DOJ Grants $63 Million for Social Justice School Discipline Promoted by Bill Ayers

EAGnews.org:

The Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice recently promised a whopping $63 million to investigate school safety programs and to reward districts for implementing “restorative justice” and other related school discipline programs.

According to an October 1st statement from Attorney General Eric Holder, “This funding is being awarded as part of the Comprehensive School Safety Initiative – a large-scale, multi-agency research effort to build practical, and scientifically-sound, knowledge about effective ways to increase school safety nationwide.”

However, according to a review of past and current restorative justice initiatives in schools, the funding appears to be just another effort to expand whole-child social justice reforms touted by far-left progressive educators like William Ayers.

Believing that the American education system is inherently racist and oppressive and students of color only act out because they are victims of that system, Ayers began writing about restorative justice alternatives to school discipline many years ago. Examples are his 1998 book, A Kind and Just Parent, and 2001 book, Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment in Our Schools.

In 2012, Ayers led in the writing of a brief titled Increasing Safety Through Restorative Justice: Making Schools Safer for Girls and LGBTQ Students of Color in Chicago’s Public Schools, wherein he again suggests restorative methods like peace circles, student trials, and peer conferences as an alternative to the “disproportionate disciplinary referrals and sanctions” of LGBT students and students of color.

The radical ed organization, Rethinking Schools, says restorative justice in schools is a victory for activist educators like Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, who have been fighting the “school-to-prison pipeline” that they believe exists because of the unfair suspension and expulsion of students of color.

Apparently, the Obama administration agrees.

Just prior to the launching of the current $63 million DOJ initiative, the US Department of Education published a Resource Guide for Improving School Climate and Discipline, recommending “alternative disciplinary approaches such as restorative justice” to counter the “racial and gender disproportionality in school punishment.” Resources on “ending the school-to-prison pipeline” are referenced in the footnotes.

The Department of Ed resource also recommends the use of school-based psychologists, behavioral interventionists, school social workers, and mental health providers, all of whom, in addition to other school and district staff, should be trained in cultural competence, “to enhance staff awareness of their implicit or unconscious biases and the harms associated with using or failing to counter racial and ethnic stereotypes.”

Although this DOE resource and accompanying DOJ initiative are recent, the Obama administration’s push for this kind of alternative discipline program is not.

Before deciding to throw $63 million in tax payer dollars into restorative justice and like programs, the Obama Ed Department first tried its overreaching hand at forcing districts to implement them.

EAGnews recently reported that, in 2011, the Obama administration accused the Los Angeles Unified School District of discriminating against black boys who were “suspended for bad behavior at a disproportionate rate.” The district was then ordered to “reduce suspensions in hopes that unruly minority students would stay in school and graduate.” However, the results have been disastrous for teachers and other students in the district who are trying to learn admid the chaos.

Specifically, EAG reported that educators in the district told IBD that even with a restorative justice counselor, they still have the same problems, except now, kids aren’t even being suspended for serious offenses like fighting, drugs, and threats against teachers.

The IBD report continued:

Instead of being kicked out of school or suffering other serious punishment, even repeat offenders get ‘restorative justice’ therapy.

They can negotiate the consequences for their bad behavior, which usually involves ‘dialogue sessions,’ in which teachers join unruly kids in ‘talking circles’ to foster greater ‘cultural understanding.’

Talk invariably turns to racism and ‘white bias.’ Teachers are trained to make sure black kids ‘feel respected.

Couple this with the social justice curriculum thousands of schools are now teaching, and it might seem this is what social justice education looks like when firing on all cylinders. But it’s not – there’s more.

According to David Yusem, the Restorative Justice Program Coordinator for the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), “restorative justice is really part of a larger strategic vision of serving the whole child, and creating what we call “full-service community schools” that even include “medical and dental facilities… so kids can get that for free.”

Yusem continues, “We have to understand that education has to be more than just 3 + 3, right? Kids can’t learn well if they’re hungry. They can’t learn if their tooth hurts. So restorative justice is part of that strategy, and it really works here to empower youth.”

In other words, instead of accountability and consequences for bad behavior, troublesome students – who, through the lens of ‘cultural competence’ and ‘justice’, are viewed as victims of a racist system – are given more free stuff.

Despite using restorative justice to some degree in the district for several years, OUSD also faced a 2012 Department of Education civil rights investigation into high suspension and expulsion rates among African-American boys.

DOJ’s National Institute of Justice says that of the $63 million allotted, $3.5 million is being spent to enhance school safety data collection. Specifically, NIJ says it is partnering with the Department of Justice, Department of Education, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and the Secret Service Division of the Treasury Department to share “knowledge, research efforts, data collection activities and strategies, and programs supported by each agency.”

At the local level, districts receiving restorative justice grants, like Rhode Island’s Central Falls School District, for example, are working with their state departments of children and youth services to integrate all family court juvenile justice data with education, health, and other relevant data on students.

It stands to reason that the federal government will then have access to that data as well – for safety reasons, of course.

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Hundreds of US Schools Now Participating in Program Led by ‘ISIS Supporting’ Qatari Government

EAGnews.org:

More than 300 K-12 schools in America have joined President Obama’s Connect All Schools initiative since its launching in March of 2011.

The initiative, which seeks to “connect every school in the US with the world by 2016,” is a partnership of the US Department of Education, US Department of State, and Qatar Foundation International.

According to Connect All Schools, it all began with President Obama’s “historic speech” in Cairo, Egypt in 2009 where he expressed his desire to “create a new online network, so a young person in Kansas can communicate instantly with a young person in Cairo.”

In an effort to build “global competency” by connecting US students to students around the world, Connect All Schools and its partners facilitate schools with global issues curriculum, online collaboration, youth and teacher exchanges, professional development on international education, video-conferences, and more.

For example, at Alice Deal Middle School in Washington, DC, students connected with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Syria for a lesson that examined “how the media in the U.S. stereotypes Muslims in a negative light.”

At Northwest School in Seattle, Washington, 6th grade students participated in a Global Issues unit that, according to Connect All Schools, allowed them to “see themselves in a global context and gain knowledge of how resources are spread unequally around the world.”

“This unit is about research and investigation of the interconnectedness of global issues,” says Northwest co-teacher, Heather Hall. “But the most significant aspect is the action component. Each student investigates, designs, and carries out an action in the local community to address a global problem.”

As reported in 2012, the Qatar Foundation has close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and was started by the former Emir of Qatar and founder of Al Jazeera news network, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani.

Carnegie Corporation President Vartan Gregorian, who played a significant role in the creation of the Common Core State Standards, is a Qatar Foundation board member.

In 2006, the country of Qatar donated $100 million dollars to the city of New Orleans for hurricane recovery efforts. From that donation, $12.5 million was used to build a College of Pharmacy building at Xavier University. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa attended the groundbreaking ceremony.

Several American universities, including Carnegie Mellon, Texas A&M, and Northwestern, have established satellite campuses in Doha, Qatar and participate in student exchange programs.

In an effort to alert these universities and others to the fact that Qatar is a “pernicious sponsor of Islamic terror,” Col. Allen West, Frank Gaffney, Jr. of the Center for Security Policy, and Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, recently joined with several others to start the Qatar Awareness Campaign.

According to the group:

Qatar is arguably the preeminent sponsor of terror in the world today. It is a benefactor of the genocidal armies of ISIS, al Qaeda, and Boko Haram; it is involved in Taliban narcotics trafficking through a relationship with the Pakistani National Logistics Cell; and profits from operating a virtual slave state. Qatar has leveraged its relationships with violent jihadi groups to its own benefit, and to the detriment of the United States and her allies.

In addition to the Connect All Schools initiative, Qatar has gained access to America’s K-12 students through other education programs as well.

For example, Qatar Foundation International’s “flagship” Arabic Language and Culture program is offered in several US schools and districts.

In 2012, PS 368 in Hamilton Heights Manhattan became the first school in the country to implement the organization’s Arabic language course as a required course of study for its elementary students.

Qatar’s access to America’s youth, however, is not limited to online interactions and the implementation of global curricula. Last year, for example, students from New Orleans’ International High School were selected by the Qatar Foundation to travel to Doha to represent the US in a Model United Nations assembly.

New York High School Makes Anti American, ‘F*** Tha Police’ Video

By Danette Clark

“Slingshot Hip-Hop: Culture and Resistance from Brooklyn to Palestine” is a semester long course created by the Palestine Education Project for Bushwick Community High School in Brooklyn, NY.

Bushwick Community High is a transfer school for students 17 and older who have not yet earned a high school diploma.

According to the Palestine Education Project (PEP), the course is “a collaboration between students, teachers, artists, and community organizers… designed to examine both global and local systems of oppression; to identify the common struggles people of color share against racism, militarism, and displacement; to empower students to discover their own voices of resistance; and to break down the walls that separate us”.

In 2010, PEP made the video below featuring Bushwick students and ‘facilitators’. The intent of the video is to connect the struggles of Palestinians at the hands of Jewish oppressors to the struggles of Brooklyn minorities “under the foot” (as the video states) of America’s “racist, oppressive, disgusting, vile system”.

The girl shown at the top proudly displaying her “F*** tha Police” t-shirt is seen just seconds into the video. At the 7 minute, 44 second mark, a Bushwick student (or facilitator) explains that the same people in control of the criminal justice system in America are the same people who enslaved his people for 400 plus years and the same people who wiped out the indigenous.

The PEP curriculum includes a “participatory activity” wherein students are asked to stand on a large map of Palestine outlined with tape on the floor. As the teacher shows a slideshow of images and maps, the students “move through the history of colonization and displacement in Palestine” by moving into smaller and smaller areas on the map. PEP says this exercise is intended to help students understand how the Palestinians must feel as their land is being taken from them and they are pushed into refugee camps or separated from their families.

Of course, there is no mention of the Arab rejection of the 1948 UN Partition Plan that would have secured land for the Palestinians; nor is there mention of the numerous times Israel gave land to Palestine in exchange for peace.

The PEP course and video also largely focus on what is referred to as America’s “prison industrial complex”. For example, at 8 minutes and 34 seconds into the video, we’re told that prisons are created for profit, are an extension of slavery, and that “the architects are very intentional about seeing to it that 18 to 35 year old men, the strongest… who could actually lead a revolt and change the world, are either working for them or in cages”.

Bushwick Community High is one of 46 partner schools of College Summit, a non-profit that claims to be “dedicated to transforming the lives of low-income youth by connecting them to college and career”.

In 2010, President Obama donated a portion of his Nobel Peace Prize money to College Summit, whose other partner schools include ACORN Community High, a school started and run by the radical Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Bushwick is a member of the Coalition of Essential Schools, the progressive reform behind Common Core that has long received the support and praise of President Obama.

In 2012, Bushwick was labeled a consistently underperforming school and slated for closure, but has since been given a reprieve for showing some improvement.

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.

Students Schooled on White Privilege and ‘5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO’

By Danette Clark

The 15th annual White Privilege Conference kicked off this week in Madison, Wisconsin.

The conference was founded in 1999 by Dr. Eddie Moore, Jr. to examine “challenging concepts of privilege and oppression and offer solutions… to work toward a more equitable world”, and is attended annually by more than 1,500 students, educators, and activists.

Built on the premise that “the U.S. was started by white people, for white people”, the conference boasts a long list of radical partner organizations, including Code Pink, The Social Justice Training Institute, and Hip Hop Congress, whose co-founder, Shamako Noble, has collaborated on projects with Public Allies, an organization whose Chicago branch was first led by Michelle Obama.

But what exactly is ‘white privilege’?

According to some of the speakers and conference goers in this video, ‘white privilege’ is a “transparent preference for whiteness that saturates our society,” and if you are white, it means “there is a whole part of you that you are not naming and you’re not understanding because whiteness is just normalized and it’s just there…”.

One poor woman in the video says she has to work really hard to keep it in her consciousness that she is white. Perhaps I’m missing the point, but wouldn’t it be more beneficial for people to keep in their consciousness a constant effort to show kindness and compassion to everyone, regardless of race or class?

How can we blur the lines of race and see all men as created equal while focusing on color, differences, and our own ‘whiteness’?

Educators in social justice schools and universities talk to students about race regularly, even incorporating it into their daily curriculum, regardless of course subject. Now, thanks to radical teacher training programs and Common Core recommended texts and other aligned resources, the white privilege guilt-trip is rapidly spreading.

In 2007, Seattle Public Schools came under scrutiny for using federal grant money to escort twenty high school students to Colorado to attend a White Privilege Conference. Seattle is just one of many school districts, funded by your tax dollars, promoting the conference to its students and teachers.

The State of Wisconsin is footing a large chunk of the bill for this year’s conference.

Unfortunately, Wisconsinites, this is the kind of garbage you’re paying for:

The 2007 White Privilege Conference invited The Coup to perform for attending youth on the last day of the conference.

The Coup is a radical hip hop group whose lyrics incite violence with songs like 5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO and Kill My Landlord.

Lyrics taken in part from The Coup’s 20,000 Gun Salute:

20,000 gun salute, get rowdy like you got a substitute
This slug’s for Newt – shut your mouth don’t pollute…

…. just how we gonna overthrow they bitch asses, give
whiplashes from the force as we make it tight, and ignite
the flames of takin over daily life, make it a right to have
food, threads and homestead.

Regarding their 2006 album, Pick a Bigger Weapon, Rolling Stone Magazine called it “the rare record that makes revolution sound like hot fun on a Saturday night.”

The Coup has released several award winning albums including Kill My Landlord, Steal this Album, and Genocide and Juice.

Steal this Album is a tribute to Abbie Hoffman’s book, Steal this Book. Abbie Hoffman, a radical 60s activist, was one of the “Chicago Seven” tried for conspiracy, inciting riot, and other crimes related to protests in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Co-founder of The Coup, Boots Riley, is a social justice activist from Oakland, California, who speaks publically about his admiration for the Black Panthers, the Chinese Revolution, and Saul Alinsky’s “radical organizing” techniques.

As covered by Michelle Malkin after the 9/11 attacks, Riley released an “album cover depicting himself partying in front of a doctored image of the World Trade Center being blown up”.

Boots Riley performed at Fresh Fest 2010, which was produced in collaboration with two organizations founded by Obama’s former green jobs czar, Van Jones.

Past speakers at White Privilege Conferences include Obama’s Department of Education appointee, Kevin Jennings, founder of the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network, and Tim Wise, a white ‘anti-racism expert’ whom Rush Limbaugh says is ignorant about the founding of this country.

Lisa Arrastia — who recently co-edited with Bill Ayers, White Before We Got Here: Youth and the Hidden Curriculum of Whiteness — spoke at the 2011 conference, as did Rosa González, the Education Director of the Van Jones organization, Green for All.

Hundreds of youth are likely attending this year’s White Privilege Conference at the Monona Terrace Conference Center in Madison, WI, and I wonder how many parents really know what their kids are learning, and who they’re learning it from.

Louisiana Ed Department Recommends Lesson on Pluralism From Former Obama Advisor Who Compares Christians to Al Qaeda and Has an ‘Affinity’ for Terrorists

By Danette Clark

In one of the most conservative states in the nation, the Louisiana Department of Education has risked it all by going all-in on the far left and dangerous global agenda of the Common Core State Standards.

As shown in this Grade 5 Year-at-a-Glance ELA Curriculum Sample, the Louisiana DOE recommends a disturbing and grossly false history of Christopher Columbus, a video titled A Declaration of INTERdependence, and a  lesson on pluralism from Eboo Patel, a former Obama ‘faith’ advisor who recently compared Pat Robertson to Osama Bin Laden and Christian and Jewish “totalitarians” to Al Qaeda terrorists.

Like President Obama, Patel also has history with domestic terrorist William Ayers.

During the 2004-2005 school year, Patel stayed as a guest in residence in the same hall as Bill Ayers and his wife at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Patel also co-authored a book in 2005 with Bill Ayers’ adopted son, Chesa Boudin.

The book, Letters from Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out, was authored by several young radicals including Ismail Khalidi. Ismail is the son of Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia University professor with ties to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, who describes Israel as a “racist” state with an “apartheid” system.

The Preface of Letters from Young Activists was written by Ayers’ wife, Bernardine Dohrn (also once wanted by the FBI for terrorism), who describes Letters as “a clarion call of hope, defiance, critical analysis, humor, irony, and self-conscious insistence that the queer, the Palestinian, the immigrant, the privileged, the children of prisoners and hip-hopsters have arrived.”

The back cover of the book boasts an endorsement from Mumia Abu-Jamal, a convicted cop-killer and former member of the Black Panther Party. On the Acknowledgments page is a great big thank you to Bill Ayers himself for “guidance” and “encouragement”.

Patel and Ayers’ son appeared together on radio and at Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstore in 2005 to promote the release of their book.

In a later book, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, in the Struggle for the Soul, Eboo Patel thanks Ayers for suggesting there may be a story worth telling floating around in his head.

He further writes that he “searched for models of people who had tried to block the machinery of American imperialism,” at which point, he says, a “campus radical” suggested Patel talk with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

During a 2007 NPR interview promoting the release of Acts of Faith, Patel, a Chicago native, was asked about his affinity for “the American terrorist, Bill Ayers, who is a member of the Weather Underground.” Patel responded: “Well, you know, actually my story is much closer to Bill Ayers as in the early days than it is to any of these Muslim terrorists, even though I’m Muslim, because I actually grew up in the same hometown that Bill Ayers did and I was kind of taught the same myths about America, a land of freedom and equality and justice, et cetera, et cetera.”

The essay by Patel recommended by the Louisiana Department of Education, We Are Each Other’s Business, is completely harmless on its face. However, knowing of Patel’s associations and political and social views on America, you have to wonder about the underlying message and intent of the lesson as a whole. After all, Patel, Ayers, and many of their marxist-progressive friends have a long history of attacking Christianity and American values in the name of ‘tolerance’ and ‘religious freedom’.

Although none of Patel’s writings are specifically recommended by the Common Core State Standards, Patel’s beliefs fit perfectly with the agenda at the heart of Common Core — an agenda hostile to Christians, Jews, and America, and conceived in the minds of terrorists.

Is this what conservative-Christian Governor Bobby Jindal had in mind for Louisiana’s children? If not, perhaps it’s time Jindal take a closer look at his State Superintendent of Education, John White, who, as head of Teach for America Chicago, likely worked closely with Eboo Patel through his organization, Interfaith Youth Core.

‘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.

Common Core ‘Architect’ David Coleman’s History With the Ayers and Obama Led Chicago Annenberg Challenge

By Danette Clark

Re-post. Original posted June 17, 2013. Also found at EAGnews.org.

Referred to as ‘Common Core lead standards authors’ by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), David Coleman and Jason Zimba are just two in a long list of Common Core creators whose academic roots are with the education-for-a-revolution machine borne by Annenberg Institute, Carnegie Corporation, Bill Gates, et al.

Today, Coleman and Zimba are head of Student Achievement Partners, an organization that played a leading role in developing the standards and actively supports districts and states in implementing them.

Prior to Student Achiement Partners, Coleman and Zimba were co-founders of the Grow Network (now owned by McGraw-Hill Company). Grow Network began as a pilot program in New York in 2000. Less than a year later, the Chicago Public Education Fund began negotiating a contract with Grow Network on behalf of Chicago Public Schools.

The Chicago Public Education Fund (‘The Fund’) was created in 1998 by the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) board of directors, which included Barack Obama as board chairman and communist Bill Ayers, as co-chair.

President Obama’s recently appointed Commerce Secretary, Penny Pritzker, was one of twelve founding board members appointed to The Fund.

Obama himself worked with The Fund for the next several years as a leadership council member, along side Bill Ayers’ father, Thomas Ayers, and brother, John Ayers.

From Catalyst Chicago, March 2000:

“The Chicago Annenberg Challenge will close up shop in June 2001, but its efforts to improve public education will live on through a new community foundation…the Chicago Public Education Fund…”

The Fund existed and still exists to carry on the work of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge — that work being the expansion of Theodore Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools, the reform movement that now (even absent Common Core) indoctrinates students in several states and districts nationwide with a Marxist-Communist political, moral and social ideology.

In 2001, shortly after Arne Duncan began his stint as CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS), David Coleman’s newly formed Grow Network solidified its $2.2 million contract with CPS to provide the district with data driven student performance reports for the 2002-2003 school year.

In CPS’s 2002 Education Plan, which introduced Grow Network as a new initiative, President Obama is listed as a member of the district’s planning and development advisory committee. The report also names John Ayers and Communist-Maoist Mike Klonsky of Bill Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop as participants in CPS’s education plan discussion groups.

In 2004, Coleman and Zimba sold Grow Network to McGraw Hill, which continues its lucrative partnership with CPS today. In fact, two former Grow Network members now work for the Chicago Public Education Fund — one of them as its managing director.

The fact that Grow Network has history with the Ayers/Obama/Annenberg led Chicago school system, and was recruited by the Ayers/Obama/Annenberg created Chicago Public Education Fund, doesn’t necessarily implicate David Coleman and Jason Zimba as supporters of Chicago’s radically progressive style of education. However, given Coleman’s progressive upbringing and the fact that CPS paid more than $2 million to bring his untested and unproven program to the district, it does seem likely that Coleman and Zimba had prior connections to the Chicago ed machine.

Fast forward to today and we see each of these players still working to expand the Annenberg/Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) reform model, a model whose teaching strategies, lesson plans, and curriculum resources are identical to those now being used with Common Core.

Communist, domestic terrorist, and creator of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Bill Ayers, continues to speak on behalf of the Annenberg/CES reform effort and provides professional development to teachers and principals from CES schools and districts.

From the White House, Obama and Duncan promote, by name, Bill Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop and the Coalition of Essential Schools while funneling billions to states that have adopted Common Core.

Carnegie Corporation, which has continued to support Annenberg/CES reform over the years, now also provides heavy funding to the Council of Chief State School Officers for the creation and implementation of Common Core.

Louisiana High School Recommends Porn to Students for Summer Reading Assignment

By Danette  Clark

Judging from the content of several texts recommended by the Common Core State Standards, it seems apparent that both the creators of the standards and the U.S. Department of Education (by way of its continued endorsement and funding of the standards) consider sex, profanity, and violence to be somehow beneficial to the education of children.

Thanks to a few attentive parents, we know that at least two Common Core Text Exemplars, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Dreaming in Cuban by Christina Garcia, contain pornography and vulgar language.

For details on these books, go here and here.

Dutchtown High School in the Ascension Parish School District of Louisiana  recommended both The Bluest Eye and Dreaming in Cuban to students in 2012 as part of a required summer reading assignment. In addition to these two books, several others on the school’s summer reading list contain sexually explicit material, sexual themes, graphic violence, and profanity. Some of them recommended reading, some required.

As shown in the screen shot above, 11th grade English III AP students were required to read Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. This book was previously banned for offensive language and sexually explicit content.

Another required text from the Dutchtown High School list is Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor.  Sounds harmless enough (and boring), right? Hardly.

In this book, Foster jumps immediately into race baiting his readers, in the Introduction no less, by comparing white people to the devil.

Many pages, including a chapter titled It’s All About Sex, are dedicated to “finding the sexual component in literature”. Readers are taught to look for sex in everything — such as identifying lances, swords, guns and keys as phallic symbols and chalices, grails and bowls as symbols of female sexual organs.

Unfortunately, CCSSO and the Obama administration have cunningly managed to evade accountability for The Bluest Eye and Dreaming in Cuban by way of liability waivers and by labeling these trash texts as ‘recommended’ and the standards as ‘voluntary’ and ‘state-led’.

States and districts, however, can and should be made accountable for this obvious attack on our children and on parental authority.

As explained here, at the heart of the Common Core State Standards is a political and social agenda. These standards are a means to further infiltrate and then take over schools for the purpose of indoctrinating and controlling our children, a vital step in an attempt to decimate the social and moral fabric of our country.

Ascension Parish has long been a politically conservative district boasting some of the highest performing schools in the State of Louisiana. The district recently ranked 7th out of 70 in the state. Today, however, it appears to be the district most enthusiastic to embrace the morally corrupt agenda of the Common Core State Standards.

Read more about Common Core in Louisiana and Ascension Parish here.

Radical Elements of Common Core Curriculum Rapidly Emerging in Louisiana

By Danette Clark

In Louisiana, the new Common Core State Standards for Math and English are just ramping up with the recent start of the new school year, and already many parents are outraged and speaking out about what their children are learning.

A group of parents in St. Tammany Parish voiced their concerns last week at a local school board meeting over lessons they describe as “left-wing” and “anti-American”.

Parents of several high school students and a few teachers have expressed their disgust to me over innapropriate books being used in the classrooms of their local schools.

In Ascension Parish, 5th grade ELA students are already delving into a “close reading” of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

That particular lesson was originally created for New York City Public Schools by Expeditionary Learning, an organization I wrote about here to explain their close and long-time partnership with the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES). CES is the progressive indoctrination movement whose roots can be traced to President Obama.

The Expeditionary Learning/Common Core lesson refers to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an “informational text”, which confirms the fears of many — that the increase of informational texts at the expense of quality fictional literature would open the door to more political indoctrination.

As shown in the screen shot below, at least one Ascension Parish teacher is adhering to the lesson’s intended social justice/redistribution of wealth theme by teaching students that under Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a person’s rights are violated (‘the promise is broken’) when the wealthy own more land than they do.

As more and more information like this surfaces, Arne Duncan’s recent condescending response to Common Core opposition — “It’s not a black helicopter ploy and we’re not trying to get inside people’s minds and brains.” — becomes all the more laughable and insulting.

To see an overview of the human rights lessons being taught in at least one Ascension Parish School (specifically referenced as Module 1) click here. A more detailed lesson within Module 1 can be viewed here.

With the first few weeks of the new school year in Louisiana already causing a Common Core uproar, many are concerned what the coming months will have in store.

According to this Grade 5 Year-at-a-Glance ELA Curriculum Sample from the Louisiana Department of Education, it appears that students in this largely conservative state can look forward to a false history of Christopher Columbus, a lesson on pluralism from Eboo Patel, a former Obama ‘faith’ advisor who recently compared Christians to Al Qaeda, and the video below titled, A Declaration of INTERdependence.

Still think Common Core is not a globalized curriculum influenced by the federal government?

Much of my previous research on Eboo Patel is no longer on the web, but I would encourage you to at least read this. The people involved in our children’s education are just as important as the content of the curriculum.

Thanks to Kathleen for alerting me to the Grade 5 Year-at-a-Glance sample and Declaration of Interdependence video.