the Largest Progressive Indoctrination Movement in the U.S.

Update / Correction — CSCOPE Curriculum Designer Employed by CCSSO Partner to Aid in Implementing Common Core.

In response to a couple of inquiries and comments as to whether Grant Wiggins is actually a ‘designer’ of CSCOPE, I decided to look further into Wiggins’ involvement to be certain that I’m not misleading or providing false information.

Although the link I provided in the original post names Wiggins and several others under the title “Beginning and Background of CSCOPE”, it does also say “Research Base” directly above the list of ‘designer’ and ‘developer’ names.

Someone pointed out that they believe this means the CSCOPE development team, after researching ‘best practice’ designs and strategies, chose to use those of Wiggins, McTighe, and others listed in the linked document, for the creation of CSCOPE — not that Wiggins directly contributed to CSCOPE by writing curriculum or designing lesson plans.

That makes perfect sense, and I admit that the document I chose to link to doesn’t effectively back up my claim that Wiggins is ‘one of eight designers… of CSCOPE’.

However, in light of information evidencing Wiggins’ involvement in professional development training for Texas educators both before and after CSCOPE was implemented, coupled with the fact that Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design® framework for curriculum, assessment, and learning was directly incorporated into the design of CSCOPE, I think it would be safe to say that Wiggins had a hand in the design of CSCOPE, and further add that it appears he had a hand in its implementation as well.

With over 1,600 lesson plans at any given time (some conveniently disappearing) and rumors of plagiarism, who can say for certain whose lesson plans or content is being provided through CSCOPE?

If CSCOPE was created using Wiggins’ design framework and he provides professional development to Texas educators that use his design framework, why would it be out of the question for CSCOPE to contain lesson plans created by Wiggins?

The sample lesson below uses ‘questions as curriculum’ and was created by Wiggins and McTighe. Compare this to the CSCOPE lesson that referred to the Boston Tea Party as an act of terrorism.

This lesson plan looks like something that could have been used to teach students at Flour Bluff Intermediate School in Texas that the U.S. may have been a target for terrorism on 9/11 because we hurt other countries by making bad decisions.

More ‘essential questions‘ from Wiggins and McTighe:

• Was George Washington any different from Palestinian terrorists trying to protect their country?

• Was Jefferson a hypocrite? Did he really think of a slave as a sub-human while writing the Declaration of Independence?

Here’s an essential question — With Wiggins acting on behalf of the CCSSO and Pearson to aid educators in implementing Common Core, how can we not expect lessons like these to become the national standard?

More Proof that CES, a Nationwide Progressive Organization Launched in Part by President Obama, is Behind Recent Controversy in Texas Schools

By Danette Clark

As I wrote here, Texas ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) is linked to the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), a nationwide progressive education reform movement that, as a matter of practice, indoctrinates students in a racist, pro-communist, anti-American environment and curriculum.

In an apparent attempt to fly under the radar in Texas, the Texas ASCD website does not specifically refer to Theodore Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), as does the national ASCD website. In fact, a few pages that did connect Texas ASCD to other progressive organizations are now no longer found on the internet.

Texas ASCD’s website does, however, name many progressive educators that can be directly connected to CES schools.

For example, here are just a few of the keynote speakers to past Texas ASCD conferences and professional developement seminars that are affiliated with CES schools:

Howard Gardner – partner with CES founder, Theodore Sizer, in the creation of Atlas Learning Communities, a CES partner organization.

Heidi Hayes Jacobs – curriculum designer for CES schools.

Pedro Noguera – educator who has partnered with Theodore Sizer and CES on many programs and initiatives.

H. Lynn Erickson – consultant to CES mentor schools and other schools and districts for the implementation of CES reform.

Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe – consultants to schools and districts for the implementation of CES reform.

Robert Marzano – research and consulting to schools and districts regarding the implementation of reform, including the CES reform model.

Interestingly enough, five of the Texas ASCD professional development keynotes listed above (Jacobs, Erickson, Wiggins, Tighe and Marzano) are also developers, along with Linda Darling Hammond, of the Texas CSCOPE curriculum.

Linda Darling Hammond is a board member of the Coalition of Essential Schools Bay Area location in Oakland, CA (now named the National Equity Project).

Each of these people also work for progressive organizations to implement Common Core State Standards.

The largest private funder of CES schools, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is also the largest private funder of Common Core. Gates also funds several organizations, including ASCD, to support implementation of Common Core standards.

Read about the connection between President Obama, Bill Ayers, and CES schools here and here. Also, see other radicals involved in CES schools at Name Names (where a new radical will be added each week, including state representatives, school superintendents, and school board members).

Indoctrination in Texas Schools Long Before CSCOPE

By Danette Clark

The technology developer of a controversial computer based curriculum management system for Texas schools has a long history of working with progressive educators.

3rd Learning, the organization chosen by the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative to create the online program, CSCOPE, was founded in 2007, but is a wholly owned subsidiary of Performance Learning Systems, which has been around for more than 45 years.

Performance Learning Systems specializes in staff development and teaching strategies, and has partnered with the Coalition of Essential Schools for more than 20 years to structure curriculum material that incorporates ‘essential schools’ pedagogy.

The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) began as a small progressive education reform model that was promoted and expanded with the help of President Obama years ago and with his continued support today. CES now indoctrinates hundreds of thousands of students in U.S. schools every year. Read more about CES schools here.

The computer based CSCOPE curriculum currently being used in over 800 Texas school districts has come under heavy fire recently for providing lesson plans that many parents, educators, and several state senators have described as anti-American, anti-Christian, and pro-Islamic.

What many people don’t realize, however, is that those offensive lesson plans were in many Texas schools long before CSCOPE was created.

In 1999, the Texas Education Agency, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Education under Bill Clinton, awarded Comprehensive School Reform grants to 137 campuses in 31 school districts for the implementation of several school reform models, including the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) model and a few others that have since become affiliated and closely aligned with CES.

Today, several organizations, including Performance Learning Systems, Linda Darling-Hammond’s School Redesign Network, the Industrial Areas Foundation, and CES partner organization, Texas ASCD, are still working to further infect Texas schools until they become full-on indoctrination centers that transform American children into communist revolutionaries.

Click here to view a lesson on race and ‘white privilege’ that was created by Professional Learning Systems. White privilege is the theory that all whites are premanently racist because they enjoy privileges that American law and society make available only to white people. This is often used by educators in conjunction with Derrick Bell’s critical race theory and is being taught in CES affiliated schools across the country.

Students are also exposed to this garbage through the White Privilege Conference that I wrote about 2 years ago in Students Schooled on White Privilege and 5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO.

Please go to Take it Back! for more information and a list of schools indoctrinating in your area.

Texas CSCOPE Part of a Nationwide Progressive Indoctrination Scheme

By Danette Clark

A prime example of the stealth take over by progressives of our public school system is CSCOPE.

Even in a conservative state like Texas that has been under the watch of conservative governors for the last 18 years, an organized cartel of big money backing (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), slimy lawyers, community organizers disguised as concerned parents, socialist educators, curriculum developers, and teacher-principal coaches, managed to infect over 600 Texas school districts before anyone realized what was happening.

In recent years, concerned parents became aware and started crying out for something to be done to stop the progressive CSCOPE curriculum that is now being used in over 80% of Texas’ public schools.

Janice VanCleave and Ginger Russell have taken the lead in the fight to eliminate CSCOPE and to gain access to the entire curriculum, which is being hidden, even from parents who should have a legal right to see what their children are learning. Go to VanCleave and Russell’s website, txcscopereview.com, for more information on CSCOPE and to see which schools and districts in Texas are using the curriculum. Those schools are also being added to my list of schools and organizations nationwide that are involved in progressive indoctrination. Look for your state here.

CSCOPE is the same as other curriculums I’ve written about in What are They Learning?, except that it has been structured around Texas’ education standards.

In fact, CSCOPE was developed by several ‘educators’ who work closely with and through the Coalition of Essential Schools. Linda Darling-Hammond, education advisor to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, is a CSCOPE developer.

Hammond, who has worked closely with communist education reformer, Bill Ayers, has worked with the Coalition of Essential Schools for decades as an advisory board member to its bay area location (Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools/BayCES). BayCES recently changed it’s name to the National Equity Project and now focuses most of its resources on ‘equity coaching’ in schools nationwide.  This is the same equity coaching that brought us the ‘peanut butter and jelly sandwich is racist’ mentality that made news a few months ago.

The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) is at the center of a massive network of progressive educators, schools, and organizations working to indoctrinate America’s youth “for a more democratic society”, and its very roots can be traced to President Obama.

Linda Darling-Hammond founded the School Redesign Network, one of the organizations that has been instrumental in infiltrating Texas schools.

For example, parents in the Austin Independent School District (AISD) can thank former Superintendent Pascal Forgione for bringing CSCOPE to Austin. Forgione and AISD’s board of trustees sought out and partnered with Hammond’s School Redesign Network to “better prepare students to
be the thinkers and well-rounded citizens of the 21st Century”.

The problem is, creators of CSCOPE and other CES curriculums do not see America as a leader in the 21st Century, and the progressive definition of a well-rounded citizen is completely contrary to what most Christians, conservatives, and freedom-loving parents want their children to become.

Conservative parents and teachers, Christians, and church and community leaders in every state should take note of the work being done in Texas to take back education for their children.

Find schools in your state here, then go to Take it Back! for more information and a list of resources and suggestions on how to fight back in your area.