State Representative Peter Breen (R-Lombard) recently introduced HB 2689, also known as the Internet Screening in Public Libraries Act. This common sense legislation would help protect children and families from obscene and illegal material on the Internet and prevent public libraries from becoming sexually hostile work environments.

Sexually graphic websites — including child-pornography — would no longer be found at your local public library. Internet filtering technology would help clean up communities and protect children, families, and library personnel from being exposed to these harmful and illegal materials.

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to send a message to your state representative to ask him/her to support or even co-sponsor HB 2689.

You can also contact your state representative by calling the Capitol switchboard at (217) 782-2000.

Background

The legislation is patterned after the federal Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA) that requires filters in exchange for federal E-rate funds. CIPA was found to be Constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003. Because installing filters frees up federal funds available for libraries, there is little, if any, cost to install them — which means that in many cases installing filters is financially beneficial to libraries.

This legislation is another step in the ongoing battle to protect children from illegal pornography and Internet predators. The current policy of allowing libraries the choice to offer this material to their patrons not only violates the federal obscenity law but also endangers our children and the community. While some legislators have opposed this bill because it places a “mandate” on libraries, this mandate is critical.

The radically liberal American Library Association (ALA) and its state affiliate, the Illinois Library Association (ILA) will bring great pressure to bear in opposition to this bill, claiming that this is a free speech issue, and that filtering the Internet amounts to censorship.  However, nothing in the First Amendment requires any publicly funded institution to provide illegal material, including child pornography. Furthermore, filters don’t remove the content, they just block access on taxpayer funded computers.

Public libraries should not be in the business of distributing materials that are harmful to minors and illegal for adults. Obscenity and child pornography are not protected forms of speech under the First Amendment. Filtering the Internet in public libraries isn’t about the First Amendment; it’s about protecting our children and the taxpayers!

The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized the fact that the government (which includes public libraries) has a “compelling interest” in protecting children from sexually explicit materials.

In Ginsburg v. New York, the U.S. Supreme Court stated that “parents who have this primary responsibility for children’s well-being are entitled to the support of laws designed to aid discharge of that responsibility.” In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court has uniformly ruled that governmental regulations may also act to facilitate parental control over children’s access to sexually explicit material.

Pornography is not protected by the First Amendment, but in fact violates the human rights of every man and woman — and especially our children. Taxpayers do not want pornography in their neighborhood libraries.

This vote will be a vote for the future safety of our children.

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Written by J. Michael Smith

Amid the immigration debate in Washington, D.C., legislation is pending that will make it possible for families who are treated harshly over homeschooling to find refuge in the United States. The legislation was developed by HSLDA along with supportive members of Congress in the wake of the Romeike family’s asylum case. The bill has been introduced as H.R. 1153, the Asylum Reform and Border Protection Act of 2015, and is scheduled for a vote in the House Judiciary Committee this week.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (UT), joined by original cosponsor Daniel Webster (FL) and Rep. Robert Goodlatte (VA), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, have included specific language that would allow up to 500 grants of asylum to families fleeing homeschool persecution. The Romeike family would be able to reopen their case under the proposed law. The bill, which includes other changes to the Immigration and Nationality Act, including ordering the U.S. Attorney General to hire at least 50 more immigration judges, would make it easier for families who are treated harshly because of homeschooling to be granted asylum.

The bill explicitly refers to homeschooling as a particular social group and specifies that a person is “deemed” to be eligible for asylum if he or she is persecuted for homeschooling or if the person resists anti-homeschooling laws in his country of origin. The House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to discuss the bill on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.

“America is a country that protects freedom,” said Webster. “The right of parents to educate their children is a fundamental human right that is internationally acknowledged. This legislation strengthens these opportunities by providing protection for families facing persecution at the hands of their own government and protects their right to practice the basic liberties to educate and nurture their own children.”

Chairman Goodlatte summarized the bill: “The Asylum Reform and Border Protection Act cracks down on fraudulent and baseless asylum claims in order to preserve the integrity of our immigration system. It also makes common sense changes to the law to protect victims of persecution around the globe, like allowing those fleeing their home countries based on their being persecuted for choosing to homeschool their children to apply for asylum. Altogether, this bill strengthens our asylum system so that those truly persecuted can come to the U.S. and seek refuge from oppression.’

Place of Refuge

Michael Farris, HSLDA’s chairman, who argued before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of the Romeike family, was pleased with the congressional action.

“No one should be forced to flee their homeland in order to homeschool,” Farris said. “But that is what the Romeikes and scores of other families have had to do in order to escape crushing fines, criminal penalties and even the seizure of their children in countries like Germany and Sweden. Homeschooling is no threat to free societies, and I applaud the Congress for taking action so that families like the Romeikes and others who experience harsh treatment may find refuge and legal status in the land of the free.”

The Romeike family came from Germany to the United States in 2008 seeking asylum after being fined for homeschooling their children. With HSLDA’s help, the Romeikes won asylum in 2010.

U.S. immigration judge Lawrence Burman granted the family asylum, saying that the German policy against homeschooling was “repugnant to everything we believe as Americans.” Burman found that the family had a legitimate fear of persecution because of homeschooling and said that the United States should “be a refuge” for the family.

Judge Burman’s favorable decision was overturned in the Sixth Circuit after the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement objected. Soon, the family was appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a deportation order. But although the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, the Department of Homeland Security granted the family indefinite deferred action status at the last minute, allowing them to remain in the United States.

Building a Home

The Romeike family now resides in eastern Tennessee. Uwe Romeike, a trained concert pianist, teaches private piano lessons, plays for their church and is an accompanist at a local university. The family has had two more children since coming to the United States. They are grateful to be able to remain, but yearn to be able to seek citizenship.

“We did not want to have to leave our home in Germany in order to homeschool,” Uwe explains. “But when we were harshly treated, America opened its doors to us. America has become our new home. We have become part of our community and have been so welcomed by our brothers and sisters in Tennessee. We want to be citizens of this great country, and we are so grateful to the congressmen for writing this bill.”

“HSLDA’s support has been so helpful, and I am so glad that they continue to work to help homeschoolers abroad who are in trouble,” added his wife, Hanne Romeike. “We love America and our freedom to homeschool. Our seven children love this country, and we are so grateful to God for this incredible blessing.”

HSLDA has reported on numerous cases in Germany and Sweden where families have been denied the right to homeschool, including the Wunderlich family of Germany and the Petersens in Sweden. HSLDA is looking into taking these and other cases to the European Court of Human Rights, as well as other international tribunals, to highlight the need for nations to respect this important right.

Powerful Statement

Michael Donnelly, HSLDA director of global outreach, called the bill “groundbreaking.”

“A country that bans homeschooling is violating the basic human rights of their citizens. It makes me proud that our Congress is willing to make a statement like this—that this right should be recognized and protected,” he said. “I think this bill is going to kickstart serious discussion among Germans and policy makers in other countries, too. What are they going to say when hundreds of families start seeking asylum in the United States fleeing this kind of harsh treatment?”

“Although I see some evidence of slow change in Germany, too many homeschooling families are still treated very harshly, and many still leave the country,” Donnelly continued. “No one should have their children seized or have to leave their home in order to homeschool,” he continued. “Other countries need to sit up and take notice of this too. Sweden, Spain, and Brazil are among some of the places where laws have not been passed to recognize homeschooling or where homeschoolers are treated harshly.”

HSLDA Director of Federal Relations Will Estrada expressed the gratitude everyone at HSLDA and in much of the homeschool community feels at the introduction of this bill.

“I am so thankful to the many supportive members of Congress who have helped develop this legislation including Rep. Daniel Webster (FL) who has been the driving force along with Randy Hultgren (IL), Marlin Stutzman (IN) and Tim Walberg (MI),” he said. “And without the support of Representative Chaffetz and Chairman Goodlatte, this bill would never have seen a vote.”

“The entire homeschool community has had a hand in this also by their tremendous outpouring of support for the Romeike family and for other families who are denied the fundamental freedom to homeschool their children,” Estrada continued. “It’s an incredible privilege for all of us at HSLDA to serve such great families in support of such a worthy cause.”

The bill is scheduled to be heard on Wednesday, March 4 in the Judiciary Committee Room (Room 2141) at the Rayburn House Office Building starting at 10 a.m. HSLDA plans to hold a press conference after the bill passes committee, sometime Wednesday afternoon. Mr. Romeike is planning to attend the mark up and press conference. Local homeschoolers are encouraged to attend the committee mark up. Although no public testimony will be taken, a strong showing will demonstrate public support and interest in the bill.

TAKE ACTION: Please contact your U.S. representative and ask him or her to support the homeschool asylum language in H.R. 1153. You can reach your representative by calling the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121, or by CLICKING HERE.

Originally published at HSLDA.org.

Written by Michelle Malkin

The wheels on the bus go ’round and ’round, just like the endless cycles of big, bad government programs to federalize preschool and daycare.

On Wednesday, the White House Summit on Early Education will unveil nearly $1 billion in new “investments” to “expand access to high-quality early childhood education to every child in America” from “birth and continuing to age 5.” It’s a retread of President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union school-spending plan, which was a repackaging of his 2011 Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge program.

Those Obama initiatives are knockoffs of moldy-old Democratic policy chestnuts, such as former Vice President Al Gore’s push to fund preschool for all 3-year-olds at a cost to taxpayers of at least $50 billion over 10 years, left-wing actor/director Rob Reiner’s “I Am Your Child” campaign for universal preschool and child care, and Hillary Clinton’s various “It Takes a Village” schemes to expand Head Start from womb to work. With age comes fiefdom.

How could anybody be against tax-subsidized Pre-K for all, you say? Let me count the ways.

Every one of these Big Babysitter boondoggles rests on “progressive” junk science. The Obama White House asserts that “studies show that for every dollar we invest in early childhood education, we see a rate of return of $7 or more.” Balderdash. This discredited claim rests on results of the tiny Perry Preschool Project in Michigan, run at a cost of $19,000 per child more than a half-century ago, and a similar program in North Carolina called the Abecedarian Early Intervention Project.

As David Armor of the libertarian Cato Institute noted in a thorough review of the scientific literature this fall, the “groups studied were very small, they came from single communities several decades ago, and both programs were far more intensive than the programs being contemplated today.”

More recent research by the Brookings Institution’s Russ Whitehurst found that the vaunted academic benefits of full-time Pre-K in Georgia and Oklahoma “have had, at best, only small impacts on later academic achievement.” In fact, Georgia elementary school students’ test scores are mediocre, and Oklahoma test scores have been on the decline for the past decade. A 2010 Department of Health and Human Services report, which assessed approximately 5,000 3- and 4-year-olds who were randomly assigned to either a control group or a group that had access to the federal Head Start program, concluded that “at the end of kindergarten and first grade … the Head Start children and the control group children were at the same level on many of the measures studied.”

In 2012, government researchers reported “little evidence of systematic differences in children’s elementary school experiences through 3rd grade, between children provided access to Head Start and their counterparts in the control group.” The federal investments in early childhood programs keep ballooning, yet the educational impacts are dubious at best.

Then there’s the alarming encroachment of data miners into the lives of parents and their young children. As I’ve reported previously, Common Core-aligned assessment systems such as Teaching Strategies Gold in Colorado and California’s “Desired Results Developmental Profile” are stockpiling massive amounts of information on preschoolers’ social, emotional, physical, language and cognitive development. The collection of data and accompanying assessment inevitably dictate the content in the classroom. TS Gold, which integrates its results into the vast network of statewide longitudinal data systems, raked in $30 million in federal Race to the Top subsidies in 2012. The latest round of Obama’s “Preschool Development Grants” and “Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership Awards” require applicants to plug into this insatiable data machine, as well as “linking” and “partnering” with a plethora of other government programs.

After attending TS Gold training sessions last year, Cindee Will, principal of the James Irwin Charter Academy in Colorado Springs, calculated that compliance, not including taking and uploading photos of students as required, would soak up at least 16.5 hours of kindergarten class time per week or 640 hours a year of instruction in class. Test administration four times a year for an average of 25 students, she told me, would mean “150 hours per year or 2.5 months: one quarter of our time. And this equation is done with the knowledge that our K program is a half-day program!”

As you might imagine, the administrative and financial burdens on small, privately run part-time preschool programs would be even more onerous. Fatal. And exactly as planned.

Think ObamaCare is bad? Well, welcome to TotCare. The goal of the educational central planners, you see, is the elimination of competition. The fact is that the vast majority of Pre-K kids are already happily enrolled in early childhood programs outside of Fed Ed’s clutches. The “problem” isn’t most families’ lack of access to preschool. It’s Washington’s lack of access to your kids for their institutionalized warehousing, data mining and pedagogical propaganda schemes. The Nanny State’s ceaseless quest for control keeps creepily rolling along.

Originally posted at OneNewsNow.com

Its time to raise the standards for sex education in Illinois. Recently, parents of 5th grade students at a West Side Chicago Public School (CPS) magnet school, were stunned and repelled by the binder of sex ed material that they were shown recently during an after-school presentation about the upcoming sex ed class.

In light of such revelations, Scott Phelps of Abstinence & Marriage Partnership is encouraging parents and taxpayers to get involved with what is being taught to their children.

Written by Napp Nazworth

Implementation of the Common Core State Standards Initiative has not gone well, supporters and critics alike now agree. Understanding why the education reform has been so rocky could aid future policy initiatives.

Here are five of the main reasons Common Core has been a disaster.

1) No Deliberative Democracy

Common Core was put into effect sneakily, rather than through the usual deliberative and democratic processes.

The Common Core is a set of math and English standards for K-12 education developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, both of which are non-governmental organizations. Neither Congress nor state legislatures were involved in developing the standards.

For comparison, look at how President George W. Bush’s education reform, No Child Left Behind, was implemented. That legislation was debated in subcommittee hearings, committee hearings, and on the floors of the U.S. House and Senate before being passed on a bipartisan vote. While the debate was taking place in Congress, there was a public debate, with newspaper reports and pro and con arguments presented in editorials, news programs and water cooler talk across the nation. None of that happened when states adopted the Common Core.

The Common Core was developed in a private meeting by a non-governmental body. States were then encouraged to adopt the standards in an Department of Education grant competition that was part of the 2009 stimulus bill.

Even some Common Core supporters now admit that the way it was implemented was a mistake. At an American Enterprise Institute panel in October, Chris Minnich, current executive director of CCSSO and the council’s strategic initiatives director of standards assessment and accountability in 2009, said that Common Core would be better off today if the federal government had not been involved by creating incentives and funding the testing consortia.

By the time the standards had made its way to teachers, students and families, most were taken by surprise. And due to the lack of deliberative democracy, proponents had not gone through the difficult task of building public support before the policy was thrust onto the public.

2) Supporters Demonized Critics

Common Core supporters also made the mistake of characterizing critics as a bunch of crazies. A May Christian Post analysis pointed out many examples of this.

Common Core critics have been derided as “fringe voices,” people who are “comfortable with mediocrity,” an “ideological circus” with “hysterical claims and fevered accusations” from “the market-share-obsessed talk-radio crowd,” “far-right,” a “mediocrity caucus,” and “white suburban moms” opposed to educational progress.

Demonizing critics created additional problems for the Common Core. First, supporters lost legitimacy when these claims were easily demonstrated as false. Some of the harshest critics have been liberals, academics and teachers.

And second, by demonstrating an unwillingness to listen to the critics, Common Core supporters reinforced the critic’s view that Common Core is top-down and elite-driven. The arrogance of these Common Core supporters is similar to that of “Obamacare” architect Jonathan Gruber, who said that implementation of President Obama’s signature healthcare reform law had a “huge political advantage” in its “lack of transparency” due to the “stupidity of the American voter.”

3) No Trial and Error

Rather than pushing Common Core on an unsuspecting public using backdoor methods, supporters should have started small.

In the United States federalist system, states are often described as “laboratories of democracy.” Policies can be tried by early adopter states while other states wait to see the results. If the results are positive, other states will adopt them.

At the AEI October panel, Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at AEI, said that 10 to 15 states likely would have adopted the Common Core on their own, even without the federal incentives. Hess is neither for nor against the Common Core standards, but has been critical of how they have been implemented.

If Common Core had started that way, Hess noted, it would have been “a truly and genuinely kind of state-led effort, which if it was working and being implemented well, others would have wanted in.”

4) No Process to Improve Them

The developers of the Common Core did not leave in place a process to improve the standards.

In a perfect illustration of how the Common Core was put together haphazardly and without much forethought, the standards were created by a panel formed exclusively for the purpose of writing the standards. The panel was disbanded, and then the standards were copyrighted.

So, as education historian Diane Ravitch has pointed out, if a state wanted to change the standards, how would they do so? The answer is not entirely clear.

What if a state wanted to keep part of the standards but throw out other parts? Over 500 early childhood experts, for instance, signed a letter saying that the standards would be harmful for children in the early grade levels. (No early childhood experts were part of the panel that developed the standards.) So some states may want to dispose of at least that part of the standards. Whether they are legally allowed to do that is, however, murky.

Legally, a state should not be able to change a copyrighted product it does not own. But, who would a state go to for permission? And, if a state violated the copyright, who would sue them anyway? Others have even argued that the Common Core is not something that should have been able to obtain a copyright in the first place, because, according to copyright law, “ideas, methods, or systems” cannot be copyrighted.

Some states, like Florida, have made changes to the Common Core. Those changes appear to be mostly additions to the standards, which is legal, rather than changing the existing standards.

Suppose, however, that each state does ignore the potential copyright issues and changes the Common Core to its liking. That would undermine one of the main purposes of the Common Core to begin with. One of the primary impetuses for having a Common Core was that it would be, well, common. Having all, or many, states on the same set of standards, comparisons could be made across states and resources could be pooled for texts and testing materials. So, without a national process for improving the standards, the reason for having common standards in the first place has already been undermined.

5) Cronyism

Now that the secretive, top-down, elite-driven education reform was thrust onto unsuspecting students, parents and teachers, American taxpayers will wonder why they are being asked to pay for what is turning out to be an extremely expensive project with most of the benefits going to a few large companies.

A significant portion of the taxpayer dollars for Common Core implementation will go to testing companies. And these testing companies were also involved in developing Common Core.

As Julian Vasquez Heilig, professor of educational leadership and policy studies and the director of the doctorate in educational leadership program at California State University, points out on his blog, the work groups who designed the Common Core were comprised of five employees of ACT, two employees from a Pearson affiliate, six employees from Achieve, seven employees from The College Board and two employees and co-founders of Student Achievement Partners. Teachers and administrators were part of the group that reviewed the standards but not the group that wrote the standards.

Parents and teachers may look at that situation and wonder if those who wrote the standards did so in the interests of their children or in their self-interest. There is, however, a more important question raised by Common Core cronyism.

In all likelihood, those who wrote the standards see no conflict between their self-interest and what is best for American students. They are, after all, involved in those companies (many of which are non-profit) because they believe the work of those companies is to the benefit of students.

The larger question that should be asked, then, is — why should they get to decide education policy for the nation? As Vasquez Heilig pointed out, those involved in writing the Common Core have a particular view of education (which he wrote more about here and here). It is a legitimate view of how children should educated, but it is not a view shared by all educators, parents and education professors. There are equally legitimate alternatives that should also be part of the national dialogue on education reform.

Americans hold certain expectations of how education should be reformed — with parent and teacher input; through deliberation (both talking and listening) and democratic processes; and through trial, error and re-reforms at the local and state level. Common Core did none of those things and that is why it has been a disaster.

This article was originally posted at the ChristianPost.com website.

The inmates are running the asylum in Indy.

Until recently I had not heard of the National Federation of State High School Associations, or NFHS. This Indianapolis-based organization has, since 1920, developed and published playing rules for high-school sports in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Like so many other national organizations charged with establishing curricula, policies and practices for primary and secondary education (consider the NEA), the NFHS has become completely overrun by radical leftists and sexual extremists. It has placed political correctness and the adult “LGBT” political agenda above the welfare and safety of the boys and girls it purports to serve.

Last week, I received an email from a concerned public educator. He is also an NFHS member and high-school sports announcer: “I wanted to pass along to you an advisory that the National Federation of State High School Associations recently released on ‘Developing Policies for Transgender Students on High School Teams,’” he wrote, adding that, “in light of [his] positions,” and the threat of near-certain employment termination, he wished to remain anonymous.

And so I clicked on the link provided. It led me to an NFHS advisory penned by University of Massachusetts “social justice education” professor emerita Pat Griffin. (In other words, “Dr.” Griffin has a PhD in BS and has made a good, taxpayer-funded living shoveling it into that expansive black hole known as the “collegus craniumus.” As I have addressed before, “social justice” is simply code for “social-ism,” or, more precisely, cultural Marxism.)

Writing on behalf of the NFHS, Griffin advises every high school administrator in America that, according to the Federal Office of Civil Rights, Title IX requires that boys pretending to be girls, and girls pretending to be boys, must be permitted to compete on, and share locker room and showering facilities with, the sports teams of the opposite sex.

This is a bald-faced lie.

Griffin then lays the fantastical foundation for her entire “advisory”: “It is important for policy-makers to understand that transgender girls (who were assigned a male gender at birth) are not boys.”

This, of course, is objectively, “I am Napoleon,” house-full-of-kitty-cats cray cray. (Figure out a way, Ms. Griffin, to do a full override of a “transgender” kid’s reproductive system, give him a fertile uterus, vagina, birth canal and the like, preform a complete DNA/chromosome reversal, and we might at least have a place to begin a discussion. Until then, seek therapy. Your Huxleyan delusions are hurting, not helping, the sexually confused children you claim to serve. Besides, it makes you look nuttier than squirrel poop.)

Griffin then states the obvious, complaining, “School officials often see transgender students’ interest in participating in sports according to their affirmed gender identity as disruptive.” She further objects, “[P]ractices such as requiring them to use locker rooms and bathrooms that correspond to their gender assigned at birth discourage participation.”

“Gender assigned at birth.” Get that? Orwell would be proud. As if a person’s immutable, biological sex is both subjectively determined and arbitrarily “assigned” to them by our “heteronormative” American patriarchy.

You’re assigned homework, Ms. Griffin. You’re not assigned “gender.”

Therefore, administrators have a “responsibility,” she demands, “to ensure that transgender athletes have access to athletic teams according to their affirmed gender identity and that these students are safe in locker rooms and on the playing field.”

Girls playing boys’ football, boys playing girls’ basketball and coed showers – what could possibly go wrong?

Griffin then acknowledges, and promptly dismisses, “four major concerns” raised by mentally stable parents and school administrators. To the person who even dabbles in objective reality and speaks English only, the following will appear as gibberish. Fortunately, I speak fluent Moonbat and have translated accordingly.

“These concerns,” she writes, “are: 1) transgender girls [meaning boys pretending to be girls] are really boys [meaning real boys] despite their affirmed gender identity as a girl; 2) fear that non-transgender boys [meaning boys not pretending to be girls] will pretend to be girls [like ‘transgender girls’ do, only, in this case, just pretending to pretend to be girls] to win championships or get more playing time on girls teams; 3) transgender girls [meaning boys pretending to be girls] pose a safety risk for non-transgender girls [meaning real girls] in some sports, like basketball or field hockey; and 4) transgender girls [meaning boys pretending to be girls] have a competitive advantage over non-transgender girls [meaning real girls].”

“The belief that transgender girls are not ‘real’ girls is sometimes expressed as a concern,” she adds.

Ya think?

What a tangled web of gender identity disorder and “progressive” pathology we weave. Note that all of the “concerns” Griffin rejects happen to be 100 percent legitimate and fact-based. It is not a “belief” that “transgender girls are not real girls.” It is an empirical, biological fact that “transgender” girls are not real girls. They are, have always been and always will be boys, no matter how deep-seated their sexual confusion.

Still, the main issue here, the one that exposes the NFHS as nothing more than a dangerously reckless vehicle for radical “social change,” is the issue of safety.

Continues Griffin: “Some sports leaders and parents express concerns that allowing transgender girls [meaning high school boys] to participate on girls teams will pose a safety risk for non-transgender girls. This concern is based on an assumption that transgender girls are bigger, stronger and unable to exercise adequate body control resulting in an increased risk of injury to other participants.”

Again, this is utterly surreal. It is not an “assumption” that post-pubescent boys are “bigger” and “stronger” than girls, it is an irrefutable fact that they are. Girls, with the rare exception, are physically weaker, slower and less aggressive than boys. They have far less testosterone, muscle mass and a skeletal frame that is smaller, less dense and, therefore, more frail by comparison.

Pumping kids full of dangerous hormones or mutilating their genitalia changes none of this.

It’s easy enough to dismiss Ms. Griffin as the left-wing extremist she is. It’s not so easy, however, to dismiss the NFHS, which has both authorized her to represent the organization and to develop highly dangerous policies that will be adopted by high schools nationwide.

As a licensed attorney, and having once worked for years in the insurance industry, I can tell you that if a high school permits a sexually confused boy to play on a girls’ sports team, and that boy hurts a female player, that school has exposed itself to tremendous liability.

My suggestion to parents? If your high school allows boys to play on your daughters’ sports teams, sue, sue, sue.

And if, God forbid, one of those boys actually injures your daughter, then don’t just sue the school – sue the NFHS and Pat Griffin.

They’re ultimately accountable for this foolishness.

Please support the work of Illinois Family Institute.

**Caution: Not For Younger Readers**
Includes Some Graphic Content and Links

Before the dust has settled on a school sex ed controversy in Chicago, another outrageous sexuality “education” scandal has erupted, this time in Oregon.

School personnel and students as young as 11 years old from 16 school districts were invited to the annual Adolescent Sexuality Conference in Seaside, Oregon.

Available material included handouts and pamphlets that encourage adolescent “dry humping” to save lives, “cyber and phone sex…bathing together, shaving each other, wearing each other’s underwear, role playing, buying an extra-large pair of pajama bottoms to sleep in together, lap dances and strip teases…” and discuss meth use for having “lots of sex with lots of partners for long periods.”

There was also “a workshop where the speaker brought students to a porn website and taught them to program virtual women….When you press a certain command, it tells her to perform various sexual acts.”

Interestingly, when interviewed, Brad Victor, the director of the conference (which receives government funding), arrogantly and stubbornly refused to answer questions about the controversial content. Ironically, he characterized questions about the controversial materials as “inappropriate.” Click here to watch the illuminating news report.

Sex “educator” or perverse porn purveyor?

Keynote speaker Cory Silverberg shared that “Teledildonics basically refers to the control of sex toys over the Internet; the remote use of sex toys.” Silverberg is a Canadian sex educator and former founder of the “anti-capitalist, egalitarian” sex toy co-op called “Come As You Are.”

Silverberg wrote the book What Makes a Baby, a picture book for children from preschool to age 8 that teaches them about the ways homosexuals and “transgenders” acquire children.

Homosexual activists become unhinged about any social science research that comes to conclusions they don’t like, applying standards to these studies that they would never apply to studies whose conclusions they like. Well, sexpert Cory Silverberg wrote in one of his articles that “some activities… (like using vibrators) are more popular among observant Christians.”

Surprised by such a claim, I pursued it a bit further, following the link Silverberg provided and found the source of this peculiar statement. In another article about vibrators,  Silverberg wrote this: “According to Xandria Collection’s ‘Toys in the Sheets’ survey, the most common vibrator user was a white Christian married woman, in her thirties, who votes Republican.” The website Xandria Collection has been selling “sex toys and adult accessories for an amazing 40 years.” Yes, folks, the source for his dubious claim was a survey conducted by an online sex toy website.

Silverberg has also written multiple articles for Huffington Post’s “education” section. Here are two titles:

• “What Gender Doesn’t Have to Do With Making Babies,” in which he says that in his book on how babies are made he explains that “some bodies have eggs and some don’t. Some bodies have sperm and some don’t. Some bodies have a uterus and some don’t.” But he emphasizes that he does not “gender the bodies” or “gender their parts.” He refuses to identify male body parts with men or female body parts with women because some people who claim to be men are in reality women, and some people who claim to be women are in reality men. And these are the bizarre notions that comprehensive sex “educators” want taught to even our youngest children in public schools funded by taxpayers.

•  “We Need a New Orientation to Sex” in which he complains that “Embedded in this idea of sexual orientation is the (false) notion that there are two sexes, and two genders, and that gender is the central focus and most important aspect of sexual desire.”

Twenty years ago, most Americans would have viewed adults who would expose other people’s children to the kind of perversity that children were exposed to at this conference as, well, perverts. But now this kind of person is being invited into and paid by our schools. Their arguable notions about human sexuality and flourishing are informing or rather deforming curricula. Teachers are taking the befouling ideas, values, and beliefs they pick up from these conferences into the classroom to twist the minds of other people’s children and undermine both innocence and modesty.

What parents can and should do

• Parents in every community in America should be asking their elementary, middle, and high school administrators to see all curricular and supplementary sex ed resources that may be presented to students or that teachers are being exposed to in professional development seminars, workshops, and conferences. And they should ask to be informed of any speakers who will be invited to speak to students.

• Parents should inform their public school administrations and their children’s teachers that under no circumstance are their children to be exposed to any resources or activities that address homosexuality, gender confusion, sexual fantasy, or masturbation.

• Parents should insist that the only information teachers should convey to middle and high school students about pornography is that there is an abundance of research suggesting that pornography use affects the neurochemistry of the brain resulting in addiction, low libido, and erectile dysfunction in young men. Physiology teacher and TED Talk speaker Gary Wilson, writes that “In May 2014, JAMA Psychiatry published a study by the Max Planck Institute. It found that years and hours of porn use correlated with loss of grey matter in the brain’s reward system. Lead researcher Kühn stated that study results ‘could mean that regular consumption of pornography more or less wears out your reward system.’” This is what educators who truly care about the health and welfare of children would teach them.

• Parents should insist that teachers share with middle and high school students the most current research from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on the health risks for the group the CDC designates “men who have sex with men” (MSM):

1.)  [Men who have sex with men] represent approximately 2 percent of the United States population, yet are the population most severely affected by HIV. In 2010, young gay and bisexual men (aged 13-24 years) accounted for 72 percent of new HIV infections among all persons aged 13 to 24, and 30 percent of new infections among all gay and bisexual men. See source here.

2.)  In 2012, 75 percent of the reported [primary and secondary] syphilis cases were among men who have sex with men (MSM). See source here.

Parents and Concerned Taxpayers: Be pro-active. Insist on the research about MSM and porn use be taught to middle and high school students, and insist that all pornographic, inappropriate material and ideas  be prohibited from being presented to students. Trying to remove malignant materials from public schools is much more difficult than preventing them from getting a muddy foothold in the first place.

Please consider supporting the work of Illinois Family Institute.

**Caution: Not For Younger Readers**
Includes Some Graphic Content and Links

Parents of 5th grade students at Andrew Jackson Language Academy, a West Side Chicago Public School (CPS) magnet school,  were stunned and repelled by the binder of sex ed material that they were shown recently during an after-school presentation about the upcoming sex ed class.

The binder included the following PowerPoint slides:

1. A picture of Homer Simpson with the words, “Lube, Lube, Lube. Use more lubrication, increase pleasure…”
2. A slide which appears to come from the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, a homosexual activist organization(slide#5): “Once you pop, you won’t have to stop! FCs [female condoms] don’t require an erect penis, so your partner doesn’t have to pull out right after ejaculation. Feel the heat! FCs adjust to body temperature, so both you and your partner can feel the heat. Oh! Oh! The two rings of the FC double the pleasure for you and your partner.”
3. A slide that reads “Female condoms are for everybody: men, women, transgender folk, gay straight, any position, any time.”
4. And a slide that says “Where YOU can get female condoms…,” with a list of places where 11-year-olds could presumably access female condoms.

A mother interviewed by a local news station was clearly irritated with material pertaining to anal intercourse, saying that it is not “appropriate” for the school to tell her 5^th grade daughter that “it’s okay to have safe anal sex.”

CPS parents shouldn’t expect sex ed to improve for 6^th graders. Here are two videos that the CPS “Sexual Health Education Grade 6” curriculum recommended,  the first one of which was produced by Planned Parenthood (The CPS “Sexual Health Education for Grade 6” website was available Monday morning and early afternoon but was taken down by late afternoon Monday, November 17, 2014. Click here for a cached version):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdSq2HB7jqU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjmoQlAQP4Y

The narrator in the Planned Parenthood video says to students who use condoms, “Congratulations! You just prevented a pregnancy, a sexually transmitted infection, or both.” This is a false statement that will create in adolescents a false sense of security. A properly used condom will reduce the risk of conception and reduce the risk of acquiring a sexually transmitted infection, but condoms do not prevent either.

The CPS “Sexual Health Education Grade 6” curriculum also includes this activity for 11-12 year-olds in co-ed classes:

Activity #1 – Contraceptive Relay

Break students into small groups. Provide each group with “Steps to Using a Male Condom” activity sheet and “Steps to Using a Female Condom” activity sheet (cut and shuffled). Student teams should work together to assemble “Steps to Using a Male Condom”. Once they have achieved the correct order they will move on to “Steps to Using a Female Condom.”

The first team to assemble both activity sheets correctly receives bragging rights.

Sex education classes should not be co-ed. Among the myriad, diverse, expanding, and protean objectives and “values” to which public school administrators and teachers claim they are committed, you will never see modesty. With a culture as coarse and immodest as ours, schools should stand as a bulwark against immodesty and vulgarity. Our literature, our sex ed curricula, our classes, and our government employees (i.e., teachers) should do nothing to undermine whatever vestige of modesty our children and teens are able to retain as they move through our crass culture which tells them there are no aspects of human life that are private and that objective, immutable biological sex (i.e.,  maleness and femaleness) is meaningless.

CPS spokesman Bill McCaffrey stated that “The objectionable material presented at Andrew Jackson Language Academy this week is not and never was part of the student sexual education curriculum. It was mistakenly downloaded and included in the parent presentation, and we agree with parents it is not appropriate for elementary school students.”

But the CPS also said that only teachers were supposed to see the material. If teachers were supposed to see the material, then the material was not “mistakenly downloaded.” The material was deliberately downloaded. The mistake that CPS employees made was to show the deliberately downloaded material to parents.

If parents of CPS students think that all CPS teachers share Mr. McCaffrey’s publicly stated view that this material is objectionable, M.I.T. economist Jonathan Gruber has some healthcare to sell you. Many teachers, rather, share the sexuality ethos of Planned Parenthood and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. It’s not moral indignation that rattled the CPS cage. It was that parents had their consciousness and dander raised by some inadvertent truth-telling from CPS teachers. Parents accidentally found out, and they responded with unselfconscious and justifiable outrage. That’s what led to the CPS apology (and website-scrubbing).

In order to conceal the identity or identities of those government employees who were responsible for downloading the  controversial material, McCaffrey conveniently used the passive voice saying,  the “objectionable material….was mistakenly downloaded.” Parents and other taxpayers are entitled to know specifically who downloaded these materials. And who told the person printing and assembling the binders what to print and include in the binders?

Taxpayers in every community are entitled to know specifically which teachers and administrators are choosing controversial, age-inappropriate supplemental and curricular resources. And the press should be naming names. These government employees should be required to defend publicly the choices they make for other people’s children with other people’s money rather than being shielded by PR spin masters.

It gives me no pleasure to say to CPS parents that we tried to warn them in this article.

Taxpayers in every community should take this CPS imbroglio as a warning because the Common Core of sex ed is coming. An unholy alliance of feckless organizations committed to the boundary-free,  morality-free early sexualization of children has created the National Sexuality Education Standards  intended to promote their dogmatic ideology through the nationalization of  sex ed.

Please consider supporting the work of Illinois Family Institute.

Written by Malcolm A. Kline

As we’ve noted before, when proponents of the Obama Administration’s Common Core education reforms try to make the case for the program, they often end up giving material to their opponents.

Case in point: the Center for American Progress (CAP), in a recently released report on The Cognitive Science Behind the Common Core, attempted to show how much easier Common Core math is than traditional means of mathematical problem-solving:

“Elizabeth is at the grocery store buying fruit for the week. She wants to purchase $7.60 worth of apples with a $20.00 bill. How much change should the cashier return to Elizabeth? Illustrate your answer. Using the traditional method, the student would simply write:

 

$20.00

-$7.60

=$12.40

 

“However, this does not teach the student to do math as it is done in everyday life; it simply involves plugging new numbers into an algorithm learned through hours of rote memorization. Under the Common Core, the student instead would follow a process similar to Elizabeth’s actual mental computation while standing at the register:

 

$7.60 + $.40 = $8.00

$8.00 + $2.00 = $10.00

$10.00 + $10.00 = $20.00

 

“The cashier should give Elizabeth $12.40 in change.

 

“This is exactly how someone with a strong grasp of numeracy does calculations on a daily basis. Furthermore, solving the problem in this way teaches the relationship between different values far more effectively than the traditional method of plugging numbers into a formula. It is critical that students grasp the concepts behind subtraction before they rely solely on the traditional algorithm.”

I’d really like to see them try this in Starbuck’s at rush hour.

“No government educational initiative, be it federal, state, or local, even a private one, will ever bring students up to speed or have them reach the bar, as we use these strange gymnastics terms to discuss education,” Ulf Kirchdorfer avers in an essay which appeared on the Academe blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).  “The reality is that many teachers, whether prompted by supervisors or of their own volition, continue to pass students so that we have that we have many that reach college with the most basic of literacy skills, in English, math, science, the foreign languages.”

Kirchdorfer is a professor of English at Darton State College.  “Tired of listening to some of my colleagues complain of college students being unable to write, I went to look at learning outcomes designed for students in secondary education, and sure enough, as I had suspected, even a junior high, or middle-school, student should be able to write a formulaic, basic five-paragraph theme,” he recalled. “Guess what.  Many college students, even graduating ones, are unable to do so.”

“For many years the state of Georgia had a kind of graduation test, the Regents’ Essay, which was required for any student of any institution in the System, be it Georgia Tech or what was then Darton College, to obtain his or her four-year degree. There were cases of students taking this essay test a number of times reaching the double-digit range.  The test has now been abandoned and other measures have been implemented to ensure literacy-competencies of college graduates.”

This article was originally posted at the Accuracy in Academia website.

Written by Cynthia Walker

I became a math teacher by a circuitous route.  My degree is in engineering.  I spent five and a half years refurbishing nuclear submarines, and then I quit work to bear, rear, and eventually homeschool of our three children.

As a homeschool mom, I participated in co-ops, taking turns teaching groups of homeschooled children subjects such as nature study and geography. As our children entered their teen years, I began teach to teach algebra, trig, and calculus to small classes of homeschoolers at my kitchen table.  And as our children left home for their four-year universities, two to major in engineering and one in art, I began teaching in small private schools known as classical academies.

This last year, I have also been tutoring public-school students in Common Core math, and this summer I taught a full year of Common Core Algebra 2 compressed into six weeks at an expensive, ambitious private school.

I’ve taught and tutored the gamut of textbooks and curricula: Miquon and Saxon to my own kids and whenever the choice of curriculum was mine to make; Foerster, Saxon, Jacobs, or Holt when hired to teach at a school.  I’ve tutored out of the California state adopted texts: CPM, Everyday Math, Mathland, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw Hill, Addison Wesley, and Holt.  I’ve had students come to me from all of the above plus Teaching Textbooks, Singapore, and Math U See.

This last year was my first experience first tutoring, then teaching Common Core, and I was curious.  I had read the reports of elementary-school children crying over their homework and staying up past midnight to complete it, so I expected Common Core to be like Everyday Math, Mathland, and CPM: poorly explained, abstruse, confusing.  I was correct on those counts.

What surprised me was that Common Core was also hard.

Now, I like rigor.  I have high standards.  My goal for my students is that they will become competent and confident mathematicians.  But I was stunned to see that my tutoring student’s pre-algebra work incorporated about a third of a year of algebra 1.  The algebra 2 text incorporated about a third of the topics I would expect to find in a precalculus course.  And so forth.

This did not mesh with the reports from Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Utah, or New York, where Common Core is alleged to lower standards – in one case, specifically, to move multiplication tables from third grade to fifth grade.  It appears that Common Core is not being implemented in a consistent (or common) way across the United States.  But I can only address pre-algebra through calculus in texts claiming to be Common Core in California.  These texts are shoveling about a third of the subsequent year’s topics into the current year.

This problem is exacerbated by the recent fad for accelerating students through their math classes.  Fifty years ago, algebra 1 was a ninth-grade course for fourteen-year-olds.  Now it is routinely taught in eighth grade, sometimes in seventh.  Algebra 1 in seventh grade means that pre-algebra is taught in sixth grade to eleven-year-olds, and few eleven-year-olds have achieved the cognitive development necessary to master the abstract logic of one third of a year of algebra.

Cognitive development proceeds not in a smooth curve, but in jumps and plateaus.  Just as most babies learn to walk at twelve months, so most adolescents become capable of logical operations such as algebra at twelve years.  And just as whether a baby walks at nine months or fifteen months has no bearing on whether he plays football in college, so whether a student learns algebra in 7th or 9th grade has no bearing on whether she becomes a National Merit Scholar…save that a child who is pushed and flounders and fails is unlikely to love an activity.

That is what I am seeing with my tutoring students: the math-bright ones are being encouraged to take honors pre-algebra at age eleven.  In prior years, this would have meant that they first had a thorough, final review of arithmetic: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing whole numbers, decimals, and fractions; long division; changing fractions to decimals to percents and back.  Then for a treat, they would be introduced to the glories of algebra, the fun stuff: Rene Descartes’ brilliant invention, with plenty of lists of points that, if properly executed, form an outline of a fish or a dinosaur.  They would be taught signed numbers, order of operations, distributive property, and how to solve for x, and that would be about it.  They would finish the year happily aware that math is fun and that they are good at it.  If they were fortunate enough to be taught from Jacobs’s Mathematics: a Human Endeavor, they would learn about sequences and mosaics and logarithms and even networks, but all with a very concrete development, suited to the emergent logical thinker.

The reform mathematicians who put together Common Core are ignoring cognitive development.  My Common Core pre-algebra students are hurried through the arithmetic review and taught the coordinate system.  They graph lines and parabolas.  They do transformations, exponents (including zero and negative exponents), and a truly horrendous percentage of percentage problems.  The homework can be finished in an hour if the student’s parents can afford to hire a BS mechanical engineer to sit at his elbow and remind him when he takes a wrong turn.  Otherwise, he is up ’til midnight.  Students work hard at tasks beyond their strength; they flounder; they fail; they learn that math is no fun.

This isn’t education. This is child abuse.

Another aspect of Common Core that surprised me was the emphasis given to parent functions and transformations. People over forty years of age, even techies such as physicists, chemists, engineers, and mathematicians, won’t know what parent functions are.  People under thirty-five who have been educated in reform mathematics textbooks will be surprised that is possible to learn mathematics without learning about transformations.

Fifty years ago, transformations were not taught, although math-bright students would figure them out for themselves in analytic geometry (second-semester pre-calculus).  Today, they are taught systematically beginning in elementary school.

The treatment of transformations reminds me of the New Math debacle of the 1960s.  The reform mathematicians of the day decided that they were going to improve mathematical education by teaching all students what the math-bright children figured out for themselves.

In exactly the same way, the current crop of reform math educators has decided that transformations are an essential underlying principle, and are teaching them: laboriously, painfully, and unnecessarily.  They are tormenting and confusing the average student, and depriving the math-bright student of the delight of discovering underlying principles for herself.

One aspect of Common Core that did not surprise me was a heavy reliance on calculators.

The main problem I see with my algebra students is that they have poor number sense.  They can’t tell whether the answer their calculator shows is reasonable or not.  They cling to the notion that 1.41 is somehow more precise than square root of two.  They also can’t add fractions or do long division, which puts them at a severe disadvantage when they must add rational expressions or divide polynomials.

Common Core exacerbates this problem.  At every level, the problems are designed to be too hard to solve by hand.  A calculator is necessary even in elementary school – unless a child is to spend 5 hours a night on homework.  A graphing calculator is necessary for algebra – calculating correlation coefficients by hand is not a viable option.  My students are whizzes with their calculators.  But they reach for them to square 1/3…then write it as 0.11.

Common Core advocates claim that they are avoiding that boring, rote drill in favor of higher-order thinking skills.  Nowhere is this more demonstrably false than in their treatment of formulas.  An old-style text would have the student memorize a few formulas and be able to derive the rest.  Common Core loads the student down with more formulas than can possibly be memorized.  There is no instruction on derivation; the formulas are handed down as though an archangel brought them down from heaven.  Since it is impossible to memorize all the various formulas, students are permitted – nay, encouraged – to develop cheat sheets to use on the tests.

The second-biggest problem with Common Core is the problem of Big Mistakes.  Pretend for a moment that a homeschool family did something as asinine as giving their eight-year-old a calculator instead of teaching him his times tables.  That child would be a calculator cripple.

But that would be a small mistake, affecting one child.  Now consider what happens when a state made such a mistake.  We don’t even have to pretend.  In 1986, California adopted Whole Language Arts, which proved to be a disaster.  Within a decade, California plunged to 49th out of 50 in reading performance.  Millions of children were affected.  Big mistake.

If different states have different curricula, we can observe what works and what does not, and improve thereby.  But Common Core is being pushed nationwide.  This could be the Biggest of all possible Mistakes.

But the worst problem with Common Core is its likely effect on the educational gap between rich and poor in this country.  The students I tutor have parents who would describe themselves as “comfortable.”  No one likes to admit to being rich.  But the middle class and poor cannot afford to pay a tutoring company $50 to $100 per hour so that someone will sit with their children and explain trig identities.

The oft-repeated goal of Common Core is that every child will be “college or career ready.”  Couple that slogan with the oft-expressed admiration for the European system of education – in European countries, students are slotted for university or a dead-end job at age fourteen, based ostensibly on their performance on high-stakes tests, but that performance almost inevitably matches the student’s socioeconomic class.  Do we really want to destroy upward mobility and implement a rigid class structure in the United States of America?

To recapitulate: Common Core teaches about a third of algebra 1 in pre-algebra, a third of pre-calculus in algebra 2, et cetera.  Common Core teaches unnecessary abstractions as essential principles.  Common Core creates calculator cripples.  Common Core fails to derive mathematical expressions, instead presenting them as Holy Writ.

I predict that if we continue implementing Common Core, average students will drop out of math as early as they are allowed.  Even math-bright students will hate math.  Tutoring companies will proliferate to serve wealthy families.  The educational gap between rich and poor will widen.  If we want to destroy math and science education in this country, keep Common Core.

This article was originally posted at the AmericanThinker.com blog.

Last Saturday, IFI posted a video from a news program that purported to demonstrate teaching math the Common Core way. This video had been and continues to be widely circulated on conservative websites like Daily Caller and shown on television programs like John Stossel’s program Stossel and Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld.

We received a few critical email messages from IFI subscribers who either misunderstood our motives for posting it or perhaps are unamused by satire (including inadvertent satire). So, I would like to clarify why we posted it, what the video demonstrates about Common Core that we believe warrants criticism, and what we are not criticizing:

1.  The reason we posted it is the same reason it is circulating: It is—to many viewers—funny. It is funny because it is (inadvertently) satirical. Satire mocks phenomenon—not because the phenomenon is wholly flawed—but because some aspect of it is flawed.

2.  The video is funny because it draws attention to two common criticisms of Common Core. It draws attention to the criticism that Common Core de-emphasizes memorization and that it overcomplicates the teaching of subject matter through confusing explanations and education jargon. While the method demonstrated in the video is touted as making addition problems easier, the way the teacher explained it in this particular video would be confusing to young children—and many adults.

Perhaps the teacher’s poor explanation derived from the limited time she had available or perhaps from the Common Core language (i.e., “anchoring” and “decomposing”), but nonetheless, many people find the demonstration amusing.

Two of our critics, while agreeing that the teacher’s explanation was inadequate and the language inappropriate, found nothing funny about it. I would agree that if the funny parts were taken out, it wouldn’t be funny.

Many viewers who are amused by the video are also troubled by it. They’re troubled by Common Core’s apparent de-emphasis on memorization of facts (and not just in math), which this video reinforces. Even the interviewer’s introduction reinforces the public’s concern with Common Core’s de-emphasis on memorization.

Click here to see an even funnier video of a Grayslake, Illinois math teacher making that point explicitly. Just to be clear, my posting of this video should not be interpreted as a criticism of requiring students to explain their reasoning. It is a criticism of an apparent de-emphasis on math facts—which many students learn, develop facility with, and retain through memorization.

3.  The reason IFI posted the video on Saturday is not that we find the strategy the teacher is using inherently problematic. Nor do we oppose the teaching of base 10, or the teaching of  mathematical concepts, principles, and strategies that facilitate both comprehension and computation. IFI heartily and unequivocally endorses the teaching of math concepts, principles, strategies, facts—and satire (including inadvertent satire).

Those of you who enjoy a dollop of lighthearted satire following a more substantive meal of propositional argumentation (heavy on nutritional evidence), pick up your dessert spoon and taste this: “Ten Dumbest Common Core Problems.”

In response to last week’s article on Banned Books Week, multiple homosexuality-affirming websites have been apoplectic about the five story ideas about homosexuality and gender confusion I mentioned, particularly the hypothetical picture book about a bird who experiences joy when, after the deaths of her fathers, she is adopted by a father and mother.

These websites make two errors: They twist what I actually said (no surprise there) and ignore the fact that I wasn’t recommending any of the hypothetical books. Rather, I was wondering aloud whether librarians would apply consistently their own anti-book-banning propositions. I was wondering if they would request those kinds of stories in order to fill gaps in their book collections. I was wondering if librarians would include stories in their book collections with which some children may identify but that convey ideas “progressives” don’t like. I was suggesting that “progressives” engage in a more absolute form of “book-banning” than the kind of which they accuse conservatives.

The anger of “progressives” on these websites demonstrates that they are far more, shall we say, “passionate” in their opposition to books they don’t like—including even book ideas—than are conservatives. “Progressives” become enraged in the presence of a story idea—including book ideas that haven’t even a suggestion of hatred. Their anger confirms my point. When conservative parents challenge an actual book, “progressives” ridicule them (which includes librarians ridiculing their own patrons). When I merely describe hypothetical stories, the Left goes ballistic.

Homosexuals have once again revealed their hypocrisy. In response to the story ideas I described, they are howling in rage: How dare I even propose a story that suggests some child somewhere may want a mother and a father or that a teen may not like the promiscuity of her fathers or the emotional and relational instability of his mothers. If this is how homosexuals respond to a story idea, imagine if such a story were published and purchased and displayed in a library? Librarians better be ready for the jackbooted agents of change—you know, the anti-censorship crowd.

Ah, how the liberal ironies abound.

I also received a few colorful email messages from critics that reveal a lot about the Left’s inability to read closely; the nature of their commitment to diversity, tolerance, and truth; and their lack of understanding of Scripture.

** Caution: Vulgar Content **

Email from Jason Boro:

(Mr. Boro quotes from my article), “Will they ask for picture books that show the joy a little birdie experiences when after the West Nile virus deaths of her two daddies, she’s finally adopted by a daddy and mommy?”

How anyone can wish the death of parents is a vile c***. I can only imagine that when this despicable, poor excuse of a human being dies there will be thousands dancing on her grave to celebrate that she can no longer can spew forth her hate. How sad it must be to be filled with so much hate and venom. 

You as an organization are so far from Christianity it is frightening. 

Email from Grant Lange:

(Mr. Lange begins with same quote), “You have gone WAY too far and crossed some serious lines.  Do not EVER call yourself a “christian” or a “pro-family” person…as I can finally see you that display the characteristics of neither.  Advocating the death of any person you deem unworthy or putting any child through that scenario you describe is abhorrent and certainly NOT “pro-family”.

I will in fact thank you, however, for opening my eyes.  This shock has allowed to me to see you and this organization for what it is….nothing but hateful prejudice disguised as “faith”. 

Email from John Lockwood:

I just wanted to take a moment to express my disgust and disappointment with the current article by Laurie Higgins. 

What kind of sane person spews the divisiveness and hatred, like she does and did?  Certainly not a religious, god-fearing person.  Anyone with even a tiny bit of knowledge of the bible and the teachings of Jesus, would see just how far off the mark she is.  She claims to be a happily married mother and wife, and yet her pre-occupation with the sexual behaviors of others, is disgusting, and frankly, a bit concerning.  Why does she feel it is her duty to deny others, get into their lives, and dictate what people read and how parents raise their children?  At the very least, taking the scriptures to heart, she should be loving, caring, and if you really believe, subservient.  Instead, she prattles on, dispensing hateful advice on what our children should and should not read.  Dictating how our schools and libraries should be stocked.  She has no excuse for her behavior, and your employing of her, and publishing her filth, is tacit acceptance of her behavior. 

Enough!  Walk the walk, or shut up.  You either believe and love your god, or you act like this woman.  Hypocrisy is evident, and that takes away from the legitimacy of your organization. 

Email from anonymous critic:

F*** you. You are evil. How dare you wish teens identify with loss instead of love.

My thoughts:

The claims that I wish “the death of parents” and advocate the deaths of people I “deem unworthy” are both peculiar and false. I described a story in which a bird lost her homosexual parents and was subsequently adopted by a father and a mother. There was nothing in my description that expressed a wish for or advocated the deaths of parents. The bird’s joy results from her adoption—not the deaths of her parents. If I were to suggest a picture book about a child who experiences joy at being adopted by a young mother and father after the deaths of her grandparents who had been raising her, would I be accused by anyone of wishing for or advocating the deaths of grandparents? I suspect not, which points to the kind of ideological oppression the Left seeks.

And I don’t deem homosexuals unworthy. Quite the opposite. I consider their lives—both temporal and eternal—of infinite value. My moral opposition to homoerotic activity does not diminish my recognition of their infinite value, because I don’t believe their identity or worth is defined by their sin.

The hypothetical story I described suggests, rather, that children deeply and inherently long for both mothers and fathers. Are Boro and Lange asserting that there exists no child adopted by two men or two women who longs for the mother or father of which they have been intentionally deprived?

And if telling a story that includes a painful experience for a child constitutes “advocating” such a painful experience—as Mr. Lange argues—then our libraries and publishing companies have been “advocating” death, divorce, disease, drug use, rape, bullying, beatings, molestation, and torture for children for quite some time.

While the Left claims to want stories with which children and teens identify, my anonymous critic believes that it’s the task of authors to direct children to feel a certain way. He doesn’t want any books published that reflect children’s feelings about same-sex parenting that the Left doesn’t like. Instead, he wants only books in libraries that direct children on how to feel about the absence of either mothers or fathers.

My critics suggest that I express hatred, but is the claim that children have a right to be raised whenever possible by a mother and father a sign of hatred? Is the claim that some children may feel sadness about the absence of a mother or father an expression of hatred? And is the claim that libraries should include stories about children who—though loving their adoptive homosexual parents—wish they had both a mother and father a sign of hatred?

A word about love: To treat someone with love requires first an understanding of what is true. If homoerotic activity is, indeed, immoral, unhealthy, and destructive to both temporal and eternal lives, it is the very antithesis of love to affirm homoerotic activity and relationships.

When Mr. Lockwood suggests that I demonstrate little knowledge of Scripture and that I should “walk the walk, or shut up,” he ignores the biblical truth that while loving his creation, God hates much that we humans choose to engage in, including homoerotic activity. That is made clear in both the Old and New Testaments.

Is “the walk” to which Lockwood refers, the walk of God who says that homoerotic activity (among other behaviors) is detestable and that none who engage in it will see the kingdom of Heaven? Or is “the walk” the walk of Jesus who says that marriage is the lifelong union of one man and one woman? Does the walk include God’s mandate that his followers should expose the “the unfruitful deeds of darkness,” declare “the whole counsel of God,” and be willing to be hated because the world first hated Jesus?

Or did Mr. Lockwood mean I should walk the walk of a heretic, denying those parts of Scripture that are difficult, counter-cultural, inconvenient, and will make the world hate me?

For most of my life, I paid little attention to either the private or public activity of homosexual activists, but then their activities became too troubling to ignore:

• They started infiltrating public schools, demanding that their non-objective assumptions about the nature and morality of homosexuality and theirs alone be taught as objective, unassailable truths.
• They began imposing their redefinition of marriage on all of society through specious, incoherent arguments.
• They began attacking First Amendment rights.
• They began robbing children of their right to be raised whenever possible by a mother and a father.
• They  began hurling epithets at anyone who dared to express ontological and moral beliefs with which homosexual activists disagreed.
• And then they began their quest to make it impossible for dissenters to work in America.

In other words, they began demanding the entire public square to themselves.

Mr. Lockwood is wrong: It is “progressives,” not conservatives, who seek to dictate what people read and how children are raised. It is the Left that imposes their values and assumptions about homosexuality on all families through public schools, while censoring all resources that dissent from their homosexuality-affirming dogma.

It is the Left that believes that kindergartners should be exposed to Leftist assumptions about homoeroticism and gender confusion in public school.

It is the Left that engages in defacto censorship in library book collections.

Perhaps the resentment generated by my book ideas is evidence of the claim Robert Oscar Lopez—who was raised by two lesbians—makes in his article “Same-Sex Parenting: Child Abuse?“:

“Normalization” [of same-sex parenting] demands a kind of silence from multiple parties in a child’s life. The child’s lost biological parent(s) must keep a distance or disappear to allow two gay adults to play the role of parent. Extended family must avoid asking intrusive questions and shouldn’t show any disapproval through facial expressions or gestures. Schools and community associations have to downplay their celebrations of fatherhood or motherhood (even canceling Father’s Day and Mother’s Day in favor of “Parenting Day”). The media have to engage in a massive propaganda campaign, complete with Disney productions featuring lesbian moms, to stifle any objections or worries. Nobody must challenge the gay parents’ claim that all is being done for love. Does the silence of so many surrounding parties reverse the sense of loss?

No. The child still feels the loss, but learns to remain silent about it because her loss has become a taboo, a site of repression, rather than a site for healing and reconstruction.

I’ve learned that truth and accuracy is less valued by “progressive” ideologues than are lies and distortion in the service of their unholy cultural quest for ideological conformity to false and destructive ideas.

Illinois Family Institute
Faith, Family and Freedom Banquet

Friday, September 19 , 2014
The Meadows Club – Rolling Meadows, IL

Secure your tickets now – click here or call (708) 781-9328.

This should help all of us dullard parents clarify Common Core arithmetic for our confused little ones–you know, without forcing them to memorize those pesky math facts. (Remember: No chuckling, which would be mean to the teacher—maybe even bullying):

 Illinois Family Institute
Faith, Family and Freedom Banquet

Friday, September 19 , 2014
The Meadows Club – Rolling Meadows, IL

Secure your tickets now – click here or call (708) 781-9328.

And if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone tied around his neck. –Mark 9:42 

There are numerous problems affecting public education, problems so serious that many families are choosing either to homeschool their children or send them to private schools—options which very few families are able to implement or afford.

The most serious problems affecting public education emerge from the stranglehold that disciples of the “teaching for social justice” movement and the related social and political movement to normalize homosexual practice and Gender Identity Disorder (GID) have on academia.

These subversive ideologies, fallaciously promoted as fact, infect public education at all levels, and contribute to the undermining of biblical truth, the natural family, and love of America.

The efforts to promote these partisan political theories and the simultaneous censorship of conservative resources reveal the hypocrisy of the commitments of public educators to diversity, critical thinking, and intellectual inquiry.

Problems: Homosexuality and Gender Identity Disorder

The problem of the presence of homosexuality-affirming resources is underestimated by far too many parents and other taxpayers. If we do not muster the courage to oppose these resources with the same conviction, vigor, and tenacity that radical activist ideologues use to promote them, we become complicit in the loss of First Amendment speech and religious liberties that will soon follow. Our continued silence will bequeath to our children and grandchildren even greater oppression than we experience today—oppression, that is, for those students who are not deceived by the specious arguments to which they are relentlessly exposed.

The ubiquitous propaganda from activist public educators, and organizations such as Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, the National Education Association, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s educational division’s, “Teaching Tolerance”, and the American Library Association compel Illinois Family Institute to spend a considerable amount of time addressing the problem of pro-homosexual advocacy in public education.

Students are exposed to “progressive” views of homosexuality and GID (euphemistically referred to as “gender identity”) and cross-dressing (euphemistically referred to as “gender expression”) in many school contexts. The resources and activities to which students are exposed implicitly or explicitly espouse unproven, non-factual, subjective liberal assumptions on the nature and morality of homosexuality and GID. Some of the numerous contexts in which students are exposed to these ideas include: English, social studies, foreign language, theater/drama, and health/sex ed classes; assemblies; anti-bullying programs, and teacher advocacy in the classroom setting.

In addition, extracurricular clubs such as gay-straight alliances and political action clubs (e.g. AWARE) organize activities in support of the Day of Silence, make announcements, hold fundraisers, and put up posters that promote the normalization of homosexuality during the school day.

The kinds of resources that activist teachers use in their efforts to use public education to change the moral and political views of other people’s children include newspaper and magazine articles, essays, plays (both read and performed), novels, picture books, films, guest speakers, and games.

To make matters worse, public educators engage in pervasive censorship of all resources that espouse conservative views of homosexual practice and GID. In so doing, they undermine the legitimacy of public education and transform education into indoctrination by routinely violating school commitments to diversity, critical thinking, and intellectual inquiry.

Parents should be especially wary of anti-bullying activities, programs, resources, or curricula, no matter where they emerge. “Anti-bullying” resources and policies are the Trojan Horses for secreting affirmative ideas about homosexuality and GID into public schools, including elementary schools.

Teaching for “Social Justice”

The second serious problem in public schools is commonly referred to as “teaching for social justice,” which shares some of the philosophical features of “Critical Theory,” “Critical Education Theory,“ Critical Pedagogy,” “Critical Race Theory,” and, within theological circles, “Black Liberation Theology.”

In the broadest of outlines, “teaching for social justice” is essentially repackaged socialism with its focus on economic redistribution. Social justice theory emphasizes redistribution of wealth and values uniformity of economic and social position over liberty. Social justice advocates seek to use the force of government to establish economic uniformity.

Its other dominant features pertain to race, gender, class, homosexuality, “gender identity” and “gender expression.” Social justice theory encourages people to view the world through the divisive lens of identity politics that demarcates groups according to which group constitutes the “oppressors” and which the “oppressed.” Those who are identified as the “oppressors” need not have committed any acts of actual persecution or oppression, nor feel any sense of superiority toward or dislike of the supposed “oppressed” class. The theory illogically promotes the idea that “institutional racism,” as opposed to actual acts of mistreatment of individuals by other individuals, is the cause of differing lots in life. Social justice theorists cultivate the racist, sexist, heterophobic stereotype that whites, males, and heterosexuals are automatically oppressors.

Former Marxist David Horowitz warns that,

“Today the gravest threat to American public education comes from educators who would use the classroom to indoctrinate students from kindergarten through the 12th grade in radical ideology and political agendas.

Much of this indoctrination takes place under the banner of “social justice,” which is a short-hand for opposition to American traditions of individual justice and free market economics. Proponents of social justice teaching argue that American society is an inherently “oppressive” society that is “systemically” racist, “sexist” and “classist” and thus discriminates institutionally against women, non-whites, working Americans and the poor…. In recent years teaching for social justice has become a powerful movement in American schools of education…”

Some of the influential Critical Theorists are Paulo Freire, Maxine Greene, William (Bill) Ayers, Peter McLaren, Bell Hooks, Henry Giroux, Jonathan Kozol, Lisa Delpit, Peggy McIntosh, Herbert Kohl, James Banks, Cornel West, and Howard Zinn.

Solutions:

The solution begins with us—with a spiritual transformation. Our own self-indulgence—indulging our laziness and fear—has resulted in vulnerable, impressionable young children being exposed to positive views about the sins of homosexuality and cross-dressing. Our passivity has allowed those who hold distorted views of America to cultivate anti-American sentiments in our nation’s children.

Everyone who remains silent in the face of this unconscionable educational travesty bears some measure of guilt.

Character Changes:

We must start with the willful cultivation of those character traits required for the task at hand: courage, boldness, perseverance, and a willingness to endure persecution.

Scripture teaches that “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matt. 5: 10, 11). Despite this clear teaching of Christ, many Christians retreat from even the mildest manifestations of persecution.

Informed Minds:

• Taxpayers need to research the authors whose writing students are reading, and research the organizations that are publishing materials used in class and professional development activities.
• Taxpayers need to request and study the content of professional development opportunities that school districts provide to teachers at taxpayer expense (e.g. Late Arrival and Institute Day activities, conferences, seminars, and summer workshops).
• Taxpayers need to be able to refute the deceptive secular arguments used to normalize homosexuality. To that end, churches should offer classes or workshops that educate their members. If church leaders are themselves ill-equipped, we need to urge them to invite guest speakers to teach such workshops.

Policy Changes:

• Taxpayers should urge their schools to create policy that requires teachers who present resources that address controversial issues to spend equal time on and present equivalent resources from all perspectives. So, if an English teacher assigns The Laramie Project, he should be required to also assign essays, commentaries, or journal articles written by conservative scholars on the issue of homosexuality.
• Taxpayers should urge their schools to create policy that prohibits ideological litmus tests in hiring. Some school districts are attempting to ensure ideological uniformity among faculty and administrators via the interview process for new hires.
• Taxpayers should urge their schools to create policy that requires “opt-in” options for highly controversial resources, including any that address homosexuality or Gender Identity Disorder.
• Taxpayers should urge their schools to create policy that requires ideological balance in the content of professional development opportunities. For example, if a district offers an Institute Day workshop on “teaching for social justice,” they should be required to offer a workshop in which teachers read and analyze criticism of “teaching for social justice.”
• Taxpayers should oppose the inclusion of the terms “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” and “gender expression” in anti-discrimination and/or anti-bullying policies.

Community Awareness:

• Taxpayers should attend school board meetings, and make statements to, ask questions of, and run for election to school boards.
• Taxpayers should write letters to their local newspapers when a curricular or policy problem is discovered.
• Christians need to urge their church leaders to be involved in the schools in the communities in which they live.
• As citizens, they have both a right and an obligation to participate in shaping a godly community, and they have an obligation to set examples for the men and women whom they lead.

Specific Suggestions for Parents:

• Notify K-8 teachers that under no circumstance is your child to be exposed to any resources or activities that mention homosexuality or Gender Identity Disorder. Ask them to agree in writing to your expectation, and if they won’t, ask for a change of teachers.
• Notify high school teachers that your child is not to be exposed to resources that address homosexuality or Gender Identity Disorder unless equal time is spent studying resources that articulate conservative views on the subject.
• Call your children out of school on the Day of Silence if your school is permitting children to remain silent during class.
• Homeschool high school kids for health class.

Homosexuality-Affirming Resources

Books taught in many schools:

The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes by Tony Kushner

Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Misfits by James Howe

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Rainbow Boys, Rainbow High, Rainbow Road, The God Box, all by Alex Sanchez

It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health by Robie H. Harris

Additional books are listed at:

http://www.safeschoolscoalition.org/RG-books_elementary.html

http://www.safeschoolscoalition.org/RG-books_secondary.html

http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/booklink/K-6.html

http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/booklink/7-12.html

http://rainbowlist.wordpress.com/rl-2008/

http://rainbowlist.wordpress.com/rl-2009/

http://rainbowlist.wordpress.com/rl-2010/

Films:

Films recommended by the Safe Schools Coalition: http://www.safeschoolscoalition.org/RG-videos.html

Film recommended by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s educational division’s, “Teaching Tolerance”: Bullied: A Student, a School and a Case that Made History.

We need to insist that our public schools fulfill their commitments to honor diversity, to challenge assumptions and beliefs, to pursue intellectual inquiry, and to cultivate critical thinking skills.

If educators define “safety” as making kids feel comfortable, as many schools do, then they must censor resources that make any students uncomfortable, rather than censoring only those that make homosexual students uncomfortable.

If, on the other hand, schools oppose censorship, then they must not censor the writing of scholars who articulate conservative views of homosexuality and Gender Identity Disorder or those who criticize “social justice” theory.

All concerned taxpayers should be involved in the effort to effect change in public schools. Our taxes are paying the salaries of educators and are used to purchase materials that disseminate destructive ideas to children. We must assume responsibility for the ways in which our money is spent.

Concern for both the temporal and eternal lives of children—for their hearts, and minds, and bodies—should compel us to work tirelessly for truth.

We must remember that the children in public schools today will very shortly be our culture-makers. If we care about the future health of America, we should participate in the effort to restore a proper understanding of the role of public educators and the scope of public education.

For PDF version of this article, CLICK HERE.

By Phyllis Schlafly 

The highly acclaimed school standards called Common Core are becoming so unpopular that they may soon be politically untouchable. The critics are piling on from Glenn Beck to the Wall Street Journal, with senior academics and activist parents in between.

The latest is a detailed criticism of the mathematics standards by a prize-winning math professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Marina Ratner. It is refreshing that her criticisms are very specific and include examples of assignments that parents can see are ridiculous.

Professor Ratner was alerted to the stupidity of Common Core by looking at the homework assigned to her grandson in 6th grade Berkeley middle school. Fractions are taught by having the kids draw pictures of everything such as 6 divided by 8, and 4 divided by 2/7, and also by creating fictional stories for such things as 2/3 divided by 3/4. A student who gives the correct answer right away and doesn’t draw a picture or make up a story loses points.

Ms. Ratner concluded that Common Core is making simple math concepts “artificially intricate and complex with the pretense of being deeper, while the actual content taught was primitive.” The bottom line is that Common Core is inferior to the current good California standards, and the $15.8 billion spent nationally to develop and adopt Common Core was a gigantic waste.

College ready? That’s another deceit. Math experts are saying that Common Core standards are not preparing students for colleges to which most parents aspire to send their children.

The Common Core History Standards have just become available. Real scholars say they are a “stealthy” plan to teach kids a leftwing curriculum.

Scholar Stanley Kurtz says that the new plan for teaching American History is spelled out in the SAT college entrance and Advanced Placement exams. They pitch out “traditional emphasis on America’s founders and the principles of constitutional government” in favor of a leftist “emphasis on race, gender, class, ethnicity.”

According to Kurtz, “James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and the other founders are largely left out of the new test unless they are “presented as examples of conflict and identity by class, gender, race, ethnicity, etc.” The text of the new AP U.S. History exam has been closely guarded, revealed only to a few certified AP U.S. History teachers who are sworn to secrecy.

Parents who are attentive to their children’s studies and homework have been up in arms against Common Core for many months. Now Common Core has become such a big issue that it’s beginning to bring the politicians into line with what the public is demanding.

Indiana was the first state to show the political power of the anti-Common Core movement. The activist moms defeated a superintendent of education and several legislators on this issue.

Oklahoma made the biggest splash when the state legislature voted to repeal the state’s earlier endorsement of Common Core. The governor signed the repeal, but the unelected state board of education impudently filed suit to nullify the repeal, and then the Oklahoma state supreme court wisely upheld the elected legislature’s repeal.

South Carolina’s Governor signed a bill repealing that state’s commitment to Common Core. North Carolina’s Governor signed a more modest bill authorizing the state school board to tweak the standards.

The state of Texas, under Governor Rick Perry, was smart enough to be one of the five states that never signed on to Common Core in the first place. But now the pressure is on to force Texas to use the new AP U.S. History Exam anyway, and Texans claim that is illegal under state law.

Louisiana was one of the original 45 states that endorsed Common Core before the standards were even written. But one day Governor Bobby Jindal actually read his son’s Common Core math homework, was shocked, and then issued an executive order to block its implementation in Louisiana.

Two more Governors have just seen the light and turned against Common Core. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker announced that he wants the state legislature to repeal the standards when it reconvenes in January, and Governor Gary Herbert of Utah ordered his attorney general to conduct a review of the controversial standards.

Hoping to line up the support of teachers, the Gates Foundation education chief is now urging states to wait two years before using Common Core tests to make decisions about teacher performance.

Like many do-gooders, Bill Gates is obsessed with the problem of inequality. However, Common Core’s way of trying to overcome inequality is by dumbing down all U.S. students and pretending, like the Lake Wobegon kids, that all children are above average.

Reacting to the growing opposition to Common Core, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the biggest money bag for Common Core, is now urging states to have a two-year moratorium on all states and school districts about to make any high-stakes decisions based on tests aligned to the new standards.