When it comes to education policy, the Biden administration is making the radicalism of the Obama years look mild by comparison.

The goal is to ultimately replace parents with bureaucrats and “experts” to facilitate the indoctrination of America’s youth. That transformation is accelerating.

Not only are the education system and America’s children being weaponized against America, federal law enforcement is now being weaponized against parents who speak out about it.

If left unchecked, catastrophe awaits. However, the more monstrous the federally directed abuses in schools become, the more outraged Americans join the fight.

The future of the nation is literally on the line in this issue. The outcome of the battle between who will raise children—government or parents—will determine the fate of America.

Parents, Get Out of the Way

The attitude toward parents in Washington has long been hostile. Hillary Clinton famously claimed in 1996 that it “takes a village” to raise children. What she really meant, of course, was a government village.

In fact, during the Obama years, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan publicly called for some children to be in government “boarding schools” 24 hours per day, seven days a week. Others should remain in school, including “after school programming,” for 12 to 14 hours each day, he declared.

A policy document (pdf) drafted by the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services called for home visits by government officials and argued that parents could be “equal partners” with government in the rearing of their children.

But as fringe as those totalitarian views may sound to normal people, the extremism has now been taken to a whole new level under the current administration.

When Republican U.S. Senator Mike Braun of Indiana asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona if parents should be the “primary stakeholder” in the education of their children, it would have been easy to spit one’s coffee on the floor.

“Stakeholder”?! What?

Of course, parents should never be viewed as mere “stakeholders” in the education of their children, “primary” or otherwise. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, “stakeholder” is defined as “one that has a stake in an enterprise” or “one who is involved in or affected by a course of action.”

To call a mother or father a “stakeholder” in one of the most important facets of their child’s life is like calling a pilot of a private plane a “stakeholder” in whether his plane will land successfully or not. Technically it’s true. But it’s an outrage nonetheless.

Mothers and fathers should be in charge of their children’s education—not bystanders or “stakeholders.” This has been the case in virtually every human society for millennia. It’s also what the Bible clearly prescribes.

But the Biden administration, by contrast, does not believe parents should have any say in the “education” of children.

Cardona could not even bring himself to concede that parents should be the “primary stakeholders” in their children’s education.

“I believe parents are important stakeholders,” Cardona responded to Braun’s question, adding that “educators” also “have a role in determining educational programming.”

Indeed. That’s a nice way of saying: Parents, get out of the way, the Biden administration and its “experts” know better what and how your child should learn. More on that later.

Democrat Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAullife, who wisely sent his children to private school, famously put it this way in a debate in September: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Targeting Concerned Parents as ‘Terrorists’

As if matters could not get any worse, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, responding to an outrageous letter from the National Association of School Boards (NASB) painting concerned parents as possible “domestic terrorists,” decided to sic the FBI on moms and dads.

Among other concerns, Garland cited (pdf) “harassment” and “intimidation” by parents against the people brainwashing their kids with critical race theory (CRT), Marxist ideology, gender confusion, hyper-sexualized propaganda, and more. No examples of actual, legitimate threats were cited.

One of the examples of the supposed “threat” cited by the NASB was Scott Smith. What sort of dangerous domestic terrorist was Smith? Well, he was arrested for “disorderly conduct” while trying to tell the school board about his daughter being allegedly sodomized by a male pretending to be a girl in the girls’ restroom under the federally supported “transgender” dictates on bathrooms.

The other examples are equally outlandish: a ticket for “trespassing,” a nasty letter, a “Nazi salute” to protest mandatory face masks, somebody describing the school board as “Marxist,” and similar horrors requiring the might of the federal beast.

This is, of course, not about actual threats or violence, however. It’s naked intimidation of parents who are struggling to make their voices heard.

It’s also the political weaponization of federal law-enforcement in a way that’s unprecedented in American history. In fact, most parallels involve totalitarian dictatorships rather than civilized and free societies.

Fortunately, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and other state and local leaders are working to protect children in their jurisdictions from this outrageous abuse by the Biden administration. But it’s not enough to stop the freight train of evil being pumped into local schools by Washington.

The irony of treating desperate moms and dads as terrorists after pretending not to see months on end of actual domestic terrorism from rioters and looters burning down major American cities and even police precincts defies belief. Welcome to the “new normal.”

Even the former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI, Kevin Brock, has warned that the FBI should ignore Garland’s Orwellian directive.

After sparking a firestorm of criticism and alarming Americans across the political spectrum—and after being rebuked by state and local school boards nationwide—the NASB reluctantly apologized.

But nobody with a brain believes for a second that the education establishment would not sic the FBI and Homeland Security on angry parents if it thought it could get away with it.

Targeting State and Local Leaders, Too

Not long before announcing that the FBI and the Department of Justice would be employed to bully and intimidate parents, the Biden administration announced “civil rights” investigations into state leaders that refused to force children to wear masks at school against their parents’ wishes.

The threat, made by Cardona, invoked the communist understanding of “rights” to claim that everyone has a “right” to a government “education.” As such, states that do not force all children to wear face masks are somehow violating the supposed “rights” of some children to an education.

Yes, seriously. This is the so-called logic of the people who have usurped control over “educating” your children for you.

When Florida and other states sought to limit the ability of local school boards to force masks on children against their parents’ wishes, the Biden administration also vowed to send COVID stimulus money to local officials who defied their state government and state law.

Before that, the Department of Justice (DOJ) released a video urging children confused about their gender to report their local communities to the feds if government schools did not fully bow down to the “transgenderism” madness being pushed on America from D.C. and Hollywood.

The video, which featured transgender Health and Human Services bigwig Dr. Rachel Levine and senior officials from the Department of Education and the DOJ, gave multiple websites for children to get the feds involved in protecting their “rights” to use opposite-sex bathrooms, play on opposite-sex sports teams, and more.

The message was clear: Trust Biden, not your family or your community. And if anyone interferes with your supposed “right” to shower or relieve yourself or wrestle with members of the opposite sex, team Biden will unleash the fury of the weaponized federal machine.

So far there has been no federal intervention to protect the rights of Scott Smith’s daughter, though.

The Biden Agenda: CRT

At the top of Biden’s “education” agenda is using the education system to further divide parents and children, as well as the nation, while weaponizing impressionable youngsters in the war against their own country and its institutions.

Earlier this year, for example, the Department of Education proposed a “regulation” to inject even more Marxist race-mongering and CRT into public schools nationwide.

Under the scheme, the feds are bribing schools with “grants” and “incentives” paid with U.S. taxpayer money.

Among other elements, the administrative edict creates “American History and Civics Education programs” designed to radically change the teaching of history and civics. Between statements on “systemic racism” and “anti-racist practices,” the nature of the changes being sought is easy to discern.

Indeed, the Department of Education actually cited the debunked “1619 Project,” a fake history narrative addressed in part 17 of this series, as one of the inspirations for the effort.

The New York Times’ propaganda version of history, which has been ridiculed even by left-wing historians for its errors, turns U.S. history on its head. It paints the first nation in history founded on the premise that all are created equal—the first nation where abolition of slavery took root—into a uniquely evil nation with racism and slavery supposedly in its very “DNA.”

Also cited by the Education Department for the proposed regulation was the work of Ibram X. Kendi, one of the premier proponents of CRT and author of books such as “Anti-Racist Baby.”

Among other ideas, Kendi advocates a “Department of Antiracism” that would serve as an unelected racial dictatorship with power to overturn any law or rule it dislikes.

To qualify for the Education Department funding, state and local “education” officials would have to incorporate the administration’s extremist ideologies into the classroom—evil ideologies that divide children by “race” for sinister purposes while teaching a twisted (and false) version of American history and government.

Almost 40 U.S. senators and tens of thousands of citizens in official comments blasted the scheme’s overtly anti-American extremism.

Only after that massive outcry did the administration backtrack even slightly and remove some of the most outrageous language and references. But the somewhat scaled-back rule was still implemented, and the vision remains clear despite the attempted obfuscation.

To illustrate just how committed the administration is to this poison, in early October they appointed political activist Precious McKesson to a senior post at the Education Department. McKesson is a strong advocate of CRT, and she even recently expressed her support for teaching all children about the alleged “systemic racism” of America.

Ironically, perhaps, Garland’s son-in-law’s company reportedly supports CRT teaching in government schools, sparking concerns about a potential conflict of interest in the decision to sic the feds on parents.

The O’Biden Agenda: Centralize and Get Them Young!

The proposed $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” abomination that Biden and congressional Democrats are trying to ram through Congress without the support of a single Republican is packed with “education” gimmicks, too. If approved, the descent into collective madness will accelerate.

One of the major schemes Biden and his handlers are trying to get through, this time with the “Reconciliation” bill, is a $200 billion program for universal pre-kindergarten. The goal: Get all of America’s children into government indoctrination programs even earlier.

Under the proposed plan, which may be rammed through Congress on a partisan vote with no filibusters allowed, all children in America ages 3 and 4 would receive federally directed, tax-funded “pre-K” through government schools.

None of this should be surprising. During the Obama years, the same warped view of “education” and parents reigned in Washington and throughout the monstrosity improperly referred to as the nation’s “public education” system.

Common Core, for example, was used to cement national standards into place using bullying and bribes from the stimulus slush fund.

And lest anyone think this was actually about “improving” education, the federal government funded a study showing “significant negative effects” on grade 4 reading after the standards were put in place. Less than one third of the victims of government school at grade 8 are proficient in core subjects, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reveals.

But academic achievement was never really the goal. Under Obama and Common Core, parents and elected school boards were out, while D.C. bureaucrats and special-interest groups funded by billionaire profiteers were in.

The plan succeeded wildly, with parents nationwide unable to help their children with “Common Core” math while states and school districts struggle for breathing room in the straitjacket of the national standards.

Also under Obama, federally funded so-called Full-Service Community Schools revealed perhaps the most brazen attempt to sideline parents in American history. These federally backed institutions, which are now scattered across the nation, promise to handle the dental health, mental health, nutritional needs, and much more for every child in their “care.”

It would be more honest to refer to these institutions as “parental replacement centers,” but of course those behind the agenda would never be so honest.

As explored in part 10 of this series, this federal usurpation of authority over families and schools accelerated rapidly under Obama. It’s now reaching a climax under Biden. And it has resulted in the absolute decimation of whatever may have once been decent in America’s disastrous “education” system.

From the 1960s’ U.S. Supreme Court opinions imposing humanism and ousting Christianity to the federal funding that eventually paved the way for control over standards and so much else, Washington’s influence over schools has been toxic from the start.

Under Obama and now Biden, the globalization of the indoctrination system described in part 9 of this series also came out of the closet, with Obama’s Education Secretary referring to the U.N. education agency as his “global partner” in the process.

Indeed, Common Core’s own architects and proponents bragged that the controversial standards were aligned with “international standards” even as training for “global citizenship” became ubiquitous.

This is about more than the government simply brainwashing your children. This is about removing you from the picture almost entirely so that the forces of wickedness, perversion, and tyranny can poison your children’s minds and souls unimpeded by pesky parents.

As this series has documented extensively, this was always the goal of the “education” establishment going back to the Utopian and even socialist architects of the system: communist Robert Owen, collectivist Utopian Horace Mann, and socialist–humanist luminary John Dewey.

Obviously, attending school board meetings to express concerns is not a viable strategy for protecting children. In fact, it may even lead to harassment and intimidation from the politicized and disgraced FBI. It may be worth doing, but it will not save your children.

While it’s critical for parents to be involved and for state and local government to resist the Biden administration’s escalating attacks, the only true long-term solution is an exodus from the government’s indoctrination system.

This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

Using data primarily gathered through the public-education system, Big Brother and the collectivists running the government schools now know more about American children than their own parents do. The awesome powers offered by “Big Data” will blow your mind.

In fact, authorities have vacuumed up so much private information on America’s youth that, according to a U.S. Department of Education report, it’s now possible to predict the “future behavior and interests” of children. It also allows the government to manipulate their thoughts and attitudes like never before.

The data-gathering has become so intrusive and extreme that some critics have even referred to it as the “data-rape” of American children. And this is just the start.

From biometric data and private health care information to academic records, online browsing habits, and mental-health data, government schools and technocratic policymakers across the United States want it all—from “cradle to career” and beyond, as authorities often put it. Thanks to federal grants, they’re getting it, and sharing it.

Hundreds of data points on each child are now being collected and stored in databases accessible by state and federal authorities. Privacy laws and regulations prohibiting the creation of national databases with student information were ignored and pushed aside beginning during the Obama administration, and even earlier.

Through a byzantine combination of public schools, government agencies, social-media companies, crony contractors, testing companies, non-profit organizations, and more, there’s now more data collected on children than anyone could have imagined even just a few short years ago. Many times, the children do not even realize they’re giving their private data to Big Brother—forever.

The tip of the iceberg occasionally becomes visible. Right now, for example, there’s an ongoing lawsuit against the non-profit College Board, currently headed by Common Core architect David Coleman, for allegedly collecting and selling private student data to third parties without the consent of the children or their parents. According to the plaintiffs, numerous laws have been broken.

That is all a big deal, of course. And it’s wrong. But it pales in comparison to the dangers of what Big Government and Big Business are doing right now—and what they have planned for the future.

The Common Core national standards imposed on the United States by the Obama administration, covered in the most recent piece in this series, super-charged the government’s data-harvesting and data-mining operations. After that, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which Obama referred to as a “Christmas miracle,” took it even further.

But it has been going on for quite some time. Consider a 2012 “Issue Brief” titled “Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics.” In the report, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology dropped a bombshell regarding what all this data was going to be used for: Basically, the feds want to make predictions about your children.

In the report, authorities said that “online learning systems” allow the government to “capture streams of fine-grained learner behaviors.” These systems send to a database the “time-stamped student input and behaviors captured as students work within the system,” the document explained.

Authorities then combine that behavioral data with other external information sources, including sensitive personal data held by the school, the district, or the state, according to the report. Then, the information is put to use making predictions and shaping “interventions.”

“A predictive model combines demographic data (from an external student information system) and learning/behavior data from the student learning database to track a student’s progress and make predictions about his or her future behaviors or performance,” the report explains (emphasis added).

The data being collected can also allow the government to peer into the minds of students. “Big data captured from users’ online behaviors enables algorithms to infer the users’ knowledge, intentions, and interests and to create models for predicting future behavior and interest,” the report adds.

Using controversial federally funded “surveys” under the guise of “health,” public schools across the United States have been collecting some of the most intimate data imaginable: political views, religious beliefs, sexual behaviors, sensitive information on parents or the home, private medical information, and much more.

Among the creepiest elements of the data-gathering and data-mining machine is the ability it gives to peer into the innermost thoughts and feelings of students. With access to this data, and the computing power to process it all, government and those connected to it can become nightmarishly powerful—and they will, if nothing is done to stop it, as the people of China are discovering under the “social credit” system.

Consider a 2010 speech to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), also the subject of part 9 in this series, by then-U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. In it, the Chicago radical celebrated the rapidly expanding data-gathering colossus and the new powers it would unleash.

“More robust data systems and a new generation of assessments can assist teachers and principals to improve their practices and tailor their instruction in ways that were largely unthinkable in the past,” said Duncan, who regularly boasted about using schools to brainwash children with “sustainability” propaganda. “We have advanced data systems that we are constantly improving.”

In the decade since then, those “advanced data systems” have become ever more sophisticated, enabling governments to build unfathomable personal profiles on every public-school student in the United States. Even students in private schools and home schools are now in the cross-hairs of the data-mining machine.

Some of the technological tools that have already been used by the federal government in these areas have sparked grave privacy concerns. In 2013, the U.S. Department of Education released a report titled “Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century” that became a lightning rod for criticism.

Among other developments, the report included revelations about the sorts of technology being used in some federal programs to gather data on children. One of the tools, for example, was described as a “facial expression camera.” The report said this was used to “detect emotion” and “capture facial expressions,” with the data then processed through software and fed into databases.

Other tools described in the report, which has since been taken off the Education Department’s website, included a “posture analysis seat,” a “pressure mouse,” and a “wireless skin conductance sensor.” All of these existing technologies are used to monitor and collect “physiological response data” that can “examine student frustration.”

“Researchers are exploring how to gather complex affective data and generate meaningful and usable information to feed back to learners, teachers, researchers, and the technology itself,” the report explains, with “affective” data referring to students’ attitudes and feelings, rather than academic or educational abilities. “Connections to neuroscience are also beginning to emerge.”

More recently, a U.S. company called BrainCo developed a headband that measures and collects data on students’ “brainwaves.” BrainCo, which is part funded by Chinese state-owned companies, has already trialed the devices on 10,000 students in China. Back in 2017, the CEO talked of building the “world’s largest database,” which could be analyzed by artificial intelligence to better detect emotions. Some U.S. schools have reportedly tried the devices, too.

In 2017, the federal government funded a project to build a “friendly social robot” to collect highly sensitive psychological data on children. Known as “EMAR,” or Ecological Momentary Assessment Robot, the robot “gathers teen mental health data in a public high school setting,” the National Science Foundation said.

One of the major concerns surrounding all this intrusive data-gathering technology is that it’s being used by government schools and the education establishment to manipulate the thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of children. As the technology advances, it will allow bureaucrats and technocrats to do much more of this in the future, too.

Under new “Social and Emotional Learning” (SEL) programs, which are currently all the rage in educational circles, authorities set goals for various attitudes and values they want children to hold. By testing for these “affective” characteristics, the technology can help determine whether children hold the government-mandated attitudes. If not, the programs then help to develop “interventions” to get the desired attitude inculcated in the child.

As far back as 2016, Education Week revealed that, under the guise of providing “personalized learning experiences,” new technology was aiming at students’ “individual emotions, cognitive processes, ‘mindsets,’ and character and personality traits.” So-called “non-cognitive competencies” were also targets.

That same year, the U.S. Department of Education released a “National Education Technology Plan” peddling “assessments” that measure “non-cognitive competencies” including “attitudes that facilitate functioning well in school, work, and life.” How the feds would determine the correct “attitudes” for children to have was not specified.

The potential for abuse is self-evidently enormous. What if these tools get into the hands of evil-doers? What if they already are in the hands of evil-doers? Do Americans really want unelected bureaucrats at the far-left U.S. Department of Education—where 99.7 percent of 2016 donations to presidential campaigns went to Hillary Clinton—determining what attitudes and values children will hold on controversial issues such as homosexual marriage, immigration, and abortion?

When one realizes that the public education system was literally created by Utopian collectivists to fundamentally transform society, as this series has documented extensively since the first segment, the dangers are obvious and extraordinary.

Indeed, the architects and current leaders of the government-school machine have long been open about their desire to shift the United States away from a liberty-minded Christian society, and toward collectivism and humanism. With these powerful tools, resistance will become increasingly difficult, if not futile, for children held captive by the system.

Another major concern is that all of this data being gathered by schools is being fused with labor and career data. For years, authorities have been openly working on connecting the various “education” databases packed with information gathered on Americans by schools with that collected by other government organs.

Officials are hoping that this enormous amount of data, all brought together in one place, will help them do what previous attempts at central planning have always failed to do: accurately understand the needs of the economy, and then adjust production, employment, consumption, training, and education accordingly.

Then, imagine combining all of that with emerging developments such as artificial intelligence and super computers with unprecedented capabilities, plus all of the data being gathered on Americans by agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, the National Security Agency, and more. Big Brother will know everything about everyone, literally from “the cradle,” as the Utopians themselves often say.

It’s a recipe for disaster—or even a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions.

Around the world, the U.N. is also leaning heavily on governments to start collecting, sharing, analyzing, using, and weaponizing all sorts of data on children via schools. And more than a few foreign governments—communist China and certain Western European governments, among others—have been more than happy to jump on the bandwagon.

Humanity must resist. Americans, in particular, have the means to effectively resist, if only they can find the will.

Privacy is extremely important to a free society. That’s why America’s Founding Fathers enshrined it in the U.S. Constitution. Without privacy, liberty cannot exist. And without liberty, prosperity and other blessings enjoyed by the people of the United States will end as well.

Americans must demand an end to the Orwellian data-gathering apparatus, and protect their children from it, before it’s too late.

This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

UPDATE: A Freedom of Information Request has revealed that the cost for speakers for New Trier’s All-School Seminar Day are almost $28,000, with $15,000 alone going to Colson Whitehead.

Much virtual ink has been spilled, money wasted, and fallacious arguments spewed by supporters of the bias inarguably present in the sessions offered on New Trier’s All-School Seminar Day titled “Understanding Today’s Struggle for Racial Civil Rights,” which takes place tomorrow Feb. 28.

A closer look at the money spent and diversity ideology promoted—often through fallacious logic—may lead parents to do two things: 1. Keep their children home on “progressive” dogma day. 2. Pursue changes in future seminars with the doggedness and passion (if not the fallacious reasoning) of “progressives.”

Pacific Educational Group lines its pockets with taxpayer money to subsidize Leftist definition of “diversity

On Feb. 19, the North Cook News reported that New Trier has paid almost $90,000 to notorious snake oil salesman Glenn Singleton and his Pacific Educational Group. Here’s a little anecdote about another affluent school district on Chicago’s North Shore that was similarly beguiled by the oily diversity scammer Singleton: District 113 which encompasses Deerfield and Highland Park high schools and which is where I first encountered the ethically-challenged Glenn Singleton. This is my former place of employment and the school from which all four of my children graduated.

Between spring 2007 and spring 2008, District 113, using both federal and district money, spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $83,000 to hire the San Francisco-based Glenn Singleton and representatives from his Pacific Educational Group to come  seven times to teach District 113 employees about their “whiteness.” This figure included Singleton’s fees, travel expenses, per diem, and costs of hiring substitute teachers for all the teachers who were absent from class to attend the all-day indoctrination seminars. The $83,000 included $10,000 for substitute teachers and $20,000 to feed everyone at the Highland Park Country Club where the meetings took place.

I asked then-superintendent George Fornero why we were hiring Singleton and was told it was due to Highland Park High School’s failure to make “adequate yearly progress” under the No Child Left Behind Act. The district had received federal money to help the Hispanic students perform better on standardized tests, and Fornero used it to hire Singleton. Both Singleton and his facilitators explicitly stated that neither he nor his book on which his consultations were based (Courageous Conversations) provide any solutions.

Every time Singleton or his representative came, every administrator, every department chair, two teachers from every department, and area (e.g., multi-media, custodial pool, technology, secretarial pool) from both high schools attended all-day meetings during which they discussed their “whiteness.” This meant that all the participating employees missed seven days of work or classes.

I asked the school board and administration how even in theory does having secretaries, custodians, and teachers miss school to talk about their “whiteness” at the Highland Park Country Club help minority students improve their test scores.

They offered no answer.

At the all-staff, all-faculty meeting to introduce District 113 to his “social justice” theories, Singleton made some surprising statements. He explained that many experts believe the causes for the underperformance of minority students are poverty, language issues, mobility, and lack of family support. He then made the startling claim that none of those factors is the cause. The causes, he claimed, are “institutional racism” and “whiteness.”

He went on to classify audience members into three categories according to their potential responses to his theories: The first group were those who would agree with him immediately. The second group were those who would be on the fence and need to be convinced. And the third group were “those who are gifted at subverting reform.” In other words, those who dare to suggest that limited English skills likely affect test scores are “gifted at subverting reform.” Singleton cunningly attempted to prevent dissent by pre-labeling pejoratively those who disagree with his theories.

Toward the end of the year, Singleton visited classrooms to evaluate the continued need for his services. He also visited the writing center where I had worked for eight years. After school, he met with the administration which included all department chairs to “debrief.” The next day, one department chair told me and two others confirmed that Singleton had called for me to be fired citing as justification the following quotes I had on my wall:

“Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.” (The Supreme Court of the United States, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)

Despite incessant repetition of the word ‘diversity’ in academe, the tragic fact is that the academic world is one of the most intolerant places in America when it comes to diversity of ideas” (Thomas Sowell, African American, Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution).

“One is an individual, not an instance of blood or appearance. The assault on individual identity was essential to the horror and inhumanity of Jim Crow laws, of apartheid, and of the Nuremberg Race Laws. It is no less inhuman when undertaken by ‘diversity educators’” (Alan Kors, Professor of Intellectual History at University of Pennsylvania).

“‘[D]iversity’ — nowadays, the first refuge of intellectually disreputable impulses – [is] the . . . belief in identity politics and its tawdry corollary, the idea of categorical representation” (George Will, syndicated columnist).

“The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling” (Thomas Sowell).

Singleton also boasted in the meeting that he had gotten employees in other school districts fired. Two weeks later, I was demoted.

After spending thousands of dollars on Singleton’s doctrinaire and racist theories, Fornero, perhaps unintentionally, acknowledged precisely what District 113 got for their time and money in a 2009 letter to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan:

Dear Honorable Duncan,

. . .

As was the case in the spring of 2008, our non-English speaking students were once again asked to demonstrate their academic abilities by taking the ACT and the WorkKey assessments in English. And once again, despite taking the test seriously and despite working for hours longer than other students to complete it, when these students receive their results next fall, they will all fail [emphasis added].

One would think that an admission like that would be the nail in the coffin of divisive, intellectually vacuous, ideologically-driven expenditures. But the public should never underestimate the fervor of true proselytes driven by political motives. They will continue to abuse their access to public money until community members publicly and vigorously oppose them.

Fallacious arguments of seminar defenders

Getting to the gist of the concerns of critics of Tuesday’s seminar is made challenging by the pervasive use  of fallacious arguments by “progressives” to obscure the critics’ arguments. Here’s a quick look at some of the fallacies New Trier “progressives” use:

1.)  Traitorous critic fallacy (an ad hominem fallacy):  Criticizing or dismissing an opponent’s argument by attributing it to some unfavored group rather than responding to the substance of the argument.

The use of this fallacy was on full and unabashed display by New Trier father Paul Traynor when he appeared recently on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight  ( a must watch segment for a lesson in fallacious reasoning) and dismissed the arguments of New Trier parents by suggesting these parents are somehow connected to Breitbart and IFI.  Traynor twice claimed IFI is a “hate group registered with the Southern Poverty Law Center” clearly suggesting that IFI is, in reality, a hate group. In addition, Traynor complained that “IFI—this hate group—has gone after me personally.”  What did IFI do to warrant his fear? I critiqued his public comments that he voluntarily provided to the Chicago Tribune. Instead of responding to the substance of the seminar critics’ arguments, Traynor attacked two organizations that have written about the controversy.

2.)  Abusive fallacy (ad hominem): Verbally abusing one’s opponents rather than responding to their arguments.

For example, seminar supporters have repeatedly called seminar critics “racists.” In addition, on Chicago Tonight, Traynor criticized the suggestion that Colonel Allen West or Sheriff David Clarke could be  invited to represent conservative ideas and criticized Dennis Prager as a member of the “alt right.” (Apparently, Traynor views invited “queer Latinx” speaker Monica Trinidad as a moderate—Trinidad who once “tweeted a picture of mounted police officers with the comment ‘Get them animals off those horses.’”)

3.)  Straw man fallacy:  Refuting an argument never made by one’s opponents.

So, when seminar supporters say things like “Racism exists,” “New Trier kids are sheltered,” “Colson Whitehead and Andrew Aydin [two of the invited speakers—both liberal Democrats] have won national book awards,” “Students may express dissenting views,” “New Trier is a great school,” “The seminar was carefully constructed,” or “Parents were included,” they are not responding to the central argument made by critics who justifiably see the seminar sessions as biased. All of these claims made by seminar supporters are true (well, most of them) but irrelevant to the arguments of seminar critics.

4.)  Appeal to popularity (argumentum ad populum, appeal to common belief, bandwagon fallacy): Expressing the idea that because a belief is popular or widely held it must be true.

Both seminar supporters and superintendent Linda Yonke employed this fallacy saying that most community members support the seminar as currently constituted. Whether or not such a claim is true is irrelevant.

Maybe, just maybe New Trier community members can wade through the flurry of fallacies to get seminar supporters to answer the only relevant question: Do you believe the sessions are relatively balanced between conservative and “progressive” views on race-related topics. If so, can you point to the resources used and speakers invited that represent conservative perspectives.

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Written by Phyllis Schlafly

Many people said Ho-Hum when Barack Obama threatened to change any law with his pen or phone, and even used that power to personally alter Obamacare and the welfare law, and to “legislate” the Dream Act that Congress refused to pass. But Americans are rising up by the tens of thousands to stop Common Core, which is the current attempt to compel all U.S. children to be taught the same material and not be taught other things parents might think important.

Ever since Congress began pouring federal tax dollars into public schools, parents have been solicitous to have Congress write into law a prohibition against the federal government writing curriculum or lesson plans, or imposing a uniform national curriculum. Parents want those decisions made at the local level by local school boards which are, or should be, subject to the watchful eyes of local citizens and parents.

Parents are supported in this view by the U.S. Constitution which gives the federal government no power over education. Here is some of the repetitive language included in federal school appropriation laws.

The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the first federal attempt to regulate and finance schools, stated: “Nothing in this act” shall authorize any federal official to “mandate, direct, or control” school curriculum. The 1970 General Education Provisions Act stipulates that “no provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any” federal agency or official “to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction or selection of instructional materials by any” school system.

The 1979 law that created the Department of Education forbids it to exercise “any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum” or “program of instruction” of any school system. The amended Elementary and Secondary Education Act reiterates that no Education Department funds “may be used … to endorse, approve, or sanction any curriculum designed to be used in” grades K-12.

Despite all those emphatic words Obama’s Department of Education, headed by an alumnus of the Chicago Democratic machine and other leftists, seeks to mold the minds of all our children into supporters of big-government. Their vehicle to accomplish this is Common Core, which is artfully designed to impose de facto national uniformity while complying with all explicit federal prohibitions.

The mechanism of control is the tests that all students must take, which will be written by the people who created Common Core. If students haven’t studied a curriculum “aligned” with Common Core, they will have a hard time passing the tests required for a high school diploma and entry into college.

As explained by education researcher and author Darcy Pattison, the Common Core gang in 1996 gathered a cozy group of rich big businessmen, six governors, and a few other politicians and founded an organization called Achieve Inc. Working backward from the 12th grade down to kindergarten, this eventually morphed into the Common Core State Standards.

Achieve Inc. started implementation of Common Core with 13 states, but a national curriculum was still the goal, and a congressional debate about that would have been a political risk. So the Common Core advocates bypassed most elected officials, went straight to each state department of education, and by 2009, 35 state curriculums had aligned with Common Core.

Common Core advocates then announced that “standards” had been developed “in collaboration with teachers, school administrators, and experts … to prepare our children for college and the workforce.” By 2011, 45 states signed up even though the final draft of the standards was not yet available and they had never been field tested.

Still careful to skirt the laws barring federal control of curriculum, Education Secretary Arne Duncan used federal funds to bait the states to align with Common Core by offering grants from the federally funded Race to the Top program.

The Common Core promoters, whose goal is a national curriculum for all U.S. children despite laws prohibiting the government from requiring it, used the clever device of copyrighting the standards by a non-government organization, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). That enables Common Core advocates to force uniform national standards while claiming that the laws prohibiting federal control of curriculum are not violated.

No one may copy or reprint the standards without permission, and states that sign on to Common Core may not change or modify the standards. The license agreement that states must sign in order to use Common Core states: “NGA/CCSSO shall be acknowledged as the sole owners and developers of the Common Core State Standards.”

This article was originally posted at the EagleForum.org blog.

Most Americans have heard the term Common Core Standards (CCS), but many have little idea what those standards are, who created them, or what is troubling about those standards, which are a significant step in the movement toward nationalizing public education. What’s remarkable is that this governmental overreach is managing to achieve the nearly impossible: unify the political left and right. Even the extreme leftwing Wisconsin-based Rethinking Schools says that the process by which these standards were developed involved “‘too little honest conversation and too little democracy.’” CCS with their yawn-inducing name are anything but innocuous. Americans best turn off their televisions and spend a little time looking at the history, players, and problems associated with the adoption of these standards while there’s still time to jump ship.

Thanks to the concerted efforts of a relatively small number of vigilant individuals and organizations, a groundswell of bipartisan opposition to this effort is intensifying and with good reason. There are huge problems with adopting Common Core Standards, including the vast expansion of government bureaucracy, loss of local control over education, high costs of implementation, invasive individual tracking of children, and the dumbing down of curricula that will follow in the wake of this Bill and Melinda Gates/Barack Obama/Arne Duncan power grab.

Four states (Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia) have rejected CCS. Minnesota has rejected the Common Core math standards, and Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, and South Dakota are revisiting the implementation of them. As constituent knowledge of CCS increases, so does constituent opposition. (Their opposition extends also to curricula like those developed by CSCOPE).

The deeper one digs into this labyrinthine and incestuous story, the more confusing it becomes, so a few preliminary statements are in order.

First, I will not include—nor could I include—every detail about this story.

Second, when discussing those who stand to profit financially from the CCS initiative, please don’t think IFI is criticizing capitalism. Profit-making becomes profiteering when the process is insulated from market forces. Our concern is the absence of free market forces in the development and sale of curricular, testing, and professional development (i.e., teacher-training) materials. These materials, which align with the CCS, have already been produced—though not tested—and are now available even though the CCS are not scheduled to be implemented until the 2014-2015 school year.

Third, we and many others are concerned that this has been a top-down initiative largely concealed during its planning phase from state stakeholders. Education becomes corrupted when concealed from major stakeholders, which is to say, parents and other taxpayers.

 Background:

There appears to be an unholy alliance between purported non-profit education organizations; for-profit businesses that produce curricula, testing materials, and teacher-training materials; our government schools; and our elected leaders, which needs to be untangled and exposed.

In 2008 the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) (a private trade organization) and the National Governors Association decided to create the CCS with the central goal of developing “some uniform standards to get more low-performing students into college courses without needing remedial courses once they got there.” Actually, according to the American Principles Project, initially  the idea for these national standards came from “private interests [primarily the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation] in Washington D.C. without any representation from the states. Eventually the creators realized the need to present a façade of state involvement and therefore enlisted the National Governors Association (NGA) [a trade organization that doesn’t include all governors].” Then the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided funding to a private organization called Achieve to develop the standards, the final version of which were released in June 2010. (This is not the only troubling involvement of the Gates Foundation in education. More on that tomorrow.)

The next significant step in the propulsion of the CCS was President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s plan to incentivize, or perhaps more accurately, coerce, states into “voluntarily” adopting these standards. That plan was the cunning “Race to the Top” competition. Chicago pals Obama and Duncan made $4.35 billion available to states, but the catch was that bonus application points would be awarded to those states that adopted CCS. In other words, the odds of a state winning Race to the Top money increased if they “voluntarily” adopted the CCS. It was the equivalent of affirmative action college admission policies, and in this lousy economy, it was the ethical equivalent of extortion.

Education historian, Diane Ravitch explains her reasons for opposing Common Core standards:

President Obama and Secretary Duncan often say that the Common Core standards were developed by the states and voluntarily adopted by them. This is not true.

They were developed by an organization called Achieve and the National Governors Association, both of which were generously funded by the Gates Foundation. There was minimal public engagement in the development of the Common Core. Their creation was neither grassroots nor did it emanate from the states.

In fact, it was well understood by states that they would not be eligible for Race to the Top funding ($4.35 billion) unless they adopted the Common Core standards. Federal law prohibits the U.S. Department of Education from prescribing any curriculum, but in this case the Department figured out a clever way to evade the letter of the law.

It should be no surprise that Illinois, old stomping grounds of Barack Obama and Arne Duncan, has embraced Common Core standards and the filthy lucre ($42.8 million) that is used as a bribe to lure states in.

Achieve has a 20-state consortium called the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) that develops Common Core-aligned assessments (i.e., tests), and which received $186 million dollars of federal funds from the Department of Education’s Race to the Top. Greg Forster explains what is so problematic about this:

The Department of Education is forbidden by law from developing a national curriculum. This reflects the clear judgment of the people and their congressional representatives, expressed forcefully on all the previous occasions when this issue has come up, against handing over control of education to a single national body.

In lieu of an outright establishment of a national curriculum, the Department has spent the past year pressuring states to “voluntarily” adopt the education standards promoted by the private organization Common Core. At the same time, it has hired two consortia to develop curriculum materials and tests based on the Common Core’s vision. These materials are being developed behind closed doors, with no transparency or accountability to the public.

To further expose the incestuous relationships among the CCS players without boggling already boggled minds, let’s look at just three of them.

Phil Daro and Sally Hampton served on the committee that drafted the common core standards which were released to the public in June 2010. They also worked for the non-profit educational reform organization America’s Choice, which in August 2010, the for-profit educational publishing company Pearson Education announced it was purchasing. Pearson, which bought the non-profit organization for which Daro and Hampton worked, is now profiting from the “voluntarily” adopted Common Core Standards. Pearson has been awarded “the contract to develop test items that will be part of the new English and Mathematics assessments.”

David Coleman is considered the “architect” of CCS. Until 2007 he worked for McGraw-Hill, a company that publishes educational curricula. He left McGraw-Hill in 2007 to start a non-profit organization that played a critical role in the formation of the CCS. And surprise, surprise, McGraw-Hill already has CCS curricula available. (McGraw-Hill even has curricula available that aligns with the Next Generation Science Standards, about which very few taxpayers have even heard.)

Coleman is now the president of College Board that creates the SAT and AP tests. The College Board has recently announced its intention to redesign the tests to align with CCS, which means that even private and home schools will be compelled to align their curricula with CCS in order for their students to succeed on these critical college admission exams.

As it now stands, 45 states have bought into the Common Core scheme to nationalize education, despite the fact that there has been no field-testing to determine the standards’ efficacy. As with Obamacare, it appears most of the country is going to jump headfirst into stygian waters even as a swelling number of prescient guards are screaming at us to stop.

Tomorrow: Common Core Standards Part 2

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Obama searched the nation for the best candidate to serve as Secretary of Education, and, lo and behold, he found just the person right here in Illinois: Arne Duncan, current CEO of the Chicago Public School system.

To be fair, Duncan has earned praises from some quarters for his support of charter schools, his willingness to close failing schools, his support for greater student accountability, and his promotion of merit pay for teachers. Even conservative educational policy expert, Chester Finn, president of the non-profit Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, is pleased with Duncan’s appointment.

That said, however, Duncan also recommended approval of the proposed Chicago Social Justice High School-Pride Campus that was committed to affirming, and therefore normalizing, homosexuality. This publicly subsidized high school, which the proposal designers have promised to reintroduce next year, would have had homosexuality-affirming curricula.

Duncan’s approval of this highly controversial proposal was foolish, irresponsible, unethical, and pedagogically unsound. His recommendation necessarily required that Duncan arrive at conclusions regarding the nature and morality of homosexuality and then required that the taxes of hard-working Illinois taxpayers subsidize the promotion of views that many believe hurt teens and undermine marriage, the family, and the public good.

If Duncan takes this Cabinet position, taxpayers all over the country need to pay close attention to the decisions coming out of the Department of Education and vigorously respond if Duncan decides to use his platform and power to enact policies that further undermine the legitimacy of public education.

And Illinoisans need to pay close attention to Mayor Richard Daley’s appointment of the next CEO of Chicago Public Schools — he or she could be even worse. 

Next week, the Chicago Board of Education will vote on the proposed Social Justice High School-Pride Campus that Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan has endorsed. Rumors are circulating that, despite Mayor Richard Daley’s explicit opposition to the school, the board intends to vote in favor of it.

The Windy City Times, a Chicago newspaper serving the homosexual and “transgender” population, explains that “the school will exist as a training hub on LGBT issues and social-justice curricula for teachers, both locally and nationally. Social-justice history, practices and discussion will be embedded in the curriculum, allowing for all students, including LGBTQ youth, to find representation in the courses they are taking in school.” (See “Social Justice or Educational Injustice“)

It is critical to understand that the taxes of all Illinoisans, not just Chicagoans, will be used to subsidize this subversive project, because all public schools receive state funds. Arne Duncan and any member who agrees with Duncan that the state should subsidize this school had to have come to prior conclusions that homosexual conduct is safe and moral. If Duncan had concluded otherwise — if he had concluded that homosexual conduct is neither safe nor moral-he would never have recommended approval of this proposal.

It is clearly far outside both Duncan’s area of expertise and his professional responsibilities to make implicit proclamations on the nature and morality of homosexuality, and it is inappropriate to demand that taxpayers subsidize his controversial and unproven philosophical and moral conclusions.

The Windy City Times has taken notice of IFI’s efforts to oppose this school and is urging its readers to fight back, calling our letter-writing and email campaign “negative.” Our opposition to this school is only negative if our beliefs are wrong. If, however, our beliefs that homosexual conduct is volitional, unsafe, and immoral are correct, then our opposition to this school is a positive effort to protect teens, preserve a proper understanding of the nature and morality of homosexuality, and prevent our money from being used to promote radical, subversive ideas about homosexuality that will ultimately destroy marriage, destroy the natural family, and undermine fundamental First Amendment speech and religious rights. 

It is cruel and tragic that those in positions of authority today are so bereft of both knowledge and wisdom that they claim that sexually confused teens deserve to have a homosexual identity affirmed. It is cruel and tragic that, despite the absence of any supporting research, so-called “educators” tell sexually confused teens that they were “born that way” And it is a grievous offense to demand that the public subsidize this ignorance, arrogance, and cruelty. If we truly love these teens, we will speak the truth. 

Public schools must stay away from subjects that fall far outside the appropriate purview of public education. We have one week left to express not merely our opposition to, but our outrage about the proposed Social Justice High School-Pride Campus.

TAKE ACTION: Contact CPS Chief Arne Duncan and the Chicago Board of Education to express your opposition to the use of public funds to subsidize a school that affirms disputable and divisive views on homosexuality and gender-confusion.

Additional Contact Information
E-mail Arne Duncan at aduncan@cps.k12.il.us with your letter of opposition. To cc the Chicago Tribune, e-mail ctc-tribletter@tribune.com. To cc the Chicago Sun-Times, e-mail mcooke@suntimes.com. 

To mail or fax a letter, send it to:

Mr. Arne Duncan, Chief Executive Officer
Chicago Public Schools
125 S. Clark, 5th Floor
Chicago, IL 60603

The fax number is 773-553-1502.

To send to the board of education, mail a letter to:

Chicago Board of Education
125 S. Clark, 6th Floor
Chicago, IL 60603

The fax number is 773-553-1601.

Next Wednesday, October 22nd, the Chicago Board of Education will consider a proposal for a “gay”-friendly high school for homosexual and gender-confused students. The proposal already has the recommendation of School CEO Arne Duncan.

Despite the fact that 70 percent of Chicago high school students are testing below state standards and the sad reality that almost half of Chicago high school students fail to graduate, Chicago Public School (CPS) officials are seriously considering investing time, energy, and hard-earned tax dollars toward social engineering and the promotion of controversial views of homosexuality. 

TAKE ACTION: Contact CPS Chief Arne Duncan and the Chicago Board of Education to express your opposition to the use of public funds to subsidize a school that affirms disputable and divisive views on homosexuality and gender-confusion. 

Pasted below is a copy of a certified letter IFI’s Division of School Advocacy sent to the Mr. Duncan and the Chicago Board of Education.

RE: Social Justice High School-Pride Campus

Members of the Board of Education, 

The Illinois Family Institute strongly urges you to vote against the creation of a new and controversial Social Justice High School-Pride Campus. Subsidizing this school would represent a gross misuse of public funds. 

Public educators have no business taking a position on the nature and morality of homosexuality and “transgenderism,” which Arne Duncan necessarily has done in recommending approval of this school. 

Will the board of education also consider a high school for students who are harassed for myriad other reasons, most of which, unlike homosexuality and “transgenderism,” have no moral implications? 

Will the board of education and administrators in this high school commit in written policy to allotting equal time and equivalent resources to all sides of the cultural debate on homosexuality and cross-dressing? 

Will you ensure that curricula that address these topics are unbiased and uncensored, or will you permit only biased, censored curricula that exclusively affirm controversial, unproven theories on the nature and morality of homosexuality? 

How will the faculty and administration teach critical thinking skills on the divisive issue of homosexuality and gender identity disorder if they have previously committed only to affirm homosexuality as normative and morally defensible? 

Are the board of education and administration prepared to provide justifications and evidence for claims that homosexuality is biologically determined or that disapproval of behavior constitutes bullying?

Are the board of education and administration prepared to provide justifications and evidence for the implicit claim that volitional behavioral choices that may emerge from biologically influenced impulses are inherently moral?

Are you prepared to apply consistently to all behaviors the principle that disapproval of behavior makes students “unsafe”?

It is an outrage that Mr. Duncan would recommend and the board of education consider using the hard-earned money of Chicago taxpayers to subsidize a school whose curricula will violate fundamental educational principles regarding intellectual diversity and exploration that give public education legitimacy. 

And it is an outrage that Mr. Duncan and the board would consider using public funds to undermine the values of many members of the community who supply those funds.

If this school is approved, it will become obvious to all that the promulgation of controversial, unproven socio-political theories has replaced academic inquiry as the guiding principle of the Chicago Board of Education.

Again, we strongly urge you to vote against this proposal.

Sincerely,

Laurie Higgins, Director
Division of School Advocacy
Illinois Family Institute