Friday, October 23, 2015

My Turn: School choice works for Croydon students via the Concord Monitor

My Turn: School choice works for Croydon students


In the 2014-2015 school year, New Hampshire taxpayers spent $17,233.48 for every student in public elementary and secondary education.

This is more than most private schools in New Hampshire charge. But it isn’t enough. It will never be enough. We could raise school spending until we are spending approximately $30,000 per student, as Washington, D.C., does. We could spend a million dollars per student, and it still won’t be enough . . . until we let children learn in their different ways. No single cage, no matter how gold-plated the bars, is the right place for all minds.
The necessity of choice is shown by this: The enemies of choice for your children send their own children to private schools.
Gov. Hassan’s children went to private school. Obama’s children go to private school. A long list of anti-choice senators, congressmen, governors and mayors have their own children in private schools.
Educators themselves support choice for their own children. In Philadelphia, 44 percent of the public-school teachers send their own children to private school at their own expense. The figures are disproportionately high for educators in other major cities.
This is because educators know about education. Education isn’t something that is done to you; it is something you do yourself. In the modern world, no one is looking for regimented drones to turn a bolt on an assembly line.
The ability to create your own projects and the persistence to finish them are the ingredients for success. Those abilities can be developed in many different ways: online education, immersive language courses, travel, art, music, robotics. All modern educational roads lead to individual journeys conducted at individual speeds. The idea that most children should be condemned to rote learning of one national curriculum, taught at one tedious speed, doesn’t belong in the 21st century.
So the obvious question is: shouldn’t public-school families have access to the best schools for their children, especially when it would cost less than our current failing system? Authors from Milton Friedman to Elizabeth Warren have asked this question for decades.
To the parents and school board of Croydon, there seemed to be a simple win-win answer. In 2012 they voted to provide access to whatever school best fit their children. Parents in Croydon have had choices for the last two school years.
Most Croydon parents this year chose public middle and high school in nearby Newport. A few chose to send five children to a private Montessori school. The cost is $8,200 per Montessori student. This is less than half the average cost of a New Hampshire public education. But the value to the children and the parents is immeasurable. Access to alternative teaching methods can mean the difference between success and failure, between a lifelong love of learning or the permanent dulling of a creative mind.
The response of the New Hampshire Education Department to the success of the Croydon program has been fear and hostility. Education Commissioner Virginia Barry had Associate Attorney General Anne Edwards send the town a cease-and-desist letter. The state has actually demanded that children be pulled out of their schools in the middle of their school year!
Croydon has naturally refused to disrupt the lives of their children. The town isn’t going without a fight, either. They geared up to take on the state’s legal threats with a crowdfunding site. Croydon’s lawyer is former state Supreme Court Justice Charles Douglas.
All these legal fireworks make little sense, even apart from their destructive effect on education. The larger and richer towns in New Hampshire have been sending their children to private schools for decades. Pinkerton Academy in Derry is a prominent example.
New Hampshire has a long tradition of flexibility in education.
We have had interstate school districts since the early 1960s. Orford is part of Rivendell, serving towns in Vermont and New Hampshire. If we can cooperate with Eriador, why is it so hard to cooperate with a Montessori school in our own state? Is our public education funding actually focused on serving each individual child, or is it just a jobs program for bureaucrats?
Is launching a huge legal battle to drag five happy children out of their chosen school the best use of our education tax money?
(Bill Walker is a member of the Sullivan County Republican Committee.)

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Teacher quizzes students on porn habits

Teacher quizzes students on porn habits

Common Core? Does it Finish What John Dewey Started?

The following is from the website Henry Makow.com.  One most ask oneself if the top down national curriculum "Common Core" is intended to complete what John Dewey started.  

Cathy

John Dewey Sabotages American Education
August 12, 2010

by L.C. Vincent
for henrymakow.com

In 1897, the "Father of American Education," John Dewey (1859-1952) wrote his manifesto "My Pedagogic Creed."  One would expect that the author would explain the basis of his philosophy.

On the contrary, Dewey continually repeated the mantra " I believe.... I believe... I believe....".  One could hardly find more extended articles of faith in the Christian Bible.

Author Bruce Deitrick Price wrote that Dewey not only subverted education, he subverted the very language of education with his nebulous and purposely vague concepts and theories.  And he nominates this gem for the most revealing John Dewey quote of all time:  "The mere absorption of facts and truths is so exclusively an individual affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness.  There is not obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat."

In two sentences, Dewey relegates all art, science, philosophy, history, mathematics, archeology and all related academic fields to the trash heap of irrelevancy.  As Price concludes:  "All the dumbing down we've seen in the last 100 years is right there in that little quote."  And make no mistake:  that dumbing down has been both damnable and deliberate.

John Dewey and his friend,  the influential Jewish Marxist propagandist, Sidney Hook, saw the American school system as the thin end of the wedge in their deceitful game to slowly build a secular society with no moral absolutes.

Using Rockefeller money to establish the Teachers College in New York (1922), their goal was to create a new generation not quite as bright as their parents; and with every succeeding generation, a copy, the actual content of which -- facts, data, objective truth --  faded and became less clear and comprehensible. 

Replacing mathematics, geography, history and science with cooking, sewing, household management and manual training skills necessary to run machinery, Dewey initiated what Price correctly called "...a slow motion coup, carried out, for all practical purposes, in the dead of night.  And thus began 100 years of deceit, disingenuousness and dishonesty."

Educators were now indoctrinated to accept the viewpoint, based on nothing more than Dewey's belief, that "what" they taught was irrelevant; how and why they taught were the main considerations.

Price correctly observes that educators now continue "...concocting an infinitude of programs, methodologies, theories, studies, research, insights, slogans and conceptual breakthroughs...."  yet all are meaningless when the children are still as dumb as a post and as thick as a brick.

Perhaps nowhere in the entire school curriculum is the educational sabotage more evident than in the deliberate destruction of reading skills.   The attack began with John Dewey's 1898 essay, 'The Primary Education Fetish.'

Dewey's disciples took over the major educational colleges of Columbia, Chicago and Palo Alto, and began bringing in their colleagues to the exclusion of all contrary viewpoints.  Phonics expert Sam Blumenfeld states:   "They commissioned books to be written promoting whole-word instruction.  And they got publishers to publish the new programs because the professors were in a position to get these new primers purchased by virtually every public school system in the country.  Many whole-language advocates are simply the latest of the socialists who are willing to destroy this country in order to change it."  Blumenfeld aptly and correctly concludes:  "Evil is a force in this world, and it manifest itself in many different ways.  Including deliberately dumbing down a nation."

The end result of this madness is clear:  by grades 3-4, most children taught to read via the "whole word" method give up in frustration, and become marginal readers for the rest of their lives.  There is no reading for pleasure, for knowledge, for growth, for entertainment, for speculation, for theory, for travel or adventure, or for learning.  Reading is now equated with drudgery, imprecision, guessing, failure and misery.  Lack of reading skills translates into an extremely negative self image with consequences that flow over to every other academic subject in school, which all require reading skills to one degree or another.

As Malkin Dare, founder of the Society of Quality Education, stated: "The result is massive illiteracy and misery."  Don Potter, phonics expert, concludes that memorizing "sight words" as a part of the whole language fraud "...creates a reflex that interferes with later phonics instruction.  Sight words are an obstacle to reading, not an aid."  Boys, especially, have their self-confidence destroyed and give up, often being diagnosed with ether dyslexia or ADD.  It becomes a vicious, downward spiral of failure.  And it is all premeditated!


lcvincent88@bigstring.com
- See more at: http://www.henrymakow.com/dewey_imports_soviet_education.html#sthash.iTRhX7g8.dpuf

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Citizens for Reasonable And Fair Taxes - Croydon: PTA's and PTO's hijacked by the teachers' unions....

Citizens for Reasonable And Fair Taxes - Croydon: PTA's and PTO's hijacked by the teachers' unions....: Teachers, teacher unions and school administrators do not want what is best for parents and their children they want what is best for their ...

Re-BLOG from 2008. 

Updated web page address for MWHodges.
Cathy