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Saturday, May 31, 2008
Everybody Cheats especially the teachers Wonderful System No one wants to be Honest
I'm not sure the point of the article - cheating has been going on in both public and private schools for years. Why are we not surprised?
Levitt and Dubner wrote about it in their chapter 'what do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?' They wrote a simple computer program that identified classrooms in Chicago that cheated, just by looking at similarities in student responses.
Living in an age where US students score the lowest in the English-speaking world, why would a teacher be compelled to teach, when everyone else obviously does so poorly?
Although our leaders say that testing scores are tied to funding, has this really been the case? Statistically, the evidence isn't there - only the threat of a federal takeover, but once again that seems unlikely. Certainly turning schools over to private contractors, like Community Education Partners, will only generate more panic and hysteria. I think our politicians are devoid of any humanity.
It is more likely that an administrator would lose their job over low test scores, but not as the article claims - questioning high test scores. There is a significant difference.
Finally, what about the unrealistic claims made by math reform researchers of improved test scores - Nelson's infamous study comparing 22 high schools that used Core Plus with schools that used in the state of Washington - proving a significant increase in WASL test scores - a study that certainly had statistical failings (1999).
This is a study that has yet to be verified and more fascinating since Nelson is a consultant for Core Plus (translated means he sells 'Success for All')
So while their are abundant stories of cheating by schoolteachers and students in the media, it rarely looks at real cases of fraud, involving millions of dollars. What about bid rigging? Especially when it involves federal funds, like Erate. Even T.B's flirtation with Carkuff explained in Wikipedia has failed to generate any interest from the public.
"A Sept 2006 investigation by the Snohomish County Journal found that the WASL was based on work by Robert Carkhuff, a self-published Washington OSPI contractor. He has had a decades-long professional relationship with key OSPI staff members Terry Bergeson and Shirley McCune. Documents show he was paid more than $1 million to restructure Washington state education around his thinking systems.[9] The investigation concluded that the WASL was designed improperly and that flaws within the test were responsible for the high rate of student failure. Among the problematic components of the test were the structure, phrasing, and content of its math and writing sections. These sections were not designed with a complete understanding of the intellectual abilities and knowledge levels of students. The investigation concluded that the best method to ensure the fulfillment of Terry Bergeson’s pledge that all students have the opportunity to earn a diploma was to correct the flaws within the WASL."
Its has already been shown by research the larger amounts of money stolen and the more people involved in a scheme, the less likely they'll be charged or convicted.
Also, grants are really a perfect way of stealing money, since controls are nonexistent (college professors by their position uphold high standards) and stipulations only direct the beneficiaries.
Washington statistics on fraud show that less that only 17% of reported fraud are education related and most of these crimes involve classified personnel, ESD's, and school districts. This makes sense because they have control and make the decisions (not teachers).
So now you have to ask yourself, who benefits most by widespread classroom cheating?
How about administrators - like Rod Paige?
or ... Diane Briars? Diane Lam? Alan Birsin? Daniel Alvarado? This issue is a whole lot bigger than a few teachers cheating on a student exam? You get my point?
I returned to a site and I don't think this person minds if I print some of her writings concerning OSPI hijinx. You can see from my earlier comments that the bigger the fraud; the less likely it will be questioned by law enforcement. If you are the Superintendent will anything is possible.
The State Superintendent also chose to use the WASL as the assessment to fulfill the accountability requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). NCLB annually requires schools to establish and achieve academic gains for its students. If a school fails to meet AYP, which is determined by the percentage of students passing the WASL, the school must submit to a School Improvement Process. In order to assist schools in this process, OSPI developed a School Improvement Planning Process Guide (2003) and, in collaboration with the Washington Association of School Administrators, developed the School System Improvement Resource Guide (SSIRG, 2004). These are two separate publications; however, they are the same in content. Both planning guides are designed around the “Eight Stages of School Improvement.” Is it possible that this author is correct in asserting that the eight stages align with and have the same intent as the “Eight Psychological Themes of Thought Reform?” The school improvement process mandates that schools and districts adopt policies and implement instructional practices that align with WASL standards. As previously mentioned, the school improvement process guides, developed by OSPI, are designed to further refine the thought reform milieu. Controlling the public education system allows the leaders of the milieu to target internal impurities, such as failing schools, teachers and students. The school improvement process becomes the key device to force conformity. A recent annual audit of statewide agencies, published by the Washington State Auditor, found that “The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction did not comply with state and federal requirements when contracting for services paid with federal Title I funds.”30 The contracting services were for school improvement facilitators. The findings disclose that the OSPI paid 49 Facilitators in the fiscal year 2004 for a total of $2,128,600. A total contract dollar amount of $3,199,600 was awarded fiscal year 2002 ($761,000), fiscal year 2003 ($1,117,500) and to date in fiscal year 2005 ($2,006,000). The OSPI contracted with these individuals without initiating a formal bidding process. This violation of state and federal contractual procedures allowed OSPI to hand pick facilitators who might best ensure that the school improvement process advanced in a manner that would yield their desired outcomes. The OSPI 2005-07 budget requests for School Improvement Assistance includes a requirement that the grant recipients must use the SSIRG.
Bergeson without going through a bidding process contracted Carkhuff Learning Systems and 49 school improvement facilitators for $10 million using Title I funds and nobody batted an eye.
Gee, I wonder if former head of MCREL, Shirley 'Anne Bezant' McCune, OSPI had anything to do with it - that's 'bid rigging' and imagine our DOE was in on it.
This is from learn-usa -
For those doing research into education reform, aka systems education, Dr Shirley McCune entered the scene in 1989 when she was a guest speaker at the 1989 Governor's Conference on Education called by President George Bush, Sr, and held in Wichita, Kansas.
Researchers were, and still are, aghast at what McCune had to say at that conference, and further aghast that governors in attendance applauded her.
"What is happening in America today and what is happening to Kansas in the great plains is not simply a chance situation in the usual winds of change.
What it amounts to is a total transformation of our society ...
... So we have to anticipate what the future is and then move back and figure out what it is we need to do today. That's called anticipatory socialization or the social change function of schools ...
... You have to understand the breadth of the task that's before us. You cannot think about restructuring of education without understanding that our total society is in a crisis of restructuring and you can't get away from it. You can't go into rural areas, go into the churches, go into government, you can't go into business and hide, for what we are facing is a total restructuring of the society ..."
The point here being, how did these reform movements begin? Low achievement, low academic programs and that was the result of adopting poor textbooks in math and science.
If the school's operating philosophy did not come from Judeo-Christian principles, where did it come from? The answer is to be found in the New Age philosophy that was the moving spirit behind OBE. Carol Belt, a former school board member in Englewood, Colo., was chairman of a Strategic Planning committee in charge of drawing up "vision statements" about the future. She writes: "As background material to help with the process I received materials on globalism and books by 'futurists.'
One of those books was 'The Aquarian Conspiracy,' authored by Marilyn Ferguson. I was told that it was the 'best reference' to the 'new curriculum' that was coming into our school district. I read the book and decided if the 'future' that Marilyn Ferguson was predicting was in fact going to become a reality, I wanted no part of it. I discovered that this was the 'foundational book' of the 'New Age' movement."
To help the teachers in Littleton become effective change agents, they were required to attend training sessions given by the Strategic Options Initiative. The trainees were requested to read the second, third, and ninth chapters of "The Aquarian Conspiracy."
Marilyn Ferguson writes in Chapter Nine, "You can only have a new society, the visionaries have said, if you change the education of the younger generation. Yet the new society itself is the necessary force for change in education. ... Of the Aquarian conspirators surveyed, more were involved in education than in any other single category of work. ... Tens of thousands of classroom teachers, educational consultants and psychologists, counselors, administrators, researchers, and faculty members engaged in colleges of education have been among the millions engaged in personal transformation."
In other words, American schools like Columbine High have been completely paganized by educators who have adopted the occult philosophy of the Aquarian Conspiracy. It is a philosophy in conflict with Judeo-Christian teachings, and it is a philosophy that opens the door to satanism. It is impossible for a member of the Aquarian Conspiracy to be indifferent to Christianity. He or she must oppose it, for Christianity is based on absolute biblical principles that condemn pagans. And that is why the public educrats are so adamantly opposed to any acknowledgment of the biblical God in the schools.
Now juxtapose this with Ms. Santorno who was the area sup at the time and now jet over to Moses Lake, where you had another school shooting and you begin to see some startling coincidences.
http://www.newswithviews.com/Stuter/stuter53.htm
Another little known fact concerning the Moses Lake School District is that it was one of the pilot schools for education reform, both in the state of Washington and nation-wide. The program for which Moses Lake School District was a pilot was called the Schools for the 21st Century program. The legislation establishing the program, SB 5479, was passed in 1987. In total, the program affected 111 schools, 27 school districts and over 50,000 students (SBE, 1995). The program commenced in 1988 and sunset in 1994; the schools and school districts participating then falling under laws passed in 1992 and 1993 bringing the pilot program to every school in Washington state.
By any objective standard, the program was an abysmal failure, not even meeting the requirements of the law governing it. Such, however, was never addressed by the Washington Legislature even though the failure of the program was the subject of a Senate Education Committee hearing in February 1998. Although the members of both the House and Senate were invited to the hearing, the meeting was largely boycotted by members of both houses.
In support of legislative approval of the program, then Governor Booth Gardner brought in his friend, Marc Tucker, to address the Washington Legislature in February 1987.
Marc Tucker would become an individual known to many researching education reform, not only in Washington State but in many other states as well. A former employee of Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NWREL) in Portland, Oregon, Tucker went on to establish the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy (CFEE), funded by the Carnegie Foundation of New York. CFEE would become the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) with Marc Tucker as president. In that capacity, NCEE established a design team that would become a major player in the New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDC) established during the Bush (Sr) Administration to oversee the thoroughgoing transformation of American education. Tucker's design team was called the National Alliance for Restructuring Education (NARE). It was later renamed America's Choice™.
Tucker was also a major player in the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce (CSAW) another program of NCEE. It was under the guidance of the CSAW commission that, America's Choice: high skills or low wages! was written.
This was not like my own set of experiences at another school in Washington State which I reported on without success. I was appalled that ICP gang members were allowed to walk without regard through the school campus espousing racial hate messages, while Mexican -Americans were subjected to all sorts of mistreatments by administrators (eg. school videos of racial stereotypes and arbitrary rules regarding dress (wearing blue for instance)
Tim Westerberg by the way is on the Board for the Alliance for Quality Teaching with Jan Mazotti, Colorado Roundtable, and has written a book about Reform called Making High Schools of our Choice which I found excerpts like the following about Directions 2000 which McCune helped fund:
You'll find passages about Alan Birsin in here too.
This is how you build a social movement
This is from ed week in 2000
Colo. Teacher Policies All Over the Map, Study Finds By Ann Bradley The most comprehensive study about teacher policy ever conducted in Colorado has found wide variation across the state in how educators are recruited, hired, paid, developed, and evaluated.
"Teaching in Colorado: An Inventory of Policies and Practices" was presented last month to the Alliance for Quality Teaching, a group of 45 state legislators, education policymakers, educators, and residents.
The alliance, which will meet this week to discuss the report's findings, was convened in September 1998 by the Denver-based Rose Community Foundation to discuss teacher quality in the wake of national reports warning...
I'm not sure the point of the article - cheating has been going on in both public and private schools for years. Why are we not surprised?
ReplyDeleteLevitt and Dubner wrote about it in their chapter 'what do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?' They wrote a simple computer program that identified classrooms in Chicago that cheated, just by looking at similarities in student responses.
Living in an age where US students score the lowest in the English-speaking world, why would a teacher be compelled to teach, when everyone else obviously does so poorly?
Although our leaders say that testing scores are tied to funding, has this really been the case? Statistically, the evidence isn't there - only the threat of a federal takeover, but once again that seems unlikely. Certainly turning schools over to private contractors, like Community Education Partners, will only generate more panic and hysteria.
I think our politicians are devoid of any humanity.
It is more likely that an administrator would lose their job over low test scores, but not as the article claims - questioning high test scores. There is a significant difference.
Finally, what about the unrealistic claims made by math reform researchers of improved test scores - Nelson's infamous study comparing 22 high schools that used Core Plus with schools that used in the state of Washington - proving a significant increase in WASL test scores - a study that certainly had statistical failings (1999).
This is a study that has yet to be verified and more fascinating since Nelson is a consultant for Core Plus (translated means he sells 'Success for All')
So while their are abundant stories of cheating by schoolteachers and students in the media, it rarely looks at real cases of fraud, involving millions of dollars. What about bid rigging? Especially when it involves federal funds, like Erate.
Even T.B's flirtation with Carkuff explained in Wikipedia has failed to generate any interest from the public.
"A Sept 2006 investigation by the Snohomish County Journal found that the WASL was based on work by Robert Carkhuff, a self-published Washington OSPI contractor. He has had a decades-long professional relationship with key OSPI staff members Terry Bergeson and Shirley McCune. Documents show he was paid more than $1 million to restructure Washington state education around his thinking systems.[9] The investigation concluded that the WASL was designed improperly and that flaws within the test were responsible for the high rate of student failure. Among the problematic components of the test were the structure, phrasing, and content of its math and writing sections. These sections were not designed with a complete understanding of the intellectual abilities and knowledge levels of students. The investigation concluded that the best method to ensure the fulfillment of Terry Bergeson’s pledge that all students have the opportunity to earn a diploma was to correct the flaws within the WASL."
Its has already been shown by research the larger amounts of money stolen and the more people involved in a scheme, the less likely they'll be charged or convicted.
Also, grants are really a perfect way of stealing money, since controls are nonexistent (college professors by their position uphold high standards) and stipulations only direct the beneficiaries.
Washington statistics on fraud show that less that only 17% of reported fraud are education related and most of these crimes involve classified personnel, ESD's, and school districts. This makes sense because they have control and make the decisions (not teachers).
So now you have to ask yourself, who benefits most by widespread classroom cheating?
How about administrators - like Rod Paige?
or ... Diane Briars? Diane Lam? Alan Birsin? Daniel Alvarado? This issue is a whole lot bigger than a few teachers cheating on a student exam? You get my point?
I returned to a site and I don't think this person minds if I print some of her writings concerning OSPI hijinx. You can see from my earlier comments that the bigger the fraud; the less likely it will be questioned by law enforcement. If you are the Superintendent will anything is possible.
ReplyDeletehttp://thefactsaboutedreform.homestead.com/Thought_Reform_pdf.pdf
The State Superintendent also chose to use the WASL as the assessment to
fulfill the accountability requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act
(NCLB). NCLB annually requires schools to establish and achieve academic
gains for its students. If a school fails to meet AYP, which is determined by the
percentage of students passing the WASL, the school must submit to a School
Improvement Process. In order to assist schools in this process, OSPI
developed a School Improvement Planning Process Guide (2003) and, in
collaboration with the Washington Association of School Administrators,
developed the School System Improvement Resource Guide (SSIRG, 2004).
These are two separate publications; however, they are the same in content.
Both planning guides are designed around the “Eight Stages of School
Improvement.” Is it possible that this author is correct in asserting that the
eight stages align with and have the same intent as the “Eight
Psychological Themes of Thought Reform?”
The school improvement process mandates that schools and districts adopt
policies and implement instructional practices that align with WASL standards.
As previously mentioned, the school improvement process guides, developed by
OSPI, are designed to further refine the thought reform milieu. Controlling the
public education system allows the leaders of the milieu to target internal
impurities, such as failing schools, teachers and students. The school
improvement process becomes the key device to force conformity.
A recent annual audit of statewide agencies, published by the Washington
State Auditor, found that “The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction did
not comply with state and federal requirements when contracting for services
paid with federal Title I funds.”30 The contracting services were for school
improvement facilitators. The findings disclose that the OSPI paid 49 Facilitators
in the fiscal year 2004 for a total of $2,128,600. A total contract dollar amount of
$3,199,600 was awarded fiscal year 2002 ($761,000), fiscal year 2003
($1,117,500) and to date in fiscal year 2005 ($2,006,000). The OSPI contracted
with these individuals without initiating a formal bidding process. This violation
of state and federal contractual procedures allowed OSPI to hand pick facilitators
who might best ensure that the school improvement process advanced in a
manner that would yield their desired outcomes.
The OSPI 2005-07 budget requests for School Improvement Assistance
includes a requirement that the grant recipients must use the SSIRG.
Bergeson without going through a bidding process contracted Carkhuff Learning Systems and 49 school improvement facilitators for $10 million using Title I funds and nobody batted an eye.
ReplyDeleteGee, I wonder if former head of MCREL, Shirley 'Anne Bezant' McCune, OSPI had anything to do with it - that's 'bid rigging' and imagine our DOE was in on it.
This is from learn-usa -
For those doing research into education reform, aka systems education, Dr Shirley McCune entered the scene in 1989 when she was a guest speaker at the 1989 Governor's Conference on Education called by President George Bush, Sr, and held in Wichita, Kansas.
Researchers were, and still are, aghast at what McCune had to say at that conference, and further aghast that governors in attendance applauded her.
"What is happening in America today and what is happening to Kansas in the great plains is not simply a chance situation in the usual winds of change.
What it amounts to is a total transformation of our society ...
... So we have to anticipate what the future is and then move back and figure out what it is we need to do today. That's called anticipatory socialization or the social change function of schools ...
... You have to understand the breadth of the task that's before us. You cannot think about restructuring of education without understanding that our total society is in a crisis of restructuring and you can't get away from it. You can't go into rural areas, go into the churches, go into government, you can't go into business and hide, for what we are facing is a total restructuring of the society ..."
The point here being, how did these reform movements begin? Low achievement, low academic programs and that was the result of adopting poor textbooks in math and science.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ritalindeath.com/Education/columbine-high-new-age.htm
If the school's operating philosophy did not come from Judeo-Christian principles, where did it come from? The answer is to be found in the New Age philosophy that was the moving spirit behind OBE. Carol Belt, a former school board member in Englewood, Colo., was chairman of a Strategic Planning committee in charge of drawing up "vision statements" about the future. She writes: "As background material to help with the process I received materials on globalism and books by 'futurists.'
One of those books was 'The Aquarian Conspiracy,' authored by Marilyn Ferguson. I was told that it was the 'best reference' to the 'new curriculum' that was coming into our school district. I read the book and decided if the 'future' that Marilyn Ferguson was predicting was in fact going to become a reality, I wanted no part of it. I discovered that this was the 'foundational book' of the 'New Age' movement."
To help the teachers in Littleton become effective change agents, they were required to attend training sessions given by the Strategic Options Initiative. The trainees were requested to read the second, third, and ninth chapters of "The Aquarian Conspiracy."
Marilyn Ferguson writes in Chapter Nine, "You can only have a new society, the visionaries have said, if you change the education of the younger generation. Yet the new society itself is the necessary force for change in education. ... Of the Aquarian conspirators surveyed, more were involved in education than in any other single category of work. ... Tens of thousands of classroom teachers, educational consultants and psychologists, counselors, administrators, researchers, and faculty members engaged in colleges of education have been among the millions engaged in personal transformation."
In other words, American schools like Columbine High have been completely paganized by educators who have adopted the occult philosophy of the Aquarian Conspiracy. It is a philosophy in conflict with Judeo-Christian teachings, and it is a philosophy that opens the door to satanism. It is impossible for a member of the Aquarian Conspiracy to be indifferent to Christianity. He or she must oppose it, for Christianity is based on absolute biblical principles that condemn pagans. And that is why the public educrats are so adamantly opposed to any acknowledgment of the biblical God in the schools.
Now juxtapose this with Ms. Santorno who was the area sup at the time and now jet over to Moses Lake, where you had another school shooting and you begin to see some startling coincidences.
http://www.newswithviews.com/Stuter/stuter53.htm
Another little known fact concerning the Moses Lake School District is that it was one of the pilot schools for education reform, both in the state of Washington and nation-wide. The program for which Moses Lake School District was a pilot was called the Schools for the 21st Century program. The legislation establishing the program, SB 5479, was passed in 1987. In total, the program affected 111 schools, 27 school districts and over 50,000 students (SBE, 1995). The program commenced in 1988 and sunset in 1994; the schools and school districts participating then falling under laws passed in 1992 and 1993 bringing the pilot program to every school in Washington state.
By any objective standard, the program was an abysmal failure, not even meeting the requirements of the law governing it. Such, however, was never addressed by the Washington Legislature even though the failure of the program was the subject of a Senate Education Committee hearing in February 1998. Although the members of both the House and Senate were invited to the hearing, the meeting was largely boycotted by members of both houses.
In support of legislative approval of the program, then Governor Booth Gardner brought in his friend, Marc Tucker, to address the Washington Legislature in February 1987.
Marc Tucker would become an individual known to many researching education reform, not only in Washington State but in many other states as well. A former employee of Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NWREL) in Portland, Oregon, Tucker went on to establish the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy (CFEE), funded by the Carnegie Foundation of New York. CFEE would become the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) with Marc Tucker as president. In that capacity, NCEE established a design team that would become a major player in the New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDC) established during the Bush (Sr) Administration to oversee the thoroughgoing transformation of American education. Tucker's design team was called the National Alliance for Restructuring Education (NARE). It was later renamed America's Choice™.
Tucker was also a major player in the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce (CSAW) another program of NCEE. It was under the guidance of the CSAW commission that, America's Choice: high skills or low wages! was written.
This was not like my own set of experiences at another school in Washington State which I reported on without success. I was appalled that ICP gang members were allowed to walk without regard through the school campus espousing racial hate messages, while Mexican -Americans were subjected to all sorts of mistreatments by administrators (eg. school videos of racial stereotypes and arbitrary rules regarding dress (wearing blue for instance)
Tim Westerberg by the way is on the Board for the Alliance for Quality Teaching with Jan Mazotti, Colorado Roundtable, and has written a book about Reform called Making High Schools of our Choice which I found excerpts like the following about Directions 2000 which McCune helped fund:
You'll find passages about Alan Birsin in here too.
This is how you build a social movement
This is from ed week in 2000
Colo. Teacher Policies All Over the Map, Study Finds
By Ann Bradley
The most comprehensive study about teacher policy ever conducted in Colorado has found wide variation across the state in how educators are recruited, hired, paid, developed, and evaluated.
"Teaching in Colorado: An Inventory of Policies and Practices" was presented last month to the Alliance for Quality Teaching, a group of 45 state legislators, education policymakers, educators, and residents.
The alliance, which will meet this week to discuss the report's findings, was convened in September 1998 by the Denver-based Rose Community Foundation to discuss teacher quality in the wake of national reports warning...