The first compulsory attendance laws in America were introduced by Horace Mann in Massachusetts in 1852. This created a shift from what I consider to be true “public schools,” which were open to the public, but controlled by parents in local communities, to “government schools,” which we have had ever since. Today’s schools are funded by the government, regulated, and controlled by the government, and all of the standards are set and enforced by government dictates. By 1900, the U.S. government had an almost complete monopoly on education in our country, as virtually every state in the union had adopted compulsory school laws. If your child did not show up at these schools, you could be prosecuted as truant under these laws.

While most people were compliant and went along with the new government monopoly created by Mann, religious Catholics began looking for a way to give their students a religious education, rather than the “non-sectarian” version offered by the new government model. In 1925, in a U.S. Supreme Court case called, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, Catholics gained legal permission to opt-out of compulsory attendance laws and create their own parochial schools. In this landmark decision, the SCOTUS declared that a child is “no mere creature of the state,” and recognized that parents have a compelling interest in the education and upbringing of their own children.

In 1972, another pivotal case, Wisconsin v. Yoder, opened the door for the Amish to opt-out their children from government schools and form their own Amish schools. This enabled them to hire their own teachers and choose their own (religious) curriculum. In the 1970s, there was an explosion of Christian schools being started by Protestants.

Brave pastors in places like Kansas and Nebraska had begun using the classrooms in their church buildings not merely for religious instruction on Sunday, but to teach subjects like Math, Science and History on Monday through Friday as well. Not knowing they were in violation of Mann’s compulsory attendance laws, many of these pastors found themselves handcuffed and arrested while the doors of the church buildings were chained and padlocked. Thankfully, legal organizations like the Rutherford Institute and Christian Law Association began representing these church schools and winning in court. Publishing houses like ACE School of Tomorrow, Bob Jones Press and A BEKA started creating K-12 curriculum for the Christian school classroom and a new movement was underway.

On the heels of the Christian school movement came the modern-day homeschooling movement which began in 1983 when Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) was formed as well as about twenty-six state homeschooling organizations, many of whom created their own homeschooling conferences.

The primary reason all these efforts were made from 1925 through today was to create an alternative system of schooling and education that was not controlled and regulated by the state or federal government. The way the courts have always seen these scenarios is that they are totally separate from, and free from control by, the government because they are privately funded.

With Shekels Come Shackles

There has been a massive push on the part of many conservatives in recent years to create legislation that would enable tax-dollars to “follow the student.” There are many variations of this: ESAs, vouchers, virtual charter schools, and many other public school / private school / homeschool hybrids. The mentality behind this, on the part of some conservatives is, “We pay our taxes, but we aren’t getting any benefit from our tax dollars. We have to pay to educate everyone else’s children, and we should be entitled to get some of our tax money back for the education of our children, even if we choose to send them to a private school or homeschool them.”

This sounds good on paper, but many liberty-minded skeptics of this plan have warned that whatever the government funds it controls. There is no free lunch. If the government pays for the schooling, they can dictate policy regarding how it gets used. Many school choice advocates have derided such views as being mere conspiracy theories and even referred to such theories as being akin to Chicken Little falsely telling his friends “The sky is falling,” when everything was just fine.

Because most states have not yet adopted voucher systems or other such school choice options that fund private schools and homeschools (in fact many state constitutions strictly forbid it), we don’t have a lot of test cases to look at and prove definitively whether such predictions are accurate.

Alberta, Canada and Private School Vouchers

One case we have observed in recent years regarding this matter took place in Alberta, Canada in 2016 where the Canadian government ordered that all private schools in the province that accepted government funds would need to become LGBTQ-complaint (including curriculum compliance and transgender bathroom accommodations) in all their school policies. It turns out almost all private schools DID indeed receive such funds and were susceptible to this order. In Alberta, there is not a separate homeschool exemption (you either homeschool through a private school or directly through the government), so all homeschoolers become impacted by this mandate as well.

Cases like this eventually find their way to courts where judges decide on the constitutionality of such cases, but it demonstrates the intent of government officials to bring private schools (and any homeschooling families connected to them) under their control through the use of tax dollars.

New York’s Hasidic Schools

In New York, there is a system of schools called “yeshivas.” They are institutions for the religious training of Jewish youth. In America, these schools for elementary-age students are called cheder, yeshiva ketana for post bar-mitzvah students and yeshiva gedola for high school students. These schools focus on teach the Talmud (Jewish religious writings) and the Torah (Old Testament scriptures). The intent of these schools is to pass on their religious heritage to the next generation.

For many years these schools operated as a class of private schools separate from the government system. In recent years, however, huge amounts of state funds became available to them, and they readily accepted them. In fact, over the course of four years, these schools received over one billion dollars in government money. This has now opened an investigation of their entire system by the New York government. This situation is likely to go through the courts for some time and it will be interesting to see the outcome.

Standardized Testing

The first regulation that came attached to receiving government funds was a requirement for standardized testing. This did not go well for these schools. Because government schools operate on pre-set government standards, their schools teach to the test. This was one of the objections many had to Common Core standards. The government can create a set of standards that they alone use, encourage employers to reject any students who do not utilize those standards, and penalize students who do not comply with the monopoly.

Regulating the Curriculum

Because the scope and intent of these Hasidic schools are different than the government schools, their students failed to perform well on the standardized tests. This has led to a push from the state government to regulate the curriculum. As a homeschooling parent myself, we often choose to focus on content that is not taught in most government schools (things like Logic, Constitutional Law, the Christian basis for our founding documents, free market enterprise (rather than socialism), ethics, Bible, and many other topics ignored by the government system). My boys are not taught that they can be menstruating persons and my girls are not encouraged to become transgender. We have a completely different approach to education than students in government schools. Our methods and content are radically different. So, it would not surprise me that students taught with different materials, that have a different intent, would fail to do well on a standardized test created by a government school.

I’d love to see government school students tested on their knowledge of the topics taught in our homeschool. Most would completely fail. It is true that most teenagers who attend government schools can list off the top ten rappers and best-selling video games, but few could list ten American presidents or explain the uniqueness of our representative constitutional republic (in fact, most are wrongly taught in government schools that we live in a democracy).

So, which set of standards should be used? The one by the government, or the ones set by private religious schools and homeschools? Most people, even conservatives, would say we should all abide by government standards. I would suggest that is because most Americans have attended government schools and have been brainwashed into believing the government should control education rather than parents. This really is the pivotal issue. No one wants to see students who do not excel academically, but ultimately, that is really a subjective issue. If you believe in forced universal conformity to a set of beliefs and ideologies pushed by the government, you will believe that all students should be forced to learn the same things, in the same way, at the same time as all other children.

If you believe in liberty, you will allow for diversity and freedom for students to be taught in unique ways, even if you personally don’t approve of the methods or content used for those students. I personally, as a Christian, do not agree with Wiccan ideology. But I fully support the right of parents to teach those values to their children if that is their sincere belief. Do I want my tax dollars going to teach Wicca? No, I do not. And most people don’t want their tax dollars going to support Muslim instruction or Christian instruction if they don’t hold to those views. So, what is the solution? All private education should remain truly private. If you pay for your own child’s education out of your own pocket, you can teach whatever you like to your child (or pay a teacher to do so). I can disagree with you, but I’m not going to be a fascist and force you to teach my beliefs, values, and ideologies. I’m not like the government. I believe parents are the best educators for their own children and should decide what they learn and when.

Business leaders are tasked with developing and executing strategies that lead to desired results, namely, to maximize shareholder value in a manner that is honest, moral, and upright. Successful businesses measure their performance in myriad ways and use these results to implement changes, if needed, to achieve desired results. The ethos of the business world is defined by accurate measurement of results, high performance and achievement, continuous improvement, and maintaining a competitive edge. This high-performance orientation in American businesses has resulted in the U.S. being the largest, most successful economy in the world. Why is this not the case for the Illinois public school system?

The facts available to measure the performance of Illinois public schools reveal alarming and ongoing under-performance.  The 2021 academic proficiency results are in, and Illinois public schools have gone from bad to worse. More important, the Illinois public school system knows the proficiency scores across the state but does nothing to address the root causes of poor performance. This failure constitutes performance-arrogance–not performance-orientation–which defies logic. Only in the public school system can one find such poor results on the key metrics of performance without ever seeing meaningful efforts to improve.

Statewide average proficiency scores at the 11th grade level for 2021 are shown below. Proficiency, in this case, means that a student scored at either “proficient” or “above proficient” based on standardized test scores.

On a statewide average basis, Illinois public school students are not even at the 50th percentile of proficiency in the three subject areas tested. It seems statistically impossible to be this bad.

In the business world, if only 1 percent of a workforce were proficient at their job, that business would be wiped out by competitors who operated more effectively. Competition in business leads to high performance. Illinois’ public school system has few competitors and, therefore, little pressure to perform. As a result, it continues to underperform, producing students who are not academically ready to compete in the real world.

Unbelievably, the graduation rate for Illinois public schools in 2021 was 87 percent. A system that cannot come close to even average proficiency levels in three core subjects, graduates almost all those same students! In business we say that “facts are friendly and made-up facts are friendlier.”

Made-up facts give the appearance of performance when in fact they are misleading and should be ignored if improvement is desired. The graduation rate in Illinois public schools is a doozy of a made-up fact. The proficiency scores prove students are not performing at grade-level, so it is clear that the graduation rate is a result of “social-promotion,” where schools push students to the next level regardless of their mastery of material.

The days of admitting and addressing failure are gone in our public school system.

In addition to very poor academic performance, curricula are woke, Marxist, sexualized, and anti-American. The dumbing down of curricula continues as Common Core, the 1619 Project, inappropriate sexual education, and critical race theory (CRT) rule the day.

Grammar, classic literature, true American history, and civics are just some of the important topics removed from public schools today. Our schools have become leftist indoctrination centers where children are inculcated with a worldview antithetical to their parents’ worldview and a biblical worldview.

The Illinois public school system is broken and beyond repair. Any business that consistently demonstrated results as poor as Illinois public schools do would see a purging of leadership, management, and employees. Expecting improved results from a broken system is a fool’s game, but in Illinois it’s the only game in town. The status quo is maintained by entrenched left-wing politicians and unions scratching each other’s backs; bloated education bureaucracies taking huge amounts of money away from actual education; and shocking educator compensation/benefits schemes no one in business can afford or would tolerate for such poor performance.

Businesses seek people with the ability to collaborate, think critically, communicate effectively, and demonstrate creative problem-solving. Exceptional performers in business not only have a well-trained mind, but they also possess strong moral character, an ability to self-govern, and compassion. People like this more often emerge from home education programs and authentic biblically based private schools.

The public school system also produces some highly capable people who are able to overcome some of the huge systemic problems endemic to public schools–people who are able to thrive in a highly competitive global economy. But American businesses no longer count on the public education system to do its job. Instead, we now see businesses in the U.S. hiring people from other countries with excellent education systems to do jobs requiring high skill.

The future of America and the businesses so vital to our country are not going to be able to depend on an army of woke, Marxist-leaning, poorly educated people to achieve great ends. We need godly, well-educated, wise people who love liberty and this country. This is not what Illinois public schools are producing. Tragically, government schools don’t even strive to produce these kinds of students. It is time to exit Illinois public schools and pursue a growing number of vastly better options.

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.

Academics are fast becoming a thing of the past in public schools.

In their place are behavioral psychology and “social and emotional learning” (SEL) designed not to educate but to transform children’s core values, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.

Once upon a time, education meant learning how to read, write, do math, and think. It meant learning history and science as well.

That is barely happening now, as government data show.

Perhaps more importantly, once upon a time, school children all over the nation also learned the Ten Commandments—do not murder, do not lie, do not steal, and so on.

They learned the Golden Rule, too: Treat others as you want to be treated.

But those “good old days” are largely gone.

Today, government schools use advanced methods including SEL to instill in children a radical new and oftentimes contradictory “politically correct” value system: radical environmentalism, radical feminism, critical theory, Marxism, social justice, LGBTQ-plus, population control, socialism, hyper-racialism, class struggle, and more.

There’s also an occult connection to it all that would shock most secular observers—not to mention Christians, Muslims, Jews, and adherents of other traditional faiths.

SEL: The Mechanism for Transformation

In public schools across the United States today, from pre-K through 12th grade and beyond, children are being subjected to what is seemingly just the latest educational fad—silly, perhaps, but no more harmful than anything else—at least on the surface.

The education establishment refers to it as “social and emotional learning,” “social-emotional learning,” or just SEL for short. Generally they speak only in vague generalities using soothing language while dealing with the public.

And it’s true, some of what falls under the SEL umbrella is fairly harmless.

But then again, the food pellets that contain rat poison are fairly harmless, too—at least until the poison, which is just a trace component in the pellets, is digested by the intended victim.

Similarly, SEL all seems innocent enough at first glance.

“Social and emotional learning (SEL) is the process through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions,” explains the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), one of the leading outfits promoting SEL.

The way proponents explain it, SEL is simply aimed to help children do well emotionally and succeed.

What could be wrong with that?

Well, CASEL’s website, a review of SEL programs, and educators themselves reveal a great deal more about the agenda. And it’s not pretty.

Political Extremism and Radical Values

Behind the nice public facade lurk swarms of psychologists, psychiatrists, “educators,” and radical leftists hoping to exploit a century of psychological research for the purpose of molding children’s beliefs and “deconstructing” the values parents seek to instill.

“With a growing number of partners, CASEL is creating a more comprehensive approach to education, one that will lead to a more equitable, just, and productive society,” the organization’s website boasts under the headline “SEL as a Lever for Equity,” hitting multiple key buzzwords associated with the far-left “social justice” movement.

In other words, one of the purposes of SEL—as its leading promoters admit—is to reform society.

Among the webinars offered there are “SEL as a Lever for Equity and Social Justice,” and also a lecture on how to use SEL to “support antiracist practices.” Another webinar outlines how to use policy to “dismantle inequities.”

Again, the leftist buzzwords are everywhere. And that isn’t an accident.

Under SEL Competencies, CASEL drops multiple bombshells acknowledging the far-left globalist indoctrination taking place under the guise of “social” and “emotional” learning.

“SEL competencies can be leveraged to develop justice-oriented, global citizens, and nurture inclusive school and district communities,” it states, adding that the programs will involve getting children to “assess power dynamics” and confront “issues of race and class across different settings.”

The children are also expected to “develop an understanding of systemic or structural explanations for different treatment and outcomes.”

In short, they are expected to believe the highly controversial hypothesis that America is awash in “systemic” and “structural” racism, and that only massive government-led social engineering can fix it.

The children are also expected to accept and agree with the artificial divisions being fomented along “race” and “class” lines as part of the now-obvious effort to “divide and conquer” America.

Put simply, this is all blatantly Marxist “critical theory” rhetoric masquerading as “education.”

It’s extremely dangerous.

In Practice, Educators Shine the Light

A review by The Epoch Times of a wide range of SEL programs used across the United States found that all contain similar extremism, along with highly controversial teachings on sex, sexuality, gender, race, racism, class, economic liberty, family, marriage, and more.

Interviews with educators and a review of their writings on the subject were also very revealing.

In short, the real goals of SEL go far beyond “helping” children socially and emotionally. And it isn’t difficult to find that out.

In fact, in practice, SEL is frequently and explicitly used in public schools to instill certain attitudes and values in children that many parents, if not most, would find controversial at the very least.

For example, public-school teachers in Florida, to comply with SEL mandates, were ordered to show a number of videos to their middle school students.

These included propaganda videos promoting homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, “diversity,” “inclusion,” and more.

Regardless of one’s views on these subjects, countless parents—especially those from faith traditions including Christianity, Islam, or Judaism—would find the effort to obliterate traditional sexual morality and even biological sex in children’s minds to be objectionable.

Numerous other highly controversial political, religious, economic, and worldview positions are treated as “correct” by the forces behind SEL.

More than a few self-styled SEL educators are very open about how they intend to use SEL to brainwash children.

Open Circle Director Kamilah Drummond-Forrester, who supports “social and emotional development for children,” wrote openly at EdSurge.com about weaponizing SEL to indoctrinate children with her hyper-racialist views.

“Teaching [white children] to be aware of their racial identity would allow them to better understand the privileges that accompany that identity,” she wrote, adding that this would help them dismantle the “concept of ‘whiteness.’”

“Social and emotional learning (SEL) has an important role to play in that education.

“One of the core competencies we focus on, as a necessary foundation for the others, is self-awareness. That self-awareness must include race,” she continued, without acknowledging that many parents probably don’t want their children obsessing about “race” or being propagandized by a far-left activist posing as an educator.

In an article for EdTech Magazine on peddling SEL to students amid coronavirus-inspired online learning, writer Adam Stone touts “SEL-oriented teaching materials from the Zinn Education Project.”

Howard Zinn, of course, is the far-left pseudo-historian whose dishonest and politically motivated narratives were most recently debunked by historian Mary Grabar in the book “Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America.”

Zinn described himself as “something of a Marxist,” his biographer recounted.

According to EdTech, though, the “SEL-oriented” propaganda from Zinn is supposedly “aimed at nurturing empathy and compassion.”

In the real world, Marxism has everywhere and always nurtured hatred, death, slavery, torture, starvation, shortages, political repression, religious persecution, and other evils.

And yet under the guise of SEL programs and “nurturing empathy and compassion,” millions of children are having their minds poisoned by being force-fed actual Marxist propaganda and fake history.

And perhaps even more alarming, Stone urges educators to use surveillance tools that give “insight into students’ online behaviors—both inside and outside the virtual classroom—to enhance SEL.”

One of the recommended total surveillance tools offers educators “a holistic view of online activity across search engines, social media, email and web apps,” Stone said, adding that an artificial-intelligence engine would perform “real-time assessments” to “flag online behaviors that indicate emotional distress.”

As explained in an earlier segment of this series, Orwellian technology is used to monitor and track “progress” on adjusting children’s attitudes, too. That data is being compiled and saved forever under the label of “emotional intelligence.”

The Big Brother technology is also used to determine whether further “interventions” are needed to coerce the child into holding the desired attitudes, values, and beliefs about the issue in question.

And, as U.S. Department of Education documents make clear, it will also be used to predict “future behavior and interests” of the children.

Educators Speak Out

Of course, educators who have seen through the agenda reject SEL as a massive threat to America’s children.

One of those who spoke out against the SEL abuses taking place in her school, Jennifer McWilliams of Indiana, was even fired for being too vocal about it.

“The thing I find to be the most disturbing about social emotional learning is how well it disguises its true sinister motives,” she told The Epoch Times. “Parents do not understand that SEL psychologically manipulates children to question (and eventually rebuke) any Christian or conservative beliefs that may be taught in the home.”

While parents are led to believe that SEL is like teaching children The Golden Rule, “it is quite the opposite,” McWilliams said.

“Social emotional learning is rooted in progressive, social justice ideology that divides anyone who questions the radical groupthink agenda,” she said. “From my personal experience, not only do parents not understand it but teachers and administrators don’t either.”

SEL also represents the “brainwashing of our children,” McWilliams continued, noting that it trains children to “compromise on everything” with no consideration of what is taught in the home.

“These programs rely on a bombardment of propaganda, conditioning, and role playing to separate children from God and the nuclear family,” she said, saying SEL was the vehicle used to get children to accept as truth the narratives behind Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) and Black Lives Matter (BLM).

The popular SEL program used in McWilliams’s school, Leader in Me, was designed to “shift the culture of the school to influence children’s morals and values based on progressive social justice standards,” she said, adding that it became ubiquitous on campus.

When she began publicly speaking out about it on social media, she was fired for supposedly making the school look bad.

“Parents must speak up and take back control of the influence in their children’s lives. If not, the kids will pay with their freedom,” McWilliams said.

The Occult Origins of SEL

The story behind SEL is even more troubling.

According to a history of SEL by CASEL, the term “social and emotional” originated in a meeting at the Fetzer Institute, a shadowy New Age powerhouse created by wealthy New Age guru and late media baron John Fetzer.

One of the founders of the SEL movement, David Sluyter, served as president and CEO of the organization.

“Our mission is to help build the spiritual foundation for a loving world,” the group states on its website, adding that it is working toward a “transformative sacred story for humanity in the 21st century.”

According to Brian Wilson’s book “John E. Fetzer and the Quest for the New Age,” Fetzer was, among other things, a public and fervent devotee of Alice Bailey, the controversial occultist who founded the Lucifer Publishing Company (now known as the Lucis Trust).

So obsessed was Fetzer with Bailey that he and his people would regularly recite her “Great Invocation,” which she claimed was given to her by spiritual beings known as “ascended masters,” Wilson documents in his book.

The Fetzer Institute didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. CASEL initially suggested it would make somebody available for an interview, but didn’t follow up despite multiple requests.

More than a few other prominent names in education were similarly enamored with Bailey’s bizarre teachings from supposed spiritual entities.

United Nations World Core Curriculum author Robert Muller, for instance, who served as assistant secretary-general of the U.N., said in the teachers’ manual that his U.N.-backed global school curriculum was based on the teachings of Bailey and one of her “ascended masters.”

The values being taught to children under Fetzer-inspired SEL programs feature remarkable similarities to those taught by John Dewey, a man almost universally known among educators as the founding father of America’s “progressive” education system.

Dewey, who was inspired by the Soviet educational system, was a co-author and signer of the Humanist Manifesto, a religious document rejecting God and prescribing collectivism as the cure for society’s ills.

For at least 12 years—more if they go to college—American children are indoctrinated into the collectivist values of Dewey’s religion, which was essentially just warmed-over communism and atheism hiding behind a religious facade.

Interestingly, as early as 1898, Dewey himself expressed an understanding of the need to utilize psychology, a discipline then still in its infancy, if the plan to re-shape Americans through “education” was going to succeed.

Even more interesting, perhaps, is the fact that Bailey, citing her ascended masters, recognized the importance of Dewey’s educational schemes in achieving her goal of a one-world order with a global religion.

“Our problem is to attain the kind of overall synthesis that Marxism and neo-Scholasticism provide for their followers, but to get this by the freely chosen cooperative methods that Dewey advocated,” Bailey wrote in her book “Education in the New Age.”

Funding and People

Even a brief review of the funding and individuals behind SEL also reveals a great deal about the agenda.

On its website, CASEL lists, among other financiers, billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Gates, who has a friendly relationship with the Chinese Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping, put almost $300 million behind the Obama-backed Common Core standards, which formally nationalized and helped globalize America’s education system.

Before that, Gates signed a deal with UNESCO, the subject of part nine in this series, to work on globalizing the world’s education systems.

Also listed among the financiers of CASEL is Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which CASEL said “provides generous funding to CASEL to support school districts and their capacity to promote social and emotional learning.”

For some background, the recently deceased patriarch of the family, David Rockefeller, wrote in The New York Times in 1973 that “the social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.”

Rockefeller also boasted in his autobiography “Memoirs” of “conspiring” with a “secret cabal” of globalists, “against the best interests of the United States,” to build a “One World” political and economic system.

Aside from its financiers, CASEL’s leading super-stars also suggest something is amiss, to put it mildly.

Consider the involvement of radical Stanford educator Linda Darling-Hammond, a board member emeritus of CASEL and known associate of communist terrorist turned educator William Ayers.

Ayers’s Weather Underground group set off bombs across America in cooperation with communist Cuban intelligence. The FBI operative who infiltrated the group’s leadership, Larry Grathwohl, revealed that the organization’s leadership was plotting to exterminate millions of Americans in camps.

Interestingly, Darling-Hammond had an opportunity to test out her educational quackery unimpeded in the Stanford New Schools. The results are now in: In 2010, Stanford New Schools placed in the lowest-achieving 5 percent of schools in California, according to multiple reports.

More than a few other colleagues of Ayers are or were also involved with CASEL and SEL, with his University of Illinois at Chicago being central to the scheme. At least 3 of 13 members listed on CASEL’s website came from that university’s Department of Education and Psychology.

SEL was formally unveiled in the late 1990s. However, the real history behind it goes way back to Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist who studied how to effectively brainwash children to become good communists.

Vygotsky’s contributions in laying the foundations for SEL are widely acknowledged among practitioners and even in the academic literature (pdf).

Interestingly, Vygotsky was a close colleague of Ivan Pavlov, the Soviet psychologist famous for his behavioral-conditioning experiments on dogs.

Vygotsky had been inspired, in part, by American psychologist and educational researcher E.L. Thorndike, a student of close Dewey-ally and associate James McKeen Cattell of Columbia University.

In fact, Vygotsky wrote the foreword to the Russian translation of Thorndike’s “Principles of Learning Based Upon Psychology” published in Moscow in the mid-1920s.

Thorndike didn’t bother to conceal his views on education: Children should be educated like circus animals, and it should be so arranged that the child will be incapable of not doing what the trainer wants.

Vygotsky, too, had grandiose ideas about how Soviet “education” and “psychology” would be used to fundamentally transform the individual, and ultimately, mankind.

“It is education which should play the central role in the transformation of man this road of conscious social formation of new generations, the basic form to alter the historical human type,” Vygotsky wrote in 1930 in the journal of the All-Union Association of Workers in Science and Technics for the Furthering of the Socialist Edification in the USSR.

“New generations and new forms of their education represent the main route which history will follow whilst creating the new type of man,” he added.

SEL is simply the latest tool of the collectivist education establishment in its fiendish drive to create this “new type of man”—a collectivist man who will mindlessly submit to the tyranny of his overlords, without the intellectual ability to effectively resist.

Conclusion

Today, while most educators and parents have little understanding of what is going on, SEL has become ubiquitous in government schools across the nation.

National Education Association (NEA) Foundation Global Learning Fellow Wendy Turner, a second-grade teacher and self-styled “SEL warrior” quoted in an article on the NEA’s website, explained that SEL is now the top priority for schools.

“SEL is the foundation, the heartbeat of the classroom,” she said. “It’s about connecting everybody and making them feel safe and secure before you get to the academics.”

In a U.S. Department of Education report, a “review” of existing studies called for subjecting “the entire student body” to constant SEL programming “in order to reinforce social and emotional learning not only in the classroom but also on the playground, in the cafeteria, and in hallways.” Parents should also “reinforce” it at home.

But the facts are now clear: The SEL craze is an extreme threat to America’s youth—and to individual liberty.

The scheme isn’t about helping children at all. Instead, it’s about manipulating and conditioning America’s youth to hold the values and beliefs that the education establishment wants to instill.

Unfortunately, those values and beliefs are incompatible with individual liberty, Western civilization, the U.S. Constitution, the nuclear family, religious liberty, and other key values that underpin the United States.

Parents and policymakers must urgently protect the nation’s children from this dangerous threat.

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.

Perhaps nothing has done more to rouse Americans from their slumber on government education than the so-called Common Core standards, which were quietly imposed on the nation by the leftist Obama administration using tax-funded “bribe” money and arm-twisting. People were furious. Trump called the standards “a total disaster.” But the anger only scratched the surface of the problem.

Despite the public outrage over the dumbed-down standards and the centralization of education in the hands of federally funded elites, the toxic scheme is still firmly entrenched across the United States. Often under new names, the Common Core wreaked havoc on an already dismal education system created by collectivists. The devastation continues, too, as federally funded research on the program has revealed.

The outrage expressed by American voters about this has been intense. In 2014, as the battle was reaching its climax, the annual PDK/Gallup poll on attitudes toward public schools revealed that almost two-thirds of Americans opposed Common Core, while about one-third supported it. President Donald Trump ran on a platform of getting rid of it, seizing on that fury to propel him into the White House.

“Common Core, No Child Left Behind, and Race to the Top are all programs that take decisions away from parents and local school boards,” he said. “These programs allow the progressives in the Department of Education to indoctrinate, not educate, our kids. What they are doing does not fit the American model of governance. I am totally against these programs and the Department of Education. It’s a disaster. We cannot continue to fail our children—the very future of this nation.”

He was right, of course. And it was hardly a mystery why that message resonated with so many. Teachers, parents, and taxpayers were all outraged. Common Core had become politically toxic like nothing before in the history of U.S. public education—and for good reason.

First of all, in flagrant violation of the U.S. Constitution, the scheme centralizes control over education at the national level. Public surveys reveal that just a tiny fringe minority of Americans—about 15 percent—believe that the federal government ought to dictate what is taught in the classroom. The overwhelming majority believe that local, elected school boards should be in charge.

In part 10 of this series on education, the history behind the federal government’s gradual takeover of education was explored. Common Core, then, wasn’t the beginning of the federalization of education, and it almost certainly won’t be the end. In fact, it has often been described as just a “symptom” of the problem, rather than the problem itself.

A Mockery of Education

Another major issue with the standards is that Common Core makes a mockery of real education. To understand just how atrocious the standards are from an educational perspective, consider that the only two subject-matter experts on the Common Core Validation Committee both refused to sign off on the scheme.

Dr. Sandra Stotsky, professor of education emerita at the University of Arkansas, served as the only English-Language Arts expert on the committee. She vehemently rejected it. One of the biggest problems, she said, is that the Common Core “reduces both literary study and the opportunity for kids to develop critical thinking skills.”

Among other concerns, Stotsky blasted the replacement of great literature with Obama’s executive orders and EPA regulations as reading material. The standards “were written hastily by people who didn’t care how poorly written they were,” added the English expert, who is not opposed to national standards, per se, but has testified against Common Core in legislatures across America.

The absurd Common Core “math” standards, meanwhile, have been the subject of endless jokes. But unfortunately, the large-scale handicapping of America’s youth is no laughing matter. The only math expert on the Common Core Validation Committee, Dr. James Milgram of Stanford University, spoke out clearly and forcefully against the standards.

“The Core Mathematics Standards are written to reflect very low expectations,” he said. “They are as non-challenging as possible with extremely serious failings.” Indeed, there are “actual errors” in some of the math, he said, adding that the standards “are neither mathematically correct nor especially clear.”

Even some of the people who worked on writing the standards have spoken out. Dr. Louisa Moats, an internationally renowned reading expert who served as a contributor to the Common Core’s literacy standards, for instance, has been warning that children will not learn to read properly using the national scheme. “My warnings and protests were ignored at the time,” Moats said in an interview.

And yet, despite those warnings and many others from leading experts, the educational establishment—backed by endless supplies of federal tax money and billions from Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates—proceeded to impose it on America anyway. Even under the Trump administration, those same standards remain firmly in place.

Marketed as a way to make Americans “college and career ready,” the opposite would have been closer to reality. The ACT standardized test results released this year, for instance, revealed that college-bound students in the United States are doing worse than they have ever done in the ACT examination’s history.

And just as critics warned, American students—already far dumber and less educated than previous generations—have continued to suffer academically as Common Core accelerated the destruction of education. The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) revealed that more than two-thirds of U.S. eighth-graders are not even proficient in any core subject.

The federal government knows this well, too. In a federally funded study by the Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction and Learning (C-SAIL) released this year, researchers found results they didn’t expect. In short, the investigation concluded that Common Core produced “significant negative effects” in both English and math. “The magnitude of the negative effects [of Common Core] tend to increase over time,” added Mengli Song, one of the researchers involved.

Other experts have highlighted the indoctrination component, too. Tenured English professor Dr. Duke Pesta, director of FreedomProject Academy and one of the nation’s leading experts on Common Core, has delivered hundreds of speeches about the standards all over the United States that have been viewed millions of times online. And his assessment could hardly be worse.

He told The Epoch Times that one of the goals of Common Core’s creators was to indoctrinate American children into progressive ideology. “Common Core—now re-branded state by state to fool people into thinking it has been removed—is a key part of a broader movement to transform American education,” said Pesta, who hosts the popular education-focused Doctor Duke Show.

“Common Core is more than just weak standards: it is also bound up with the curriculum, pedagogy, teacher training, high-stakes standardized testing, and data gathering so typical of the progressive and statist push to override traditional knowledge-based education with left-wing and socialist ‘social justice’ education,” he said.

“Social justice education transforms public school classrooms into places of radical political advocacy that appropriates the prerogatives of parents and seeks to re-socialize students along progressive lines.”

In his talks, Pesta includes seemingly endless examples of this sort of dangerous indoctrination from Common Core-aligned textbooks and materials. Fake history. Fake science. Social-justice propaganda in math questions. Outrageous “reading” assignments. Virtually every semi-involved parent of a public-school child these days has seen it too.

Common Core Origins

The history of Common Core is deliberately opaque, too. To skirt federal statutes prohibiting direct U.S. government meddling in what is taught at schools, Common Core was officially created at the direction of the federally funded, Washington-based trade groups known as the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).

Then the Obama administration used “bribe” money, as critics put it, from the so-called stimulus package—all combined with threats and even waivers from the Bush-era “No Child Left Behind” scheme—to force states to accept it. Virtually every state caved. And even in the handful of states that resisted, Common Core has entered through the back door.

Common Core was crafted by “Achieve, Inc.,” an organization controlled by U.S. and global elites whose top leaders had openly advocated abolishing local school districts and nationalizing control of all education. This same group also created the “Next Generation Science Standards” that are so outrageous they don’t even include a reference to the scientific method.

But the road to nationalized and even globalized education didn’t begin with Common Core. In fact, before that was even dreamed up, the federal government used Goals 2000 under President Bill Clinton, followed by President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, to help centralize education in the United States.

Before those two schemes, President George H.W. Bush pushed “America 2000,” dubbed “a long-term national strategy” to accomplish “education goals” outlined by Bush. At one of the summits peddling the scheme, Shirley McCune, who worked on the effort with the U.S. Department of Education and the National Education Association (NEA), said it wasn’t just about education, but rather about the “total restructuring of the society.”

“We have moved into a new era,” she said, boasting about the ongoing “human resource development restructuring” taking place. One of the two main functions of schools, McCune said, is “to prepare students not for today’s society, but for a society that’s 20, 30, 40, 50 years down the road.”

“So we have to anticipate what the future is, and then move back and figure out what it is we need to do today,” she said, without explaining what sort of fortune-telling methods might be used. “That’s called anticipatory socialization, or the social-change function of schools.”

Most incredibly, perhaps, she revealed that “what the revolution has been in curriculum is that we no longer are teaching facts to children.” That is because it’s “almost impossible for us to guess the kinds of facts that they will need,” McCune said, without explaining how children would be able to think or have a frame of reference without knowing facts.

In an upcoming piece in this series, the nexus between Common Core and the ongoing globalization of education will be explored in much more depth. Interestingly, the U.N.’s “World Core Curriculum” is based on the teachings of Alice Bailey, the same occultist who inspired McCune, according to former U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Robert Muller, who wrote the U.N.’s global education curriculum.

Separately, another upcoming piece in this series will examine the explosion in data gathering and data-mining by government. It’s impossible to truly understand Common Core and what’s happening in education without understanding the massive amounts of personal information on children being vacuumed up by authorities and the crony companies that work with them.

For now, it’s important that Americans understand a few important facts: Common Core is still very much alive, it’s still handicapping children on an industrial scale; promoters hope to ensnare nongovernment-school children as well, and there are no plans to get rid of it on the horizon. All of that is a documented fact.

But it’s also crucial to realize that Common Core itself is not the problem. Instead, it’s a symptom of the problem that has been explored in the previous 10 parts of this series. It’s merely the next step forward in “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” as Obama put it.

Getting rid of Common Core would be great. But unfortunately, it will not fix the government education system that’s destroying the United States by destroying the nation’s children. That will require much more fundamental reforms that get to the root of the problem.

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.

It may seem counterintuitive, but massive tax-exempt foundations funded by some of America’s most prominent capitalists and industrialists helped foment what congressional investigators described as a collectivist “revolution” in the United States.

The goal was to “so alter life in the United States that it could be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.” Many tools were used, but the public education system was the most important and effective.

Congress Investigation

In the early 1950s, with growing concerns of subversion and communist penetration surrounding the enormous foundations, the U.S. Congress launched investigations. Investigators for Congress’s Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, sometimes referred to as the “Reece Committee,” after the chairman, found that there was good reason to be concerned.

According to the committee’s chief investigator, some of the foundations were weaponizing the American education system to enable what was described as “oligarchical collectivism,” or collectivist rule by an oligarchy. This was done by financing the promotion of “internationalism and moral relativism,” among other dangerous “isms,” investigators found.

The chief culprits included some of the largest and most important foundations in the United States. These included the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller foundations, and the Carnegie Endowment. According to congressional investigators, they were showering money on Columbia University, Harvard, Chicago University, and the University of California to advance their objectives through education. And it worked.

Norman Dodd, the director of research for Congress’s select committee, reported that the foundations had even orchestrated a “revolution” in the United States. The revolution “could not have occurred peacefully, or with the consent of the majority, unless education in the United States had been prepared in advance to endorse it,” Dodd told lawmakers in his sworn testimony.

The committee’s final report, released in late 1954, found that “some of the larger foundations have directly supported subversion in the true meaning of that term—namely, the process of undermining some of our vitally protective concepts and principles.” Those same entities have also “actively supported attacks upon our social and governmental system and financed the promotion of socialism and collectivist ideas,” investigators concluded.

Globalism and distorting history were also major priorities. In the final report, the committee noted that the foundations had “supported a conscious distortion of history.” As part of that, they also  “propagandized blindly for the United Nations as the hope for the world,” undermining American constitutional principles and liberty.

One of the experts who testified during the hearings was attorney Aaron Sargent, whose background included special investigations, especially into education and subversion. He told lawmakers that many of the big foundations were actively promoting socialism in the United States, in violation of the law and their charters, and that education was among their key tools.

“First of all, in approaching this problem of foundation influence, the subversive-teaching problem is a foundation problem,” he said, noting that the problem began in the 1890s. “This movement is closely related to Fabian socialism.” These subversives tried to infect America, but found it more difficult than in Britain due to Americanism, a written Constitution, and federal courts capable of protecting constitutional rights.

And so, the radicals “relied upon propaganda and brainwashing,” using the school system to attack patriotism, natural law, and even real history, said Sargent, who was asked to serve as counsel to the select committee but had to decline. “They sought to create a blackout of history by slanting and distorting historical facts,” he testified. “They introduced a new and revolutionary philosophy—one based on the teachings of John Dewey.”

On the educational front, he said, the story actually begins with the Rockefeller-funded Dewey Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, a topic that has already been explored in this series. From there, Dewey “expounded a principle which has become destructive of traditions and has created the difficulties and the confusion … that we find today.” As part of that, “Professor Dewey denied that there was any such thing as absolute truth,” a concept that was “revolutionary in practice.”

Foundations’ Role

In previous articles in this series on the history of public education, the Rockefeller dynasty’s role in funding collectivist “education reformer” John Dewey, widely considered to be the “father” of America’s public school system, was documented extensively. The Rockefeller philanthropies—especially the “General Education Board”—provided millions of dollars to advance Dewey’s quackery around the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th.

But that would be just the beginning. Rockefeller money also helped resettle the communists of the Frankfurt School at prestigious U.S. academic institutions, primarily Dewey’s Columbia University. From there, their subversive poison infected all of U.S. society, mostly through the public education system.

The Rockefeller dynasty was key in shaping education policy. In 1902, facing an avalanche of bad publicity over his ruthless business practices, oil baron John D. Rockefeller created the “General Education Board.” This ostensibly “philanthropic” venture was used to help fund and eventually control education in the United States.

Rockefeller put Frederick Gates in charge of his “charitable” schemes. And Gates was honest about the agenda. “In our dream we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand,” Gates wrote in “The Country School of To-morrow, Occasional Papers Number 1.”

“The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk.”

He was clear that the goal was not to raise up philosophers, scientists, authors, poets, musicians, artists, lawyers, doctors, preachers, or statesmen. There was already an “ample supply” of those, he said. Instead, the goal was to create docile and largely unthinking workers who could be used and controlled by the elites.

The ultimate goal of all this subversion from the mega-foundations, though, was even more horrifying.

Dodd Interview

In an interview with G. Edward Griffin in 1982, chief investigator Dodd dropped a bombshell that should have, and would have, shocked America to the core—at least if it had been more widely known. The goal of the foundations’ scheming in education and beyond was to crush individualism, promote collectivism, and prepare the way for the United States to be merged with the totalitarian Soviet Union.

While investigating, Dodd was contacted by Ford Foundation President Alan Gaither and asked to come to the foundation’s offices in New York. “On arrival, after a few amenities, Mr. Gaither said, ‘Mr. Dodd, we have asked you to come up here today because we thought that, possibly, off the record, you would tell us why the Congress is interested in the activities of foundations such as ourselves,’” Dodd recalled in the interview.

Dodd continued: “Before I could think of how I would reply to that statement, Mr. Gaither then went on voluntarily and stated: ‘Mr. Dodd, all of us who have a hand in the making of policies here have had experience … operating under directives … the substance of which is, that we shall use our grant-making power so to alter life in the United States that it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.’”

In short, the head of the Ford Foundation, one of the most influential in the world, told the chief congressional investigator of a committee investigating foundations that the foundations were helping to pave the way to a merger of the free world with the slave world. And Americans remained blissfully unaware, as the cancer crept in quietly through the school system over a period of generations.

According to Dodd and the congressional investigation, the Carnegie foundations decided after World War I that gaining control of education would be crucial. The leadership’s goal at that time, Dodd said, was to prevent “a reversion of life in the United States to what it was prior to 1914.” But the task was so enormous that it would require help. And so, while the Carnegie Endowment would focus on international education matters, the Rockefeller foundations were put in charge of domestic initiatives, according to documents uncovered by investigators in the Carnegie Endowment’s archives.

“The effect was to orient our educational system away from support of the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence, and implemented in the Constitution, and educate them over to the idea that the task now was, as a result of the orientation of education, away from these briefly stated principles and self-evident truths,” Dodd said in the interview.

“What we had uncovered was the determination of these large endowed foundations, through their trustees, to actually get control over the content of American education.”

Investigations also found that since at least the 1930s, Moscow decided to infiltrate educational and large foundations in the United States. Following their orders from the Soviet Union, American communists even created a commission focused on infiltrating and taking over foundations.

One of the major successes identified by the congressional investigators was Soviet agent Alger Hiss, who became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace after playing a starring role in creating the United Nations. He was later exposed as a spy for Joseph Stalin’s mass-murdering regime.

Current State

This work of the major foundations continues to this day. Consider, for example, Microsoft founder Bill Gates pouring billions of dollars into “education reform” and into supporting the collectivist agenda of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In fact, Gates’s foundation was, aside from U.S. taxpayers, the single largest financier of Common Core, the universally reviled national (and internationally aligned) “standards” imposed on the United States by the Obama administration. More on that in a future piece of this education series.

The Rockefeller foundations also continue to be deeply involved in “education.” And key Rockefeller bigwigs have become increasingly open about their real agenda. In his autobiography, for instance, the late dynasty patriarch David Rockefeller dropped a bombshell.

“Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure–one world, if you will,” he wrote on page 405. “If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

When examining these facts, it seems perplexing that the wealth of some of America’s most important super-capitalists would be put to use advancing collectivism, subversion, and even socialism. And yet, it was hardly a new phenomenon. In his important book “Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution,” Stanford historian Anthony Sutton meticulously documented the role of major bankers and financiers from New York City in financing the communist enslavement of the Russian people.

It is time for Americans to completely rethink education or be destroyed. That rethink must involve discarding all of the quackery and subversive influences brought about by collectivists such as Dewey, and the out-of-control foundations that funded and helped them. The future of United States and liberty literally depend on sorting out this mess.

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.

Widespread illiteracy and the ignorance it produces represent an existential threat to the United States today. But it wasn’t always this way.

And it can be fixed.

Fortunately, neither the cause of this crisis nor the solution to it is a mystery—at least to anyone who has studied the issue.

To blame for this dangerous phenomenon are socialist “educators” going back to the mid-1800s. In particular, it was their quack methodologies ostensibly aimed at “teaching reading” to children.

The answer to the illiteracy crisis is simple, though: America must go back to what worked for thousands of years and continues to work today: systematic phonics instruction.

Americans were almost certainly the most literate people on the planet in the 1700s and 1800s.

In fact, the earliest settlers in Massachusetts, the Puritans, were so passionate about reading that in the 1640s, they passed the “Old Deluder Satan Act” mandating that everyone learn to read. The thinking was that, without knowledge of the Bible, the devil would be more easily able to deceive their communities. And so, it was understood that every town must strive for universal literacy.

This passion for literacy translated into what would become the most literate society that mankind had ever produced up to that time.

According to University of Montana scholar Kenneth Lockridge’s study, “Literacy in Colonial New England,” 90 percent were literate by 1800, with numbers approaching 100 percent in cities such as Boston.

Even among women, that was true. According to estimates by Joel Perlmann of Bard College and Dennis Shirley of Boston College, virtually all women born in the early 1800s were literate.

At the time, Americans realized that as well. In his groundbreaking 1812 study “National Education in the United States of America,” Du Pont de Nemours estimated that even among young people, not more than “four in a thousand are unable to write legibly—even neatly.”

And in 1800, the Boston Review reported that no other nation in the world had a larger percentage of its population with at least basic literacy skills and an understanding of the “rudiments of science.”

Considering documents such as the Federalist Papers, which were addressed to the common American man, it’s also clear that the level of literacy by the late 1700s was extraordinary—especially by today’s standards.

Remarkably, this was all accomplished with virtually no government involvement in education at all. In fact, most children learned to read from their families using simple but highly effective resources such as Noah Webster’s “Blue Back Speller” and the “New England Primer.” These two tools taught reading using phonics while providing valuable moral lessons.

Literacy Crisis

By the middle of the 20th century, everything changed.

A crisis in literacy was brewing that’s without precedent in the history of the world. Literacy rates began plummeting, particularly after World War II. And today, the government’s own data shows evidence of a catastrophic decline in reading.

In 1993, the U.S. government conducted the most comprehensive literacy study ever performed up to that time. And the results were shocking.

On Sept. 9 of that year, citing the study, the Boston Globe reported that “nearly half of Americans read and write so poorly that it is difficult for them to hold a decent job.”

Many other analysts concluded, based on the findings, that almost half of the nation was either illiterate or at least very close to functional illiteracy. In short, the United States had been handicapped.

Another federal study performed a decade later found similar results.

The numbers are even worse in certain areas, and among America’s youth.

According to the federal government’s most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, only about one-third of high school seniors are proficient in reading.

And in Washington, D.C., a recent State Education Agency report revealed that two-thirds of the adult population is functionally literate, falling to 50 percent in some wards. In response, top D.C. officials took a trip to communist Cuba to see how that murderous regime “educates” children.

Of course, there had been a sneak preview of what is now being observed in Boston under then-Massachusetts Secretary of Education Horace Mann—a collectivist Utopian who led the government takeover of schooling in his state and beyond—in the mid-1800s.

But the quackery there had been quickly and ably exposed by experienced and professional educators, limiting the damage.

Quackery Pushed by Collectivists

The root of the problem stems from the method used to teach reading. The writing system in English is based upon phonetic characters, with each letter representing one or more audible sounds. For instance, the letter “b” makes a “buh” sound, while a “p” makes a “puh” sound.

So, from the time this writing system was developed thousands of years ago by the Phoenicians, teaching an individual how to read has involved giving the student the knowledge to sound out letters, blend them together, and then decode words.

A great Christian minister and educator, Rev. Thomas Gallaudet of Connecticut, after learning from a French minister in Paris, pioneered a new system. It would come to be known variously as the “whole-word” method, the “look-say” method, or the “sight-word” method. It seems clear that Gallaudet had nothing but the best of intentions, even if his ideas ended up producing so many problems.

In his capacity as director of the American Asylum at Hartford for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb from 1817 to 1830, Gallaudet worked to refine methods to teach reading to children who were deaf and mute. Because deaf children are incapable of hearing sounds, obviously, teaching them to associate certain sounds with certain symbols—letters in this case—wasn’t feasible.

So instead, he taught the children to look at whole words as ideographs or pictographs, similar to the Chinese writing system, as if the words themselves were the symbol, rather than a group of symbols each one representing a sound. Instead of teaching a child that the word “hat” includes three symbols, each one representing a specific sound, Gallaudet would show them the entire word, along with a drawing of a hat, encouraging children to memorize the whole word and its meaning.

For deaf children, this was an enormous leap forward. But Gallaudet and others theorized, incorrectly, that this same method might help non-deaf children. Gallaudet even created a reading primer based on these ideas, and began promoting his methods in educational circles and publications.

Just a few short months after being selected to serve as the commonwealth’s first Secretary of Education in 1837, Mann, a collectivist who seemed always ready to embrace quackery, would oversee the introduction of this new system into the government primary schools of Boston.

It was a disaster.

Basically, children suddenly struggled to learn how to read, with many of them displaying symptoms that today would be diagnosed as “dyslexia.”

Within a few years, the schoolmasters of Boston joined forces to expose and repudiate the quackery before it did more damage. In a stinging paper, more than 30 school chiefs wrote that “such a change, as that proposed by Mr. Mann and others, is neither called for, nor sustained by sound reasoning.”

The critical comments, made in the “Remarks on the Seventh Annual Report of the Hon. Horace Mann,” pointed out that many of the arguments made in support of the whole-word method were “fallacious” and “based upon false premises.” Others were irrelevant.

And the results were clear, too: “There has been a great deterioration during the trial of the new system.”

That was the end of that—at least for a while.

Resurrecting the Quackery

Incredibly, some 50 years after being exposed as harmful, the whole-word method would be resurrected by “education reformer” John Dewey, a hardcore socialist who is almost universally recognized as the founding father of America’s “progressive” public education system.

While Mann may have genuinely believed that the whole-word method would work, it appears very likely that Dewey suffered under no such delusions. For one, the method had been conclusively debunked in the 1840s under Mann. In addition, Dewey used the method on children in his “experimental” school in Chicago, with results similar to those obtained in Boston generations earlier: children unable to read properly.

Dewey also left smoking-gun evidence of his desire to intentionally destroy the high literacy rates among children that existed throughout America at that time. In his controversial 1898 essay “The Primacy Education Fetich [sic],” he openly argued that schools should de-emphasize the teaching of reading, which he believed led to individualism.

In fact, he said children in the early grades were better off not receiving much instruction at all in the so-called “3 Rs”; reading, writing, and arithmetic. Instead, Dewey, an ardent admirer of the Soviet Union, thought young children mostly needed to be properly socialized to become functional members of the collective.

He knew his ideas would not go over well with parents, teachers, or taxpayers of the era.

“Change must come gradually,” Dewey wrote in that essay. “To force it unduly would compromise its final success by favoring a violent reaction.”

So instead, he went to the Rockefeller dynasty and the elites.

Years later, Dewey disciples—a motley collection of socialists and racist eugenicists—would create “reading” primers based on the whole-word quackery. William Gray at the University of Chicago, where Dewey led the education faculty for years, would produce the “Dick and Jane” series. Meanwhile, Arthur Gates at Columbia University’s Teachers College, where Dewey went after Chicago, would produce the Macmillan Readers.

It took a while for them to catch on in America. But after World War II, with plenty of taxpayer cash to burn, school districts across the United States, many being influenced by Dewey and his minions, started buying up the books and imposing the whole-word method on millions of innocent students.

Literacy rates promptly collapsed.

By the 1950s, the crisis was so serious that the public was starting to ask questions. And in 1955, Rudolf Flesch published the explosive book, “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” blowing the lid off the quackery.

“The teaching of reading—all over the United States, in all the schools, in all the textbooks—is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense,” he explained, lambasting the whole-word method and the literacy crisis it produced.

The ensuing scandal caused many schools to restore traditional phonics instruction. But the Utopian advocates of reading quackery did not go away.

Less than 20 years after Flesch exposed them, legendary educator and reading expert Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld would expose them again in “The New Illiterates.” In the book, he systematically analyzed the most common reading primers then in use across the United States, highlighting the problems and showing the enormous damage being done to children.

Again, scandal ensued. And again, quackery advocates rebranded their schemes as “whole language” and offered minor alterations, then went right on handicapping American children by the millions.

Incredibly, some especially unhinged “educators” argued that teaching children to read properly was all part of a vast “right-wing” conspiracy.

Now, brain scans performed with new technology have actually shown the damage being done to the physical brains of children victimized by the quackery. Dr. Stanislas Dehaene, director of the Cognitive Neuro-Imaging Unit at Saclay in France, demonstrated the harm and explained that reading must be taught by systematically teaching children the correspondence between sounds and letters.

The education establishment pretended not to notice. And the absurdity continues.

Today, key elements of the “whole-word” method still haunt public schools across the United States, often under new terminology such as “balanced literacy” and “guided reading.” Under the national “Common Core” education standards imposed on the United States by former President Barack Obama, kindergarten children are even required to memorize “sight words.” This causes a whole-word reflex to develop that can produce lifelong reading disabilities, despite having a bit of phonics mixed in.

Perhaps more incredibly, even though the methods have been totally discredited since the 1840s, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) claims children all over the world should still learn a “sight vocabulary.”

Consider: People who can’t read can’t readily educate themselves. They are much easier to control and manipulate, too. And perhaps that is the point.

With Mann, it’s entirely possible that this was all an innocent mistake. Certainly, that’s true of most teachers in the United States today as well who haven’t been trained to teach reading properly.

But the fact that this giant “mistake” continues to be supported by the education establishment to this day—and that it always seems to be socialists, communists, and collectivists pushing it—suggests that there is a much more nefarious agenda at work.

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.

All those Anti-Trump Christians who either did not vote for the oft-unpleasant Trump or, worse, voted for befuddled Biden and his puppeteers now bear some culpability for ceding more control to those whose lust for power far exceeds their compassion for the weak or love of freedom. After leftists’ Russian-collusion disinformation ruse failed, they floundered about until the Chinese Communists came to their rescue. An ocean of blood has been and will be spilled at the hands of leftists, and all who played a part in facilitating their acquisition of more power bear a measure of guilt.

When the escaped Wuhan virus began its deadly circumnavigation of the world, the left mocked Trump for saying hydroxychloroquine was effective, children should be in school, and businesses opened. A nanosecond after Chinese Communist colluder, profiteer, and taradiddler (pun intended) Biden was elected via the mail-in voting allegedly impervious to fraud and the machinations of Big Tech, leftists said hydroxychloroquine was effective, children should be in school, and businesses should open. Can’t have all that Trump-caused misery associated with leftism (nudge nudge wink wink. Ssshhh! Don’t mention the suicides of children.)

In the midst of the Wuhan crisis, the rage of the fatherless and improperly tutored made our streets and businesses abominable infernos unfit for civilized humans for months. The left cheered and paid for the criminals’ freedom, thereby normalizing lawlessness. When, in a far less destructive or deadly riot, the Capitol was besieged by a crowd imitating the lawlessness they saw celebrated for months, the left marshalled a military response that would make Stalin, Chairman Mao, Kim Jung Un, and Xi Jinping proud.

Throughout “campaign” season, the daft old man shuffling between his cellar and the nearest Dairy Queen was left unmolested by the thoroughly corrupt press who would have made mincemeat out of any Republican candidate who so resembles Grampa Simpson. No hard questions about Biden’s plans for America, no inquisitorial questions about his crime syndicate family, no questions at all about his questionable mental agility.

Over the past five years, our thoroughly corrupt press has exposed exactly how committed to inclusivity they are.  The all-inclusive leftist press that licks the sneakers of Kamala Harris because she’s the first semi-black, female (whatever that is) vice president, and continues to drool over the sartorial style of Michelle Obama, shunned Melania Trump, the most beautiful First Lady in America’s history, who is also an immigrant and polyglot with a fashion sense surpassing Michelle Obama’s. The press revealed that leftist inclusivity and love of diversity looks remarkably like mean-spirited, petty, non-inclusive, middle-school-girl bullying.

And now the bloodletting and oppression are really gaining steam—thanks in no small part to anti-Trump Christians.

In a flurry of Executive Orders so furious that even the New York Times said, slow down, old man, Biden has increased funding for Calculated Carnage Planned Parenthood, and released U.S. taxpayer money to fund human slaughter all around the world. Yes, leftists seek the destruction of babies of color everywhere, and they get special pleasure from making you, Americans, fund it.

But remember, anti-Trump Christians insisted self-righteously that ensuring Trump’s loss would enhance the image of Christianity among the God-hating. Sure, sure, Trump’s administration did do more to protect the unborn than any administration since 1973, but getting Biden elected would do far more to make God-hating, baby-killing leftists think Christians aren’t so bad after all—or so anti-Trumpers insist. Never mind, that Jesus told his followers the world would hate them because it hated him first. Anti-Trump tub-thumpers know better.

In the name of unity, creepy Biden wants to unify boys and girls in college dorm room assignments. He wants to unify naked boys and girls in locker rooms. He wants young men with all their male “equipment” intact to be set loose in the showers and barracks of young women who have volunteered to serve our country. And what Biden wants, Biden gets with the stroke of a pen.

An Army training manual created in the wake of Obama’s efforts to unify males and females in military barracks and showers includes this:

[F]ollowing her [sic]transition from male to female (which did not include sex reassignment surgery) …  a transgender Soldier begins using female barracks, bathroom and shower facilities. Because she [sic]did not undergo a surgical change, the Soldier still has male genitalia. [Female] Soldiers must accept living and working conditions that are often austere, primitive, and characterized by little or no privacy.

I guess we should be thankful that leftists still recognize that forcing young women to shower in the presence of male peers is “primitive.”

The Trump administration began unraveling Obama’s obscene, science-denying offenses against women. Biden is reinstating them. Maybe anti-Trumpers can explain how their complicity in the sexual integration of the private spaces of girls and women enhances their Christian witness.

Brassy AOC and brittle Nancy Pelosi have accused Congressional colleagues of attempted murder without being censured. AOC has urged the creation of a blacklist to track Trump-supporters and keep them unemployed. Other Democrats have urged the creation of another spy agency to be used specifically for targeting “domestic terrorists.” Sounds benign, maybe even good, until you remember that Big Brother’s Ministry of Truthiness redefines everything. Division is unity, men are women, war is peace, and Trump voters are domestic terrorists.

Months of lawless riots that included direct brutal attacks on police officers and setting fire to federal buildings, state property, and private businesses are “mostly peaceful protests.” A 90-minute lawless siege on the Capitol during which there were no direct attacks on law enforcement is a seditious insurrection that necessitates an overwhelming show of military force and a lethal razor-enhanced border wall around the area where the elite sequester themselves from the deplorable rabble they rule serve.

Biden has committed to passing the “Equality Act,” which explicitly subordinates religious free exercise protections to sexual perversion. Or perhaps it won’t actually be Biden who will kill the First Amendment. Perhaps it will be an unseen Kamala Harris who in the dark of night like the unsexed Lady Macbeth will drive a knife into the heart of American freedom.

Unifier-in-Chief Biden is restoring federal funding for the dissemination of Critical Race Theory through government agencies. And Democrats under a Biden administration are gearing up with the help of gullible Republicans to usurp local control of education through a tricksy Common Core-type maneuver. Stanley Kurtz warns,

Remember, the Obama-Biden administration imposed Common Core on the country via a Rube Goldberg mechanism designed to circumvent the prohibition on federal curriculum controls. That mechanism was powered by money tucked away in the stimulus package and passed without debate. Obama hadn’t run on Common Core, and there was no national consensus in favor of it. Instead this ill-conceived experiment was imposed by stealth with the help of massive funding from the Gates Foundation, various businesses, and an education bureaucracy decidedly at odds with parents and voters.

There is every indication that this process is about to repeat itself under a Biden administration—this time in the culturally critical area of history and civics standards. The effort to create a civics version of the Common Core will be made by the “bipartisan education reform movement.”

Kurtz draws attention to a proposed “bipartisan” bill—sponsored by a Democrat and co-sponsored by 10 Democrats and one lone Republican, Tom Cole from Oklahoma—that has received too little attention:

Comprehensive proposals to create de facto national history and civics standards on the model of Common Core are in the works as well, and likely to be adopted by a Biden administration.

The text of the bill sounds innocuous enough until you remember who’s in charge of the organizations that will be creating curricula that will enable schools to get their mitts on federal dollars. What the government under a Biden administration will fund will not be curricula that conservatives like.

Totalitarian control requires this kind of indoctrination. Haven’t Americans learned anything from history? Oh, wait … Never mind.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/audio_What-Is-Becoming-of-America.mp3

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Written by Dr. Sean M. Brooks

The 1776 Commission and the executive order signed by the president of the United States are the last things being discussed right now, and understandably so.  However, the 1776 Commission is more than what meets the eye.  The executive order is committed to restoring an education about the founding of our nation to the frontline of the information war: our nation’s schools.

The 1776 Commission is dedicated to increasing an accurate teaching and an emphasis on this teaching in America’s K–12 schools and throughout formal instruction.  The executive order also emphasis this education regarding the current statues and historical landmarks that currently exist, thereby providing protection of these monuments and statues that have previously been attacked and vandalized or taken down by radicals and politicians throughout America.  This has been a historic tactic by Marxists to remove America’s history in an effort to destroy the truth, while replacing this history with their own propagandized interpretation.

The 1776 Commission is also a full rebuke and a knockout punch to The 1619 Project and its mission to rewrite America’s history based on the lie that America is founded on racism, bigotry, and discrimination.  A simple reading of Thomas Jefferson’s own writings would clearly show that he, too, was interested in abolishing slavery, even as a young congressman in Virginia before the revolution.  In fact, it was placed to a vote because of his hard work on this issue.  The vote failed due to countless congressmen in Virginia being beholden to England.  It’s this accurate history that the 1619 Project sought to ignore while replacing it with their own false interpretation.  The 1776 Commission takes the 1619 Project head on, while also emphasizing the need to fully remove Common Core, which has been known to be the vector of such indoctrination and propaganda.

The Commission is to be made up of approximately no more that 20 people, including members of the president’s own Cabinet and non-administrative civilian members who are content experts and experts in the field of education.  These individuals are given two years to organize and report growth in the areas of education and exposure to America’s youths and protection of landmarks and state parks, veterans’ memorials, and other historic sites that are critical to the education of our youth to instill an accurate understanding of our nation’s history and the founding of America.  The 1776 Commission is also committed to grant funding for groups and educational institutions who show an increased interest in education America’s youths about the founding of American, its founders, its history, and the Revolutionary War and those who fought for our independence and allow us to be free.

The Commission has two years to produce results, and those results and accomplishments are to be reported by the secretary of education.  The Commission can continue beyond two years, based on a presidential order or recommendation.  However, this is where the bullet hits the bone.  If Common Core digs in, as it has in the past, by simply moving into and hiding within corporatized curricula that are commonly sold to and accepted by K–12 school districts, the propaganda and indoctrination will not go away.  The Commission cannot recommend that those who are in positions of influence (i.e., administrators, elementary teachers, history teachers, civics teachers, etc.) be replaced, as these decisions reside with the school districts themselves.

Effective educators have already been teaching an accurate history of our nation’s founding and the Revolutionary War, along with our founders.  So the 1776 Commission cannot remove destructive ideologies that exist within individuals who are hell-bent on indoctrinating America’s youths.  What the 1776 Commission does do, however, is stop groups and organizations such as the 1619 Project from entering government-funded K–12 schools, along with government-funded higher education institutions.  This is a good thing.  In fact, those institutions that allow these groups to enter and plant their seeds of propaganda will most likely be defunded by the federal government, but it will take a vigilant citizenry to pay attention and report any occurrences of infiltration.

The final part, and perhaps a more hidden positive aspect of the 1776 Commission and the signed executive order, is that it may give educators the right to refuse any professional development that seeks to disparage our nation’s history or indoctrinate or humiliate educators based on their race or ethnicity.  If educators are knowledgeable of these actions and movements in a positive direction, they could easily reference the 1776 Commission and the executive order as a possible defense as to why they are filing a complaint regarding unprofessional or insulting training that seeks to disparage their heritage or race.  However, this too is a slippery slope, and it’s up to the discretion of the individual educator to make such a decision because the executive order clearly states that the removal of an educator is up to the local district, not the federal government.

The 1776 Commission is a step in the right direction.  It stops radical Marxist organizations from infiltrating our schools in an organized fashion.  It incentivizes educators and K–12 school districts to teaching and seeking out a further education for America’s youths regarding our nation’s founding and those who fought for and worked toward our nation’s independence.  The 1776 Commission also seeks to halt the removal of historic sites, monuments, and statues that advance an accurate history of our nation’s founding and our nations conflicts, while preventing their removal or destruction, as these sites and monuments are deemed national educational sites to be referenced and learned from.

The 1776 Commission could stem the tide of the infiltration of Marxist ideologies that seek to disparage our nation’s founding and those who fought and died for our freedom.  Time will tell.

Dr. Sean M. Brooks is the author of six books, and the host of American Education FM Podcast. This article was originally published at Townhall.com.

Written by Michelle Thomas

If you remember the late, great financial teacher Larry Burkett, your life is likely the better for it. I worked with Larry for several years in his Gainesville, Georgia headquarters of Christian Financial Concepts (and continued to work for the organization from home for many years after my children started coming along). In my mind, he ranks right up there with some of our Founding Fathers in his wisdom, love for this country, and amazing foresight in economic and political issues. He even left this world on the same patriotic day as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe—on Independence Day, 2003, at the young age of 63. His teachings, which were straight from Scripture, changed my life and bent the twig for my children and hopefully future generations.

The department in which I worked was tasked with answering constituents’ financial questions, so I had to be quite the student of Larry Burkett. In preparation for answering a certain e-mail, I had the opportunity to skim through the pages of Larry’s 1991 best seller, The Coming Economic Earthquake. The book was updated in 1994 to reflect the happenings of the Clinton era, and it’s amazing how accurate Larry was in his foresight of what was coming for our economy and for the nation, in general. He touched on many topics in the book, but some jumped out at me as especially relevant for today.

In light of the battles over the Common Core agenda that was shoved down the nation’s collective throat, Larry said, “Check out the curriculum being taught in your local schools and see if it is anti-free-market. It would shock most Americans to realize that a great deal of the economic information being fed their children in elementary schools, high schools, and especially state universities is blatantly socialistic, if not openly communistic.”

He went on,

The only place that communism still seems to flourish is in the American classroom. It is often labeled ‘socialism’ but, in reality, it is the same doctrine that was taught in the Soviet Union prior to the communism collapse: Government is the protector of the downtrodden; capitalism is inherently evil; people deserve decent incomes, regardless of their desire to work or not; and last, the government is a better purveyor of the nation’s resources than the wage earners are.

Sound familiar? The very issues that Larry saw as major problems 25 years ago have escalated at an alarming rate.

The government takeover of health care that was attempted during the Clinton administration was delayed only a few years until Obama came into power and had the political backing to force it onto the nation. Larry had great wisdom and forethought in this matter: “Let me say that if the federal government is allowed to take control of health care, which represents approximately 14 percent of our total economy, it will be the stake in the heart of our free enterprise system. The government cannot solve our health care problems—it is the problem!”

Larry continued,

Only twelve cents of every government dollar spent on health care now actually reaches a patient. It is a grossly inefficient system. There are two old sayings in Washington that describe what will happen to health care as soon as the political system gains control of that area too: ‘A camel is a horse designed by a government committee,’ and ‘An elephant is a mouse designed to government specifications.’

Wow. If only we had heeded his warning, maybe we wouldn’t be facing the disastrous effects of the government hijacking of our health care system.

Regarding abortion coverage, Larry said, “I rather suspect that, if abortion is accepted as a ‘necessary benefit,’ there would be heavy pressure put on those who oppose abortion to participate or be subjected to financial penalties.” Isn’t this exactly what we’re seeing today? Ministries and faith-based companies (Hobby Lobby and James Dobson’s Family Talk are some of the most recognizable) have been forced to sue the federal government over the abortion mandate in Obamacare. Larry added,

Christians will have to take a stand on this issue, regardless of the consequences. We should have acted with one voice when the Supreme Court decided that somehow an unborn human has no rights. Once abortion is funded through a national health care plan, the number of abortions will likely escalate. God’s people must wake up to this offense now! There is no nation that will survive God’s wrath for long, if and when it decides to kill its young (and old).

When writing The Coming Economic Earthquake, Larry reported that at the current rate of growth, the national debt would swell to $8.7 trillion by the year 2004. Even Larry couldn’t anticipate the rate of reckless spending by the most liberal president in the history of our nation–Barack Obama. Thanks to democrats and republicans alike, I believe Larry would be utterly shocked to know that the national debt is now nearly three times his predicted 2004 level, and it is higher than the Gross Domestic Product of our entire nation.

Writing about the forecasted 2004 national debt of $8.7 trillion, Larry said,

There has never been anything approaching this level of debt funding in the history of mankind in so short a period of time, even on a percentage basis. The effects of this will be felt throughout the U.S. and ultimately the world’s economies…..Either the government will take the necessary steps to control the budget and reduce the deficits drastically, or they will resort to monetizing the debt by printing massive amounts of new currency.

We know which option our leaders chose.

Larry went on to say that,

Logic and common sense seem to play small parts in our present society….The answer [to these and all other issues] is found in God’s Word. All of these things are but symptoms. The real problem is that we have removed God from the decision-making process in America today. When any nation does this, evil will prosper. This is not the fault of the politicians; they are responding to the wishes of the most vocal groups. It is that the unprincipled people around us seem to be more committed to their agenda than the true ‘moral majority’ is to theirs.

Larry urged us to get involved in the political process and the issues of the day so that we could make a difference for the better. I would add that if we want to leave this great nation intact for our children and grandchildren, we have no choice but to hold our leaders accountable for their foolish decisions and force them to make changes that will lead us back to the founding principles that made us exceptional.

Some wise thoughts that Larry left us:

The one certainty is that God is still in control no matter what happens….However, knowing that God is in control does not remove our responsibility to do everything possible to change what is happening or to prepare ourselves for some difficult times. As Proverbs 16:9 says, ‘The mind of man plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.’

We are to witness to those around us that God is sufficient in all things….God desires followers who will serve Him regardless of the costs. Adversity seems to strengthen us, whereas prosperity tends to weaken us. As the Prophet said in Proverbs 30:8-9, ‘Keep deception and lies far from me, give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is my portion, lest I be full and deny Thee and say, “Who is the Lord?” or lest I be in want and steal, and profane the name of my God.’

Larry Burkett left this earth entirely too soon. We need his wisdom now more than ever.

Michelle Thomas is a Christ follower, wife to Trevor Thomas, and homeschooling mom of four. Her books include a devotional for moms, Lord, I Need You, a book about her grief journey, Through Deep Waters, and a chronicle of their financial journey, Debt-Free Living in a Debt-Filled World. Her website is KingdomCrossing.com, and her email is michelle@kingdomcrossing.com.

This article was originally published at TrevorGrantThomas.com.

Written by Jane Robbins and Emmett McGroarty

In 2013 Michael Cohen of Achieve, Inc. (an organization integral to developing and marketing the Common Core national standards) testified in New York that Common Core is a long-term education experiment on our children: “The full effects… won’t be seen until an entire cohort of students, from kindergarten through high school graduation, has been effectively exposed to Common Core teaching.” Four years later we may not be seeing the full effects, but heaven help us when we get there.

The most recent red flag comes from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), an international assessment of the reading skills of representative samples of fourth-graders. As reported by the Washington Post, the 2016 PIRLS results show U.S. students tumbling from fifth in the world to thirteenth. Scores fell by seven points from those achieved by fourth-graders in 2011, the last time scores were released.

Hmm. What could have happened in schools between 2011 and 2016 that might have affected the academic performance of eight-year-olds? A Harvard education professor speculated that the 2009 recession and that old reliable — poverty — could have been the culprits. Education Secretary and on-again off-again Common Core supporter Betsy DeVos couldn’t identify a specific factor but suggested we need to “rethink school.”

Maybe. But Latvia — one of Europe’s poorer countries — outperformed the U.S. And the school structure that DeVos says we should rethink was pretty much the same in 2016 as in 2011. So what could it be?

Written by Bruno Behrend

American education has become more and more centralized over the past 100 years. While this consolidation is associated with a great deal of expense, there has been little evidence that it has improved outcomes. Instead, the evidence points to, but does not yet prove, that decentralizing education offers more benefits, first in outcomes, and second in lower cost.

Centralization is the key problem in American education

In 1939, America had 117,108 school districts. By 2006, this number was down to 13,862. While it is difficult to correlate test scores over this period of time, America’s relative decline in comparison with other nations in reading and math since the 1950s is convincing evidence that this rapid consolidation and centralization clearly hasn’t helped outcomes.

Expense

During this same period, education spending has skyrocketed, much more so in the last 30 years than the previous 50. It is interesting that the bulk of district consolidation took place from 1950 to 1968, and rapidly decelerated from 1970 through today. This lack of correlation between the spending increases of the last 30 years and the consolidation that took place before that does not necessarily show that continued consolidation would have lowered cost. Rather it shows that expense and district consolidation bear little connection.

It should be noted that while the numerous small districts that were consolidated during the 50s and 60s might be considered “centralization” from the perspective of the small districts, the fact remains that during that period, education was still considered a local matter. These districts, though fewer in number, still were mostly locally controlled. The more insidious type of centralization is where the state, and then increasingly the federal government, started to dictate curriculum, standards, and desired outcomes. This has accelerated over the last few decades. We are now at the point where we can say “local control” is mostly a myth.

This creeping centralization, whether intended or not, has lead to the rapid acceleration of administrative positions in government schools. It is clear from the data that this run up in employment, primarily in non-classroom expenditures, has been the largest cost driver in the last few decades.

This is borne out through many studies on district consolidation. It doesn’t really matter whether you consolidate, split up, or otherwise rearrange the management of schools. Relative to expense, what matters is payroll, and the payrolls are fat.

Curriculum Quality

If there is any area where we can see the dramatic effects of centralization, it is the curriculum most American children are exposed to. Standards, curricula, and testing have become increasingly centralized. You can say what you want about the local control and your elected school board, but the 50 states now have standards that are increasingly similar, and districts must comply. Combine this with the oatmeal-like similarity of the textbooks and narrow choice of testing regimes across America, and American school districts all operate within a very narrow band, dictated by an affiliation of public, private, and quasi-private organizations that advise the federal government on what should, and shouldn’t be, taught in American schools.

That was how things were before the “Common Core State Standards,” and the adoption of the Common Core in 45 states merely codified a process that had been taking place for decades.

In an effort to avoid making this article an anti-common core screed or a pro-common core wonk-piece, it suffices to say that the centralization culminating in the Common Core hasn’t “destroyed” American education, and getting rid of it won’t “save” American education.

Rather, the tepid benefits and pitfalls of the Common Core illustrate that American public education has reached yet another expensive dead end (or cul-de-sac). The standards might have been a slight improvement over the aggregated standards of all 50 states (at the expense of the better standards in some states). But a standard is only as good as the number of people who can attain them, and tests show that the Common Core has been another expensive experiment that yield little or no clear benefits in that regard.

Jay P. Greene, Head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, testified before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Early Education, Elementary and Secondary Education about the role and implementation of national curriculum standards. He testified that:

“One thing that should be understood with respect to nationalized approaches is that there is no evidence that countries that have nationalized systems get better results. Advocates for nationalization will point to other countries, such as Singapore, with higher achievement that also have a nationalized system as proof that we should do the same. But they fail to acknowledge that many countries that do worse than the United States on international tests also have nationalized systems. Conversely, many of the countries that do better than the United States, such as Canada, Australia, and Belgium, have decentralized systems. The research shows little or no relationship between nationalized approaches and student achievement.”

Instead of debating yet another attempt to fix our overly centralized education system, perhaps it is time to begin the process of decentralizing it. Should we spend less time trying to “fix” things, and more time pulling things apart? Should we create more independent schools, putting more authority in the hands of parents, who might then choose from a wider array of these new, independent education options? Would that work.

Is Decentralization better?

Decentralization probably would work better, but we can’t say definitively unless we try. Following the logic of Mr. Greene above, there are excellent schools in today’s centralized system, as well as awful ones. It follows that there will be awful schools among these new options, as well as excellent ones.

However, unlike today’s system, where the awful schools stay open, and their attendees have few options to leave them, a more decentralized system will cycle through the good and the bad options faster. People will learn very quickly whether their child’s school is working for them or not. If it isn’t, a decentralized system will allow parents more options.

In short, there is no guarantee that a de-centralized education system will improve aggregate outcomes. What is very likely, however, is that parents and students will have more options, and that the action of choosing those options, will create a more dynamic system of testing those options. This alone will be a dramatic improvement over the expensive, slow, and culturally painful process of implement a large scale change in today’s ossified “district-based” system, where nearly every school is merely a franchise of a federally run school system. Furthermore, the probability is high that a decentralized system will be less expensive as well, as smaller, more nimble, schools do not require the administrative overhead of today’s “compliance-based” bureaucracy.

Decentralize, but how?

Of course, once you start talking about decentralizing education, the entire Government Education Complex engages in the process of defending its hard-won turf. Decentralization means dis-empowering the decades-long accretion of bureaucrats, union bosses, and private contractors that live off the yearly cash flow of education spending that reached $634 billion in 2013 (latest year available).

Simple legislative tools, such as charter schools, vouchers or education savings accounts, bring out the hammer and tongs of the entrenched education bureaucracy. They argue that this money diverts money from the local school district or our “already struggling public schools.”

This is beside the point. If a parent is unhappy with a local school, and believes they may have access to a better option, then denying the school district of funds is a pointless argument. Education spending should benefit the student, not the local bureaucracy.

Sadly, charters, vouchers and other mechanisms that might decentralize education will likely never take enough hold to truly do what the necessary dismantlement of today’s centralized system. The political clout of the established system is too great to allow enough funds (or students) to be pulled from their maw.

While there is value in doing what you can to expand your education options legislatively, the fact is that we are on the cusp of developing an entirely new way to decentralize government schools. Just leave them.

What if they gave an expensive, bureaucratized school district, and nobody came? Welcome to the “micro-school.” While very early in the development stages, the fact is that these new, small, schools are starting up across America. Maybe it is time you thought about starting one too.

Building upon the proven success of home schooling, American parents can now choose a wide variety of curricula, on-line resources, and tutors / teachers to educate their children. I lack the space in this article to provide all the details, but it suffices to say that all the pieces are in place for an exodus from the centralized system, and the moment you choose that option, you have essentially succeeded in decentralizing education in the only part of America that is most important to you – your kids and your home.

Yes, you will still be on the hook for all the taxes that the district system eats, but instead of fighting the impossible battle of convincing voters to cut that spending, convince them to open a small school with you instead. As more people leave for better options, the constituency for all that wasteful spending will shrink. It is time to do to government schools what Priceline did to travel agents.

Please click the links below to find out more about micro-schools, and how they might be the “killer app” the finally puts a stake through the heart of America’s mediocre, expensive, and sclerotic Government Education Complex.

• Acton Academy

• AltSchool

• Brightworks

• Full Circle School

• Highlands Micro School

• Khan Lab School

• NOLA Micro Schools

• Parish Academy

Bruno Behrend is a Senior Fellow at the Heartland Institute and a free lance writer on education policy.

The Left is working overtime to silence and/or marginalize conservative voices in America
The time to support IFI is now!

Every 12 years another set of children progress through America’s government-run school system. Those that graduated this past spring started twelve years before that as first-graders in 2005.

In 2005 I had the honor of serving as the president of the Family Taxpayers Foundation (FTF), a non-profit focusing chiefly on school reform — both curriculum and finance…a to z, soup to nuts.

Jack Roeser, the founder of FTF and a self-made millionaire, witnessed the disintegration of the public schools both academically and fiscally.

School reform became a passion for him, and it was for me as well. During the years that I headed-up FTF in the mid-2000’s, we tracked and reported the news on the school reform front and conducted an exhaustive study of Chicago suburban area school district spending. That study is worthy of a separate article — suffice it to say that the adults running the “public” schools (teachers and administrators) enjoyed yearly pay raises unheard of in the private sector even as academic performance stagnated or dropped.

What resulted from my tenure at FTF was weariness with the national school reform movement. So many of the experts that I agreed with didn’t seem to grasp the fact that their message was not reaching enough people, or that their progress in bringing reform to the system was relatively miniscule.

After I left FTF, I stopped paying attention to the school reform movement.

Then, in 2013 I read an article by Bruce Deitrick Price. Price’s writings have been posting at what is still one of the best websites, American Thinker, since 2012.

When an individual is weary with a political topic and or political movement, it’s not easy to revive enthusiasm for it. But Price’s writing did that for me. Why? There is a directness, boldness, and thoughtfulness that kept my attention.

Over the years when I have come across articles on American Thinker it is common for me to ignore the author’s name and just begin reading. Without fail, when I found myself in agreement with an article about American public education, and that old spark in me on the topic reignited, I’d scroll up to see who authored the piece…and it was Bruce Deitrick Price.

When I discovered that he had authored a book on the subject of education, it was an easy decision to add it to my reading list.

Saving K-12: A Citizen’s Guide to Improving Public Education.

It doesn’t disappoint. The cover reads: “What happened in Our Public Schools? How Do We Fix Them?”

The following is the summary of the book from the publisher’s page (with emphasis added by me):

Public schools are a vast money pit. Education officials seem to prefer inefficiency and mediocrity. We could have better schools at less cost. This book explains how.

Bruce Deitrick Price is the country’s most prolific and aggressive writer on education. He is good at explaining the root causes, the problems that typically occur, and the ideological obsessions that lead our Education Establishment astray.

This book presents 65 articles divided into 10 themes: Reading; Math; Weird Theories and Methods; Common Core; Historical Background; Guilty as Charged; Where Are Our Leaders; and What to Do Now. You can read the articles in any order and dip in wherever you want. This is pleasant reading about grim topics. If we don’t save the public schools, we’re not going to save very much else.

Here is the author’s short bio:

Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, poet, and education reformer. He graduated with Honors in English Literature from Princeton and lived for many years in Manhattan where he ran a graphic design business. Along the way he was fascinated by the counterproductive practices so common in public schools. He founded Improve-Education.org in 2005.

In part two I’ll provide examples of Price’s “aggressive” approach as revealed in the book.

The Left is working overtime to silence and/or marginalize conservative voices in America
The time to support IFI is now!

Written by Kate Hardiman

For 11 years, Professor Duke Pesta gave quizzes to his students at the beginning of the school year to test their knowledge on basic facts about American history and Western culture.

The most surprising result from his 11-year experiment? Students’ overwhelming belief that slavery began in the United States and was almost exclusively an American phenomenon, he said.

“Most of my students could not tell me anything meaningful about slavery outside of America,” Pesta told The College Fix. “They are convinced that slavery was an American problem that more or less ended with the Civil War, and they are very fuzzy about the history of slavery prior to the Colonial era. Their entire education about slavery was confined to America.”

Pesta, currently an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, has taught the gamut of Western literature—from the Classics to the modern—at seven different universities, ranging from large research institutions to small liberal arts colleges to branch campuses. He said he has given the quizzes to students at Purdue University, University of Tennessee Martin, Ursinus College, Oklahoma State University, and University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

The origin of these quizzes, which Pesta calls “cultural literacy markers,” was his increasing discomfort with gaps in his students’ foundational knowledge.

“They came to college without the basic rudiments of American history or Western culture and their reading level was pretty low,” Pesta told The Fix.

Before even distributing the syllabus for his courses, Pesta administered his short quizzes with basic questions about American history, economics and Western culture. For instance, the questions asked students to circle which of three historical figures was a president of the United States, or to name three slave-holding countries over the last 2,000 years, or define “capitalism” and “socialism” in one sentence each.

Often, more students connected Thomas Jefferson to slavery than could identify him as president, according to Pesta. On one quiz, 29 out of 32 students responding knew that Jefferson owned slaves, but only three out of the 32 correctly identified him as president. Interestingly, more students— six of 32—actually believed Ben Franklin had been president.

Pesta said he believes these students were given an overwhelmingly negative view of American history in high school, perpetuated by scholars such as Howard Zinn in “A People’s History of the United States,” a frequently assigned textbook.

What’s more, he began to observe a shift in his students’ quiz responses in the early 2000s. Before that time, Pesta described his students as “often historically ignorant, but not politicized.” Since the early 2000s, Pesta has found that “many students come to college preprogrammed in certain ways.”

“They cannot tell you many historical facts or relate anything meaningful about historical biographies, but they are, however, stridently vocal about the corrupt nature of the Republic, about the wickedness of the founding fathers, and about the evils of free markets,” Pesta said. “Most alarmingly, they know nothing about the fraught history of Marxist ideology and communist governments over the last century, but often reductively define socialism as ‘fairness.’”

Pesta also noted that, early on, his students’ “blissful ignorance was accompanied by a basic humility about what they did not know.” But over time he said he increasingly saw “a sense of moral superiority in not knowing anything about our ‘racist and sexist’ history and our ‘biased’ institutions.”

“As we now see on campus,” Pesta said, “social justice warriors are arguing that even reading the great books of Western culture is at best a micro-aggression, and at worst an insidious form of cultural imperialism and indoctrination.”

Pesta, an outspoken critic of Common Core, said he believes that these attitudes will become more pronounced moving forward, due to Common Core architect David Coleman’s rewrite of Advanced Placement American and European history standards.

Pesta argues that Coleman, now president of the College Board, “has further politicized the teaching of history, reducing the story of Western culture to little more than a litany of crimes, exploitations, and genocides, while simultaneously whitewashing the history of ideologies like socialism and communism.”

Despite no longer giving the quizzes, Pesta told The Fix that he continues “to seek effective ways to teach students the literature of Western culture, which it is not only alien and complex, but often condemned by students before it is truly encountered.”

“We must absolutely teach those areas where Western culture has fallen short, but always with the recognition that such criticism is possible because of the freedoms and advantages offered by Western culture,” he said.

This article was originally posted at TheCollegeFix.com