Many were shocked to learn that IRS agents actually targeted conservative advocacy groups for heightened scrutiny when making decisions concerning their tax exempt status. I don't know why so many people were shocked. This is what university administrators have been doing for nearly twenty years. I've been writing about it for over ten years because I know that what you see on the campus today is what you will see in the broader culture tomorrow.
It all began in my home state back in 1995. That was when a gay activist and UNC administrator named Jonathan Curtis targeted the Muslim Student Association (MSA) for de-recognition. He didn't like the MSA position on homosexuality so he decided to yank their status as an official student group.
Jonathan Curtis
According to Curtis' demands, the only way the MSA could remain an official group at UNC would be to change their constitution to be more "inclusive." This de-recognition would have meant that the MSA would receive no university funding even though their members paid mandatory student activity fees. Thankfully, a UNC attorney stopped Curtis from acting on his threats.
When UNC got a new university attorney in 2002, Curtis decided to subject a number of Christian organizations to heightened scrutiny. I have in my possession every single email Curtis sent to the organizations he targeted. It is a stunning display of intolerance in the name of diversity and inclusion. In one email, Curtis told a campus Christian organization they would be derecognized if they did not remove statements from their constitution asserting a "belief in God."
Fortunately, I later found a Christian organization willing to sue. After years of fighting both in and out of court, the practice of interfering with the belief requirements of Christian organizations has ended at UNC Chapel Hill. But for years the cancer spread throughout the broader UNC system.
In 2003, UNC-Wilmington tried to derecognize the College Republicans for refusing to allow Democrats to lead their organization. We fought that battle and won. But as late as 2012, UNCW was still trying to deny official recognition to Christian organizations who wanted to be led by, of all people, Christians. It took a threat of litigation but I managed to get the university to change its policy. Now, UNCW Christian groups can control their membership and their message without government interference. But this basic freedom of association is still in jeopardy on some UNC campuses.
At their core, these assaults on freedom of association have always been assaults on freedom of speech. The campus administrators only target groups that are saying things with which the administration disagrees. The administration is trying to evangelize the student body and bring them into the church of multiculturalism. So they try to eliminate groups that promote any kind of absolute truth or core conservative values.
The IRS has now been caught doing a very similar thing. Their organization collects taxes. They have an interest in big government. So they are naturally hostile toward groups seeking a reduction in the size of government. The source of their motivation is obvious. But where do they get the hubris to act upon the desire to abuse their power?
The answer is simple: they learned it in college.
Is it any wonder that government agents are now showing the same disdain for free speech and freedom of association that has been on display on our nation's campuses since the 1990s?
Things are going to get worse, not better. Just ask the students who are now appearing before rape tribunals on American campuses. They are routinely denied attorneys when they appear before the campus judiciary. They are routinely denied the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And now campuses are giving accusers the right to appeal rape acquittals until the judiciary reaches the "right" result.
Americans beware. The students running these rape tribunals are our future prosecutors and our future judges. And they won't just be coming for our taxes. They will be coming for our liberty as well.
A Florida elementary school teacher's lesson on the First Amendment has some parents speaking out. Amy Harvey says she opened her fourth-grader's backpack and found a sheet of paper on which he wrote, "I am willing to give up some of my constitutional rights in order to be safer or more secure."
Father Aaron Harvey says he was so angry that his blood pressure was high for a few days. His son said that his teacher at Cedar Hills Elementary in Jacksonville, Cheryl Sabb, asked he and some other students to write the statement.
The school district's superintendent expressed "possible concern [...] with a follow-up activity that may have been conducted after the lesson," explaining that the approved First Amendment curriculum was created with the help of local attorneys. The Harveys say they, and other parents, plan to meet with Sabb about the lesson.
According to the pro-education reform documentary Waiting for ‘Superman,’ one out of every 57 doctors loses his or her license to practice medicine.
One out of every 97 lawyers loses their license to practice law.
In many major cities, only one out of 1000 teachers is fired for performance-related reasons. Why? Tenure.
Tenure is the practice of guaranteeing a teacher their job. Originally, this was a due process guarantee, something intended to work as a check against administrators capriciously firing teachers and replacing them with friends or family members. It was also designed to protect teachers who took political stands the community might disagree with. Tenure as we understand it today was first seen at the university level, where professors would work for years and publish many pieces of inspired academic work before being awarded what amounted to a job for life.
At the elementary and high school level, tenure has evolved from the original understanding of “due process” to the university-style “job for life.” In most states, teachers are awarded tenure after only a few years, at which time they become almost impossible to fire. The main function of these laws is to help bad teachers keep their jobs.
We talk endlessly about improving public schools. So what's standing in the way? Stanford Professor Terry Moe identifies the biggest obstacle -- teachers unions.
Professor of Political, Science, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Ph.D., University of Minnesota
The problem is that top colleges expect applicants to complete a calculus course in high school, so that if geometry remains as a full year course, the sequence leading college preparation requires five years, not four. Students who do not begin this sequence in 8th grade can catch up by taking two math courses at the same time. It’s more likely that they will not arrive at graduation fully prepared for top-ranked universities.
The key question is whether requiring students to enroll in a course that they may not be conceptually ready for helps or hurts them.
Ask any college freshman what he knows about communism and he will likely engage in a word association game.
“The red scare, McCarthyism,” he will blurt out, displaying lessons well-learned from his textbooks and teachers.
One way to go beyond the idea of communism as evidence of paranoia, though, is to recall George Orwell’s Animal Farm. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” will be the phrase students recall. Students seem to get that “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” never works out in reality from this fictional work.
This novel shows how literature can sometimes demonstrate historical realities better than many textbooks.
But with the Obama administration’s unconstitutional program of nationalizing education, students will not likely be able to experience the insights and pleasures of novels, like Orwell’s. In 2009, during the economic “crisis,” states were offered part of the $4.35 billion in stimulus funds in a hurried contest called Race to the Top. After the initial application, they were told that they would have to adhere to national standards and testing called Common Core, sight unseen, and without any legislative input. Forty-eight states signed on initially; today, 45 states are committed to CC—although citizens and teachers are organizing against it.
The standards, now in place for math and English, emphasize “work and career readiness”--that is for workers who see themselves as global citizens unacquainted with their national and cultural heritage. This became apparent as I read the recent article, “Teachers Get Help with Common Core Lessons Through (sic) CPALMS,” at the NPR site. This was also because one of the CPALMS lessons for English/Language Arts was on Animal Farm.
The article explained that as Common-Core aligned assessments and textbooks are being written, the state of Florida is using a federal Race to the Top grant from the Department of Education to develop a site of resources for teachers who are scrambling to adhere to the new standards.
Pinnellas County School Superintendant Mike Grego recently told the Florida State Board of Education that there is “no resistance” to Common Core. At the same time, Florida’s new state superintendant, Tony Bennett, is steamrolling in the curriculum. Bennett, by the way, lost reelection in Indiana, many believe, because of his support for Common Core.
The lack of “resistance” may very well be due to the behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the Department of Education that bypassed state legislatures and public input, often gaining the support of Republicans with vague promises of “rigor” and uniform “standards.” Most in the politically informed Tea Party Manatee audience before whom I spoke on the evening of January 8 were not aware of this federal takeover of education.
Among the points I made are those from my recent report for Accuracy in Media. National tests (being written by close, like-minded colleagues of terrorist-turned-education-professor Bill Ayers, like Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond) will eventually nullify the idea of private schools and even home schools. Some Catholic and other religious schools are already beginning to adopt Common Core standards as they see college entrance exams being written to CC specifications. The 45 participating states are also required to keep data bases of students from “cradle to career”--to use Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s favorite phrase--and submit them to the federal government, in effect making a national database.
Some conservative organizations have protested this unconstitutional power grab by the Department of Education.
But the mandate to replace literature in English classes with “informational texts”—with only half the time allotted to literature, and reduced to only 30 percent by the last two years of high school—caught the attention of even the liberal media. They became alarmed that favorites like To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye are to be replaced by such things as EPA directives.
Spokesmen tried to alleviate fears. They directed skeptics to the standards: “the Standards require a certain critical content for all students including classic myths and stories from around the world, America’s Founding Documents, foundational American literature, and Shakespeare.” Plus, they “intentionally do not offer a reading list.” David Coleman the well-connected new president of the College Board, which writes and administers college entrance exams, has pointed to these caveats, and repeated the claim that the standards call for evidence-based writing instead of writing based on personal experience and feelings. (See the very funny takedown by the Pioneer Institute’s James Stergios of how the advocate of “close reading,” David Coleman, mixed up Federalist 51 and 10 in an instructional video.)
Animal Farm would seem to fall into the category of classical literature that the bureaucrats and educrats refer to in attempts to mollify critics. Those who wrote the ninth and tenth-grade lesson plans for CPALMS (Collaborate, Plan, Align, Learn, Motivate, Share) seemed to have this in mind. First, the novel is put into the broad category of “fables” from Aesop, with a list of those usually taught to young children like “The Tortoise and the Hare.” In typical Common Core fashion, students are to search out “elements” of a fable and then mechanically fill in a chart that is provided as a hand-out in the lesson plan.
Did anyone consider, though, that the comparison to a fable for preschoolers might be insulting to teenagers? The teacher’s version of the chart has the blanks filled in, with the element of the “problem” described as “Power can make the animals corrupt; they struggle to take care of the farm and with leadership.” The “resolution” is “The farm ends up being worse with the animals in control because of too much power and corruptness by the pigs.” The “moral/lesson” is “Power Corrupts, and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely.” (The source for this quotation, the conservative historian Lord Acton, is not mentioned, however.)
All this is very general. And when one compares it to other sample lessons in Common Core and its standards, one sees that it is deliberately so. While one small mention is made in a sheet on the “elements of a fable” that Animal Farm is “satirized Stalinist Communism, in particular, and totalitarianism, in general” it is clear that the novel is to be taught in a historic vacuum. The pointed criticisms of communism are generalized to an indictment of a vague sense of too much “power.”
This exercise recalls one that gave consternation to teachers when they were instructed to read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address without emotion and without providing any historical context. Common Core reduces all “texts” to one level: the Gettysburg Address to the EPA’s Recommended Levels of Insulation. This leveling is demonstrated in another lesson plan at CPALMS that involves the historical young adult novel Kidnapped in Key West, where teachers are told to “avoid giving any background context or instructional guidance at the outset of the lesson while students are reading the text chorally.” This kind of “close reading” presumably “forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge and levels the playing field for all students as they seek to comprehend the text.”
Leveling the playing field is a primary objective of the Obama Department of Education, and Common Core presents a means to do so by encouraging such “close” or “deep” reading. Reading the “text” “chorally,” which Merriam-Webster defines as "sung," implies reading aloud in unison. It ensures that all students, including struggling readers, are brought along with the group. Such objectives are in line with Darling-Hammond’s educational agenda. The former Obama education transition team director is in charge of using $176 in Race-to-the-Top funds to develop tests for one of two consortia and is implementing her “five-dimensional grading rubric” of personal responsibility, social responsibility, communication skills, application of knowledge, and critical and creative thinking. This assessment philosophy had the dubious distinction of placing her Stanford New Schools on California’s list of the lowest-achieving five percent. Now about half of American students will be required to take her tests.
The sample test questions released by her consortia give no indication that acquisition of knowledge is important. As I noted in my other reports, social responsibility is the aim of the new curriculum materials being developed. They follow Arne Duncan’s stated purpose for schools: to be part of the “battle for social justice.”
Many have been fooled by rhetoric that simply repeats the talking points of the Department of Education and the well-connected leftists in the education field who will profit from our tax dollars by selling teacher training, software and hardware, and Common Core-aligned curricula. Bernie Reeves even called David Coleman an “education hero” in American Thinker. I thought it might be a satire, or Newspeak.
Duncan, who worked with Bill Ayers in Chicago on education issues, is on the same page, as is Darling-Hammond. Obama’s signature education initiative has been dubbed “Obama Core” for good reason. It is an Orwellian re-education campaign.
Florida’s sample lesson for teaching, among all things, Animal Farm, provides an illustration of how this is being done.
Goodbye George Orwell, hello Federal Register. The Obama Administration wants students to read propaganda instead of the classics. . The Common Core curriculum asks that kids read informational texts, including pamphlets from the federal government. Have our schools turned into reeducation camps? Find out as Trifecta tells you about Obama's brave new education system.
Zo thinks that punk rockers and other anti-establishment types are promoting socialism, and ironically enough, the very establishment that they are supposedly rebelling against. Hear more on this ZoNation.
A recent study shows that US schools are lagging behind international counterparts. Does education matter more than life experience? Find out on this Trifecta.
Occasionally, a columnist must issue an apology for something he wrote that, while seeming correct at the time, later proved to be misguided. Today, is one of those occasions where I must take the time to write a retraction concerning a column I wrote some time ago. Although it has been roughly four years since the column appeared, I am still compelled to offer an apology.
The issue concerns the use of pictures of the aftermath of abortion and whether the pictures should be displayed on college campuses, which are obviously populated by scores of women who have, in fact, suffered through the trauma of abortion. Four years ago, I took the position that the pro-life movement should not be doing that. The publication of that opinion constituted a serious error of judgment on my behalf. Accordingly, I offer an apology to my readers as well as an explanation of how I arrived at that incorrect conclusion.
Liberals have a tendency to think in terms of problems and solutions, not in terms of tradeoffs. We see this all the time. A liberal will identify a social problem. Then, he will attempt to identify a solution. The bad news for the rest of us is that the liberal “solution” usually involves government intervention, not private initiative.
The “problem” I identified four years ago came from a survey on campus censorship – one that I gave in my Introduction to Criminal Justice class every semester. I simply asked which book they would like to see banned from the library and which person or group they would like to see banned from campus. I then moved into a discussion of how the growing tendency to censor (with government backing) threatens our campus environment.
For years, the KKK and the Black Panthers vied for first place among the groups my students would most like to ban from campus. Then, in 2008 I was hit with a shocking new development: students voted “pro-lifers” as the group they most wanted to see kicked off campus. Their reason was simple: they sometimes showed pictures of aborted babies.
I saw this as a “problem.” Therefore, I wrote suggesting a “solution.” The solution was that we, as pro-lifers, should voluntarily abandon the practice of showing such pictures on campus. I did not advocate government backed censorship – the kind of advocacy we expect to hear from liberals. I just thought that voluntary abandonment of the practice would be the best “solution.” In retrospect, the suggestion was more than just naïve. It was stupid. And I am very sorry I ever wrote the column.
Living in an imperfect world among fallen people does not generally facilitate finding solutions to problems. Life is not that simple. Instead, it involves the making of decisions involving trade-offs. The decision of whether pictures of aborted babies should be displayed – even on campuses among those who have experienced abortion – is no different. So I should not have approached the issue like the liberals analyzing things within a problem/solution framework. I should have examined the trade-offs.
Put simply, the use of graphic abortion pictures on college campuses will upset women who have had abortions. They will also upset men who have financed abortions – especially those who actively pressured women into having them. But a greater number of people will be awaked to the fact that abortion involves the dismemberment of innocent human beings. Confrontation with those pictures will put the lie to the assertion that the unborn is nothing more than a clump of cells. The confrontation will draw an unmistakable moral distinction between the picking of a scab and the termination of a pregnancy. There may be negative aspects to showing the pictures. But they are far outweighed by the information they convey and the moral impulse they compel.
Put simply, we cannot enable those who would deny the American Holocaust in order to reduce emotional discomfort. That is not an acceptable trade-off. It sounds more like a final solution.
One area that awareness of the need for freedom from government control has penetrated black attitudes is in education.
The chronic failure of public schools to notably improve dismal test scores and high dropout rates of black children has made it clear to many black citizens of good will that there has got to be a better way.
Polls show black support for school choice. For example, in a poll done last year in New Jersey by the Rutgers-Eagleton Center at Rutgers University, 54 percent of blacks expressed support for school vouchers compared to 36 percent of whites.
Growing grass roots support among blacks for education alternatives surely influenced the Obama administration’s agreement, this past week, to ongoing support for the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. The administration opposes the program and would have been perfectly happy to see its funding spigot turned off.
This is a modest program, with federal funds available now for 1,615 scholarships for kids in DC’s public schools to attend private schools. Its existence and potential for growth was at stake, with House Speaker John Boehner and Senator Joseph Lieberman carried the ball for it. The new agreement will allow it to continue, with a small provision for 85 new scholarships.
But this makes even more perplexing recent incidents where Republican state legislators have turned their backs on the education hopes of blacks.
Republicans in Pennsylvania can change the political landscape of their state by helping black aspirations for education freedom. But in a state that some analysts see as conceivably swinging into the Republican column, Republicans are blowing it.
The Pennsylvania state Senate passed a bill last year that would make vouchers available to kids in the worst 5% of public schools.
The public schools serving blacks kids in cities like Philadelphia are disasters. I know from my own survey of pastors in local churches there that hopes for this voucher initiative have been high.
Yet, by all indication it’s not going to happen.
The state House, controlled by Republicans, has been sitting on the bill. With no action before the end of the session on June 30 it will be dead.
There is talk of an alternative scholarship bill financed through tax credits. But the most optimistic estimate I have heard is that the scholarship would be worth less than half what the voucher would pay and therefore insufficient on its own to pay full tuition in a private church school.
Courageous leadership by Republicans could have captured black hearts and minds in Pennsylvania’s cities that might have paved a path to a new black relationship with Republicans.
But sadly, fear of union power rather than leadership and courage seems to be motivating these legislators.
In 2010, a similar disappointment occurred in Illinois.
In a genuine breakthrough, a black Democrat in the Illinois state Senate, Rev. James Meeks, who happens to also be the pastor of Chicago’s largest Baptist congregation, introduced a school voucher bill.
The bill passed the Illinois senate and then died in the state House, with only 25 of 48 Republicans supporting it. It fell 12 votes short of the 60 it needed to pass.
This is not an across the board indictment of Republicans. Two Republican governors – Mitch Daniels in Indiana and Bobby Jindal in Louisiana – have spearheaded passage of school voucher programs in their states.
In a new Gallup poll, only 29 percent, an all time low, express “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in our public schools.
The Republican Party is supposed to be the party of freedom and limited government. No where are these principles more needed than in education, and no community needs it more than blacks.
At a time when our country and our poor communities are hurting so badly, any failure of leadership by those in the party of Lincoln is inexcusable.
Japanese students can learn to do complex calculations quickly without the need for paper or calculators. American students in contrast are flying kites and trying to feel good about themselves. Can we fix American schools?
Many were shocked to learn that IRS agents actually targeted conservative advocacy groups for heightened scrutiny when making decisions concerning their tax exempt status. I don't know why so many people were shocked. This is what university administrators have been doing for nearly twenty years. I've been writing about it for over ten years because I know that what you see on the campus today is what you will see in the broader culture tomorrow.
It all began in my home state back in 1995. That was when a gay activist and UNC administrator named Jonathan Curtis targeted the Muslim Student Association (MSA) for de-recognition. He didn't like the MSA position on homosexuality so he decided to yank their status as an official student group.
The IRS has now been caught doing a very similar thing. Their organization collects taxes. They have an interest in big government. So they are naturally hostile toward groups seeking a reduction in the size of government. The source of their motivation is obvious. But where do they get the hubris to act upon the desire to abuse their power?
